Simon dropped the gun back into his pocket.
“Landed?” he said.
“Yes—just as if somebody had thrown it. Somebody must have thrown it. I felt it hit. That was what woke me up. I saw what it was, and of course I let out a yell, and then the door slammed, and I looked round too late to see who it was. But I didn’t care who it was, then. All I could see was that Goddamn snake leering at me. I almost thought I was seeing things again. But I knew I couldn’t be. I wouldn’t have felt it like that. I was just taking a nap, and somebody came in and threw it on top of me!”
“How long ago was this?”
“Just now! You don’t think I lay there for an hour necking with a snake, do you? As soon as it fell on me I woke up, and as soon as I woke up I saw it, and of course I let out a yell at once. You heard me yell, didn’t you, Esther? And right after that the door banged. Did you hear that?”
“Yes, I heard it,” said the Saint.
But he was thinking of something else. And for that once at least, even though she had admitted that she was not so bright, he knew that Esther was all the way there with him. He could feel her mind there with him, even without turning to find her eyes fastened on his face, even before she spoke.
“But that proves it, Simon! You must see that, don’t you? I couldn’t possibly have done it, could I?”
“Why, where were you?” Freddie demanded.
She drew herself up defiantly and faced him.
“I was in Simon’s room.”
Freddie stood hunched and stiff and staring at them. And yet the Saint realised that it wasn’t any positive crystallising of expression that made him look ugly. It was actually the reverse. His puffy face was simply blank and relaxed. And on that sludgy foundation, the crinkles of unremitting feverish bonhomie, the lines and bunchings of laborious domineering enthusiasm, drained of their vital nervous activation, were left like a mass of soft sloppy scars in which the whole synopsis of his life was hieroglyphed.
“What is it now?” Lissa’s voice asked abruptly.
It was a voice that set out to be sharp and matter-of-fact, and failed by an infinitesimal quantity that only such ceaselessly critical ears as the Saint’s would catch.
She stood in the doorway, with Ginny a little behind her.
Freddie looked up at her sidelong from under his lowered brows.
“Go away,” he said coldly. “Get out.”
And then, almost without a pause or a transition, that short-lived quality in his voice was only an uncertain memory.
“Run along,” he said. “Run along and finish dressing. Simon and I want to have a little talk. Nothing’s the matter. We just had a little scare, but it’s all taken care of. I’ll tell you presently. Now be nice children and go away and don’t make a fuss. You, too, Esther.”
Reluctantly, hesitantly, his harem melted away.
Simon strolled leisurely across to a side table and lighted himself a cigarette as Freddie closed the door. He genuinely wasn’t perturbed, and he couldn’t look as if he was.
“Well,” Freddie said finally, “how does it look now?”
His voice was surprisingly negative, and the Saint had to make a lightning adjustment to respond to it.
He said, “It makes you look like quite a bad risk. So do you mind if I collect for today and tomorrow? Two Gs, Freddie. It’d be sort of comforting.”
Freddie went to the dressing-table, peeled a couple of bills out of a litter of green paper and small change, and came back with them. Simon glanced at them with satisfaction. They had the right number of zeros after the 1.
“I don’t blame you,” said Freddie. “If that snake had bitten me—”
“You wouldn’t have died,” said the Saint calmly. “Unless you’ve got a very bad heart, or something like that. That’s the silly part of it. There are doctors within phone call, there’s sure to be plenty of serum in town, and there’s a guy like me on the premises who’s bound to know the first aid. You’d have been rather sick, but you’d have lived through it. So why should the murderer go through an awkward routine with a snake when he had you cold and could’ve shot you or slit your throat and made sure of it?…This whole plot has been full of silly things, and they’re only just starting to add up and make sense.”
“They are?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“I wish I could see it.”
Simon sat on the arm of a chair and thought for a minute, blowing smoke-rings.
“Maybe I can make you see it,” he said.
“Go ahead.”
“Our suspects were limited to six people the first night, when we proved it was someone in the house. Now, through various events, every one of them has an alibi. That would make you think of a partnership. But none of the servants could have poisoned your drink this afternoon, and it wasn’t done by the waiter or the bartender—they’ve both been at the club for years, and you could bet your shirt on them. Therefore somebody at the table must have been at least part of the partnership, or the whole works if there never was a partnership at all. But everyone at the table has still been alibied, somewhere in the story.”
Freddie’s brow was creased with the strain of following the argument.
“Suppose two of the girls were in partnership?”
“I thought of that. It’s possible, but absolutely not probable. I doubt very much whether any two women could collaborate on a proposition like this, but I’m damned sure that no two of these girls could.”
“Then where does that get you?”
“We have to look at the alibis again. And one of them has to be a phony.”
The corrugations deepened on Freddie’s forehead. Simon watched him silently. It was like watching wheels go round. And then a strange expression came into Freddie’s face. He looked at the Saint with wide eyes.
“My God!” he said. “You mean—Lissa…”
Simon didn’t move.
“Yes,” Freddie muttered. “Lissa. Ginny’s got a perfect alibi. She couldn’t have shot at me. You were with her yourself. Esther might have done it if she’d hidden a gun there before. But she was in your room when somebody threw that snake at me. She couldn’t have faked that. And the servants have all gone…The only alibi Lissa has got is that she was the first one to be attacked. But we’ve only got her word for it. She could have staged that so easily.” His face was flushed with the excitement that was starting to obstruct his voice. “And all that criminology of hers…of course…she’s the one who’s always reading these mysteries—she’d think of melodramatic stuff like that snake—she’d have the sort of mind…”
“I owe you an apology, Freddie,” said the Saint, with the utmost candor. “I didn’t think you had all that brain.”
8
He was alone in the house. Freddie Pellman had taken the girls off to the Coral Room for dinner, and Simon’s stall was that he had to wait for a long-distance phone call. He would join them as soon as the call had come through.
“You’ll have the place to yourself,” Freddie had said when he suggested the arrangement, still glowing from his recent accolade. “You can search all you want. You’re bound to find something. And then we’ll have her.”
Simon finished glancing through a copy of Life, and strolled out on the front terrace. Everything on the hillside was very still. He lighted a cigarette, and gazed out over the thin spread of sparkling lights that was Palm Springs at night. Down below, on the road that led east from the foot of the drive, a rapidly dwindling speck of red might have been the tail light of Freddie’s car.
The Saint went back into the living-room after a little while and poured himself a long lasting drink of Peter Dawson. He carried it with him as he worked methodically through Esther’s and Ginny’s rooms.
He wasn’t expecting to find anything in either of them, and he didn’t. But it was a gesture that he felt should be made.
So after that he came to Lissa’s room.
He worked unhurriedly through
the closet and the chest of drawers, finding nothing but the articles of clothing and personal trinkets that he had found in the other rooms. After that he sat down at the dresser. The center drawer contained only the laboratory of creams, lotions, powders, paints, and perfumes without which even a modern goddess believes that she has shed her divinity. The top right-hand drawer contained an assortment of handkerchiefs, scarves, ribbons, clips, and pins. It was in the next drawer down that he found what he had been waiting to find.
It was quite a simple discovery, lying under a soft pink froth of miscellaneous underwear. It consisted of a .32 automatic pistol, a small blue pharmacist’s bottle labeled “Prussic Acid—POISON,” and an old issue of Life. He didn’t really need to open the magazine to know what there would be inside, but he did it. He found the mutilated page, and knew from the other pictures in the layout that the picture which had headed the letter that Freddie had shown him at their first meeting would fit exactly into the space that had been scissored out of the copy in front of him.
He laid the evidence out on the dresser top and considered it while he kindled another cigarette.
Probably any other man would have felt that the search ended there, but the Saint was not any other man. And the strange clairvoyant conviction grew in his mind that that was where the search really began.
He went on with it more quickly, with even more assurance, although he had less idea than before what he was looking for. He only had that intuitive certainty that there should be something—something that would tie the last loose ends of the tangle together and make complete sense of it. And he did find it, after quite a short while.
It was only a shabby envelope tucked into the back of a folding photo frame that contained a nicely glamorised portrait of Freddie. Inside the envelope were a savings bank pass book that showed a total of nearly five thousand dollars, and a folded slip of paper. It was when he unfolded the slip of paper that he knew that the search was actually over and all the questions answered, for he had in his hands a certificate of marriage issued in Yuma ten months before…
“Are you having fun?” Lissa asked.
She had been as quiet as a cat, for he hadn’t heard her come in, and she was right behind him. And yet he wasn’t surprised. His mind was filling with a great calm and quietness as all the conflict of contradictions settled down and he knew that the last act had been reached.
He turned quite slowly, and even the small shining gun in her hand, aimed squarely at his chest, didn’t surprise or disturb him.
“How did you know?” he drawled.
“I’m not so dumb. I should have seen it before I went out if I’d been really smart.”
“You should.” He felt very detached and unrealistically balanced. “How did you get back, by the way?”
“I just took the car.”
“I see.”
He turned and stood up to face her, being careful not to make any abrupt movement, and keeping his hands raised a little, but she still backed away a quick step.
“Don’t come any closer,” she said sharply.
He was just over an arm’s length from her then. He measured it accurately with his eye. And he was still utterly cool and removed from it all. The new stress that was building up in him was different from anything before. He knew now, beyond speculation, that murder was only a few seconds away, and it was one murder that he particularly wanted to prevent. But every one of his senses and reflexes would have to be sharper and surer than they had ever been before to see it coming and to forestall it…Every nerve in his body felt like a violin string that had been tuned to within an eyelash weight of breaking—
And when it came, the warning was a sound so slight that at any other time he might never have heard it—so faint and indeterminate that he was never absolutely sure what it actually was, if it was the rustle of a sleeve or a mere slither of skin against metal or nothing but an unconsciously tightened breath.
It was enough that he heard it, and that it exploded him into action too fast for the eye to follow—too fast even for his own deliberate mental processes to trace. But in one fantastic flow of movement it seemed that his left hand plunged at the gun that Lissa was holding, twisted it aside as it went off, and wrenched it out of her hand and threw her wide and stumbling while another shot from elsewhere chimed into the tight pile-up of sound effects; while at the same time, quite independently, his right hand leapt to his armpit holster in a lightning draw that brought his own gun out to bark a deeper note that practically merged with the other two…And that was just about all there was to it.
The Saint clipped his own gun back in its holster, and dropped Lissa’s automatic into his side pocket. It had all been so fast that he hadn’t even had time to get a hair of his head disarranged.
“I’m afraid you don’t have a very nice husband,” he said.
He stepped to the communicating door and dragged the drooping figure of Freddie Pellman the rest of the way into the room and pushed it into a chair.
9
“He’ll live, if you want him,” said the Saint casually. “I only broke his arm.”
He picked up the revolver that Freddie had dropped, spilled the shells out, and laid it with the other exhibits on the dresser while Freddie clutched at his reddening sleeve and whimpered. It seemed as if the whole thing took so little time that Lissa was still recovering her balance when he turned and looked at her again.
“The only trouble was,” he said, “that you married him too soon. Or didn’t you know about the will then?”
She stared at him, white-faced, without speaking.
“Was he drunk when you did it?” Simon asked.
After a while she said, “Yes.”
“One of those parties?”
“Yes. We were both pretty high. But I didn’t know he was that high.”
“Of course not. And you didn’t realise that he wouldn’t mind framing you into a coffin to keep his gay playboy integrity.”
She looked at the collection of exhibits on her dresser, at Freddie, and at the Saint. She didn’t seem to be able to get everything coordinated quickly. Simon himself showed her the marriage certificate again.
“This is what I wasn’t supposed to find,” he said. “In fact I don’t think Freddie even imagined you’d have it around. But it made quite a difference. How much were you going to shake him down for, Lissa?”
“I only asked him for two hundred thousand,” she said. “I’d never have said anything. I just didn’t want to be like some of the others—thrown out on my ear to be a tramp for the rest of my life.”
“But you wanted too much,” said the Saint. “Or he just didn’t trust you, and he thought you’d always be coming back for more. Anyhow, he figured this would be a better way to pay off.”
His cigarette hadn’t even gone out. He picked it up and brightened it in a long peaceful draw that expressed all the final settling down of his mind.
“The mistake that all of us made,” he said, “was not figuring Freddie for a moderately clever guy. Because he was a bore, we figured he was moderately stupid. Which is a rather dangerous mistake. A bore isn’t necessarily stupid. He doesn’t necessarily overrate his own intelligence. He just underrates everyone else. That makes him tedious, but it doesn’t make him dumb. Freddie isn’t dumb. He just sounds dumb because he’s talking down to how dumb he thinks the rest of us are. As a matter of fact, he’s quite a lively lad. He put a lot of gray matter into this little scheme. As soon as he heard that I’d arrived in town, he had the inspiration that he’d been waiting for. And he didn’t waste a day in getting it started. He wrote himself the famous threatening letter at once—it was quite a coincidence, of course, that there was that last Christmas party to hang it on, but if there hadn’t been that he’d certainly have thought of something else almost as good. He only had to establish that he was being menaced, and get me into the house to protect him. Then he had to put you in the middle of the first situation, in a set-up that would
look swell in the beginning but would get shakier and shakier as things went on. That wasn’t difficult either.”
The only sound when he paused was Freddie Pellman’s heavy sobbing breathing.
“After that, he improvised. He only had to stage a series of incidents that would give everyone else in turn an absolutely ironclad alibi that would satisfy me. It wasn’t hard to do—it was just a matter of being ready with a few props to take advantage of the opportunities that were bound to arise. Perhaps he was a bit lucky in having so many chances in such a short space of time, but I don’t know. He couldn’t go wrong anyway. Everything had to work in for him, once the primary idea was planted. Even an accident like Angelo picking up the knife was just a break for him—there weren’t any fingerprints on it, of course, and it just helped the mystery a little…And this evening he was able to finish up in style with the snake routine. It wasn’t exactly his fault that the routine fitted in just as well with another pattern that was gradually penetrating into my poor benighted brain. That’s just one of the natural troubles with trying to create artificial mysteries—when you’re too busy towing around a lot of red herrings, you don’t realise that you may be getting a fishy smell on your own fingers…That was what Freddie did. He was being very clever about letting it work out that your alibi was the only flimsy one, but he forgot that when I had to start questioning alibis it might occur to me that there was one other person whose alibis were flimsier still. And that was him.”
Simon drew on his cigarette again.
“Funnily enough, I was just leading up to telling him that when he made his first major mistake. You see, I had an idea what was going on, but I was going nuts trying to figure out why. There didn’t seem to be any point to the whole performance, except as a terrific and ponderous practical joke. And I couldn’t see Freddie with that sort of humor. So I was just going to come out flatly and face him with it and see what happened. It’s a shock technique that works pretty well sometimes. And then he took all the wind out of my sails by insisting on helping me to see how it all pointed to you. That’s what I mean about him underrating other people’s intelligence. He was just a little too anxious to make quite sure that I hadn’t missed any of the points that I was supposed to get. But it had just the opposite effect, because I happened to know that your alibi must have been genuine. So then I knew that the whole plot didn’t point to you—it was pointed at you. And when Freddie went a little further and helped me to think of the idea of staying behind tonight and searching your room, I began to guess that the climax would be something like this. I suppose he got hold of you privately and told you he’d started to get suspicious of what I was up to—maybe I was planning to plant some evidence and frame one of you?”
The Saint Goes West (The Saint Series) Page 15