Hollywood

Introduction

It is not remarkable that a writer of such catholic scope as myself should have finally succumbed to the temptation of offering his own fictional slant on Hollywood, but it is almost phenomenal that he should have waited so long to do it.

Such records as I have indicate that this story was written some time in 1941, or at least eight years after I first displayed my open mouth in a booth at a Brown Derby.

It would be nice to say that this unprecedented pause for station identification was solely due to an impregnable integrity which would not permit me to go off on any subject at half cock.

Unfortunately, that same impregnable integrity forbids me to make any such claim. The plain truth of the matter is that for eight years I resisted the temptation, clinging fanatically to some ethereal hope that I might go to my grave with that one esoteric epitaph: “At least he never wrote a line about Hollywood.” Having failed to die during that unconscionable time, this harmless fancy seemed to become more tired with every passing year. It finally reversed itself so that it seemed almost mandatory for me to write something about Hollywood, however half-baked, before I appeared actually eccentric.

This then is my superficial version of Hollywood, a town about which I think I know much less today than I thought I knew in 1933.

— Leslie Charteris (1946)

1

It was not to be expected that Simon Templar could have stayed in Hollywood in an ordinary way. Nothing that ever happened to him was really ordinary — it was as if from the beginning he had had some kind of fourth-dimensional magnetism that attracted adventure and strange happenings, or else it may have been because nothing to him was entirely commonplace or unworthy of expectant curiosity, that he had a gift of uncovering adventure where duller people would have passed it by without ever knowing that it had been within reach. But as the saga of perilous, light-hearted buccaneering lengthened behind him past inevitable milestones of newspaper headlines, it became even more inescapable that adventure would never let him alone, for unordinary people went out of their way to drag him into their unordinary affairs. In the most platitudinous and yet exciting and fateful way, one thing simply led to another, and he was riding a tide that only slackened enough to let him catch his breath before it was off on another irresistible lunge.

It was like that in Hollywood, where he was eating his first breakfast of that visit when the telephone rang in his apartment at the Château Marmont, which he had chosen precisely because he thought that he might attract less attention there than he would have at one of the large fashionable hotels with a publicity agent hungrily scrutinising every guest for possible copy.

“Mr Simon Templar?” said a girl’s voice.

It was a businesslike and efficient voice, but it had a nice quality of sound, a freshness and a natural feeling of friendliness that made him feel interested in talking to it some more. So he admitted hopefully that he was Simon Templar.

“Just a moment,” she said. “Mr Ufferlitz is calling.”

Simon was not quite sure whether he caught the name right, but it didn’t sound like any name among his acquaintances. In any case, he had arrived late the night before, and hadn’t yet told anyone he knew that he was in town. Of course, it was possible that some shining light of the local Police Department was already leaping on to his trail, afire with notions of importance and glory — that was an almost monotonous habit of shining lights of local Police Departments, even in much more out-of-the-way places, whenever Simon Templar paused in his travels, although none of them had ever achieved the importance and glory to which their zeal would have entitled them in a world less hidebound by the old-fashioned rules of evidence. But Simon also felt sure that no Police Department employed telephone girls with such friendly voices. It would have disrupted the whole system...

“Hullo, Mr Templar,” said the telephone. “This is Byron Ufferlitz.”

“Baron who?” Simon queried.

“Byron,” said the new voice. “Byron Ufferlitz.”

This voice was not fresh and provocative, although it was apparently trying to be friendly. It sounded as if it was rather overweight and wore a diamond ring and had a cigar in its mouth. It also appeared to think that its name should be recognised immediately and inspire awe in the hearer.

“Have we ever met?” Simon asked.

“Not yet,” said the voice jovially. “But I want to put that right. Will you have lunch with me?”

There were times when Simon’s directness left the Emily Post School of Social Niceties out of the cosmos.

“What for?” he inquired, with the utmost detachment.

“I’m going to give you a job.”

‘Thank you. What is it?”

“I’ll tell you all about it at lunch.”

“Did anyone tell you I was looking for a job?”

“Oh, I know all about you,” said Mr Ufferlitz confidently. “Been watching you for a long time. That was a great thing you did in Arizona. And that funny business in Palm Springs — I read all about it. So I know what you cost. You asked Pellman for a thousand dollars a day, didn’t you? Well, I’ll pay you the same. Only I don’t want a bodyguard.”

“How do you know I can do what you want?”

“Look,” said Mr Ufferlitz, “you’re Simon Templar, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“You’re the fellow they call the Saint.”

Something like the faintest whisper of distant music seemed to touch the Saint’s eardrums with no more substance than the slipstream of a passing butterfly.

“Well,” he admitted cautiously, “I’ve heard the name.”

“You’re what they call the Robin Hood of modern crime. You’re the greatest crook that ever lived, and you’ve put more crooks away than all the detectives who keep trying to hang something on you. You’re always on the side of the guy who’s up against it, and you’re always busting up some graft or dirty work, and all the gals are nuts about you, and you can jump through windows like Doug Fairbanks used to and knock guys cold like Joe Louis and shoot like Annie Oakley and figure things out like Sherlock Holmes and... and—”

“Catch airplanes in my teeth like Superman?” Simon suggested.

“No kidding,” said Mr Ufferlitz. “You’re the greatest proposition that ever hit this town. I’ve got all the angles worked out. Tell you all about it at lunch. Let’s say the Vine Street Derby at one o’clock. Okay?”

“Okay,” said the Saint tolerantly.

It was exactly why and because he was Simon Templar, the Saint, that things always happened to him. The last few sentences of Mr Ufferlitz had given him a sudden and fairly clear idea of what sort of proposition Mr Ufferlitz would consider “great,” and what kind of angles Mr Ufferlitz would have worked out — even before he turned to the telephone directory and found an entry under Ufferlitz Productions, Inc. Anyway, he had nothing else to do and no other plans for lunch, and Mr Ufferlitz could always provide comic relief.

He was right about that, but he also had no inkling whatever of a number of quite unfunny things that were destined to cross his path as a direct result of his amused acceptance of that invitation.

During the morning he called a friend of his, an agent, and after they had exchanged a suitable amount of nonsense he inquired further about Mr Ufferlitz.

“Byron Ufferlitz?” repeated Dick Halliday. “He’s quite an up-and-coming producer these days. A sort of cross between Sammy Click and Al Capone. I don’t suppose you’d know about it, but he bobbed up only a little over a year ago with some wildcat Studio Employees Union that he’d invented, and somehow he got so many studio employees to join it and made such a nuisance of himself with a few well-timed strikes that finally they had to buy him off.”

“By suddenly discovering that he was a production genius?”

“Something like that. The Government tried to get him for extortion, but the witnesses called it off, and he was supposed to be wanted in New Orleans on some old charge of sticking up a bank, but nothing came of that either. Now he’s quite the white-haired boy. He brought in a picture for about fifty thousand dollars, and surprisingly enough it wasn’t bad. What does he want you to do — sell him your life story or bump somebody off?”

“I’m going to find out,” said the Saint, and went to his appointment with even a shade more optimism.

The Brown Derby on Vine Street — smarter offspring of the once famous hat-shaped edifice on Wilshire Boulevard — was unchanged since he had last been there. Even the customers looked exactly the same — the same identifiable people, even with different names and faces, labeled as plainly as if they had worn badges. The actors and actresses, important and unimportant. The bunch of executives. The writers and directors. The agent with the two sides of a possible deal. The radio clan. The film colony surgeon and the film colony attorney. The humdrum business men and the visiting firemen. The unmistakable tourists, working off this item of their itinerary, trying hard to look like unimpressionable natives but betraying themselves by the greedy wandering of their eyes.

In this clear-cut patchwork of types the Saint acquired a puzzling neutrality. He stood scanning the room with interest, but he was quite positively not a tourist. Yet the tourists and the non-tourists stared at him alike, as if he were someone they should have known and were trying to place. With the casual elegance of his clothes and his dark handsome face he could have been some kind of romantic actor, only that his good looks didn’t seem to have any of the weaknesses of a romantic actor — they had a sinewy recklessness of fundamental structure that belonged more to the character that a romantic actor would try to play than to the character of the impersonator. But he was quite unactorishly unaware of attracting that sort of interest at all, and was satisfied when he caught the eye of a man who was waving frantically at him from a booth half-way down the room, who could only have been Mr Byron Ufferlitz.

For Mr Ufferlitz looked just like his voice. He was rather overweight, and he wore a diamond ring, and he had a cigar in his mouth. The rest of him fitted those features in with the picture that Simon had constructed from Dick Halliday’s comments. He had thick shoulders and thick black hair, and his face had a quality of actual physical toughness that was totally different from the thin-lipped affectation of a tough guy behind a mahogany desk.

“Have a drink,” said Mr Ufferlitz, who had already been passing the time with a highball.

“Cleopatra,” said the Saint.

“What’s that?” asked Ufferlitz, as the waiter repeated it and moved away.

“One of the best dry sherries.”

It was as if Ufferlitz opened a filing cabinet in his mind, punched a card, and put it away. But he did it without the flicker of a muscle in his face, and sat back to make a cold-blooded inventory of the Saint’s features.

“You’re all right,” he announced. “You’re swell. I recognised you as soon as you came in. From your pictures, of course. But I couldn’t tell from them whether they’d just caught you at a good angle.”

“This is a great relief to me,” Simon remarked mildly.

A flash bulb popped at close quarters. Simon looked up, blinking, and saw the photographer retreating with an ingratiating grin.

“That’s just a beginning,” explained Mr Ufferlitz complacently. “We’ll get plenty more pictures later, of course. But there’s no harm grabbing anything that comes along.”

“Would you mind,” asked the Saint, “telling me just what this is all about?”

“Your build-up. Of course I know you’re a celebrity already, but a little extra publicity never hurt anyone. I’ve got the best press-agent in town working on you already. Want you to meet him this afternoon... We got you all fixed up for tonight, by the way.”

“You have?” Simon said respectfully.

“Yep. It was in Louella Parsons this morning. I shot it in last night, soon as I knew you’d arrived. Didn’t you see it?”

“I’m afraid I was too busy reading the subsidiary part of the paper. You know — the part where there’s a war going on.”

Mr Ufferlitz thumbed through a bulging wallet and extracted a clipping. It had a sentence ringed in red pencil.

...Simon Templar (“The Saint,” of course) will be in town today, and the glamor girls have a new feud on. But his first date is April Quest, whom he will squire to Giro’s tonight. They met in Yellowstone last summer...

“It’s wonderful,” said the Saint admiringly. “A whole new past opens behind me.”

“You’ll be crazy about her,” said Mr Ufferlitz. “Face like a dream. Chassis like those girls in Esquire. And intelligent! She’s been all through college and she reads books.”

“Does she remember Yellowstone too?”

For the first time, a slight cloud passed over Mr Ufferlitz’s open features.

“She’ll cooperate. She’s a real trouper. You gotta cooperate too. Hell, I’m paying you six G a week, ain’t I?”

“Are you?” said the Saint interestedly. “I don’t remember that we fixed it definitely. It might help if you told me what you wanted me to do.”

“All I want you to do,” said Ufferlitz expansively, “is be yourself.”

“There’s a catch in it,” said the Saint. “I do that most of the time for free.”

“Well, there’s a difference...”

The revelation of the difference had to wait while they gave their lunch order. Then Mr Ufferlitz put his elbows on the table and leaned forward.

“This is the greatest idea there’s ever been in pictures,” he stated modestly. “They’ve done plenty of movies about modern heroes — Edison — Rockne — Sergeant York — all the rest of ’em. But there’s always something phony about it to me. I can’t look at Spencer Tracy and think he’s Edison, because I know he’s Spencer Tracy. I can’t see Tyrone Power building the Panama Canal or the Pyramids or whatever it was. Now when the Duke of Windsor walked out of Buckingham Palace I had a great idea. Let him play himself in his own story. It was a natural. I wrote to Sam Goldwyn about it — I was in business in Chicago then — but he was too dumb to see it. Would ya believe that?”

“Amazing,” said the Saint.

“But this is even better,” said Mr Ufferlitz, cheering up. “You’re plenty hot yourself, right now, and some ways you got more on the ball. Everything you’ve done was on your own. And you can still do it. Sergeant York couldn’t play himself because he’s an old man now, but you’re just right. And are you photogenious? Hell, the fans’ll go nuts about you!”

Simon Templar took a long mouthful of Cleopatra.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “Do I get the idea that this earth-shaking idea of yours is a scheme to make a movie star out of me?”

“ Make a star?” echoed Mr Ufferlitz indignantly. “You are a star! All I want you to do is help me out with one picture. We’ll make it a sort of composite of your life, ending up with that Pellman business in Palm Springs. I got a coupla writers working on it already — they’ll have a first draft for me tomorrow. You’ll play yourself in your own biography. I had the idea all worked out for a fiction character — Orlando Flane was going to do it for me — but this is ten times hotter. We can easily fix up the story.”

His face was bright with the autogenous energy of its own enthusiasm. And then, as if a switch had been flipped over, the theatrical lighting was gone. The professional illumination which he had picked up somewhere in his career went away from him, and there was only the heavy-boned face that had kicked an independent union together and made it stick.

“Of course,” he said, “there are plenty of people who’d hate to see me make a hit with this idea. One or two of ’em would go a long ways to wreck it. That’s why I couldn’t try it with anyone but you. I guess you can take care of yourself. But if you’re scared, we can call it off and you won’t get hurt.”

2

She was everything that her voice had promised. Beyond that, she had golden-brown hair and gray eyes with a sense of humor. She looked as if she could take care of herself without hurting anyone else. She had a slim figure in a navy blue sweater that brought her out in the right places. She was taller than he had expected, incidentally. Long legs and neat ankles.

Simon said, “By the way, what’s your name?”

“Peggy Warden,” she told him. “What now?”

“While the attorneys haggle over my epoch-making contract, you’re supposed to introduce me to the writing talent.”

“The third door on the left down the passage,” she said. “Don’t let them get your goat.”

“My goat is in cold storage for the duration,” said the Saint. “See you later.”

He went to the third door down the passage and knocked on it. A voice like that of a hungry wolf bawled “Yeow?” The Saint accepted that as an invitation, and went in.

Two men sat around the single battered desk. Both of them had their feet on it. The desk looked as if it had learned to think nothing of that sort of treatment. The men had an air of proposing that the desk should like it, or else.

One of them was broad and stubby, with a down-turned mouth and hair turning gray. The other was taller and thinner, with gold-rimmed glasses and a face that looked freshly scrubbed, like the greeting of a Fuller Brush Man. They inspected the Saint critically while he closed the door behind him, and looked at each other as if their heads pivoted off the same master gear.

“I thought he’d have a machine-gun stuck down his pants leg,” said the gray-haired one.

“They didn’t put the chandelier back in time,” countered the Fuller Brush Man, “or he could swing on it. Or am I thinking of somebody else?”

“Excuse me,” said the Saint gravely. “I’m supposed to be taking an inventory of this circus. Are you the performing seals?”

They looked at each other again, grinned, and stood up to shake hands.

“I’m Vic Lazaroff,” said the gray-haired man. “This is Bob Kendricks. Consider yourself one of us. Sit down and make yourself unhappy.”

“How are you getting on with the epic?” Simon inquired.

“Your life story? Fine. Of course, we’ve had a lot of practice with it. It started off to be a costume piece about Dick Turpin. Then we had to make it fit a soldier of fortune in the International Brigade in Spain. That was when Orlando Flane was getting interested. Then we took it to South America when everyone was on the goodwill rampage. We worked in a lot of stuff that they threw out of one of the Thin Man pictures, too.”

“Were you ever befriended by a Chinese laundryman when you were a starving orphan in Limehouse?” Kendricks asked.

“I’m afraid not,” Simon confessed. “You see—”

“That’s too bad; because it ties in with a terrific routine where you’re flying for the Chinese Government and the Japs have captured one of the guerrilla chieftains and they’re going to have a ceremonial execution, and you find out that this chieftain is the guy who once saved your life with chop suey, and you set out for practically certain death to try and save him. Flane thought it was swell.”

“I think it’s swell too,” said the Saint soothingly. “I was only mentioning that it didn’t happen.”

“Look here,” said Lazaroff suspiciously, “are you trying to set us right about your life?”

“We’ve got to have some dramatic license,” explained Kendricks. “But we’ll do right by you. You’ll see. We’ll give you the best life story any guy ever had.”

“As Byron is always saying,” insisted Lazaroff, “you gotta cooperate. Aren’t you going to cooperate?”

Simon added his feet to the collection on the desk, and lighted a cigarette.

“Tell me more about the great Byron,” he said.

Lazaroff ruffled his untidy gray locks.

“What, his life story? He changes it every time he tells it. Actually he’s a retired racketeer. Well, not retired, but he’s changed his racket. Now his strong-arm men don’t walk in and say ‘How about buyin’ some protection, bud?’ They say, ‘How about lendin’ us your yacht for a coupla days for some location shots?’ — in the same tone of voice.”

“Byron Ufferlitz is his real name, too,” supplied Kendricks. “It’s on his police record.”

“It’s on our checks every Saturday,” said Lazaroff, “and the bank honors it. That’s all we have to worry about.”

“How do you get on with him?”

“I get on fine with anyone who gives me a check every Saturday. In this town, you have to, if you want to eat. He isn’t any more ignorant than a lot of other producers we’ve worked for who didn’t have police records. We rib him plenty, and he doesn’t get too sore. Just now and again he gets a look in his eye as if he’s just ready to say ‘Okay, wise guy, howja like to get taken for a ride?’ Then we lay off him for a bit. But we don’t have to steal anything more illegal than ideas, so what the hell? At that, I’d rather work with him than Jack Groom.”

“The trouble is,” said Kendricks, “we don’t have the choice. We have to work with both of ’em.”

“Who’s Jack Groom?” Simon asked.

“The genius who’s going to condescend to direct this epic. Art with a capital ‘F.’ You’ll meet him.”

Simon did, a little later.

Mr Groom was tall and thin and stoop-shouldered. He had pale hollow cheeks and lank black hair that fell forward to meet his thick black brows. He had a rich deep voice that never seemed as if it could be produced by such a sepulchral creature.

He inspected Simon with complete detachment, and said, “Could you grow a moustache in ten days?”

“I should think so,” said the Saint. “But what would I do with it? Is there a market for them?”

“You should have a moustache in this picture. And your hair should be slicked down more. It’ll give you a smoother appearance.”

“I used to slick it down once,” said the Saint, “but I got tired of it. And I never have worn a moustache, except in character.”

Mr Groom shook his head, and swept his forelock back with long tired fingers. It promptly fell down again.

“The Saint would wear a moustache,” he stated impregnably. “I’ve got a feeling about it.”

“You remember me?” said the Saint, with a slight floating sensation. “I’m the Saint.”

“Yes,” said Mr Groom patiently. “I visualise you with a moustache. Get one started right away, won’t you? Thanks.”

He waved a limp hand and drifted away, preoccupied with many responsibilities.

Eventually Simon found his way back to Byron Ufferlitz’s outer office, where Peggy Warden looked up from a clatter of typewriting with her fresh friendly smile.

“Well,” she said cheerfully, “did you meet everybody?”

“I don’t know,” said the Saint. “But if there are any more of them, I’ll wait till tomorrow. I don’t want to spoil the flavor by being gluttonous. The Wardrobe Department will probably want to check the cut of my jockstrap, and I expect the Prop Department will tell me what sort of gun I prefer.”

“We’ll find out about that as soon as we make the breakdowns.”

“That’s a cheering thought,” Simon murmured. “I’ll be the easiest breakdown you ever saw.”

“Is there anything I could do to make you happy?”

“Yes. Tell me what you’re doing tonight?”

“You’re forgetting. You’ve got a date.”

“Have I?”

“Miss Quest. You pick her up at her house at seven o’clock. Here’s the address.”

“What would Byron and I do without you?” Simon pocketed the typewritten slip. “Let’s go out and get a drink now, anyway.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, laughing. “I punch a time clock. And Mr Ufferlitz mightn’t like it if I just walked out... You’ll come back, won’t you? Mr Ufferlitz wanted to see you again before you left. I think he wants to tell you how to act with Miss Quest. In case you can’t find out for yourself.”

“You know,” said the Saint, “I like you.”

“Don’t commit yourself until after tonight,” she said.

Byron Ufferlitz, of course, as he had carefully explained to the Saint, was too smart to have fallen for a salaried producer’s job at one of the major studios. What he had negotiated for himself was a major release — he did his own financing, and saved the terrific standard mark-up for “overhead” of ordinary studio production. He had his offices and rented facilities at Liberty Studios, a new outfit on Beverly Boulevard which catered to independent producers. Opposite the entrance there was a cocktail lounge whimsically named The Front Office, which would unmistakably have suffered a major depression if a hole had opened across the street and Liberty Studios had dropped in. But ephemeral as its position may have been in the economic system, it fulfilled the Saint’s immediate requisites of supply and demand, and he settled himself appreciatively on a chrome-legged stool and relaxed into the glass-panelled décor without any active revulsion.

He had a little difficulty in getting service, because the lone bartender, who looked like a retired stunt man and was actually exactly that, was having a little dialogue trouble with the only other customer at that intermediate hour, who had obviously been a customer with more enthusiasm than discretion.

“He can’t do that to me,” declared the customer, propping his head in his hands and staring glassy-eyed between his fingers.

“Of course not,” said the bartender. “Take it easy.”

“You know what he said to me, Charlie?”

“No. What did he say to you?”

“He said, ‘You stink!’ ”

“He did?”

“Yeah.”

“Take it easy.”

“You know what I’m gonna do, Charlie?”

“What you gonna do?”

“I’m gonna tell that son of a bitch where he gets off.”

“Take it easy, now.”

“He can’t do that to me.”

“Of course not.”

“I’m gonna tell him right now.”

“Now take it easy. It’s not that bad.”

“I’ll kill the son of a bitch before he can get away with that.”

“Why don’t you go out and get something to eat first? You’ll feel better.”

“I’ll show him where he gets off.”

“Take it easy.”

“I’m gonna show him right now.” The customer lurched up, staggered, found his balance, and said, “Goo’bye.”

“Goodbye,” said the bartender. “Take it easy.”

The customer navigated with careful determination to the door, and vanished — an almost ridiculously good-looking young man, with features so superficially perfect that he could easily have stepped straight out of a collar advertisement if he had been a little less dishevelled.

“Yes, sir?” said the bartender, facing the Saint with the combination of complete aplomb, extravagant apology, comradely amusement, genial discretion, and sophisticated deprecation which is the heritage of all good bartenders.

“A double Peter Dawson and plain water,” said the Saint. “Is there something about the air around here which drives people to drink?”

“It’s too bad about him,” said the bartender tolerantly, pouring meanwhile. “When he’s sober, he’s as nice a fellow as you could meet. Just like you’d think he would be from his pictures.”

A vague identification in the Saint’s mind suddenly came into surprising focus.

“I get it,” he said. “Of course. Orlando Flane — the heartthrob of the Hemisphere.”

“Yeah. He really is a nice guy. Only when he’s had a few drinks you gotta humor him.”

“Next time,” said the Saint, “you should ask him about the Chinese laundryman.”

It took no little ingenuity to frustrate the bartender’s professional curiosity about that unguarded remark, but it was as entertaining a way of passing the time as any other, and the Saint felt almost human again when he turned back to the white walls of Liberty Studios.

He had no lasting interest in Orlando Flane as a person at all, and might have forgotten him again altogether if they had not been literally thrown together so very shortly afterwards.

That is, to be excruciatingly specific, Orlando Flane was thrown. Or appeared to be. At any rate, he seemed to be nearing the end of a definite trajectory when Simon opened the outer door of Mr Ufferlitz’s office and almost tripped over him. Only because he was prepared by a lifetime of lightning reactions, Simon adapted himself resiliently to the shock and scooped the actor up with one sinewy arm.

“Is there a lot of fun like this around here?” he inquired pleasantly, looking at Peggy Warden, who was getting up rather suddenly from her typewriter.

Then he saw that Mr Ufferlitz himself was standing in the communicating doorway to his private office, and realised exactly what certain remarks of the cynical Lazaroff were intended to convey, and why out of his own experienced judgement he had sensed long ago that Mr Ufferlitz was not merely a farcical stock character.

“Get out of here,” Byron Ufferlitz was saying coldly. “And stay out, you drunken bum.”

Orlando Flane might have gone back to the floor a second time, if the Saint had not been interestedly holding him up. He reeled inside the supporting semicircle of the Saint’s arm, and wiped the back of his hand across his bruised lips. But he had sobered surprisingly, and there was no more alcoholic slur in his syllables than there was in the savage set of his dark long-lashed eyes as he looked back across the room.

“All right, you bastard,” he said distinctly. “You can throw me out now because I’m drunk. But I can remember just as far back as you can. I’ve got plenty of things to settle with you, and when I fix you up you’re going to stay fixed!”

3

The colored butler showed Simon into April Quest’s living-room, and brought him a Martini. It was a comfortable room, modern in style, but it had the untouched impersonal feeling of an interior decorator’s exhibit. Everything in it looked very new and overwhelmingly harmonious. But the chairs were large and relaxing, the sort of chairs that a man likes, and at least there were no sham-period gewgaws or laboriously exotic touches.

Simon lighted a cigarette and amused himself with some magazines which he found on a shelf under the table by the couch. Some of them were fan magazines, and one of them had her picture on the cover. He remembered now that it had caught his eye on a newsstand not long ago. Naturally it was a beautiful face, since that was part of her profession, framed in softly waved auburn hair, with a small nose and high cheekbones and large expressive eyes. But he had noticed her mouth, which was generous and yet sultry, laughing and yet wilful, as if she could be passionate in her selfishness but never cold or unkind... Then he looked up, and she was standing in front of him.

It was a slight shock, as if the picture had suddenly come to life. She was so exactly like it. The only thing different was her dress, and this was something formal and white and very simple. But the neck was cut down to her waist, and the material was so sheer that you would have known exactly what she wore underneath it if she had worn anything. She looked like a wayward Madonna decked out in a suitable disguise to find out what really went on in night clubs.

She said, “Sorry I wasn’t ready, but I had the goddamnedest time getting dressed. Every lousy rag I put on looked like hell.”

“Well,” he said, “I’m glad you were able to save something out of the junk pile.”

“Pretty frightening, isn’t it?” she said, looking down at herself. “Brings out all the floozie in me. And everything else. Well, nobody can ever say I didn’t give my All.”

She had a glass in her hand, practically empty. She emptied it, and sat down beside him and tinkled a small hand-bell.

“Shall we have some more serum before we go to the rat race?”

He drained his own glass and nodded, but the acceptance was hardly necessary. The butler appeared like a watchful genie with a shaker in his hand, and proceeded to pour without any instructions.

Simon gazed at her speculatively over his cigarette.

“It’s a hell of a way to get acquainted, isn’t it?” he remarked. “But it’s nice of you to cooperate, as Byron calls it.”

“If a girl never had to cooperate any worse than this,” she said, “this goddamn racket would be a breeze.”

“Just how much cooperation is supposed to he ordered here?” Simon asked. “Byron left it a little vague.”

She looked at him.

“It doesn’t sound like Byron, to leave anything to your imagination.”

“Maybe my imagination is a little slow.”

“Are you kidding me, or where have you been all your life?”

“I haven’t been getting an Ufferlitz-Hollywood build-up all my life.”

Her eyes were curious.

“We’re going to Ciro’s together; in this town, that automatically means a budding romance. If we leer at each other and hold hands a bit, they’ll just about have us in bed together. We don’t actually have to go to bed before witnesses, because you can’t print that anyway. Disappointed?”

“Not a bit,” said the Saint. “It’s much more fun without witnesses.”

“For Christ’s sake,” she said pleasantly. “You didn’t have to be here long to learn the routines, though.”

His clear blue eyes rested on her again, and this time their lazy mockery had a different twinkle. A slow grin etched itself around his mouth.

“Thank God,” he drawled, and held out his hand. She couldn’t help shaking it, and smiling back at him, and suddenly they were laughing together. “Now we can have fun,” he said.

So they were friends.

Simon Templar had to admit that inefficiency at least was not one of Mr Ufferlitz’s failings, or at any rate of his assistants. The head waiter at Giro’s, whom Simon had never seen before in his life, said “Good evening, Miss Quest,” and then, “Good evening, Mr Templar!” with an air of glad surprise, as though he were greeting an old and valued customer who had been away for a long time, and ushered them to a ringside table from which he removed the RESERVED card with a flourish. He said enticingly, “A cocktail to start with?”

“Dry Martinis,” said the Saint, and he bowed and beamed himself away.

“The works,” said April Quest.

“So I see,” murmured the Saint. “Let’s pretend we’re used to it.”

“You’re going to be an experience,” she said. “Did you ever do any acting?”

“Not for the camera.”

“Were you on the stage?”

He shook his head.

“Not that either. Just what you might call privately. You see, when you lead a wicked life like mine, you can’t always be yourself,” he explained. “According to the job in hand, you may want to pretend to be anything, from a dyspeptic poet with Communist tendencies to a retired sea-captain with white whiskers and a perpetual thirst.”

She was studying him with candid interest now.

“Then some of that stuff about you must be on the level.”

“Some of it,” he admitted mildly.

“Most of it, I guess.” She said it herself. “I ought to have known — it isn’t the sort of thing that press-agents think up. But Jesus, you meet so many phonies in this business you get out of the habit of believing anything. I’m one myself, so I know.”

“You?”

“What do you think you know about me?”

“Let’s see. Your name’s April Quest,” he began cautiously. “Or is it?”

“That’s about as far as you’ll get, and nobody would believe that. What’s a name! Even that isn’t a hundred per cent, either. It was Quist on my birth certificate, but they thought Quest sounded better.”

“I remember reading something about you,” he recalled. “Last year, wasn’t it, when you were the new sensational discovery? You were raised in the logging country up north. Your parents died when you were a kid, but you kept the old forest going. You’d never been in a city or bought a ready-made dress or worn a pair of shoes, but tough lumberjacks worshipped the ground you walked on and worked like slaves for you. You’d never seen a lipstick or a powder puff. You were the unspoiled glamor girl of the wilderness, the untamed virgin queen of the Big Trees—”

“Nuts,” she said. “My father was a drunken longshoreman who got his skull cracked in a strikers’ riot. I was dealing them off the arm in a truck-drivers’ hash house outside Seattle when Jack Groom stopped in for a cup of coffee and offered me a trial contract at twenty-five a week. I’d just about settled on another offer to be a B-girl in San Francisco, but this looked better. And that’s more than I’d tell another soul in this village. I guess I must have a feeling about you.”

“That’s nice,” said the Saint, and meant it.

Suddenly her hand slid over his fingers, and her smile was really intoxicating.

“Darling,” she said softly.

He looked at her in a quite unreasonable stillness.

A flash bulb popped.

Simon turned in time to see the photographer backing away. April Quest giggled, and let go his hand.

“Sorry,” she said. “I only just saw the bastard coming in time.”

“Try to warn me next time, will you?” said the Saint gently. “My heart’s liable to blow a gasket when you put so much soul into your work.”

A heavy hand fell on his shoulder, and he looked up and back. April mirrored his movement at the same time. Mr Byron Ufferlitz stood between them, looking heavily genial with a fat cigar in his mouth.

“That was nice cooperation, kiddies,” he rumbled. “I told him to get another later on, when you’re dancing. How’s everything?”

“Fine,” April said.

She smiled dazzlingly, but her voice sounded very faintly mechanical.

“How ya getting on with the Saint? He’s all right, huh? What a profile! And that figure... You two are gonna make a great team. Maybe you’ll do a lotta pictures together, like Garbo and Gilbert or Colman and Banky in the old days.”

“I can’t afford it,” said the Saint. “Earning that kind of money is too expensive these days.”

“We’ll take care of that,” said Mr Ufferlitz jovially, if a trifle ambiguously. “Say, April, about your new hair-do, I was talkin’ to Westmore just now and...”

Simon looked around the room and caught the raised eyebrows of Dick Halliday, who had just come in with Mary Martin. He grinned, and then he saw Martha Scott and Carl Alsop making faces at him, and they were just the first of other faces that were breaking into expressions of recognition, and he knew that he was certainly going to have to be well paid for the explanations he would have to make to some of his friends in Hollywood for his manner of arriving back among them. Then, trying to postpone that awkward moment by finding some blank direction to turn to, he looked towards the entrance from the bar and saw Orlando Flane.

Flane was looking right at them. He had a highball glass in his hand, and his feet were braced apart as if to steady himself. In spite of that he was swaying a little. His too-handsome face was flushed, and his hair and necktie had the uncomfortably rumpled look that can never be confused with any other kind of untidiness. There was no doubt that Orlando Flane was drunk again, or still drunk. The twist of his mouth was vicious.

“Well, I mustn’t stay any longer,” Mr Ufferlitz was saying. “Don’t want to look like I was promoting this. Have yourselves a time, and don’t worry about the check. It’s all taken care of. ’Bye.”

He clapped them on the shoulders again and moved away. Simon’s eyes followed him towards the bar with interested expectations, but Orlando Flane had disappeared.

“There,” said April cold-bloodedly, “goes one of the prize-winning swine of this town.”

With Flane still on his mind, Simon said, “Who?”

“Ufferlitz, of course. Dear Byron.”

Their drinks came belatedly, accompanied by menus, and there was an interruption for the ordering of dinner. From the wine list, Simon added a bottle of Bollinger ’31.

“On Byron,” he said, as the waiter removed himself. “Everyone tells me something about him. He was a stick-up man in New Orleans, but his pictures make money. He’s a retired union racketeer, but he pays his slaves. Take it away.”

“How much does he pay them?”

The Saint’s brows levelled fractionally.

“He hasn’t shown me the payroll yet,” he admitted. “But two literary gents named Kendricks and Lazaroff told me his checks were okay.”

“Listen,” she said. “Those two clowns used to be rated one of the best writing teams in Hollywood, even though they nearly drove every producer nuts that they worked for. But last year they went too far. They got in a beef with Goldwyn, and he fired them. So they bluffed their way into his house when he was out and filled all his clothes with itching powder and left ink soap in all the bathrooms. The Producers’ Association banned them and they haven’t worked since — until Byron hired them. How much d’you think he had to pay them when they were in a spot like that, and why wouldn’t they be goddamn glad to get it?”

This was a new angle.

“I didn’t know about that,” he said thoughtfully. “The deal he offered me was all right, but of course he hasn’t got anything on me... yet,” he added. “What about you?”

This was a new angle.

“He expects to rape me before we start shooting, of course, but he doesn’t need much else. He got me with Jack Groom, because Jack still has my contract.”

“For twenty-five a week?”

“No, a bit more than that now. I don’t know what Jack’s deal is, but I know he hates Byron’s guts.”

“I met Comrade Groom today,” Simon remarked casually. “How do you get on with him?”

The exquisitely drawn green eyes measured him contemplatively, and then they were bright with laughter.

“ ‘The Saint Goes On,’ ” she quoted. “I can see it coming. Now stop being a damn detective, will you? This is your night off. We’re supposed to be having fun and romance, and we’ve hardly stopped being serious for a minute. Dance with me.”

She stood up imperiously, and he had to join her. It wasn’t hard to do. She could change her moods as quickly as light could flicker over the facets of cut crystal, and do it without seeming to leave raw edges or a sense of chill: you were not cut off or left behind, but taken with her.

They danced. And dined. And danced again. And she made it impossible to be serious any more. With all her callous cynicism and violent language, she could be a fascinating and exciting companion. The Saint found himself having a much more entertaining evening than he had expected. It was as if they instinctively recognised in each other an intense reality which in spite of all other differences made them feel as if they had known each other a hundred times longer than those few hours.

It was one o’clock when he drove her home, after a brief struggle through the regular nightly crew of autograph hunters outside.

“Come in and have a drink,” she said.

Simon thought about it, while another belated car cruised by.

“Maybe not,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Cooperation only goes so far.”

“So what?”

“So I don’t want you to call me a wolf again. But I’m human.”

“My God,” she said, “don’t you think I know the difference? Don’t you think I could... I’d like to buy you a drink,” she said.

He kissed her, and broke it off quickly when he felt the warmth of her lips.

“Goodnight, darling,” he said.

She got out, and he drove away while he still could.

When he entered his apartment at the Château Marmont there was a note in a plain envelope under the door. He opened it and frowned over the heavy sprawling hand. It seemed to have been composed very much impromptu, for it was written on a sizable blank space under the date line of The Hollywood Reporter — obviously torn out of one of those strange advertisements which say, in infinitely modest type, “Joe Doakes directed WOMEN IN ARMS,” and buy a whole page to set it off.

WHATEVER TIME you get home tonight, I want you to come right out and see me. Don’t tell ANYONE I sent for you. This is VERY IMPORTANT. The door will be open. Don’t ring! BYRON UFFERLITZ (603 Claymore Drive)

The Saint sighed, and put the note in his pocket. A few minutes later he was retracing his tracks out Sunset Boulevard.

Claymore Drive was only a couple of blocks from April Quest’s house, and as he passed her street Simon smiled again over the easy way she had taken his mind from its habitual restless search for plot. She had been right, of course: so much of his life had been woven with conspiracy and dark purposes that he had long since ceased to be as interested in the solution of past mysteries as he was in anticipating mysteries that had not yet shaped themselves, and that inquiring watchfulness had become so automatic that he was apt to find himself stalking the shadow of his own imagination.

Or was he?... A long time had gone by since one of those hunches had last let him down. What had Ufferlitz said? “There are plenty of people who’d hate to see me make a hit with this idea. One or two of ’em would go a long ways to wreck it... I guess you can take care of yourself...” He had almost accepted Ufferlitz’s note as just one of those regal impetuosities that Hollywood producers traditionally indulge in; the thought that it might after all be more than that gave him a sudden feeling of inward stillness as if the blood momentarily ceased to move in his veins.

He shrugged it off as he slowed down at Mr Ufferlitz’s number, and yet enough of it remained to paralyse his right foot from the reflex shift from accelerator to brake. He crawled round the next corner, and in the next few yards found several cars parked outside a house where all the lights were on. He eased in among them, and walked back to 603 Claymore Drive. He grinned derisively at himself for doing it; yet it was one of those Saintly precautions that cost nothing even if they were to prove unnecessary. So was the handkerchief with which he covered his fingers when he opened the front door.

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 anymore.

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 number 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, besides 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 murderer 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 lighters, handkerchiefs, keys, match booklets, cuff links, spectacles, gloves, combs, wallets, rings, fraternity pins, fobs, nail files, false teeth, tie clips, overcoats, ticket stubs, hairpins, 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 prefabricated 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 entertain 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 together 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 Ufferlitz 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 ready-made 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 re-awakened 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, without 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 interest in the premises, they must have already received a hint that there was something there to merit their professional 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 spilling their brains over the furniture. The Saint knew better than anyone how sceptical policemen could be in circumstances 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 extended 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 garages 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 “Goodnight” 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 recollection 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 together it began to look as if somebody was quite anxious to make sure that Hollywood wouldn’t be dull for him.

5

Simon walked into 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 communicating 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 anymore.”

“No?”

“Mr Ufferlitz is dead.”

Simon allowed the faint frown of perplexity which had begun 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 unless 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 timing 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 Giro’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 hour...”

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

“...the first time, that is,” he continued easily. “Then I went out again. I didn’t have any liquor in the apartment, and I wanted another drink. I went to a joint on Hollywood 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.”

“What do the doctors say?”

“They can’t fix it as close as that. You ought to know.”

“I suppose not,” said the Saint. “Still, you make it a bit tough for a guy. You want me to have an alibi, but you don’t know what time I’m supposed to have an alibi for.”

Condor removed his toothpick, inspected it profoundly, and put it back.

“I got another time,” he announced finally.

“What’s that?”

“Ufferlitz called the Beverly Hills police station and said he thought someone was prowling around his house, and asked for a patrol car to come by. That call was received at exactly eight minutes of two.”

A subcutaneous tingle pin-pointed up between the Saint’s shoulder-blades — even though he had always been sure that that patrol car had never arrived by accident. But his face showed nothing more than a rather exasperated bafflement.

“For Pete’s sake,” he said, “how many more times have you got to cover?”

“Just that one.”

“But that makes the other time all haywire.”

“Could be. I said, maybe the cook never heard the shot. She went to sleep again.”

Simon consumed his cigarette meditatively for a few seconds. Then he looked at Condor again with a slight lift of one eyebrow.

“On the other hand,” he remarked, “can anyone swear that Ufferlitz made that call? Maybe the murderer made it himself, just to confuse you. Maybe you ought to be very suspicious of anybody who has got a perfect alibi for eight minutes of two.”

Condor stared at him for a while with unblinking intentness, and then the barest vestige of a smile moved in under his long drooping features. It literally did that, as if the surface of his face was too stiffly set in its cast of abject melancholy to relax perceptibly, and the smile had to crawl about under the skin.

“That,” he said, “is the first thing you’ve said that sounds like some of the stuff I’ve heard about you.”

“So far,” murmured the Saint, “you’ve seemed to want me for a suspect more than a collaborator.”

“I gotta suspect everybody.”

“But be reasonable. Ufferlitz just gave me a job for a thousand dollars a day. I don’t know now whether I’ve got a job any more. Why would I kill that sort of meal ticket? Besides, I never met him before lunch-time yesterday. I’d have to have hated him in an awful hurry to work up to shooting point by last night.”

Condor wrinkled his nose.

“It seems to me,” he said, “I’ve heard you’re supposed to’ve killed a few people that you didn’t have any particular personal feelings about. Something about being your own judge, jury, and hangman. Not that it wasn’t all quite legal and accidental, of course,” he added, “or it came to look that way in the end, but that’s what they say. Well, from what I’ve heard about Ufferlitz, he’s got some things in his record that might save you the trouble of hating him by yourself.”

The Saint sank lower in his chair and for the first time ventured to look slightly bored.

“Here we go again,” he drawled. “Are you trying to hang something on me or not? Make up your mind.”

“Well...” Condor drew his chin back so that the toothpick drooped from his upper teeth. “I guess I do sound sort of antagonistic sometimes. Gets to be second nature. You’ll have to excuse me. But I’ve heard plenty of complimentary things about you too. Maybe you could help me a lot, at that.

“You’ve given me one good idea already. I wouldn’t like to be a nuisance, but if you wanted to give me any more I’d be honored.”

He was as disarming as a drowsing crocodile. You felt ashamed of yourself for having misunderstood him and put him into a position where he had to defend himself. Your heart warmed with the consciousness of having put him back where he belonged, nevertheless. You felt pretty loosened up altogether. Unless you were Simon Templar.

“I’m afraid it’s a little bit out of my line,” said the Saint. “As a matter of fact, I go a little bit nuts over these split-second timetables. They’re too confusing. And I don’t believe in them, anyway. They’re too much like the super-solemn kind of detective story. Nobody outside of a book is ever watching the time from minute to minute. And even if they were, their watches wouldn’t be synchronised. And as soon as there’s any chance of any error, you might as well give up. On top of which there are too many ways of faking, if you’ve read any mysteries.”

“That’s how I feel,” Condor agreed sadly. “Personally, I’ll settle for anyone who could have been there between twelve-thirty and about two-fifteen, when the patrol found him.”

“What about the other people you’ve talked to?”

“You mean have they got alibis too?”

“Yes.”

“Lazaroff and Kendricks were working on a script until about two-thirty. They share an apartment. They have a cleaning woman, but she doesn’t sleep there, so there’s no one to back them up. But they alibi each other.”

“And Groom?”

“He was with a dame. He left her at half-past one and stopped in at the Mocambo for a couple drinks. He told me three or four people he spoke to, so he probably did.”

“He could have telephoned, too,” Simon observed.

Condor brooded silently, poking his toothpick about in his bicuspids.

“There’s one thing I’m puzzled about,” Simon said presently. “Ufferlitz must have known quite a few people outside. Why does it have to be someone from this unit?”

“It just seems a good place to start. The cook says he never had anybody home except people he was mixed up in business with, except sometimes a girl he was trying to promote. Besides, from what I hear nobody else was crazy about visiting him anyway. Then, when he came home to dinner yesterday evening, he said he wasn’t in to anyone unless it was from the studio.”

“What about the business he was in before this?”

“He cut himself off from all those mugs when he got to be a producer. We keep tabs on some of ’em, so I know that. But I don’t know any of ’em who’re sore with him.”

“He played square with the racket while he was in it, did he?”

“He knew what was good for him. You can’t chisel those kind of guys and keep healthy. You can only do that with high-class suckers.” The detective seemed to derive some morbid satisfaction from the thought. “No — he still sees some of the mob, but he don’t ask ’em home. Some of ’em think it’s a big laugh, his going high-hat. But they aren’t sore. Or I haven’t heard about it... None of it’s conclusive, of course, but this still looked like a good place to begin. I’ve found with most murders you don’t have to look awful far. It’s usually somebody who’s been around pretty close.”

Simon lighted another cigarette and drew at it for a while. Condor didn’t seem to have anything more to say. He began pulling open drawers and browsing through the papers he found in them.

Presently Simon got up.

“Well, I’d better leave you to it,” he said. “If I get any more brilliant ideas I’ll let you know.”

“Do that,” said Condor earnestly. “I’ll be seeing you around.”

The Saint strolled out and met Peggy Warden’s tentative half-apologetic smile with unruffled cheerfulness.

“Quite a business, isn’t it?” he said.

She nodded.

“I felt mean about not telling you. But Lieutenant Condor told me not to say anything. I’m glad it didn’t get you into trouble.”

“I never get into trouble,” said the Saint virtuously. “But I seem to live an awfully precarious life. Have I got a job now, or do I go back on relief?”

Her eyes strayed to some papers on her desk.

“I don’t really know,” she confessed. “Mr Braunberg brought your contract back yesterday evening, and Mr Ufferlitz signed it before he left the office, but you didn’t sign anything yourself so I don’t know what the position is.”

“Braunberg — he was the attorney, wasn’t he?”

“Yes. I’ve already spoken to him on the phone, of course, and he said he’d be in this afternoon. I’m sure he’ll be able to tell you how you stand legally.”

Simon picked up the contract. It was a standard printed form, about the size of a centenarian’s autobiography, covering every possible contingency from telepathy and revolutions to bankruptcy and habitual drunkenness, with a couple of pages of special clauses which invalidated most of it. Simon only glanced through it casually, and turned to the signature.

He had a microphotographic eye for certain kinds of detail, and he had no need to compare it with the note that was in his pocket to know that the note was a forgery — a passable amateur job, but a long way from being expert.

Unfortunately it would be a great deal harder if not impossible to discover who had done it. He was practically resigned to discarding The Hollywood Reporter as a clue. Almost everybody in the movie business was a subscriber, and in addition it could be bought at any newsstand within a radius of twenty miles. It was far too much to hope that the sender of the note would be considerate enough to have kept in his possession the mutilated copy into which the Saint’s torn fragment could be fitted.

The decease of Mr Ufferlitz was a mystery that looked less encouraging every time Simon Templar turned to it.

He said, “Don’t forget, Peggy, you’ve got a date with me for lunch.”

6

“No,” she said. “No more cocktails. I’ve still got to look as if I wanted to keep a job.”

The Front Office offered a choice of steaks, chops, or hamburger. They had steaks. She sniffed hers ecstatically.

“Mmm! This was a good idea. I’d almost forgotten what a real lunch could taste like.”

“I heard of a studio once where they had good food in the commissary,” said the Saint. “So everybody felt fine and happy every afternoon. Agents came in and sold them everything they had at enormous prices, actors broke down and begged for salary cuts, assistant directors went about their work with a smile, and writers told producers their ideas stank and they ought to go back to peddling trusses.”

“What happened?”

“The other producers ganged up on them and charged them with unfair trade practices. The Government ordered them to go back to serving the same old dead food as all the other studios, and very soon they were quite normal and in receivership again.”

“You’ve learnt a lot in a little while.”

Simon finished his drink and picked up his knife and fork.

“How long have you been in this racket?” he asked.

“Only about six months.”

“Where were you before?”

“In a real estate office in New York.”

“You didn’t know when you were well off.”

“I thought I’d come out here and get educated.”

“Were you with Byron all that time?”

“No. I started in the stenographic department at MGM. Then an agent took me out of there. Then Mr Ufferlitz took me away from the agent. Now I may have to go on relief with you. I expect Mr Braunberg will tell me.”

The Saint nibbled a fried potato.

“My life with Byron was certainly short and sweet,” he remarked. “What sort of a guy was he really?”

She finished a mouthful carefully before she said, “You must have heard something about him.”

“A few things.”

“Then you must have your own ideas.”

“Not very good ones,” said the Saint.

She shrugged.

“He was just his own kind of Hollywood producer.”

“He went further than most of them, though, didn’t he?” said the Saint. “I mean, he was a rather special kind. That is, if there’s anything in the rumors.”

“There’s something in most rumors — even in Hollywood.”

“I’ve been wondering,” Simon said, carving himself another wedge of sirloin, “what Orlando Flane had on his mind yesterday. You know — during that happy homey interlude when Byron called him a drunken bum and bounced him off the carpet into my arms. Flane said he could remember as far back as Byron could. Was he referring to some other rumor, or were they just boys together?”

“It could have been both,” she said cautiously.

He waited.

After a while she said, reluctantly, as if she would rather have changed the subject if she could have seen herself doing it gracefully, “You’ve probably heard another rumor that Mr Ufferlitz is supposed to have been in trouble with the police in New Orleans.”

“Yes.”

“Orlando Flane comes from New Orleans.”

“I see.”

“He won one of those publicity department contests three or four years ago — for somebody to be the New Rudolph Valentino, with a touch of George Raft. The story is that he was much more of a real-life George Raft type before he became a glamor boy.”

“Is he really a drunken bum?”

“I think he’s been drinking rather a lot lately. He’s supposed to have been slipping at the box office, so there may be an excuse for him. But it just made the producers cool off faster. He hadn’t had a decent part for nearly a year until Mr Ufferlitz offered him a break just a few weeks ago.”

Simon raised his eyebrows.

“Then what on earth had Flane got to beef about?”

“Flane was going to star in this picture — it was called Salute to Adventure then. Mr Ufferlitz fired him when he decided to change the story and hire you.”

The Saint concentrated on applying mustard to a piece of steak with the infinite care of a painter of miniatures. His face was impassive, but the series of obvious implications tripped through his head with the dainty footsteps of a troupe of charging elephants.

Orlando Flane had good and recent cause to hate Mr Byron Ufferlitz. Orlando Flane had openly threatened Mr Ufferlitz with permanent evidence of his dislike. Orlando Flane had a background which in spite of his slightly effeminate facial beauty might have qualified him as a cool tough hombre. And Orlando Flane had a reason to resent Simon Templar enough to be willing to round out his revenge by trying to stage it so that the Saint would take the rap for it.

Simon looked at Peggy Warden again and said, “Do you think Flane could have killed Byron?”

She stared at him as though the idea stunned her.

“Flane?” she repeated.

“Yes.”

“But... he’s an actor,” she said weakly.

He chuckled.

“Most murderers have some other spare-time job, darling. Comrade Condor seems to think it could easily have been somebody from the studio. You must have heard our conversation. If it could have been a writer, a director, or me, it could have been an actor. Byron is dead. Somebody killed him.”

She nodded in a bewildered way.

“Yes. I suppose so. It just doesn’t seem real. I mean... I can’t imagine Orlando Flane as a real murderer.”

“He had the best motive I’ve come to yet.”

“But a lot of other people didn’t like Mr Ufferlitz.”

Simon nodded. It was true, of course.

“I hear that Jack Groom didn’t like him either. Do you know why that was?”

She shook her head.

“I haven’t any idea.”

“Was it on account of April Quest, by any chance?”

“I don’t know.” The girl studied him shrewdly. “Are you rather interested in that?”

“Very much,” said the Saint calmly. “It’s the only other angle that doesn’t seem to have been gone into yet, and it’s a good traditional motive. What sort of a guy was Ufferlitz with women?”

She hesitated for a few seconds before she met his eye, but then her gaze was steady and direct.

“I believe he was quite a swine,” she said.

“Who with?”

“I wouldn’t know that. I didn’t have anything to do with his private life.”

“He didn’t ever take a shot at you?”

Her face chilled for barely an instant, and then she laughed a little without smiling.

“I’m a good secretary,” she said, “and that’s harder to find.”

Simon conceded that. But on second thought he added to himself that she might also not have been Mr Ufferlitz’s type. His guess was that Byron Ufferlitz’s quarry would have been either ingenuous and trusting or tough and cynical. The dumb innocents could be swept off their feet by Mr Ufferlitz’s self-created grandeur and overwhelmed with the old line of what he could do for them in pictures, and the hard-boiled mercenaries could be talked to in their own language and handled as they expected to be, thereby reducing the shooting schedule. But to a man of that type Peggy Warden’s natural honesty and clear-eyed composure would be highly disconcerting. She could so obviously deflate baloney or bullying with equally devastating simplicity.

Simon liked her for those same qualities. It occurred to him with a sort of rueful inward humor that he really met quite a remarkable number of girls he liked. He must have possessed an inexhaustible human sympathy, or else he was very lucky. In twenty-four hours, to have drawn two out of the bag like Peggy Warden and April Quest...

He frowned. April Quest — there was someone that Byron Ufferlitz might easily have seen as a good prospect. And the Saint remembered that she had made no secret of what she expected Mr Ufferlitz’s intentions to be and what she thought of him.

He was getting nowhere at an impressively steady pace.

“Do you get headaches?” Peggy Warden asked, several minutes later.

“Headaches?” The Saint came back a few thousand miles with a start.

“Yes. You keep your brain working so hard.”

He grinned, and pushed away his plate and lighted a cigarette.

“It’s a bad habit,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

The gray eyes were still inquiring.

“Are you really taking a professional interest?”

“You heard what Condor said. If I get any brilliant ideas, he wants to hear them.”

“But why should you be interested?”

Simon meditated over his cigarette. It was a question that he had been about ready to ask himself.

“Partly because I don’t have anything much else to do just at this moment,” he said at length. “And this is pretty much in my lap. Partly because the guy who bumped off Byron has probably cheated me out of an amusing experience — not to mention an interesting amount of dough. Partly because it’s a rather fascinating problem, in a very quiet way. A murder without clues and without alibis — so beautifully simple and so beautifully insoluble. There has to be a catch in it somewhere, and I collect catches.”

“But you aren’t a policeman. You’re supposed to have very unconventional ideas about justice. Suppose you decided that the murderer had a thoroughly good reason to kill Mr Ufferlitz?”

“I’d still want to know who did it. It’s like having to know the answer to a riddle.”

He couldn’t tell her that while all that was true, the most important reason was that in everything but the leaving of a skeleton Saint figure pinned to Mr Ufferlitz’s back, the murder seemed to have been staged with the considered intention of having the Saint accused of it, and to Simon Templar that was a challenge which could not be let pass. The Saint had for once been minding his own inoffensive business, and somebody had gratuitously tried to get him into trouble. Therefore somebody had got to be shown what an inferior inspiration that had really been.

His financial interest was actually the least of all, but there were other reasons why he was anxious to hear the official statement of Mr Braunberg that afternoon.

The attorney arrived almost as soon as they got back, and hurried busily into the late Mr Ufferlitz’s private office, calling Peggy Warden after him and closing the door.

The Saint sat on a corner of Peggy Warden’s desk and eased open the nearest drawer. He knew that he would not have to look far for what he wanted, and as it happened he found it at the first try — an indexed loose-leaf book of private addresses and telephones. He could probably have asked her for the information, but it was even more convenient to get it without advertising. He copied the locations of Lazaroff and Kendricks, Orlando Flane, and Jack Groom on to a slip of paper, and he had just finished and put the directory back when Lazaroff and Kendricks came in.

Kendricks shook his hand solemnly and said, “Congratulations, pal. I knew you’d do it. What a masterful way to deal with a producer! You should have come to Hollywood sooner — it would have been a different town.”

“About four weeks sooner would have suited me,” said Lazaroff. “When I think of all the cooperation we put in on that lousy script—”

“Never mind,” said the Saint. “You can just change it around some more and sell it to Columbia for a new Blondie.”

Lazaroff went through the mechanical gesture of smoothing his unsmoothable hair.

“Seriously, I suppose a guy like you takes a murder like this in his stride. But I’d still like to know how you got away with it.”

“With what?” Simon asked a little incredulously.

“With just being anywhere around when it happened. I should think the cops would grab a guy like you without even asking questions, and start beating you up to see what they got.”

“There was a certain suspiciousness at first,” Simon admitted. “But I was able to talk myself out of it. For the time being, anyway. You see, as a matter of fact I wasn’t around.”

“Well, you’d just come into the studio and signed up with Byron.”

“But God!” said Kendricks, “if you’d been at Byron’s house when it happened, or if you’d found the body—”

The Saint smiled.

“It would have been distinctly awkward,” he said candidly.

At which point Peggy Warden came out and said, “Will you all go on in?”

They filed in and chose their chairs and lighted cigarettes, and there was a rather self-conscious silence. Then the door opened again and April Quest came in, with Jack Groom following her. She had a friendly smile for everyone, and if the smile that she gave the Saint had a personal and curious quality it was not to be noticed by anyone else, and even Simon might have imagined it. She sat in a chair that Lazaroff gave up, and Jack Groom sat on the arm and gave an impression of covering her with his wing.

Mr Braunberg shuffled a sheaf of papers, zipped and unzipped his briefcase, adjusted his rimless glasses, and cleared his throat. Having thus obtained the awed attention of the gathering, he put his fingertips together and launched very briskly into his speech.

“You are all naturally anxious to know how Mr Ufferlitz’s death will affect you. I can tell you this very quickly.”

He picked up a pencil and tapped his sheaf of papers.

“Your contracts with Mr Ufferlitz were all personal contracts with him. In his releasing contract with Paramount he merely undertakes to provide a certain number of pictures of a certain length on certain terms; all the details of cast and production were in his hands, and therefore your individual contracts with him were not included in any kind of assignment. His arrangements with his financial backers were of the same nature, so that your contracts do not revert to them either. Normally, therefore, they would pass to his heirs. Mr Ufferlitz, however, has no heirs. His will directs that the residue of his estate, if any, shall be expended on an... er... open house party which anyone and everyone employed in the motion picture industry may attend, so long as the refreshments last. I believe that it would be impossible to hold that such a party could inherit, enforce, discharge, or in any sense administer these contractual obligations. Legally, therefore, you are all free persons, subject of course to technical confirmation when Mr Ufferlitz’s will is probated. I think you can safely regard that as a mere formality.”

Lazaroff went over to Kendricks, who stood up. They shook hands, gravely emitted three shrill irreverent yips, bowed to each other and to Mr Braunberg, and sat down again.

Mr Braunberg frowned.

“Your salaries will be paid up to and including yesterday, on which date the estate will hold that all obligations were mutually terminated. The only difficulty arises with Mr Templar.”

“Who is neither here nor there,” murmured the Saint.

“Your position is a little ambiguous,” Mr Braunberg conceded. “However, in the circumstances I don’t think we’ll need to fight over it. As Mr Ufferlitz’s executor, I’m willing to offer you, say, three thousand dollars, or half a week’s salary, in full settlement. That would save us both the expense of going to court over it and also a long delay in winding up the estate, and I don’t think the... er... party will suffer very much from it. Mr Ufferlitz’s assets, I believe, will be sufficient to take care of everything on this basis. If that’s satisfactory to you?”

“Fair enough,” said the Saint, who was a philosopher when there was no useful alternative.

Jack Groom leaned forward over his lantern jaw.

“You said that Mr Ufferlitz had no heirs, Mr Braunberg. Suppose some obscure relative should turn up and contest the will?”

“He’d be taken care of with the usual formula. There’s a standard clause in the will which provides that everyone not specifically named is specifically excluded and if they want to argue about it the estate can settle with them for one dollar.” The attorney put his fingertips together again. “Are there any further questions?”

There didn’t seem to be any.

“Very well, then. It may be a week or two before I can get your checks out, but I’ll take care of it as soon as I can. Thank you very much.”

He stood up and began to shovel the papers into his briefcase, an efficient business man with a lot of other things to attend to. With true professional discretion, he had not even said a word about the circumstances of Mr Ufferlitz’s departure from the ranks of mushroom Hollywood magnates. From his point of view as the executor of a will, the question was not involved. And Simon felt an inward quirk of sardonic amusement as he considered how rapidly and methodically a man’s material affairs could be wound up, the ideas and intrigues and ephemeral importances to which he had seemed so essential...

The telephone began to ring then in the outer office.

Kendricks and Lazaroff had a few words with Jack Groom on their way out, and Simon caught April Quest’s eye again and was moving towards her when Peggy Warden intercepted him.

“A Mr Halliday’s calling you.”

Simon went into the outer office and took the telephone.

“A fine thing,” said Dick Halliday. “Don’t you ever take a holiday?”

“I don’t seem to have much chance,” said the Saint.

“Now I suppose you’re out of a job again.”

“It looks like it. We’ve all just had a speech from a legal gent named Braunberg, and we’re all out. But being treated right.”

“That’s quite a break for Lazaroff and Kendricks,” Dick said. “I hear that Goldwyn has been offering all kinds of money to get them back.”

A formation of butterflies looped and rolled in the Saint’s stomach.

“But I thought he’d sworn they were never going to get another job in Hollywood.”

“I know. But you know what this town is like. It seems that Goldwyn read a story about how Zanuck hired a man who kicked his behind and told him he was a lousy producer, so now he wants to have a sense of humor too. Besides, the last job they did for him is a terrific success right now. So he wants to forgive them and double their salary.”

7

The congregation had dispersed as easily as a puff of smoke. Simon glanced up and down an empty corridor, and went rapidly on to the stairs which led him out into the stucco-reflected glare of Avenue A. He just caught a glimpse of what looked like the thin stooped back of Jack Groom vanishing into the doorway of the entrance lobby, and lengthened his stride in pursuit.

It was Groom, but April Quest had already disappeared when Simon saw him. Instead of her, Lieutenant Condor was talking to him. The detective moved slothfully out in an effective blocking movement that would have made it impossible for the Saint to pass by with a nod.

“Well, Mr Templar, what did you think of the will?”

“Interesting and original,” drawled the Saint. “It should be quite a party. I suppose you knew about it already.”

“Yeah — I had a preview.”

“It’s too bad there weren’t a lot of heirs and legatees, isn’t it?” Simon remarked. “It would have made everything so nice and complicated.”

Condor nodded, with his toothpick wagging from his incisors.

“I guess the freed slaves will be all moved out from here tomorrow. You weren’t thinking of leaving town, were you?”

“No, I think I’ll stick around for a bit.”

Groom had been gazing at the Saint in aloof and somber silence.

“You shaved this morning,” he said at last, with an air of tired and pained discovery.

“I often do,” Simon admitted.

“I thought I asked you to start a moustache for this picture.”

“I know. I remember. But since there ain’t gonna be no picture—”

Condor moved his large feet.

“When you shaved this morning,” he said suddenly, “how did you know there wasn’t going to be a picture?”

No earthquake actually took place at that moment, but Simon Templar had the same feeling in his limbs as if the ground had started to shiver under him. He felt rather like a master duellist whose flawless guard has been thrown wide by a bludgeon wielded by an unconsidered spectator. But he was only stopped for an instant. He was lighting a cigarette, and he brought the job to an unruffled completion while his reflexes used the pause to settle back into balance.

“I didn’t know,” he said lightly. “I was just trying to make Mr Groom see that it doesn’t really matter now. As a matter of fact I still wasn’t sold on the idea, and I was going to argue about it some more.”

“The Saint would wear a moustache,” Mr Groom insisted moodily.

His pale emaciated face seemed to be without triumph or maliciousness: he might have been quite unaware of having set a trap and caught a stumble.

“I hate to see you still worrying,” said the Saint. “Didn’t you hear Braunberg say that we were through with the picture?”

“He didn’t say that,” Groom corrected him. “He said that we were through with Mr Ufferlitz. There are still Mr Ufferlitz’s backers. They’ve got a certain amount of money invested, and they might want to go on. It’d be a different set-up, of course.”

Condor’s bright black eyes were still fixed on the Saint, and Simon knew it, but he was careful not to glance that way. He said to Groom, “Would that mean that you’d still be the director and you might step into Ufferlitz’s job as well?”

“I don’t know. It’s possible,” Groom said vaguely.

“So this murder could be quite a break for you.”

The detective’s eyes had changed their objective. Simon knew that, still without looking.

“What are you getting at?” said Groom.

“I’m just wondering how much this new set-up might be worth to you.”

“Isn’t that rather insulting?”

The Saint’s smile was charming.

“Maybe,” he said. “But you can’t find a murderer without insulting somebody. You hated Ufferlitz, didn’t you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You hated his guts,” said the Saint.

The director combed his fingers through his dank forelock and turned to Condor with a baffled gesture.

“I don’t know what he’s trying to make out, but he must want to put me in a bad light. He’s making a mountain out of a molehill.”

“What was there between you and Ufferlitz?” Condor asked casually.

“If you don’t want to do it,” said the Saint relentlessly, “I don’t mind telling him for you.”

After which he held his breath.

Groom said, “It just shows what silly gossip will do. Ufferlitz and I had a bit of a fight once at the Trocadero. I got into conversation with a girl at the bar, and apparently he had a date to meet her there. He’d been drinking. He got mad and made a scene.”

“And of course you beat the bejesus out of him,” Simon said gently.

Two faint red spots burned on Groom’s pallid cheekbones.

“It was just one of those night-club brawls. He apologised later. It was just one of those things. That ought to be obvious. Otherwise I wouldn’t have been working for him afterwards.”

“Do you know what I think?” asked the Saint, with such complete deliberation that the effrontery of what he was saying was almost too bland to grasp. “I think you were on the make for his girl, and you were out of luck. I think he pushed your face in in front of everyone who was there. I think you’ve been nursing your humiliation ever since—”

“Then why did I go to work for him?” asked Groom, with surprising self-possession.

Simon knew that he was on a tightrope. He was bluffing his head off to get information, and it had worked up to a point, but he could be knocked off his precarious elevation with a feather. But once he had started, he couldn’t stop.

“What did Ufferlitz have on you?” he retorted.

“You must be crazy.”

“Are you sure?”

“All right. You tell the Lieutenant this time.”

Condor’s inquisitive gaze switched back again.

The Saint shrugged.

“You’re too clever,” he said. “I don’t know. Naturally. If a lot of people knew, there wouldn’t have been any point in playing ball with Ufferlitz to keep him quiet. And there wouldn’t have been any point in killing him to make it permanent.”

The director appealed to Condor with another helpless movement of his hands.

“What on earth can I say to an insinuation like that? I took this job with Ufferlitz because I needed it quite badly, and I thought it might do me some good. I didn’t have to like him especially. But now he must have been blackmailing me, and if nobody knows what I was being blackmailed with I must have murdered him.”

“This girl you quarrelled about,” Condor said. “Was that recently?”

“No. It was months ago — nearly a year.”

“What was her name and where does she live?”

“She doesn’t,” said Groom.

The detective cocked his head sharply.

“What’s that?”

“She died soon after. Too many sleeping tablets.” Groom’s voice had an almost ghoulish flatness. “She was pregnant. She was trying to get into pictures, but I guess she never got any further than the casting couch.”

“Is that on record?”

“No — it’s just more gossip. Ufferlitz went out with her quite a lot. However, Mr Templar will probably tell you that I murdered her too.”

“What was her name?” asked the Saint.

“Trilby Andrews.”

Something smooth and magnificent like a great wave rolled up over Simon Templar’s head, and when it had passed he was outside the studio, alone, and the conversation had broken up and petered out in the frustrated ineffectual way that had perhaps always been doomed for it, but that didn’t seem to matter anymore. It had ended with Groom sulky and sneering, and Condor turning his long predatory nose from one to the other of them like the beak of a suspicious bird; there was nothing much more that he could do, it was only talk and suggestion and leads that he could remember to follow later, but Simon hardly even noticed how the scene ended. Clear as a cameo in his mind now he had a name, a name that had been written on a photograph of a face which in some faint disturbing way had seemed as if it should have been familiar and yet was not, and now the wave rolled over and left him with a serenity of knowledge that out of all the cold threads that he had been trying to weave into patterns he had at last touched one that had a warmth and life of its own...

He found himself crossing the boulevard to think it over with the mild encouragement of a few drops of Peter Dawson. The interior of the Front Office was dim and soothing after the bold light outside, and he had been there for several minutes with a drink in front of him before he was aware that he was not the only customer ahead of the five o’clock stampede.

“H’lo,” said the heart-shaking voice of Orlando Flane, now somewhat thickened and slurred with alcohol. “The great detective himself, in person!”

He unwound himself from the obscurity of a booth and steered a painstaking course to the bar, only tripping over his own feet once.

“Hullo,” said the Saint coolly.

“The great actor, too. Going to be a big star. Have your name in lights. Women chasing you. Cheering crowds, an’ everything.”

“Not any more.”

“Whaddaya mean?”

“My job was with Ufferlitz. No more Ufferlitz — no more job. So I have to go back to detecting, and the crowds can cheer you again.”

Flane shook his head.

“Too bad.”

“Isn’t it?”

“Too bad, after you did such a swell job chiselling me out.”

“I didn’t chisel you out.”

“No. You just took my part away from me. That was nice to do. Real Robin Hood stuff.”

“Listen, dope,” said the Saint temperately. “I never took anything away from you. You were out anyway. Ufferlitz dragged me in. When he made a deal with me I didn’t know you’d ever been involved. How the hell should I?”

Flane thought it over with the soggy concentration of drunkenness.

“Thass right,” he announced at last.

“I’m glad you can see it.”

“You’re okay.”

“Thanks.”

“Shake.”

“Sure.”

“Less have a drink.”

They had a drink. Flane stared heavily at his glass.

“So here we are,” he said. “Neither of us got a job.”

“It’s sad, isn’t it?”

“My pal. You gotta get a job. I’ll find you a job. Talk to my agent about you.”

“I wouldn’t bother, I didn’t really want to be in this racket to start with. It just looked like fun and a bit of dough.”

“Yeah. Dough. That’s all I’m in for. I never thought I’d be in this racket either.”

“What racket were you in before?”

“Lotsa things. You don’t think I’m tough, do you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Most people don’t.”

“I suppose not.”

“But I am tough, see? I’ve been around. I know what it’s all about.”

“Like Ufferlitz?”

“That son of a bitch.”

“Was he really?”

“Threw me out of the picture. Threw me outa his office when I was drunk an’ couldn’t give him what he had coming.”

“Yes, I was there.”

“That dirty bastard.”

“But you fixed him, didn’t you?” Simon asked gently.

Flane stared at him dimly.

“Whatsat?”

“You said you were going to fix him.”

“Yeah. So he’d stay fixed.”

“You certainty did.”

“Too late now,” Flane said gloomily.

Simon looked at him over his glass with a slight frown.

“What d’you mean — too late?”

“Too late to fix him. He’s been fixed.”

“But you did it, didn’t you?”

Flane steadied himself, and a smudgily truculent rigidity came over his face.

“Are you nuts?”

“No. But you said you’d fix him—”

“Are you trying to hang something on me?”

“No. It was just a natural thing to think.”

“Well quit thinking.”

“I might,” said the Saint, “but I don’t know whether the police will. After all, you were heard to threaten him.”

“To hell with the police.”

“Hasn’t Condor talked to you yet?”

“Who?”

“Lieutenant Condor — the guy who’s in charge of the case.”

“Christ, no! Why should he? Annew know something? You know what I’d do if any cop came near me?”

“What would you do?”

“I’d poke him right in the eye!”

“Let’s have another drink,” said the Saint.

Flane picked up his drink when it came and focused on it with intense deliberation. He held it rather like a binnacle holds a ship’s compass, rocking under and around it but holding it in miraculously isolated suspension.

“That son of a bitch,” he said. “I coulda fixed him.”

“How?”

“I coulda put him right in the can.”

“What for?”

“For quail!”

Simon lighted a cigarette as if it were fragile. It was curious how coincidences always had to be repeated, and when your luck was coming in you just had to let it alone.

“You mean Trilby Andrews,” he said calmly.

“Yeah. She was under age. He ditched her an’ she took a sleep.”

“That’s just gossip.”

“That’s what you think. But I coulda proved it.”

“Only you didn’t,” Simon said carefully, “because he had something even better on you.”

He had a picture already of the methods and associations of the late Mr Ufferlitz which made that kind of shot in the dark look almost as good as the chance of hitting a wall from inside a room, but he was not quite prepared for the response that he got this time.

Flane put down an empty glass and turned and took hold of him by the lapels of his coat. The alcoholic slackness was crushed down in his face as if with a great effort of will, and his eyes were cold even through the obvious bleariness of his vision. For the first time since Simon had set eyes on him he really looked as if he could have been tough. He didn’t raise his voice.

“Who told you that?” he said.

Simon had played this kind of poker all his life. Now he had to be good. He didn’t move. The bartender was down at the far end of the bar, polishing glasses while he looked over a magazine, and he didn’t seem to have been paying any attention for some time.

The Saint met Flane’s straining gaze with utter confidence. He dropped his own voice even lower, and said, “Ufferlitz’s attorney.”

“What did he know?”

“Everything.”

“Keep talking.”

“You see, Ufferlitz didn’t trust you. And he wasn’t dumb. He took precautions. He left a letter to be opened if anything happened to him. He had quite a story about your early life.”

“In New Orleans?”

“Yes.”

Flane fought against the compulsion of his clouded instincts. Simon could see him doing it, and see him losing his way in the struggle.

“About the girl who got knocked off — who was a witness—”

“Yes,” said the Saint, with absolute intuitive certainty now. “When you were a talent scout for a rather less glamorous business.”

Flane steadied himself against Simon’s lapels.

“How many other people did he tell?”

“Quite a lot. More than you could take care of now... You’re all washed up, brother. If Condor hasn’t found you yet, you’d better get ready for him. You’re going to make the best headlines of your career.”

“Yeah?... My pal!”

“Not your pal,” said the Saint, “since you tried to hang the rap on me by sending me that note.”

Flane blinked at him.

“What note?”

“The note you sent to put me on the spot.”

“I didn’t send you any note.”

“Your memory needs a lot of reminding, doesn’t it? But you’re not helping yourself a bit. You had it all—”

The Saint’s voice loosened off uncertainly. It wasn’t from anything that Flane had said or done. It was from something that came up within himself: a recollection, an idea — two ideas — something that was trying to form itself in his mind against the train of his thought, that suddenly softened his own assurance and his attention at the same time.

At that instant Flane pushed lurchingly against him, and the bar stool started to topple. Off balance, the Saint made a wild attempt to get at least one foot on the ground and get a foundation from which he could hit. It was too much of a contortion even for him, Flane’s fist smashed against his jaw — not shatteringly, but hard enough to put new acceleration into his fall. As he went down, the next stool hit him on the back of the head, and then for an uncertain interval there was nothing but a thunderous blackness through which large engines drove round and round...

8

He woke up in a surprising lucidity, as if he had only dozed for a moment — except for a throbbing ache that swelled up in waves from the base of his brain. He woke up so clearly that he could lay still for a moment and take full advantage of the wet towel that the bartender was swabbing over his face.

“Thanks,” he said. “Do I look as stupid as I feel?”

“You’re okay,” said the bartender, and added without intention, “How d’ya feel?”

“Fine.”

The Saint stood up. For a second he thought his head was going to fall off; then it righted itself.

“What happened?” asked the bartender.

“I slipped.”

“He gets ugly sometimes, when he’s been drinking.”

“So do a lot of guys. Where did he go?”

“Out. He scrammed outa here like a bat outa hell. Maybe he was scared what you’d do to him when you got up.”

“Maybe,” said the Saint, appreciating the sympathy. “How long a start has he got?”

“Long enough. Now look, take it easy. Better have a drink and cool off. On the house.”

“Anyway that’s an idea,” said the Saint.

He had a drink, which might or might not have helped the pain in his head to subside a little, and then went back across the boulevard and interviewed the studio gatekeeper.

“Lieutenant Condor? No, sir. He left right after you did. He didn’t say where he was going.”

Simon picked up the desk phone and dialled Peggy Warden.

“So you’re still there,” he said. “Didn’t they fire you too?”

“I expect I’ll be here till the end of the week, clearing some things up for Mr Braunberg.”

“That’s good.”

“You left in an awful hurry.”

“My feet started travelling. I had to run to catch up with them.”

“You’ve got to give me an address where we can send your check.”

“I’ll be seeing you before that.”

“You’re not still going on being a detective, are you?”

“I am.”

“I wonder what you’re like when you relax?”

“You could find out.”

“A dialogue writer,” she said.

“Where are you going to be later?”

“Where are you going to be?”

“I don’t know right now. Can I call you?”

“I’ll be at home. Probably washing my last pair of silk stockings. The number’s in the book.”

“I don’t read very well,” said the Saint, “but I’ll try and get someone to look it up for me.”

He walked around to the parking lot and retrieved his car, and drove north towards the hills that look down across the subdivided prairie between Sunset Boulevard and the sea. Lazaroff and Kendricks lived up there, not Orlando Flane, and yet suddenly the pursuit of Orlando Flane was not so important. Flane could be found later, if he wanted to be found at all — if he didn’t, he wouldn’t be sitting at home. But other patterns were taking a shape from which Flane was curiously lacking. It was like stalking a circus horse in the belief that it was real, and finding it capable of separating into two identities with cloths over them...

The house was perched on a sharp buttress of rock high above the Strip — that strange No Man’s Land of county in the middle of a city whose limits traditionally extend to the Jersey side of the Holland Tunnel. There were cars in the open garage, Simon noticed as he parked, and he rang the bell with the peaceful confidence that the wheels were meshing at last and nothing could stop them.

Kendricks himself flung the door open, looking more than ever like one of the earnest ambassadors of the House of Fuller, as if their positions ought to have been reversed and he should have been on the outside trying to get in. The sight of the Saint only took him aback for a moment, and then his face broke into a hospitable grin.

“Surprise, surprise,” he said. “Superman has a nose like a bloodhound, on top of everything else. We were just starting to celebrate. Come in and help us.”

“I didn’t get your invitation,” said the Saint genially, “so I didn’t know what time to come.”

“Somebody has to be first,” Kendricks said.

He led the way into the Tudor bar which appeared to substitute for a living-room, and Vic Lazaroff raised his shaggy gray head from some intricate labors over a cocktail shaker.

“Welcome,” he said. “You are going to study genius in its cups. We shall reciprocate by studying you in yours.”

“It’s a great event,” Simon said.

“You bet it is. Once again the uncrowned kings of Holly wood are on the throne—”

“That’s quite definite, is it?”

“Everything but the signatures, which we shall write tomorrow if we can still hold a pen.”

Simon settled on the arm of a chair.

“Goldwyn must think a lot of you.”

“Why shouldn’t he? Look at all the publicity he can get out of us.”

“But it does seem like going a bit far.”

“What does?”

“Murdering Ufferlitz,” said the Saint, “so he could get you back.”

Neither of them spoke at once. Kendricks stood still in the middle of the room. Lazaroff carefully put down the bottle from which he had been pouring. The silence was quite noticeable.

“It’s a deep gag,” Kendricks said finally.

“Of course,” said the Saint imperturbably, “if it wasn’t so obvious that Sam Goldwyn must have bumped him off so he could get his two favorite writers back, some people might think the writers had done it to get free again.”

“Very deep,” said Lazaroff.

“The only thing I don’t get,” Simon said, “is why you thought it would be clever to hang it on me.”

“We what?”

“Why you sent me that note and phoned the police about a prowler, pretending that you were Ufferlitz, so that I’d be caught in the house with his body and very probably sent to jail for a week or two for killing him.”

This silence was even deeper than the last one. It grew up until Simon was conscious of making an effort to hold the implacable stillness of his face and force them to make the first movement.

At last Lazaroff made it.

He stretched up a little, as though he were lifting a weight with his hands.

“Better tell him, Bob,” he said.

Kendricks stirred, and the Saint looked at him.

“I guess so,” he said. “We did send you that note.”

“Why?”

“For a laugh.” Kendricks was like a schoolboy on the carpet. “One of those crazy things we’re always doing. You could have made the front pages all day, too. Banners when you were arrested, and a double column when they found out it was all a mistake.”

“And how were they going to find that out?”

“I tell you, when we planned it we didn’t know Ufferlitz was going to get killed.”

“So you only thought of that afterwards.”

Lazaroff dragged his fingers through his hair and said, “Good God, we didn’t kill him.”

“You were just playing rough, and he couldn’t take it.”

“We never saw him.”

“Then why didn’t you say anything? You expected me to be there, and get caught by the police. If you were surprised to hear Ufferlitz had been murdered, weren’t you surprised that I wasn’t in jail?”

“We were,” said Kendricks. “When I saw you in the office this afternoon I nearly fell over backwards.”

“But you never said anything.”

“We sort of hinted — to try and find out where you stood.”

“But you didn’t care whether I was in a jam.”

“We didn’t know. You mightn’t have fallen for that note. Anything might have happened. You mightn’t have gotten home at all last night—”

“But you knew I’d received the note and fallen for it,” said the Saint coldly. “You saw me drop April Quest and go home. Your car drove by when we were saying goodnight.” It was another fragment of the jigsaw that fitted accurately into place now. “After that you saw me arrive at Ufferlitz’s. That was when you phoned the police. But you still didn’t think I was in a jam.”

Kendricks made a helpless movement.

“You’re getting me tied up,” he said. “Just like a lawyer. The whole truth is that we didn’t know what had happened to you. You’ve got a great reputation for getting out of jams — you might have dodged that one. We didn’t know. But we couldn’t come out and say anything, because if the cops knew we’d framed you like that they’d naturally think what you thought — that we’d murdered Ufferlitz and tried to make it look like it was you. We were in the hell of a jam ourselves. It was a gag that fate took a hand in, or something. And we were stuck with it. We just had to shut up and hope something would happen.”

“But you weren’t in the house yourselves.”

“Not once.”

“Then how,” Simon asked very placidly, “did you know, when you wrote that note, that the front door would be unlocked?”

There was stillness a third time, a stillness that had the explosive quality of a frenzied struggle gripped in immovable chains. Lazaroff finally made a frustrated gesture, as if his hand had turned into lead.

“It sounds worse and worse, but we just happened to know.”

“How?”

“I heard Ufferlitz telling his secretary about working there last night. He said ‘The door’ll be open as usual.’ She said ‘Don’t you ever lock your door?’ and he said ‘I haven’t locked my house up for years. I always lose keys, and what the hell, if anybody’s going to get in they’ll get in anyway and leave me a busted window on top of it.’ I don’t suppose you’ll believe that, but you can check on it.”

Simon held his eyes and moved to another seat by the telephone. He picked up the directory, and found Peggy Warden’s number. He put the telephone on his knee and dialled it.

Lazaroff went on looking at him steadily.

“Hullo,” she said.

“This is Lieutenant Condor,” said the Saint, and his voice was a perfect imitation of the detective’s soured and dismal accent. “There’s one thing I forgot to check with you. When you left Mr Ufferlitz’s house last night, did you leave the door unlocked?”

“Why, yes. It was unlocked when I got there. He never locked it.”

“Never?”

“No. He said he always lost his keys, and if a burglar really wanted to get in he’d just break a window or something.”

“When did he tell you that?”

“It was only yesterday, as a matter of fact. But the door was unlocked the last time I went there, to bring him some letters.”

“Had you been there often — of course, I mean on business?”

“Only once before. I just took him some letters one Sunday morning, and he signed them and I took them away with me.”

“Did anyone else know about him never locking the door?”

“I don’t really know, Lieutenant.”

“Could anyone have heard him telling you?”

“I suppose so.” She hesitated. “Those two writers had been in the office — yes, Mr Lazaroff was still there. But—”

“But what?”

“You don’t really think they could have had anything to do with it, do you?”

“I can’t make guesses, miss,” he said. “I’m trying to get facts. Thanks for your information.”

He hung up. Lazaroff and Kendricks were watching him.

“Well,” he said, “she confirms your story.”

“It’s true,” said Kendricks.

“But it only proves that you knew the door would be open — so you could be sure of putting your scheme through.”

“Look, for Christ’s sake. We aren’t dopes. We’ve kicked plots around. If we’d really wanted to frame you, we could have done more than that. We could have put you in a much worse spot. We could have left your trademark drawing on Ufferlitz, if we’d killed him, so you’d really have had something to explain. Now don’t do another of those lawyer tricks and ask how we know there wasn’t a drawing. I’ll bet there wasn’t, or Condor would certainly have had you in the cooler.”

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 shaker. 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 about 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.”

Condor chewed audibly on his flake of timber.

“I like having my mind put straight for me,” he said. “So you played secrets. Did you know who the murderer was then?”

“No,” said the Saint honestly. “I had to get away and think and investigate for a bit. But I had to find him. I had to find him before he got me into some more trouble that I wouldn’t be able to get out of so easily. I knew it must have been somebody who hated my guts. Somebody who was tough enough to kill Ufferlitz in the first place, and vicious enough to try and frame me for it. A guy with two motives.”

“And you found him all by yourself.”

“Yes,” said the Saint. “Orlando Flane.”

They stopped for a traffic light. Simon shifted into low gear and held the clutch out. He kept his eyes ahead, but he knew Condor was still watching him.

“You tell it,” said Condor. “It’s your story.”

“There wasn’t much to it. I’d taken a part away from Flane. He was on the skids, and that part might have saved him, but I took it away. I didn’t mean to. It was Ufferlitz’s idea. Flane was just letters in lights to me. But he didn’t understand that. His brain was all rotten with alcohol, anyway. He was drunk at Giro’s last night when we were there. You can check on that, too. And I guess he was just too mad to have any sense.”

“But why did he kill Ufferlitz?”

“Because Ufferlitz was blackmailing him. Flane wasn’t always a glamor boy for cameras. There was a time in New Orleans when he was charming feminine hearts for a much less romantic racket. He was in a bad spot once, and there was a girl who was a witness. She died — very conveniently. But Ufferlitz had the goods on him.”

“How do you know that?”

“You forget,” said the Saint gently. “Crime is my business. And I’ve got a rather phenomenal memory. Only sometimes it’s a little bit slow. But you don’t have to take my word for it. You can confirm it with New Orleans.”

They were rolling eastwards on the boulevard again.

“Why didn’t you tell me that this morning?”

“It just hadn’t come into my head then. I got it after I left you this afternoon. Going off on a wrong tack after Groom — that business about the girl... girls... dirty work with girls — and suddenly the gates were open and it all poured in. I was in the Front Office then, and by God, Flane was there. Well, I’m just not a good citizen. I never could see why policemen should have all the fun. I just have to stick my own nose in. So I did. I told Flane I was wise to him. I told him the whole story, and invented what I wasn’t sure of. But I made it good. Just to see if I could make him break.”

“And then—”

“Then he broke. I don’t have to try and convince you about that. Here’s my first witness.”

He braked the car to a stop outside the neon façade of the Front Office, and the prowl car slid tightly in behind. Simon opened his door and got out with careful leisureliness, and the detective put his gun away and got out after him.

They went into the crepuscular discretion of the bar, where a sizeable clientele was now dispersed through shadowy corners, and Simon beckoned the bartender over.

“Will you tell Mr Condor what happened this afternoon?”

The bartender looked surprised to see the Saint again so soon, and along with his surprise there was a habitual wariness.

“About what?” he said innocently.

“About Flane,” said the Saint.

“It’s all right,” Condor put in soothingly. “There’s no beef. Mr Templar just wanted me to hear it.” The bartender wiped his hands on his apron.

“I guess Mr Flane had just had one too many,” he said.

“He was talking to this gentleman, and I couldn’t hear what they were saying. Then it looked as if Mr Flane was getting tough — he does that sometimes, when he’s had a drink — or I should say he used to do it—”

“Go on,” Condor said.

“Well, I tried to hear something then, but I couldn’t hear anything, and then he must have slugged Mr Whatyoucalledhim, because he fell off his stool, and Mr Flane beat it out of here, an’ I got the gentleman up again an’ bought him a drink an’ he went out. That’s all I know.”

“Thank you,” said Condor.

Then they were outside again.

“After that,” said the Saint, “I went back to the studio to see if you were still there, but you’d left. We can walk over and you can check that. If the same gatekeeper isn’t on now, he’ll know where we can find the guy I spoke to.”

Condor gazed moodily across the street, like a dyspeptic crocodile on a river bank watching succulent game cavorting on the other side.

“I’ll believe you,” he said. “You wouldn’t want me to check it if I wouldn’t get the right answers. But why didn’t you call me at Headquarters?”

“I meant to,” said the Saint. “But I... well, I had a date. You know how it is. And I got drinking, and sort of put it off. Then I heard the news on the radio. Then I was just scared to stick my neck out. I figured the case was washed up anyhow. I’d as good as told Flane he was sunk, and he’d bumped himself off. So — justice was done, even if nobody got any medals.”

Condor massaged his long melancholy nose.

“You want me to believe a helluva lot,” he said. “And a guy in my job eats medals.”

“Don’t believe any more than you want to,” Simon said nonchalantly. “Just convince yourself. Flane had it in for Ufferlitz. He’d threatened him before—”

“He had?”

“Right in that bar. The first time I ever saw him. He was drunk, and he was shooting off his mouth about how Ufferlitz couldn’t do things to him and he was going to show him where he got off. The bartender was trying to calm him down. Go back and ask him.”

The detective shook his head.

“If you had that bartender primed with one story, you’d have him rehearsed in all of ’em,” he said unenthusiastically. “Who else heard Flane say he’d get Ufferlitz?”

The Saint thought, and a picture came into his mind.

“Ufferlitz’s secretary heard him — Ufferlitz threw him out of his office yesterday, and Flane said then that he’d fix him. Didn’t she tell you?”

“No.”

“She should have. She was there.”

Condor hunched his shoulders.

“We’ll see if she’s home,” he said.

So they were in the Saint’s car again, heading north across Hollywood Boulevard to an address that they looked up in the phone book in the corner drug store. The prowl car followed behind them like a shadow.

But the Saint was hardly aware of it any more. Certainly it had no more sinister implications. Condor was sold, even though he hadn’t admitted it aloud. It was only a question of a little more time and some routine verifications. The detective’s mournful passivity and the dejected downward angle of the toothpick in his mouth were their own acknowledgments. In the end it had been as simple as that. And Simon was only wondering why he had never thought of that scene before, when Flane had come hurtling out of Ufferlitz’s office and the Saint had picked him up and steadied him while he made his threat — the scene that Peggy Warden had omitted to tell Condor about. Simon thought he had been very slow about that. But it was all taken care of now...

And they were in Peggy Warden’s apartment, and she was a little frightened and wide-eyed, but she said, “Yes, Mr Flane did say that, but—”

And Condor said, “Do you remember his words?”

“It was something like—” She wrinkled her brow. “Something like ‘When I fix you, you’re going to stay fixed.’ ”

“That was it,” said the Saint.

She said, “But he was drunk — he didn’t really know what he was saying—”

Condor turned away from her with a movement of glum separation whose superficial rudeness had less to do with any deliberate intention than with his congenital inability to loosen his official armor.

His bright black eyes circled down on to the Saint like tired dead crows.

“Okay, Saint,” he said. “You’re good. I don’t know how good yet, but good.”

“Then what happens?”

“I can’t say. I just work for a living. It’ll all have to go to the DA. Probably the Big Shots’ll go to work on him to push it away without any scandal. Another Hollywood mystery dies a natural death. That’s my guess. I’m only a cop.”

“But you’re satisfied?”

“I’m going to have to be. I’ll do some more checking up, but if you’re as good as you sound it won’t make any difference.” His mouth turned down one-sidedly. “If you’re not worried any more, you don’t need to be.”

The Saint sat down in the nearest chair and prepared himself a cigarette with unwontedly deliberate fingers.

“I think,” he remarked judicially, “that I could use a drink.”

“I’ve got some Scotch,” said the girl.

“With ice,” said the Saint, “and plain water.”

“What about you, Lieutenant?”

Condor shook his head.

“Thanks, miss. I’ve got to worry about my report. I won’t take any more of your time.” He looked at the Saint. “You’ve got your car, so I’ll be on my way.”

He pulled the toothpick out of his teeth, inspected it, and thrust it back. He didn’t seem to be able to make a good exit. His eyes were still watchful, as they always would be, as they would always be searching and challenging, but without the conscience-created menace behind them they were just awkward and lonely and disillusioned. He was just a guy who’d been trying to do a job. And when the job wasn’t there any more he was no more frightening or perhaps just as frightening as a man who had rung the bell to try and sell a vacuum cleaner and been told that there were no customers for vacuum cleaners. He said at last: “Well, next time don’t forget that some of us need medals.”

“I won’t,” said the Saint.

He sat and watched the door close, and drew slowly and introspectively at his cigarette, and waited while Peggy Warden brought him a highball and put it into his hand. He smiled his thanks at her and oscillated the glass gently so that the liquid circulated coolingly around the ice cubes.

She had a drink herself. She sat down opposite him, and he admired her again in his mind, the fresh clean trimness of her, so fearless and clean-cut, and quietly lovely too, with the natural golden brown of her hair and the steady gray of her eyes. It was a face that one would never remember vividly for any unique lines, and yet it had something independent of conformation that would puzzle the memory and yet always be haunting — as it was haunting him now.

“I’ve been very stupid, Peggy,” he said. “But the case is closed now, as you heard Condor say, and it’s all right the way it is. I just lose sleep over loose ends. Tell me why you killed Byron Ufferlitz.”

11

She couldn’t answer at first. It was as if all the answers were there in her mind, but she couldn’t talk.

He helped her after a little while, and his voice and body were very lazy and peaceful, without any urgency or eagerness. They had a hypnotic quality, unassumed and unthinkably comforting.

“It was for Trilby Andrews, wasn’t it?” he said.

Her eyes drew all their life from his face.

“Andrews — Warden,” he said. “It’s practically an anagram. But I almost missed it. And then the signed photograph in his study. I knew it was familiar — it kept worrying me. But I was looking at it the wrong way. I kept thinking it had to be somebody, and so I never could place it. It took a long time before I realised that it was just like somebody. Like somebody else... What was she?”

“My sister,” she said.

It was as if speech were a strange thing, as if she had never spoken before.

He nodded.

“Yes, of course.”

“When did you know?” she asked, still with that curious preciseness, as if the forming of words was a conscious performance.

“It sort of came gradually. I was all wrong most of the time. Eventually I knew it must have been a woman, because all the ashtrays were emptied. So there wouldn’t be any cigarette-ends with lipstick on them. But then I had the wrong woman. It all hit me together when I found out that you’d never said anything about that scene in the office that I walked in on — when Flane told Ufferlitz he was going to fix him. Naturally that should have been the first thing you’d think of, if you were just an ordinary person. But you never said a word about it.”

“How could I?” she said. “I’d done it, and I didn’t want to be caught, but I didn’t want anyone else to get in a jam because of me.”

He drew again at his cigarette.

“Do you want to tell me the rest of it?”

“There isn’t much else. She was younger than me, and... maybe she was stupid. I don’t know. But she thought she could go places. She might have. She was really beautiful... She came out here, and she met Ufferlitz. I got that from her letters, when she wrote sometimes. But she met a lot of other people too. She never said who it was. But... when she was in trouble, it sounded like Ufferlitz. And then she was dead... I had to find out. I came out here, got a job at MGM, and made contacts and waited until I could get with Ufferlitz. Then I waited. I had to be sure. And I still didn’t know what I could do. But I went to his house once, and there was a picture... After that I bought a gun. I still didn’t know what I’d do with it. But I had it with me last night... Then he came in, and — I suppose I’d been thinking too much. It just ran away with me.”

“You were sure then?”

“He’d been drinking,” she said. “He wasn’t drunk, but he’d been drinking. Enough for him to let down his hair. He’d never been like that with me before. He tried to make love to me. He said ‘You remind me of somebody.’ I asked him if it was the girl in the photograph. He said ‘She was a dumb cluck.’ I asked him why. He said ‘She didn’t know what it was all about, and she lost her head.’... That was when I lost my head. I went around behind him and pretended I was still making up to him, and said ‘Was she just a little bit pregnant?’ — as if I thought it was funny. He said ‘Yeah, the damn fool. I’d have taken care of her. But she lost her head.’... Then I picked up my bag and took the gun out. It was just like being drunk. I said ‘She was probably making a sucker out of you. How did she know it was you?’ He said ‘Jesus Christ, it was me all right, but she didn’t have any sense. I never let a girl down in my life, baby’ — and then I knew it was him, I didn’t think any more, but I knew it was him, and he’d let anybody down, but he had his line off by heart, and she might have listened to the same words I was listening to, and I just didn’t think any more, but I put the gun against the back of his head and pulled the trigger and I was glad about it.”

Simon moved his glass after a while, and she lighted a cigarette and shook the match out, and it was as if her mind had been washed clear at last as a shower washes the sky.

“So,” she said, “then I knew what I’d done, but I didn’t feel any different about it. I just tried to be very careful. I gathered up the papers I’d been working on, and emptied the ashtrays because they were so obvious — though I didn’t stop to think then that I was supposed to have been there anyway — and I dug the bullet out of the panelling. And all the time it didn’t seem like me. I’d done something and I thought it was right, but I knew it was dangerous, and I didn’t see why I should be punished. I just tried to think of everything. I even drove home all the way round by Malibu Lake, and threw the gun and the bullet in... Now you know it all.”

“I’ve forgotten already,” he said.

She still seemed to be wondering where she really was.

“Do you... do you think Condor was really satisfied?”

“I believe him,” said the Saint. “The case is closed. Flane shot himself. So he had a gun. His gun could have killed Ufferlitz, and if he’d dug out the bullet and got rid of it there wouldn’t have been any more evidence.”

“But I still don’t know why Flane shot himself.”

“I drove him into it,” said the Saint. “I was just blundering on, annoying everybody and waiting for a fish to rise. Well, Orlando rose. I knew Ufferlitz must have had something on him, since that seems to have been Ufferlitz’s technique with almost everybody, and I just bluffed it out of him. It was something quite ugly, so we don’t need to feel sorry for him. But I let him think that Ufferlitz had pretty well broadcast it with one of those voice-from-the-grave messages. It was something that would have sold him out of pictures for good and all. So — he just rang his own curtain down. It was a big help, though, because then I was able to come out with a nice solution and make Condor happy and make sure that the case was all tied up and put away.”

She got up and went to the window and looked out, and presently when she came back he knew that the world had begun again for her as if it had never stopped moving.

“There’s no reason why you should do all that for me,” she said.

“I didn’t do it for you,” he said brutally. “I just did it. I like to see puzzles worked out to the right solution. I don’t mean the correct solution. That’s dull pedantic stuff. I mean the right one. Which means the right one for all concerned, as well as I can see it. Don’t try to put too many haloes on me.”

“You’ve already got one, haven’t you?”

He finished his drink, and peeled himself out of the chair, the whole whipcord length of him, and stretched himself with the physical luxury of a cat, so that suddenly it seemed as if his world also began again; only this was a world which began again every day, and would never cease to begin again, and everything in the past was only a holiday. She saw his face dark and debonair in the shaded lamplight, and the ageless amusement in his blue eyes, and already she had the feeling that he was only a legend that had paused for a few hours.

“Don’t ever be sure of it,” he said.

He thought about her some more as he drove west again on Sunset, but there was someone else on his mind too, so that his thought became somewhat confused. Only a little while ago he had been falsely accusing April Quest, and he realised now that once she recovered her poise she had been quietly leading him on — for mischief, or because she had to know what he would propose to do about his belief? Or perhaps some of both... Well, he’d still given the right answer... So now there was a threat of another unwanted halo hanging over his head, and a few more pitfalls between them. But nothing, he hoped, that the drink he had asked her to save for him wouldn’t cure. Or at least the drink after that.