Thanks to the Saint (The Saint Series) Page 12

  “In fact,” Simon observed, “this must be one of the smallest Defense establishments in the country.”

  “It isn’t a factory,” Rand said severely. “It’s purely a Research Station. And the—er—device we are working on is quite small. But I assure you, its size is in no proportion to its importance. I think I can say that without betraying any official secrets.”

  From Harry Tanner came the kind of subsonic rumble that might have been emitted by a volcano that was trying not to erupt.

  “Official shinplasters,” he said obscurely. “What I’d like to know, Professor, is how you expect me to investigate a murder without investigating anything around it.”

  “What I’ve been trying to tell you, Marshal, is that I don’t expect you to. That is no slight, but—”

  “But you think I’m just a dumb village cop, eh?”

  “I know your record, Marshall, but I’m sure you don’t claim to have the same facilities here that you had in Cleveland.”

  “That’s right,” Simon interposed quietly. “And we probably don’t even need them.”

  All of them looked at him in a puzzled but guarded way, irresistibly drawn by an elusive quality of assurance that emanated from him, but uneasy as to what it might portend for any of them individually. Tanner in particular had a shocked and resentful expression, as if one ally that he had counted on was deserting him at the first shot.

  The Saint lighted a cigarette as if he were quite unaware of being saddled with so much responsibility and went on: “After all, there might be a clue anywhere in the house. Perhaps in the kitchen. I’m sure Professor Rand wouldn’t object if we searched the kitchen. But if we aren’t looking for anything definite, I’m damned if I know what we’re likely to find. The clue might just as well be a bottle of Escoffier Sauce as an electrode…And the same with the fingerprint routine. There doesn’t seem to be any possibility that this wasn’t an inside job. Therefore everyone at the Station is theoretically suspect. But so far as I know, everyone at the Station could have a legitimate excuse for having been anywhere or touched anything.”

  “Except the cops,” Soren said.

  He had a very deep voice that reverberated disproportionately from his narrow chest and a meticulous way of articulating every syllable that made him sound rather like a talking robot.

  “Beg your pardon, sir,” Ingram put in. “The guards are supposed to check all the rooms, twice in each watch, at night and on weekends or whenever there’s nobody working.”

  “Okay,” said the Saint. “So no fingerprints mean a thing, anywhere, except maybe on the soldering iron or the screwdriver—and you can bet the murderer wiped those.”

  “Precisely,” Rand agreed, but in a somewhat defensive way, as if he wondered what his concurrence might be letting him in for.

  Simon took a long drag at his cigarette and half sat on one corner of a sturdy antique table.

  “That brings us,” he said, “to the next standard routine: alibis.”

  There was a brief silence, until it became apparent that he was waiting for answers.

  “Klein’ll have the best one,” Ingram said. “He left the Station soon after seven, to drive to Tucson.”

  “So I heard,” Tanner confirmed. “And Loretto and Burney sat chewing the fat after you started your round until you found the body and called ’em. So they rule out each other.”

  “Unless they were in cahoots,” Soren said, with the punctilious enunciation that gave such an odd effect to his choice of vocabulary.

  Tanner said, with studied reasonableness, “All these guards must’ve had the hell of a check-up by the FBI you’re so sold on before they qualified for this job. Sure, any security system can slip up. But for it to slip twice on four men is mighty long odds for me to swallow. I’d rather see if ever’body else has an alibi first. Like you gentlemen, for instance.”

  Professor Rand made a little sound that was almost a polite snort.

  “Really, Marshal, if you think the guards were so carefully checked, you can imagine the kind of clearance we must have had, to be actually working on this project.”

  “I remember a scientist named Klaus Fuchs,” Simon murmured, “who went over to the Russians with stuff that’s supposed to have cut down our lead in atomic weapons by five years. Why shouldn’t you give the marshal your alibis—if you have any?”

  There was another, more searching pause.

  “I suppose I had better come clean,” Soren boomed at last. “I have none. Oakridge and I were working in the main workshop. He went to the drafting room to check some specifications on a final drawing, and I went on with what I was doing. But of course, you have only my word for it.”

  “When I came in,” Marjorie Tanner said, speaking for the first time in a clear, impersonal voice, “I went straight to the office and went on with some typing that I hadn’t finished yesterday. But I couldn’t prove that I stayed there.”

  “I heard the typewriter,” said Rand. “But I couldn’t swear that it never stopped. For that matter, I couldn’t prove what I was doing myself. While Soren and Oakridge went to the main workshop, I had something to do in the other room where I told you I was. But I haven’t any witness.”

  “And anyone,” said the Saint, “could have gone up or down that corridor, from any room to another, without being seen and probably without being heard.”

  Tanner threw Simon a grateful glance of restored confidence.

  “There you are,” he said. “It sets up four possible suspects, including my own daughter.”

  “You needn’t be quite so generous, Marshal,” Rand said with scarcely veiled sarcasm. “It’d be hard to make anyone believe that Miss Tanner committed murder in the horrible way that we’ve seen. And there’s still only one of us who can be called a cop.”

  Tanner turned heavily to the young man in uniform.

  “Well, Jock,” he said, “if you don’t have an alibi, you’re no worse off than anybody else.”

  “I don’t,” Ingram said steadily. “After I left the gate, I made the round of the fence. I didn’t hurry—there wasn’t any reason to. Then I went most of the way around again the way I’d just come—that’s a trick we pull sometimes. Then I came up to the house and checked the emergency light plant and batteries. Then I went in the kitchen and got a coke—”

  “We keep soft drinks and stuff to make sandwiches for lunch in the icebox,” Marjorie Tanner said, telling it to the Saint.

  “Then I came in and talked to Marj for a few minutes. That was about nine-thirty. I stayed five or ten minutes—”

  “It was nearer fifteen,” she said.

  “Then I walked out around the house, and I happened to look in a window and saw Mr Oakridge on the floor, and I came back in and found he was dead.”

  “So for ten or fifteen minutes, anyway, you two got alibis for each other,” the marshal said.

  Simon shook his head.

  “Don’t let’s kid ourselves, Harry,” he said with genuine regret. “You know as well as I do that that doesn’t mean a thing. No autopsy is going to fix the time of death as accurately as that.”

  “I am not sure,” Soren said with measured resonance. “We all know how it is between Miss Tanner and this guard. We can only sympathize with Mr Tanner’s natural instinct to give his prospective in-law every legal break.”

  “But not with trying to cover up for him,” Rand said, his eyes snapping hard and bright behind his glasses. “I’ve tried to be patient, but I’m finding it more difficult all the time to understand your reluctance to concentrate on the most obvious suspect. I’ll tell you frankly that from the moment we saw the circumstances of the murder, Dr Soren and I have felt it our duty to drop everything else and keep this young man under our personal surveillance. If you’re so anxious to take a hand in this investigation, I suggest that your first and most useful contribution would be to take him into custody.”

  “If I’m investigating, I’ll do it my own way,” Tanner growled. “I s
aw that word COP, too, but I didn’t see any proof Oakridge wrote it. Somebody else could of dipped Oakridge’s finger in the blood and done it.”

  It was a weak try, and they all knew it. Rand simply clamped his lips tighter, in an expression of pitying impatience. Soren condescended to consider it more respectfully, his lustrous eyes peering up intently from under lowered brows, but he finally said, “I would not have tried to frame him like that. A clever killer would feel safer if everyone could be suspected. Why narrow it down to only one—who might have been the one to have a perfect alibi?”

  “That’s pretty good criminal thinking,” said the Saint, with the detached appreciation of a connoisseur. “I’ll take it a little further, for what it’s worth. I think the murderer’s instinct would be to get away as quickly as possible—at least to be somewhere else when the body was found, even if he didn’t have an alibi—”

  “Then how can anyone have this stupid idea that Jock did it,” said the girl quickly, “when he found the body?”

  “There are exceptions,” Soren said, not unkindly. “He is one person who might have thought he could get away with it.”

  “With what? Writing something on the floor that would only point to himself?”

  For a moment everything sagged into the vertiginous hiatus which can yawn before the most brilliant minds in the presence of a feminine lunge towards total confusion.

  Simon took a final pull at his cigarette and chuckled. He put it down and said, “Let’s stay on the rails. With that screwdriver still in the wound, Oakridge would have taken a few minutes to bleed as much as we saw externally. Of course, the murderer might have had the nerve to stand there and wait till there was enough blood to write with; anything’s possible. But let’s try the things that are easier to believe first. Assuming that Oakridge wrote the word, is there anything else he could have been trying to say, besides accusing Ingram?”

  Tanner swung around towards Soren.

  “Your first name is Conrad, isn’t it?” he said. “He could just as well have been starting to try to write that, and his hand slipped—”

  “No,” said the Saint scrupulously. “It’s as definite a ‘P’ as I ever saw. It could never by any stretch of imagination have set out to be an ‘N.’ ”

  “But it might perhaps have been an unfinished ‘R,’ ” Soren retorted. “And if the ‘C’ was really a crude ‘L,’ the finger would be on Loretto.”

  “No again,” said the Saint judicially. “The ‘C’ is round and positive—almost a complete circle. It couldn’t be anything else.”

  The marshal turned to Rand almost pleadingly.

  “Could those letters stand for anything to do with your work?” he asked. “I mean, if they were chemical symbols, or something mathematical…”

  Rand stared at him without any softening but visibly forced himself to give the suggestion a conscientious mental review. Then he glanced at Soren, who responded only with a slight blank shrug.

  “No,” Rand said, turning back to Tanner more stonily than ever. “I’m sorry—absolutely nothing.”

  Tanner took a compulsive lumbering step in one direction, then in another, not going anywhere, but rather in helpless stubborn rebellion against the inexorable walls of logic that were crowding him closer on every side except one. But his resistance was beginning to have some of the tired hopelessness of the last minutes of a beleaguered bull.

  Ingram’s and the girl’s glances met, in a simultaneous reaching towards each other of complete unison.

  Ingram looked up again and said, “Thanks for trying to give me a fair break, sir. But neither of us want you to get yourself in Dutch for me. Go ahead and arrest me, if you think you ought to. I’ll prove I didn’t do it, somehow.”

  The girl reached up and took his hand as he stood beside her and said, “I know he will, Dad.”

  Simon slid another cigarette into his mouth and struck a match. Inwardly he was approaching the same state of baffled frustration as the marshal, even if his purely intuitive inability to visualize Jock Ingram as this kind of murderer was perhaps even greater, but no one could have guessed it from his cool and nerveless exterior. That aura of unperturbed relaxation was the only authority he had to keep everyone answering his questions, but he intended to exploit it to the last second—even though he still seemed to be groping in unalleviated darkness.

  “Just one last little detail before we call the paddy wagon,” he intruded. “I said there couldn’t be any argument that Oakridge wrote the letters C-O-P. But from the position of his hand, and the fresh blood on his finger—it looked to me as if he’d dipped it again after he wrote the “P”—I’d say there were good grounds to believe that he was trying to add something more when he passed out. Now, I don’t imagine he wanted to say that everything was copacetic, or put in a dying plug for the Copacabana. But can any of you think of anything else beginning with the same letters that has anything to do with this project here? Have you done any experimenting in a place that could be called a copse?”

  “No,” Rand said promptly.

  But in spite of themselves they could all be seen gazing into space and trying out tentative syllables.

  “Cope,” said the girl. “Copious…”

  The words died forlornly, inevitably.

  “Copper,” Ingram said, and immediately reddened. “I mean—”

  “The metal is used in most electrical work, of course,” Soren said kindly. “It has no unusual significance in what we are doing.

  “Copra?” Tanner said.

  “A coconut product, I believe,” Rand said witheringly, “which, without asking for any official clearance, I can say that we do not use.”

  “Copy,” Soren said.

  There was a moment’s breathless hush.

  Marjorie Tanner’s hand tightened on Ingram’s fingers, and her father’s baggy eyes began to light up; even Rand pursed his small mouth hesitantly.

  “But after all,” Soren said, with sadness in his sonorous bass, “if poor Oakridge was worried about a copy, even of a vital diagram—we have all thought of that motive. He was not telling us anything.”

  The room sighed as a multiple of separately inaudible deflations.

  “Copulation, anyone?” flipped the Saint.

  He should have known better than that. The silence this time was deafening.

  “I really think we’re entitled to know the name of your new assistant, Marshal,” Rand said at last, with the smoothness of a wrapped package of razor blades, and Simon decided that the marshal had carried him long enough.

  “The name is Templar,” he said. “More often called the Saint.”

  He had seen all the conceivable reactions to that announcement so often that they were seldom even amusing any more. This time he only hoped they would be disposed of quickly.

  “Did you know this, Marshal?” Rand was the one who finally cracked the new stillness, in a voice of shaky incredulity.

  “Yes, Professor,” Tanner said.

  “And knowing it, you brought him here and let him pretend to be your assistant?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “The FBI will be very interested.”

  “I don’t think it’ll surprise ’em much,” Tanner said, with the first real satisfaction he had permitted himself. “When I was calling Tucson, I thought to mention that I’d got a fellow named Simon Templar registered at the motel. It turned out the FBI man I was talking to had had something to do with clearing Mr Templar for some special work during the war. He said if I could get the Saint to come out here with me it wouldn’t hurt anything, at least.”

  Simon let an embryo smoke ring disintegrate at his lips as he paid Tanner the salute of a half-surprised, half-laughing flicker of his brows and hitched himself with the flowing movement of a gymnast off the table where he had been perched.

  “And for the record,” he said, to put all the cards down together, “I don’t think Jock Ingram did it either.”

  “Indeed.” Rand had
been shaken, but flint sparked behind his prim, scholarly eyeglasses. “According to your analysis, then, you must think it was either Dr Soren or myself, because that’s what you’ve reduced the list of suspects to.”

  “Maybe I do,” said the Saint cheerfully. “It wouldn’t make any difference if it were reduced to only one other suspect. In detective stories I’ve noticed they like to confuse you with a lot of possibilities, but in real life it isn’t any easier if you only have two alternatives. I mean to pick the right one honestly, for sure, and so that you can make it stick—not taking a fifty-fifty chance on a guess, or flipping a coin.”

  He made a slight arresting gesture with his cigarette to forestall the interruptions he could see formulating.

  “Let’s reconstruct the crime. It doesn’t seem difficult. Oakridge went into that room and caught somebody doing something he shouldn’t. According to Professor Rand, there was a very important drawing on the board. Very likely someone was photographing it. Not copying”—he gave Soren a nod of acknowledgement—“because that would be easier for this Someone to explain away. It had to be so blatant that Someone knew that his goose was cooked the minute Oakridge got out of the room to tell his story. So Someone picked up the nearest blunt instrument, a soldering iron, and hit Oakridge on the head from behind as he started for the door. The position of the wound on his skull confirms that. Then, wanting to make sure that if Oakridge wasn’t dead he would die quickly, and without being able to talk, and not wanting to do it by hammering away at his skull until he smashed a hole in it—which, if you’ll take my word for it, is a messy and uncertain business for a guy who isn’t a very muscular and physical type—he shoved a screwdriver in through his jugular vein and his throat.”

  Simon angled a hand towards Ingram, who stood rather stiffly but unfalteringly at a kind of attention beside Marjorie Tanner’s chair, but with her fingers still firmly locked in his.

  “Now I’ll admit that, of all of us here, Jock is one of the most likely to beat a man’s head to a pulp, if he had enough provocation. But that is exactly how Oakridge wasn’t killed. And if any of you can visualize this lad in the rest of the part, the essential part, as the master spy who infiltrates a top-secret project and photographs the priceless plans—even if, with the best will in the world, you believe he could tell a priceless plan from the blueprint for a washing machine—”