Through the French windows of the living-room he saw Ginny sitting alone at the long table in the patio beside the barbecue. He went out and stood over her.
“Hullo,” she said.
“Hullo,” he agreed. “You don’t mind if I join you?”
“Not a bit,” she said. “Why should I?”
“We could step right into a Van Druten play,” he observed.
She looked at him rather vaguely. He sat down, and in a moment Angelo was at his elbow, immaculate and impassive now in a white jacket and a black bow tie.
“Yes, sir?”
‘Tomato juice,” said the Saint. “With Worcestershire sauce. Scrambled eggs, and ham. And coffee.”
“Yes, sir.”
The Filipino departed, and Simon lighted a cigarette and slipped the robe off his shoulders.
“Isn’t this early for you to be up?”
“I didn’t sleep so well.” She pouted, “Esther does snore. You’ll find out.”
Before the party broke up for the second time, there had been some complex but uninhibited arguments about how the rest of the night should be organised with a view to mutual protection, which Simon did not want revived at that hour.
“I’ll have to thank her,” he said tactfully. “She’s saved me from having to eat breakfast alone. Maybe she’ll do it for us again.”
“You could wake me up yourself just as well,” said Ginny. The Saint kept his face noncommittal and tried again. “Aren’t you eating?”
She was playing with a glass of orange juice as if it were a medicine that she didn’t want to take.
“I don’t know. I sort of don’t have any appetite.”
“Why?”
“Well…you are sure that it was someone in the house last night, aren’t you?”
“Quite sure.”
“I mean—one of us. Or the servants, or somebody.”
“Yes.”
“So why couldn’t we just as well be poisoned?”
He thought for a moment, and chuckled.
“Poison isn’t so easy. In the first place, you have to buy it. And there are problems about that. Then, you have to put it in something. And there aren’t so many people handling food that you can do that just like blowing out a match. It’s an awfully dangerous way of killing people. I think probably more poisoners get caught than any other kind of murderer. And any smart killer knows it.”
“How do you know this one is smart?”
“It follows. You don’t send warnings to your victims unless you think you’re pretty smart—you have to be quite an egotist and a show-off to get that far—and anyone who thinks he’s really smart usually has at least enough smartness to be able to kid himself. Besides, nobody threatened to kill you.”
“Nobody threatened to kill Lissa.”
“Nobody did kill her.”
“But they tried.”
“I don’t think we know that they were trying for Lissa.”
“Then if they were so half-way smart, how did they get in the wrong room?”
“They might have thought Freddie would be with her.”
“Yeah?” she scoffed. “If they knew anything, they’d know he’d be in his own room. He doesn’t visit. He has visitors.”
Simon felt that he was at some disadvantage. He said with a grin, “You can tie me up, Ginny, but that doesn’t alter anything. Freddie is the guy that the beef is about. The intended murderer has very kindly told us the motive. And that automatically establishes that there’s no motive for killing anyone else. I’ll admit that the attack on Lissa last night is pretty confusing, and I just haven’t got any theories about it yet that I’d want to bet on, but I still know damn well that nobody except Freddie is going to be in much danger unless they accidentally find out who the murderer is, and personally I’m not going to starve myself until that happens.”
He proved it by taking a healthy sip from the glass of tomato juice which Angelo set in front of him, and a couple of minutes later he was carving into his ham and eggs with healthy enthusiasm.
The girl watched him moodily.
“Anyway,” she said, “I never can eat anything much for breakfast. I have to watch my figure.”
“It looks very nice to me,” he said, and was able to say it without the slightest effort.
“Yes, but it has to stay that way. There’s always competition.”
Simon could appreciate that. He was curious. He had been very casual all the time about the whole organisation and mechanics of the ménage, as casual as Pellman himself, but there just wasn’t any way to stop wondering about the details of a set-up like that. The Saint put it in the scientific category of post-graduate education. Or he was trying to.
He said, leading her on with a touch so light and apparently disinterested that it could have been broken with a breath: “It must be quite a life.”
“It is.”
“If I hadn’t seen it myself, I wouldn’t have believed it was really possible.”
“Why not?”
“It’s just something out of this world.”
“Sheiks and sultans do it.”
“I know,” he said delicately. “But their women are brought up differently. They’re brought up to look forward to a place in a harem as a perfectly normal life. American girls aren’t.”
One of her eyebrows went up a little in a tired way.
“They are where I came from. And probably most everywhere else, if you only knew. Nearly every man is a wandering wolf at heart, and if he’s got enough money there isn’t much to stop him. Nearly every woman knows it. Only they don’t admit it. So what? You wouldn’t think there was anything freakish about it if Freddie kept us all in different apartments and visited around. What’s the difference if he keeps us all together?”
The Saint shrugged.
“Nothing much,” he conceded. “Except, I suppose, a certain amount of conventional illusion.”
“Phooey,” she said. “What can you do with an illusion?”
He couldn’t think of an answer to that.
“Well,” he said, “it might save a certain amount of domestic strife.”
“Oh, sure,” she said. “We bicker and squabble a bit.”
“I’ve heard you.”
“But it doesn’t often get too serious.”
“That’s the point. That’s what fascinates me, in a way. Why doesn’t anybody ever break the rules? Why doesn’t anybody try to ride the others off and marry him, for instance?”
She laughed shortly.
“That’s two questions. But I’ll tell you. Nobody goes too far because they wouldn’t be here if they did. Or they’d only do it once. And then—out. No guy wants to live in the middle of a mountain feud, and after all, Freddie’s the meal ticket. He’s got a right to have some peace for his money. So everybody behaves pretty well. As for marrying him—that’s funny.”
“Guys have been married before.”
“Not Freddie Pellman. He can’t afford to.”
“One thing that we obviously have in common,” said the Saint, “is a sense of humor.”
She shook her head.
“I’m not kidding. Didn’t you know about him?”
“No. I didn’t know about him.”
“There’s a will,” she said. “All his money is in a trust fund. He just gets the income. I guess Papa Pellman knew Freddie pretty well, and so he didn’t trust him. He sewed everything up tight. Freddie never will be able to touch most of the capital, but he gets two or three million to play with when he’s thirty-five. On one condition. He mustn’t marry before that. I guess Papa knew all about girls like me. If Freddie marries before he’s thirty-five, he doesn’t get another penny. Ever. Income or anything. It all goes to a fund to feed stray cats or something like that.”
“So.” The Saint poured himself some coffee. “I suppose Papa thought that Freddie would have attained a certain amount of discretion by that time. How long does that keep him safe for, by the way?”
“As a matt
er of fact,” she said, “it’s only a few more months.”
“Well, cheer up,” he said. “If you can last that long you may still have a chance.”
“Maybe by that time I wouldn’t want it,” she said, with her disturbing eyes dwelling on him.
Simon lighted a cigarette and looked up across the patio as a door opened and Lissa and Esther came out. Lissa carried a book, with her forefinger marking a place: she put it down open on the table beside her, as if she was ready to go back to it at any moment. She looked very gay and fresh in a play suit that matched her eyes.
“Have you and Ginny solved it yet?” she asked.
“I’m afraid not,” said the Saint. “As a matter of fact, we were mostly talking about other things.”
“I’ll take two guesses,” said Esther.
“Why two?” snapped Ginny. “I thought there was only one thing you could think of.”
The arrival of Angelo for their orders fortunately stopped that train of thought. And then, almost as soon as the Filipino had disappeared again and the cast were settling themselves and digging their toes in for another jump, Freddie Pellman made his entrance.
Like the Saint, he wore swimming trunks and a perfunctory terry-cloth robe. But the exposed portions of him were not built to stand the comparison. He had pale blotchy skin and the flesh under it looked spongy, as if it had softened up with inward fermentation. Which was not improbable. But he seemed totally unconscious of it. He was very definitely himself, even if he was nothing else.
“How do you feel?” Simon asked unnecessarily.
“Lousy,” said Freddie Pellman, no less unnecessarily. He sank into a chair and squinted blearily over the table. Ginny still had some orange juice in her glass. Freddie drank it, and made a face. He said, “Simon, you should have let the murderer go on with the job. If he’d killed me last night, I’d have felt a lot better this morning.”
“Would you have left me a thousand dollars a day in your will?” Simon inquired.
Freddie started to shake his head. The movement hurt him too much, so he clutched his skull in both hands to stop it.
“Look,” he said. “Before I die and you have to bury me, who is behind all this?”
“I don’t know,” said the Saint patiently. “I’m only a bodyguard of sorts. I didn’t sell myself to you as a detective.”
“But you must have some idea.”
“No more than I had last night.”
A general quietness came down again, casting a definite shadow as if a cloud had slid over the sun. Even Freddie Pellman became still, holding his head carefully in the hands braced on either side of his jawbones.
“Last night,” he said soggily, “you told us you were sure it was someone inside the house. Isn’t that what he said, Esther? He said it was someone who was here already.”
“That’s right,” said the Saint. “And it still goes.”
“Then it could only be one of us—Esther or Lissa or Ginny.”
“Or me. Or the servants.”
“My God!” Freddie sat up. “It isn’t even going to be safe to eat!”
The Saint smiled slightly.
“I think it is. Ginny and I were talking about that. But I’ve eaten…Let’s take it another way. You put the finger on Johnny Implicato last Christmas. That’s nearly a year ago. So anybody who wanted to sneak in to get revenge for him must have sneaked in since then. Let’s start by washing out anybody you’ve known more than a year. How about the servants?”
“I hired them all when I came here this season.”
“I was afraid of that. However. What about anybody else?”
“I only met you yesterday.”
“That’s quite true,” said the Saint calmly. “Let’s include me. Now what about the girls?”
The three girls looked at each other and at Freddie and at the Saint. There was an awkward silence. Nobody seemed to want to speak first; until Freddie scratched his head painfully and said, “I think I’ve known you longer than anyone, Esther, haven’t I?”
“Since last New Year’s Eve,” she said. “At the Dunes. You remember. Somebody had dared me to do a strip tease—”
“—never dreaming you’d take them up on it,” said Ginny.
“All right,” said the Saint. “Where did you come in?”
“In a phone booth in Miami,” said Ginny. “In February. Freddie was passed out inside, and I had to make a phone call. So I lugged him out. Then he woke up, so we made a night of it.”
“What about you, Lissa?”
“I was just reading a book in a drug store in New York last May. Freddie came in for some Bromo-Seltzer, and we just got talking.”
“In other words,” said the Saint, “any one of you could have been a girlfriend of Johnny’s, and promoted yourselves in here after he was killed.”
Nobody said anything.
“Okay,” Freddie said at last. “Well, we’ve got fingerprints, haven’t we? How about the fingerprints on that knife?”
“We can find out if there are any,” said the Saint.
He took it out of the pocket of his robe, where he had kept it with him still wrapped in his handkerchief. He unwrapped it very carefully, without touching any of the surfaces, and laid it on the table. But he didn’t look at it particularly. He was much more interested in watching the other faces that looked at it.
“Aren’t you going to save it for the police?” asked Lissa.
“Not till I’ve finished with it,” said the Saint. “I can make all the tests they’d use, and maybe I know one or two that they haven’t heard of yet. I’ll show you now, if you like.”
Angelo made his impassive appearance with two glasses of orange juice for Lissa and Esther, and a third effervescent glass for Freddie. He stood stoically by while Freddie drained it with a shudder.
“Anything else, Mr Pellman?”
“Yes,” Freddie said firmly. “Bring me a brandy and ginger ale. And some waffles.”
“Yes, sir,” said the Filipino, and paused, in the most natural and expressionless way, to gather up three or four plates, a couple of empty glasses, and, rather apologetically, as if he had no idea how it could have arrived there, the kitchen knife that lay in front of the Saint with everyone staring at it.
5
And that, Simon reflected, was as smooth and timely a bit of business as he had ever seen. He sat loose-limbed on his horse and went on enjoying it even when the impact was more than two hours old.
It had a superb simplicity of perfection which appealed to his sardonic sense of humor. It was magnificent because it was so completely incalculable. You couldn’t argue with it or estimate it. There was absolutely no percentage in claiming, as Freddie Pellman had done, in a loud voice and at great length, that Angelo had done it on purpose. There wasn’t a thing that could be proved one way or the other. Nobody had told Angelo anything. Nobody had asked Angelo to leave the knife alone, or spoken to him about fingerprints. So he had simply seen it on the table, and figured that it had arrived there through some crude mistake, and he had discreetly picked it up to take it away. The fact that by the time it had been rescued from him, with all the attendant panic and excitement, any fingerprints that might have been on the handle would have been completely obscured or without significance, was purely a sad coincidence. And that was the literal and ineluctable truth. Angelo could have been as guilty as hell or as innocent as a newborn babe: the possibilities were exactly that, and if Sherlock Holmes had been resurrected to take part in the argument his guess would have been worth no more than anyone else’s.
So the Saint hooked one knee over the saddle horn and admired the pluperfect uselessness of the whole thing, while he lighted a cigarette and let his horse pick its own serpentine trail up the rocky slope towards Andreas Canyon.
The ride had been Freddie’s idea. After two more brandies and ginger ale, an aspirin, and a waffle, Freddie Pellman had proclaimed that he wasn’t going to be scared into a cellar by any goddam ga
ngster’s friends. He had hired the best goddam bodyguard in the world, and so he ought to be able to do just what he wanted. And he wanted to ride. So they were going to ride.
“Not me,” Lissa had said. “I’d rather have a gangster than a horse, any day. I’d rather lie out by the pool and read.”
“All right,” Freddie said sourly, “You lie by the pool and read. That makes four of us, and that’s just right. We’ll take lunch and make a day of it. You can stay home and read.”
So there were four of them riding up towards the cleft where the gray-green tops of tall palm trees painted the desert sign of water. Simon was in the lead, because he had known the trail years before and it came back to him as if he had only ridden it yesterday. Freddie was close behind him. Suddenly they broke over the top of the ridge, and easing out on to the dirt road that had been constructed since the Saint was last there to make the canyon more accessible to pioneers in gasoline-powered armchairs. But bordering the creek beyond the road stood the same tall palms, skirted with the dry drooped fronds of many years, but with their heads still rising proudly green and the same stream racing and gurgling around their roots. To the Saint they were still ageless beauty, unchanged, a visual awakening that flashed him back with none of the clumsy encumbrances of time machines to other more leisured days and other people who had ridden the same trail with him, and he reined his horse and thought about them, and in particular about one straight slim girl whom he had taken there for one stolen hour, and they had never said a word that was not casual and unimportant, and they had never met again, and yet they had given all their minds into each other’s hands, and he was utterly sure that if she ever came there again she would remember, exactly as he was remembering…So that it was like the shock of a cold plunge when Freddie Pellman spurred up beside him on the road and said noisily: “Well, how’s the mystery coming along?”
The Saint sighed inaudibly and tightened up, and said, “What mystery?”
“Oh, go on,” Freddie insisted boisterously. “You know what I’m talking about. The mystery.”
“So I gathered,” said the Saint. “But I’m not so psychic after a night like last night. And if you want to know, I’m just where I was last night. I just wish you were more careful about hiring servants.”
The Saint Goes West (The Saint Series) Page 12
