Montague Velston tugged some folded paper and a ballpoint pen out of his pockets.
“This,” he said, “I have got to get verbatim.”
“So I started thinking about the other alibis where they were thin. For instance, while there was an hour where Ziggy was only represented by a tapping typewriter, there was also an hour where you and Lois only have each other to testify that you were both sitting around here.”
“But even if we’d wanted to... to do it, for any reason,” Lois said breathlessly, “we couldn’t have. I mean, how could we tell when Ziggy would decide to quit working? It might’ve been in two hours, or ten minutes, or even in ten seconds he might’ve come bouncing out to get a drink or ask us to listen to something!”
The Saint nodded cheerfully.
“I thought of that too. And I may say, darling, that I felt a lot better when I convinced myself that you weren’t in on the deal. But then I had to start thinking about Ted and Ralph, who also were their own best witnesses for more than an hour. And when Ted took me aside and began selling Ziggy shorter than anyone, it made more sense all the time.
“Sure,” Colbin scoffed. “That’s how I got to be a big agent, selling my clients short.”
“You could always get other clients, but you only had one neck. You’d try almost anything to protect your property, but if it went sour the property could take the rap. You thought you had it made until I showed up, and then you got a wee bit panicky and started coppering your bet too fast. You always had that way out in mind, of course, from the time you swiped a piece of new rope from Ziggy’s boat. But you were hottest of all when you sized up Ralph Damian as a bird of your own feather. He’d provide the alibi you thought you ought to have — according to all those paperbacks you read — and on top of that you could see how useful it might be to have a big wheel at UBC tied to your wagon. What percentage of your percentage of Ziggy did you have to promise him to sell the deal?”
“This is all delightfully libelous,” Damian said, with his bright eyes dancing. “Does he have any assets, Ted? We should be able to sue him for everything he’s got.”
The Saint sighed. It was a pity, he thought, that there were still a lot more detective-story clichés which he hadn’t yet had time to extirpate. But he could keep working at it.
“You must talk it over with your lawyers,” he said agreeably. “I know they’ll be glad to hear that you expect to have some way of paying them. But first they’ll have to get you off this murder rap. Perhaps you’d better phone them right away, because the cops are planning to pick you both up after you leave here. The only reason they aren’t banging on the door now is because the Ziggy Zaglan show is such good publicity for Miami Beach that they want to keep him out of it as much as possible.”
“Who did you talk to when you went to the phone?” Colbin challenged shrilly. “Anyone but this hick medical examiner?”
“Only an old friend of mine, the sheriff Newt Haskins. He told me that a more elaborate autopsy, with an analysis of Paul’s digestive tract, which I didn’t mention before, had pinned down the time of death pretty closely around midnight,” said the Saint prophetically. “At that time you two were supposedly on your way to the Latin Quarter. But then they checked the car-park attendants,” he went on mendaciously, but with unwavering assurance, “and found that you didn’t get there until very much later, in fact only a short while before Ziggy and Monty came to drag you out. And then they went back to make another check at Paul’s — they must have arrived right after Lois and Monty and I left — and they found that like any good gadget man he also was wired for sound. He had his plaything running when someone dropped in last night, and the sound track is a bit confusing, but—”
“You moronic crummy little fast-buck promoter,” spat out the network executive, glaring brilliantly at the haggard little agent. “You said it was foolproof, but—”
“I didn’t know there were such fools as you,” Colbin said wearily.
Simon Templar shrugged, and backed away from the argument, and went in search of the telephone again to call an old friend, the sheriff, Newt Haskins, whom he had not yet talked to. It was not altogether unfortunate, he thought, that some of the oldest clichés were still paying off. As long as they could still be used to make the ungodly trip over their own tongues, he would probably have to go on taking advantage of them.
He also hoped he would be able to get his part wrapped up in time to move on to an equally venerable but more pleasurable cliché, which would call for taking Lois Norroy off to dinner as a preliminary.
The good medicine
“Don’t you ever feel foolish about telling people you’ve retired and don’t want to get in any more trouble?” David Stern asked.
“About as foolish as I feel when I’m asked whom I’m planning to swindle or slaughter next,” Simon Templar admitted.
“That’s a fine way to talk to an influential newspaper owner who is also buying you a magnificent dinner.”
“I’ve never asked you to use your influence for me, Dave. And I also notice that you apparently didn’t want to be seen with me in one of the more widely advertised food foundries that bring tourists to New Orleans from every corner of the continent, according to the guidebooks.”
The newspaper owner grinned.
“If you lived here, you might like a change from that fancy cooking too. And I can’t imagine you acting like a tourist anywhere.”
They were in Kolb’s, on St Charles Street, a restaurant whose cuisine favors (as the name implies) a tradition Teutonic rather than Creole. Thus, by a paradox of environment, what might have been commonplace in Leipzig became actually more exotic in Louisiana than the famous establishments that emphasize their French background.
“Don’t think I’m complaining,” said the Saint, making happy inroads on some tenderly baked duckling bedded in sauerkraut. “But you should know better than to introduce an Ulterior Motive into this pleasant session — unless it is young, beautiful, and of course uncooked.”
“Like, for example, the specimen at the corner table that you have so much trouble keeping your eyes off?”
“Well, for example.”
“I think he calls himself the Marchese di Capoformaggio, or some such name. But I only know what I read in the columns I buy. Possibly he’s as phony as any Balkan prince of the pre-war crop. But she seems to like him — at least as of the last press releases.”
“Thank you,” said the Saint politely. “You are a salt mine of information. And now, as a purely incidental item, who is she?”
“As if I didn’t know that was the one you were interested in. That is Elise Ashville.”
“The Elise Ashville?”
“Of course.”
“Hell,” said the Saint with great patience, “who the hell is the Elise Ashville?”
Stern was honestly surprised.
“You really don’t know? She owns Ashville Pharmacal Products, Inc. — one of our bigger local industries. They make patent medicines. Juven-Aids. VervaTonique. Dreemicreem. You must have seen them advertised, at least.”
“Gawd, who could help it? But I never had any reason to notice who made ’em.”
Simon looked towards the corner table again. The woman who sat there with the pale-blond, delicate-featured, expensively tailored and shirted and accessoried type, for which a previous generation’s graphic term “lounge lizard” has never been bettered, was not constructed to the conventional specifications of a female tycoon. Even to refer to her as a “woman” seemed slightly heavy, although the much-abused word “girl” was equally inapplicable. She could easily have passed for much less than thirty and could not have ranked forty by the most vicious estimate: the Saint would have personally favored the lower estimate, being a man and vulnerable to certain figures, of which she had a honey, unless the couturiers had cooked up some new gimmicks which could falsify even such a candid décolleté as she was wearing. Incontrovertibly above that she had a face of petulant but exciting beauty, capped by a casque of darkly burnished copper hair. If she could have walked many blocks outside without eliciting an appreciative whistle, it would only have been in a blackout that coincided with a dense fog.