The Big Midget Murders

by Craig Rice

  Not so long before, he’d carried the empty bass fiddle case down this corridor to the midget’s dressing room. And not so terribly long before, someone—but who?—had carried the fiddle case, with the midget’s body, through this same corridor and out of the Casino. Carried the midget’s body back to its own hotel room and put it to bed there, dressed in gaudy silk pajamas. But why the devil would anyone bother to do that? Would they ever know who it was, and why?

  He opened the door to his office, turned on the light, and stood for a moment, listening. It seemed to him that he’d heard a sound, somewhere in the Casino.

  Nonsense, he told himself. He knew the place was empty. Nerves and lack of sleep, that was all that was the matter with him.

  Still, there was something about the office—something he couldn’t define or explain—just a feeling that someone had been there before him.

  The office chair he’d left where it usually belonged, between the safe and his desk, had been moved aside.

  Hell, the cleaning woman had done it. He lit a cigarette, took a long, slow drag, knelt down, and began opening the safe.

  There was the box. He took it out and examined it, a long, narrow, metal box, covered with black leather, not large, but substantial. Looked as though it would take an axe to open it. Well, he’d worry about that when he got back to the hotel.

  He laid it on the floor and began closing the safe. Suddenly he paused, listening, sitting back on his heels. Was that a sound in the corridor, or was his imagination playing a game with him?

  It was a sound. A footfall.

  Jake started to wheel around. In exactly the same instant, the office lights went out. He leaped to his feet, blinded by the sudden darkness.

  There was one brilliant flash of light in the darkness, it seemed as though the ceiling had dropped on his head, and that was all Jake remembered.

  Chapter Twelve

  “No murder has any business being as mixed up as this one,” Malone complained as they turned down Rush street. “Especially when it happens to me.”

  “This murder really happened to the midget,” Helene observed.

  The little lawyer sniffed indignantly. “He should worry! All he has to do is appear at the inquest, and even that’s arranged for him. I’ve got everything in the world on my hands now, including”—he cast a sidelong glance at her—“you and Jake.”

  “Malone, he’s worried. He doesn’t act it, but he is.”

  “I would be too, if I wanted to keep on owning the Casino, and I’d borrowed dough to remodel it from Max Hook. What the hell made Jake do that, anyway?”

  Helene shrugged her shoulders, sending two little avalanches of snow sliding down her fur coat. “Nobody else would lend it to him, except me, and he wouldn’t borrow it from me. It must be hell to have a rich wife.”

  “It must be worse to be a rich wife,” Malone said softly.

  She smiled at him. “Don’t ever tell Jake that. Malone, what do you suppose is in that precious box?”

  “A clue to the murder of Jay Otto, the Big Midget, I hope,” Malone said. “Though as I said before, I don’t care. I’m not even curious. If I didn’t have Allswell McJackson on my shoulders”—He raised his eyes accusingly to Heaven. “Damn it, I’ve got everything on my shoulders. I’m like Jupiter.”

  “You mean Atlas,” Helene said. “He had the world on his shoulders.”

  Malone shook his head. “Can’t fool me. Atlas is the guy who says that ‘You Too can be a New Man.’ Not a bad idea, either, the way I feel right now. I’d like to be a couple of new men, and neither of ’em John J. Malone.”

  “It’s too bad about you,” Helene said unfeelingly. “I wonder how Ruth Rawlson is feeling now?”

  “I don’t know,” Malone said, frowning. “The knockout drops in that whiskey were funny stuff. The guy who analyzed it for me gave me some dope to give Ruth Rawlson when she wakes up. Because she may wake up feeling perfectly okay and not knowing anything hit her, and then after a while just pass out again and stay passed out for hours. The dope he gave me is an antidote.”

  “Even if she woke up feeling wonderful,” Helene objected, “I should think she’d know she’d been drugged. She’d remember the way she felt before it laid her out.”

  “Not with this stuff,” Malone said. “She wouldn’t remember going out. She wouldn’t even remember she was a little dizzy first.”

  “Well,” Helene said, “you revive Ruth Rawlson and find out anything you can from her, and Jake can get the midget’s precious little box, and I’ll see what Annette Ginnis will confide in me. Maybe when we meet again at the hotel we’ll know something.”

  “I doubt it,” the lawyer said sourly. “We’ll probably know less than when we started out. That’s the way things always happen to me.”

  “If I had time,” Helene said, “I’d burst into tears. This is where we part, and I’ll see you at noon.”

  She turned up Oak street toward the lake, walking more slowly. The soft April snow falling against her face was cool and pleasantly caressing, like a snow facial. At the entrance to the tall apartment building where Annette Ginnis lived she paused a moment, letting the snow revive her spirits. During the short walk since she’d left Malone, she’d felt suddenly like a very small girl, frightened and helpless.

  “Look here, my good woman,” she told herself sternly. “This isn’t like you at all. You’ve been in worse spots than this and enjoyed them. And gotten out of them. What’s bothering you, anyway?”

  The midget.

  Even now that he was dead, he seemed to have left some mark on the world, dark, frightening, and curiously evil.

  Helene shivered ever so little, said to the doorman, “It’s damned cold for April,” and went on into the apartment building.

  In the lobby, sitting in a big leather chair beside an ash tray piled high with cigarette stubs, twisting the finger of a glove, was Betty Royal.

  Helene stared at her for a moment before she crossed the lobby.

  “Well, well,” she said, as though she’d been at an alumnae tea. “How nice to run into you.”

  “Oh!” Betty Royal said. It was more than half gasp. “Thank goodness! I’ve been sitting here for an hour, trying to get up nerve enough to go up and see her.”

  “If you mean Annette,” Helene said, sitting down on a couch beside her, “why do you want to see her in the first place? And why are you afraid to in the second place?”

  “I don’t know what to say to her,” Betty Royal said. “I thought I did when I came here, but now I don’t. And yet I’ve got to do something.”

  “You left a message for Pen Reddick saying you’d found out something,” Helene said firmly, hoping Betty Royal wouldn’t ask how she knew. “What did you find out, and why did it bring you here to see Annette?”

  “She’d been married before,” Betty Royal half-sobbed.

  Helene said, “For the love of Mike. That’s nothing to get excited about.” She lit a cigarette and thrust it between the girl’s fingers.

  “You don’t understand,” Betty Royal said. She took a drag on the cigarette that wore it down half an inch. “It was the same sort of thing. After Pen took me home I couldn’t sleep, and I got to worrying. And I remembered a boy friend of mine, Jack Norris, who got into exactly the same kind of a jam about six months ago, and he got out of it all right. So I called him up, and he told me about it, how he went out on a tear one night with some friend he’d picked up, and next morning he woke up married to this awful chorus girl. And his mother had heart trouble and Lord only knows what would have happened if anyone had heard about it. And then this same friend he’d picked up got him a lawyer, and the lawyer managed a quiet annulment so that nobody ever heard about it, only he had to pay this girl some terrific sum.”

  “I see,” Helene said quietly. She was beginning to feel uncomfortably cold, in spite of her furs and the warmth of the lobby.

  “And the girl,” Betty Royal said between tight lips, “was Annet
te Ginnis.”

  Helene was silent for a minute. “It must be true,” she said slowly, at last, “but it’s damned hard to believe. Because Annette Ginnis—I can’t imagine her thinking of such a racket, or lending herself to it if anyone else thought of it. And besides, she certainly doesn’t seem to have much money.” She lit a cigarette for herself and sat frowning at it. “Then you decided to come over here and confront her?”

  “Not then.” Betty Royal shook her head. “I just sat and worried and almost went completely mad. You know the family. We went all over that before.” She drew a long, sighing breath. “Finally I decided I had to find Ned, and find her, and tell him the whole thing, and—well, maybe scare her into not asking him for money, at least. But I didn’t know where she lived. So I went into Ned’s room, thinking he’d have her address, and there was Ned.”

  “Not married at all,” Helene said.

  “No. I was frantic, honest. I went through his pockets and found her address, and then I shook him and tried to wake him up, but he was passed out. I shook him and shook him, and finally he blinked a little and said, ‘The midget’s dead!’ and laughed and passed out again.”

  Helene said, “Oh,” and took one quick nibble at her lower lip. The uncomfortable cold seemed to be reaching the center of her bones now.

  “What did he mean by that, Helene?” Betty Royal begged.

  “He meant the midget,” Helene said. “The midget. And the midget is dead.”

  The chalky pallor crept slowly over Betty Royal’s face, so slowly that Helene could almost watch its progress. Suddenly Helene reached out and caught the girl’s hand.

  “Listen, Betty. This is important. Do you have any idea where your brother went last night, or what time he was anywhere, or when he came home?”

  “I—” Betty Royal’s eyes grew wide. She shook her head slowly. “No,” she whispered. “No, I don’t.” Her face was dead-white now. “What shall I do? Oh, what shall I do?”

  Helene thought fast. “Go home,” she said quickly. “Go straight home and get some sleep, and don’t talk to anybody. Except your brother, and try to talk to him before anybody else does. Don’t say anything about this to him—I mean about Annette—or about the midget, but ask him where he was last night, and when, and if he remembers”—She paused and frowned. “Look. No matter what he says, don’t let him talk to anybody—anybody, understand?—except us, or—Malone.”

  Betty Royal nodded dumbly. She rose, all at once looking about ten years old, wet-eyed, and dead for sleep.

  “Now beat it,” Helene snapped, getting to her feet, “and—don’t worry.”

  Betty Royal’s lips formed the words, “I won’t,” but no sound came, and the smile that passed quickly over her face was more than half ghost. Then she turned and dived through the revolving doors, waving to a taxi as she reached the sidewalk.

  Helene toyed for a moment with the thought of getting in touch with Pen Reddick and letting him know Betty was safe and on her way home, and then gave it up. It wouldn’t be long before she’d meet him, back at the hotel. She went on into the elevator, said “Twelve, please,” let her shoulders rest against the elevator wall, and regarded herself in the mirror opposite her.

  For someone who hasn’t had any sleep, she reflected, and who has a murder on her mind, to say nothing of a possible scandal, a frightened debutante, a worried husband, and now a probably hysterical chorus girl, you’re doing very well, Helene my girl. The tall, ash-blonde young woman who stared back at her from the glass was bright-eyed; her pale skin still glowed faintly from the April snow.

  “Twelve,” the elevator operator said, looking at her admiringly.

  At the door to 1267, Helene paused, listening. It occurred to her suddenly that Annette Ginnis had had a bad night, that she’d been hysterical when Malone had been here earlier, and that she might just possibly have fallen asleep at last. And yet—Helene hardened her heart, and tapped lightly on the door.

  “Go away,” said a voice sounding, even at that distance, thick with weeping. From behind the door Helene heard a slow, terrible sobbing.

  “Open the door,” she called softly, knocking again, “or I’ll have to tear it down with my bare hands, and I just got a manicure yesterday, and—”

  The sobbing broke off suddenly, in a gasp. The voice said, “Wait a minute.” There were a few quick motions inside the room, and then the door opened. Annette Ginnis said, “It’s you! Come in, quick!” and shut the door so rapidly after Helene that the breeze blew a little gust of ashes from one of the trays.

  “A fine thing,” Helene said cheerfully, peeling off her gloves, “to come visiting at an hour like this, and then be left standing out in the hall. Is there any coffee in this rat-hole, or do I have to make it for myself?”

  “Yes. Yes, there is,” Annette Ginnis said. She smiled automatically, still breathing fast. “I just need to heat it up. I’ll heat it up. Sit down and take off your coat. There’s cigarettes on the table.” She seemed to be talking in a trance.

  “Thanks,” Helene said. She sat down, let her furs slip off, and, while Annette Ginnis was in the kitchenette, looked around her.

  It was a small room, typical of those buildings which offer a smart address, an elaborate lobby, and “tasteful decorations,” and not enough space to swing so much as a kitten. Everything in it, from the white-framed flower prints on the sage-green walls to the rose rep cover on the disguised bed, showed the touch of a mass production interior decorator, everything, that is, save the little touches that were definitely Annette Ginnis. The double photograph, in an embossed leather frame—Ma and Pa, Helene decided. The autographed glossy print of Angela Doll. The Chinese cigarette boxes, and the sweet-grass basket full of undarned stockings.

  Through the half-open doors of the kitchenette, Helene could see Annette Ginnis carefully filling two coffee cups and setting them on a tray, pouring condensed milk into a glass pitcher with a not too steady hand, finding the sugar box in the cupboard and filling the sugar bowl. She was looking intently at a last week’s newspaper left on the coffee table when the chorus girl carried the tray into the living room.

  “Cream? Sugar?” Annette Ginnis asked.

  “Neither, thanks,” Helene said. She noticed that the girl took hers black too, and that she spilled a little of it as she carried the cup across the room.

  “Cold for April, isn’t it?” Annette Ginnis said. She put her coffee cup down on the end table beside her chair, and lit a cigarette.

  “Unusually cold,” Helene said.

  She stirred her coffee slowly, watching Annette Ginnis through her eyelashes. What was the phrase Jake had used? “Those kitteny, soft-looking, little brown-eyed blondes.” He knew what he was talking about, Helene decided.

  Annette Ginnis was a small girl, with a heart-shaped face and an underdeveloped, trembling chin. At least, it was trembling now. She wasn’t pretty. Her nose was too short, her melting brown eyes were too large, and her painted lower lip was too full. Her hair looked soft and fine, like baby hair, corn-silk hair that had never grown up. Her thin pale hands played with it continually, twisting it, curling it around one finger, pushing up the waves at the back of her neck, fluffing out the bangs that hung over her forehead. Suddenly Helene found herself remembering a kitten the gardener had given her when she was nine years old, a tiny, half-trembling, half-playful thing that had licked its paws and chased its tail, and snuggled close to her for affection, and that had suddenly had a fit and died, beating its own little brain out against the fireplace wall.

  Helene put down her coffee cup, crushed out her cigarette, and said, “Mind if I use your bathroom? Thanks. I can find it.”

  When she returned five minutes later, Annette Ginnis was powdering a freshly dampened face, her cup of coffee still cooling, untouched, on the end table.

  “Just between us girls,” Helene said, reaching for the lipstick in her purse, “what do you do with all the money?”

  Fifteen seconds later Annett
e Ginnis gasped, “Money?” as though she’d never heard of it before.

  “Sure,” Helene said, finishing with the lipstick and putting it away. “You certainly aren’t spending it on yourself. What are you doing with it?”

  This time the chorus girl waited thirty seconds and then said, “What money?”

  “Come on now,” Helene said. “You can’t be working this multiple-marriage racket for sheer childish willfulness, even at your tender age.” She hated to do it. It was like giving that medicine the veterinary had prescribed to the kitten. And the kitten hadn’t survived. She caught her breath and went on, fast. “Tender age is right. How old are you, anyway? Twenty?”

  “Twenty-one,” Annette Ginnis said.

  “That’s pretty young for so many unhappy marriages,” Helene said, shaking her head sadly. “Where did you marry Jack Norris, anyway?”

  “In South Bend,” Annette Ginnis whispered.

  “And who was this guy you married in Crown Point a few weeks ago?”

  “His name was Harold Williamson.” Suddenly the girl jumped to her feet, her face chalk-white. “What do you mean? What are you asking all these questions for?”

  Helene pretended not to have heard. “It’s been a hard life,” she said with mock sympathy. “Often married, but never a bride. Or am I wrong about that?”

  “It wasn’t really marriage,” Annette Ginnis said between tight lips. She sank back into her chair. “I mean, I never—you know what I mean. I’m not even sure if it was legal or not.”

  “Oh, it was probably legal all right,” Helene said, shooting into the dark. “And it must have been pretty damned easy. A young guy, not too smart, susceptible, and full of liquor—a grafting justice of the peace—a bright lawyer—and a quick annulment. A nice racket! Look, I don’t give a hoot, you understand. It’s none of my business. I’m just being indecently curious. What did you do with the money?” She paused, lit another cigarette, and smiled across the room at Annette as though to say, “It’s your play.”