The Saint did not actually groan out loud, but the impulse was there.
“I can’t understand why this is always happening to me,” he complained. “I thought I spoke reasonably good English. The idea should be easy to grasp. All I told you was that Lida Verity was dead. You immediately assumed that she’d committed suicide. Statistics show that suicide is a helluva long way from being the most common way to die. Therefore the probability is that something or someone specifically gave you that idea. Either you knew that she might have had good reason to commit suicide, or somebody else has already talked to you. Whichever it is, I want to know about it.”
Kerr licked his lips.
“I fail to see what right you have to come here and cross-examine me,” he said, but his voice was not quite as positive as the words.
“Let’s not make it a matter of rights,” said the Saint easily. “Let’s put it down to my fatal bigness of heart. I’m giving you the chance to talk to me before you talk to the sheriff. And you’ll certainly have to talk to the sheriff if the gun that Lida was shot with happens to be registered in your name.”
It was a shot in the dark, but it seemed to be worth taking, and Simon felt an inward leap of optimism as he saw that at least he had come close to his mark. Kerr’s hand jumped involuntarily so that the ice in his highball gave a sharp tinkle against the glass, and his face turned a couple of shades lighter in color.
“What sort of gun was she shot with?”
“A thirty-two Colt automatic.”
Kerr took it with his eyes. There was a long moment’s silence while he seemed to search either for something to say or for the voice to say it.
“It could have been my gun.” He formed the words at last. “I lent it to her this evening.”
“Oh?”
“She asked me if I had a gun I could lend her.”
“Why did you let her have it if you thought she was going to shoot herself?”
“I didn’t think so at the time. She told me she was going to meet someone that she was scared of, but she didn’t tell me who it was, and she wouldn’t let me stay with her. She was rather overwrought and very mysterious about it. I couldn’t get anything out of her. But I never thought about suicide — then.”
Simon’s blue eyes held him relentlessly through a cool drift of cigarette smoke.
“And that,” said the Saint, “answers just half my question. So you weren’t thinking about suicide. So somebody told you. Who?”
Muscles twitched sullenly over Kerr’s brows and around the sides of his mouth.
“I fail to see—”
“Let me help you,” said the Saint patiently. “Lida Verity didn’t commit suicide. She was murdered. It wasn’t even a planned job to look like suicide. This unanimous eagerness to brush it off as a suicide was just an afterthought, and not a very brilliant one either. The sheriff doesn’t believe it and I don’t believe it. But there’s one difference between the sheriff and me. I may be a red herring to him, but I’m not a red herring to myself. I know this is one killing I didn’t do. So I’ve got a perfectly clear head to concentrate on finding out who did it. If anyone seems to be stalling or holding out on me, the only conclusion I can come to is that they’re either guilty themselves or covering up for a guilty pal. In either case, I’m not going to feel very friendly about it. And that brings us to another difference between the sheriff and me. When I don’t feel friendly about people, I’m not tied down by a lot of red tape and pettifogging legal procedures. As you may have heard. If you are covering up for a pal he must mean a lot to you, if you’re willing to let me hang you for him.”
Kerr took another sip of his drink. It was a long sip, turning gradually into a gulp. When he set down his glass, the last pretense of dignified obstinacy had gone out of him.
“I did have a phone call from one of the men at the club,” he admitted.
“Who was it?”
“I don’t know exactly. He said, ‘The Saint’s on his way to see you. Mrs Verity just shot herself here. Esteban says to tell you not to talk.’ ”
“Why should this character expect you to do what Esteban told you?”
Kerr fidgeted.
“I work for Esteban, in a sort of way.”
“As a shill?” Simon inquired.
The other flushed.
“I bring people to the club and I get a small commission on the business. It’s perfectly legitimate.”
“It would be in a legitimate business. So you shill for the joint. You latch on to visiting pigeons around town and steer them in to be plucked.” Simon studied him critically. “Times must be getting tough, Maurice. I seem to remember that you used to do much better marrying them occasionally and getting a nice settlement before they divorced you.”
“That’s neither here nor there,” Kerr said redly. “I’ve told you everything I know. I’ve never been mixed up with murder, and I don’t want to be.”
The Saint’s cigarette rose to a last steady glow before he let it drop into an ashtray.
“Whether you want it or not, you are,” he said. “But we’ll take the best care we can of your tattered reputation.”
He held out his hand to Patricia and helped her up, and they went out and left Maurice Kerr on his own doorstep, looking like a rather sullen and perturbed penguin, with an empty glass still clutched in his hand.
“And that,” said Patricia, as the Saint nursed his car around a couple of quiet blocks and launched it into the southbound stream of Collins Avenue, “might be an object lesson to Dr Watson, but I left my dictionary at home.”
The Saint dipped two fingers into the open pack in his breast pocket for another Pall Mall, and his smile tightened over the cigarette as he reached forward to press the dashboard lighter.
“Aside from the fact that you’re much too beautiful to share an apartment safely with Mr Holmes,” he said, “what seems to bother you now?”
“Why did you leave Kerr like that? He was working for Esteban. He told you so himself. He was telling you the story that Esteban told him to tell you — you even made him admit that. And Lida seems to have been shot with his gun. It’s all too obvious.”
Simon nodded, his eyes on the road.
“That’s the whole trouble,” he said. “It’s all too obvious. But if she really was shot with Kerr’s gun — which seems to be as certain as any guess can be — why did the guy leave it behind to lay a trail straight to his doorstep? He may be a poop, but can you believe that he’s that half-witted? There’s nothing in his record to show that he had softening of the brain before. A guy who can work his way through four rich wives in ten years may not be the most desirable character on earth, but he has to have something on the ball. Most of these over-bank-balanced broads have been around too.”
Patricia fingered strands of golden hair out of her eyes.
“He doesn’t sound like the dream-boy of all time,” she said. “I can imagine how Dick Verity would like to hear that Lida and Maurice were a steady twosome.” Her eyes turned to him with a sudden widening. “Simon, do you think—”
“That there was blackmail in it?” The Saint’s face was dark and cold. “Yes, darling, I think we’re getting closer. But I don’t see the fine hand of Maurice in it. A man with his technique doesn’t suddenly have to resort to anything so crude as murder. But you meet all kinds of types at the Quarterdeck Club — and I think we belong there.”
The moon was the same, and the rustle of palm fronds along the tall dark margins of the road, but the night’s invitation to romance had turned into something colder that enclosed them in a bubble of silence which only broke on the eventually uprising neons of the Quarterdeck Club and the hurricane voice of the Admiral.
“Avast there!” he bellowed, as the car came to a stop. “My orders are to repel boarders.”