“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.”
Malone relit his cigar. “Now that we’re on the subject, who might have wanted to murder your midget?”
“I don’t know,” Jake said thoughtfully. “Nobody really liked him, and a lot of people downright hated him, but not murderously, as far as I know. I can’t imagine anybody hating him that much.”
Helene nodded. “It would take twice as much motive to make someone murder a midget as an ordinary person. You’d think it would be just the other way, but it isn’t.”
“I know exactly what you mean,” Malone told her. Before he could say anything more, he caught sight of the huge figure of Jay Otto’s assistant in the doorway leading backstage, and felt a sudden cold shiver run up and down his spine.
Jake saw him in the same instant, and whispered in what he hoped was a reassuring tone, “He can’t possibly know anything about it.”
Seen at close range, the big man appeared even more massive than on the Casino’s stage. Malone peered at him for a moment, trying to place a resemblance, until at last he realized he was remembering the pictures in the early pages of The Outline of History.
Jake introduced him as Mr. McJackson—Allswell McJackson—and invited him to join them. Mr. McJackson shook his head, ruffling his mane of thick, brown hair.
“I’ve got to hurry to the hotel, or Mr. Otto’ll be in a frenzy.” He spoke in a beautifully modulated voice that had a very definite Harvard overtone. “I went to take Angela Doll home the minute I left the stage, and if I’d dreamed Mr. Otto would leave before I got back, I’d have hurried more than I did.”
Jake and Helene looked at each other, each signaling the other to speak first. Malone had trouble with cigar smoke that went down the wrong way, and by the time he’d downed half his drink in order to stop strangling, Mr. McJackson had gone on talking, apparently oblivious of the interruption.
“I hope Mr. Otto isn’t angry,” he said.
“For the love of Mike!” Malone exploded. “He’s only a midget.” He’d been within a hairsbreadth of saying, “He was.”
Mr. McJackson smiled wryly. “You don’t know Mr. Otto.”
Malone downed the other half of his drink. “Now I’d have been glad to take Miss Doll home for you,” he said gallantly, “if it would have saved you any trouble.”
“I wanted to get her away from the Casino before Mr. Otto did his impression of her,” the giant said. “Not that she won’t hear about it anyway.”
Jake said, “He could have picked out someone else and saved me a lot of trouble.”
“Yes,” Mr. McJackson agreed. “But he doesn’t enjoy doing an impression unless it makes somebody mad.” He sighed.
“It must be a lousy job,” Malone said. “Why don’t you quit him?”
Allswell McJackson shook his head, and a wistful look came into his eyes. “I’d do it tomorrow,” he said unhappily, “if I could only get a professorship. Even in some little jerk-water college.” He sighed again. “But it appears to be impossible.” He sighed again, said goodnight, and began shoving his way toward the exit.
Malone waited till he was out of earshot before growling, “And you wouldn’t believe in leprechauns?”
“Poor Allswell,” Helene said feelingly. “He has a degree in chemistry, and nobody’ll give him a job as a professor because he looks like a wrestling champion. All he could do was be a stooge for Jay Otto.”
“And now,” Jake said, “that’s shot. Or hanged, rather.”
Malone scowled.