Thanks to the Saint (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  “I haven’t offered anything.”

  “Okay. ‘Nothing venture, nothing gain.’ What can you lose? I’ll play my hand, you play yours. But I’m putting my cards on the table. Help yourself. From all I’ve heard about you, if anyone gives you a square shake, you do them the same courtesy. That’s all I’m asking.”

  “Since we’ve agreed to no bullshooting, Ted—how do I know about your shake?”

  “Try me.”

  Simon took out a cigarette and lighted it, taking plenty of time.

  “Well, Ted,” he said, “what’s all this about how happy Paul Zaglan was, just before he topped himself?”

  “I’d say he was walking on air,” Colbin answered. “I mean metaphorically, before he tried it for real. He’d just delivered his last script and quit his job with Ziggy.”

  Simon raised his eyebrows.

  “Was that something to celebrate?”

  “Now he was going to write what he’d always wanted to.”

  “The Great American Novel—or The Play?”

  “Anything, later. But first he was going to get eating money by selling his memoirs of Life With Ziggy.”

  “It sounds like a nice fraternal parting gesture.”

  “They were only legally brothers. You could find that out quick enough. Paul was the elder, but he was adopted. Later on the parents were surprised to discover that they could make one of their own, after all. That was Ziggy. But all his life Paul took care of him. He’d promised the mother he would—the father died while they were kids. It was Paul’s way of paying her back for taking him out of an orphanage and raising him in a real home.”

  “Until last night he decided he was all paid up?” Simon murmured.

  “Until the day before yesterday, when she died. I guess that’s when he really started to feel happy.”

  The Saint was luckily accustomed to surviving jolts that would have staggered the ordinary mortal.

  “No doubt he was anticipating a humdinger of a wake,” he said.

  “She’d been very sick for a long time,” Colbin said stonily. “Cut out the phony bullshooting sentiment and anyone would call it a merciful release. But it was a release for Paul too. He could stop being a brother to Ziggy.”

  Two thin parenthetic wrinkles cut between the Saint’s brows.

  “I must have missed that—at least, I didn’t notice anything about it in the papers.”

  “You wouldn’t have. It wasn’t the same name. She married again after the boys were grown up.”

  “Even so, I’d’ve thought—”

  “Her second husband went to jail as a Red spy. Very likely it was as big a shock to her as anyone—anyhow, she wasn’t indicted with him—but you know how these things go with the public. It wasn’t a relationship that Ziggy would want to advertise.”

  Simon released a very long slow trail of smoke.

  “But you knew it”

  “Ziggy got drunk and cried it out on my shoulder when the story broke. About the husband, I mean. He thought his career was finished, and I was ten per cent as worried myself. But somehow the connection never came out.”

  “Then why are you telling me?”

  “To prove I’m leveling with you,” Colbin said, and took a swallow from his glass. “Norroy and Velston may trip over it someday, by accident, but they won’t find it by hard work because they don’t work like that. You’ll find out, if you cared enough, so I’m only saving you the trouble. But you won’t spill it to Lois or Monty just for kicks. ‘The leopard doesn’t change his spots.’ ”

  “Some great philosopher launched that one,” said the Saint. “When did Ziggy see his mother last?”

  “I don’t think he ever saw her after that. He couldn’t risk it, could he? Be reasonable, man. But I know he called her on the phone quite often. She understood.”

  Simon Templar took a last deep pull at his cigarette and put it down in the ashtray on one of the marble poolside tables. He stared abstractly at the darkening blue bay, beyond which the deceptive sky-line lights and neon tints of Miami were beginning to twinkle, striking the high points off the gleaming chrome and glistening varnish of Ziggy Zaglan’s trim speed cruiser tied alongside the sea wall. Now he could read the name lettered on her transom: she was called, almost inevitably, the Zig Zag.

  “Yeah,” said the Saint vaguely. “I’m sure.” He could have been talking to himself, until he turned. “Do you know where I can make a quiet phone call?”

  Colbin pointed, with an air of complete confidence.

  “Over there, the way the reporters left. Around the corner, you’re in the hall, and the phone’s in an alcove on the right. I’ll wait here for you.”

  Simon made no commitment but threaded his way between a vine trellis and some potted palms and located the phone without much difficulty. He had a little more trouble finding the man he wanted to talk to, but there were few places where the Saint did not have his own odd connections, and in Miami they were especially various.

  In a comparatively few minutes he had been deviously and electronically introduced to the Beach medical examiner.

  “Certainly he was hanged, Mr Templar,” was the official statement. “Any other injuries? Nothing that I noticed, though of course I didn’t look very hard. The larynx was ruptured, but that often happens, particularly with a heavy man.”

  “There’s no chance that he was throttled first and then hung up there?”

  “Not unless he was garrotted with the same rope. And I think even that would have left a different kind of mark. Yes, I’m sure of it. But death was definitely due to strangulation.”

  “His neck wasn’t broken?”

  “No.” An increasingly pulled note crept into the doctor’s voice. “May I ask what you’re driving at?”

  “I’ll tell you at the morgue tomorrow,” said the Saint. “I think you’ll be there again.”

  He went back out to the pool terrace, where he found that Lois had joined Colbin. They both dropped anything they might have been discussing as soon as he came in sight and waited expectantly for him to talk first. It happened to be conveniently easy to address them together.

  “You were both right,” he said. “I was led into this by the nose, so it’s too late to tell me to keep my nose out of it. But I soon found there were so many paradoxes in this set-up that I was very nearly ready to believe that one more would turn out to be like the rest—just normal. Until it dawned on me that I’d only been looking at it upside down.”

  “I have to read this sort of thing every time I pick up a paperback book,” Colbin complained. “I guess it must be the only way to do it.”

  He had made himself comfortable on an aluminum and plastic long chair, and Lois was sitting on the end where his feet were up. The whole setting, from the boat at one side to the living room in which the other three men were now lighted as if on a stage, was straight out of House & Garden.

  “Everyone here is a fugitive from type-casting,” Simon explained imperturbably. “Lois could be taken for a lot of things, none of which is a female writer. Her partner, Monty Velston, looks like the popular picture of a cardsharp or a con man. You’re a big-time agent, but you might be an ex-jockey. Ralph Damian is a network vice-president, but he could pass for a junior-college teacher. Ziggy looks like—well, frankly, nothing. Maybe it should have a big “N”…What did Paul look like?”

  “A bear,” Lois said.

  “Weighing?”

  “Oh, more than two hundred.”

  “About two-thirty,” Colbin estimated.

  The Saint kindled another cigarette.

  “All right. Among all these contradictions, I couldn’t go up like a rocket over a suicide that didn’t look like a suicide. Even though Lois tried to tell me he was too happy. After all, I thought, maybe that’s the way they kill themselves in show business. But you added a lot of detail, Ted, that I couldn’t slough off. And about that time the light struck me. I try to tell everyone I’m a mystery moron, but it finall
y got even me. It wasn’t a suicide that didn’t look like a suicide. It was a murder that didn’t look like a murder.”

  “Ah.” The ice cubes rattled in Colbin’s glass as he drained it. “Thanks for the elucidation. And you know who?”

  “I think so.”

  “Do we have a deal to talk over?”

  “No deal, Ted. Not for the cold-blooded murder of a happy man. There are too few of them.”

  “Okay. If it’s a square shake, okay. Let’s have it”

  “Let’s go inside,” Simon said.

  Lois Norroy got to her feet, her eyes fixed on him frantically as if she was dying to ask something but couldn’t. Simon took her arm and turned her quietly towards the living room. The deck chair creaked as Colbin hoisted himself up with a sigh and followed them.

  Plate glass sliding on noiseless rollers let them into another world as silently as a film dissolves.

  Zaglan and Damian stood with highball glasses in hand, listening raptly to a voice which came from the battery of speakers, which was still Ziggy’s but with improved resonance. Velston sat in a chair a little apart, also nursing a tumbler and listening with no less attention, if with a more cynical air.

  The voice was saying: “It’s the oldest cliché there is in the theater, that the show must go on. But we’ll try to give it a different reading, which I think would be more like what Paul would have told us: Let’s go on with the show!”

  Ralph Damian was rubbing his chin, pursing his lips judicially, saying, “I don’t know, Ziggy. It still sounds a bit—”

  “Flatulent?” Colbin rasped.

  For a stunned second after that he had everyone’s undivided attention, and he did not waste it. He said, “Anyhow, the Saint’s got another different idea of what Paul would want. He thinks Paul was murdered.”

  Since the bombshell had been dropped for him, Simon Templar resignedly made the best use he could of it and took a moment to observe the reactions. Ziggy’s, almost fatefully, was the most stereotyped and the most exaggerated. His eyes bugged and his mouth fell open. Damian switched off the playback machine, and his eyes sparkled fascinatedly. Montague Velston even looked interested.

  The Saint tidily eased some ash off his cigarette and said deprecatingly, “It wasn’t my original idea, but it grew on me. I didn’t start turning psychological handsprings the first time I heard that Paul seemed too happy to commit suicide. However, I’ve heard a few important details since which made it pretty unarguable.”

  Ziggy brought his chin up off his chest at last, so abruptly that it squeezed the horizontal lines of his mouth.

  “What details?” he demanded, and his eyes turned so that they almost switched the question to Colbin.

  “Nothing that would have to come out if the rest of the case was clean,” said the Saint quietly. “But I’d already started squinting sideways at some of the other details. First, Paul’s lamppost—or gallows, as it turned out to be. An unusually neat and ingenious piece of homework, certainly put together by someone with a good mechanical mind. Then the noose—if you’ll pardon my enthusiasm—a beautiful professional job, which very few amateurs could tie, not even good carpenters like Paul. But the gallows was already there, and it wasn’t planned for a gallows. Someone else might have tied the noose. Someone else who had an interest in knots and who’d bothered to learn some.”

  “Like me?” Damian suggested, the edge of derision barely showing through a mask of polite intelligence. “How did you know I kept a little sailboat on Long Island Sound?”

  “Shoot me,” Colbin said. “I should of kept quiet about the stretch I did in the Navy in the last war, after the draft caught me.”

  “Tell him about me, fellers,” Ziggy implored frantically. “Tell him how I can’t even tie up a Christmas package. Tell him I only have a boat because it looks good out there in the publicity pictures. Tell him I can’t even wear a clip-on bow tie without it coming undone.”

  The Saint smiled, with a patience he did not feel.

  “To be more concrete,” he said, “I just talked to the medical examiner who did a pro forma autopsy on Paul. He confirmed that Paul died by strangulation, which could include hanging. He wasn’t throttled by hand. His larynx was ruptured—if you’ll all pardon the gruesome details. But his neck wasn’t broken.”

  “What is this supposed to mean to us laymen?” Velston asked, with strenuously inoffensive tolerance.

  “Only that a guy who apparently liked to do everything just right, whether it was putting together a lamppost or a scaffold, and who must have been one of the few suicides who ever swung in a genuine hangman’s knot, must’ve turned awful clumsy and stupid at the last moment if he couldn’t think of any better way to finish the job than to step off a low rung of a six-foot stepladder and choke himself slowly and miserably to death, instead of jumping off the top and getting it done with a quick, clean broken neck.”

  “Would you expect a man who’s upset enough to commit suicide to be as rational about it as that?” Damian objected.

  “If he was calm enough to tie that knot, I would,” Simon replied.

  Colbin crossed to the liquor trolley and refilled his glass.

  “What the man means,” he said, “is that someone grabbed hold of Paul, who was twice as big as any of us, and hung him up there.”

  “After hitting him a judo chop on the Adam’s apple which would make him helpless and also start his strangling,” Simon said calmly.

  They all thought about it with reluctant but increasing soberness.

  “Did you tell him we once did a Portrait on a judo expert, Lois?” Velston asked. “With his hints on self-defense for determined spinsters. I remember, that was one of them. But of course, two million other people read it in Fame,” he added hopefully.

  The attempt fell rather flat.

  “When did Paul die, Saint?” Lois asked.

  “That was my first question,” Simon answered. “As practically everyone knows now, no doctor can examine a corpse and say, ‘He died three hours and twenty minutes ago,’ like they used to in the old detective stories. How closely they can hit it depends on the climate, and what the body died of, and a lot of other things. The guy I talked to wouldn’t stick his neck out—if you’ll pardon the expression—any further than that it was somewhere between eleven last night and one this morning, give or take an hour or so at either end.”

  Everyone could be seen doing mental arithmetic on that.

  “Then that clears all of us, at least,” Damian said in a tone of relief. “We were all together, more or less, for hours before and after that margin.”

  “That’s true,” said the Saint. “But if this was a premeditated job, it was meditated by someone who knew about that gallows-lamppost. And the advertisement I saw only came out yesterday, and it was under a box number. That doesn’t make it top secret, but it does limit the field.”

  “We all knew about it,” Lois said. “Paul had us all over to his place for cocktails two days ago, and that’s when we were kidding about it and the idea for the advertisement came up.”

  “Except me,” Ziggy put in quickly. “I wasn’t there. I had a date with—”

  “But you heard about it.”

  Colbin turned around with a sudden angry break in his dour composure.

  “Where are we getting at with all this bullshooting?” he snarled. “Let’s say it and the hell with it: most of us had some reason to shut Paul up, because of the damage he was threatening to do Ziggy—”

  “Not me,” Velston said. “I love Ziggy like Pasteur loved rabies, but for him I wouldn’t murder a maggot.”

  “How do I know what you wouldn’t do to stop someone scooping you with a scandal?” the agent retorted. “How do I know you weren’t jealous because Lois was getting too chummy with him? Or if Lois had a grudge against him for something that happened when they knew each other before? And who the hell cares? We don’t have to go through all this crap about motives, because all of us have got perfect
alibis.”

  All of them turned to the Saint again, only now they seemed far more comfortable than they had been for some time. It was as if Colbin’s outburst had enabled them to throw off a lurking doubt which had been privately oppressing each of them, letting them take deep breaths and begin to relax again.

  But, somewhat disconcertingly, Simon Templar was still the most confident and relaxed of all.

  “Therefore,” he said equably, “the alibis may not all be perfect.”

  “Mine is,” Ziggy croaked. “It must be good for about twelve hours. I was here before dinner, and all through dinner, and then I was working for a bit, and then—”

  “You went into the den, but can you prove that you stayed there and worked?”

  A stricken expression that was unintentionally one of the funniest grimaces he ever made came over Zaglan’s face.

  “I was belting the typewriter all the time. Everyone must of heard me.” He appealed to the others. “You all heard me, didn’t you?”

  “They heard a typewriter,” said the Saint. “For about an hour—which was enough time for you to have run over to Paul’s, by car or even across the bay in your boat, and done everything we’ve talked about, and come back. May I look in your den?”

  Zaglan nodded, dumbly, pointing to a door in a side wall.

  Simon opened it, glanced in, and came back. He said, “There’s a tape recorder on the desk, which I suppose you use to try routines out for sound. You seem very fond of that method. But it could just as easily have played back an hour of typewriter music which you’d recorded in advance, and you already had everyone scared to death of interrupting you when you’re having an inspiration, so there was no risk that anyone would even knock on the door.”

  “You’re nuts,” Zaglan said hoarsely. “If you can find a tape recording anywhere in this house with typewriters clicking on it, I’ll eat it. I’ll be the first guy to have a tapeworm with sound effects.”

  “That’s not the right answer, Ziggy,” Damian said, his eyes glittering with alert anxiety. “Everyone knows you can run a tape back and erase everything on it in a few seconds.”