The Saint Goes West s-23

by Leslie Charteris

  The hall itself was unlighted, but a shaft of illumination spilled from an open doorway to his left.

  "Hullo there," he said quietly.

  There was no answer as he crossed to the lighted doorway. As soon as he reached it he could see why. The room was Mr. Ufferlitz's study, and Mr. Ufferlitz was there; but it was quite obvious that no one would have to cooperate with Mr. Ufferlitz any more.

  4 MR. UFFERLITZ sat at his mahogany desk, which was about the size of a ping-pong table. His head was pillowed on the blotter, which had not proved sufficiently absorptive to take care of all the blood that had run out of him. Simon walked round the desk and saw that Mr. Ufferlitz's back hair was a little singed around the place where the bullet had gone in, so that the gun must have been held almost touching his head: probably most of the upper part of his face had been blown out, because blood had splashed forward across the desk and there were little blobs of gray stuff and white chips of bone mixed with it.

  The larger splotches of blood were still shiny, and the chewed end of a cigar that lay among them was still visibly damp. So the Saint estimated that the shot couldn't have been fired more than an hour ago. At the outside.

  He looked at his watch. It showed exactly two o'clock.

  The house was absolutely silent. If there were any servants in, their quarters were far enough away for them to have been undisturbed.

  Simon stood very quietly and looked around the room. It had an air of having been put together according to a studio designer's idea of what an important man's study should look like. One wall was lined with bookshelves, but most of the books wore dark impressive bindings with gilt lettering, having undoubtedly been bought in sets and most probably never read. The bright jackets of a few modern novels stood out in a clash of color. There were a couple of heavy oil paintings on the walls. Scattered between them were a numнber of framed photographs with handwriting on them. They were all girls. One of them was April Quest; and there was another face that seemed faintly familiar, but the inscription only said "Your Trilby"; Obviously these were symbols of Mr. Ufferlitz's new career as a producer. The room itself had the same appearance-Mr. Ufferlitz had hardly been in the business long enough to have built the house himself, but he had clearly selected it with an eye to the atmosphere with which he felt he ought to surround himself.

  The one thing that was conspicuously lacking was any sort of clue of the type so dear to the heart of the conventional fiction writer. There might have been fingerprints, but Simon was not equipped to look for them just then. On the desk, beнsides the blotter and Mr. Ufferlitz's head and samples of his blood, brains, and frontal bones, there was a fountain pen set, a couple of pencils, an evening paper, a couple of scripts and some loose script pages, a dentist's bill, a liquor price list, and a memorandum block on which nobody had thoughtfully borne down on the last sheet torn off with a blunt pencil so that the writing would be legible on the next page in a slanting light. On a side table by the fireplace there were some old weeklies, but no copies of the Hollywood Reporter-which meant nothing, because the executive subscribers to this daily record of the movie industry usually receive it at their offices. The only indication of anything unusual at all was the ashtrays. There were three of them, and they had all been used, and they were smeared with ash and carbon to prove it; but they had all been emptied-and not into the fireplace or the wastebasket.

  Simon thought mechanically, like an adding machine: "A servant didn't empty them, because he'd have wiped them as well. Byron didn't do it, because he wouldn't have carried the ashes out of the room. Therefore the murderer did it, and took the debris away with him, so that his cigarette stubs wouldn't be held against him. I guess he doesn't believe in Sherlock Holmes and what he would do with a microscope and what's left in the trays. He could be right, at that. .."

  But the train of thought did suggest another. If the murнderer had had to take that precaution, he must have done his share of smoking; therefore he had been there for some time; therefore he was most likely someone whom Mr. Ufferlitz knew-someone who might even have talked to Mr. Ufferlitz for quite a while before putting a gun to his occiput and blowing it out through his forehead.

  And that suggested something else. Simon stood behind Mr. Ufferlitz and sighted along the line that the bullet would probably have taken. It carried his eyes to a fresh scar gouged in the panelling opposite. He walked over to it, and had no doubt that it had been made by the spent bullet. But either the slug had not had enough force left to embed itself properly in the woodwork, or else it had been carefully pried out: it was not in the hole, or on the floor below it. There was no way to tell even the caliber of the gun which had been used. The murderer seemed to have been quite efficient.

  And he had not left behind any muddy footprints, buttons, shreds of cloth, hairs, hats, scraps of paper, cigarette lightнers, handkerchiefs, keys, match booklets, cuff links, specнtacles, gloves, combs, wallets, rings, fraternity pins, fobs, nail files, false teeth, tie clips, overcoats, ticket stubs, hairнpins, garters, wigs, or any of the other souvenirs which murderers in fiction are wont to strew around with such self-sacrificing generosity. He had just walked in and smoked a few cigarettes and fired his gun and emptied the ashtrays and walked out again, without leaving any more traces than any normal visitor would leave.

  "Which is Unfair to Disorganised Detectives," said the Saint to himself. "If I knew where the guy lived I'd picket him."

  But the flippancy was just a ripple on the surface of his mind, and underneath it his brain was working with the steady flow of an assembly line, putting together the prefabнricated pieces that he had been collecting without knowing what they were for. If he was right, and the murderer was someone whom Mr. Ufferlitz had known well enough to enнtertain in his study at that hour, there was at least a fair chance that it was someone whom Simon had already met. It might even be more than a chance. The Saint was probing back through the threads that he had once tried to weave toнgether when there was nothing to tie them to. And the note in his pocket, the note that had brought him there, with its hurried scrawl and emphatic capitals, came into his mind as clearly as if he had taken it out to look at it. Had Byron Uffнerlitz written it because something had happened to warn him that he would be in danger that night?

  Or hadn't he written it?

  Had somebody seen the Saint's entrance-literally-into the picture as the heaven-sent gift of a readymade scapegoat, and cashed in on it without one day's delay? Had it been sent only to bring him there at the right moment, so that...

  All at once Simon was aware of the silence again. The whole house was wrapped in an empty hush that seemed to close in on him with an intangible pressure, while he tried to strain through it for any sound that would crystallise this reawakened vigilance. He was very cool now, utterly limber and relaxed, with the triggered stillness of a cat.

  There was no sound even yet.

  He went out of the study and crossed the hall, moving with the same supple noiselessness. The front door had a small glass panel in it, and he looked out through that without touching anything. There was a car parked outside now, withнout lights, and two dark figures stood beside it. While he looked, a flashlight beam stabbed out from one of them, swept over the lawn, flicked across the front of the house, and wavered nosily over palm trees and shrubbery. The two figures began to move up the paved walk. The Saint didn't have to see them any better to know what they were.

  "Ay tank we go home," he murmured, and turned rapidly back.

  He didn't hesitate for a moment over the idea of flinging the door open and congratulating them on their prompt arrival. If the police were already preparing to take an inнterest in the premises, they must have already received a hint that there was something there to merit their profesнsional attention; and with the Saint's unfortunate reputation there were inclined to be certain technical complications about being caught in strange houses with dead bodies spillнing their brains over the furniture. The Saint knew bet
ter than anyone how sceptical policemen could be in circumнstances like that, and he had no great faith now that the note which he might have produced from his pocket to substantiate part of his story would stand up to unfriendly scrutiny.

  He wrapped a handkerchief round his right hand again as he went back through the study, where he had already noticed a glazed door to the garden. It was bolted on the inside- another partial confirmation of his theory that the murderer had not crept in on Mr. Ufferlitz unseen. Simon opened it, and stepped out into a paved patio, closing the door silently again behind him. A wooden gate in the wall to his left let him out on to a lawn with a swimming pool in the center. The wall around this lawn was six feet high, with no gates. Even more like a prowling cat, Simon swung himself to the top of the wall without an effort and dropped like a feather on to the lawn of the house next door. This was the corner house. He turned to the right, where the grounds were bordered by a high thick hedge. A well aged and artistically planted elm exнtended a massive branch at just the right height and angle for him to catch with his hands and jackknife his long legs over the hedge. This time he landed on concrete, in the black shadow of the big tree, and found that he was at the side of the house around the corner, in the drive leading to the gaнrages at the back.

  As he came to the corner of the building he walked into a babble of cheerful voices that ended with a chorus of good-nights. A door closed; and he saw two couples straggling away in search of their cars. Without hesitation he set off in a brisk curve that carried him first towards them and then away from them, as though he had left the party at the same time and branched off towards his own car.

  A flashlight sweeping over from some yards away touched on him as he reached the pavement.

  Simon squinted at it, and turned away to call a loud "Goodнnight" after the other departing guests. Then without a pause he opened the door of his car and ducked in. An automatic answering "Goodnight!" echoed back to him as he did it. And with that pleasant exchange of courtesies he drove away.

  As he turned on to Sunset he had an abrupt distinct recolнlection of a previous goodnight, and a car that had driven slowly by while he was outside April Quest's. That could have been a coincidence, and the recent timely arrival of the police could have been another; but when they were put toнgether it began to look as if somebody was quite anxious to make sure that Hollywood wouldn't be dull for him.

  5

  SIMON WALKED inno Mr. Ufferlitz's outer office at eleven o'clock in the morning and said: "Hullo, Peggy."

  "Hullo." Peggy Warden's smile was a little vague, and her voice didn't sound quite certain. "How are you today?"

  "Fine."

  "Did you have a good time last night?"

  "Mm-hm." The Saint nodded. "But I still want a date with you."

  "Well --"

  "What about lunch?"

  "I don't know--"

  Her face was paler than it had been yesterday, but he gave no sign of noticing it.

  "It's a date," he said, and glanced towards the communiнcating door. It was half open. He had seen that when he came in. "Has the Great Man arrived yet?"

  "Will you go right in?"

  Simon nodded, and strolled through.

  A new face sat behind Mr. Ufferlitz's desk. It was a lined face of indeterminate age, with a yellowish kind of tan as if it had once had a bronze which was wearing off. It had close-cropped gray-black hair and heavy black brows over a long curved nose like a scimitar. Its whole sculpture had an air of passive despondency that was a curious contrast to its bright black eyes.

  "Hullo," murmured Simon amiably. "Do you work here too?"

  "Condor's the name," said the face pessimistically. "Ed Condor. Yours?"

  "Templar. Simon Templar."

  The face moved a toothpick from one side of its mouth to the other.

  "Mr. Ufferlitz won't be in today," it said.

  "Oh."

  "In fact, Mr. Ufferlitz won't be around here any more."

  "No?"

  "Mr. Ufferlitz is dead."

  Simon allowed the faint frown of perplexity which had beнgun to gather on his brow to tighten up.

  "What?"

  "He's dead."

  "Is this a gag?"

  "Nope. He died last night. You won't see him any more unнless you go to the morgue."

  The Saint lighted a cigarette slowly, glancing back at the door through which he had just entered with the same puzzled frown deepening on his face.

  It was a masterpiece of tuning and restrained suggestion. If Condor was disappointed because he didn't draw one of the conventional gaffes of the "Who shot him?" variety, he didn't show it. He said: "I told her not to say anything. Wanted to see how you took it."

  "I may be dumb," said the Saint, "but I think I'm missing something. Are you an undercover man for a Gallup Poll, or what is this?"

  Condor flipped his lapel.

  "Police," he said gloomily. "Sit down, Mr. Templar."

  The Saint sank into a deep leather armchair and exhaled a long drift of smoke.

  "Well I'm damned," he said. "What did he die of?"

  "Murder."

  Simon blinked.

  "Good God-how?"

  "Shot through the head. From behind. In his study, at his house." Condor seemed to resign himself to the conviction that he wasn't going to catch any revelations of premature knowledge, and opened up a bit. "Sometime around half-past one. The cook thought she heard a noise about that time, but she didn't wake up properly and figured it was probably a car backfiring outside. Miss Warden was working there until about midnight, when he came in, and she says he was all right when she left about half an hour later."

  Simon nodded.

  "I saw him at Ciro's before that"

  "What time did he leave there?"

  "I wouldn't know. It was probably around eight-thirty when I saw him, but I don't know how much longer he stayed. I wasn't paying much attention."

  "You with anyone?"

  "April Quest."

  "How did Ufferlitz seem?"

  "Perfectly normal... Are there any clues?"

  "We haven't found any yet. The killer seems to have been good and careful. Even emptied the ashtrays."

  Simon drew at his cigarette again and rubbed his chin thoughtfully. He found an ashtray on the small table at his right elbow and tapped his cigarette over it. The rest of the table was littered with a pile of back numbers of the Hollywood Reporter and Variety. Right on top of the pile was a Reporter of yesterday. So Byron Ufferlitz hadn't had it with him to scribble that note on; and if he had written it in his office before leaving he wouldn't have used the Reporter for paper. Of course he could have picked up another copy, but -- "The only thing is," said Condor, "Ufferlitz knew the guy who killed him. The servants didn't let anyone in, except Miss Warden, so Ufferlitz must have done it himself."

  "Suppose the guy let himself in?"

  "Then he couldn't have gone into the study until not more than an hour before he shot Ufferlitz. But he still smoked enough to have to empty three ashtrays. So Ufferlitz knew him well enough to keep talking to him."

  Simon nodded again. It was his own old deduction, but it indicated that Ed Condor was at least not totally blind and incompetent. The Saint wondered how much more he had on the ball. Certainly he was not a man to be careless with.

  "I see," Simon said. "So you sit here waiting for people who knew him to drop in."

  "Yeah. I've seen two writers and the director-Groom. Now you."

  "Have you had any good reactions?" Simon asked with superb audacity.

  Condor nibbled his toothpick with the corners of his mouth drawn down unhappily.

  "Nope. Not yet. It hasn't been anybody's morning to pull boners." He went on without any transition: "What time did you go home last night?"

  "I took Miss Quest home about one o'clock."

  "When were you home?"

  "We talked for a while. I didn't notice the time, but I guess I was home in about half an ho
ur ..."

  Condor's black eyes that missed nothing were fixed on him steadily, and Simon knew almost telepathically that the night elevator operator at the Chтteau Marmont had already been consulted. But he had had several hours to remember that that would have been an inevitable routine, eventually, anyнway.

  "... the first time, that is," he continued easily. "Then I went out again. I didn't have any liquor in the apartнment, and I wanted another drink. I went to a joint on Hollyнwood Boulevard and had a drink at the bar, and went home at closing time."

  "What joint was that?"

  Simon told him the name of a night spot which did a roaring if not exactly exclusive trade, where he knew that nobody would be able to say positively whether he had been in or not.

  "See anyone you knew there?" Condor asked nevertheless.

  "No. In fact, if you want a cast-iron alibi," Simon admitted with an air of disarming candor, "I'm afraid I can't give it to you. Do I need one?"

  "I dunno," Condor said glumly. "How long would it take you to drive from your apartment to Ufferlitz's?"

  "I haven't the least idea," said the Saint innocently. "Where does he live?"

  The detective sighed. In any other circumstances Simon could almost have felt sorry for him. He was certainly a trier, and it just wasn't doing him any good.

  He said: "On Claymore, in Beverly Hills. You could drive there in ten minutes easy, even missing a few lights."

  "But I thought Ufferlitz was shot at one-thirty. I was home just about then."

  "You aren't sure. And the cook isn't sure either. She only thinks it was about one-thirty. She could be five minutes wrong. So could you. That makes enough difference for you to have been there. Maybe the shot wasn't at one-thirty anyway. Maybe she did hear a car backfiring, and the shooting was some other time. Like when you say you were out having a drink."