The Saint smiled, with a patience he did not feel.
“To be more concrete,” he said, “I just talked to the medical examiner who did a pro forma autopsy on Paul. He confirmed that Paul died by strangulation, which could include hanging. He wasn’t throttled by hand. His larynx was ruptured — if you’ll all pardon the gruesome details. But his neck wasn’t broken.”
“What is this supposed to mean to us laymen?” Velston asked, with strenuously inoffensive tolerance.
“Only that a guy who apparently liked to do everything just right, whether it was putting together a lamppost or a scaffold, and who must have been one of the few suicides who ever swung in a genuine hangman’s knot, must’ve turned awful clumsy and stupid at the last moment if he couldn’t think of any better way to finish the job than to step off a low rung of a six-foot stepladder and choke himself slowly and miserably to death, instead of jumping off the top and getting it done with a quick, clean broken neck.”
“Would you expect a man who’s upset enough to commit suicide to be as rational about it as that?” Damian objected.
“If he was calm enough to tie that knot, I would,” Simon replied.
Colbin crossed to the liquor trolley and refilled his glass.
“What the man means,” he said, “is that someone grabbed hold of Paul, who was twice as big as any of us, and hung him up there.”
“After hitting him a judo chop on the Adam’s apple which would make him helpless and also start his strangling,” Simon said calmly.
They all thought about it with reluctant but increasing soberness.
“Did you tell him we once did a Portrait on a judo expert, Lois?” Velston asked. “With his hints on self-defense for determined spinsters. I remember, that was one of them. But of course, two million other people read it in Fame,” he added hopefully.
The attempt fell rather flat.
“When did Paul die, Saint?” Lois asked.
“That was my first question,” Simon answered. “As practically everyone knows now, no doctor can examine a corpse and say, ‘He died three hours and twenty minutes ago,’ like they used to in the old detective stories. How closely they can hit it depends on the climate, and what the body died of, and a lot of other things. The guy I talked to wouldn’t stick his neck out — if you’ll pardon the expression — any further than that it was somewhere between eleven last night and one this morning, give or take an hour or so at either end.”
Everyone could be seen doing mental arithmetic on that.
“Then that clears all of us, at least,” Damian said in a tone of relief. “We were all together, more or less, for hours before and after that margin.”
“That’s true,” said the Saint. “But if this was a premeditated job, it was meditated by someone who knew about that gallows-lamppost. And the advertisement I saw only came out yesterday, and it was under a box number. That doesn’t make it top secret, but it does limit the field.”
“We all knew about it,” Lois said. “Paul had us all over to his place for cocktails two days ago, and that’s when we were kidding about it and the idea for the advertisement came up.”
“Except me,” Ziggy put in quickly. “I wasn’t there. I had a date with—”
“But you heard about it.”
Colbin turned around with a sudden angry break in his dour composure.
“Where are we getting at with all this bullshooting?” he snarled. “Let’s say it and the hell with it: most of us had some reason to shut Paul up, because of the damage he was threatening to do Ziggy—”
“Not me,” Velston said. “I love Ziggy like Pasteur loved rabies, but for him I wouldn’t murder a maggot.”
“How do I know what you wouldn’t do to stop someone scooping you with a scandal?” the agent retorted. “How do I know you weren’t jealous because Lois was getting too chummy with him? Or if Lois had a grudge against him for something that happened when they knew each other before? And who the hell cares? We don’t have to go through all this crap about motives, because all of us have got perfect alibis.”
All of them turned to the Saint again, only now they seemed far more comfortable than they had been for some time. It was as if Colbin’s outburst had enabled them to throw off a lurking doubt which had been privately oppressing each of them, letting them take deep breaths and begin to relax again.
But, somewhat disconcertingly, Simon Templar was still the most confident and relaxed of all.
“Therefore,” he said equably, “the alibis may not all be perfect.”
“Mine is,” Ziggy croaked. “It must be good for about twelve hours. I was here before dinner, and all through dinner, and then I was working for a bit, and then—”
“You went into the den, but can you prove that you stayed there and worked?”
A stricken expression that was unintentionally one of the funniest grimaces he ever made came over Zaglan’s face.
“I was belting the typewriter all the time. Everyone must of heard me.” He appealed to the others. “You all heard me, didn’t you?”
“They heard a typewriter,” said the Saint. “For about an hour — which was enough time for you to have run over to Paul’s, by car or even across the bay in your boat, and done everything we’ve talked about, and come back. May I look in your den?”
Zaglan nodded, dumbly, pointing to a door in a side wall.
Simon opened it, glanced in, and came back. He said, “There’s a tape recorder on the desk, which I suppose you use to try routines out for sound. You seem very fond of that method. But it could just as easily have played back an hour of typewriter music which you’d recorded in advance, and you already had everyone scared to death of interrupting you when you’re having an inspiration, so there was no risk that anyone would even knock on the door.”
“You’re nuts,” Zaglan said hoarsely. “If you can find a tape recording anywhere in this house with typewriters clicking on it, I’ll eat it. I’ll be the first guy to have a tapeworm with sound effects.”
“That’s not the right answer, Ziggy,” Damian said, his eyes glittering with alert anxiety. “Everyone knows you can run a tape back and erase everything on it in a few seconds.”
“Whatya trying to do, frame me?” Ziggy squealed. “You sold out to another network?”
He tore at his hair in quietly cosmic desperation, his rubbery features contorting like those of a baby preparing to cry, until a brain wave rolled over him as transparently as an ocean comber.
“So after I knocked Paul out with the judo, I dragged him up a ladder and stuck his head through a noose. Me, weighing a hundred and twenty pounds soaking wet. Tell ’em, Ted,” he pleaded desperately. “Tell ’em how I sprain my wrist if I swat a fly. Tell ’em about my hernia—”
“Take it easy, little man,” said the Saint hastily. “I’d already thought of that. I suppose you could theoretically have done it all, but only with the help of a lot of gadgets and gimmicks which are much too complicated for my simple mind. I’ve only put you through the wringer this much because by all accounts you seem to be rather a heel, and it may do you some good. But I was using you mainly to prove how deceptive an alibi can be. Now I have to wreck the whole time-honored alibi system.”
Ziggy Zaglan was too dazed, or relieved, to be insulted. He sagged back against the nearest supporting piece of furniture and gulped, “You do?”
“I mean, according to the tired old detective-story rules. If any of you ever read them, which I suspect you have, you know the convention. An alibi is an alibi is an alibi. Even if only one other character corroborates it, it’s an alibi. In detective stories, for some reason, it isn’t supposed to be kosher to have two characters in cahoots. The villain is always a lone wolf. But in real life it’s usually the opposite. When a good police officer hears a cast-iron alibi, the first thing he wonders is what might be in it for the supporting witness. I keep telling everyone I’m a lousy detective, but I have talked to some good ones.”