“Sit down,” Kerr invited graciously. “What is this all about?”
Simon remained standing. He put his lighter to a cigarette and said, “Our spies tell us that you went to the Quarterdeck Club with Lida Verity tonight.”
He risked the exaggeration intentionally, and saw it pay off as Kerr paused to pick up the highball which he had obviously put down when they knocked.
Kerr sipped the drink, looked at the Saint. “Yes?”
“Why did you leave the club without her?”
“May I ask what that has to do with you?”
“Lida was a friend of mine,” Patricia said. “She asked us to help her.”
“Just before she died,” the Saint said.
Kerr’s soft manicured hand tightened around his glass. His dark eyes swung like pendulums between the Saint and his lady. He didn’t catch his breath—quite, and the Saint wondered why.
“But that’s ghastly!” Kerr’s voice expressed repugnance, shock, and semi-disbelief. “She—she lost too much?”
“Meaning?” the Saint asked.
“She killed herself, of course.”
“Lida,” Simon explained, “was shot through the heart in the grounds of the Quarterdeck Club.”
“You’re trying to frighten me,” Kerr said. “Lida couldn’t have been—”
“Who said so? Who told you she committed suicide?”
“Why, why—it was just a—” Kerr broke off. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The Saint did not actually groan out loud, but the impulse was there.
“I can’t understand why this is always happening to me,” he complained. “I thought I spoke reasonably good English. The idea should be easy to grasp. All I told you was that Lida Verity was dead. You immediately assumed that she’d committed suicide. Statistics show that suicide is a helluva long way from being the most common way to die. Therefore the probability is that something or someone specifically gave you that idea. Either you knew that she might have had good reason to commit suicide, or somebody else has already talked to you. Whichever it is, I want to know about it.”
Kerr licked his lips.
“I fail to see what right you have to come here and cross-examine me,” he said, but his voice was not quite as positive as the words.
“Let’s not make it a matter of rights,” said the Saint easily. “Let’s put it down to my fatal bigness of heart. I’m giving you the chance to talk to me before you talk to the sheriff. And you’ll certainly have to talk to the sheriff if the gun that Lida was shot with happens to be registered in your name.”
It was a shot in the dark, but it seemed to be worth taking, and Simon felt an inward leap of optimism as he saw that at least he had come close to his mark. Kerr’s hand jumped involuntarily so that the ice in his highball gave a sharp tinkle against the glass, and his face turned a couple of shades lighter in color.
“What sort of gun was she shot with?”
“A thirty-two Colt automatic.”
Kerr took it with his eyes. There was a long moment’s silence while he seemed to search either for something to say or for the voice to say it.
“It could have been my gun.” He formed the words at last. “I lent it to her this evening.”
“Oh?”
“She asked me if I had a gun I could lend her.”
“Why did you let her have it if you thought she was going to shoot herself?”
“I didn’t think so at the time. She told me she was going to meet someone that she was scared of, but she didn’t tell me who it was, and she wouldn’t let me stay with her. She was rather overwrought and very mysterious about it. I couldn’t get anything out of her. But I never thought about suicide—then.”
Simon’s blue eyes held him relentlessly through a cool drift of cigarette smoke.
“And that,” said the Saint, “answers just half my question. So you weren’t thinking about suicide. So somebody told you. Who?”
Muscles twitched sullenly over Kerr’s brows and around the sides of his mouth.
“I fail to see—”
“Let me help you,” said the Saint patiently. “Lida Verity didn’t commit suicide. She was murdered. It wasn’t even a planned job to look like suicide. This unanimous eagerness to brush it off as a suicide was just an afterthought, and not a very brilliant one either. The sheriff doesn’t believe it and I don’t believe it. But there’s one difference between the sheriff and me. I may be a red herring to him, but I’m not a red herring to myself. I know this is one killing I didn’t do. So I’ve got a perfectly clear head to concentrate on finding out who did it. If anyone seems to be stalling or holding out on me, the only conclusion I can come to is that they’re either guilty themselves or covering up for a guilty pal. In either case, I’m not going to feel very friendly about it. And that brings us to another difference between the sheriff and me. When I don’t feel friendly about people, I’m not tied down by a lot of red tape and pettifogging legal procedures. As you may have heard. If you are covering up for a pal he must mean a lot to you, if you’re willing to let me hang you for him.”
Kerr took another sip of his drink. It was a long sip, turning gradually into a gulp. When he set down his glass, the last pretense of dignified obstinacy had gone out of him.
“I did have a phone call from one of the men at the club,” he admitted.
“Who was it?”
“I don’t know exactly. He said, “The Saint’s on his way to see you. Mrs Verity just shot herself here. Esteban says to tell you not to talk.’ ”
“Why should this character expect you to do what Esteban told you?”
Kerr fidgeted.
“I work for Esteban, in a sort of way.”
“As a shill?” Simon inquired.
The other flushed.
“I bring people to the club and I get a small commission on the business. It’s perfectly legitimate.”
“It would be in a legitimate business. So you shill for the joint. You latch on to visiting pigeons around town and steer them in to be plucked.” Simon studied him critically. “Times must be getting tough, Maurice. I seem to remember that you used to do much better marrying them occasionally and getting a nice settlement before they divorced you.”
“That’s neither here nor there,” Kerr said redly. “I’ve told you everything I know. I’ve never been mixed up with murder, and I don’t want to be.”
The Saint’s cigarette rose to a last steady glow before he let it drop into an ashtray.
“Whether you want it or not, you are,” he said. “But we’ll take the best care we can of your tattered reputation.”
He held out his hand to Patricia and helped her up, and they went out and left Maurice Kerr on his own doorstep, looking like a rather sullen and perturbed penguin, with an empty glass still clutched in his hand.
“And that,” said Patricia, as the Saint nursed his car around a couple of quiet blocks and launched it into the southbound stream of Collins Avenue, “might be an object lesson to Dr Watson, but I left my dictionary at home.”
The Saint dipped two fingers into the open pack in his breast pocket for another Pall Mall, and his smile tightened over the cigarette as he reached forward to press the dashboard lighter.
“Aside from the fact that you’re much too beautiful to share an apartment safely with Mr Holmes,” he said, “what seems to bother you now?”
“Why did you leave Kerr like that? He was working for Esteban. He told you so himself. He was telling you the story that Esteban told him to tell you—you even made him admit that. And Lida seems to have been shot with his gun. It’s all too obvious.”
Simon nodded, his eyes on the road.
“That’s the whole trouble,” he said. “It’s all too obvious. But if she really was shot with Kerr’s gun—which seems to be as certain as any guess can be—why did the guy leave it behind to lay a trail straight to his doorstep? He may be a poop, but can you believe that he’s that half-witted? Ther
e’s nothing in his record to show that he had softening of the brain before. A guy who can work his way through four rich wives in ten years may not be the most desirable character on earth, but he has to have something on the ball. Most of these over-bank-balanced broads have been around too.”
Patricia fingered strands of golden hair out of her eyes.
“He doesn’t sound like the dream-boy of all time,” she said. “I can imagine how Dick Verity would like to hear that Lida and Maurice were a steady twosome.” Her eyes turned to him with a sudden widening. “Simon, do you think—”
“That there was blackmail in it?” The Saint’s face was dark and cold. “Yes, darling, I think we’re getting closer. But I don’t see the fine hand of Maurice in it. A man with his technique doesn’t suddenly have to resort to anything so crude as murder. But you meet all kinds of types at the Quarterdeck Club—and I think we belong there.”
The moon was the same, and the rustle of palm fronds along the tall dark margins of the road, but the night’s invitation to romance had turned into something colder that enclosed them in a bubble of silence which only broke on the eventually uprising neons of the Quarterdeck Club and the hurricane voice of the Admiral.
“Avast there!” he bellowed, as the car came to a stop. “My orders are to repel boarders.”
Simon opened the door and swung out a long leg.
“A noble duty, Horatio,” he murmured, “but we belong here—remember? The sheriff wouldn’t like it if he thought we’d jumped ship.”
The Admiral stood firmly planted in his path. His face was no longer ruddily friendly, and his eyes were half shuttered.
“I’m sorry, sir. I don’t know how you were able to disembark, but my orders—”
That was as far as he got, for at that moment the precise section of his anatomy known to box-fighting addicts as the button came into unexpected violent contact with an iron fist which happened at that moment, by some strange coincidence, to be traveling upwards at rocket speed. For one brief instant the Admiral enjoyed an entirely private fireworks display of astonishing brilliance, and thereupon lost interest in all mundane phenomena.
The Saint caught him as he crumpled and eased his descent to the gravel. There was no other movement in the parking lot, and the slow drumming of the distant surf blended with a faint filtration of music from inside the club to overlay the scene with the beguiling placidity of a nocturne. Simon took another grip and heaved the Admiral quite gently into the deeper shadows of some shrubbery, where he began to bind and gag him deftly with the Admiral’s own handkerchief, necktie, and suspenders.
“You, too, can be a fine figure of a man, bursting with vibrant health and super strength,” recited Patricia. “Send for our free booklet, They Laughed When I Talked Back to the Truck Driver.”
“If Mary Livingstone ever loses her voice, you can get a job with Jack Benny,” said the Saint. “Now while I finish this up, will you be a good girl and go in and engage Esteban in dulcet converse—with his back to the door. I’ll be with you in two seconds.”
To be drearily accurate, it was actually sixty-eight seconds later when the Saint entered the gaming room again. He found Esteban facing a vivacious Pat, and it was clear from his back that it would take something rather important to drag him away from her.
The Saint was able to provide this. It manifested itself as a pressure in the center of Esteban’s spine.
“This isn’t my pipe, Esteban,” he breathed in the entrepreneur’s ear. “Shall we adjourn to your private office, or would you like bits of your sacroiliac all over the joint?”
Esteban said nothing. He led the way, with the Saint walking apparently arm in arm with him, and Pat still chattering on the other side.
“—and I am going to write to my mother, Mr Esteban, and tell her what a romantic place you—”
“Now we can wash this up,” the Saint said.
He closed the door behind them. Esteban stood very still.
“What do you expect this to get you, Mr Templar?”
“A peek in your safe,” said the Saint softly.
“The safe is locked.”
“This is still the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Sacroiliacs,” Simon reminded him. “The safe can be unlocked.”
“You wouldn’t dare to shoot!”
“Not until I count to three, I wouldn’t. It’s a superstition with me. One…two…”
“Very well,” Esteban said.
Little beads of sweat stood on his olive brow as he went to the wall safe and twirled the dial.
Simon handed his gun to Pat.
“Cover him. If he tries anything, shoot him in his posterity.” He added to Esteban, “She will, too.”
Esteban stood to one side as the Saint emptied the safe of bundles of currency, account books, and sheaves of business-like papers. He was pleased to find that Esteban was a neat and methodical man. It made the search so much quicker and easier. He had known before he started what kind of thing he was looking for, and there were not too many places to look for it. He was intent and efficient, implacable as an auditor, with none of the lazy flippancy that normally glossed his purposes.
Another voice spoke from the doorway behind him.
“So we’re havin’ a party. Put that gun down, Miss Holm. What would this all be about, son?”
“Come on in, daddy,” Simon said. “I was just deciding who you were going to arrest.”
Esteban’s sudden laugh was sharp with relief. “I think, my friend, the sheriff knows that already. Mr Haskins, I shall be glad to help you with my evidence. They stick me up in my own club, bring me in here, and force me to open the safe. Fortunately you catch them red-handed.”
“That’s the hell of a way to talk about a guy who’s just going to save your worthless neck,” said the Saint.
Newt Haskins pushed his black hat onto the back of his head.
“This had shuah better make a good story, son,” he observed. “But I’m listenin’.”
“It wasn’t too hard to work out,” Simon said seriously. “Lida Verity was being blackmailed, of course. That’s why she told us she was in trouble, instead of calling on you. Blackmail has been a side line in this joint for some time—and a good hunting ground this must be for it, too. This town is always full of wives vacationing from their husbands, and vice versa, and the climate is liable to make them careless. Somebody stooging around this joint could build up interesting dossiers on a lot of people. In fact, somebody did.”
He took a small notebook from his pocket.
“Here it is. Names, dates, details. Items that could be plenty embarrassing if they were used in the wrong way. I’m going to rely on your professional discretion to see that it’s destroyed when you’re through with it.”
“He’s trying to pull the fast one!” Esteban burst out. “He never found such a book in my safe—”
“I didn’t say I did,” Simon responded calmly. “I found it on somebody else. But since you were the most obvious person to be behind the operation, I wanted to nose around in your safe to see if there was anything in it that would confirm or deny. I’m afraid the results let you out. There doesn’t seem to be anything that even remotely connects you. On the other hand, I found this.”
He handed Haskins a slip of paper, and the sheriff squinted at it with his shrewd gray eyes.
“Seems to be a check made out to Esteban,” Haskins said. “It says on the voucher ‘January installment on car-park concession.’ What do you figger that means, son?”
“It means that if the Admiral was paying Esteban for the car-park concession, Esteban could hardly have been using him as part of a blackmail racket. Otherwise the pay-off would have gone the other way. And certainly it would if the Admiral had been doing Esteban’s dirty work when he killed Lida Verity.”
“The Admiral!” Patricia exclaimed.
Simon nodded.
“Of course. Our corny nautical character. He never missed anything that went on here
—including Mrs Verity’s rather foolish affair with a superior gigolo and shill named Maurice Kerr. Only she didn’t sit still for blackmail. I guess she told the Admiral she was going to have me take care of him, and she may even have tried to scare him with the gun she’d borrowed. He got mad or lost his head and grabbed the gun and shot her.” The Saint dipped in his pocket again. “Here are the white gloves he always wore. You’ll notice that there’s a tear in one of them. I’m betting that the thread you found in that trigger guard can be proved to have pulled out of that glove.”
Haskins turned the gloves over in his bony hands, and brought his eyes slowly back to the Saint.
“Reckon you done another good job, Saint,” he conceded peacefully. “We’ll soon know…An’ this heah Esteban, he ought to stake you with blue chips all night for lettin’ him out.”
“Letting me out!” Esteban echoed indignantly. The enormity of the injustice done to him grew visibly in his mind, finding voice in a crescendo of righteous resentment. “I tell the world I am let out! That Admiral, he makes agreement with me to pay me half of everything he makes from the concession. And he never tells me—the peeg!—he never tells me anything about this blackmail at all!”
JEANNINE
INTRODUCTION
Before you have ploughed very far into this episode, it is bound to become manifest even to the most obtuse of you that you are reading a sort of sequel to the one before. So I am going to take the edge off it and admit it before you start.
But this was not anything I planned. There was a lapse of many years between the writing of the stories. The fact that the same girl turned out to be involved was almost a surprise even to me. But the story called for a character that the Saint had matched wits with before, and while I suppose it wouldn’t have been too difficult to invent one, it seemed a lot simpler to dig one out of the Saint’s recorded past, where the previous encounter was fully documented.
This is one of the sordid advantages of writing such an unconscionable number of stories. You don’t have to keep on creating new characters indefinitely. The time comes when you only have to reach back into the half-forgotten past, pick up some personality that once flashed across your screen, and figure what might have happened to him or her (and how tediously grammatical I must be getting) since the earlier encounter.
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