Saint Errant (7 page)

“So am I, Sheriff,” Simon said easily, “but possibly not about the same thing.”

“You admit you came here lookin’ for the dead woman, son?”

“Now, daddy,” the Saint remonstrated. “You know I’d be looking for a live woman.”

“Hum,” Newt Haskins said. “Reckon so. But the law’s found plenty o’ dead people around right after you been in the neighborhood. So when I see you here right next to a death that’s just happened, I kinda naturally start wonderin’ how much you know about it.”

“I hope you’re not suggesting that I murdered her?”

“You done the suggestin’, son. That she was murdered, that is. Everything else points to the lady’s takin’ the hard way out of a jam.”

“You don’t really believe that, do you?”

“Will you excuse me?” Esteban said. “My guests . . .”

Sheriff Newt Haskins waved a negligent hand.

“Go ahead, Esteban. Call you if I want ya.” To the Saint, after Esteban had gone, he said: “He ain’t much help.”

“Are you sure he couldn’t be if he wanted to?”

“Wa’al-” Newt Haskins shrugged his thin shoulders non-committally. “Let’s get back to your last question. Nope, I don’t think Mrs Verity shot herself. Seein’s how good-lookin’ dames like her hate to disfigure themselves. It’s generally gas, or sleepin’ tablets. Still, you can’t say it’s never happened.”

Pat said: “Think of that little evening bag. Lida wouldn’t have carried a gun in that.”

Haskins pulled his long upper lip.

“It ain’t exactly probable, ma’am,” he agreed. “But on the other hand, it ain’t impossible, either.”

“Permit me to call your attention,” Simon said, “to one thing that is impossible.”

“The white thread caught in the trigger guard?” Haskins anticipated blandly. “Yup, I saw that, son.”

“You’ve got good eyes for your age, daddy. It’s a white cotton thread. Lida Verity was wearing a green silk dress. She didn’t have anything white on her that I noticed. On the other hand, if someone had wiped the gun with a handkerchief to get rid of fingerprints-“

Haskins nodded, his eyes on Patricia.

“You’re wearin’ a white jacket thing, Miss Holm.”

“This bolero? You can’t suggest that I-“

“Don’t get excited darling,” said the Saint. “The sheriff is just stirring things up, to see what comes to the top.”

Haskins held the creases in his leathery face unchanged
“Any reason, son, why you and Miss Holm shouldn’t lay your cards on the table?”

“We always like to know who’s staying in the game, daddy. Somebody around this place has a couple of bullets, back to back.”

The lanky officer sighed. He picked up a glass paperweight, turned it in bony fingers, gazed into it pensively.

“I guess I’ll have to put it to you straight, then.”

“A novelty,” the Saint said, “from the law. You’re going to say that Mrs Verity was loaded down with moola.”

“An” might have been shaken down for some of it. Your crystal ball’s workin’ almost as good as mine, son… .”

The Saint looked out into space, poising puppets with a brown hand.

“If you’ll just concentrate … concentrate … I may be able to do more- I have it!” He might have expected to get his palm crossed with a silver dollar. “My record leads you to suspect me of a slight tendency towards-“

“Bein’ interested in other folks’ money.”

“Your confidence touches me.”

“That ain’t all that may be touchin’ you soon, son.”

“Now you’ve broken the spell,” said the Saint reproachfully, “We are no longer in tune with the infinite. So-it seems as if we may have to leave you with your problem. Unless, of course, you propose to arrest me now and fight it out with my lawyers later.”

“Not right away, son. We don’t none of us want to be too hasty. But just don’t get too far away, or the old police dog might have to start bayin’ a trail.”

“We’ll be around,” said the Saint, and ushered Patricia out.

As the murmurous inanities of the public rooms lapped around them again, she glanced up and found his eyes as blue and debonair as if no cares had ever crossed his path. The smile he gave her was as light as gosling down.

“I hardly think,” he drawled, “that we have bothered Seńor Esteban enough. Would’st care to join me?”

“Try and lose me,” said the girl.

They found Esteban keeping a weather eye on the play of his guests, and followed his politely lifted brows to the patio.

“The moonlight, she is so beautiful,” Esteban said, with all the earnestness of a swing fan discussing Handel. “Did the sheriff let you go?”

“Like he let you-on probation,” Simon answered cheerfully. “He just told us to stick around.”

The man formed insolent question marks with the corners of his mouth.

“I did not think you would care to stay here after your friend kill herself.”

“I heard you the first time, Esteban. I’m sure if your customers have to die on the premises, you’d much rather have a Monte Carlo suicide than a murder. It wouldn’t scare half so many suckers away. But we happen to know that Mrs Verity wasn’t the sort to be worried about being blackjacked out of a few hundreds, or even thousands, in this kind of clip joint.”

There was no reaction in the dark lizard eyes.

“You hint at something, maybe?”

“I hint at nothing, maybe. I’m still asking questions. And one thing I’ve been wondering is, who did she come here with?”

Esteban repeated, without inflection: “Who she come here with?”

“She wouldn’t have come here alone,” said Patricia. “She didn’t come with her husband, because he’s still in Tokyo. So- who?”

“A little while ago, madame, you tell me she come here to meet you.”

“Tonight, perhaps,” Simon admitted patiently. “But this wasn’t her first visit. The Admiral of the watch seemed to know her quite well. So who did she usually come with?”

Esteban shrugged.

“I do not inquire about these things.”

The Saint’s voice became rather gentle.

“Comrade, you don’t seem to get the point. I’m a guy who might make a great deal of trouble for you. On the other hand, I might save you a lot.”

Esteban took note of the steady blue eyes, the deceptive smile that played across the Saint’s chiseled mouth. He forced a laugh.

“You frighten me terribly, Seńor Templar.”

“But you don’t frighten me, Don Esteban. Because whatever Sheriff Haskins may think, I have the advantage of knowing that I had nothing to do with killing Mrs Verity. Which leaves me with a clear head to concentrate on finding out who did. So if you don’t co-operate, I can only draw one conclusion.”

There was silence, save for the rustle of palm fronds and the thud and hiss of the surf-and the muffled sounds of the Quarterdeck doing business as usual.

At last Esteban said craftily: “What will you do if I help you?”

“That depends on how much you know and how much you tell. I don’t mind admitting that Miss Holm and I are slightly allergic to people who kill our friends. Also, it wouldn’t bother me a bit if the sheriff closed your parcheesi parlor. You ought to know how much you’ve really got to be scared of.”

Esteban seemed to give him the same poker-faced assessment that he would have performed on a new customer who wanted to cash a check. And with the same impenetrable decisiveness he said: “Mrs Verity come here with Mr Maurice Kerr. He is what you call a-ah, playboy. A leetle old, perhaps, but most charming. Perhaps you should ask him your questions. If you wait, I tell you where he lives.”

The address he came back with was only a half mile south, on a side street off Collins Avenue. There were still lights in the house when the Saint’s car pulled up outside a mere matter of minutes later; and a man who could only have been Kerr him self, in white tie and a smoking jacket, opened the door to the Saint’s casual knock. His somewhat florid face peered out under the porch light with strictly reasonable ineffusiveness.

He said: “What do you want? Who are you?” But his tone was still genial enough to be described as charming.

“A moment with you, Mr Maurice Kerr,” the Saint answered. “You may call me the Saint-temporarily. Before we’re through with you, you may think of some other names. And this is Miss Holm.”

Kerr’s eyebrows rose like levitating gray bushes.

“I don’t pretend to understand you.”

“May we come in? This is a matter of life and death.”

Kerr hesitated, frowned, then swung the door wide.

“Do. In here, in the library.”

The library was lighted for the benefit of those who liked to read comfortably at the least expense to their eyesight. The walls were lined with books, an artificial fire flickered in the fireplace, and chairs, lovingly fashioned to fit the human form, were spaced at tasty intervals.

“Sit down,” Kerr invited graciously. “What is this all about?”

Simon remained standing. He put his lighter to a cigarette and said: “Our spies tell us that you went to the Quarterdeck Club with Lida Verity tonight,”

He risked the exaggeration intentionally, and saw it pay off as Kerr paused to pick up the highball which he had obviously put down when they knocked.

Kerr sipped the drink, looked at the Saint. “Yes?”

“Why did you leave the club without her?”

“May I ask what that has to do with you?”

“Lida was a friend of mine,” Patricia said. “She asked us to help her.”

“Just before she died,” the Saint said.

Kerr’s soft manicured hand tightened around his glass. His dark eyes swung like pendulums between the Saint and his lady. He didn’t catch his breath-quite; and Saint wondered why.

“But that’s ghastly!” Kerr’s voice expressed repugnance, shock, and semi-disbelief. “She-she lost too much?”

“Meaning?” the Saint asked.

“She killed herself, of course.”

“Lida,” Simon explained, “was shot through the heart in the grounds of the Quarterdeck Club.”

“You’re trying to frighten me,” Kerr said. “Lida couldn’t have been-“

“Who said so? Who told you she committed suicide?”

“Why, why-it was just a-” Kerr broke off. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The Saint did not actually groan out loud, but the impulse was there.

“I can’t understand why this is always happening to me,” he complained. “I thought I spoke reasonably good English. The idea should be easy to grasp. All I told you was that Lida Verity was dead. You immediately assumed that she’d committed suicide. Statistics show that suicide is a helluva long way from being the most common way to die. Therefore the probability is that something or someone specifically gave you that idea. Either you knew that she might have had good reason to commit suicide, or somebody else has already talked to you. Whichever it is, I want to know about it.”

Kerr licked his lips.

“I fail to see what right you have to come here and cross-examine me,” he said, but his voice was not quite as positive as the words.

“Let’s not make it a matter of rights,” said the Saint easily. “Let’s put it down to my fatal bigness of heart. I’m giving you the chance to talk to me before you talk to the sheriff. And you’ll certainly have to talk to the sheriff if the gun that Lida was shot with happens to be registered in your name.”

It was a shot in the dark, but it seemed to be worth taking; and Simon felt an inward leap of optimism as he saw that at least he had come close to his mark. Kerr’s hand jumped involuntarily so that the ice in his highball gave a sharp tinkle against the glass, and his face turned a couple of shades lighter in color.

“What sort of gun was she shot with?”

“A thirty-two Colt automatic.”

Kerr took it with his eyes. There was a long moment’s silence while he seemed to search either for something to say or for the voice to say it.

“It could have been my gun.” He formed the words at last. “I lent it to her this evening.”

“Oh?”

“She asked me if I had a gun I could lend her.”

“Why did you let her have it if you thought she was going to shoot herself?”

“I didn’t think so at the time. She told me she was going to meet someone that she was scared of, but she didn’t tell me who it was, and she wouldn’t let me stay with her. She was rather overwrought and very mysterious about it. I couldn’t get anything out of her. But I never thought about suicide- then.”

Simon’s blue eyes held him relentlessly through a cool drift of cigarette smoke.

“And that,” said the Saint, “answers just half my question. So you weren’t thinking about suicide. So somebody told you. Who?”

Muscles twitched sullenly over Kerr’s brows and around the sides of his mouth. “I fail to see-“

“Let me help you,” said the Saint patiently. “Lida Verity didn’t commit suicide. She was murdered. It wasn’t even a planned job to look like suicide. This unanimous eagerness to brush it off as a suicide was just an afterthought, and not a very brilliant one either. The sheriff doesn’t believe it and I don’t believe it. But there’s one difference between the sheriff and me. I may be a red herring to him, but I’m not a red herring to myself. I know this is one killing I didn’t do. So I’ve got a perfectly clear head to concentrate on finding out who did it. If anyone seems to be stalling or holding out ,on me, the only conclusion I can come to is that they’re either guilty themselves or covering up for a guilty pal. In either case, I’m not going to feel very friendly about it. And that brings us to another difference between the sheriff and me. When I don’t feel friendly about people, I’m not tied down by a lot of red tape and pettifogging legal procedures. As you may have heard.

If you are covering up for a pal he must mean a lot to you, if you’re willing to let me hang you for him.”

Kerr took another sip of his drink. It was a long sip, turning gradually into a gulp. When he set down his glass, the last pretense of dignified obstinacy had gone out of him.

“I did have a phone call from one of the men at the dub,” he admitted.

“Who was it?”

“I don’t know exactly. He said: “The Saint’s on his way to see you. Mrs Verity just shot herself here. Esteban says to tell you not to talk.’ “

“Why should this character expect you to do what Esteban told you?”