“Only particularly stupid cops, and crooked cops,” Simon said, answering what sounded almost like a question. “And I’ve had to do a few unkind things to fairly good cops, who were just too ambitious about adding my scalp to their trophies. But I didn’t hate them.”
“That’s the way I got it,” Tanner said. “From a cop named Inspector Fernack, of New York. He was our guest of honor at a Police Association dinner in Cleveland once, and your name came up, I forget how, in a bull session afterwards. I figured he knew what he was talking about.”
“That was nice of John Henry,” Simon murmured. “I must try to be kinder to him next time I’m in his bailiwick... But I still don’t get the connection.”
“You will in just a minute,” Tanner said. He opened the front door of the house and went in. They stepped directly into the living room, without any intervention of a hallway. It was a large room which seemed lofty because no ceiling intruded between the floor and the rough-hewn beams and rafters of the roof. There was a broad picture window on the other side framing a panorama of pale grays and olive green that ended in a low line of corrugated purple hills, and a big smoke-blackened stone fireplace at one end. The solid Spanish-derivative furniture, Navaho rugs on the floor, and copper and Indian pottery ornaments had obviously been left unchanged since the departure of the ill-starred original owner, and it had been kept as a common room for some of the very different breed of pioneers who had infiltrated the Southwest since the dawn of the Atomic Age.
The Professors, as the guards seemed to have aptly christened them — or, at least, the two who were left — were typical of the New Order, which at that time still seemed disconcertingly untypical of the Old. As befitted the priests of a Science separated by multiple walls of electronic computers from the gropings of the dreamy medieval alchemist, they would have seemed much more at home in a small-town bank than stirring a smelly caldron on some blasted heath. The one who bustled instantly into the foreground, forestalling any possible query as to who was the ranking spokesman, was so executive that it crackled.
“Glad you got here at last, Marshal,” he said.
The way he uttered the words “at last,” with bell-like clarity, yet with a total lack of inflection, so that the implied censure was unmistakable and yet, if challenged, he could unassailably disclaim any such intention, was as much a triumph of technique as the way he turned the compliment of giving Tanner his correct title into a subtle reminder of a class difference between them. He was a short rotund man with rimless glasses and a tight mechanical smile and wispy brown hair stretched thinly over the places where it had stopped growing, whose neat business suit was a final incongruity against the décor of the room and the scenery outside.
“Professor Walter Rand,” Tanner said introductorily.
Rand shook hands heartily and vacantly, like a politician.
Tanner continued, pointing at the others in turn with a thick, uncourtly forefinger: “Dr Conrad Soren. My daughter Marjorie. Jock Ingram.”
Dr Soren inclined his head stiffly. His costume was almost as inappropriate as Rand’s, in a different direction, consisting of unbleached linen slacks and an exuberantly flowered shirt that would have been more at home on the beach at Waikiki. He had a short nose and a long upper lip and a brush of thick straight wiry hair, all of which might have given him a rather simian aspect if it had not been for his large and extremely intelligent eyes.
Marjorie Tanner was a pretty girl with nice brown hair and nice brown eyes and a nice figure. She was not the type that was likely to launch a thousand ships, or even a thousand feet of motion-picture film, but she had a wholesome air of being nice to know and even nice to live with. Jock Ingram was a few years older but well under thirty, a well-knit young man with crew-cut sandy hair and pleasantly undistinguished features but very earnest eyes, the type that most parents of daughters would be happy to see calling. Already they managed to look like a couple, and they looked at the Saint together in the same politely puzzled way.
The marshal, however, had again conveniently forgotten to complete the other side of the introduction.
“Let’s see the body, Jock,” he said bluntly.
“Yes, sir.”
The young man in uniform headed towards an open arch in the wall opposite the fireplace. It was the end of a corridor that ran lengthways through the house, with doors on each side and another door across the far end. Ingram led the way past two doors on the right and opened the third room.
It faced the same view as the living room and had obviously once been a bedroom, but it had been stripped of all household furniture. Instead, it held a workbench littered with an assortment of small tools, an engineer’s drawing board under the window, a bookcase with rolls of drafting paper and other stationery on the shelves, and the body.
The body lay on the floor near the middle of the room, belly down, the head turned to the right so that the left cheek rested on the bare floor. Of all the workers in that converted Western setting, Edward Oakridge, even in death, looked the least out of place, for he wore a plaid shirt and blue jeans secured by a tooled leather belt, although he had not gone so far as to wear cowboy boots but had his feet in comfortable sneakers. He was a short burly man, and what could be seen on his face had some of the same Neanderthal ruggedness as his physique. His head was completely hairless, so that the blood-clotted wound slightly above and behind his right ear could be plainly seen, but even more conspicuous and more gruesome was the screwdriver handle that stuck out at an angle from his powerful neck, directly over the jugular vein.
It was the latter wound which had done the most bleeding, to form a pool on the bare tile floor. Into that pool of ghastly ink the dying man had dipped a finger, and with it had traced three capital letters close to his face, which spelled a word. And as he gazed down at it, the earliest of the Saint’s perplexities was answered.
The word was: “COP.”
“Now I get it,” said the Saint at last. “Why didn’t you tell me, Harry?”
“Jock told Loretto and Loretto told me when he phoned,” Tanner said. “But that was double hearsay. I hadn’t seen it myself.”
He squatted to make a closer examination, and Simon leaned over to confirm it.
“Somebody hit him when he wasn’t looking, with something with a sort of cornered edge,” Tanner said. “It may have cracked his skull, but it doesn’t seem to have crushed it in. The murderer wasn’t certain that that killed him either, so he stuck the screwdriver in his throat to make sure.”
“There’s a soldering iron here on the workbench with what looks like blood on the tip,” Ingram said. “The guy could’ve put it back down there when he picked up the screwdriver.”
They went over and looked, without touching.
“But Oakridge still wasn’t quite dead,” Simon said slowly. “He came to again for a few seconds, before he passed out for keeps. He couldn’t even yell, with that thing in his gullet. But he tried to leave a message.”
Then all three of them sensed the presence of Professor Rand in the doorway and turned before he spoke, but it was the Saint who was the objective of his busy bright eyes.
“Are you from the FBI?” he inquired.
“He’s assisting me,” Tanner pre-empted the reply calmly. “But the FBI have been notified. They’re sending a man from Tucson.”
“Then wouldn’t it be better to leave everything undisturbed till he gets here? After all, this establishment is under the Federal Government—”
“It may sound crazy, Professor, and it likely is, but this is also inside the town limits of Primrose Pass, which were drawn by some optimist who figured it didn’t cost anything to think big. I haven’t been told anything by the Federal Government which says I shouldn’t bother about a murder committed anywhere in my territory.”