II. Palm Springs

Introduction

Palm Springs, if anybody doesn’t know it by this time, is an oasis in the desert a little more than a hundred miles east of Los Angeles. When I first went there, the business district was about three blocks long and a block wide; there were about three hotels, much too big for the town, a reasonable number of homes, a few auto courts, and a dude ranch on the outskirts. Today the neon signs of the motels greet you miles out in the desert and escort you in unbroken procession to a main street as long as the whole village used to be when I first knew it, and the houses have spread way out where we used to ride after jackrabbits, and they have flowed all around the dude ranch on the other side, and then for about fifteen miles out on the highway beyond more villages or communities have sprung up in an almost uninterrupted chain to take advantage of the overflow that even this enlarged Palm Springs cannot swallow; I seldom go there anymore, because it is too different from the place I used to love.

But I spent six consecutive winters there in the good old days which ended at Munich, and it would have been strange if I had never set a story there.

The actual process of doing it, however, suffered some vicissitudes.

My first attempt was when RKO was making Saint movies. Thinking how pleasant it would be to work on a picture in my own favorite location, I cleverly suggested that we should make one called The Saint in Palm Springs. They liked the idea very much, and I went to work on the script. It turned out to be an excellent story; so naturally the producers (who always knew that they could have written much better Saint stories than I did, only they never got around to it) didn’t like it much. They hired various wizards to improve it, and did such a thorough job that the final script contained absolutely nothing whatsoever of mine except the title. I have never been able to guess why they flinched from that ultimate alteration, unless it was because they feared they might obscure the genius of the inspired executive who decreed that this epic should be shot at Palmdale, which is only a hundred and fifty miles away from Palm Springs.

Then in early 1941, Dan Longwell, chairman of the Editorial Board of Life magazine, paid me a visit in California. I had known Dan many years before, when he was one of the editors of my New York publishers, a firm then known as Doubleday, Doran & Co. (Everything in this busy life keeps changing, as we reminiscent ancients are continually being reminded.) Dan, or somebody on his staff, had abruptly recalled that in 1841 Edgar Allen Poe had published The Murders in the Rue Morgue, that therefore in 1941 the world should theoretically be celebrating the centenary of the detective story, and that therefore Life should somehow be represented in the chorus of tribute.

Dan’s idea was that Life should mark the occasion by publishing the first “mystery” story of the new era, and for reasons which I am far too bashful to speculate about, he wanted me to write it. It was, of course, to be done in a series of photographs with captions, rather like stills from an unmade movie.

Again I thought of Palm Springs, and what could be better than a trip there, in good company, at the expense of Life?

But RKO still owned (and for that matter still owns) the original Palm Springs story I had written, since they had paid me handsomely for it — even though to this day they have never used a line of it. (This is why it costs you so much to go to the movies.)

So I wrote another story, and was especially careful to include three beautiful girls in it. And since Life magazine, at that time anyway, had not discovered that it was as great a creative genius as the current crop of producers at RKO, they stupidly accepted it as I wrote it. We went to Palm Springs with three models and a photographer — and they not only left me to direct the shots but, God help me, made me play the part of the Saint as well.

This was my first and only appearance as a film star, even on static film, and I am not going to pretend I didn’t enjoy it. A hell of a time was had by all.

The resultant million-dollar comic strip was duly published in eight pages of Life magazine in May 1941. And there again an immortal Palm Springs story might have been decently interred.

But I am a very persistent, or at least economical, writer. I still wanted a Palm Springs story, and even after a lapse of years I thought this was a good one. I went to work elaborating it. And the story you are about to read is what came out.

— Leslie Charteris (1951)

1

“Look,” said Freddie Pellman belligerently. “Your name is Simon Templar, isn’t it?”

“I think so,” Simon told him.

“You are the feller they call the Saint?”

“So I’m told.”

“The Robin Hood of modern crime?”

Simon was tolerant.

“That’s a rather fancy way of putting it.”

“Okay then,” Pellman lurched slightly on his bar stool, and took hold of his highball glass more firmly for support.

“You’re the man I want. I’ve got a job for you.”

The Saint sighed.

“Thanks. But I wasn’t looking for a job. I came to Palm Springs to have fun.”

“You’ll have plenty of fun. But you’ve got to take this job.”

“I don’t want a job,” said the Saint. “What is it?”

“I need a bodyguard,” said Pellman.

He had a loud harsh voice that made Simon think of a rusty frog. Undoubtedly it derived some of this attractive quality from his consumption of alcohol, which was considerable. Simon didn’t need to have seen him drinking to know this. The blemishes of long indulgence had worked deeply into the mottled puffiness of his complexion, the pinkish smeariness of his eyes, and the sagging lines under them. It was even more noticeable because he was not much over thirty, and could once have been quite good-looking in a very conventional way. But things like that frequently happen to spoiled young men whose only material accomplishment in life has been the by no means negligible one of arranging to be born into a family with more millions than most people hope to see thousands.

Simon Templar knew about him, of course — as did practically every member of the newspaper-reading public of the United States, not to mention a number of other countries. In a very different way, Freddie Pellman was just as notorious a public figure as the Saint. He had probably financed the swallowing of more champagne than any other individual in the twentieth century. He had certainly been thrown out of more night clubs, and paid more bills for damage to more hotels than any other exponent of the art of uproar. And the number of complaisant show girls and models who were indebted to him for such souvenirs of a lovely friendship as mink coats, diamond bracelets, Packards, and other similar trinkets would have made the late King Solomon feel relatively sex-starved.

He travelled with a permanent entourage of three incredibly beautiful young ladies — one blonde, one brunette, and one redhead. That is, the assortment of colorings was permanent. The personnel itself changed at various intervals, as one faithful collaborator after another would retire to a well-earned rest, to be replaced by another of even more dazzling perfections, but the vacancy was always filled by another candidate of similar complexion, so that the harmonious balance of varieties was retained, and any type of pulchritude could always be found at a glance. Freddie blandly referred to them as his secretaries, and there is no doubt that they had left a memorable trail of scandal in every playground and every capital city in Europe and the Americas.

This was the man who said he wanted a bodyguard, and the Saint looked at him with cynical speculation.

“What’s the matter?” he asked coolly. “Is somebody’s husband gunning for you?”

“No, I never mess about with married women — they’re too much grief.” Pellman was delightfully insensitive and uninhibited. “This is serious. Look.”

He dragged a crumpled sheet of paper out of his pocket and unfolded it clumsily. Simon took it and looked it over.

It was a piece of plain paper on which a cutting had been pasted. The cutting was from Life, and from the heading it appeared to have formed part of a layout reviewing the curtain calls in the careers of certain famous public enemies. This particular picture showed a crumpled figure stretched out on a sidewalk with two policemen standing over it in attitudes faintly reminiscent of big-game hunters posing with their kill, surrounded by the usual crowd of gaping blank-faced spectators. The caption said:

A village policemans gun wrote finis to the career of “Smoke Johnny” Implicato, three times kidnaper and killer, after Freddie Pellman, millionaire playboy, recognised him in a Palm Springs restaurant last Christmas Day and held him in conversation until police arrived.

Underneath it was pencilled in crude capitals:

DID YOU EVER WONDER HOW JOHNNY FELT? WELL YOU'LL SOON FIND OUT. YOU GOT IT COMING MISTER. A FRIEND OF JOHNNY.

Simon felt the paper, turned it over, and handed it back.

“A bit corny,” he observed, “but it must be a thrill for you. How did you get it?”

“It was pushed under the front door during the night. I’ve rented a house here, and that’s where it was. Under the front door. The Filipino boy found it in the morning. The door was locked, of course, but the note had been pushed under.”

When Freddie Pellman thought that anything he had to say was important, which was often, he was never satisfied to say it once. He said it several times over, trying it out in different phrasings, apparently in the belief that his audience was either deaf or imbecile but might accidentally grasp the point of it were presented often enough from a sufficient variety of angles.

“Have you talked to the police about it?” Simon asked.

“What, in a town like this? I’d just as soon tell the Boy Scouts. In a town like this, the police wouldn’t know what to do with a murderer if he walked into the station and gave them a signed confession.”

“They got Johnny,” Simon pointed out.

“Listen, do you know who got Johnny? I got Johnny. Who recognised him? I did. I’d been reading one of those true detective magazines in a barber shop, and there was a story about him in it. In one of those true detective magazines. I recognised him from the picture. Did you read what it said in that clipping?”

“Yes,” said the Saint, but Freddie was not so easily headed off.

He took the paper out of his pocket again.

“You see what it says? ‘A village policeman’s gun wrote finis to the career...’ ”

He read the entire caption aloud, following the lines with his forefinger, with the most careful enunciation and dramatic emphasis, to make sure that the Saint had not been baffled by any of the longer words.

“All right,” said the Saint patiently. “So you spotted him and put the finger on him. And now one of his pals is sore about it.”

“And that’s why I need a bodyguard.”

“I can tell you a good agency in Los Angeles. You can call them up, and they’ll have a first-class, guaranteed, bonded bodyguard here in three hours, armed to the teeth.”

“But I don’t want an ordinary agency bodyguard. I want the very best man there is. I want the Saint.”

“Thanks,” said the Saint. “But I don’t want to guard a body.”

“Look,” said Pellman aggressively, “will you name your own salary? Anything you like. Just name it.”

Simon looked around the bar. It was starting to fill up for the cocktail session with the strange assortment of types and costumes which give Palm Springs crowds an unearthly variety that no other resort in America can approach. Everything was represented — cowboys, dudes, tourists, trippers, travelling salesmen, local business men, winter residents, Hollywood; men and women of all shapes and sizes and ages, in Levis, shorts, business suits, slack suits, sun suits, play suits, Magnin models, riding breeches, tennis outfits, swim suits, and practically nothing. This was vacation and flippancy and fun and irresponsibility for a while, and it was what the Saint had promised himself.

“If I took a job like that,” he said, “it’d cost you a thousand dollars a day.”

Freddie Pellman blinked at him for a moment with the intense concentration of the alcoholic.

Then he pulled a thick roll of green paper out of his pocket. He fumbled through it, and selected a piece, and pushed it into the Saint’s hand. The Saint’s blue eyes rested on it with a premonition of doom. Included in its decorative art work was a figure “1” followed by three zeros. Simon counted them.

“That’s for today,” said Freddie. “You’re hired. Let’s have a drink.”

The Saint sighed.

“I think I will,” he said.

2

One reason why there were no gray hairs on the Saint’s dark head was that he never wasted any energy on vain regrets. He even had a humorous fatalism about his errors. He had stuck his neck out, and the consequences were strictly at his invitation. He felt that way about his new employment. He had been very sweetly nailed with his own smartness, and the only thing to do was to take it with a grin and see if it might be fun. And it might. After all, murder and mayhem had been mentioned, and to Simon Templar any adventure was always worth at least a glance. It might not be so dull...

“You’ll have to move into the house, of course,” Pellman said, and they drove to the Mirador Hotel to redeem the Saint’s modest luggage, which had already run up a bill of some twenty dollars for the few hours it had occupied a room.

Pellman’s house was a new edifice perched on the sheer hills that form the western wall of the town. Palm Springs itself lies on the flat floor of the valley that eases imperceptibly down to the sub-sea level of the Salton Sea, but on the western side it nestles tightly against the sharp surges of broken granite that soar up with precipitous swiftness to the eternal snows of San Jacinto. The private road to it curled precariously up the rugged edges of brown leaping cliffs, and from the jealously stolen lawn in front of the building you could look down and see Palm Springs spread out beneath you like a map, and beyond it the floor of the desert mottled gray-green with greasewood and weeds and cactus and smoke tree, spreading through infinite clear distances across to the last spurs of the San Bernardino mountains and widening southwards towards the broad baking spreads that had once been the bed of a forgotten sea whose tide levels were still graven on the parched rocks that bordered the plain.

The house itself looked more like an artist’s conception of an oasis hideaway than any artist would have believed. It was a sprawling bungalow in the California Spanish style that meandered lazily among pools and patios as a man might have dreamed it in an idle hour — a thing of white stucco walls and bright red tile roofs, of deep cool verandahs and inconsequential arches, of sheltering palm trees and crazy flagstones, of gay beds of petunias and ramparts of oleanders and white columns dripping with the richness of bougainvillea. It was a place where an illusion had been so skilfully created that with hardly any imagination at all you could feel the gracious tempo of a century that would never come again; where you might see courtly hacendados bowing over slim white hands with the suppleness of velvet and steel, and hear the tinkle of fountains and the shuffle of soft-footed servants, and smell the flowers in the raven hair of laughing señoritas; where at the turn of any corner you might even find a nymph—

Yes, you might always find a nymph, Simon agreed, as they turned a corner by the swimming pool and there was a sudden squeal and he had a lightning glimpse of long golden limbs uncurling and leaping up, and rounded breasts vanishing almost instantaneously through the door of the bath house, so swiftly and fleetingly that he could easily have been convinced that he had dreamed it.

“That’s Esther,” Freddie explained casually. “She likes taking her clothes off.”

Simon remembered the much-publicised peculiarities of the Pellman ménage, and took an even more philosophical attitude towards his new job.

“One of your secretaries?” he murmured.

“That’s right,” Freddie said blandly. “Come in and meet the others.”

The others were in the living-room, if such a baronial chamber could be correctly designated by such an ordinary name. From the inside, it looked like a Hollywood studio designer’s idea of something between a Cordoban mosque and the main hall of a medieval castle. It had a tiled floor and a domed gold mosaic ceiling, with leopard and tiger skin rugs, Monterey furniture, and fake suits of armor in between.

“This is Miss Starr,” Freddie introduced. “Call her Ginny. Mr Templar.”

Ginny had red hair like hot dark gold, and a creamy skin with freckles. You could study all of it except about two square feet which were accidentally concealed by a green Lastex swim-suit that clung to her soft ripe figure — where it wasn’t artistically cut away for better exposures — like emerald paint. She sat at a table by herself, playing solitaire. She looked up and gave the Saint a long disturbing smile, and said, “Hi.”

“And this is Lissa O’Neill,” Freddie said.

Lissa was the blonde. Her hair was the color of young Indiana corn, and her eyes were as blue as the sky, and there were dew-dipped roses in her cheeks that might easily have grown beside the Shannon. She lay stretched out on a couch with a book propped up on her flat stomach, and she wore an expensively simple white play suit against which her slim legs looked warmly gilded.

Simon glanced at the book. It had the lurid jacket of a Crime Club mystery.

“How is it?” he asked.

“Not bad,” she said. “I thought I had it solved in the third chapter, but now I think I’m wrong. What did he say your name was?”

“She’s always reading mysteries,” Ginny put in. “She’s our tame crime expert — Madam Hawkshaw. Every time anyone gets murdered in the papers she knows all about it.”

“And why not?” Lissa insisted. “They’re usually so stupid, anyone but a detective could see it.”

“You must have been reading the right books,” said the Saint.

“Did he say ‘Templar’?” Lissa asked.

The door opened then, and Esther came in. Simon recognised her by her face, a perfect oval set with warm brown eyes and broken by a red mouth that always seemed to be whispering “ If we were alone... ” A softly waved mane the color of smoked chestnuts framed the face in a dark dreamy cloud. The rest of her was not quite so easily identifiable, for she had wrapped it in a loose blue robe that left a little scope for speculation. Not too much, for the lapels only managed to meet at her waist, and just a little below that the folds shrank away from the impudent obtrusion of a shapely thigh.

“A fine thing,” she said. “Walking in on me when I didn’t have a stitch on.”

“I bet you loved it,” Ginny said, cheating a black ten out of the bottom of the pack and slipping it on to a red jack.

“Do we get introduced?” said Esther.

“Meet Miss Swinburne,” said Freddie. “Mr Templar. Now you know everybody. I want you to feel at home. My name’s Freddie. We’re going to call you Simon. All right?”

“All right,” said the Saint.

“Then we’re all at home,” said Freddie, making his point. “We don’t have to have any formality. If any of the girls go for you, that’s all right too. We’re all pals together.”

“Me first,” said Ginny.

“Why you?” objected Esther. “After all, if you’d been there to give him the first preview—”

The Saint took out his cigarette-case with as much poise as any man could have called on in the circumstances.

“The line forms on the right,” he remarked. “Or you can see my agent. But don’t let’s be confused about this. I only work here. You ought to tell them, Freddie.”

The Filipino boy wheeled in the portable bar, and Pellman threaded his way over to it and began to work.

“The girls know all about that threatening letter. I showed it to them this morning. Didn’t I, Lissa? You remember that note I showed you?” Reassured by confirmation, Freddie picked up the cocktail shaker again and said, “Well, Simon Templar is going to take care of us. You know who he is, don’t you? The Saint. That’s who he is,” said Freddie, leaving no room for misunderstanding.

“I thought so,” said Lissa, with her cornflower eyes clinging to the Saint’s face. “I’ve seen pictures of you.” She put her book down and moved her long legs invitingly to make some room on the couch. “What do you think about that note?”

Simon accepted the invitation. He didn’t think she was any less potentially dangerous than the other two, but she was a little more quiet and subtle about it. Besides, she at least had something else to talk about.

“Tell me what you think,” he said. “You might have a good point of view.”

“I thought it sounded rather like something out of a cheap magazine.”

“There you are!” exclaimed Freddie triumphantly, from the middle distance. “Isn’t that amazing? Eh, Simon? Listen to this, Ginny. That’s what she reads detective stories for. You’ll like this. D’you know what Simon said when I showed him that note? What did you say, Simon?”

“I said it sounded a bit corny.”

“There!” said Freddie, personally vindicated. “That’s the very word he used. He said it was corny. That’s what he said as soon as he read it.”

“That’s what I thought too,” said Esther, “only I didn’t like to say so. Probably it’s just some crackpot trying to be funny.”

“On the other hand,” Simon mentioned, “a lot of crackpots have killed people, and plenty of real murders have been pretty corny. And whether you’re killed by a crackpot or the most rational person in the world, and whether the performance is corny or not, you end up just as dead.”

“Don’t a lot of criminals read detective stories?” Lissa asked.

The Saint nodded.

“Most of them. And they get good ideas from them, too. Most writers are pretty clever, in spite of the funny way they look, and when they go in for crime they put in a lot of research and invention that a practising thug doesn’t have the time or the ability to do for himself. But he could pick up a lot of hints from reading the right authors.”

“He could learn a lot of mistakes not to make, too.”

“Maybe there’s something in that,” said the Saint. “Perhaps the stupid criminals you were talking about are only the ones who don’t read books. Maybe the others get to be so clever that they never get caught, and so you never hear about them at all.”

“Brrr,” said Ginny. “You’re giving me goose-pimples. Why don’t you just call the cops?”

“Because the Saint’s a lot smarter than the cops,” said Freddie. “That’s what I hired him for. He can run rings round the cops any day. He’s been doing it for years. Lissa knows all about him, because she reads things. You tell them about him, Lissa.”

He came over with clusters of Manhattans in his hands, poured out in goblets that would have been suitable for fruit punch.

“Let her off,” said the Saint hastily. “If she really knows the whole story of my life she might shock somebody. Let’s do some serious drinking instead.”

“Okay,” said Freddie amiably. “You’re the boss. You go on being the mystery man. Let’s all get stinking.”

The fact that they did not all get stinking was certainly no fault of Freddie Pellman’s. It could not be denied that he did his generous best to assist his guests to attain that state of ideal ossification. His failure could only be attributed to the superior discretion of the company, and the remarkably high level of resistance which they seemed to have in common.

It was quite a classic performance in its way. Freddie concocted two more Manhattans, built on the same scale as milk shakes. There was then a brief breathing spell while they went to their rooms to change. Then they went to the Doll House for dinner. They had two more normal-sized cocktails before the meal, and champagne with it. After that they had brandy. Then they proceeded to visit all the other bars up and down the main street, working from north to south and back again. They had Zombies at the Luau, Planter’s Punches at the Cubana, highballs at the Chi Chi, and more highballs at Bil-Al’s. Working back, they freshened up with some beer at Happy’s, clamped it down with a Collins at the Del Tahquitz, topped it with Daiquiris at the Royal Palms, and discovered tequila at Claridge’s. This brought them back to the Doll House for another bottle of champagne. They were all walking on their own feet and talking intelligibly, if not profoundly. People have received medals for less notable feats. It must be admitted nevertheless that there had been a certain amount of cheating. The girls, undoubtedly educated by past experiences, had contrived to leave a respectable number of drinks unfinished, and Simon Templar, who had also been around, had sundry legerdemains of his own for keeping control of the situation.

Freddie Pellman probably had an advantage over all of them in the insulating effect of past picklings, but Simon had to admit that the man was remarkable. He had been alcoholic when Simon met him, but he seemed to progress very little beyond that stage. Possibly he navigated with a little more difficulty, but he could still stand upright; possibly his speech became a little more slurred, but he could still be understood; certainly he became rather more glassy-eyed, but he could still see what was going on. It was as if there was a definite point beyond which his calloused tissues had no further power to assimilate liquid stimulus: being sodden already, the overflow washed over them without depositing any added exhilaration.

He sat and looked at his glass and said, “There must be some other joints we haven’t been to yet.”

Then he rolled gently over sideways and lay flat on the floor, snoring.

Ginny gazed down at him estimatingly and said, “That’s only the third time I’ve seen him pass out. It must be catching up with him.”

“Well, now we can relax,” said Esther, and moved her chair closer to the Saint.

“I think we’d better get him home,” Lissa said.

It seemed like a moderately sound idea, since the head waiter and the proprietor were advancing towards the scene with professional restraint.

Simon helped to hoist Freddie up, and they got him out to the car without waking him. The Saint drove them back to the house, and the lights went up as they stopped at the door. The Filipino boy came out and helped phlegmatically with the disembarcation. He didn’t show either surprise or disapproval. Apparently such homecomings were perfectly normal events in his experience.

Between them they carried the sleeper to his room and laid him on the bed.

“Okay,” said the boy. “I take care of him now.”

He began to work Freddie expertly out of his coat.

“You seem to have the touch,” said the Saint. “How long have you been in this job?”

“’Bout six months. He’s all right. You leave him to me, sir. I put him to bed.”

“What’s your name?”

“Angelo, sir. I take care of him. You want anything, you tell me.”

“Thanks,” said the Saint, and drifted back to the living-room.

He arrived in the course of a desultory argument which suggested that the threat which had been virtually ignored all evening had begun to seem a little less ludicrous with the arrival of bedtime.

“You can move in with me, Ginny,” Lissa was saying.

“Nuts,” said Ginny. “You’ll sit up half the night reading, and I want some sleep.”

“For a change,” said Esther. “I’ll move in with you, Lissa.”

“You snore,” said Lissa candidly.

“I don’t!”

“And where does that leave me?” Ginny protested.

“I expect you’ll find company,” Esther said sulkily. “You’ve been working for it hard enough.”

Simon coughed discreetly.

“Angelo is in charge,” he said, “and I’m going to turn in.”

“What, so soon?” pouted Esther. “Let’s all have another drink first. I know, let’s have a game of strip poker.”

“I’m sorry,” said the Saint. “I’m not so young as I was this afternoon. I’m going to get some sleep.”

“I thought you were supposed to be a bodyguard,” said Ginny.

The Saint smiled.

“I am, darling. I guard Freddie’s body.”

“Freddie’s passed out. You ought to keep us company.”

“It’s all so silly,” Lissa said. “I’m not scared. We haven’t anything to be afraid of. Even if that note was serious, it’s Freddie they’re after. Nobody’s going to do anything to us.”

“How do you know they won’t get into the wrong room?” Esther objected.

“You can hang a sign on your door,” Simon suggested, “giving them directions. Goodnight, pretty maidens.”

He made his exit before there could be any more discussion, and went to his bedroom.

The bedrooms trailed away from the house in a long L-shaped wing. Freddie’s room was at the far end of the wing, and his door faced down the broad, screened verandah by which the rooms were reached. Simon had the room next to it, from which one of the girls had been moved; their rooms were now strung around the angle of the L towards the main building. There was a communicating door on both sides of his room. He tried the one which should have opened in to Freddie’s room, but he found that there was a second door backing closely against it, and that one was locked. He went around by the verandah, and found Angelo preparing to turn out the lights.

“He sleep well now,” said the Filipino with a grin. “You no worry.”

Freddie was neatly tucked into bed, his clothes carefully folded over a chair. Simon went over and looked at him. He certainly wasn’t dead at that point — his snoring was stertorously alive.

The Saint located the other side of the communicating door, and tried the handle. It still wouldn’t move, and there was no key in the lock.

“D’you know how to open this, Angelo?” he asked.

The Filipino shook his head.

“Don’t know. Is lock?”

“Is lock.”

“I never see key. Maybe somewhere.”

“Maybe,” Simon agreed.

It didn’t look like a profitable inquiry to pursue much further, and Simon figured that it probably didn’t matter. He still hadn’t developed any real conviction of danger over-shadowing the house, and at that moment the idea seemed particularly far-fetched. He went out of the room, and the Filipino switched off the light.

“Everything already lock up, sir. You no worry. I go to sleep now.”

“Happy dreams,” said the Saint.

He returned to his own room, and undressed and rolled into bed. He felt in pretty good shape, but he didn’t want to start the next day with an unnecessary headache. He was likely to have enough other headaches without that. Aside from the drinking pace and the uninhibited feminine hazards, he felt that a day would come when Freddie Pellman’s conversational style would cease to hold him with the same eager fascination that it created at the first encounter. Eventually, he felt, a thousand dollars a day would begin to seem like a relatively small salary for listening to Freddie talk. But that was something that could be faced when the time came. Maybe he would be able to explain it to Freddie and get a raise...

With that he fell asleep. He didn’t know how long it lasted, but it was deep and relaxed. And it ended with an electrifying suddenness that was as devastating as the collapse of a tall tower of porcelain. But the sound was actually a little different. It was a shrill shattering scream that brought him wide awake in an instant and had him on his feet while the echo was still ringing in his ears.

3

There was enough starlight outside for the windows to be rectangles of silver, but inside the room he was only just able to find his dressing-gown without groping. His gun was already in his hand, for his fingers had closed on it instinctively where the butt lay just under the edge of the mattress at the natural length of his arm as he lay in bed. He threw the robe on and whipped a knot into the belt, and was on his way to the door within two seconds of waking.

Then the scream came again, louder now that he wasn’t hearing it through a haze of sleep, and in a way more deliberate. And it came, he was certain, not from the direction in which he had first automatically placed it, without thinking, but from the opposite quarter — the room on the opposite side of his own.

He stopped in mid-stride, and turned quickly back to the other communicating door. This one was not locked. It was a double door like the one to Freddie’s room, but the second handle turned smoothly with his fingers. As he started to open it, the door outlined itself with light; he did the only possible thing, and threw it wide open quickly but without any noise, and stepped swiftly through and to one side, with his gun balanced for instant aiming in any direction.

He didn’t see anything to aim at. He didn’t see anyone there except Lissa.

She was something to see, if one had the time. She was sitting upright in bed, and she wore a filmy flesh-colored nightgown with white overtones. At least, that was the first impression. After a while, you realised that it was just a filmy white nightgown and the flesh color was Lissa. She had her mouth open, and she looked exactly as if she was going to scream again. Then she didn’t look like that any more.

“Hullo,” she said, quite calmly. “I thought that’d fetch you.”

“Wouldn’t there have been a more subtle way of doing it?” Simon asked.

“But there was someone here, really. Look.”

Then he saw it — the black wooden hilt of a knife that stood up starkly from the bedding close beside her. The resignation went out of his face again as if it had never been there.

“Where did he go?”

“I don’t know — out of one of the doors. If he didn’t go into your room, he must have gone out on to the porch or into Ginny’s room.”

Simon crossed to the other door and stepped out on to the verandah. Lights came on as he did so, and he saw Freddie Pellman swaying in the doorway at the dead end of the L.

“Whassamarrer?” Freddie demanded thickly. “What goes on?”

“We seem to have had a visitor,” said the Saint succinctly. “Did anybody come through your room?”

“Anybody come through my room? I dunno. No. I didn’t see anybody. Why should anybody come through my room?”

“To kiss you goodnight,” said the Saint tersely, and headed in the other direction.

There was no other movement on the verandah. He knocked briefly on the next door down, and opened it and switched on the light. The bed was rumpled but empty, and a shaft of light came through the communicating door. All the bedrooms seemed to have communicating doors, which either had its advantages or it didn’t. Simon went on into the next room. The bed in there had the covers pulled high up, and appeared to be occupied by a small quivering hippopotamus. He went up to it and tapped it on the most convenient bulge.

“Come on,” he said. “I just saw a mouse crawl in with you.”

There was a stifled squeal, and Esther’s head and shoulders and a little more jumped into view in the region of the pillow.

“Go away!” she yelped inarticulately. “I haven’t done anything—”

Then she recognised him, and stopped abruptly. She took a moment to straighten her dark hair. At the same time the other half of the baby hippopotamus struggled up beside her, revealing that it had a red-gold head and a snub nose.

“Oh, it’s you,” said Ginny. “Come on in. We’ll make room for you.”

“Well, make yourselves at home,” said Esther. “This just happens to be my room—”

“Little children,” said the Saint, with great patience, “I don’t want to spoil anybody’s fun, but I’m looking for a hairy thug who seems to be rushing around trying to stick knives into people.”

They glanced at each other in a moment’s silence.

“Wh-who did he stick a knife into?” Ginny asked.

“Nobody. He missed. But he was trying. Did you see him?”

She shook her head.

“Nobody’s been in here,” said Esther, “except Ginny. I heard a frightful scream, and I jumped up and put the light on, and the next minute Ginny came rushing in and got into my bed.”

“It was Lissa,” said Ginny. “I’m sure it was. The scream sounded like it was right next door. So I ran in here. But I didn’t see anyone.” She swallowed, and her eyes grew big.

“Is Lissa—?”

“No,” said the Saint bluntly. “Lissa’s as well as you are. And so is Freddie. But somebody’s been up to mischief tonight, and we’re looking for him. Now will you please get out of bed and pull yourselves together, because we’re going to search the house.”

“I can’t,” said Esther. “I haven’t got anything on.”

“Don’t let it bother you,” said the Saint tiredly. “If a burglar sees you he’ll probably swoon on the spot, and then the rest of us will jump on him and tie him up.”

He took a cigarette from a package beside the bed, and went on his way. It seemed as if he had wasted a lot of time, but actually it had scarcely been a minute. Out on the verandah he saw that the door of Lissa’s room was open, and through it he heard Freddie Pellman’s obstructed croak repetitiously imploring her to tell him what had happened. As he went on towards the junction of the main building, lights went on in the living-room and a small mob of chattering figures burst out and almost swarmed over him as he opened the door into the arched alcove that the bedroom wing took off from. Simon spread out his arms and collected them in a sheaf.

“Were you going somewhere, boys?”

There were three of them, in various interesting costumes. Reading from left to right, they were: Angelo, in red, green, and purple striped pyjamas, another Filipino in a pair of very natty bright blue trousers, and a large gentleman in a white nightshirt with spiked moustaches and a Vandyke.

Angelo said, “We hear some lady scream, so we come to see what’s the matter.”

Simon looked at him shrewdly.

“How long have you worked for Mr Pellman?”

“About six months, sir.”

“And you never heard any screaming before?”

The boy looked at him sheepishly, without answering.

The stout gentleman in the nightshirt said with some dignity: “Ziss wass not ordinairy screaming. Ziss wass quite deefairent. It sounds like somebody iss in trouble. So we sink about ze note zat Meestair Pellman receive, and we come to help.”

“Who are you?” asked the Saint.

“I am Louis, sir. I am ze chef.”

“Enfin, quand nous aurons pris notre assassin, vous aurez le plaisir de nous servir ses rognons, légèrement grillés.”

The man stared at him blankly for a second or two, and finally said, “I’m sorry, sir, I don’t ondairstand.”

“You don’t speak French?”

“No, sir.”

“Then what are you doing with that accent?”

“I am Italian, sir, but I lairn this accent because she iss good business.”

Simon gave up for the time being.

“Well, let’s get on with this and search the house. You didn’t see any strangers on your way here?”

“No, sir,” Angelo answered. “Did anyone get hurt?”

“No, but we seem to have had a visitor.”

“I no understand,” the Filipino insisted. “Everything lock up, sir. I see to it myself.”

“Then somebody opened something,” said the Saint curtly. “Go and look.”

He went on his own way to the front door. It was locked and bolted. He opened it and went outside.

Although there seemed to have been a large variety of action and dialogue since Lissa’s scream had awakened him, it had clicked through at such a speed that the elapsed time was actually surprisingly short. As he stood outside and gave his eyes a moment to adjust themselves to the darkness he tried to estimate how long it had been. Not long enough, he was sure, for anyone to travel very far... And then the night cleared from his eyes, and he could see almost as well as a cat could have seen there. He went to the edge of the terrace in front of the house, and looked down. He could see the private road which was the only vehicular approach to the place dropping and winding away to his left like a gray ribbon carelessly thrown down the mountainside, and there was no car or moving shadow on it. Most of the street plan at the foot of the hill was as clearly visible also as if he had been looking down on it from an airplane, but he could see nothing human or mechanical moving there either. And even with all his delays, it hardly seemed possible that anything or anyone could have travelled far enough to be out of sight by that time — at least without making a noise that he would have heard on his way through the house.

There were, of course, other ways than the road. The steep slopes both upwards and downwards could have been negotiated by an agile man. Simon walked very quietly around the building and the gardens, scanning every surface that he could see. Certainly no one climbing up or down could have covered a great distance: on the other hand, if the climber had gone only a little way and stopped moving he would have been very hard to pick out of the ragged patchwork of lights and shadows that the starlight made out of tumbles of broken rock and clumps of cactus and incense and grease-wood. By the same token, a man on foot would be impossibly dangerous game to hunt at night: he only had to keep still, whereas the hunter had to move, and thereby give his quarry the first timed deliberate shot at him.

The Saint could be reckless enough, but he had no suicidal inclinations. He stood motionless for several minutes in different bays of shadow, scanning the slopes with the unblinking patience of a head-hunter. But nothing moved, and presently he went back in by the front door and found Angelo.

“Well?” he said.

“I no find anything, sir. Everything all lock up. You come see yourself.”

Simon made the circuit with him. Where there were glass doors they were all metal framed, with sturdy locking handles and bolts in addition. All the windows were screened, and the screen frames fastened on the inside. None of them showed a sign of having been forced or tampered with in any way, and the Saint was a good enough burglar in his own right to know that doors and casements of that type could not have been fastened from outside without leaving a sign that any such thing had been done — particularly by a man who was trying to depart from the premises in a great hurry.

His tour ended back in Lissa’s room, where the rest of the house party was now gathered. He paused in the doorway.

“All right, Angelo,” he said. “You can go back to your beauty sleep... Oh, yes, you could bring me a drink first.”

“I’ve got one for you already,” Freddie called out.

Simon went on in.

“That’s fine.” He stood by the portable bar, which had already been set up for business, and watched Freddie manipulating a bottle. It was a feat which Freddie could apparently perform in any condition short of complete unconsciousness. All things considered, he had really staged quite a comeback. Of course, he had had some sleep. The Saint looked at his watch, and saw that it was a few minutes after four. He said, “I think it’s so nice to get up early and catch the best part of the morning, don’t you?”

“Did you find out anything?” Freddie demanded.

“Not a thing,” said the Saint. “But that might add up to quite something.”

He took the highball that Freddie handed him, and strolled over to the windows. They were the only ones in the house he had not yet examined. But they were exactly like the others — the screens latched and intact.

Lissa still sat up in the bed, the covers huddled up under her chin, staring now and again at the knife driven into the mattress, as if it were a snake that somebody was trying to frighten her with and she wasn’t going to be frightened. Simon turned back and sat down beside her. He also looked at the knife.

“It looks like a kitchen knife,” he remarked.

“I wouldn’t let anyone touch it,” she said, “on account of fingerprints.”

Simon nodded and smiled, and took a handkerchief from the pocket of his robe. Using the cloth for insulation, he pulled the knife out and held it delicately while he inspected it. It was a kitchen knife — a cheap piece of steel with a riveted wooden handle, but sharp and pointed enough to have done all the lethal work of the most expensive blade.

“Probably there aren’t any prints on it,” he said, “but it doesn’t cost anything to try. Even most amateurs have heard about fingerprints these days, and they all wear gloves. Still, we’ll see if we have any luck.”

He wrapped the knife carefully in the handkerchief and laid it on a Carter Dickson mystery on the bedside table.

“You’re going to get tired of telling the story,” he said, “but I haven’t heard it yet. Would you like to tell me what happened?”

“I don’t really know,” she said. “I’d been asleep. And then suddenly for no reason at all I woke up. At least I thought I woke up, but maybe I didn’t, anyway it was just like a nightmare. But I just knew there was somebody in my room, and I went cold all over, it was just as if a lot of spiders were crawling all over me, and I didn’t feel as if I could move or scream or anything, and I just lay there hardly breathing and my heart was thumping away till I thought it would burst.”

“Does that always happen when somebody comes into your room?” Ginny asked interestedly.

“Shut up,” said the Saint.

“I was trying to listen,” Lissa said, “to see if I couldn’t hear something. I mean if he was really moving or if I’d just woken up with the frights and imagined it, and my ears were humming so that it didn’t seem as if I could hear anything. But I did hear him. I could hear him breathing.”

“Was that when you screamed?”

“No. Well, I don’t know. It all happened at once. But suddenly I knew he was awful close, right beside the bed, and then I knew I was wide awake and it wasn’t just a bad dream, and then I screamed the first time and tried to wriggle out of bed on the other side from where he was, to get away from him, and he actually touched my shoulder, and then there was a sort of thump right beside me — that must have been the knife — and then he ran away and I heard him rush through one of the doors, and I lay there and screamed again because I thought that would bring you or somebody, and besides if I made enough noise it would help to scare him and make him so busy trying to get away that he wouldn’t wait to have another try at me.”

“So you never actually saw him at all?”

She shook her head.

“I had the shades drawn, so it was quite dark. I couldn’t see anything. That’s what made it more like a nightmare. It was like being blind.”

“But when he opened one of these doors to rush out — there might have been a little dim light on the other side—”

“Well. I could just barely see something, but it was so quick, it was just a blurred shadow and then he was gone. I don’t think I’ve even got the vaguest idea how big he was.”

“But you call him ‘he,’ ” said the Saint easily, “so you saw that much, anyway.”

She stared at him with big round blue eyes.

“I didn’t,” she said blankly. “No, I didn’t. I just naturally thought it was ‘he.’ Of course it was ‘he.’ It had to be.” She swallowed, and added almost pleadingly, “didn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” said the Saint, flatly and dispassionately.

“Now wait a minute,” said Freddie Pellman, breaking one of the longest periods of plain listening that Simon had yet known him to maintain. “What is this?”

The Saint took a cigarette from a package on the bedside table and lighted it with care and deliberation. He knew that their eyes were all riveted on him now, but he figured that a few seconds’ suspense would do them no harm.

“I’ve walked around outside,” he said, “and I didn’t see anyone making a getaway. That wasn’t conclusive, of course, but it was an interesting start. Since then I’ve been through the whole house. I’ve checked every door and window in the place. Angelo did it first, but I did it again to make sure. Nothing’s been touched. There isn’t an opening anywhere where even a cat could have got in and got out again. And I looked in all the closets and under the beds too, and I didn’t find any strangers hiding around.”

“But somebody was here!” Freddie protested. “There’s the knife. You can see it with your own eyes. That proves that Lissa wasn’t dreaming.”

Simon nodded, and his blue eyes were crisp and sardonic.

“Sure it does,” he agreed conversationally. “So it’s a comfort to know that we don’t have to pick a prospective murderer out of a hundred and thirty million people outside. We know that this is strictly a family affair, and you’re going to be killed by somebody who’s living here now.”

4

It was nearly nine o’clock when the Saint woke up again, and the sun, which had been bleaching the sky before he got back to bed, was slicing brilliantly through the Venetian blinds. He felt a lot better than he had expected to. In fact, he decided, after a few minutes of lazy rolling and stretching, he felt surprisingly good. He got up, sluiced himself under a cold shower, brushed his hair, pulled on a pair of swimming trunks and a bath robe, and went out in search of breakfast.

Through the French windows of the living-room he saw Ginny sitting alone at the long table in the patio beside the barbecue. He went out and stood over her.

“Hullo,” she said.

“Hullo,” he agreed. “You don’t mind if I join you?”

“Not a bit,” she said. “Why should I?”

“We could step right into a Van Druten play,” he observed.

She looked at him rather vaguely. He sat down, and in a moment Angelo was at his elbow, immaculate and impassive now in a white jacket and a black bow tie.

“Yes, sir?”

‘Tomato juice,” said the Saint. “With Worcestershire sauce. Scrambled eggs, and ham. And coffee.”

“Yes, sir.”

The Filipino departed, and Simon lighted a cigarette and slipped the robe off his shoulders.

“Isn’t this early for you to be up?”

“I didn’t sleep so well.” She pouted, “Esther does snore. You’ll find out.”

Before the party broke up for the second time, there had been some complex but uninhibited arguments about how the rest of the night should be organised with a view to mutual protection, which Simon did not want revived at that hour.

“I’ll have to thank her,” he said tactfully. “She’s saved me from having to eat breakfast alone. Maybe she’ll do it for us again.”

“You could wake me up yourself just as well,” said Ginny. The Saint kept his face noncommittal and tried again. “Aren’t you eating?”

She was playing with a glass of orange juice as if it were a medicine that she didn’t want to take.

“I don’t know. I sort of don’t have any appetite.”

“Why?”

“Well... you are sure that it was someone in the house last night, aren’t you?”

“Quite sure.”

“I mean — one of us. Or the servants, or somebody.”

“Yes.”

“So why couldn’t we just as well be poisoned?”

He thought for a moment, and chuckled.

“Poison isn’t so easy. In the first place, you have to buy it. And there are problems about that. Then, you have to put it in something. And there aren’t so many people handling food that you can do that just like blowing out a match. It’s an awfully dangerous way of killing people. I think probably more poisoners get caught than any other kind of murderer. And any smart killer knows it.”

“How do you know this one is smart?”

“It follows. You don’t send warnings to your victims unless you think you’re pretty smart — you have to be quite an egotist and a show-off to get that far — and anyone who thinks he’s really smart usually has at least enough smartness to be able to kid himself. Besides, nobody threatened to kill you.”

“Nobody threatened to kill Lissa.”

“Nobody did kill her.”

“But they tried.”

“I don’t think we know that they were trying for Lissa.”

“Then if they were so half-way smart, how did they get in the wrong room?”

“They might have thought Freddie would be with her.”

“Yeah?” she scoffed. “If they knew anything, they’d know he’d be in his own room. He doesn’t visit. He has visitors.”

Simon felt that he was at some disadvantage. He said with a grin, “You can tie me up, Ginny, but that doesn’t alter anything. Freddie is the guy that the beef is about. The intended murderer has very kindly told us the motive. And that automatically establishes that there’s no motive for killing anyone else. I’ll admit that the attack on Lissa last night is pretty confusing, and I just haven’t got any theories about it yet that I’d want to bet on, but I still know damn well that nobody except Freddie is going to be in much danger unless they accidentally find out who the murderer is, and personally I’m not going to starve myself until that happens.”

He proved it by taking a healthy sip from the glass of tomato juice which Angelo set in front of him, and a couple of minutes later he was carving into his ham and eggs with healthy enthusiasm.

The girl watched him moodily.

“Anyway,” she said, “I never can eat anything much for breakfast. I have to watch my figure.”

“It looks very nice to me,” he said, and was able to say it without the slightest effort.

“Yes, but it has to stay that way. There’s always competition.”

Simon could appreciate that. He was curious. He had been very casual all the time about the whole organisation and mechanics of the ménage, as casual as Pellman himself, but there just wasn’t any way to stop wondering about the details of a set-up like that. The Saint put it in the scientific category of post-graduate education. Or he was trying to.

He said, leading her on with a touch so light and apparently disinterested that it could have been broken with a breath: “It must be quite a life.”

“It is.”

“If I hadn’t seen it myself, I wouldn’t have believed it was really possible.”

“Why not?”

“It’s just something out of this world.”

“Sheiks and sultans do it.”

“I know,” he said delicately. “But their women are brought up differently. They’re brought up to look forward to a place in a harem as a perfectly normal life. American girls aren’t.”

One of her eyebrows went up a little in a tired way.

“They are where I came from. And probably most everywhere else, if you only knew. Nearly every man is a wandering wolf at heart, and if he’s got enough money there isn’t much to stop him. Nearly every woman knows it. Only they don’t admit it. So what? You wouldn’t think there was anything freakish about it if Freddie kept us all in different apartments and visited around. What’s the difference if he keeps us all together?”

The Saint shrugged.

“Nothing much,” he conceded. “Except, I suppose, a certain amount of conventional illusion.”

“Phooey,” she said. “What can you do with an illusion?”

He couldn’t think of an answer to that.

“Well,” he said, “it might save a certain amount of domestic strife.”

“Oh, sure,” she said. “We bicker and squabble a bit.”

“I’ve heard you.”

“But it doesn’t often get too serious.”

“That’s the point. That’s what fascinates me, in a way. Why doesn’t anybody ever break the rules? Why doesn’t anybody try to ride the others off and marry him, for instance?”

She laughed shortly.

“That’s two questions. But I’ll tell you. Nobody goes too far because they wouldn’t be here if they did. Or they’d only do it once. And then — out. No guy wants to live in the middle of a mountain feud, and after all, Freddie’s the meal ticket. He’s got a right to have some peace for his money. So everybody behaves pretty well. As for marrying him — that’s funny.”

“Guys have been married before.”

“Not Freddie Pellman. He can’t afford to.”

“One thing that we obviously have in common,” said the Saint, “is a sense of humor.”

She shook her head.

“I’m not kidding. Didn’t you know about him?”

“No. I didn’t know about him.”

“There’s a will,” she said. “All his money is in a trust fund. He just gets the income. I guess Papa Pellman knew Freddie pretty well, and so he didn’t trust him. He sewed everything up tight. Freddie never will be able to touch most of the capital, but he gets two or three million to play with when he’s thirty-five. On one condition. He mustn’t marry before that. I guess Papa knew all about girls like me. If Freddie marries before he’s thirty-five, he doesn’t get another penny. Ever. Income or anything. It all goes to a fund to feed stray cats or something like that.”

“So.” The Saint poured himself some coffee. “I suppose Papa thought that Freddie would have attained a certain amount of discretion by that time. How long does that keep him safe for, by the way?”

“As a matter of fact,” she said, “it’s only a few more months.”

“Well, cheer up,” he said. “If you can last that long you may still have a chance.”

“Maybe by that time I wouldn’t want it,” she said, with her disturbing eyes dwelling on him.

Simon lighted a cigarette and looked up across the patio as a door opened and Lissa and Esther came out. Lissa carried a book, with her forefinger marking a place: she put it down open on the table beside her, as if she was ready to go back to it at any moment. She looked very gay and fresh in a play suit that matched her eyes.

“Have you and Ginny solved it yet?” she asked.

“I’m afraid not,” said the Saint. “As a matter of fact, we were mostly talking about other things.”

“I’ll take two guesses,” said Esther.

“Why two?” snapped Ginny. “I thought there was only one thing you could think of.”

The arrival of Angelo for their orders fortunately stopped that train of thought. And then, almost as soon as the Filipino had disappeared again and the cast were settling themselves and digging their toes in for another jump, Freddie Pellman made his entrance.

Like the Saint, he wore swimming trunks and a perfunctory terry-cloth robe. But the exposed portions of him were not built to stand the comparison. He had pale blotchy skin and the flesh under it looked spongy, as if it had softened up with inward fermentation. Which was not improbable. But he seemed totally unconscious of it. He was very definitely himself, even if he was nothing else.

“How do you feel?” Simon asked unnecessarily.

“Lousy,” said Freddie Pellman, no less unnecessarily. He sank into a chair and squinted blearily over the table. Ginny still had some orange juice in her glass. Freddie drank it, and made a face. He said, “Simon, you should have let the murderer go on with the job. If he’d killed me last night, I’d have felt a lot better this morning.”

“Would you have left me a thousand dollars a day in your will?” Simon inquired.

Freddie started to shake his head. The movement hurt him too much, so he clutched his skull in both hands to stop it.

“Look,” he said. “Before I die and you have to bury me, who is behind all this?”

“I don’t know,” said the Saint patiently. “I’m only a bodyguard of sorts. I didn’t sell myself to you as a detective.”

“But you must have some idea.”

“No more than I had last night.”

A general quietness came down again, casting a definite shadow as if a cloud had slid over the sun. Even Freddie Pellman became still, holding his head carefully in the hands braced on either side of his jawbones.

“Last night,” he said soggily, “you told us you were sure it was someone inside the house. Isn’t that what he said, Esther? He said it was someone who was here already.”

“That’s right,” said the Saint. “And it still goes.”

“Then it could only be one of us — Esther or Lissa or Ginny.”

“Or me. Or the servants.”

“My God!” Freddie sat up. “It isn’t even going to be safe to eat!”

The Saint smiled slightly.

“I think it is. Ginny and I were talking about that. But I’ve eaten... Let’s take it another way. You put the finger on Johnny Implicato last Christmas. That’s nearly a year ago. So anybody who wanted to sneak in to get revenge for him must have sneaked in since then. Let’s start by washing out anybody you’ve known more than a year. How about the servants?”

“I hired them all when I came here this season.”

“I was afraid of that. However. What about anybody else?”

“I only met you yesterday.”

“That’s quite true,” said the Saint calmly. “Let’s include me. Now what about the girls?”

The three girls looked at each other and at Freddie and at the Saint. There was an awkward silence. Nobody seemed to want to speak first; until Freddie scratched his head painfully and said, “I think I’ve known you longer than anyone, Esther, haven’t I?”

“Since last New Year’s Eve,” she said. “At the Dunes. You remember. Somebody had dared me to do a strip tease—”

“—never dreaming you’d take them up on it,” said Ginny.

“All right,” said the Saint. “Where did you come in?”

“In a phone booth in Miami,” said Ginny. “In February. Freddie was passed out inside, and I had to make a phone call. So I lugged him out. Then he woke up, so we made a night of it.”

“What about you, Lissa?”

“I was just reading a book in a drug store in New York last May. Freddie came in for some Bromo-Seltzer, and we just got talking.”

“In other words,” said the Saint, “any one of you could have been a girlfriend of Johnny’s, and promoted yourselves in here after he was killed.”

Nobody said anything.

“Okay,” Freddie said at last. “Well, we’ve got fingerprints, haven’t we? How about the fingerprints on that knife?”

“We can find out if there are any,” said the Saint.

He took it out of the pocket of his robe, where he had kept it with him still wrapped in his handkerchief. He unwrapped it very carefully, without touching any of the surfaces, and laid it on the table. But he didn’t look at it particularly. He was much more interested in watching the other faces that looked at it.

“Aren’t you going to save it for the police?” asked Lissa.

“Not till I’ve finished with it,” said the Saint. “I can make all the tests they’d use, and maybe I know one or two that they haven’t heard of yet. I’ll show you now, if you like.”

Angelo made his impassive appearance with two glasses of orange juice for Lissa and Esther, and a third effervescent glass for Freddie. He stood stoically by while Freddie drained it with a shudder.

“Anything else, Mr Pellman?”

“Yes,” Freddie said firmly. “Bring me a brandy and ginger ale. And some waffles.”

“Yes, sir,” said the Filipino, and paused, in the most natural and expressionless way, to gather up three or four plates, a couple of empty glasses, and, rather apologetically, as if he had no idea how it could have arrived there, the kitchen knife that lay in front of the Saint with everyone staring at it.

5

And that, Simon reflected, was as smooth and timely a bit of business as he had ever seen. He sat loose-limbed on his horse and went on enjoying it even when the impact was more than two hours old.

It had a superb simplicity of perfection which appealed to his sardonic sense of humor. It was magnificent because it was so completely incalculable. You couldn’t argue with it or estimate it. There was absolutely no percentage in claiming, as Freddie Pellman had done, in a loud voice and at great length, that Angelo had done it on purpose. There wasn’t a thing that could be proved one way or the other. Nobody had told Angelo anything. Nobody had asked Angelo to leave the knife alone, or spoken to him about fingerprints. So he had simply seen it on the table, and figured that it had arrived there through some crude mistake, and he had discreetly picked it up to take it away. The fact that by the time it had been rescued from him, with all the attendant panic and excitement, any fingerprints that might have been on the handle would have been completely obscured or without significance, was purely a sad coincidence. And that was the literal and ineluctable truth. Angelo could have been as guilty as hell or as innocent as a newborn babe: the possibilities were exactly that, and if Sherlock Holmes had been resurrected to take part in the argument his guess would have been worth no more than anyone else’s.

So the Saint hooked one knee over the saddle horn and admired the pluperfect uselessness of the whole thing, while he lighted a cigarette and let his horse pick its own serpentine trail up the rocky slope towards Andreas Canyon.

The ride had been Freddie’s idea. After two more brandies and ginger ale, an aspirin, and a waffle, Freddie Pellman had proclaimed that he wasn’t going to be scared into a cellar by any goddam gangster’s friends. He had hired the best goddam bodyguard in the world, and so he ought to be able to do just what he wanted. And he wanted to ride. So they were going to ride.

“Not me,” Lissa had said. “I’d rather have a gangster than a horse, any day. I’d rather lie out by the pool and read.”

“All right,” Freddie said sourly, “You lie by the pool and read. That makes four of us, and that’s just right. We’ll take lunch and make a day of it. You can stay home and read.”

So there were four of them riding up towards the cleft where the gray-green tops of tall palm trees painted the desert sign of water. Simon was in the lead, because he had known the trail years before and it came back to him as if he had only ridden it yesterday. Freddie was close behind him. Suddenly they broke over the top of the ridge, and easing out on to the dirt road that had been constructed since the Saint was last there to make the canyon more accessible to pioneers in gasoline-powered armchairs. But bordering the creek beyond the road stood the same tall palms, skirted with the dry drooped fronds of many years, but with their heads still rising proudly green and the same stream racing and gurgling around their roots. To the Saint they were still ageless beauty, unchanged, a visual awakening that flashed him back with none of the clumsy encumbrances of time machines to other more leisured days and other people who had ridden the same trail with him, and he reined his horse and thought about them, and in particular about one straight slim girl whom he had taken there for one stolen hour, and they had never said a word that was not casual and unimportant, and they had never met again, and yet they had given all their minds into each other’s hands, and he was utterly sure that if she ever came there again she would remember, exactly as he was remembering... So that it was like the shock of a cold plunge when Freddie Pellman spurred up beside him on the road and said noisily: “Well, how’s the mystery coming along?”

The Saint sighed inaudibly and tightened up, and said, “What mystery?”

“Oh, go on,” Freddie insisted boisterously. “You know what I’m talking about. The mystery.”

“So I gathered,” said the Saint. “But I’m not so psychic after a night like last night. And if you want to know, I’m just where I was last night. I just wish you were more careful about hiring servants.”

“They had good references.”

“So had everybody else who ever took that way in. But what else do you know about them?”

“What else do I know about them?” Freddie echoed, for the sake of greater clarity. “Nothing much. Except that Angelo is the best houseboy and valet I ever had. The other Filipino — Al, he calls himself — is a pal of his. Angelo brought him.”

“You didn’t ask if they’d ever worked for Smoke Johnny?”

“No.” Freddie was surprised. “Why should I?”

“He could have been nice to them,” said the Saint. “And Filipinos can be fanatically loyal. Still, that threatening letter seems a little bit literate for Angelo. I don’t know. Another way of looking at it is that Johnny’s friends could have hired them for the job... And then, did you know that your chef was an Italian?”

“I never thought about it. He’s an Italian, is he? Louis? That’s interesting,” Freddie looked anything but interested. “But what’s that got to do with it?”

“So was Implicato,” said the Saint. “He might have had some Italian friends. Some Italians do.”

“Oh,” said Freddie.

They turned over the bridge across the stream, and there was a flurry of hoofs behind them as Ginny caught up at a gallop. She rode well, and she knew it, and she wanted everyone else to know. She reined her pony up to a rearing sliding stop, and patted its damp neck.

“What are you two being so exclusive about?” she demanded.

“Just talking,” said the Saint. “How are you doing?”

“Fine.” She was fretting her pony with hands and heels, making it step nervously, showing off. “Esther isn’t so happy, though. Her horse is a bit frisky for her.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Esther said, coming up. “I’m doing all right. I’m awful hot, though.”

“Fancy that,” said Ginny.

“Never mind,” said the Saint tactfully. “We’ll call a halt soon and have lunch.”

They were walking down towards a grove of great palms that rose like columns in the nave of a natural cathedral, their rich tufted heads arching over to meet above a cloister of deep whispering shade. They were the same palms that Simon had paused under once before, years ago; only now there were picnic tables at their feet, and at some of them a few hardy families who had driven out there in their automobiles were already grouped in strident fecundity, enjoying the unspoiled beauties of Nature from the midst of an enthusiastic litter of baskets, boxes, tin cans, and paper bags.

“Is this where you meant we could have lunch?” Freddie asked rather limply.

“No. I thought we’d ride on over to Murray Canyon — if they haven’t built a road in there since I saw it last, there’s a place there that I think we still might have to ourselves.”

He led them down through the trees, and out on a narrow trail that clung for a while to the edge of a steep shoulder or hill. Then they were out on an open rise at the edge of the desert, and the Saint set his horse to an easy canter, threading his way unerringly along a trail that was nothing but a faint crinkling in the hard earth where other horses had followed it before.

It seemed strange to be out riding like that, so casually and inconsequentially, when only a few hours before there had been very tangible evidence that a threat of death to one of them had not been made idly. Yet perhaps they were safer out there than they would have been anywhere else. The Saint’s eyes had never stopped wandering over the changing panoramas, behind as well as ahead, and although he knew how deceptive the apparently open desert could be, and how even a man on horseback, standing well above the tallest clump of scrub, could vanish altogether in a hundred yards, he was sure that no prospective sniper had come within sharp-shooting range of them. Yet...

He stopped his horse abruptly, after a time, as the broad flat that they had been riding over ended suddenly at the brink of a sharp cliff. At the foot of the bluff, another long column of tall silent palms bordered a rustling stream. He lighted a cigarette, and wondered cynically how many of the spoiled playboys and playgirls who used Palm Springs for their wilder weekends, and saw nothing but the smooth hotels and the Racquet Club, even realised that the name was not just a name, and that there really were Palm Springs, sparkling and crystal clear, racing down out of the overshadowing mountains to make hidden nests of beauty before they washed out into the extinction of the barren plain...

Freddie Pellman reined in beside him, looked the landscape over, and said, tolerantly, as if it were a production that had been offered for his approval: “This is pretty good. Is this where we eat?”

“If everybody can take it,” said the Saint, “there’s a pool further up that I’d like to look at again.”

“I can take it,” said Freddie, comprehensively settling the matter.

Simon put his horse down the steep zigzag, and stopped at the bottom to let it drink from the stream. Freddie drew up beside him again — he rode well enough, having probably been raised to it in the normal course of a millionaire’s son’s upbringing — and said, still laboring with the same subject: “Do you really think one of the girls could be in on it?”

“Of course,” said the Saint calmly. “Gangsters have girlfriends. Girlfriends do things like that.”

“But I’ve known all of them for some time at least.”

“That may be part of the act. A smart girl wouldn’t want to make it too obvious — meet you one day, and bump you off the next. Besides, she may have a nice streak of ham in her. Most women have. Maybe she thinks it would be cute to keep you in suspense for a while. Maybe she wants to make an anniversary of it, and pay off for Johnny this Christmas.”

Freddie swallowed.

“That’s going to make some things — a bit difficult.”

“That’s your problem,” Simon said cheerfully.

Freddie sat in his saddle unhappily and watched Ginny and Esther coming down the grade. Ginny came down it in a spectacular avalanche, like a mountain cavalry display, and swept off her Stetson to ruffle her hair back with a bored air while her pony dipped its nose thirstily in the water a few yards downstream. Esther, steering her horse down quietly, joined her a little later.

“But this is wonderful!” Ginny called out, looking at the Saint. “How do you find all these marvelous places?” Without waiting for an answer, she turned to Esther and said in a solicitous undertone which was perfectly pitched to carry just far enough: “How are you feeling, darling? I hope you aren’t getting too miserable.”

Simon was naturally glancing towards them. He wasn’t looking for anything in particular, and as far as he was concerned Esther was only one of the gang, but in those transient circumstances, he felt sorry for her. So for that one moment he had the privilege of seeing one woman open her soul in utter stark sincerity to another woman. And what one woman said to another, clearly, carefully, deliberately, quietly, with serious premeditation and the intensest earnestness, was “You bitch.”

“Let’s keep a-goin’,” said the Saint hastily, in a flippant drawl, and lifted his reins to set his horse at the shallow bank on the other side of the stream.

He led them west towards the mountains with a quicker sureness now, as the sense of the trail came back to him. In a little while it was a track that only an Indian could have seen at all, but it seemed as if he could have found it at the dead of night. There was even a place where weeds and spindly clawed scrub had grown so tall and dense since he had last been there that anyone else would have sworn that there was no trail at all, but he set his horse boldly at the living wall and smashed easily through into a channel that could hardly have been trodden since he last opened it... so that presently they found the creek again at a sharp bend, and he led them over two deep fords through swift-running water, and they came out at last in a wide hollow ringed with palms where hundreds of spring floods had built a broad open sandbank gouged out a deep sheltered pool beside it.

“This is lunch,” said the Saint, and swung out of the saddle to moor his bridle to a fallen palm log where his horse could rest in the shade.

They spread out the contents of their saddlebags on the sandbank and ate cold chicken, celery, radishes, and hard-boiled eggs. There had been some difficulty when they set out over convincing Freddie Pellman that it would have been impractical as well as strictly illegal to take bottles of champagne on to the reservation, but the water in the brook was sweet and ice-cold.

Esther drank it from her cupped hands, and sat back on her heels and gazed meditatively at the pool.

“It’s awful hot,” she said, suggestively.

“Go on,” Ginny said to Simon. “Dare her to take her clothes off and get in. That’s what she’s waiting for.”

“I’ll go in if you will,” Esther said sullenly.

“Nuts,” said Ginny. “I can have a good time without that.”

She was leaning against the Saint’s shoulder for a backrest, and she gave a little snuggling wriggle as she spoke which made her meaning completely clear.

Freddie Pellman locked his arms around his knees and scowled. It had been rather obvious for some time that all the current competition was being aimed at the Saint, even though Simon had done nothing to try and encourage it, and Freddie was not feeling so generous about it as he had when he first invited the girls to take Simon into the family.

“All right,” Freddie said gracelessly. “I dare you.”

Esther looked as if a load had been taken off her mind.

She pulled off her boots and socks. She stood up, with a slight faraway smile, and unbuttoned her shirt and took it off. She took off her frontier pants. That left her in a wisp of sheer close-fitting scantiness. She took that off, too.

She certainly had a beautiful body.

She turned and walked into the pool, and lowered herself into it until the water lapped her chin. It covered her as well as a sheet of glass. She rolled, and swam lazily up to the far end, and as the water shallowed she rose out again and strolled on up into the low cascade where the stream tumbled around the next curve. She waded on up through the falls, under the palms, the sunlight through the leaves making glancing patterns on her skin, and disappeared around the bend, very leisurely. It was quite an exit.

The rustle of the water seemed very loud suddenly, as if anyone would have had to shout to be heard over it. So that it was surprising when Ginny’s voice sounded perfectly easy and normal.

“Well, folks,” she said, “don’t run away now, because there’ll be another super-colossal floor show in just a short while.” She nestled against the Saint again and said, “Hullo.”

“Hullo,” said the Saint restrainedly.

Freddie Pellman got to his feet.

“Well,” he said huffily, “I know you won’t miss me, so I think I’ll take a walk.”

He stalked off up the stream the way Esther had gone, stumbling and balancing awkwardly on his high-heeled boots over the slippery rounded boulders.

They watched him until he was out of sight also.

“Alone at last,” said Ginny emotionally.

The Saint reached for a cigarette.

“Don’t you ever worry about getting complicated?” he asked.

“I worry about not getting kissed,” she said.

She looked up at him from under her long sweeping lashes, with bright impudent eyes and red lips tantalisingly parted. The Saint had been trying conscientiously not to look for trouble, but he was not made out of ice cream and bubble gum. He was making good progress against no resistance when the crash of a shot rattled down the canyon over the chattering of the water and brought him to his feet as if he had actually felt the bullet.

6

He ran up the side of the brook, fighting his way through clawing scrub and stumbling over boulders and loose gravel. Beyond the bend, the stream rose in a long twisting stairway of shallow cataracts posted with the same shapely palms that grew throughout its length. A couple of steps further up he found Freddie.

Freddie was not dead. He was standing up. He stood and looked at the Saint in a rather foolish way, with his mouth open.

“Come on,” said the Saint encouragingly. “Give.” Freddie pointed stupidly to the rock behind him. There was a bright silver scar on it where a bullet had scraped off a layer of lead on the rough surface before it ricocheted off into nowhere.

“It only just missed me,” Freddie said.

“Where were you standing?”

“Just here.”

Simon looked at the scar again. There was no way of reading from it the caliber or make of gun. The bullet itself might have come to rest anywhere within half a mile. He tried a rough sight from the mark on the rock, but within the most conservative limits it covered an area of at least two thousand square yards on the other slope of the canyon.

The Saint’s spine tingled. It was a little like the helplessness of his trip around the house the night before — looking up at that raw muddle of shrubs and rocks, knowing that a dozen sharpshooters could lie hidden there, with no risk of being discovered before they had fired the one shot that might be all that was necessary... “Maybe we should go home, Freddie,” he said.

“Now wait.” Freddie was going to be obstinate and valiant after he had found company. “If there’s someone up there—”

“He could drop you before we were six steps closer to him,” said the Saint tersely. “You hired me as a bodyguard, not a pall-bearer. Let’s move.”

Something else moved, upwards and a little to his left. His reflexes had tautened instinctively before he recognised the flash of movement as only a shifting of bare brown flesh.

From a precarious flat ledge of rock five or six yards up the slope, Esther called down: “What goes on?”

“We’re going home,” Simon called back.

“Wait for me.”

She started to scramble down off the ledge. Suddenly she seemed much more undressed than she had before. He turned abruptly.

“Come along, then.”

He went back, around the bend, past the pool, past Ginny, to where they had left the horses, hearing Freddie’s footsteps behind him but not looking back. There were no more shots, but he worked quickly checking the saddles and tightening the cinches. The place was still just as picturesque and enchanting, but as an ambush it had the kind of topography where he felt that the defending team was at a great disadvantage.

“What’s the hurry?” Ginny complained, coming up beside him, and he locked the buckle he was hauling on and gave the leather a couple of rapid loops through the three-quarter rig slots.

“You heard the shot, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“It just missed Freddie. So we’re moving before they try again.”

“Something’s always happening,” said Ginny resentfully, as if she had been shot at herself.

“Life is like that,” said the Saint, untying her horse and handing the reins to her.

As he turned to the next horse Esther came up. She was fully dressed again, except that her shirt was only half buttoned, and she looked smug and sulky at the same time.

“Did you hear what happened, Ginny?” she said. “There was a man hiding up in the hills, and he took a shot at Freddie. And if he was where Simon thought he was, he must have seen me sunbathing without anything on.”

“Tell Freddie that’s what made him miss,” Ginny suggested. “It might be worth some new silver foxes to you.”

A dumb look came into Esther’s beautifully sculptured face. She gazed foggily out at the landscape as the Saint cinched her saddle and thrust the reins into her limp hands.

She said, “Simon.”

“Yes?”

“Didn’t you say something last night about — about being sure it was someone in the house?”

“I did.”

“Then... then just now — you were with Ginny, so she couldn’t have done anything. And Lissa isn’t here. But you know I couldn’t... you know I couldn’t have hidden a gun anywhere, don’t you?”

“I don’t know you well enough,” said the Saint.

But it was another confusion that twisted around in his mind all the way home. It was true that he himself was an alibi for Ginny — unless she had planted one of those colossally elaborate remote-control gun-firing devices beloved of mystery writers. And Esther couldn’t have concealed a gun, or anything else, in her costume — unless she had previously planted it somewhere up the stream. But both those theories would have required them to know in advance where they were going, and the Saint had chosen the place himself... It was true he had mentioned it before they started, but mentioning it and finding it were different matters. He would have sworn that not more than a handful of people besides himself had ever discovered it, and he remembered sections of the trail that had seemed to be completely overgrown since they had last been trodden. Of course, with all his watchfulness, they might have been followed. A good hunter might have stayed out of sight and circled over the hills — he could have done it himself...

Yet in all those speculations there was something that didn’t connect, something that didn’t make sense. If the theoretical sniper in the hills had been good enough to get there at all, for instance, why hadn’t he been good enough to try a second shot before they got away? He could surely have had at least one more try, from a different angle, with no more risk than the first... It was like the abortive attack on Lissa — it made sense, but not absolute sense. And to the Saint’s delicately tuned reception that was a more nagging obstacle than no sense at all...

They got back to the stables, and Freddie said, “I need a drink. Let’s beat up the Tennis Club before we go home.”

For once, the Saint was not altogether out of sympathy with the exigencies of Freddie’s thirst.

They drove out to the club, and sat on the balcony terrace looking down over the beautifully terraced gardens, the palm-shaded oval pool, and the artificial brook where imported trout lurked under spreading willows and politely awaited the attention of pampered anglers. The rest of them sipped Daiquiris, while Freddie restored himself with three double brandies in quick succession. And then, sauntering over from the tennis courts with a racquet in her hand, Lissa O’Neill herself came up to them. She looked as cool and dainty as she always seemed to look, in one of those abbreviated sun suits that she always seemed to wear which some clairvoyant designer must have invented exclusively for her slim waist and for long tapered legs like hers, in pastel shades that would set off her clear golden skin. But it seemed as if all of them drew back behind a common barrier that made them look at her in the same way, not in admiration, but guardedly, waiting for what she would say.

She said, “Fancy meeting you here.”

“Fancy meeting you,” said the Saint. “Did you get bored with your book?”

“I finished it, so I thought I’d get some exercise. But the pro has been all booked up for hours.”

It was as if all of them had the same question on their lips, but only the Saint could handle his voice easily enough to say, quite lazily, “Hours?”

“Well, it must have been two hours or more. Anyway, I asked for a lesson as soon as I got here, and he was all booked up. He said he’d fit me in if anybody cancelled, but I’ve been waiting around for ages and nobody’s given me a chance...”

A part of the Saint’s mind felt quite detached and independent of him, like an adding machine clicking over in a different room. The machine tapped out: she should have known that the pro would be booked up. And of course he’d say that he’d be glad to fit her in if he had a cancellation. And the odds are about eight to one that he wouldn’t have a cancellation. So she could make him and several other people believe that she’d been waiting all the time. She could always find a chance to slip out of the entrance when there was no one in the office for a moment — she might even arrange to clear the way without much difficulty. She only had to get out. Coming back, she could say she just went to get something from her car. No one would think about it. And if there had been a cancellation, and the pro had been looking for her — well, she’d been in the johnny, or the showers, or at the bottom of the pool. He just hadn’t found her. She’d been there all the time. A very passable casual alibi, with only a trivial percentage of risk.

But she isn’t dressed to have done what must have been done.

She could have changed.

She couldn’t have done it anyway.

Why not? She looks athletic. There are good muscles under that soft golden skin. She might have been sniping revenooers in the mountains of Kentucky since she was five years old, for all you know. What makes you so sure what she could do and couldn’t do?

Well, what were Angelo and his pal, and Louis the Italian chef, doing at the same time? You can’t rule them out.

Any good reader would rule them out. The mysterious murderer just doesn’t turn out to be the cook or the butler any more. That was worked to death twenty years ago.

So of course no cook or butler in real life would ever dream of murdering anyone anymore, because they’d know it was just too corny.

“What’s the matter with you all?” Lissa asked. “Wasn’t the ride any good?”

“It was fine,” said the Saint. “Except when your last night’s boyfriend started shooting at Freddie.”

Then they all began to talk at once.

It was Freddie, of course, who finally got the floor... He did it principally by saying the same things louder and oftener than anyone else. When the competition had been crushed he told the story again, challenging different people to substantiate his statements one by one. He was thus able to leave a definite impression that he had been walking up the canyon when somebody shot at him.

Simon signalled a waiter for another round of drinks and put himself into a self-preservative trance until the peak of the verbal flood had passed. He wondered whether he should ask Freddie for another thousand dollars. He felt that he was definitely earning his salary as he went along.

“...Then that proves it must be one of the servants,” Lissa said. “So if we can find out which of them went out this afternoon—”

“Why does it prove that?” Simon inquired.

“Well, it couldn’t have been Ginny, because she was talking to you. It couldn’t have been me—”

“Couldn’t it?”

She looked at him blankly. But her brain worked. He could almost see it. She might have been reading everything that had been traced through his mind, a few minutes ago, line by line.

“It couldn’t have been me,” Esther insisted plaintively. “I didn’t have a stitch on. Where could I have hidden a gun?”

Ginny gazed at her speculatively.

“It’ll be interesting to see how the servants can account for their time,” Simon said hastily. “But I’m not going to get optimistic too quickly. I don’t think anything about this business is very dumb and straightforward. It’s quite the opposite. Somebody is being so frantically cunning that he must be practically tying himself — or herself — in a knot. So if it is one of the servants, I bet he has an alibi too.”

“I still think you ought to tell the police,” Ginny said.

The drinks arrived. Simon lighted a cigarette and waited until the waiter had gone away again.

“What for?” he asked. “There was a guy in Lissa’s room last night. Nobody saw him. He didn’t leave any muddy footprints or any of that stuff. He used one of our own kitchen knives. If there ever were any fingerprints on it, they’ve been ruined. So — nothing... This afternoon somebody shot at Freddie. Nobody saw him. He didn’t leave his gun, and nobody could ever find the bullet. So nothing again. What are the police going to do? They aren’t magicians... However, that’s up to you, Freddie.”

“They could ask people questions,” Esther said hopefully.

“So can we. We’ve been asking each other questions all the time. If anybody’s lying, they aren’t going to stop lying just because a guy with a badge is listening. What are they going to do — torture everybody and see what they get?”

“They’d put a man on guard, or something,” said Ginny.

“So what? Our friend has waited quite a while already. I’m sure he could wait some more. He could wait longer than any police department is going to detail a private cop to nursemaid Freddie. So the scare blows over, and everybody settles down, and sometime later, maybe somewhere else, Freddie gets it. Well, personally I’d rather take our chance now while we’re all warmed up.”

“That’s right,” Freddie gave his verdict. “If we scare whoever it is off with the police, they’ll only come back another time when we aren’t watching for them. I’d rather let them get on with it while we’re ready for them.”

He looked rather proud of himself for having produced this penetrating reasoning all on his own.

And then his mind appeared to wander, and his eyes changed their focus.

“Hey,” he said in an awed voice. “Look at that, will you?” They looked, as he pointed. “The babe down by the pool. In the sarong effect. Boy, is that a chassis! Look at her!”

She was, Simon admitted, something to look at. The three girls with them seemed to admit the same thing by their rather strained and intent silence. Simon could feel an almost tangible heaviness thicken into the air.

Then Ginny sighed, as if relief had reached her rather late.

“A blonde,” she said. “Well, Lissa, it’s nice to have known you.”

Freddie didn’t even seem to hear it. He picked up his glass, still staring raptly at the vision. He put the glass to his lips.

It barely touched, and he stiffened. He took it away and stared at it frozenly. Then he pushed it across the table towards the Saint.

“Smell that,” he said.

Simon put it to his nostrils. The hackneyed odor of bitter almonds was as strong and unmistakable as any mystery-story fan could have desired.

“It doesn’t smell like prussic acid,” he said, with commendable mildness. He put the glass down and drew on his cigarette again, regarding the exhibit moodily. He was quite sure now that he was going to collect his day’s wages without much more delay. And probably the next day’s pay in advance, as well. At that, he thought that the job was poorly paid for what it was. He could see nothing in it at all to make him happy. But being a philosopher, he had to cast around for one little ray of sunshine. Being persistent, he found it. “So anyway,” he said, “at least we don’t have to bother about the servants anymore.”

7

It was a pretty slender consolation, he reflected, even after they had returned to the house and he had perfunctorily questioned the servants, only to have them jointly and severally corroborate each other’s statements that none of them had left the place that afternoon.

After which, they had all firmly but respectfully announced that they were not used to being under suspicion, that they did not feel comfortable in a household where people were frequently getting stabbed at, shot at, and poisoned at; that in any case they would prefer a less exacting job with more regular hours; that they had already packed their bags; and that they would like to catch the evening bus back to Los Angeles, if Mr Pellman would kindly pay them up to date.

Freddie had obliged them with a good deal of nonchalance, being apparently not unaccustomed to the transience of domestic help.

After which the Saint went to his room, stripped off his riding clothes, took a shower, wrapped himself in a bath robe, and lay down on the bed with a cigarette to contemplate the extreme sterility of the whole problem.

“This ought to learn you,” he told himself, “to just say No when you don’t want to do anything, instead of making smart cracks about a thousand dollars a day.”

The servants weren’t ruled out, of course. There could be more than one person involved, taking turns to do things so that each would have an alibi in turn.

But one of the girls had to be involved. Only one of them could have poisoned Freddie’s drink at the Tennis Club. And any one of them could have done it. The table had been small enough, and everybody’s attention had been very potently concentrated on the sarong siren. A bottle small enough to be completely hidden in the hand, tipped over his glass in a casual gesture — and the trick was done.

But why do it then, when the range of possible suspects was so sharply limited?

Why do any of the other things that had happened?

He was still mired in the exasperating paradoxes of partial sense, which was so many times worse than utter nonsense. Utter nonsense was like a code: there was a key to be found somewhere which would make it clear and coherent in an instant, and there was only one exact key that would do it. You knew that you had it or you hadn’t. The trouble with partial sense was that while you were straightening out the twisted parts you never knew whether you were distorting the straight ones...

And somewhere beyond that point he heard the handle of his door turning, very softly.

His hand slid into the pocket of his robe where his gun was, but that was the only move he made. He lay perfectly still and relaxed, breathing at the shallow even rate of a sleeper, his eyes closed to all but a slit through which he could watch the door as it opened. Esther came in.

She stood in the doorway hesitantly for a few seconds, looking at him, and the light behind her showed every line of her breath-taking body through the white crepe negligée she was wearing. Then she closed the door softly behind her and came a little closer. He could see both her hands, and they were empty. He opened his eyes. “Hullo,” she said.

“Hullo.” He stretched himself a little.

“I hope I didn’t wake you up.”

“I was just dozing.”

“I ran out of cigarettes,” she said, “and I wondered if you had one.”

“I think so.”

It was terrific dialogue.

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

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

“A bit.”

“Have you any ideas yet?”

“Lots of them. Too many.”

“Why too many?”

“They contradict each other. Which means I’m not getting anywhere.”

“So you still don’t know who’s doing all these things?”

“No.”

“But you know it isn’t any of us.”

“No, I don’t.”

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

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

“I’m afraid I’m not very clever,” Esther confessed.

He didn’t argue with her.

She said at last, “Do you think I did it?”

“I’ve been trying very conscientiously to figure out how you could have.”

“But I haven’t done anything.”

“Everybody else has said that too.”

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

“I don’t think you really like me, Simon.”

“I adore you,” he said politely.

“No, you don’t. I’ve tried to get on with you. Haven’t I?”

“You certainly have.”

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

“Would I? I love being amazed.”

“There you go again. You see?”

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t kid you.”

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

“And you use it very nicely, too.”

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

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

“You’ve got a beautiful body, too. All lean and muscular. But you’ve got brains as well. I’m sorry. I just like you an awful lot.”

“Thank you,” he said quietly.

She smoked her cigarette for a few moments.

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

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

“It must be,” he agreed.

“I’ve been watching it. I can think a little bit. You saw what happened this afternoon. I mean—”

“The blonde at the Tennis Club?”

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

“And then — Esther starts packing.”

“That’s what it amounts to.”

“But it’s been fun while it lasted, and maybe you take something with you.”

“Oh, yes. But that isn’t everything. Not the way I mean. I mean...”

“What do you mean?”

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

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

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

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

He didn’t have to.

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

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

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

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

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

Freddie pulled himself shakily up to his feet.

“Good God,” he said, and repeated it. “Good God — and it was real! Another second, and it’d have had me!”

“What happened?” Esther was asking shrilly.

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

Simon dropped the gun back into his pocket.

“Landed?” he said.

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

“How long ago was this?”

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

“Yes, I heard it,” said the Saint.

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

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

“Why, where were you?” Freddie demanded.

She drew herself up defiantly and faced him.

“I was in Simon’s room.”

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

“What is it now?” Lissa’s voice asked abruptly.

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

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

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

“Go away,” he said coldly. “Get out.”

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

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

Reluctantly, hesitantly, his harem melted away.

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

“Well,” Freddie said finally, “how does it look now?”

His voice was surprisingly negative, and the Saint had to make a lightning adjustment to respond to it.

He said, “It makes you look like quite a bad risk. So do you mind if I collect for today and tomorrow? Two Gs, Freddie. It’d be sort of comforting.”

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

“I don’t blame you,” said Freddie. “If that snake had bitten me—”

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

“They are?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“I wish I could see it.”

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

“Maybe I can make you see it,” he said.

“Go ahead.”

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

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

“Suppose two of the girls were in partnership?”

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

“Then where does that get you?”

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

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

“My God!” he said. “You mean — Lissa...”

Simon didn’t move.

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

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

8

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

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

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

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

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

So after that he came to Lissa’s room.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Are you having fun?” Lissa asked.

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

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

“How did you know?” he drawled.

“I’m not so dumb. I should have seen it before I went out if I’d been really smart.”

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

“I just took the car.”

“I see.”

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

“Don’t come any closer,” she said sharply.

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

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

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

The Saint clipped his own gun back in its holster, and dropped Lissa’s automatic into his side pocket. It had all been so fast that he hadn’t even had time to get a hair of his head disarranged.

“I’m afraid you don’t have a very nice husband,” he said.

He stepped to the communicating door and dragged the drooping figure of Freddie Pellman the rest of the way into the room and pushed it into a chair.

9

“He’ll live, if you want him,” said the Saint casually. “I only broke his arm.”

He picked up the revolver that Freddie had dropped, spilled the shells out, and laid it with the other exhibits on the dresser while Freddie clutched at his reddening sleeve and whimpered. It seemed as if the whole thing took so little time that Lissa was still recovering her balance when he turned and looked at her again.

“The only trouble was,” he said, “that you married him too soon. Or didn’t you know about the will then?”

She stared at him, white-faced, without speaking.

“Was he drunk when you did it?” Simon asked.

After a while she said, “Yes.”

“One of those parties?”

“Yes. We were both pretty high. But I didn’t know he was that high.”

“Of course not. And you didn’t realise that he wouldn’t mind framing you into a coffin to keep his gay playboy integrity.”

She looked at the collection of exhibits on her dresser, at Freddie, and at the Saint. She didn’t seem to be able to get everything coordinated quickly. Simon himself showed her the marriage certificate again.

“This is what I wasn’t supposed to find,” he said. “In fact I don’t think Freddie even imagined you’d have it around. But it made quite a difference. How much were you going to shake him down for, Lissa?”

“I only asked him for two hundred thousand,” she said. “I’d never have said anything. I just didn’t want to be like some of the others — thrown out on my ear to be a tramp for the rest of my life.”

“But you wanted too much,” said the Saint. “Or he just didn’t trust you, and he thought you’d always be coming back for more. Anyhow, he figured this would be a better way to pay off.”

His cigarette hadn’t even gone out. He picked it up and brightened it in a long peaceful draw that expressed all the final settling down of his mind.

“The mistake that all of us made,” he said, “was not figuring Freddie for a moderately clever guy. Because he was a bore, we figured he was moderately stupid. Which is a rather dangerous mistake. A bore isn’t necessarily stupid. He doesn’t necessarily overrate his own intelligence. He just underrates everyone else. That makes him tedious, but it doesn’t make him dumb. Freddie isn’t dumb. He just sounds dumb because he’s talking down to how dumb he thinks the rest of us are. As a matter of fact, he’s quite a lively lad. He put a lot of gray matter into this little scheme. As soon as he heard that I’d arrived in town, he had the inspiration that he’d been waiting for. And he didn’t waste a day in getting it started. He wrote himself the famous threatening letter at once — it was quite a coincidence, of course, that there was that last Christmas party to hang it on, but if there hadn’t been that he’d certainly have thought of something else almost as good. He only had to establish that he was being menaced, and get me into the house to protect him. Then he had to put you in the middle of the first situation, in a set-up that would look swell in the beginning but would get shakier and shakier as things went on. That wasn’t difficult either.”

The only sound when he paused was Freddie Pellman’s heavy sobbing breathing.

“After that, he improvised. He only had to stage a series of incidents that would give everyone else in turn an absolutely ironclad alibi that would satisfy me. It wasn’t hard to do — it was just a matter of being ready with a few props to take advantage of the opportunities that were bound to arise. Perhaps he was a bit lucky in having so many chances in such a short space of time, but I don’t know. He couldn’t go wrong anyway. Everything had to work in for him, once the primary idea was planted. Even an accident like Angelo picking up the knife was just a break for him — there weren’t any fingerprints on it, of course, and it just helped the mystery a little... And this evening he was able to finish up in style with the snake routine. It wasn’t exactly his fault that the routine fitted in just as well with another pattern that was gradually penetrating into my poor benighted brain. That’s just one of the natural troubles with trying to create artificial mysteries — when you’re too busy towing around a lot of red herrings, you don’t realise that you may be getting a fishy smell on your own fingers... That was what Freddie did. He was being very clever about letting it work out that your alibi was the only flimsy one, but he forgot that when I had to start questioning alibis it might occur to me that there was one other person whose alibis were flimsier still. And that was him.”

Simon drew on his cigarette again.

“Funnily enough, I was just leading up to telling him that when he made his first major mistake. You see, I had an idea what was going on, but I was going nuts trying to figure out why. There didn’t seem to be any point to the whole performance, except as a terrific and ponderous practical joke. And I couldn’t see Freddie with that sort of humor. So I was just going to come out flatly and face him with it and see what happened. It’s a shock technique that works pretty well sometimes. And then he took all the wind out of my sails by insisting on helping me to see how it all pointed to you. That’s what I mean about him underrating other people’s intelligence. He was just a little too anxious to make quite sure that I hadn’t missed any of the points that I was supposed to get. But it had just the opposite effect, because I happened to know that your alibi must have been genuine. So then I knew that the whole plot didn’t point to you — it was pointed at you. And when Freddie went a little further and helped me to think of the idea of staying behind tonight and searching your room, I began to guess that the climax would be something like this. I suppose he got hold of you privately and told you he’d started to get suspicious of what I was up to — maybe I was planning to plant some evidence and frame one of you?”

“Yes.”

“So he suggested that the two of you sneak off and see if you could catch me at it?” She nodded.

“Then,” said the Saint, “you peeked in through the window and saw me with the exhibits on the dressing-table, and he said ‘What did I tell you?’... And then he said something like, ‘Let’s really get the goods on him now. You take this gun and walk in on him and keep him talking. If he thinks you’re alone he’ll probably say enough to hang himself. I’ll be listening, and I’ll be a witness to everything he says.’ Something like that?”

“Something like that,” she said huskily.

“And then the stage was all set. He only had to wait a minute or two, and shoot you. I was supposed to have suspected you already. I’d found a lot of incriminating evidence in your room. And then you’d walked in on me with a gun... While of course his story would have been that he was suspicious when you sneaked off, that he followed you home, and found you holding me up, and you were just about to give me the works when he popped his pistol and saved my life. Everyone would have said that ‘of course’ you must have been Smoke Johnny’s moll at some time, and nobody would ever have been likely to find the record of that marriage in Yuma unless they were looking for it — and why should they look for it? So you were out of the way, and he was in the clear, and I’d personally be his best, solid, hundred-per-cent witness that it was justifiable homicide. It would have made one of the neatest jobs that I ever heard of — if it had worked. Only it didn’t work. Because just as I knew you had a good alibi all the time, I knew that all this junk in your drawer had been planted there, and so I knew that I still had something else to look for — the real motive for all these things that were going on. Maybe I was lucky to find it so quickly. But even so, from the moment when you walked in, something exciting was waiting to happen... Well, it all worked out all right — or don’t you think so, Freddie?”

“You’ve got to get me a doctor,” Freddie said hoarsely.

“Do I have all the right answers?” Simon asked relentlessly.

Freddie Pellman moaned and clutched his arm tighter and raised a wild haggard face.

“You’ve got to get me a doctor,” he pleaded in a rising shout. “Get me a doctor!”

‘Tell us first,” insisted the Saint soothingly. “Do we know all the answers?”

Pellman tossed his head, and suddenly everything seemed to disintegrate inside him.

“Yes!” he almost screamed. “Yes, damn you! I was going to fix that little bitch. I’ll do it again if I ever have the chance. And you, too!... Now get me a doctor. Get me a doctor, d’you hear? D’you want me to bleed to death?”

The Saint drew a long deep breath, and put out the stub of his cigarette. He took a pack from his pocket and lighted another. And with that symbolic action he had put one more episode behind him, and the life of adventure went on.

“I don’t really know,” he said carelessly. “I don’t think there’d be any great injustice done if we let you die. Or we might keep you alive and continue with the shakedown. It’s really up to Lissa.”

He glanced at the girl again curiously.

She was staring at Freddie in a way that Simon hoped no woman would ever look at him, and she seemed to have to make an effort to bring herself back to the immediate present. And even then she seemed to be a little behind.

She said, “I just don’t get one thing. How did you know all that stuff had been planted in my drawer? And why were you so sure that my flimsy alibi was good?”

He smiled.

“That was the easiest thing of all. Aren’t you the detective-story fan? You might have gotten good ideas from some of your mysteries, but you could hardly have picked up such bad ones. At least you’d know better than to keep a lot of unnecessary incriminating evidence tucked away where anyone with a little spare time could find it. And you’d never have had the nerve to pull an alibi like that first attack on yourself if it was a phony, because you’d have known that anyone else who’d ever read a mystery too would have spotted it for a phony all the time. About the only thing wrong with Freddie is that he had bright ideas, but he didn’t read the right books.”

“For Christ’s sake,” Freddie implored shrilly, “aren’t you going to get me a doctor?”

“What would they do in a Saint story?” Lissa asked.

Simon Templar sighed.

“I imagine they’d let him call his own doctor, and tell the old story about how he was cleaning a gun and he didn’t know it was loaded. And I suppose we’d go back to the Coral Room and look for Ginny and Esther, because they must be getting hungry, and I know I still am. And I expect Freddie would still pay off in the end, if we all helped him to build up a good story...”

Lissa tucked her arm under his.

“But what are the rest of us going to do tonight?”

“The Hays Office angle on that bothers the hell out of me,” said the Saint.