“We’re in time,” Malone said. He made it sound as though the marines had landed. While Jake and Helene looked on anxiously, he made a quick examination of the unconscious woman.
“She hasn’t been poisoned,” he announced at last. “She’s been drugged.”
He reached for a cigar, lit it, picked up one of the ash trays and emptied it into the wastebasket, and sat down beside Ruth Rawlson.
“How do you know?” Helene demanded. “Because in case you’re wrong—this is no time for guessing games.”
“I can tell by the way she’s sleeping and the way her eyeballs look,” Malone said. “I’ve seen knockout drops work before. That’s what was in that whiskey,” he added. “Dope.” He withdrew the bottle from his overcoat pocket and looked at it thoughtfully. “I hardly even need to have this analyzed now, but I might as well, just for the record. If we’d used our heads, of course, we’d have known it all the time.”
Helene sniffed. “If we’d gazed into a little crystal ball, you mean.”
“No,” Jake said, “Malone’s right. If the idea had been to poison the midget, the murderer wouldn’t have bothered to come back and hang him. Instead, he doped him, and then when he was out, came back and arranged his little noose.”
“The murderer could have poisoned him and then tried to make it look like a suicide,” Helene objected.
Malone shook his head. “Even a murderer of very slow intelligence would have made a better job of it.”
“All right,” Helene said. “I won’t argue.” She looked closely at the sleeping woman. “What shall we do about her, Malone?”
“Tuck her in bed and leave her in peace,” the lawyer growled. “She’s good for twelve to twenty-four hours. We’ll drop back from time to time and make sure she’s all right, and try to be around when she wakes up, because she’ll probably feel like hell. But that’s all we can do.”
Helene dropped her wrap on the back of a chair. “To bed she goes, then.”
While Helene busied herself with the unconscious woman, Malone prowled restlessly around the room. It was, he reflected, a horrible-looking place in which to wake up with a double hangover. He knew, because he’d occasionally waked up in places that looked about as bad. Suddenly he peeled off his coat, rolled up his sleeves, and went to work.
From a cupboard shelf he took the last clean pillow case, and put it on the pillow Jake was preparing to tuck under Ruth Rawlson’s head. Then he emptied ash trays, wiped them clean, and put them back in convenient locations. He hung up clothes, put away slippers and stockings, dusted the table, and plumped up cushions. He emptied the coffeepot, washed it out, and put it away ready for use. Then he tiptoed down the hall with the wastebasket, emptied it into the container by the back door, returned it, and straightened the pictures.
By that time, Ruth Rawlson was sleeping peacefully in her bed, and Helene was donning her wrap again. For just a moment Malone stood looking down at her; then he brushed a wisp of hair from her fore head. For all her tousled gray hair and haggard face, she looked at this moment like a dreaming child.
“Sleep well,” Malone whispered. He reached into his pocket, drew out the bottle of rye Helene had filched from Angela Doll’s dressing room, and put it on the table beside the bed.
“The supreme sacrifice,” Helene said coldly, under her breath.
Malone glared at her. “Let’s get the hell out of this place,” he said fiercely, “and head for the nearest cup of coffee you can find.”
He carefully slipped the key of Ruth Rawlson’s apartment into his pocket.
Fifteen minutes later, they settled down around a table in an all night drugstore.
“She’s going to be all right, isn’t she?” Helene asked anxiously.
Malone nodded. “Outside of the way she’ll probably feel when she wakes up, and I don’t even want to think about that.” He sighed and stirred his coffee. “Besides being the famous midget entertainer,” he said, “who was Jay Otto?”
Jake frowned. “No one seems to know,” he said. “All the life stories in his press book seem to start with his being about twenty-one years old. There’s none of the usual stuff about being born in a small town in Indiana, or a village in the Bavarian Alps.”
“Just strayed into this world, full grown,” Helene murmured, “from that other world where everybody is a midget. He probably was bright blue all over when he landed, but that faded out little by little.”
Jake made a rude face at her and went on. “He never seems to have been in any of the regular midget shows. He was always a solo act. Turned up first on some fifth-rate vaudeville circuit, and was an immediate hit. If you ever read the entertainment pages, you know the rest of his history.”
“I don’t,” Malone said, “but I’ll be satisfied to guess at it.”
“Wasn’t he mixed up in some kind of scandal a few years ago?” Helene asked.
Jake nodded. “He had a very gorgeous secretary who toured with him for a few years. She jumped out of a New York hotel window, and there was quite a stink about it. He came out of it all right, though.”
“And he has all kinds of money,” Helene said. “He can’t have been saving his salary all these years, because he spends it like so much hay, and from all I hear about him, he always has. But in spite of the size of the salary he gouged out of Jake, he lived as though he had about four times as much.”
“The rumors I’ve heard about his personal life,” Jake said, “shocked even me. But you know how people talk about anybody who isn’t exactly like everyone else. And he was such an unpleasant little guy.”
Malone yawned. “I don’t know why the hell I should be asking all this, at this hour in the morning.”
“Somebody’s got to ask,” Helene said reasonably. “Just the way somebody’s got to find out who murdered him.” She hummed briefly, “And it might as well be you.”
The lawyer yawned again, long and luxuriously. “I don’t think I’ll need to, now. If the midget’s body had been found in the Casino, then Jake would have been on the spot, and I’d have had to get to work. But now—the body is probably at the bottom of the Chicago river, by this time. There will be a flurry of excitement because of the midget’s disappearance, and the Casino will get a lot of publicity, and that’ll be the end of it.”
“You think so,” Jake said.
“I hope so,” Malone told him.
“But,” Helene insisted, “what makes you think it’s at the bottom of the river?”
The little lawyer leaned his elbows on the white-top table and looked at her wearily. “Because,” he said patiently, “the only reason anyone would have had for taking the body out of the dressing room was to dispose of it.”
“But how,” Helene demanded, “did he know the body was in the fiddle case?”
Malone sighed heavily and looked at Jake. “Why did you ever marry her, anyway?”
“I couldn’t help it,” Jake said. “She kidnapped me. I really wanted to marry the girl who makes the doughnuts in the window on Madison Street, but Helene forced me into her car and—Ouch! Stop pinching me!”
“All right, Malone,” Helene said calmly. “Now. How did he know? And don’t give me that Superman stuff again, or I’ll pinch you too.”
“It’s like this,” Malone said. “For some reason the murderer came back to get the body and dispose of it. We don’t know what that reason was,