At any rate, Mrs. Yanstead had stayed on, even after he made a partial recovery from the "intestinal flu" which had brought her in, and cared for him solicitously through the increasingly frequent gastric upsets which he became prone to, until the final acute attack to which he succumbed.
"I guess you could qualify for the Freud Trophy," Simon concurred gravely, and then hastily explained — "that's a sort of head-shrinkers' Oscar. He should have been grateful to find another apron-string."
"He was," Betty said, so bitterly that he now understood the tinge of spite that had faintly discolored her previous praise. "He left her practically everything!"
"He did?"
"Well, he left me and my cousin two thousand dollars each, like showing he hadn't forgotten us. But she got the house and all the rest."
"And there was a lot more?"
"His attorney said he had stocks worth about a quarter of a million."
Ernest Cardman's single-minded study of the oscillations of Wall Street had not been unprofitable. Yet with perhaps typical parsimony, he had saved himself a legal fee by disposing of that considerable estate in a simple one-page will written in his own crabbed and shaky hand. As a holograph will, it required no witnesses, and had been sent by ordinary mail to his attorney, who had been out of town at the time and who had not even seen it until he returned the day after his client died.
"Was it a shock to your?"
"Was it! We had no idea he was so well off, but still he'd always let us understand that whatever there was would come to us. In fact, I can remember him saying he wouldn't even waste his time making a will at all, because as his next-of-kin we'd automatically inherit anyhow. And all he'd done before that was leave a letter with his attorney willing his body to the University of Miami medical school. Henry — my cousin — was fit to be tied.
He was staying with Uncle Ernest before I came down, and he never got any kind of idea what was cooking. He says we ought to contest the will."
The phantom electric needles of unfocused intuition tried to stitch their way up the Saint's spine.
"I believe there is something called 'undue influence'," he hazarded.
"So Henry says. But I must admit, I never saw her get out of line when I was there. She was always sweet."
"Doesn't Henry think it was forged, then?"
"He's talked about that too. But Velma said she wished it could be checked by a handwriting expert. I couldn't help feeling sorry for her, in a way."
Most of this was not actually a connected conversation, as it appears — which would have been difficult in some of the places and situations they were in — but it is so presented to spare the reader all the irrelevant interruptions. And the Saint had his own way of teasing out information over a period of time, without seeming to cross-examine as it might sound from nothing but the relevant exchanges.
They were driving unhurriedly back to Palm Beach on the coast road before he brought the topic casually back to the background of her cousin.
"Was Henry at the party tonight? I don't remember meeting him."
"No. He isn't staying there. He moved out to a motel after the will was read, though Velma did say he was welcome to stay. I expect he had some other date — he'd like to be a playboy, but he can't often afford it."
"And now at least he's got two thousand to play with. What does he do for money between legacies?"
"He has a job in an advertising agency."
"And thinks he should be an account executive — with a fat expense account?"
"He'd like to be."
Simon looked at her again from another angle.
"And what about you, Betty? What do you do in New York?"
"I'm a cosmetician," she said, and added defensively: "That doesn't mean I work in a beauty parlor. I advise people what to buy, what would do the most for them, and I probably help more men than women — about choosing those kind of gifts, I mean."
She named the Fifth Avenue department store where she performed this invaluable service, but it did not awe him out of kidding her most irreverently about the qualifications for her profession and its importance to the economy.
Nevertheless, when they got back to the mansion where she was staying, she was the one who said: "Shall I be seeing you again?"
"When are you going back to the magic mud-packs?" he asked.
"On Sunday. I can't take another week off, the way it's turned out."
"How about dinner tomorrow?" He glanced pointedly at his watch. "I mean really tomorrow, not a little later today."
"Go."
(We already warned that this incident would be bound to get dated, like all the others.)
At the door, she kissed him spontaneously on the lips, but with a swiftness that was there and gone before anything but surmise could be made of it; and he drove away with one more question raised instead of answered in his mind.
In the morning, however, he was out at a very reasonably early hour, heading for the address of the late Ernest Cardman, which he located with no trouble in the phone book — he had interrogated Betty Winchester quite enough not to want to have overloaded his inquisition with that last detail.
As he had been told, it was a comparatively modest house for its prime location; and when his ring on the bell was answered he found Mrs. Velma Yanstead no less modest, in a neck-high housecoat of some starchy material which was so studiously respectable that it proclaimed almost aggressively that her virtue mattered more to her than her comfort. And yet, somewhat paradoxically, that did not make her forbidding. She was fat and forty and heartily uncomplicated.
"I'm from the Miami Guardian," he said, with conscienceless aplomb. "As you know, we have a Palm Beach section in our Sunday edition, and of course we'll have to print something about Mr. Cardman and his will. Is there anything you'd like to say about it for publication?"
"Well, really!" She was neither coy nor antagonistic, but just diffident enough to be likeable. "I'd no idea that would be news."
"A quarter of a million dollars is still news, Mrs. Yanstead, even in these inflated times. May I come in for a few minutes?"
The living-room was like a million middle-class Florida living-rooms, undistinguished by planned interior decoration or obtrusive eccentricity. It was furnished with what can best be described as furniture — more or less functional things with legs, arms, seats, or flat surfaces. The general tone, especially of the bric-a-brac, perhaps had a grandmotherly or old-maidish tinge which Mr. Cardman had clearly had no solitary urge to change; but it was not strenuously slanted towards the antique, and it certainly did not suggest wealth or extravagance.
"You sound rather like him," Mrs. Yanstead said amiably. "Always talking about inflation, he was, and twenty-five cent dollars and recessions and I don't know what else. I never argued with him — that was his hobby, and it was none of my business."
"You had no idea how wealthy he was?"
"I never thought about it. I knew he must 've been fairly comfortably off, but he didn't spend as if he had it to throw away."
"You weren't in his confidence at all personally?"
The question could hardly have been phrased more perfectly, without the slightest hint at which she could have taken offense, but open to her to answer as fully as she might be inclined.
"He was just like any other patient; but I've always got on well with my patients." She stated it as a matter of professional pride warmed by human satisfaction. "You can't do them much good if you don't get on with them. I wasn't like a servant, of course — we played cribbage and watched television together, and everything like that. But there was nothing romantic about it."