"Then the will was as much a surprise to you as to anyone?"
"You could 've knocked me down with a feather."
Simon scribbled solemnly on the back of an envelope, like a stage reporter, recording the brilliant cliche for quotation, in case he forgot it.
He changed the subject for a moment:
"What exactly did Mr. Cardman die of?"
"Acute gastro-enteritis. He'd suffered a lot with it, off and on, ever since he got that intestinal virus that had me brought in."
"There wasn't anything the doctor could do?"
"He had prescriptions. But I suppose his insides were damaged more than they could repair, at his age. And he was always trying out diets on his own, or dosing himself with medicines and health syrups that he saw advertised. I think they did him more harm than good. I used to get quite cross with Mr. Otterly for encouraging him."
The Saint was briefly puzzled.
"Mr. Otterly?"
"His nephew."
"Oh, yes. There's a niece, too, isn't there?"
"Miss Winchester. A pretty girl, and I think she was Mr. Cardman's favorite. But Mr. Otterly was naughty, always encouraging him by sending him things from New York — seaweed pills and grass powder and I don't know what else. Just trying to make up to his uncle, I know, but it was no help."
"You were always on good terms with both of them — I mean, the nephew and niece?"
"I thought so."
"So you thought they'd be understanding about being sort of disinherited in your favor?"
This time perhaps he was not quite subtle enough, for he struck a spark from her deep-set black eyes before the plump wrinkles creased around them again.
"I did feel badly at first," she said. "Until Mr. Otterly turned rather nasty — have you seen him?"
"No."
"Well, he said some very nasty things, about me taking advantage of his uncle. So then I stopped feeling sorry for him. I thought, if he's going to be a bad sport, because he didn't manage to cut out his cousin with those pills and things that he kept working on Mr. Cardman with, then why should I get in a family battle? I thought, Mr. Cardman made up his own mind, and if this is what he wanted I've got a right to take it, and bless him."
"Do you have a picture of him?"
Mrs. Yanstead looked around vaguely. There were a few framed photographs on walls and ledges; but the Saint's surreptitiously wandering glances had identified most of them as plates from a sentimental biography of a woman who could only have been Mr. Cardman's mother, a recurrent face from an old misty-edged sepia vignette of a demure young girl to a modern skilfully-retouched portrait of a prim old matriarch. Mr. Cardman's inclusion in a group with his sisters, gathered around her in their self-consciously angelic adolescence, was not what Simon had in mind; but Mrs. Yanstead's obliging exploration discovered a very contemporary snapshot tucked into one corner of phonus-period velvet frame.
"He never was one to have his picture taken," she said, "but this is one that Miss Winchester took right after she came down this season."
It was the typical box-camera enlargement, obviously taken against one side of the house, with Mrs. Yanstead and Mr. Cardman standing awkwardly side by side (but at a discreet distance) and both looking straight into the lens and grinning in the pointless mechanical way beloved of the amateur artists who are the bread and butter of the photographic-supply industry; but partly on that account it had the virtue of presenting a facial facsimile that was recognizable in the same brutal way that a passport photo or a prison mug shot may be recognizable. It showed Mr. Cardman with a predatory nose but a weak chin, a cocky but frail figure beside the foster-mother of his senility, who seemed to make an earthily honest effort to hold back and avoid eclipsing him with her superior bulk and vitality.
"May I borrow this?" Simon asked. "It won't be damaged, and I'll send it back in a day or two."
"I suppose so."
"One other thing," he said as he was leaving: "where can I find Mr. Otterly?"
"He went to the Tradewind — that's the first motel you come to down the road. I expect he'll have plenty to say about me." She pursed her lips, then shrugged and smiled again. "Well, I don't live in a glass house, so I shouldn't worry about who throws stones."
Simon drove on to the motel, and after inquiring at the office he was directed to the Terrace Snack Bar, which was beside the swimming pool, which had considerately been provided for the indulgence of guests who either found a hundred-yard walk to the beach too fatiguing or were appalled by the potential perils of the rippling ocean. There he found Cousin Henry eating an improbably early lunch, or more likely a very belated breakfast, consisting of corned beef hash and black coffee.
Henry Otterly was a broad-shouldered young man with a premature paunch bulging over the top of his Hawaiian-print shorts. His black hair was slicked down in graceful sweeps over his head and his ears, but below that it sprouted in thin curls all over him except in the conventionally scraped facial areas, which had the dark sheen of gun-metal. He had the still red and unfinished tan of the typical tourist, and another rosy tinge in his eyeballs which some Yankee visitors acquire under the palm-trees and others bring with them from a lunch diet of dry martinis. This season he still had a certain fast and superficial charm; and in a very few years, unless he found the end of his rainbow, he could be just another slob.
He received the Saint with practised Madison-Avenue affability — a blend of pressurized brightness and defensive flexibility.
"The Guardian? Of course, the best newspaper in the South, I tell everybody — except people from the other papers. But are you selling space or trying to fill some?"
"Would you like to make any statement about your late uncle's will?" Simon asked.
"I'd like to make several, but not to you. I don't want to have something printed that I could be sued for."
"I suppose we could safely say that you were surprised."
"I think so. Also astounded, staggered, flabbergasted — and perhaps even incredulous."
"And if you did make a statement it might be uncomplimentary to someone?"
"It might be," Mr. Otterly said. He tugged at his lower lip with mock judiciousness. "Yes, I think you can safely say that. Very uncomplimentary. Would you like some mocha, java, or just any coffee?"
"I'm a bit farther ahead in the day," Simon said negatively. "But a Dry Sack on the rocks would go down nicely."
"Good idea." Otterly repeated the order to a waitress, adding: "And I'll have a Bloody Mary."
Simon resumed: "I can understand that you'd want to be careful, Mr. Otterly, but it's true that you're thinking of contesting the will, isn't it?"
"I've discussed it with my attorneys, yes. We're having another meeting on it this afternoon. It's in what I would call the survey stage. We turn the pros and cons loose in the pond and see what they spawn."
"Are you hoping to prove the will was forged?"
"That might be difficult. I'm not giving much away, but everyone concerned knows that my uncle had a fairly bad stroke a few years ago, and his right hand and arm never recovered completely. So it might be a bit marginal to rely on handwriting experts. On the other hand, anyone with enough motive to forge a will would be even more capable of getting the old man to write it himself."
"You mean what they call 'undue influence'?"
"That's something like the beat of the legal jazz."
Simon circulated his drink in the glass which had been delivered to him, and sipped it appreciatively.
"Did that stroke affect Mr. Cardman anywhere besides the arm?" he inquired, without flippancy.
"Like in the head? Now you approach the cosmic. You invoke the definition that makes politics, religion, philosophy, and low comedy. Who is nuts and who isn't? Well, I'd hate to claim that my own uncle was insane, but he'd reached an age when his mind was certainly not as sharp as it was when he was younger. There's plenty of evidence that he was eccentric, to say the least. Even Mrs. Yanstead, unless she perjures herself, will have to admit that he had to be coaxed or bullied to take his doctor's medicine, but he'd try anything he heard of from some quack advertisement."