The Saint Goes West s-23 Page 6

  "I think so."

  It was terrific dialogue.

  He reached over to the bedside table, and offered her the package that lay there. She came up beside him to take it. Without rising, he struck a match. She sat down beside him to get the light. The negligee was cut down to her waist in front, and it opened more when she leaned forward to the flame.

  "Thanks." She blew out a deep inhalation of smoke. She could have made an exit with that, but she didn't. She studied him with her dark dreamy eyes and said: "I suppose you were thinking."

  "A bit."

  "Have you any ideas yet?"

  "Lots of them. Too many."

  "Why too many?"

  "They contradict each other. Which means I'm not getting anywhere."

  "So you still don't know who's doing all these things?"

  "No."

  "But you know it isn't any of us."

  "No, I don't."

  "Why do you keep saying that? Ginny was with you all the time this afternoon, and I couldn't have had a gun on me, and Lissa couldn't have followed us and been at the Tennis Club too."

  "Therefore there must be a catch in it somewhere, and that's what I'm trying to find."

  "I'm afraid I'm not very clever," Esther confessed.

  He didn't argue with her.

  She said at last: "Do you think I did it?"

  "I've been trying very conscientiously to figure out how you could have."

  "But I haven't done anything."

  "Everybody else has said that too."

  She gazed at him steadily, and her lovely warm mouth richened with pouting.

  "I don't think you really like me, Simon."

  "I adore you," he said politely.

  "No, you don't. I've tried to get on with you. Haven't I?"

  "You certainly have."

  "I'm not awfully clever, but I try to be nice. Really. I'm not a cat like Ginny, or all brainy and snooty like Lissa. I haven't any background, and I know it. I've had a hell of a life. If I told you about it, you'd be amazed."

  "Would I? I love being amazed."

  "There you go again. You see?"

  "I'm sorry. I shouldn't kid you."

  "Oh, it's all right. I haven't got much to be serious about. I've got a pretty face and a beautiful body. I know I've got a beautiful body. So I just have to use that."

  "And you use it very nicely, too."

  "You're still making fun of me. But it's about all I've got, so I have to use it. Why shouldn't I?"

  "God knows," said the Saint. "I didn't say you shouldn't." She studied him again for a while.

  "You've got a beautiful body, too. Alllean and muscular. But you've got brains as well. I'm sorry. I just like you an awнful lot."

  "Thank you," he said quietly.

  She smoked her cigarette for a few moments.

  He lighted a cigarette himself. He felt uncomfortable and at a loss. As she sat there, and with everything else in the world put aside, she was something that no man with a proper supply of hormones could have been cold to. But everything else in the world couldn't be put aside quite like that . . .

  "You know," she said, "this is a hell of a life."

  "It must be," he agreed.

  "I've been watching it. I can think a little bit. You saw what happened this afternoon. I mean--"

  "The blonde at the Tennis Club?"

  "Yes . . . Well, it just happened that she was a blonde. She could just as well have been a brunette."

  "And then-Esther starts packing."

  "That's what it amounts to."

  "But it's been fun while it lasted; and maybe you take someнthing with you."

  "Oh, yes. But that isn't everything. Not the way I mean. I mean..."

  "What do you mean?"

  She fiddled with a seam in her negligee for a long time.

  "I mean ... I know you aren't an angel, but you're not just like Freddie. I think you'd always be sincere with peoнple. You're sort of different, somehow. I know I haven't got anything much, except being beautiful, but-that's something, isn't it? And I do really like you so much. I'd-I'd do anyнthing ... If I could only stay with you and have you like me a little."

  She was very beautiful, too beautiful, and her eyes were big and aching and afraid.

  Simon stared at the opposite wall. He would have given his day's thousand dollars to be anywhere the hell out of there.

  He didn't have to.

  Freddie Pellman's hysterical yell sheared suddenly through the silent house with an electrifying urgency that brought the Saint out of bed and up on to his feet as if he had been snatched up on wires. His instinctive movement seemed to coincide exactly with the dull slam of a muffled shot that gave more horror to the moment. He leapt towards the communiнcating door, and remembered as he reached it that while he had meant to get it unlocked that morning the episode of the obliterated fingerprints had put it out of his mind. Simulнtaneously, as he turned to the outer door, he realised that the sound of a door slamming could have been exactly the same, and he cursed his own unguardedness as he catapulted out on to the screened verandah.

  One glance up and down was enough to show that there was no other person in sight, and he made that survey without even a check in his winged dash to Freddie's room.

  His automatic was out in his hand when he flung the door open, to look across the room at Freddie Pellman, in black trousers and unbuttoned soft dress shirt, stretched out on the davenport, staring with a hideous grimace of terror at the rattlesnake that was coiled on his legs, its flat triangular head drawn back and poised to strike.

  Behind him, the Saint heard Esther stifle a faint scream; and then the detonation of his gun blotted out every other sound.

  As if it had been photographed in slow motion, Simon saw the snake's shattered head splatter away from its body, while the rest of it kicked and whipped away in series of reнflex convulsions that spilled it still writhing spasmodically on to the floor.

  Freddie pulled himself shakily up to his feet.

  "Good God," he said, and repeated it. "Good God-and it was real! Another second, and it'd have had me!"

  "What happened?" Esther was asking shrilly.

  "I don't know. I was starting to get dressed-you see?-I'd got my pants and shirt on, and I sat down and had a drink, and I must have fallen asleep. And then that thing landed on my lap!"

  Simon dropped the gun back into his pocket.

  "Landed?" he said.

  "Yes-just as if somebody had thrown it. Somebody .must have thrown it. I felt it hit. That was what woke me up. I saw what it was, and of course I let out a yell, and then the door slammed, and I looked round too late to see who it was. But I didn't care who it was, then. All I could see was that God-damn snake leering at me. I almost thought I was seeing things again. But I knew I couldn't be. I wouldn't have felt it like that. I was just taking a nap, and somebody came in and threw it on top of me!"

  "How long ago was this?"

  "Just now! You don't think I lay there for an hour necking with a snake, do you? As soon as it fell on me I woke up, and as soon as I woke up I saw it, and of course I let out a yell at once. You heard me yell, didn't you, Esther? And right after that the door banged. Did you hear that?"

  "Yes, I heard it," said the Saint.

  But he was thinking of something else. And for that once at least, even though she had admitted that she was not so bright, he knew that Esther was all the way there with him. He could feel her mind there with him, even without turnнing to find her eyes fastened on his face, even before she spoke.

  "But that proves it, Simon! You must see that, don't you? I couldn't possibly have done it, could I?"

  "Why, where were you?" Freddie demanded.

  She drew herself up defiantly and faced him.

  "I was in Simon's room."

  Freddie stood hunched and stiff and staring at them. And yet the Saint realised that it wasn't any positive crystallising of expression that made him look ugly. It was actually the
reнverse. His puffy face was simply blank and relaxed. And on that sludgy foundation, the crinkles of unremitting feverish bonhomie, the lines and bunchings of laborious domineering enthusiasm, drained of their vital nervous activation, were left like a mass of soft sloppy scars in which the whole synopнsis of his life was hieroglyphed.

  "What is it now?" Lissa's voice asked abruptly.

  It was a voice that set out to be sharp and matter-of-fact, and failed by an infinitesimal quantity that only such ceaseнlessly critical ears as the Saint's would catch.

  She stood in the doorway, with Ginny a little behind her.

  Freddie looked up at her sidelong from under his lowered brows.

  "Go away," he said coldly. "Get out."

  And then, almost without a pause or a transition, that short-lived quality in his voice was only an uncertain memory.

  "Run along," he said. "Run along and finish dressing. Siнmon and I want to have a little talk. Nothing's the matter. We just had a little scare, but it's all taken care of. I'll tell you presently. Now be nice children and go away and don't make a fuss. You, too, Esther."

  Reluctantly, hesitantly, his harem melted away.

  Simon strolled leisurely across to a side table and lighted himself a cigarette as Freddie closed the door. He genuinely wasn't perturbed, and he couldn't look as if he was.

  "Well," Freddie said finally, "how does it look now?" His voice was surprisingly negative, and the Saint had to make a lightning adjustment to respond to it.

  He said: "It makes you look like quite a bad risk. So do you mind if I collect for today and tomorrow? Two Gs, Fredнdie. It'd be sort of comforting."

  Freddie went to the dressing-table, peeled a couple of bills out of a litter of green paper and small change, and came back with them. Simon glanced at them with satisfaction. They had the right number of zeros after the 1.

  "I don't blame you," said Freddie. "If that snake had bitten me--"

  "You wouldn't have died," said the Saint calmly. "Unless you've got a very bad heart, or something like that. That's the silly part of it. There are doctors within phone call, there's sure to be plenty of serum in town, and there's a guy like me on the premises who's bound to know the first aid. You'd have been rather sick, but you'd have lived through it. So why should the murderer go through an awkward routine with a snake when he had you cold and could've shot you or slit your throat and made sure of it? ... This whole plot has been full of silly things, and they're only just starting to add up and make sense."

  "They are?"

  "Yes, I think so."

  "I wish I could see it."

  Simon sat on the arm of a chair and thought for a minute, blowing smoke-rings.

  "Maybe I can make you see it," he said.

  "Go ahead."

  "Our suspects were limited to six people the first night, when we proved it was someone in the house. Now, through various events, every one of them has an alibi. That would make you think of a partnership. But none of the servants could have poisoned your drink this afternoon, and it wasn't done by the waiter or the bartender-they've both been at the club for years, and you could bet your shirt on them, Therefore somebody at the table must have been at least part of the partnership, or the whole works if there never was a partnerнship at all. But everyone at the table has still been alibied, somewhere in the story."

  Freddie's brow was creased with the strain of following the argument.

  "Suppose two of the girls were in partnership?"

  "I thought of that. It's possible, but absolutely not probable. I doubt very much whether any two women could collaboнrate on a proposition like this, but I'm damned sure that no two of these girls could."

  "Then where does that get you?"

  "We have to look at the alibis again. And one of them has to be a phony."

  The corrugations deepened on Freddie's forehead. Simon watched him silently. It was like watching wheels go round. And then a strange expression came into Freddie's face. He looked at the Saint with wide eyes.

  "My God!" he said. "You mean-Lissa ..."

  Simon didn't move.

  "Yes," Freddie muttered. "Lissa. Ginny's got a perfect alibi. She couldn't have shot at me. You were with her yourself. Esther might have done it if she'd hidden a gun there before. But she was in your room when somebody threw that snake at me. She couldn't have faked that. And the servants have all gone . . . The only alibi Lissa has got is that she was the first one to be attacked. But we've only got her word for it. She could have staged that so easily." His face was flushed with the excitement that was starting to obstruct his voice. "And all that criminology of hers ... of course . . . she's the one who's always reading these mysteries-she'd think of melodramatic stuff like that snake-she'd have the sort of mind. .."

  "I owe you an apology, Freddie," said the Saint, with the utmost candor. "I didn't think you had all that brain."

  8 HE WAS alone in the house. Freddie Pellman had taken the girls off to the Coral Room for dinner, and Simon's stall was that he had to wait for a long-distance phone call. He would join them as soon as the call had come through.

  "You'll have the place to yourself," Freddie had said when he suggested the arrangement, still glowing from his recent accolade. "You can search all you want. You're bound to find something. And then we'll have her."

  Simon finished glancing through a copy of Life, and strolled out on the front terrace. Everything on the hillside was very still. He lighted a cigarette, and gazed out over the thin spread of sparkling lights that was Palm Springs at night. Down below, on the road that led east from the foot of the drive, a rapidly dwindling speck of red might have been the tail light of Freddie's car.

  The Saint went back into the living-room after a little while and poured himself a long lasting drink of Peter Dawson. He carried it with him as he worked methodically through Esther's and Ginny's rooms.

  He wasn't expecting to find anything in either of them, and he didn't. But it was a gesture that he felt should be made.

  So after that he came to Lissa's room.

  He worked unhurriedly through the closet and the chest of drawers, finding nothing but the articles of clothing and perнsonal trinkets that he had found in the other rooms. After that he sat down at the dresser. The center drawer conнtained only the laboratory of creams, lotions, powders, paints, and perfumes without which even a modern goddess believes that she has shed her divinity. The top right-hand drawer contained an assortment of handkerchiefs, scarves, ribbons, clips, and pins. It was in the next drawer down that he found what he had been waiting to find.

  It was quite a simple discovery, lying under a soft pink froth of miscellaneous underwear. It consisted of a .32 autoнmatic pistol, a small blue pharmacist's bottle labeled "Prussic Acid-POISON", and an old issue of Life. He didn't really need to open the magazine to know what there would be inside, but he did it. He found the mutilated page, and knew from the other pictures in the layout that the picture which had headed the letter that Freddie had shown him at their first meeting would fit exactly into the space that had been scissored out of the copy in front of him.

  He laid the evidence out on the dresser top and considered it while he kindled another cigarette.

  Probably any other man would have felt that the search ended there; but the Saint was not any other man. And the strange clairvoyant conviction grew in his mind that that was where the search really began.

  He went on with it more quickly, with even more assurance, although he had less idea than before what he was looking for. He only had that intuitive certainty that there should be something-something that would tie the last loose ends of the tangle together and make complete sense of it. And he did find it, after quite a short while.

  It was only a shabby envelope tucked into the back of a folding photo frame that contained a nicely glamorised porнtrait of Freddie. Inside the envelope were a savings bank pass book that showed a total of nearly five thousand dollars, and a folded slip of paper. It was when h
e unfolded the slip of paper that he knew that the search was actually over and all the questions answered, for he had in his hands a certificate of marriage issued in Yuma ten months before ...

  "Are you having fun?" Lissa asked.

  She had been as quiet as a cat, for he hadn't heard her come in, and she was right behind him. And yet he wasn't surнprised. His mind was filling with a great calm and quietness as all the conflict of contradictions settled down and he knew that the last act had been reached.

  He turned quite slowly, and even the small shining gun in her hand, aimed squarely at his chest, didn't surprise or disturb him.

  "How did you know?" he drawled.

  "I'm not so dumb. I should have seen it before I went out if I'd been really smart."

  "You should." He felt very detached and unrealistically balanced. "How did you get back, by the way?"

  "I just took the car."

  "I see."

  He turned and stood up to face her, being careful not to make any abrupt movement, and keeping his hands raised a little; but she still backed away a quick step.

  "Don't come any closer," she said sharply.

  He was just over an arm's length from her then. He measured it accurately with his eye. And he was still utterly cool and removed from it all. The new stress that was building up in him was different from anything before. He knew now, beyond speculation, that murder was only a few seconds away, and it was one murder that he particularly wanted to prevent. But every one of his senses and reflexes would have to be sharper and surer than they had ever been before to see it coming and to forestall it ... Every nerve in his body felt like a violin string that had been tuned to within an eyelash weight of breaking ...

  And when it came, the warning was a sound so slight that at any other time he might never have heard it-so faint and indeterminate that he was never absolutely sure what it actually was, if it was the rustle of a sleeve or a mere slither of skin against metal or nothing but an unconsciously tightened breath.

  It was enough that he heard it, and that it exploded him into action too fast for the eye to follow-too fast even for his own deliberate mental processes to trace. But in one fantastic flow of movement it seemed that his left hand plunged at the gun that Lissa was holding, twisted it aside as it went off, and wrenched it out of her hand and threw her wide and stumнbling while another shot from elsewhere chimed into the tight pile-up of sound effects; while at the same time, quite independently, his right hand leapt to his armpit holster in a lightning draw that brought his own gun out to bark a deeper note that practically merged with the other two . . . And that was just about all there was to it.