"And she says you encouraged him, sending him all kinds of health foods and herb remedies and what not."
Otterly shot him a hard stare, without a flicker of embarrassment.
"Oh, you've already talked to her." It was a statement, not a question. "I don't deny it. Harmless placebos — I made sure of that. Things that I knew couldn't hurt him, and may even have given him a few extra vitamins. I went along with the gag; and if it made him happy, what was wrong with that?"
"And since you're a relative, that couldn't be called 'undue influence' in your case," Simon said.
His tone was so impeccably neutral that for the first time Henry Otterly seemed uncertain — but whether of himself or of the Saint's intention would have been a very ticklish nuance to bet on.
"My dear sir, you're not aiming a muckraker at the American Family image? Making subversive suggestions that the affection they lavish on Rich Uncle is magnetized by his credit rating? Don't apologize. Even if that's what you were thinking, it's obvious that I didn't try too hard — even if I did commit the crime of trying to be more sympathetic than my cousin Betty. The proof is that neither of us got in the real money. We were left out in the pasture by a nag with no form at all — pardon my choice of metaphor. And we hadn't even thought she was in the running. Therefore one may legitimately wonder if the race was fixed. But in such a case one suspects the winner, not the losers. Do you excavate, gate?"
"I dig," said the Saint, but regretfully decided that it would not be in keeping with his role to complete the rhyme. "Although it's still hard for me to see how a man can be influenced into actually making a will like that, cutting off his own family in favor of a comparative stranger. I mean, without thumbscrews, or that sort of persuasion."
Otterly waved his hands with a commanding eloquence that was somehow reminiscent of an orchestra conductor in full flourish.
"Psychology, my friend." He was genial again, as his confidence recovered and re-inflated. "That's something I understand. It's my business. Why do you smoke what you smoke, shave with whatever you use, brush your teeth with that toothpaste? Because they were sold to you. Now don't be offended; you think you chose them. But I have news for you. You only chose what you chose because somebody knew how to get through your resistance and make you want it. My uncle was conditioned for twenty years and more to a Mother fixation. He was a pushover for the next person who came along who could fit into that Mother-image."
"And all your psychology couldn't compete with her?"
"Does my cousin Betty look like a Mother? Only if you include the kind that you find in homes for wayward girls. Do I look like a Mother? Be careful how you answer that." Otterly grinned, and emptied his Bloody Mary. By now he was hugely pleased with himself. "You know we didn't stand a chance against a real Mother-type, if she went out to exploit it. Whether a Court will agree is another matter. So I don't think I can say any more without the risk of damaging my own case. You understand?"
"Yes, but—"
"Then goodbye." Otterly stood up, holding out his hand, pleasantly, but offensively secure in his privilege and his savoir faire, "Call me after the verdict, and I might have some more Pulitzer material for you."
He turned away and plunged into the pool, ungracefully but finally enough; and Simon let it go at that. The Saint was not yet prepared, for purely private satisfaction, to explode the innocuous anonymity with which he seemed to have saddled himself. But only a much more rarified objective could have controlled the temptation.
And now he had one, beyond any doubt, for he was sure that Mr. Ernest Cardman's death, though it could hardly be called untimely, had nevertheless been artificially expedited.
But cerebral certainty is not proof; and even the Saint in his most lawless days, with all his impatience with the finicky rules of legal evidence and his delight in clearing his own short cuts to justice, had always required some positive verification, satisfactory at least to him if not to all technical criteria. And nobody knew better than he that any law-abiding police agency would be still more hesitant to turn on the sirens and rush hither and yon merely because he, Simon Templar, walked in and said he felt sure he had discovered a murder.
Luckily (and if this sounds like one more coincidence, let the statisticians make the most of it) he had a fairly direct access to the next facility he needed which for a while at least allowed him to be himself again. The Saint had friends, acquaintances, and contacts everywhere: they were a sort of human stock-in-trade, a fringe of his life which made much of the core possible. He had acquired many of them in highly improbable ways, haphazard as often as adventurous, but when it was necessary he had no compunction about calling on any of them.
He had met Julian D Corrington, Professor Emeritus and at that time head of the Zoology Department of the University of Miami, by correspondence over a magazine article that Dr. Corrington had written about Sherlock Holmes; for Dr. Corrington, in a small part of his spare time, happened also to be one of the many distinguished intellectuals who have made a whimsical cult of studying the detective writings of Conan Doyle as minutely as a theologian analyzes the scriptures, and often with resultant discoveries which must exert as much graveyard torque on that Master as similar diversions may apply to this chronicler in due time.
A person-to-person phone call established at no cost that Dr. Corrington was still tied up with his bi-weekly Histology class, but would be in his office in the afternoon; and Simon shamelessly cheated the telephone company to the enrichment of the petroleum industry by driving down to Coral Gables and presenting himself in person after lunch, which he ate rather late but unhurriedly before heading down LeJeune Road to the University.
Directed to a room on the third floor of the Anastasia Building, on the North Campus, he found an alert good-natured man with plentiful gray hair and gray mustache, whose trim and erect figure belied the seventy years he laid claim to.
"Are you really the man I've read so much about?" he said. "I never thought I'd actually meet you in person."
They chatted for a while in generalities, until Simon felt he could broach the purpose of his call without sounding too cavalier about it.
The Professor listened to him thoughtfully, and said: "I think I should take you to see the head of the Department of Anatomy — it would be under his jurisdiction, and he knows all the law about these things. I expect you'll find you have to get a court order, or at least a formal request from the police."
"Knowing who I am, can you see the police doing me any favors?" Simon objected. "And I haven't enough to go on to get a court order, at this moment. I doubt if I could even impress the head of your Anatomy Department. And yet this is urgent. If anything happens to that body, it'll be almost impossible to make it a murder case."
"It may be hard to locate the body even now," Corrington said. "As I understand the procedure, they try to make a cadaver anonymous as soon as possible."
"But somebody must sign a receipt for it when it's delivered," Simon argued. "Somebody must unpack it and put it wherever they keep the supplies for the dissecting rooms. This was so recent that it might still be possible to trace it — if only too much time isn't wasted."
"I suppose we can make inquiries. I can take you over there, at any rate, unofficially of course, like any personal friend I'm showing around, and you can see what answers you get."