The Saint Goes West (The Saint Series) Page 23

  It was true there had been no drawing, and it was a point. Simon took out a cigarette.

  “You don’t owe us anything,” Lazaroff said. “We’re screwballs and occasional heels and a few other things, but we’ve never murdered anyone or tried to put anyone in a spot like you’re in. You call Condor if you want to. Tell him the whole story. Bob and I’ll admit it. It won’t be much fun for us, but I guess we’ve got it coming. Anyhow you’ll be in the clear.”

  “You’d better do it,” said Kendricks resignedly. “Get yourself out of the mess.”

  “And still leave it looking as if it was just a coincidence, and you guys had nothing to do with the murder.”

  “By God,” said Lazaroff, “we didn’t kill Ufferlitz! But you don’t have to cover us up. Tell this guy Condor what you think. We can take it.”

  His square florid face was screwed up like a baby preparing to cry. All at once he looked ludicrous and defeated and curiously pathetic, and at the same time desperately sincere.

  It had to be genuine; Simon realised it with a hopeless sense of relaxation. Lazaroff with a real crime on his conscience would have responded in any way but that. He wasn’t a dope. He was an irresponsible practical joker and a facile professional story-weaver as well. Between the two characteristics he would have been glib or indignant or bluffingly calm or angry. He wouldn’t have been deflated and frightened, as if he had pointed a supposedly unloaded gun once too often and heard it thunder in his hand.

  Then—it was true. A coincidence that had gotten itself entangled with real murder, that had distorted the whole picture of plotting and motive. Now the Saint was trying to shake his head clear of all the assumptions and misconceptions that had rooted themselves into his mind because he had leapt on to the premise that two things were inseparably related when actually they had no connection at all.

  “Give me that drink,” he said. “I’m going to start trying to use my brain for a change.”

  “Let’s all have one,” said Lazaroff fervently. Kendricks went over and switched on the radio. A musical theme ended, and an unctuous announcer began to discourse on the merits of a popular intestinal lubricant.

  “How bad a spot are you really in?” Kendricks asked.

  “Not so bad yet. I was in Ufferlitz’s house when the police came, but I managed to get away. Naturally I didn’t tell Condor about having been there. That note would have looked like as bad an excuse for being there as your explanation sounded. So I don’t want to drag you into it now, if you’ll go on leaving me out.”

  “You bet we will. But could Condor find out any other way?”

  “You never know. That’s why I still want to find the murderer first.”

  “Haven’t you any idea now who it was?” pleaded Lazaroff.

  The Saint stared at his cigarette. He had to begin all over again. But now things forced themselves into the front of his mind that he had not been able to see clearly before.

  The radio said, “And now, here is Ben Alexander with the news.”

  “Good evening, everyone,” said a new voice. “Before we turn to the European headlines, here’s a flash that has just come in. Orlando Flane, the movie star, shot himself at his home at Toluca Lake this afternoon. His sensational rise to world-wide fame began when he was featured in…”

  9

  April Quest poured two Martinis from the shaker and sat down beside the Saint. Her beauty still gave him that unearthly feeling of having stepped out of ordinary life into a dream—the perfect harmony of her dark copper hair, the exquisite etching of emerald eyes, the impossible sculpture of her features, the way her body flowed into every movement and disturbed the mind with its unconscious suggestion of the fulfilment of all the hungers known to all men.

  She said, “Well, you louse, I suppose you’ve stopped feeling human so now you feel safe.”

  He said, “That’s a sad reward for being a gentleman.”

  “Nuts,” she said. “A gentleman is anyone who does what you want them to do when you want them to do it. A swine is the same guy who does the same thing when you don’t want him to do it. Or who won’t do it when you want him to.”

  Simon smiled and tasted his drink.

  “You’re a philosopher too, darling. Was that why you wouldn’t talk to me this afternoon?”

  “I didn’t want to talk to you in front of all those jerks.”

  “That’s nice. But afterwards—”

  “Then you were on the phone.”

  “You must have been in an awful hurry.”

  “If you wanted to see me, you knew where to find me. I-I was hoping you would.”

  The Saint lighted her a cigarette, and one for himself. He watched the smoke drifting away, and said, “April, what do you think about Ufferlitz getting bumped off?”

  “I haven’t thought much,” she said. “It’s just something that happened. He might have caught pneumonia jumping out of a warm bed.”

  “Doesn’t it make any difference to you professionally?”

  “Not very much. I told you I was under contract to Jack Groom. He gets half of what he can sell me for, after he’s reimbursed himself for what he’s paid me when I haven’t been working. So he’ll get me another job, just to make his half good.”

  “He sort of hinted to me,” Simon said, “that Ufferlitz’s backers might give him Ufferlitz’s job. Then I suppose he might be able to make a better deal for both of you.”

  “He might be.”

  She was quite disinterested.

  “Don’t you care?”

  “Christ,” she said, “why should I get any gray hairs? If he makes a better deal, okay. If he doesn’t, I won’t starve. I’m pretty lucky. I’ve got a beautiful puss and a beautiful body, and not too much talent and goddam little sense. I’m never going to be a Bette Davis, and I’m not going to screw up my life trying to be a prima donna. I can eat. And that means plenty.”

  “You don’t care about seeing Jack Groom get ahead?”

  “Why the hell should I? He can take care of himself. Don’t let that spiritual-hammy act of his fool you. He knows all the angles. He can play politics and connive and lick boots in the best company.”

  “I asked you last night,” said the Saint, “but you wouldn’t tell me. So I was still wondering if there was anything personal between you.”

  It was amazing that such a face could be so passionless and detached.

  “He took me to Palm Springs one weekend, and he was lousy. He’ll never have the nerve to try it again. But I’ve been a good business proposition, and that’s a lot in his life.”

  Simon tapped his cigarette over the ashtray.

  “Then—you wouldn’t kill anyone on account of him?”

  “God, no.”

  “Then why did you kill Ufferlitz?”

  She was an actress. She sat and looked at him, without any exaggerated response.

  “This should be good,” she said. “Go on.”

  “By the way,” he said, “did you hear the news a little while ago? On the radio?”

  “I heard some of it.”

  “Did you hear about Orlando Flane bumping himself off?”

  “Yes. Did I do that too?”

  “I don’t know. Can you think of any reason why he should kill himself?”

  “Several. And he’s all of them. He was a bastard from away back. And he was pretty well washed up in this town. He didn’t have anything to live for for months, except Ufferlitz almost gave him a break.”

  “And what do you think about Trilby Andrews?”

  “I never heard of her. Who is she?”

  “She isn’t. She was.”

  She leaned back with her glass in her hand.

  “Hawkshaw Rides Again,” she said. “Go on. You do the talking. I told you last night I could see it coming. I’m not a detective. Tell me how it works.”

  He took another cigarette and lighted it from the stub of one that was only half finished. He refilled both their glasses from the s
haker. Then he relaxed beside her and gazed up at the ceiling. He felt very calm now.

  “I’m a lousy detective,” he said. “I never really wanted to be one…Maybe all detectives are lousy. They only get anywhere because the suspects are lousy too, and it doesn’t matter how many mistakes a detective makes. You just blunder around and wait for something to pop…That’s all I’ve been doing. I’ve thrown accusations all over the place, and been sure I’d strike a spark somewhere. You rush around and jump to conclusions and have kittens over every flash, and get gorgeously master-minded and confused…But in the end I’ve started to think.”

  He was thinking now, while he talked, picking up the loose ends that his driving imagination had so blithely pushed aside.

  “Byron Ufferlitz was shot through the back of his head, in his study, in his home, by somebody that he presumably knew pretty well—at least well enough to give an opportunity like that to. That gives the first list of suspects. None of them have very good alibis, but on the other hand nobody except the murderer knows exactly when it was done, so alibis aren’t so important. I could have done it myself. So could you.”

  “And you’ve decided that I did.”

  “There wasn’t any clue,” said the Saint. “No clue at all. Every clue had been very carefully cleaned up. And I was too busy to see that the first clue might be there.”

  “You’ll have to explain that.”

  “When you leave clues, you don’t necessarily book yourself to the gas chamber. But when you clean up clues, you may do just that. Because the blank spaces show your own guilty conscience. A clue isn’t a death warrant, because it’s only circumstantial. If I dropped in here and killed you and went out again, I might leave a lot of clues—and none of them would mean anything. A scientific detective might sweep the carpet and put the dust under a microscope and find celluloid dust in it, and say, ‘Ha! Someone has been here who’s been in contact with motion picture film; therefore the villain is someone from a studio.’ So what? So are hundreds of people…Or I might leave a book of matches from the House of Romanoff, and the inspirational detective would say, ‘Ha! This is a man of such and such a type who goes to such and such places’—regardless of the fact that I might have bummed the matches from a chauffeur who bummed them from somebody else’s chauffeur whose boss left them in the car. I might never have been in the House of Romanoff in my life…Now I don’t know what was cleaned off Ufferlitz’s carpet, or what matches were taken away, or anything else, but I do know one clue that was cleaned up that tells a story.”

  “This is fascinating,” she said. “Go on.”

  “The ashtrays were emptied,” he said.

  She sipped her Martini.

  “There might have been fingerprints on the cigarettes. Or…or the make of cigarette would tell who’d been there—”

  “I’m not such an expert, but I wouldn’t want the job of trying to get fingerprints from old cigarette butts. They aren’t held right—you might get bits of three fingers, but never one complete impression. On top of which they’d be smudged and crushed and probably fogged up with ash. It’s a million to one you couldn’t get an identification. As for telling anything from the brand of cigarette—that may have worked for Sherlock Holmes, but you can’t think of a brand today that isn’t smoked by thousands of people. And most of them change brands pretty freely, too. But one thing could have stood out on those cigarettes, one thing that nobody could miss, that even the dumbest amateur would have had to do something about.”

  “What was that?”

  He said, “Lipstick.”

  It was very quiet in the room. It was as if a section of the world enclosed between four walls and a floor and ceiling had been moved out into unrelated space. Ice settled in the shaker with a startling collapse like an avalanche.

  “Of course,” she said.

  “So it had to be a woman,” he said. “It couldn’t be Trilby Andrews, because she’s dead. But it might very likely be someone that he’d treated the same way, who reacted differently. She killed herself, but a different kind of girl might prefer to kill him. Or, it could be someone who was squaring accounts for Trilby.”

  “Either way,” she said, “you came to me.”

  He just looked at her.

  She put out her cigarette and looked at the red tip where her lips had left their color. Then she turned to him again. Her eyes were strangely hard to read.

  “So you’re still a great detective,” she said. “Now what happens?”

  “We could have another drink.”

  “Do you think I should give myself up, or would you rather turn me in and get some glory?”

  “Neither. I may be a detective, but I’m not a policeman. I can be my own grand jury. From what I’ve found out about Ufferlitz since I began meddling with this, I’d just as soon leave everything as it is.”

  A bell chimed somewhere in the house.

  “Tell me the strings,” she said. “Go on. I’m grown up.”

  “There are no strings, April,” he answered. “I feel rather satisfied about Ufferlitz getting killed. You see, some of those stories about me are still true. Once upon a time, before the Hays Office got hold of me, I might easily have killed him myself.”

  Her eyes suddenly blurred in front of him.

  “ ‘Saint,’ ” she said, and her voice gave the word new meaning. But she didn’t finish.

  The butler came in on padded feet, and said, “Lieutenant Condor is asking for Mr Templar.”

  Simon stood up.

  Her eyes never left him as she stood up too.

  “I’ll try and take him away,” he said. “May I come back and finish my drink later?”

  Without waiting for an answer he strolled out into the hall to greet the hungry lugubrious figure of Lieutenant Condor. The Saint’s smile was genial and carefree.

  “Well, well, well!” he murmured. “The never-sleeping bloodhound. How did you know I was here?”

  “I figured you’d be with somebody,” Condor said rather cryptically. “I just tried one or two places, and this was it. Do you want to talk here or shall we go outside?”

  “Let’s go outside.”

  They went out into the dark that had fallen outside, and sauntered over the lawn towards the sidewalk where Condor’s police car was parked. A street lamp shone down on it like a dull white moon among the palms. Simon saw the driver stick his head out and watch them.

  “You get on pretty well with her?” Condor asked, with matter-of-fact impersonality.

  “Very well.”

  “Was she helping you work out another alibi for when Flane was shot?”

  Simon slowed his step, with his hands in his pockets, and said quite amiably, “If you’re serious about that, I’d like an official warning and we’ll talk it over with the District Attorney and my own lawyer. Otherwise you’d better go easy with those cracks. I can’t let you go on like this indefinitely. Now do I really need an alibi or what?”

  “I’m afraid not,” Condor admitted lugubriously. He sighed. “This time you seem to be in the clear. Do you know anything about it?”

  “Only what I heard on the radio.”

  “Flane rushed into his home, quite cockeyed apparently, and went straight to his bedroom. His housekeeper was trying to ask him about something, but he just didn’t pay any attention. He must have grabbed a gun out of a drawer and shot himself, bang, just like that. She rushed right in and there he was, falling down, with a gun in his hand.”

  “That’s quite a relief to me,” said the Saint. “So now why did you want me?”

  “I thought you might have done some more figuring since it happened.”

  The police driver opened the car door and got out, as they stopped on the pavement. He kept moving towards them with short awkward steps, his face fixed and staring.

  “If it happened the way you say it did,” Simon observed, “it might have been a genuine suicide. In fact, I should say it must have been. So it’s no use dreaming abo
ut your murderer following up to cover himself.”

  “Unless he’s a genius,” said Condor.

  The driver was right with them now. He was still staring at the Saint, his eyes popping a little. Suddenly his hand settled on to his gun.

  “Is this Templar?” he interrupted hoarsely.

  “Yes,” Condor said, glancing at him.

  The driver’s mouth worked.

  “Well, I saw him last night! I was circlin’ round to cover the back, an’ I had my flashlight right on him. I thought he’d come out of another house where they was havin’ a party. He musta bin at Ufferlitz’s when we got there!”

  10

  “This had better be good,” said Condor dispassionately.

  He sat beside the Saint with a fresh toothpick between his teeth and a gun in the hand on his knee, while Simon zigzagged his big Buick down on to Beverly Boulevard. He glanced once over his shoulder at the lights following behind them, and added: “Dunnigan’s right on your trail, so I hope you weren’t thinking of pulling any fast ones.”

  “I’m hoping to save you a hell of a stink and a lawsuit for false arrest,” said the Saint. “Have you read that note?”

  Condor looked at it again under the dashboard lights.

  “And this is supposed to be why you went there.”

  “That’s why I went there.”

  “When did you write it?”

  “I knew you’d say that. That’s why I got the hell out. I walked in, and there was Ufferlitz with his brains all over the desk. Then the cops came. I knew I was being framed, so I went away quickly.”

  “You didn’t even say anything about it when I talked to you this morning.”

  “Of course not. Nothing had been changed. You’d still have thought I was trying to put over a clever story. But you can check on it yourself now. I did. According to the night man at the Château Marmont, that note was delivered by a medium-sized man in a buttoned-up tweed overcoat and a bushy red beard. A disguise, of course. And of course it sounds phony as hell. I could just as well have done it myself, with my knees bent to cut my height down. I knew you’d think that, and I’d have been crazy if I’d told you.”