Condor chewed audibly on his flake of timber.
“I like having my mind put straight for me,” he said. “So you played secrets. Did you know who the murderer was then?”
“No,” said the Saint honestly. “I had to get away and think and investigate for a bit. But I had to find him. I had to find him before he got me into some more trouble that I wouldn’t be able to get out of so easily. I knew it must have been somebody who hated my guts. Somebody who was tough enough to kill Ufferlitz in the first place, and vicious enough to try and frame me for it. A guy with two motives.”
“And you found him all by yourself.”
“Yes,” said the Saint. “Orlando Flane.”
They stopped for a traffic light. Simon shifted into low gear and held the clutch out. He kept his eyes ahead, but he knew Condor was still watching him.
“You tell it,” said Condor. “It’s your story.”
“There wasn’t much to it. I’d taken a part away from Flane. He was on the skids, and that part might have saved him, but I took it away. I didn’t mean to. It was Ufferlitz’s idea. Flane was just letters in lights to me. But he didn’t understand that. His brain was all rotten with alcohol, anyway. He was drunk at Giro’s last night when we were there. You can check on that, too. And I guess he was just too mad to have any sense.”
“But why did he kill Ufferlitz?”
“Because Ufferlitz was blackmailing him. Flane wasn’t always a glamor boy for cameras. There was a time in New Orleans when he was charming feminine hearts for a much less romantic racket. He was in a bad spot once, and there was a girl who was a witness. She died—very conveniently. But Ufferlitz had the goods on him.”
“How do you know that?”
“You forget,” said the Saint gently. “Crime is my business. And I’ve got a rather phenomenal memory. Only sometimes it’s a little bit slow. But you don’t have to take my word for it. You can confirm it with New Orleans.”
They were rolling eastwards on the boulevard again.
“Why didn’t you tell me that this morning?”
“It just hadn’t come into my head then. I got it after I left you this afternoon. Going off on a wrong tack after Groom—that business about the girl…girls…dirty work with girls—and suddenly the gates were open and it all poured in. I was in the Front Office then, and by God, Flane was there. Well, I’m just not a good citizen. I never could see why policemen should have all the fun. I just have to stick my own nose in. So I did. I told Flane I was wise to him. I told him the whole story, and invented what I wasn’t sure of. But I made it good. Just to see if I could make him break.”
“And then—”
“Then he broke. I don’t have to try and convince you about that. Here’s my first witness.”
He braked the car to a stop outside the neon façade of the Front Office, and the prowl car slid tightly in behind. Simon opened his door and got out with careful leisureliness, and the detective put his gun away and got out after him.
They went into the crepuscular discretion of the bar, where a sizeable clientele was now dispersed through shadowy corners, and Simon beckoned the bartender over.
“Will you tell Mr Condor what happened this afternoon?”
The bartender looked surprised to see the Saint again so soon, and along with his surprise there was a habitual wariness.
“About what?” he said innocently.
“About Flane,” said the Saint.
“It’s all right,” Condor put in soothingly. “There’s no beef. Mr Templar just wanted me to hear it.” The bartender wiped his hands on his apron.
“I guess Mr Flane had just had one too many,” he said.
“He was talking to this gentleman, and I couldn’t hear what they were saying. Then it looked as if Mr Flane was getting tough—he does that sometimes, when he’s had a drink—or I should say he used to do it—”
“Go on,” Condor said.
“Well, I tried to hear something then, but I couldn’t hear anything, and then he must have slugged Mr Whatyoucalledhim, because he fell off his stool, and Mr Flane beat it out of here, an’ I got the gentleman up again an’ bought him a drink an’ he went out. That’s all I know.”
“Thank you,” said Condor.
Then they were outside again.
“After that,” said the Saint, “I went back to the studio to see if you were still there, but you’d left. We can walk over and you can check that. If the same gatekeeper isn’t on now, he’ll know where we can find the guy I spoke to.”
Condor gazed moodily across the street, like a dyspeptic crocodile on a river bank watching succulent game cavorting on the other side.
“I’ll believe you,” he said. “You wouldn’t want me to check it if I wouldn’t get the right answers. But why didn’t you call me at Headquarters?”
“I meant to,” said the Saint. “But I…well, I had a date. You know how it is. And I got drinking, and sort of put it off. Then I heard the news on the radio. Then I was just scared to stick my neck out. I figured the case was washed up anyhow. I’d as good as told Flane he was sunk, and he’d bumped himself off. So—justice was done, even if nobody got any medals.”
Condor massaged his long melancholy nose.
“You want me to believe a helluva lot,” he said. “And a guy in my job eats medals.”
“Don’t believe any more than you want to,” Simon said nonchalantly. “Just convince yourself. Flane had it in for Ufferlitz. He’d threatened him before—”
“He had?”
“Right in that bar. The first time I ever saw him. He was drunk, and he was shooting off his mouth about how Ufferlitz couldn’t do things to him and he was going to show him where he got off. The bartender was trying to calm him down. Go back and ask him.”
The detective shook his head.
“If you had that bartender primed with one story, you’d have him rehearsed in all of ’em,” he said unenthusiastically. “Who else heard Flane say he’d get Ufferlitz?”
The Saint thought, and a picture came into his mind.
“Ufferlitz’s secretary heard him—Ufferlitz threw him out of his office yesterday, and Flane said then that he’d fix him. Didn’t she tell you?”
“No.”
“She should have. She was there.”
Condor hunched his shoulders.
“We’ll see if she’s home,” he said.
So they were in the Saint’s car again, heading north across Hollywood Boulevard to an address that they looked up in the phone book in the corner drug store. The prowl car followed behind them like a shadow.
But the Saint was hardly aware of it any more. Certainly it had no more sinister implications. Condor was sold, even though he hadn’t admitted it aloud. It was only a question of a little more time and some routine verifications. The detective’s mournful passivity and the dejected downward angle of the toothpick in his mouth were their own acknowledgments. In the end it had been as simple as that. And Simon was only wondering why he had never thought of that scene before, when Flane had come hurtling out of Ufferlitz’s office and the Saint had picked him up and steadied him while he made his threat—the scene that Peggy Warden had omitted to tell Condor about. Simon thought he had been very slow about that. But it was all taken care of now…
And they were in Peggy Warden’s apartment, and she was a little frightened and wide-eyed, but she said, “Yes, Mr Flane did say that, but—”
And Condor said, “Do you remember his words?”
“It was something like—” She wrinkled her brow. “Something like ‘When I fix you, you’re going to stay fixed.’ ”
“That was it,” said the Saint.
She said, “But he was drunk—he didn’t really know what he was saying—”
Condor turned away from her with a movement of glum separation whose superficial rudeness had less to do with any deliberate intention than with his congenital inability to loosen his official armor.
His bright black
eyes circled down on to the Saint like tired dead crows.
“Okay, Saint,” he said. “You’re good. I don’t know how good yet, but good.”
“Then what happens?”
“I can’t say. I just work for a living. It’ll all have to go to the DA. Probably the Big Shots’ll go to work on him to push it away without any scandal. Another Hollywood mystery dies a natural death. That’s my guess. I’m only a cop.”
“But you’re satisfied?”
“I’m going to have to be. I’ll do some more checking up, but if you’re as good as you sound it won’t make any difference.” His mouth turned down one-sidedly. “If you’re not worried any more, you don’t need to be.”
The Saint sat down in the nearest chair and prepared himself a cigarette with unwontedly deliberate fingers.
“I think,” he remarked judicially, “that I could use a drink.”
“I’ve got some Scotch,” said the girl.
“With ice,” said the Saint, “and plain water.”
“What about you, Lieutenant?”
Condor shook his head.
“Thanks, miss. I’ve got to worry about my report. I won’t take any more of your time.” He looked at the Saint. “You’ve got your car, so I’ll be on my way.”
He pulled the toothpick out of his teeth, inspected it, and thrust it back. He didn’t seem to be able to make a good exit. His eyes were still watchful, as they always would be, as they would always be searching and challenging, but without the conscience-created menace behind them they were just awkward and lonely and disillusioned. He was just a guy who’d been trying to do a job. And when the job wasn’t there any more he was no more frightening or perhaps just as frightening as a man who had rung the bell to try and sell a vacuum cleaner and been told that there were no customers for vacuum cleaners. He said at last: “Well, next time don’t forget that some of us need medals.”
“I won’t,” said the Saint.
He sat and watched the door close, and drew slowly and introspectively at his cigarette, and waited while Peggy Warden brought him a highball and put it into his hand. He smiled his thanks at her and oscillated the glass gently so that the liquid circulated coolingly around the ice cubes.
She had a drink herself. She sat down opposite him, and he admired her again in his mind, the fresh clean trimness of her, so fearless and clean-cut, and quietly lovely too, with the natural golden brown of her hair and the steady gray of her eyes. It was a face that one would never remember vividly for any unique lines, and yet it had something independent of conformation that would puzzle the memory and yet always be haunting—as it was haunting him now.
“I’ve been very stupid, Peggy,” he said. “But the case is closed now, as you heard Condor say, and it’s all right the way it is. I just lose sleep over loose ends. Tell me why you killed Byron Ufferlitz.”
11
She couldn’t answer at first. It was as if all the answers were there in her mind, but she couldn’t talk.
He helped her after a little while, and his voice and body were very lazy and peaceful, without any urgency or eagerness. They had a hypnotic quality, unassumed and unthinkably comforting.
“It was for Trilby Andrews, wasn’t it?” he said.
Her eyes drew all their life from his face.
“Andrews—Warden,” he said. “It’s practically an anagram. But I almost missed it. And then the signed photograph in his study. I knew it was familiar—it kept worrying me. But I was looking at it the wrong way. I kept thinking it had to be somebody, and so I never could place it. It took a long time before I realised that it was just like somebody. Like somebody else…What was she?”
“My sister,” she said.
It was as if speech were a strange thing, as if she had never spoken before.
He nodded.
“Yes, of course.”
“When did you know?” she asked, still with that curious preciseness, as if the forming of words was a conscious performance.
“It sort of came gradually. I was all wrong most of the time. Eventually I knew it must have been a woman, because all the ashtrays were emptied. So there wouldn’t be any cigarette-ends with lipstick on them. But then I had the wrong woman. It all hit me together when I found out that you’d never said anything about that scene in the office that I walked in on—when Flane told Ufferlitz he was going to fix him. Naturally that should have been the first thing you’d think of, if you were just an ordinary person. But you never said a word about it.”
“How could I?” she said. “I’d done it, and I didn’t want to be caught, but I didn’t want anyone else to get in a jam because of me.”
He drew again at his cigarette.
“Do you want to tell me the rest of it?”
“There isn’t much else. She was younger than me, and…maybe she was stupid. I don’t know. But she thought she could go places. She might have. She was really beautiful…She came out here, and she met Ufferlitz. I got that from her letters, when she wrote sometimes. But she met a lot of other people too. She never said who it was. But…when she was in trouble, it sounded like Ufferlitz. And then she was dead…I had to find out. I came out here, got a job at MGM, and made contacts and waited until I could get with Ufferlitz. Then I waited. I had to be sure. And I still didn’t know what I could do. But I went to his house once, and there was a picture…After that I bought a gun. I still didn’t know what I’d do with it. But I had it with me last night…Then he came in, and—I suppose I’d been thinking too much. It just ran away with me.”
“You were sure then?”
“He’d been drinking,” she said. “He wasn’t drunk, but he’d been drinking. Enough for him to let down his hair. He’d never been like that with me before. He tried to make love to me. He said ‘You remind me of somebody.’ I asked him if it was the girl in the photograph. He said ‘She was a dumb cluck.’ I asked him why. He said ‘She didn’t know what it was all about, and she lost her head.’…That was when I lost my head. I went around behind him and pretended I was still making up to him, and said ‘Was she just a little bit pregnant?’—as if I thought it was funny. He said ‘Yeah, the damn fool. I’d have taken care of her. But she lost her head.’…Then I picked up my bag and took the gun out. It was just like being drunk. I said ‘She was probably making a sucker out of you. How did she know it was you?’ He said ‘Jesus Christ, it was me all right, but she didn’t have any sense. I never let a girl down in my life, baby’—and then I knew it was him, I didn’t think any more, but I knew it was him, and he’d let anybody down, but he had his line off by heart, and she might have listened to the same words I was listening to, and I just didn’t think any more, but I put the gun against the back of his head and pulled the trigger and I was glad about it.”
Simon moved his glass after a while, and she lighted a cigarette and shook the match out, and it was as if her mind had been washed clear at last as a shower washes the sky.
“So,” she said, “then I knew what I’d done, but I didn’t feel any different about it. I just tried to be very careful. I gathered up the papers I’d been working on, and emptied the ashtrays because they were so obvious—though I didn’t stop to think then that I was supposed to have been there anyway—and I dug the bullet out of the panelling. And all the time it didn’t seem like me. I’d done something and I thought it was right, but I knew it was dangerous, and I didn’t see why I should be punished. I just tried to think of everything. I even drove home all the way round by Malibu Lake, and threw the gun and the bullet in…Now you know it all.”
“I’ve forgotten already,” he said.
She still seemed to be wondering where she really was.
“Do you…do you think Condor was really satisfied?”
“I believe him,” said the Saint. “The case is closed. Flane shot himself. So he had a gun. His gun could have killed Ufferlitz, and if he’d dug out the bullet and got rid of it there wouldn’t have been any more evidence.”
&
nbsp; “But I still don’t know why Flane shot himself.”
“I drove him into it,” said the Saint. “I was just blundering on, annoying everybody and waiting for a fish to rise. Well, Orlando rose. I knew Ufferlitz must have had something on him, since that seems to have been Ufferlitz’s technique with almost everybody, and I just bluffed it out of him. It was something quite ugly, so we don’t need to feel sorry for him. But I let him think that Ufferlitz had pretty well broadcast it with one of those voice-from-the-grave messages. It was something that would have sold him out of pictures for good and all. So—he just rang his own curtain down. It was a big help, though, because then I was able to come out with a nice solution and make Condor happy and make sure that the case was all tied up and put away.”
She got up and went to the window and looked out, and presently when she came back he knew that the world had begun again for her as if it had never stopped moving.
“There’s no reason why you should do all that for me,” she said.
“I didn’t do it for you,” he said brutally. “I just did it. I like to see puzzles worked out to the right solution. I don’t mean the correct solution. That’s dull pedantic stuff. I mean the right one. Which means the right one for all concerned, as well as I can see it. Don’t try to put too many haloes on me.”
“You’ve already got one, haven’t you?”
He finished his drink, and peeled himself out of the chair, the whole whipcord length of him, and stretched himself with the physical luxury of a cat, so that suddenly it seemed as if his world also began again; only this was a world which began again every day, and would never cease to begin again, and everything in the past was only a holiday. She saw his face dark and debonair in the shaded lamplight, and the ageless amusement in his blue eyes, and already she had the feeling that he was only a legend that had paused for a few hours.
“Don’t ever be sure of it,” he said.
He thought about her some more as he drove west again on Sunset, but there was someone else on his mind too, so that his thought became somewhat confused. Only a little while ago he had been falsely accusing April Quest, and he realised now that once she recovered her poise she had been quietly leading him on—for mischief, or because she had to know what he would propose to do about his belief? Or perhaps some of both…Well, he’d still given the right answer…So now there was a threat of another unwanted halo hanging over his head, and a few more pitfalls between them. But nothing, he hoped, that the drink he had asked her to save for him wouldn’t cure. Or at least the drink after that.
The Saint Goes West (The Saint Series) Page 24