“Perhaps a thousand dollars for yourself, Lieutenant?” suggested Mr Eade, overanxious with incipient relief.
The officer almost choked.
“Now I’ve heard everything,” he boiled over. “First it turns into legal blackmail, if there is such a thing, and using me for an accessory — and now you’d like to make me a partner too. Thanks, but you can keep the rest of your dirty money. You’re lucky I don’t get promoted for making arrests. My job is just to keep this town clean of grifters like you, who’d give it a bad name. But don’t miss that plane, Mr Eade, and don’t let me ever run into you again, or you won’t get off so easy!”
“Why on earth did you have to turn down that extra G-note?” Simon complained later. “At least it would have paid for the special plane you had to charter to get here.”
“I thought the scene was more convincing that way,” Howard Mayne said. “Anyhow, I was only helping you out for Aunt Sophie’s sake. I don’t think I’m ready for a life of crime yet.”
The Saint grinned.
“You’re wasting a lot of talent,” he opined. “But I hope Copplestone sees you in a movie some day when you’re a star and realizes how good you really might have been as Don Juan Jones.”
The happy suicide
The advertisement said:
GALLOWS FOR RENT. Strong, excellently constructed. Only ten dollars a day, exclusive occupancy. Rope free. Do it yourself. Box 13, Miami Gazette.
“It was a gag,” Lois Norroy said, perhaps rather unnecessarily.
She had a nut-brown suntan that contrasted quite startlingly with blond hair of a pale platinum shade that the human follicle hardly ever manages to sustain much beyond infancy without chemical assistance, and this, combined with a figure of noteworthy exuberance in the upper register, made her look more like the popular conception of a movie star (or rather, perhaps, that anomalous creature known to the trade as a “starlet”) than an extremely able and somewhat cynical writer of the lines that made such dumb belles seem wise, witty, or cute, which she was.
“You see, Paul was one of these do-it-yourself fiends,” she explained. “It was his one relaxation, the only pastime that could take his mind completely off his job. Where other fellows would’ve kept a library or a stable or a harem, Paul kept a workshop — to rest in. But it was a shop that any professional craftsman would’ve been glad to settle for. If there’s any tool or gadget he didn’t have, it’s only because he hadn’t heard of it. So when he decided he wanted this lamppost out by his barbecue, of course he had to make it himself. He did it very functionally and seriously, and he swore it wasn’t until it was finished that he realized how much like an old-fashioned gallows it looked.”
But only that morning Paul Zaglan had been found dangling by the neck from his own unintentional gibbet, with an overturned stepladder under him, in the barbecue-patio of his house in one of the less pretentious developments north of Miami, and only thus for one day had succeeded in crowding his more famous brother in the headlines.
“Then we started kidding about it,” Lois Norroy said, “and that advertisement was the result. It was Paul’s own idea, but we all agreed it might bring some goofy answers. And he thought they might give him some ideas or some gags he could use in a show.”
“So after all, it still only took his mind off his work the hard way,” said the Saint.
He had no reason to be quite so cynical, but if we must be technical, he had not much reason even to be there at all. Don Mucklow had invited him to help ferry a boat to Grand Bahama and stay over for some fishing, but a strong north-easter had started to blow and forced them to postpone their sailing. Then, when they were circumnavigating nothing more hazardous than the smorgasbord at Old Scandia, Don had run a collision course with Lois Norroy and introduced him. After that, being what she was, it would have been too much to hope that she would forget him when Paul Zaglan’s suicide added an unexpectedly lurid news-worthiness to the assignment she was already working on. These things were always happening to Simon Templar, and sometimes he felt he was getting quite used to them.
“But you don’t have to be so utterly flip about it,” Lois said rather edgily.
“It’s true, though, isn’t it?” Simon protested mildly. “When he built this thing he was trying to forget his job, but it turned right around and started giving him ideas. Which only proves that when Destiny has you by the ear it isn’t much use wriggling.”
“Then why don’t you relax and enjoy it?”
A certain most unsaintly gleam came into Simon’s blue gaze.
“It seems to me,” he murmured, “that that Oriental advice was originally given on a rather different subject. Now if that’s what you have in mind, darling—”
The editors of Fame magazine would have found it hard to believe, but Lois Norroy actually blushed.
“I mean,” she said hastily, “why don’t you step in and solve the mystery?”
“Because, for one thing, as I tried to tell you when you were trying to set me up for a Fame story — and in spite of a lot of popular myths — I am not a detective.”
“You’ll do until a better one comes along.”
Simon gave her a cigarette.
“I don’t think the local Joe Fridays would like to hear you say that,” he drawled. “But even if you’re determined to suborn me with outrageous flattery, what makes you think there’s any mystery to solve?”
She looked at him with improbably steady and challenging brown eyes.
“You must have been fairly close to a few suicides before this,” she said. “But did you ever know one who was completely happy just before he did it?”
“How sure are you of that?”
“Remember, I was with him all yesterday afternoon and evening, until he went home about eleven o’clock. We were still working on the Portrait. At Ziggy’s.”
This statement was not as cryptic as it may sound to those who were never addicts of Fame magazine, which at that time was at the peak of its somewhat transitory success. Devoted to the most intimate discussion and dissection of current celebrities, it was a lineal descendant of the lurid scandal sheets that had swamped the newsstands a few years before, but like many a child of murky parentage it had risen considerably above its origin. Although it catered to the same appetite for gossip and revelation, it was much more dignified, much more discriminating, and therefore on occasion much more deadly. But it was not necessarily destructive; it enhanced at least one reputation for every three that it undermined, so that there was never any lack of professional exhibitionists who were eager to play Russian roulette with their futures by cooperating to become the subject of one of the Portraits which were the main monthly feature of Fame, with their caricatures emblazoned on the cover, and a synoptic biography and assessment inside to which no closeted skeleton was sacred. And for this treatment Paul’s brother Ziggy was an ineluctable natural.
Since Fame magazine has long ago published its devastatingly competent capsule of Ziggy Zaglan, this chronicler is not going to try to top it. Let it simply remain on the record that a man who lacked every imaginable (or should it be imaginary?) asset of good looks and good voice, agility or ingenuity, wit or charm, talent or temperament was able for a stretch of months which it would only be agonizing to enumerate to stay at the top of every popularity poll or rating system devised to assure timorous sponsors that their commercials were interrupting the entertainment of a satisfactory number of bleary-eyed slaves of a TV set. He was one of those preposterous phenomena which afflict the public once in a generation like an epidemic: he resembled no other performer, living or dead, and indeed there was a cadre of diehards which forlornly maintained that he was not a performer at all, but millions of one hundred per cent American housewives would have taken a Trappist vow sooner than they would have missed their daily dose of Ziggy Zaglan.