“Whatya trying to do, frame me?” Ziggy squealed. “You sold out to another network?”
He tore at his hair in quietly cosmic desperation, his rubbery features contorting like those of a baby preparing to cry, until a brain wave rolled over him as transparently as an ocean comber.
“So after I knocked Paul out with the judo, I dragged him up a ladder and stuck his head through a noose. Me, weighing a hundred and twenty pounds soaking wet. Tell ’em, Ted,” he pleaded desperately. “Tell ’em how I sprain my wrist if I swat a fly. Tell ’em about my hernia—”
“Take it easy, little man,” said the Saint hastily. “I’d already thought of that. I suppose you could theoretically have done it all, but only with the help of a lot of gadgets and gimmicks which are much too complicated for my simple mind. I’ve only put you through the wringer this much because by all accounts you seem to be rather a heel, and it may do you some good. But I was using you mainly to prove how deceptive an alibi can be. Now I have to wreck the whole time-honored alibi system.”
Ziggy Zaglan was too dazed, or relieved, to be insulted. He sagged back against the nearest supporting piece of furniture and gulped, “You do?”
“I mean, according to the tired old detective-story rules. If any of you ever read them, which I suspect you have, you know the convention. An alibi is an alibi is an alibi. Even if only one other character corroborates it, it’s an alibi. In detective stories, for some reason, it isn’t supposed to be kosher to have two characters in cahoots. The villain is always a lone wolf. But in real life it’s usually the opposite. When a good police officer hears a cast-iron alibi, the first thing he wonders is what might be in it for the supporting witness. I keep telling everyone I’m a lousy detective, but I have talked to some good ones.”
Montague Velston tugged some folded paper and a ballpoint pen out of his pockets.
“This,” he said, “I have got to get verbatim.”
“So I started thinking about the other alibis where they were thin. For instance, while there was an hour where Ziggy was only represented by a tapping typewriter, there was also an hour where you and Lois only have each other to testify that you were both sitting around here.”
“But even if we’d wanted to…to do it, for any reason,” Lois said breathlessly, “we couldn’t have. I mean, how could we tell when Ziggy would decide to quit working? It might’ve been in two hours, or ten minutes, or even in ten seconds he might’ve come bouncing out to get a drink or ask us to listen to something!”
The Saint nodded cheerfully.
“I thought of that too. And I may say, darling, that I felt a lot better when I convinced myself that you weren’t in on the deal. But then I had to start thinking about Ted and Ralph, who also were their own best witnesses for more than an hour. And when Ted took me aside and began selling Ziggy shorter than anyone, it made more sense all the time.
“Sure,” Colbin scoffed. “That’s how I got to be a big agent, selling my clients short.”
“You could always get other clients, but you only had one neck. You’d try almost anything to protect your property, but if it went sour the property could take the rap. You thought you had it made until I showed up, and then you got a wee bit panicky and started coppering your bet too fast. You always had that way out in mind, of course, from the time you swiped a piece of new rope from Ziggy’s boat. But you were hottest of all when you sized up Ralph Damian as a bird of your own feather. He’d provide the alibi you thought you ought to have—according to all those paperbacks you read—and on top of that you could see how useful it might be to have a big wheel at UBC tied to your wagon. What percentage of your percentage of Ziggy did you have to promise him to sell the deal?”
“This is all delightfully libelous,” Damian said, with his bright eyes dancing. “Does he have any assets, Ted? We should be able to sue him for everything he’s got.”
The Saint sighed. It was a pity, he thought, that there were still a lot more detective-story clichés which he hadn’t yet had time to extirpate. But he could keep working at it.
“You must talk it over with your lawyers,” he said agreeably. “I know they’ll be glad to hear that you expect to have some way of paying them. But first they’ll have to get you off this murder rap. Perhaps you’d better phone them right away, because the cops are planning to pick you both up after you leave here. The only reason they aren’t banging on the door now is because the Ziggy Zaglan show is such good publicity for Miami Beach that they want to keep him out of it as much as possible.”
“Who did you talk to when you went to the phone?” Colbin challenged shrilly. “Anyone but this hick medical examiner?”
“Only an old friend of mine, the sheriff Newt Haskins. He told me that a more elaborate autopsy, with an analysis of Paul’s digestive tract, which I didn’t mention before, had pinned down the time of death pretty closely around midnight,” said the Saint prophetically. “At that time you two were supposedly on your way to the Latin Quarter. But then they checked the car-park attendants,” he went on mendaciously, but with unwavering assurance, “and found that you didn’t get there until very much later, in fact only a short while before Ziggy and Monty came to drag you out. And then they went back to make another check at Paul’s—they must have arrived right after Lois and Monty and I left—and they found that like any good gadget man he also was wired for sound. He had his plaything running when someone dropped in last night, and the sound track is a bit confusing, but—”
“You moronic crummy little fast-buck promoter,” spat out the network executive, glaring brilliantly at the haggard little agent. “You said it was foolproof, but—”
“I didn’t know there were such fools as you,” Colbin said wearily.
Simon Templar shrugged, and backed away from the argument, and went in search of the telephone again to call an old friend, the sheriff, Newt Haskins, whom he had not yet talked to. It was not altogether unfortunate, he thought, that some of the oldest clichés were still paying off. As long as they could still be used to make the ungodly trip over their own tongues, he would probably have to go on taking advantage of them.
He also hoped he would be able to get his part wrapped up in time to move on to an equally venerable but more pleasurable cliché, which would call for taking Lois Norroy off to dinner as a preliminary.
THE GOOD MEDICINE
“Don’t you ever feel foolish about telling people you’ve retired and don’t want to get in any more trouble?” David Stern asked.
“About as foolish as I feel when I’m asked whom I’m planning to swindle or slaughter next,” Simon Templar admitted.
“That’s a fine way to talk to an influential newspaper owner who is also buying you a magnificent dinner.”
“I’ve never asked you to use your influence for me, Dave. And I also notice that you apparently didn’t want to be seen with me in one of the more widely advertised food foundries that bring tourists to New Orleans from every corner of the continent, according to the guidebooks.”
The newspaper owner grinned.
“If you lived here, you might like a change from that fancy cooking too. And I can’t imagine you acting like a tourist anywhere.”
They were in Kolb’s, on St Charles Street, a restaurant whose cuisine favors (as the name implies) a tradition Teutonic rather than Creole. Thus, by a paradox of environment, what might have been commonplace in Leipzig became actually more exotic in Louisiana than the famous establishments that emphasize their French background.
“Don’t think I’m complaining,” said the Saint, making happy inroads on some tenderly baked duckling bedded in sauerkraut. “But you should know better than to introduce an Ulterior Motive into this pleasant session—unless it is young, beautiful, and of course uncooked.”
“Like, for example, the specimen at the corner table that you have so much trouble keeping your eyes off?”
“Well, for example.”
“I think he calls himself the
Marchese di Capoformaggio, or some such name. But I only know what I read in the columns I buy. Possibly he’s as phony as any Balkan prince of the pre-war crop. But she seems to like him—at least as of the last press releases.”
“Thank you,” said the Saint politely. “You are a salt mine of information. And now, as a purely incidental item, who is she?”
“As if I didn’t know that was the one you were interested in. That is Elise Ashville.”
“The Elise Ashville?”
“Of course.”
“Hell,” said the Saint with great patience, “who the hell is the Elise Ashville?”
Stern was honestly surprised.
“You really don’t know? She owns Ashville Pharmacal Products, Inc.—one of our bigger local industries. They make patent medicines. Juven-Aids. VervaTonique. Dreemicreem. You must have seen them advertised, at least.”
“Gawd, who could help it? But I never had any reason to notice who made ’em.”
Simon looked towards the corner table again. The woman who sat there with the pale-blond, delicate-featured, expensively tailored and shirted and accessoried type, for which a previous generation’s graphic term “lounge lizard” has never been bettered, was not constructed to the conventional specifications of a female tycoon. Even to refer to her as a “woman” seemed slightly heavy, although the much-abused word “girl” was equally inapplicable. She could easily have passed for much less than thirty and could not have ranked forty by the most vicious estimate: the Saint would have personally favored the lower estimate, being a man and vulnerable to certain figures, of which she had a honey, unless the couturiers had cooked up some new gimmicks which could falsify even such a candid décolleté as she was wearing. Incontrovertibly above that she had a face of petulant but exciting beauty, capped by a casque of darkly burnished copper hair. If she could have walked many blocks outside without eliciting an appreciative whistle, it would only have been in a blackout that coincided with a dense fog.
She was completely aware of the boldly appraising way that Simon had been looking at her, he knew, and he did not have any impression that it displeased her at all. He observed that she did not seem to have brought it to her escort’s attention, as a woman will when she is annoyed by such a scrutiny.
“I’d never have visualized her in a dispensary,” Simon remarked. “Or at an industrial board meeting, for that matter.”
“Don’t let that Vargas build fool you. As I hear it, she did most of the originating of those concoctions. And as a business woman, by all accounts, she’s sent some big wheels back with their kingpins wobbling.”
“Tell me more.”
David Stern hospitably refilled the Saint’s glass from the bottle of Alsace-Willm Gewurztraminer in the ice bucket beside them.
“I don’t go in much for gossip, but this seems to be pretty factual…”
Whatever else she was rumoured to have been before, or on the side, Mrs Elise Ashville had certainly been a waitress at the soda fountain of Richard Ashville’s modest neighborhood drugstore until she married him and began to infuse her ambitious energy into his humble business. Until then, reportedly, he thought he had already attained his personal pinnacle when he became the proprietor of a store of his own (subject to a reasonable mortgage) and had been prepared to bumble placidly through his declining years retailing the standard nostrums, scraping the standard profit off cokes and comic books, and compounding such prescriptions as came his way. He was a gentle and unassuming man whose ailing mother had successfully monopolized him until she died shortly before Elise came to work for him, by which time he was well into an unsophisticated middle age, and he had been mildly astonished when this gorgeous creature accepted the proposal which his glands forced through his shyness.
It was not long after an exhausting honeymoon, however, that he discovered that her concept of a woman’s part in a partnership was more vigorous than his mother’s in more ways than one. Browsing along the shelves while he was taking stock after closing one night, she said, “I was reading an article about what a terrific profit there is in some of this stuff, how the ingredients in a bottle that people pay more than a dollar for are worth maybe only five cents. But you only make a little bit of that profit. Why don’t we put up our own mixtures and make all of it?”
Mr Ashville painstakingly explained to her that the public would not come in and ask for these mixtures unless it had first been conditioned to think it needed them, by lavish promotion and advertising, on which the manufacturers spent a fantastic amount of the apparent gravy.
“Phooey,” said the dynamic Elise. “They’ve got a lot of overhead and stockholders to pay, too. We can put a small ad in the local papers for a few bucks and bottle the stuff ourselves.”
From there on it was the kind of homespun success story beloved by Reader’s Digest, except that the end products would never have earned the endorsement of that periodical. Not that there was anything actively poisonous or even especially deleterious about the pills and potions put out by the Ashville Pharmacal factory—the Food and Drug Administration would have seen to that, even without the help of Mr Ashville’s unreconstructed conscience—but neither would they do anyone much good, other than psychologically. This trivial imperfection, however, did no perceptible harm to the sales.
Juven-Aids (“To help restore that youthful feeling”) contained, for instance, only a few B-vitamins, harmless amounts of phosphorus and nux vomica, and minimal quantities of a common ataraxic, but hundreds of thousands were swallowed, three times a day after meals, by customers who were convinced that they felt better for them, or at least that they would have felt worse without them.
Dreemicreem (“For the skin a queen might envy”) was something that Elise herself whipped up, literally with an egg beater, in the beginning, out of a detergent, an astringent, some mayonnaise that had gone rancid, and a cheap perfume to disguise it: smeared on myriads of hopeful faces, just before washing with plain cold water, according to the instructions, it undoubtedly cleansed their pores as effectively as any soap and could not have left any more wrinkles than were there to start with.
VervaTonique (“Blended from the same herbs and fruits to which many ancient philosophers attributed the secret of long life and vigour”) also assayed twenty-five per cent alcohol by volume, if you could read the smallest print on the label, so that any of its highly respectable addicts, which included staunch supporters of the WCTU, who knocked back an ounce of it whenever they felt enervated, as the directions suggested, were benefited by the same jolt as if they had belted a good highball down to the halfway mark, without any moral qualms to detract from the resultant euphoria.
Elise turned out to have an unsuspected executive instinct, as well as a positive genius for skirting the law by juggling words into the kind of advertising claim that hinted exuberantly at miracles and only on the closest analysis could be proved to have promised practically nothing. In three breathtaking strides the local enterprise had grown to state-wide, to regional, and finally to national dimension, with the assistance of some frightening financial parlays, but it rode such an unbroken run of luck that in only five years it was in what Dun & Bradstreet called “a sound progressive condition” and could let its managing directrice draw a lavish stipend and a lush expense account with no protest from its creditors.
“So what’s wrong with that?” Simon inquired. “It’s hardly retailing gossip to say that they started on a shoestring and boiled it into oceans of slop that they’re selling at the price of soup. Maybe their ethics are dubious, but I can’t help feeling that the suckers they sell to are almost fair game.”
“Without getting into that argument,” said the publisher, “the rest of it is a bit less equivocal.”
Mrs Ashville, whose personality and tastes had been expanding as rapidly as her business, had begun to find the time and inclination for a more glamorous social life, which she indulged with increasingly frequent and protracted visits to New York, Palm Sprin
gs, and Miami Beach, where she became a regular feature of the café society columns, which reported her holding hands with a number of different squires whose impressive-sounding titles were usually better known than their credit ratings. When even the diffident Mr Ashville rebelled against being thus publicly cuckolded, at least by inference, and suggested a divorce, she obliged him promptly. It was only then that he was reminded, by coldly practical lawyers, that she owned outright the controlling percentage of stock in Ashville Pharmacal Products, which had been founded almost indulgently as a toy for her to play with, that he had even laughingly signed a document that she brought him in the early days specifically declaring that he did not in any way regard it as community property, and that the most he could claim from the Corporation, aside from his rights as the personal holder of one paid-up share, would be the few hundred dollars he had advanced to get it started.
“So she got everything,” said the Saint. “That seems to be the story in most American divorces. But for a change, there almost seems to be some justification for it. As you tell it, she was the brains of the act. She dreamed it up and put it over. He was only the first stepping-stone. If she outgrew him after that, and wants to prove she’s arrived by splurging on aristocratic gigolos, it may be deplorable, but I guess it’s her privilege.”
“I understand they paid him two thousand dollars.”
“She might have been more generous,” Simon admitted.
“He’d sold the drugstore long ago, of course, when the medicine business began to take all their time. But that was already community property, and whatever it fetched went into expanding the business. When the break-up came, he was several years older, and he wasn’t young to start with. To be exact, he was fifty-five at the time. And that was two years ago. Not the ideal age to make a fresh start, with no capital.”
Thanks to the Saint (The Saint Series) Page 7