The Big Midget Murders Page 8

  “And another question,” Helene said: “Which one was omitted, and how are we ever going to find out?”

  “And my question,” Jake said, “is, what’s going to happen to the Casino?” He kicked a small and entirely inoffensive footstool.

  Helene glanced at him. “That’s right,” she said very quietly. “After all, we’re not in business to find out who murdered Jay Otto. We’re running a night club, and there’s tonight’s show to worry about, and—a lot of other things.” She paused to light a cigarette. “There’s Ruth Rawlson, and Betty Royal’s brother, and Allswell McJackson, and Annette Ginnis.” She looked up expectantly at Malone.

  The little lawyer drew a long breath. “She called me up,” he began.

  There was a knock at the door. Jake and Helene looked at each other for a moment before Jake murmured, “We might as well open it. As soon as we get a minute we’ll go look for a monastery.”

  Helene said, “I don’t want to be selfish, darling. Let’s settle for a convent.”

  He opened the door, said, “Well—,” caught his breath and added, “I’ll be damned. Come in, Artie.”

  Helen said, in what sounded to Malone like a faintly quavering voice, “Why, hello, Artie.” It seemed to the lawyer that she had paled.

  “This is Artie Clute,” Jake said to Malone. “Mr. Malone, Artie.”

  Malone nodded, and wondered if he should know who Artie Clute was, without further explanation. He saw a short, chubby man with a round, almost cherubic, and—at the moment—extremely worried face, plentifully sprinkled with freckles, below a halo of curly, yellow hair. The little man’s blue eyes were wide and without guile. Indeed, his whole appearance—save for the anxiety that wrinkled his forehead—was a mixture of childlike innocence and good will toward all the world.

  He stood for a moment spinning a blue pork-pie hat on one forefinger, nodding to Malone, and sending a feeble smile in the direction of Helene. At last he drew a breath, gulped, and finally managed to speak to Jake.

  “I’m sorry to bother you at this time of the morning,” he said apologetically, “especially knowing you must have a lot on your mind right now, and if it wasn’t so important to me I wouldn’t do it, but it is important to me, and so I didn’t think you’d mind.” He paused.

  “Of course,” Jake said heartily. Almost too heartily. “Anything I can do for you, Artie, anytime at all—”

  “Well,” Artie said, “it’s like this.” He drew another breath, this time almost strangling on it. “Mr. Justus, now that the midget’s been murdered—can I have my bass fiddle back?”

  Chapter Ten

  The reason he loved Jake and Helene so dearly, Malone reflected, was the perfect aplomb they displayed under almost any circumstances. He was, he hoped, keeping back any faint flicker of excitement that might have showed on his own countenance, as he watched Helene lighting a cigarette with a hand that hardly trembled at all, and Jake picking up a match folder from the floor in the most carefree manner imaginable.

  “How’s that again?” Jake said, stowing the match folder in his vest pocket. “And would you mind saying it a little slower?”

  “My bull fiddle,” Artie Clute said, beginning to blush a little. “He is dead, and it is important because Al told me to let him know right away.”

  “Artie is the bass fiddle player with Al Omega’s orchestra,” Jake said to Malone, as though that explained everything. “I mean, he was.”

  “Al was perfectly right in firing me, too,” the musician said. “But now I’ve promised him I’ll never do it again and he told me he’d hire me back today, and if you ask me it was a dirty trick of that midget to hang on to my fiddle when the only way I could pay him back anyway was to go back to work for Al.”

  Malone wondered what the moon-faced young man could possibly have done that would have merited his being fired from Al Omega’s band. He said, “Let me get this straight. The midget kept your bull fiddle because you owed him some money when you got fired from the band, and now you can go back to work in the band if you have the fiddle, only the midget wouldn’t give it back to you, but now he’s dead. Is that right?” It occurred to him that only a few moments’ association with Artie Clute was affecting his own speech.

  “That’s it,” Artie said. He beamed admiration at Malone and added, “You lawyer fellas make everything sound so easy.”

  “You’ve got it wrong,” Helene said, shaking her head at him. “They go to school for years, just learning how to make the simplest things sound hard.”

  That was a little too involved for Artie Clute. He giggled appreciatively, said, “Yeah, I guess that’s it a’right,” and looked blank. “About this fiddle,” he began hopefully, looking at Jake.

  Jake managed to look stern and said, “Yes?”

  “I didn’t owe him so very much in the first place,” the musician said, talking fast. “Just what I lost one night at the Hook’s joint, and not having enough with me to pay off, they told me—the guys at the Hook’s joint, I mean—why didn’t I borrow it from the midget, hell, he had all kinds of dough, so I called him up and he said it was okay, but then Al fired me, not that he wasn’t perfectly right in doing so, and first thing you know the midget is wanting his dough back and I don’t have it, so he takes the fiddle, and”—he paused for breath—“now he’s dead, so can I have it back?”

  “This is where we came in,” Helene said under her breath.

  Jake said, “Well—” dragging it out into two syllables.

  “It isn’t as if the fiddle would do him any good now that he’s dead,” Artie Clute said urgently. “Not that it ever would have when he was alive. And look at all the good it would do me right now. Besides”—he looked appealingly at Malone—“nobody else wants it. He don’t have anybody to inherit it. How could a midget have any heirs?”

  Malone coughed discreetly and said, “He might have a father and mother.”

  Artie Clute looked skeptical, and said nothing.

  “Besides,” the little lawyer went on, “from all that I’ve heard—”

  Jake said quickly, “I imagine if any heirs do turn up, they’d be satisfied with the money instead of the fiddle, and if Artie has his job back”—He turned to the unhappy musician. “Funny Al didn’t tell me he was going to hire you again.”

  “It was only last night,” Artie Clute said. “He wouldn’t have hired me back if it hadn’t been that I was buying a pint at the liquor store over on Clark street and I didn’t have enough dough to pay for it, so I looked up at the clock and figured the band boys were out in the intermission. So then the guy in the liquor store said his delivery boy would walk over to the Casino with me and the pint, and I went in to borrow the eight cents from one of the boys and the delivery boy went in with me, carrying the pint, and there was Al, and he said, ‘For Crissakes, Artie, if you can get your bull fiddle away from that damn midget, you can have your job back starting tomorrow night,’ and Mac lent me the eight cents and the delivery boy gave me the pint and beat it back to the liquor store, and now you see, Mr. Justus, all I need is to get my fiddle and I’m all set.”

  “That’s all,” Malone said cheerfully. “Only whatever happened to the pint?”

  Artie Clute looked hurt. “That’s gone a’ready.” His face brightened suddenly. “But if you feel like a drink, Mr. Malone, I got two dollars I borrowed from the chambermaid, and I can send out for some gin.”

  “Never mind,” Malone said hastily. He turned to Jake. “About this bull fiddle. I don’t see why not—”

  “Sure,” Jake said. He looked thoughtfully at a spot on the wall just over the musician’s head. “Do you know where it is?”

  Artie Clute blinked and said, “The liquor store? It’s on the corner of Clark and—”

  “No, no, no,” Jake said. “The fiddle.”

  “Oh, the fiddle,” Artie said. His round, pleasantly childlike face began to lose its color. “You mean, do I know where the fiddle is? No, I don’t know where it is. And if I
don’t know where it is, then I don’t suppose I can get it back, and—”

  “Never mind,” Helene said, “I know where it is.” She lit a cigarette, blew out the match and dropped it in the ash tray at her elbow. “It’s in the midget’s dressing room. I saw it there myself.”

  “That’s right,” Jake said brightly. “I saw it there too.” He looked at his watch. “Joe must be there by now looking after the cleaning. I’ll call him up and have him check on it.”

  He phoned the Casino, asked if a bull fiddle and case were in the midget’s dressing room, waited five minutes and was answered in the affirmative, and arranged for both articles to be delivered by messenger to their original owner.

  “Isn’t he wonderful?” Artie Clute said admiringly. “Now I never would have thought of that.” He took one of Helene’s cigarettes, lit it, and said, “Have you got a drink around here, Mr. Justus? You have? Thanks.” And while Jake went into the kitchenette, “This is swell. Here Al’s hired me again, and I’m going to have my fiddle back again, and everything’s okay.” He downed the drink Jake had poured for him, went to the door, opened it, paused, and said, “Oh, and another thing, Mr. Justus. Now I’ve got my job with the band again, and seeing as how you’ve lived here a long time, would you mind telling the manager here that it’s okay if I don’t pay my share of the rent on our joint until a week from Saturday?”

  “Nothing would give me greater pleasure,” Jake said. He closed the door.

  Malone blew a smoke ring, gazed at it with one eye closed, and said, “I still don’t see why I wanted to be a lawyer, when I could have been a bull fiddle player.”

  “That’s von Flanagan’s line,” Helene chided him. “He never wanted to be a policeman, he wanted to raise mink.”

  “Not mink,” Jake corrected her. “He wanted to retire with a Georgia pecan grove.”

  Malone said, “The last I remember, he wanted to buy a weekly newspaper and”—he coughed—“become a journalist. But as long as he doesn’t want to be a bull fiddle player, I don’t care. If he did, he’d probably want us to come and listen to him practice.”

  “Just leave it that he never wanted to be a policeman,” Helene said, “or that you never wanted to be a lawyer. Stick to the script, Malone. Jake’s in a jam, and what are you going to do about it? And how about Annette Ginnis? And there’s another thing I want to know—”

  A thunderous knock at the door interrupted her. Jake opened the door and Artie Clute stuck in his head and shoulders.

  “I had to come back,” Artie said, “because I just wanted to say thank you very much, Mr. Justus, and I appreciate all you’ve done for me.” He started to close the door.

  “Wait a minute,” Jake said suddenly. He half-dragged the musician into the room. “You said you lost your dough at the Hook’s place. How come you boys in the band go down there, when you must know it’s crooked?”

  Artie Clute looked surprised and hurt. “Well, you know how it is, Mr. Justus. A guy sits around with the band all night, and nothing to do but look at the floor show and watch the pretty girls on the dance floor, and golly, he’s got to have some relaxation. Just because a guy plays a bull fiddle, it don’t mean he’s no slave.”

  “I don’t give a good red damn what you do in your spare time,” Jake said pleasantly. “All I want to know is why you hang out at the Hook’s, with all the places there are to go to in Chicago.”

  “Oh,” Artie Clute said, blinking. “Oh, that’s like this, Mr. Justus. Most of us owed him a little dough. Not much, maybe, but a little. And then he had something on a couple of the other guys. So when he said we should go to the Hook’s instead of maybe some other joint, there wasn’t nowhere else none of us could go.”

  The angry indrawn breath between Jake’s teeth sounded like escaping steam. “You’re talking about the Hook? You mean he said that?”

  “Oh no,” Artie Clute told him. His blue eyes were like saucers. “Not the Hook.”

  “Then who?” Jake shouted at him.

  “Why the midget, of course,” Artie Clute said. “Who else?” In the silence that followed, he half-closed the door, opened it again, repeated, “Thank you Mr. Justus, for everything,” and was gone down the hall before anyone moved.

  “Once upon a time,” Malone said, several minutes later, “I sat in the Drake bar near a nice middle-aged lady who was knitting a sock. She’d had eight Martinis, and she’d dropped four stitches, and when I watched her she was trying to pick up those stitches and figure out where all the threads came from and where they were supposed to belong.”

  “A heartbreaking picture,” Jake snapped. “I hope she finished the sock satisfactorily. But what does that have to do with any of this?”

  “Just,” Malone said, “that I know exactly how she felt.” He relit his cigar. “I feel as if I had a lot of threads in my hands, and they all come from the same pattern, but I’m damned and double-damned if I know where they all fit in.”

  “And I still haven’t had an answer to the question in my mind,” Helene said. “In fact, I haven’t had a chance to ask it yet.” As the two men stared at her, she went on, “How did Artie Clute know that the midget is dead?”

  Jake opened his mouth, closed it again, stared at her, choked, and finally said, “The newspapers—”

  “The newspapers aren’t out yet,” she told him, looking at her watch. “Of course he may be a clairvoyant—”

  He wheeled around and flung open the door, muttering, “I’ll find out—” He stopped dead-still in the doorway, one hand gripping the jamb.

  “Well, Mister Justus,” Angela Doll said, in a voice that oozed acid. “You son of a bitch!” She kicked the door shut with one gold-heeled sandal and stood leaning against it, looking like a petite, enameled angel, the delicate brown curls that framed her face escaping from the hood of her evening cape. Before anyone could say a word, she went, fast, into her next line. “You told me,” she said, “you told me”—Suddenly she crossed the six-foot distance between herself and Jake in two bounds, slapped him sharply across the face, and leaped away again. “You told me,” she screamed, “if I came to work this God-damned flea circus you call a night club, I’d get every consideration. And what happens?”

  Jake hadn’t been a press agent for nothing. He lit a cigarette, straightened his tie, and looked calm. “All right, pet,” he said, “you tell me. What happens?”

  “He asks me what happens!” Angela Doll exclaimed to the lighting fixture in the center of the ceiling. “All right, I’ll tell you what happens.” She pinned a buttonholing eye on Jake. “I’m a young girl. I want to be an actress. When I was six years old I was playing Little Eva. Nine years old, and I’m playing Little Lord Fauntleroy. Then I’m ten years old—”

  “And you’re playing Juliet,” Jake said coldly, “or was it Lady Chatterly? I forget. You can skip the next ten years of the routine, because I wrote it. Now you were saying—”

  “I was only ten years old,” Angela Doll said automatically. She stopped, stared at him, and her face hardened. “Look here, you dope. I spent years working up my act. We won’t talk about my act now. I know how good it is. You don’t have to tell me. Look what it did in Detroit.” She caught her breath. “Look here, Mr. Justus. My act is my livelihood. My old father’s in a sanitarium. My brother George has been out of work for five months. And do you know how much I have to pay my maid? Mrs. Justus, you listen to me”—she turned to Helene—“I work. I kill myself, I tell you. You’re a woman. You’ll understand. I go through my act three times every night. I tell you, every time I go through my act it takes twenty-five years off my life. Three times a night, seven nights a week.” She held her exquisite little hands over her face, and tears began to stream between her fingers. “I’m dying. I’m dying right here in front of your feet. My act, it’s all I’ve got. When I was six”—She stopped herself, skipped the repetition, and began again, “I’ve worked, I’ve slaved, I’ve killed myself, and now”—Suddenly she ripped her evening cloa
k and the dress underneath it from her right shoulder, and her voice rose hysterically. “Seven hundred and fifty dollars I spent just having a birthmark taken off, and that—that midget goes and makes a parody of my act!” For a moment she stood there in the center of the room, the torn dress hanging dramatically from one shoulder, peeking out between her fingers. Then suddenly she dropped her hands and glared at Malone. “What the hell are you pacing up and down the room for?”

  “Don’t ask,” Malone said calmly. “You’re not a lawyer. You wouldn’t understand about nerves.”

  She glared at him for a moment; then unexpectedly laughed, lit a cigarette, and relaxed.

  “Now,” Jake began, “you listen to me.”

  She waved at him. “Oh, I know,” she said amiably. “There’s nobody I can sue. Hell, I don’t want to get mixed up in lawsuits anyway. But just the same”—her eyes began to blaze—“even if the little bastard is dead, I still say it was a lousy trick to play, and”—her voice began to reach for high C—“if he were alive, by God, I’d—I’d kill him, that’s what I’d do.”

  “You’d better not go around saying that,” Helene told her, “or people might get the idea that it was retroactive.”

  Malone said gently, “She means that maybe you had that idea before he was dead.”

  Angela Doll’s rosebud mouth opened wide, and shut again like a trap. She sat down in the nearest chair.

  Jake handed her an ash tray, smiled at her agreeably, and said, “Yes, and while we’re about it, how did you know he was dead?”

  “Because”—she stared up at him helplessly—“Ruth Rawlson told me. When she called up to tell me about—what he’d done to my act. Ruth’s a friend of mine. She was a friend of my mother. They were in the Follies together. Poor old girl, I feel so sorry for her.”

  “That,” Jake said, “has nothing to do with the midget’s being murdered. Just for the record, and strictly between the four of us”—He sat down opposite her and spoke in a soft, confiding voice. “Allswell McJackson took you home from the Casino last night, didn’t he?”