fully alibied by c or more customers. I had alibied Jack. Estelle-bui wasn’t
suicide. And Hazel.
If Estelle’s fingerprint meant what it seemed; Ha:
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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 niy 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 1 dressing room and come downstairs. She stops off a moment at
the little girls room at the foot of 1 stairs, and thereby misses Jack, who is
headed those same stairs. He goes up and finds Estelle in 1 dressing room, peeled
and ready for her act-prol bly.”
I took a glance at Jack. His face was a taut mask, I he was a long way from
breaking. “There was an gument-what about, I don’t know, but it might h2 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 ch~ him out.”
First blood. He flinched at that-his mask crack “He didn’t stay out more
than a few moments,” I w~ 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 1 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. His m~ was on firmly. “He arranges
her in the pose-ten s onds 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 aroi~ a bit like this-” I monkeyed
with some glassware ~ picked up a bar spoon and pointed with it to the sta “Note
that the Mirror is lighted and empty-I’ve. the bypass on. Imagine it dark, with