If Estelle's fingerprint meant what it seemed; Hazel was out - not time enough to commit a murder, arrange a corpse, wipe a handle, and get downstairs to my side before Jack started the show.
But in that case nobody could have done it - except a hypothetical sex maniac who did not mind a spot of butchery in front of a window full of people. Nonsense!
Of course the fingerprint was not conclusive. Hazel could have pushed the button with a coin or a bobby pin, without destroying an old print or making a new one. I hated to admit it but she was not clear yet.
Again, if Estelle did not push the button, then it looked still more like an insider; an outsider would not know where to find the button nor have any reason to push it.
For that matter, why should Hazel push it? It had not given her an alibi - it didn't make sense.
Round and round and round till my head ached.
It was a long time later that I went over and tugged at the covers. "Hazel - "
"Yes, Eddie?"
"Who punched the buzzer in the eleven o'clock show?"
She considered. "That show is both of us. She did - she always took charge."
"Mmmm... . What other girls have worked in the Mirror?"
"Why, none. Estelle and I opened the show."
"Okay. Maybe I've got it. Let's call Spade Jones."
Spade assured me he would be only too happy to get out of a warm bed to play games with me and would I like a job waking the bugler, too? But he agreed to come to the Joy Club, with Joy in tow, and to fetch enough flat feet, fire arms, and muscles to cope.
I was standing back of the bar in the Joy Club, with Hazel seated where she had been when she screamed and a cop from the Homicide Squad in my seat. Jack and Spade were at the end of the bar, where Spade could see.
"We will now show how a man can be two places at one time," I announced. "I am now Mr. Jack Joy. I time is shortly before midnight. Hazel has just left the dressing room and come downstairs. She stops off a moment at the little girls room at the foot of the stairs, and thereby misses Jack, who is headed those same stairs. He goes up and finds Estelle in the dressing room, peeled and ready for her act - probably."
I took a glance at Jack. His face was a taut mask, I he was a long way from breaking. "There was an argument - what about, I don't know, but it might have been over the trumpet boy she had swapped shows meet. In any case, I am willing to bet that she stops it by switching out the dressing room light to chill him out."
First blood. He flinched at that - his mask crack "He didn't stay out more than a few moments," I was on. "Probably he had a flashlight in his pocket - h probably got one on him now - and that let him back into that terrible, dark room, and switch on the light. Estelle was already on the stage, anointing h self with catsup, and almost ready to push the buz2 She must have been about to do so, for she had star the egg timer. He grabbed the prop dagger a stabbed her, stabbed her dead."
I stopped. No blood from Jack this time. "He arranges her in the pose - ten seconds for that; it was nothing but a sprawl - wipes handle and ducks out. Ten seconds more to this sp Or make it twenty. He asks me if the buzzer I sounded and I tell him No. He really had to know, Estelle might have punched it before he got to he
"Hearing the answer he wanted, he bustles around a bit like this - " I monkeyed with some glassware I picked up a bar spoon and pointed with it to the stage "Note that the Mirror is lighted and empty - I've. the bypass on. Imagine it dark, with Estelle on the tar, a knife in her heart." I dropped the spoon do and, while their eyes were still on the Mirror, I bent a metal spoon across the two binding posts which carried the two leads to the push button on the stage. The buzzer gave out with a loud beep! I broke the connection by lifting the spoon for a split second, and brought it down again for a second beep! "And that is how a man can - Catch him, Spade!"
Spade was at him before I yelled. The three cops had him helpless in no time. He was not armed; it had been sheer reflex - a break for freedom. But he was not giving up, even now. "You've got nothing on me. No evidence. Anybody could have jimmied those wires anywhere along the line."
"No, Jack," I contradicted. "I checked for that. Those wires run through the same steel conduit as the power wires, all the way from the control box to the stage. It was here or there, Jack. It couldn't be there; it had to be here."
He shut up. "I want to see my lawyer," was his only answer.
"You'll see your lawyer," Spade assured him jovially. "Tomorrow, or the next day. Right now you're going to go downtown and sit under some nice hot lights for a few hours."
"No, Lieutenant!" It was Hazel.
"Eh? And why not, Miss Dorn?"
"Don't put him under lights. Shut him in a dark closet!"
"Eh? Well, I'll be - That's what I call a bright girl!" It was the mop closet they used. He lasted thirteen minutes, then he started to whimper and then to scream. They let him out and took his confession.
I was almost sorry for him when they led him away. I should not have been - second degree was the most he could get as premeditation was impossible to prove and quite unlikely anyhow. "Not guilty by reason of insanity" was a fair bet. Whatever his guilt, that woman had certainly driven him to it. And imagine the nerve of the man, the pure colossal nerve, that enabled him to go through with lighting up that stage just after he looked up and saw two cops standing: side the door!
I took Hazel home the second time. The bed was SI pulled down and she went straight for it, kicking her shoes as she went. She unzipped the side of I dress and started to pull it over her head, when s stopped. "Eddie!"
"Yes, Beautiful?"
"If I take off my clothes again, are you going to excuse me of another murder?"
I considered this. "That depends," I informed h "on whether you are really interested in me, or in the agent I was telling you about."
She grinned at me, then scooped up a shoe a threw it. "In you, you lug!" Then she went on shucking off her clothes. After a bit I unlaced my shoes.
FOREWORD
My next attempt to branch out was my first book:
ROCKET SHIP GALILEO.Iattempted book publication earlier than I had intended to because a boys' book was solicited from me by a major publisher. I was unsure of myself - but two highly respected friends, Cleve Cartmill and Fritz Lang, urged me to try it. So I did... and the publisher who had asked for it rejected it. A trip to the Moon? Preposterous! He suggested that I submit another book - length MS without that silly space - travel angle.
Instead I sold it to Scribner's and thereby started a sequence: one boys' book each year timed for the Christmas trade. This lasted twelve years and was a very strange relationship, as my editor disliked science fiction, disliked me (a sentiment I learned to reciprocate), and kept me on for the sole reason that my books sold so well that they kept her department out of the red - her words. Eventually she bounced one with the suggestion that I shelve it for a year and then rewrite it.
But by bouncing it she broke the chain of options. Instead of shelving it, I took it across the street... and won a Hugo with it.
ROCKET SHIP GALILEO was a fumbling first attempt; I have never been satisfied with it. But it has never been out of print, has appeared in fourteen languages, and has earned a preposterous amount in book royalties alone; I should not kick. Nevertheless I cringe whenever I consider its shortcomings.
My next fiction (here following) was FREE MEN. Offhand it appears to be a routine post - Holocaust story, and the details - idioms, place names, etc. - justify that assumption. In fact it is any conquered nation in any century -