the lawyer growled, “I’ve never even been able to meet a woman with money.” He gazed thoughtfully into his cigar smoke. “Did I hear her say she’d just come from a long chat with Angela Doll?” As Helene nodded, he went on, “But that Man Mountain the Second said he’d taken her home right after he left the stage.”
“You don’t understand Ruth Rawlson,” Helene said. “She just happened to pick on Angela Doll. She’d have made it Queen Victoria if she’d happened to think of her first.”
Malone blinked. “I can see she’s a souse,” he said, “but the insanity doesn’t show.”
“Ruth is sane,” Helene said. “She just lies by some kind of instinct, I think. It comes natural to her. If she’s been shopping in Marshall Field’s, and you ask her where she’s been, she says she’s just come from Mandel Brothers. Or if she went to the movies the night before, she’ll tell you she was home reading the most fascinating book. The chances are this time she was back chinning with the chorus girls while they dressed.”
“I’d love to be able to use Ruth on the witness stand sometime,” Malone said.
“Ruth,” Helene said gravely, “is stranger than fiction.”
The little lawyer pretended not to have heard. “She couldn’t have strayed into the midget’s dressing room and murdered him, could she?”
“She could,” Helene said, “but she wouldn’t have done it that way. Malone, who did murder him?”
“I’ve mislaid my tea leaves at the moment,” the little lawyer said gloomily. He was silent a minute, lost in thought. “The hell of it is, I have a hunch I’ll never be able to find them, now.”
The late crowd had begun to thin out by the time Jake returned. Betty Royal and her admirers had paused to speak to Helene and then gone home; the Goldsmiths had departed, not looking at or speaking to each other; the tables were emptying fast. Al Omega’s musicians were beginning to cast hopeful glances at their watches.
“Ruth must be losing her grip,” Jake announced, sitting and lighting a cigarette. “Usually she puts away enough cheap whiskey to kill a horse, and keeps right on navigating. Tonight when I put her into the cab, she was practically paralyzed. I told the driver to see her all the way in her door.”
“It isn’t every night one of her friends opens a night club,” Helene reminded him.
“Or closes one,” Jake said wearily. He blew out his match and stared at its charred end. “Let’s go back and take the midget out of his fiddle case, and call the cops.”
Helene stared at him. “Have you lost your mind?”
“I’m just getting it back,” Jake said. A thin line had appeared in his forehead, between his eyebrows. “I don’t mind breaking the law—or anyway, bending it a little—in a good cause, but murder is murder.”
Malone drew a long breath. “I thought you didn’t like the little guy.”
“I didn’t,” Jake said, “I detested him. And the cops will probably close up this joint for a week while they horse around trying to find out who killed him, and in the meantime Max Hook will want his dough back and decide to take the Casino instead. And I’ll end up with a job press-agenting an ice-skating troupe.”
“Never mind,” Helene said, “I adore traveling.”
He leaned across the table and kissed her.
“Damn it,” Malone said crossly, “never cross your bridges until the horse is stolen. Remember, things never seem as bad as they are. I can stall off Max Hook, and in the meantime, maybe I can find out who killed your midget. What’s more,” he added, “I’ll bet you even money I can have your joint open for business by tomorrow night. I don’t have three guys in the sheriff’s office owing me money for nothing.”
“Hooray for Malone!” Helene said enthusiastically.
Jake grinned. “As I’ve said before, what the hell do I have a lawyer for? Let’s go.”
He led the way back to the dressing room. The backstage of the Casino was deserted now, no light showed under the doors of the dressing room, save under the one that had been Jay Otto’s.
Jake paused at the door, one hand on the knob.
“We couldn’t possibly put him back the way we found him,” he said thoughtfully, “and we probably left fingerprints all over everything. We’ll just have to admit we took him down before we called the cops.”
“Just say you thought he might be still alive,” Malone advised.
Jake swung open the door. Helene stepped in ahead of him and switched on the light. Then she stood stock-still in the center of the floor, reaching for Jake’s arm.
“Well,” she said at last, “the marines evidently got here ahead of us.”
The fiddle case that held the body of Jay Otto, the Big Midget, was gone.
Chapter 4
Malone stared at the spot where the fiddle case had been, rapidly added up the events of the evening in his head, and privately resolved he would never take another drink, not as long as he lived.
For a moment Jake appeared to have been petrified. Then, without a word, he strode across the room to the closet where the bull fiddle had been stored and flung open the door. The bull fiddle was still there. He stared at it for an instant, then kicked the door shut again.
“It’s nonsense,” he said at last. “I don’t believe it.”
Malone leaned against the dressing table and stared bewilderedly around the room. There wasn’t a place where the fiddle case could have been concealed, not another closet nor cupboard, not so much as a curtain.
“How—” he began.
“The question isn’t ‘how’,” Jake told him. “It’s ‘what’. What the devil are we going to do now?”
“Search the rest of the place,” Helene suggested.
Jake snorted indignantly. “I suppose you want to go around asking everybody you meet if he’s seen a bass fiddle case with a dead midget in it.”
“No,” she said calmly, “but we can search the place from end to end for a pair of gloves I mislaid somewhere before the show.” And while he stared at her admiringly, she went on, “After all, it’s your night club, and you can search it if you want to.”
“So it is,” Jake said. “I keep forgetting that. Come on, then.”
Half an hour later they returned to the midget’s dressing room. By that time, save for Al Omega’s boys packing up their instruments and preparing to leave, the Casino was deserted. And the fiddle case was definitely nowhere in the building.
Malone unwrapped a cigar and stared at it for a moment before lighting it. “Well,” he said at last, “there’s nothing you can do about it. You didn’t move the body from the premises, and you don’t know who
