“Yeah,” said the Saint vaguely. “I’m sure.” He could have been talking to himself, until he turned. “Do you know where I can make a quiet phone call?”
Colbin pointed, with an air of complete confidence.
“Over there, the way the reporters left. Around the corner, you’re in the hall, and the phone’s in an alcove on the right. I’ll wait here for you.”
Simon made no commitment but threaded his way between a vine trellis and some potted palms and located the phone without much difficulty. He had a little more trouble finding the man he wanted to talk to, but there were few places where the Saint did not have his own odd connections, and in Miami they were especially various.
In a comparatively few minutes he had been deviously and electronically introduced to the Beach medical examiner.
“Certainly he was hanged, Mr Templar,” was the official statement. “Any other injuries? Nothing that I noticed, though of course I didn’t look very hard. The larynx was ruptured, but that often happens, particularly with a heavy man.”
“There’s no chance that he was throttled first and then hung up there?”
“Not unless he was garrotted with the same rope. And I think even that would have left a different kind of mark. Yes, I’m sure of it. But death was definitely due to strangulation.”
“His neck wasn’t broken?”
“No.” An increasingly pulled note crept into the doctor’s voice. “May I ask what you’re driving at?”
“I’ll tell you at the morgue tomorrow,” said the Saint. “I think you’ll be there again.”
He went back out to the pool terrace, where he found that Lois had joined Colbin. They both dropped anything they might have been discussing as soon as he came in sight and waited expectantly for him to talk first. It happened to be conveniently easy to address them together.
“You were both right,” he said. “I was led into this by the nose, so it’s too late to tell me to keep my nose out of it. But I soon found there were so many paradoxes in this set-up that I was very nearly ready to believe that one more would turn out to be like the rest — just normal. Until it dawned on me that I’d only been looking at it upside down.”
“I have to read this sort of thing every time I pick up a paperback book,” Colbin complained. “I guess it must be the only way to do it.”
He had made himself comfortable on an aluminum and plastic long chair, and Lois was sitting on the end where his feet were up. The whole setting, from the boat at one side to the living room in which the other three men were now lighted as if on a stage, was straight out of House & Garden.
“Everyone here is a fugitive from type-casting,” Simon explained imperturbably. “Lois could be taken for a lot of things, none of which is a female writer. Her partner, Monty Velston, looks like the popular picture of a cardsharp or a con man. You’re a big-time agent, but you might be an ex-jockey. Ralph Damian is a network vice-president, but he could pass for a junior-college teacher. Ziggy looks like — well, frankly, nothing. Maybe it should have a big “N”... What did Paul look like?”
“A bear,” Lois said.
“Weighing?”
“Oh, more than two hundred.”
“About two-thirty,” Colbin estimated.
The Saint kindled another cigarette.
“All right. Among all these contradictions, I couldn’t go up like a rocket over a suicide that didn’t look like a suicide. Even though Lois tried to tell me he was too happy. After all, I thought, maybe that’s the way they kill themselves in show business. But you added a lot of detail, Ted, that I couldn’t slough off. And about that time the light struck me. I try to tell everyone I’m a mystery moron, but it finally got even me. It wasn’t a suicide that didn’t look like a suicide. It was a murder that didn’t look like a murder.”
“Ah.” The ice cubes rattled in Colbin’s glass as he drained it. “Thanks for the elucidation. And you know who?”
“I think so.”
“Do we have a deal to talk over?”
“No deal, Ted. Not for the cold-blooded murder of a happy man. There are too few of them.”
“Okay. If it’s a square shake, okay. Let’s have it”
“Let’s go inside,” Simon said.
Lois Norroy got to her feet, her eyes fixed on him frantically as if she was dying to ask something but couldn’t. Simon took her arm and turned her quietly towards the living room. The deck chair creaked as Colbin hoisted himself up with a sigh and followed them.
Plate glass sliding on noiseless rollers let them into another world as silently as a film dissolves.
Zaglan and Damian stood with highball glasses in hand, listening raptly to a voice which came from the battery of speakers, which was still Ziggy’s but with improved resonance. Velston sat in a chair a little apart, also nursing a tumbler and listening with no less attention, if with a more cynical air.
The voice was saying: “It’s the oldest cliché there is in the theater, that the show must go on. But we’ll try to give it a different reading, which I think would be more like what Paul would have told us: Let’s go on with the show!”
Ralph Damian was rubbing his chin, pursing his lips judicially, saying, “I don’t know, Ziggy. It still sounds a bit—”
“Flatulent?” Colbin rasped.
For a stunned second after that he had everyone’s undivided attention, and he did not waste it. He said, “Anyhow, the Saint’s got another different idea of what Paul would want. He thinks Paul was murdered.”
Since the bombshell had been dropped for him, Simon Templar resignedly made the best use he could of it and took a moment to observe the reactions. Ziggy’s, almost fatefully, was the most stereotyped and the most exaggerated. His eyes bugged and his mouth fell open. Damian switched off the playback machine, and his eyes sparkled fascinatedly. Montague Velston even looked interested.
The Saint tidily eased some ash off his cigarette and said deprecatingly, “It wasn’t my original idea, but it grew on me. I didn’t start turning psychological handsprings the first time I heard that Paul seemed too happy to commit suicide. However, I’ve heard a few important details since which made it pretty unarguable.”
Ziggy brought his chin up off his chest at last, so abruptly that it squeezed the horizontal lines of his mouth.
“What details?” he demanded, and his eyes turned so that they almost switched the question to Colbin.
“Nothing that would have to come out if the rest of the case was clean,” said the Saint quietly. “But I’d already started squinting sideways at some of the other details. First, Paul’s lamppost — or gallows, as it turned out to be. An unusually neat and ingenious piece of homework, certainly put together by someone with a good mechanical mind. Then the noose — if you’ll pardon my enthusiasm — a beautiful professional job, which very few amateurs could tie, not even good carpenters like Paul. But the gallows was already there, and it wasn’t planned for a gallows. Someone else might have tied the noose. Someone else who had an interest in knots and who’d bothered to learn some.”
“Like me?” Damian suggested, the edge of derision barely showing through a mask of polite intelligence. “How did you know I kept a little sailboat on Long Island Sound?”
“Shoot me,” Colbin said. “I should of kept quiet about the stretch I did in the Navy in the last war, after the draft caught me.”
“Tell him about me, fellers,” Ziggy implored frantically. “Tell him how I can’t even tie up a Christmas package. Tell him I only have a boat because it looks good out there in the publicity pictures. Tell him I can’t even wear a clip-on bow tie without it coming undone.”