Thanks to the Saint (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  Mr Eade sadly extracted the other twenty-three bills from a distended wallet. Simon picked up the total and added one more green leaf from the pile on the table.

  “That’s the extra twenty she squeezed out of me for the pendant,” he explained. “Some of that other lettuce will be part of the ten grand they got from Mrs Yarmouth, and no doubt Copplestone has the rest of it. I guess they kept everything split fifty-fifty—more or less. You’d better impound it, anyway. I’ll call Mrs Yarmouth right away and tell her it’s safe and have her go to the police in Los Angeles and get the extradition machinery started.”

  Mr Copplestone Eade, after a long reproachful gaze at his spouse, turned with a sigh and conjured further wads of negotiable paper from various pockets. He was above all things a practical man and knew when to abandon a line that would obviously get him nowhere.

  “Here is five thousand dollars,” he said. “My wife, I’m sure, will be glad to contribute the other five. As you surmised, we split fifty-fifty—more or less. Shall we be realistic? Extradition proceedings can be tiresome. And trials can be lengthy, and embarrassing to all parties. And during all that time the money would be tied up by the Court. Don’t you think that if she got it all back at once, like you’ve got back yours, she could be persuaded to drop the charges?”

  Simon Templar only gave an impression of pondering this.

  “Well, I did only tell her I’d try to get her money back,” he admitted.

  “But you have to think of yourself, of course,” said Mr Eade, with increasing benignity. “I know a little about you private eyes. You’re getting a good fee from Mrs Yarmouth, naturally, but the publicity of an arrest might be even more valuable. Would—say—two thousand dollars compensate you for that?”

  “Two thousand dollars,” said the Saint blandly, “from each of you, might.”

  He collected seven thousand dollars from Mr Eade, and seven thousand more from the pile on the table, and only then seemed to become aware of the fourth person who was now speechlessly watching the proceedings.

  “This is all right with me,” he said, “but I still don’t know how the Law feels about it. After all, I’ve taken up a lot of his afternoon.”

  “Perhaps a thousand dollars for yourself, Lieutenant?” suggested Mr Eade, overanxious with incipient relief.

  The officer almost choked.

  “Now I’ve heard everything,” he boiled over. “First it turns into legal blackmail, if there is such a thing, and using me for an accessory—and now you’d like to make me a partner too. Thanks, but you can keep the rest of your dirty money. You’re lucky I don’t get promoted for making arrests. My job is just to keep this town clean of grifters like you, who’d give it a bad name. But don’t miss that plane, Mr Eade, and don’t let me ever run into you again, or you won’t get off so easy!”

  “Why on earth did you have to turn down that extra G-note?” Simon complained later. “At least it would have paid for the special plane you had to charter to get here.”

  “I thought the scene was more convincing that way,” Howard Mayne said. “Anyhow, I was only helping you out for Aunt Sophie’s sake. I don’t think I’m ready for a life of crime yet.”

  The Saint grinned.

  “You’re wasting a lot of talent,” he opined. “But I hope Copplestone sees you in a movie some day when you’re a star and realizes how good you really might have been as Don Juan Jones.”

  THE HAPPY SUICIDE

  The advertisement said:

  GALLOWS FOR RENT. Strong, excellently constructed. Only ten dollars a day, exclusive occupancy. Rope free. Do it yourself. Box 13, Miami Gazette.

  “It was a gag,” Lois Norroy said, perhaps rather unnecessarily.

  She had a nut-brown suntan that contrasted quite startlingly with blond hair of a pale platinum shade that the human follicle hardly ever manages to sustain much beyond infancy without chemical assistance, and this, combined with a figure of noteworthy exuberance in the upper register, made her look more like the popular conception of a movie star (or rather, perhaps, that anomalous creature known to the trade as a “starlet”) than an extremely able and somewhat cynical writer of the lines that made such dumb belles seem wise, witty, or cute, which she was.

  “You see, Paul was one of these do-it-yourself fiends,” she explained. “It was his one relaxation, the only pastime that could take his mind completely off his job. Where other fellows would’ve kept a library or a stable or a harem, Paul kept a workshop—to rest in. But it was a shop that any professional craftsman would’ve been glad to settle for. If there’s any tool or gadget he didn’t have, it’s only because he hadn’t heard of it. So when he decided he wanted this lamppost out by his barbecue, of course he had to make it himself. He did it very functionally and seriously, and he swore it wasn’t until it was finished that he realized how much like an old-fashioned gallows it looked.”

  But only that morning Paul Zaglan had been found dangling by the neck from his own unintentional gibbet, with an overturned stepladder under him, in the barbecue-patio of his house in one of the less pretentious developments north of Miami, and only thus for one day had succeeded in crowding his more famous brother in the headlines.

  “Then we started kidding about it,” Lois Norroy said, “and that advertisement was the result. It was Paul’s own idea, but we all agreed it might bring some goofy answers. And he thought they might give him some ideas or some gags he could use in a show.”

  “So after all, it still only took his mind off his work the hard way,” said the Saint.

  He had no reason to be quite so cynical, but if we must be technical, he had not much reason even to be there at all. Don Mucklow had invited him to help ferry a boat to Grand Bahama and stay over for some fishing, but a strong north-easter had started to blow and forced them to postpone their sailing. Then, when they were circumnavigating nothing more hazardous than the smorgasbord at Old Scandia, Don had run a collision course with Lois Norroy and introduced him. After that, being what she was, it would have been too much to hope that she would forget him when Paul Zaglan’s suicide added an unexpectedly lurid news-worthiness to the assignment she was already working on. These things were always happening to Simon Templar, and sometimes he felt he was getting quite used to them.

  “But you don’t have to be so utterly flip about it,” Lois said rather edgily.

  “It’s true, though, isn’t it?” Simon protested mildly. “When he built this thing he was trying to forget his job, but it turned right around and started giving him ideas. Which only proves that when Destiny has you by the ear it isn’t much use wriggling.”

  “Then why don’t you relax and enjoy it?”

  A certain most unsaintly gleam came into Simon’s blue gaze.

  “It seems to me,” he murmured, “that that Oriental advice was originally given on a rather different subject. Now if that’s what you have in mind, darling—”

  The editors of Fame magazine would have found it hard to believe, but Lois Norroy actually blushed.

  “I mean,” she said hastily, “why don’t you step in and solve the mystery?”

  “Because, for one thing, as I tried to tell you when you were trying to set me up for a Fame story—and in spite of a lot of popular myths—I am not a detective.”

  “You’ll do until a better one comes along.”

  Simon gave her a cigarette.

  “I don’t think the local Joe Fridays would like to hear you say that,” he drawled. “But even if you’re determined to suborn me with outrageous flattery, what makes you think there’s any mystery to solve?”

  She looked at him with improbably steady and challenging brown eyes.

  “You must have been fairly close to a few suicides before this,” she said. “But did you ever know one who was completely happy just before he did it?”

  “How sure are you of that?”

  “Remember, I was with him all yesterday afternoon and evening, until he went home about eleven o’c
lock. We were still working on the Portrait. At Ziggy’s.”

  This statement was not as cryptic as it may sound to those who were never addicts of Fame magazine, which at that time was at the peak of its somewhat transitory success. Devoted to the most intimate discussion and dissection of current celebrities, it was a lineal descendant of the lurid scandal sheets that had swamped the newsstands a few years before, but like many a child of murky parentage it had risen considerably above its origin. Although it catered to the same appetite for gossip and revelation, it was much more dignified, much more discriminating, and therefore on occasion much more deadly. But it was not necessarily destructive; it enhanced at least one reputation for every three that it undermined, so that there was never any lack of professional exhibitionists who were eager to play Russian roulette with their futures by cooperating to become the subject of one of the Portraits which were the main monthly feature of Fame, with their caricatures emblazoned on the cover, and a synoptic biography and assessment inside to which no closeted skeleton was sacred. And for this treatment Paul’s brother Ziggy was an ineluctable natural.

  Since Fame magazine has long ago published its devastatingly competent capsule of Ziggy Zaglan, this chronicler is not going to try to top it. Let it simply remain on the record that a man who lacked every imaginable (or should it be imaginary?) asset of good looks and good voice, agility or ingenuity, wit or charm, talent or temperament was able for a stretch of months which it would only be agonizing to enumerate to stay at the top of every popularity poll or rating system devised to assure timorous sponsors that their commercials were interrupting the entertainment of a satisfactory number of bleary-eyed slaves of a TV set. He was one of those preposterous phenomena which afflict the public once in a generation like an epidemic: he resembled no other performer, living or dead, and indeed there was a cadre of diehards which forlornly maintained that he was not a performer at all, but millions of one hundred per cent American housewives would have taken a Trappist vow sooner than they would have missed their daily dose of Ziggy Zaglan.

  He was also important enough to be able to dictate his own working conditions, which he took advantage of to do his show for nine months in the year from Miami Beach, where he had established his legal residence for the two most seductive reasons that Florida could offer: its climate and its freedom from state income tax. As a result, several members of his permanent team had been constrained (perhaps not too reluctantly) to follow suit and had moved their homes to the same fortunate area, though not to the identical gilded neighborhood. Perhaps the most inevitable of these was Paul Zaglan, a brother, who had the main writing credit on the show.

  “I’ve always wondered,” said the Saint. “Who was the brains of the act? Granting that some kind of brains were involved, of course.”

  “It wasn’t Paul,” she said. “Paul was a wonderful guy, and a terrific worker, and he had lots of brilliant flashes. But the personality that came over to the public was always Ziggy’s. Paul was the carpenter. He gave Ziggy scripts with a solid framework and lots of interesting angles, but they’d never have got off the ground until Ziggy added his own curlicues and all those zany touches that seem to send wild half the half-witted public.”

  “I gather that this doesn’t include you.”

  She shrugged.

  “Would anyone buy curlicues with nothing to hang ’em on?”

  “Or scaffolding with nothing on it?”

  “All right,” she said sharply. “Maybe I just liked Paul better as a person. I used to know him fairly well in New York, before Ziggy was big enough to move down here—before I even went to work for Fame.”

  Simon slanted an idle eyebrow at her.

  “Okay, what happened last night?”

  “Ziggy and Paul had been working on the show all afternoon, except when they were being interrupted by Ted Colbin—that’s Ziggy’s agent—and the man from the network, Ralph Damian. There’s a big hassle going on about a new contract, so they’re both down here to fight it out, so that every time they reach a compromise on something they can take it straight to Ziggy and see if he’ll buy it.”

  “Ziggy is so biggie?”

  “With a hey-nonny-nonny and a cha-cha-cha. So Monty and I—”

  “Take it easy,” pleaded the Saint. “I’m meeting people too fast. Who’s Monty?”

  “Montague Velston,” she said. “My partner on this assignment. This is the third Fame Portrait we’ve worked on as a team…We’d just been stooging around, watching the antics and making our own notes. That’s the way we operate when we’re getting; one of those candid snapshots of an alleged genius at work.”

  “Thank you for warning me,” Simon said. “I had a hunch all along that—”

  “We had dinner rather late, about a quarter of nine. After coffee Paul said he was bushed and went home. Ziggy was just warming up—he starts nibbling Dexedrine after lunch, and by the time everyone else is folding he’s opening up. He went in the den and started his final rewrite on the next script. He always does that himself, after everything’s been hashed out with Paul and the rest of the gang. That’s when he adds those unique touches that make the Ziggy Zaglan show.”

  “So everyone else went home too?”

  “No no. After all, we only had hotels to go to, and it was cozy enough at Ziggy’s, and the drinks were free. And he’d said, ‘Don’t go away, I’ll be through in an hour or two, and you won’t even miss me.’ Monty and Ted started playing gin rummy, and Ralph went on the make for me.”

  The Saint remained politely expressionless.

  “And?”

  “It could only be verbal skirmishing, of course, with Monty and Ted in the room. He turned the radio on to an FM station that was playing Viennese waltzes, very softly, so it wouldn’t disturb Ziggy, who was typing a blue streak in the next room, and gave me his best intellectual line. I kept him going for almost an hour, for my own education, but when he realized it was only an academic interest he got restless.”

  “Men are so selfish, aren’t they?”

  “About the same time Ted Colbin was getting tired of losing to Monty, so he was quite receptive when Ralph suggested they ought to catch the last show at the Latin Quarter and case the talent.”

  “That sounds a trifle unchivalrous,” Simon remarked.

  “Oh, naturally I was invited to go along, which gave me the chance to beg off without costing him any face. Monty was still in a sport shirt and said if he went back to the hotel and changed at that hour it would be into his pajamas. So Ralph and Ted went off, leering and wisecracking.”

  “Without saying good-bye?”

  Another voice said sepulchrally: “When Ziggy Zaglan is creating, nobody but nobody interrupts him.”

  They both turned to see the slight dapper man who had come strolling around the corner of the house. He wore gray suede shoes, charcoal doeskin slacks, and a pearl-colored silk shirt with gunmetal-tinted collar and pocket hems. Even against this carefully neutral background his face seemed colorless. He had wavy black hair, black eyes set rather close together, a pencil-thin line of black mustache, and a smooth, sallow complexion. He looked like a man that prudent strangers would hesitate to play cards with.

  “This is Monty,” Lois Norroy said, and introduced the Saint.

  Montague Velston shook hands very gently.

  “Pardon the interruption,” he said, “but I’m an amateur detective myself. When I heard that Lois had gone off with you, something told me this was where you’d be.”

  “Since you caught up with us,” Lois said, “you go on with the story.”

  “As far as I’m concerned,” Velston said, “it’s strictly filler. Lois and I sat hashing over our notes and a few other things for about an hour, and then Ziggy came out waving a script and saying he had the show wrapped up and now we should all relax. His idea of relaxing was to pick up Ted and Ralph from the Latin Quarter, and then we should all go on to some all-night strip-clip emporium out towards Hialeah where we wo
uldn’t need coats and ties or practically anything else except money. This I wanted like a brain tumour, but I figured that it might be part of our assignment to observe Ziggy on a bender, so I agreed to be sacrificed.”

  He had a soft and languid way of speaking which combined with his total lack of facial vivacity to keep you belatedly groping back for some mordant phrase that he had almost smuggled past you.

  “Was it worth it?” Simon inquired.

  “You would expect a constructive answer from a burnt offering? Ziggy played host to all the disengaged hostesses and bought, by my count, twenty-five gallons of alleged Bollinger. In between contour chasing at the table, he got into every act on the floor. If he hadn’t been the great Ziggy Zaglan, it would have been embarrassing. Since I’m not the great Ziggy Zaglan, I was embarrassed anyhow, but everyone else thought it was as funny as a case of hives. There were a few high spots which would slay the lads at a college reunion but which would hardly get a good yawn from the sophisticated editors of Fame. Finally Ziggy fell asleep, about five a.m., and Ted paid out a few hundred dollars from his account and we took him home. Since then I’ve only been trying to scratch the fungus off my palate.” Monty Velston took out a thin cigar, gazed at it mournfully, and put it back in his pocket. He turned patiently to Lois again. “I still haven’t heard what really happened with you after we dropped you off at the hotel. Or was I too groggy to assimilate it when you phoned?”

  “I didn’t do a thing but sleep, and I was having breakfast by the pool when Ziggy arrived and told me about Paul. The police had called him, and he was on his way over here. I threw some clothes on and came with him. They’d taken down the…the body, by that time, but everything else was just the way they’d found it.”

  “Which was how?” Simon asked.

  The young woman shrugged.

  “Just about like now. Except for the stepladder. That was lying down. He must have kicked it over when he…jumped off.”