dark and anxious.
“Of course he is,” Malone reassured her, hoping his voice sounded more convincing than hers.
Jake returned with a chair nicked from the next-door dressing room, and set it down beside the dangling body. “We’ll get this over with in a hurry,” he said between his teeth, “and then—” He climbed up on the chair and unhitched the peculiar rope from the hook by which it had been suspended.
“It looks like a big doll,” Helene said. She glanced quickly at the tiny body on the dressing room floor, and turned away.
Jake looked up at her from his task of searching for the key. His jaw was set in a grim line. “I know just how you feel, but we’ve got to do this.”
Malone spotted a quart bottle of Scotch, nearly full, on the dressing table, and reached for a glass. He couldn’t remember a time in his life when he’d needed a drink more acutely. He unscrewed the cap, started to tilt the bottle, stopped himself suddenly in the middle of the motion and stared at the top of the bottle.
“If you’ve found a jinn in the bottle,” Jake said, “I don’t want to hear about it.” He heard a faint giggle from Helene and added hastily, “And this is no time for bad puns.”
Malone ignored him. He was holding the bottle directly under the electric light and staring at it intently.
“Maybe it doesn’t mean a thing,” he said at last, “but there’s a little line of white powder on the rim.” He screwed the cap back on the bottle, set it on the dresser again, and stood looking at it suspiciously.
Helene gasped. “He may have been poisoned first, and then—” She paused.
After a moment Jake said, “I thought it was funny; he didn’t put up a struggle. Even a midget might make a fuss if somebody was trying to hang him. Thank God, here’s that key.”
He unlocked the case, lifted out a big, shining bull fiddle, stowed it in the closet, and closed the door.
“But why?” Helene demanded. “Why not just poison him and let it go at that? Why go to all the bother of hanging him afterwards?”
“Never mind why,” Malone growled. “This is no time to ask foolish questions. Let’s get this over and get out of here.”
Jake had unfastened the noose, and tossed the. shimmering strand aside on the floor. Helene picked it up half curiously, and began examining and unwinding it.
“There must be a dozen stockings here,” she reported, “just twisted and knotted together. Why on earth use stockings, when it’s so easy to find a rope?”
Jake had closed the fiddle case and was preparing to lock it. Now he paused and opened it again.
“Give me those stockings and I’ll put them in here too. We can’t just leave them lying around.”
“Wait a minute,” Helene said. Her eyes were blazing. Then suddenly she tossed the stockings to Jake, and looked up.
“There’s exactly eleven stockings here,” she reported.
“Well?” Jake said. “What of it?” He locked the fiddle case and stood it up in the corner, exactly as it had been. “We all know you can count.”
“Eleven stockings,” she said slowly. “The funny thing about it is that none of them were exactly the same size!”
Chapter 3
“The important thing,” Jake said, lighting Helene’s cigarette for her, “is to stay out here where everybody can see us, and act as though everything was perfectly normal.”
Malone nodded, gazing out over the still crowded dance floor of the Casino. From some long buried place in his memory came the picture of an Irish grandmother telling him how to cope with the strange and horrible things that might appear in the dark of night. “Just look at them and pretend they aren’t there at all, and keep very still, and afore long they’ll go away of their own accord.”
Perhaps if he kept very still, and pretended the tiny corpse of Jay Otto wasn’t concealed in the bass fiddle case, the whole horror would go away of its own accord, as though it had never been there at all.
It wasn’t just that a man had been murdered. He’d encountered murders before. Nor that Jake and Helene might be in a devilishly tight spot. They’d get out of it, as they always had in the past. Indeed, it wasn’t even the fact that the murdered man was a midget. No, it went deeper than any of those things. It was just that the little lawyer felt that all of them were skirting the edge of something strange and dark and terrible, something he couldn’t describe or explain, but that he knew was there.
“Stop looking as if you saw ghosts on our lovely new dance floor, Malone,” Helene said sharply.
Malone sighed, began slowly unwrapping a cigar, and tried unsuccessfully to pretend that he was having a wonderful time.
Al Omega’s band was back at work again, and the dance floor was jammed. Max Hook and his bodyguards had gone, the lawyer noticed with relief, and a party of noisy young people occupied what had been his table. The Goldsmiths were still there, the big, homely man looking worried and unhappy, his blonde wife’s lips set in a thin, cross line. Betty Royal was still at her table, entirely oblivious of the wistful and curious glances cast in her direction by the pretty young stenographers in their five-ninety-five formals, equally oblivious of the attention she was drawing from her tableful of handsome young men. She was gazing at Al Omega like a kitten gazing at a can of sardines.
Malone glanced up at the orchestra leader. “How does he do it?” he growled under his breath.
Most of the early evening crowd had gone, and their places had been taken by a later, noisier crowd, who would not remain long. It would only be a little while before the Casino would begin to empty. The lawyer drew a long, almost sighing breath, and leaned across the table to Helene.
“I don’t get it about those stockings,” he said in a low voice. “You said there were eleven of them, and all different sizes.”
She nodded her sleek blonde head. “I measured them. I happened to pick up two and they didn’t look alike, so I measured them all.”
Malone scowled at her. “I’m not calling you a liar,” he began slowly, “but I’ve paid for a lot of silk stockings in my lifetime. And there aren’t eleven different sizes. There’s eight and a half, nine, nine and a half, and so on up. I think the largest size made is twelve, but I never knew a girl with bigger feet than that. You couldn’t have had a hallucination, could you?”
“I could,” she whispered indignantly, “but I didn’t. Those were specially made stockings, and besides being different foot sizes, they were different lengths. There weren’t any two of them alike.” She crushed out her cigarette. “They were the kind of stockings the chorus here wears in that South American number, and all those girls are different heights. Jake!”
“I heard you,” Jake said, “and shut up!” He glanced around quickly to see that no one was in hearing distance before he spoke again. “All I need now is to be told that the midget was murdered by the best night club chorus in town.” He paused, frowned, and added, “Not that they wouldn’t have liked to.”
