Thanks to the Saint (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  She wasn’t altogether the invulnerably case-hardened reporter that she liked to pretend, he realized. There were words which evoked mental images that made her flinch momentarily before she consciously toughened herself to go on.

  The ladder was about six feet high, Simon judged, as he strolled past it. The top platform was just below his eye level. Some tidy soul had righted it and set it over some distance from the lamppost with which it must have been used.

  “The colored woman who works—worked for Paul every day came in at nine o’clock and found him,” Lois concluded. “The police lieutenant who sent for Ziggy only wanted to ask some routine questions, mostly to find out if we had any idea why Paul did it. He didn’t get much help.”

  Simon walked slowly around the structure that had triggered the whole weird episode, examining it more closely. The resemblance to the traditional primitive gibbet was almost ludicrously exact, for essentially it consisted simply of a square upright post about eight feet high with a single thirty-inch arm projecting from the top, like an inverted L, and a diagonal strengthening brace between the two members: it was easy to see how any imagination could have been carried away by the train of macabre humor which had ended in such a deadly joke. But a detailed study compelled one to add that even if it had fallen into an artistic pitfall it had been designed with some mechanical ingenuity and constructed with professional skill. There was an electrical outlet fitted flush in the underside of the crossbar, self-protected from rain, which was evidently intended to service the lamp which was planned to hang from the bar, but the wiring to it could only pass through the centre of the arm and the upright. Simon saw that each of these members was actually made from two pieces of wood which must have been grooved down their inside length and then joined together to form the necessary tunnel for the concealed wire, but the halves had been so carefully matched and finished that only the keenest scrutiny could detect the joint.

  “You were right,” Simon observed. “He was certainly an amateur in one sense only.” He went on staring emotionlessly at the noose which still dangled from the stout iron hook under the end of the crossbar, where the lantern was obviously meant to hang, adding the last gruesome touch to the gallows outline that turned similarity into solid fact. “And a jack of many trades, apparently. Carpenter, electrician—and rope handler. How many suicides would you think could tie a correct hangman’s knot? I’ll give any odds you like that ninety-nine per cent of hanged suicides swing themselves off on any old slipknot that they can fumble up. But the authentic legal knot is quite tricky, at least tricky enough that I’m sure nobody ever hit on it by accident, except maybe the inventor. And this is a perfect specimen that you could use in a textbook for executioners.”

  “Very interesting,” Velston said in his toneless voice that made it impossible to tell whether he was serious or sarcastic. “Do you get any other associations?”

  “The rope is fine, new, expensive white nylon—the very best. One loose end is bound with Scotch tape, the way the chandlers do it to prevent it unraveling; the other end is raw. So it was cut off a longer piece, and whoever cut it figured this piece was expendable.”

  “This is deduction?” Velston said tiredly. “But it makes sense too. What, after all, is the current market for a loose end of rope that just hung somebody?”

  “Put that needle down, Monty,” Lois snapped. “Could you do any better?”

  “That is not in my contract. I observe and report. This material I may need some day. Mr Templar cannot possibly live for ever without being taken for a Fame treatment.”

  “Children,” Simon interposed pacifically, “I may have an inspiration. Let’s pull a switch. I think I could sell Fame a portrait of two of its distinguished collaborators at work on a Fame Portrait. Let me go to work on it and give you a rest from observing me. After all, I still haven’t anything to work on here.”

  “Wouldn’t you like to look around the house?” she asked.

  “Not particularly. I wish I could convince you that I’m not the Sherlock type. Cigarette ash to me is just cigarette ash. I probably wouldn’t recognize a clue unless it was labeled. I’ve bumbled around a few times and come up with some answers, but they were mostly psychic. And here I don’t even know what crime I’m expected to investigate. Are you sure you aren’t just trying to dream one up, so you can grab a fast and phony vignette of the Saint in action? If so, you should let me in on it, and I might go along with the gag—for a percentage.”

  Lois Norroy bit her lip.

  There was a moment in which both she and Velston seemed to teeter in search of a balance that had been unfairly undermined. It was Montague Velston, expectably, who recovered first.

  “This would require a fiat from the board of directors, with whom we hirelings do not sit except at bars and usually when we’re buying,” he said. “Under the circumstances, we’d better accept your proposition, Mr Templar. Anyhow, as Lois points out, we should keep our noses to the current gallstone. The reason I’m here, in fact, is because Ziggy has called a press conference at which he will distribute his quotes on the subject of Paul’s suicide without playing any favorites, and I think we should have this performance in our file. You’re welcome to join us, Mr Templar.”

  “I wouldn’t know how to turn down an invitation like that,” said the Saint, in a perfectly dead-pan facsimile of Velston’s tone.

  He took them both in his car, since Velston had found his way there by taxi. They were only a few blocks from the western end of Broad Causeway, and on the beach side Lois gave an address which the Saint’s elephantine memory for local topographies could place within a block or two. Otherwise she sat rather quietly between the two men, as if each of them inhibited her from naturalness with the other. The Saint was correspondingly restrained by the hope of maintaining a neutrality which he did not feel. He had been aware of a certain warmth of unspoken friendliness growing between himself and Lois which might go on beyond this episode, but about Velston he was not so sure.

  Ziggy Zaglan’s home was almost completely hidden from the street by a high wall draped with blazing bougainvillea, and uninvited admirers were still further discouraged by a pair of massive wrought-iron gates that blocked the driveway. Velston got out and gave his name to a microphone set in one of the gateposts, and after a brief pause the gates swung open in response to some electric remote control. The house that came in sight as they followed the drive around the curve of a tall concealing hedge was in the tropical-modern style, with wide cantilevered overhangs to shade its expanses of glass and screened breezeways that sometimes made it hard to see exactly where the outside ended and the interior began.

  The front door was opened as they reached it by a white-haired Negro butler who should have been posing for bourbon advertisements, who said, “Good afternoon, ma’am and gentlemen. Mist’ Zaglan is out by the pool.”

  They went out of the central hall around a baffle of glass brick and indoor vines and came into the living room. At least, it had three-quarters of the conventional number of walls for a living room, and towards the back or inner wall it had many of the usual appurtenances, including some recessed shelves of surrealist bric-a-brac, some overstuffed furniture, a card table, a large portable bar, and an enormous edifice of bleached oak centered around a television screen supported by several loud-speaker grilles and buttressed by cabinets which undoubtedly contained as good a collection of records and hi-fi reproductive equipment as a dilettante with money could assemble. What would have been the fourth wall consisted only of ceiling-high panels of sliding glass, through which with the help of bamboo furniture an almost unnoticed transition could be made to the preponderant outdoorsiness of the swimming-pool area, which in turn expanded through almost invisible screens of the lot’s western frontage on upper Biscayne Bay and the sea wall and walk where a shiny thirty-foot express cruiser was tied up.

  In the area which clung hardest to the time-honored tenets of living-room decor, two men disengaged thems
elves somewhat laboriously from the plushiest armchairs. One of them was slim and wiry, with a seamed sunburnt face and crew-cut blond hair; the other was tall and moonfaced, with a hairline that receded to the crown of his head and very bright eyes behind large thick glasses.

  “This is Ted Colbin, Ziggy’s agent,” Velston introduced the wiry one, who looked like a retired lightweight fighter. “And Ralph Damian, of UBC.” He indicated the moonfaced one, who looked like a junior professor of mathematics. “May I present Simon Templar?”

  The name registered on them visibly, but not beyond the bounds of urbane interest.

  “Not the Saint?” Damian said, looking more than ever like a recent and still eager college graduate, and not at all like the lecherous executive that Simon had visualized.

  “Guilty.”

  “I’ve had so many people tell me there ought to be a TV series about you that I’ve sometimes wondered whether you were fact or fiction.”

  “Before you sign anything, Mr Templar, if you haven’t already,” Colbin said, “I wish you’d talk to me. I’d like to give you my impartial advice, and it needn’t cost you a cent.”

  “Mr Templar insists that he has nothing to sell,” Lois said. “Not even to anything as painless as a Fame interview, with me doing it. He’s only here now to watch Monty and me in action. But if you work on him, you’ll probably wake up and find him starting his own network and charging agents ten per cent for selling them to sponsors.”

  The Saint grinned.

  “This is a wicked libel,” he said. “I only came here because Lois promised I could meet Ziggy in person and perhaps get his autograph.”

  “He’s out there,” Damian said, “giving his all, putting a protractor on the angles.”

  His thumb twisted towards the pool area, where all that the uninitiated eye could see was a group of half a dozen nondescript men clustered around a focal point which their own semicircle of backs concealed from view.

  “How do you know that’s what he’s doing?” Simon asked curiously.

  “That’s easy. Would you like to hear it?”

  He opened a panel in the bank of record cabinets, flipped a switch, and turned some dials. In a few seconds the cracked plaintive voice familiar to everyone who had been within range of a radio or TV set, which to millions of fanatical adorers was capable of eliciting every nuance of response from guffaws to tears, came through the multiple speakers a little louder than life.

  “I’m not going to speculate on Paul’s reasons for doing what he did. Let the people who don’t really care have a field day with their guesses and gossip.” This was the dignified, the earnest Ziggy, who sometimes came out for a curtain speech in which he begged people to give generously to the Red Cross, or to remember an orphanage at Christmas, his plea made all the more cogent by that hoarse and helpless delivery, reminding them that under the motley of a clown might beat the heart of a frustrated crusader. “Everyone knows that I’ve always maintained that an artist’s private life should be private—that after he delivers his manuscript, or walks off the stage, the world should let him alone. Paul never short-changed any of us who depended on the material he gave us. But his own life was his own show—to coin a phrase—and if he chose to finish the script where he did, we haven’t any right to ask why.” Here came the gravelly catch in the throat, burlesqued by a hundred night-club comedians in search of something foolproof to caricature. “The only sponsor he had to please is the One who’ll eventually check on all our ratings…How does that sound?” Another voice, less readily identifiable as Damian’s said, “Pretty lustrous, Ziggy. I only wonder if that last touch isn’t extra cream on the cereal—”

  Damian flicked the switch again, silencing the record, and said himself, “We ran it through a couple of times before the newsboys got here, of course. With a property as big as Ziggy, you can’t shoot off the cuff.”

  “May we quote you?” Velston asked.

  “I’d be wasting my breath if I asked you not to, so I only hope you’ll do it correctly. I shall repeat my exact words to your charming collaborator, as a precaution.” Damian glanced around, but Ted Colbin had edged Lois away to the other side of the room, where they seemed to be talking very intensely but inaudibly. He turned back to the Saint, with a disarmingly juvenile kind of naughtiness sparkling in his eyes. “Are you shocked, Mr Templar? I’ve admitted that Ziggy Zaglan’s interview on his brother’s death was rehearsed like any other public appearance. Isn’t that a sensational revelation?”

  “You must wait till I try out a few answers to that,” said the Saint amiably.

  Outside, the group of men by the pool was breaking up. They began to straggle away towards some exit which bypassed the living room. One figure was left behind, the smallest of them all, a somber silhouette in dark-blue slacks and polo shirt gazing into the sunset.

  Then, a moment after the last reporter disappeared, the lone little man turned and began walking towards the house, with increasing briskness, until he rolled aside one of the screen doors and almost bounced into the living room.

  “It was all right,” he wheezed. “It played like an organ. I could feel it. But I need a drink.”

  His skin was tanned to the healthy nut-brown which was everything that the Florida Chamber of Commerce could ask of a professional resident with a yacht and a pool, but his build was a trifle pudgy and he had a little pot which he did not try to disguise. In fact, it was an asset when he slumped his shoulders and assumed the dejected question-mark stance which was one of his most effective mannerisms. His face could best be compared to that of a dyspeptic dachshund. He had hair that looked like the first attempt of an untalented wigmaker. This is not to say that he had a comedian’s natural advantage of looking funny. He looked like a mess, a rather unpleasant mess with a bad disposition, whose hangdog air was a shield that only served to ward off the indignation of bigger and better men. This at least was the screen personality that the American public had taken to its bosom in one of those absolutely implausible weddings of mother instinct and perversity which have been the Waterloo of every would-be prognosticator of the entertainment market. This was Ziggy Zaglan, in whom almost nobody could find any requisite of success except that millions of people were crazy about him.

  He was halfway to the portable bar when he noticed Simon and skidded to a stop. He elected to play this in dumb show, with pointing finger and interrogative eyebrows.

  “Mr Simon Templar,” Damian said. “Your summer replacement.”

  “I brought him,” Lois said, detaching herself from Colbin. “He wanted to meet you,” she said rather lamely.

  Zaglan got it. He drew circles over his head with one forefinger, his eyebrows still questioning. The Saint nodded.

  Ziggy scuttled behind the pushcart bar and cowered there, peering from behind it in abject terror. Then he picked up a bottle, aimed it like a gun, pulled an invisible trigger, and staggered from the imaginary recoil. Recovering, he inflated his chest, preened himself, and drew more halos over his head, only this time as if they belonged to him.

  It was as corny as that, but everyone had some kind of smile.

  “Have a drink, Saint,” Ziggy said, putting out his hand. “Scotch, bourbon, or shine?”

  “I’ll take some of that Peter Dawson you just blasted me with.”

  Ziggy dropped ice cubes into glasses with one hand while he simultaneously poured with the other.

  “The first one, you’re a guest. After that it’s every man for himself. Nice to have you aboard.”

  He raised his glass, saluted quiveringly, and turned back to Ralph Damian. As if nothing had interrupted him and the Saint had been disposed of like the turned page of a magazine, he went on: “Listen, Ralph, it came to me out there: this ties in perfectly with a new opening I had in mind for the next show. We know that by then the whole world has heard about Paul. Why isn’t there something better than the old Pagliacci routine and the show must go on? Why not come out and face it? Now suppose I ope
ned the show with something like I had for this press-conference bit. Then I go on: But you’ve all read how Paul didn’t seem depressed when he said goodnight to us. So whatever else was on his mind, he must have been satisfied with the ending of the script he’d written for himself. Just as he was satisfied with the script we’re going to do tonight—”

  Simon felt a nudge and turned to find Colbin at his elbow.

  “Can I talk to you for a minute?” said the agent.

  “Why not?” said the Saint. “Everyone else has.”

  Colbin steered him out on to the pool terrace, deftly collecting a highball along the way.

  “I hate bullshooting,” Colbin said bluntly. “So I’ll come right out with it. What are you doing here?”

  “You heard—”

  “I heard what Lois said, and what you said, which was two loads of nothing. The way I dope it out, Norroy and Velston are dragging you along just to see if you’ll stir up anything they can use. Even if you don’t do anything, they can hang half a dozen speculations and innuendoes on you, and since it’s a fact you were here the readers will believe that where there’s smoke there’s fire. That’s Fame oldest trick. I think you’re smart enough to know that. So I dope it that either you’ve got nothing but time to waste, or you think there may be something crooked in the deal.”

  “Why do you dope it that I’d tell you?”

  “Because I might be useful.”

  The Saint’s blue eyes probed him dispassionately.

  “You’ve got an investment here,” he said. “Ten per cent—maybe more—of an awful lot of money. Why would you want to help anyone who might even accidentally turn up something that might jeopardize it?”

  “Because I’m an old-fashioned big-dealing sonovabitch,” Colbin said without animosity. “I play all the old copybook maxims, right down the line, ‘If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em.’ I know that nobody ever scared you off or bluffed you off, if you thought you had hold of something. So why should I beat my brains out trying to be the first? So I’ll help you. I’m hoping there’s nothing you can dig up that’ll damage my property. But if there is, I want to be the first to know. Perhaps I could show you a deal.”