Thanks to the Saint

The happy suicide

The advertisement said:

“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.

He was also important enough to be able to dictate his own working conditions, which he took advantage of to do his show for nine months in the year from Miami Beach, where he had established his legal residence for the two most seductive reasons that Florida could offer: its climate and its freedom from state income tax. As a result, several members of his permanent team had been constrained (perhaps not too reluctantly) to follow suit and had moved their homes to the same fortunate area, though not to the identical gilded neighborhood. Perhaps the most inevitable of these was Paul Zaglan, a brother, who had the main writing credit on the show.

“I’ve always wondered,” said the Saint. “Who was the brains of the act? Granting that some kind of brains were involved, of course.”

“It wasn’t Paul,” she said. “Paul was a wonderful guy, and a terrific worker, and he had lots of brilliant flashes. But the personality that came over to the public was always Ziggy’s. Paul was the carpenter. He gave Ziggy scripts with a solid framework and lots of interesting angles, but they’d never have got off the ground until Ziggy added his own curlicues and all those zany touches that seem to send wild half the half-witted public.”

“I gather that this doesn’t include you.”

She shrugged.

“Would anyone buy curlicues with nothing to hang ’em on?”

“Or scaffolding with nothing on it?”

“All right,” she said sharply. “Maybe I just liked Paul better as a person. I used to know him fairly well in New York, before Ziggy was big enough to move down here — before I even went to work for Fame.”

Simon slanted an idle eyebrow at her.

“Okay, what happened last night?”

“Ziggy and Paul had been working on the show all afternoon, except when they were being interrupted by Ted Colbin — that’s Ziggy’s agent — and the man from the network, Ralph Damian. There’s a big hassle going on about a new contract, so they’re both down here to fight it out, so that every time they reach a compromise on something they can take it straight to Ziggy and see if he’ll buy it.”

“Ziggy is so biggie?”

“With a hey-nonny-nonny and a cha-cha-cha. So Monty and I—”

“Take it easy,” pleaded the Saint. “I’m meeting people too fast. Who’s Monty?”

“Montague Velston,” she said. “My partner on this assignment. This is the third Fame Portrait we’ve worked on as a team... We’d just been stooging around, watching the antics and making our own notes. That’s the way we operate when we’re getting; one of those candid snapshots of an alleged genius at work.”

“Thank you for warning me,” Simon said. “I had a hunch all along that—”

“We had dinner rather late, about a quarter of nine. After coffee Paul said he was bushed and went home. Ziggy was just warming up — he starts nibbling Dexedrine after lunch, and by the time everyone else is folding he’s opening up. He went in the den and started his final rewrite on the next script. He always does that himself, after everything’s been hashed out with Paul and the rest of the gang. That’s when he adds those unique touches that make the Ziggy Zaglan show.”

“So everyone else went home too?”

“No no. After all, we only had hotels to go to, and it was cozy enough at Ziggy’s, and the drinks were free. And he’d said, ‘Don’t go away, I’ll be through in an hour or two, and you won’t even miss me.’ Monty and Ted started playing gin rummy, and Ralph went on the make for me.”

The Saint remained politely expressionless.

“And?”

“It could only be verbal skirmishing, of course, with Monty and Ted in the room. He turned the radio on to an FM station that was playing Viennese waltzes, very softly, so it wouldn’t disturb Ziggy, who was typing a blue streak in the next room, and gave me his best intellectual line. I kept him going for almost an hour, for my own education, but when he realized it was only an academic interest he got restless.”

“Men are so selfish, aren’t they?”

“About the same time Ted Colbin was getting tired of losing to Monty, so he was quite receptive when Ralph suggested they ought to catch the last show at the Latin Quarter and case the talent.”

“That sounds a trifle unchivalrous,” Simon remarked.

“Oh, naturally I was invited to go along, which gave me the chance to beg off without costing him any face. Monty was still in a sport shirt and said if he went back to the hotel and changed at that hour it would be into his pajamas. So Ralph and Ted went off, leering and wisecracking.”

“Without saying good-bye?”

Another voice said sepulchrally: “When Ziggy Zaglan is creating, nobody but nobody interrupts him.”

They both turned to see the slight dapper man who had come strolling around the corner of the house. He wore gray suede shoes, charcoal doeskin slacks, and a pearl-colored silk shirt with gunmetal-tinted collar and pocket hems. Even against this carefully neutral background his face seemed colorless. He had wavy black hair, black eyes set rather close together, a pencil-thin line of black mustache, and a smooth, sallow complexion. He looked like a man that prudent strangers would hesitate to play cards with.

“This is Monty,” Lois Norroy said, and introduced the Saint.

Montague Velston shook hands very gently.

“Pardon the interruption,” he said, “but I’m an amateur detective myself. When I heard that Lois had gone off with you, something told me this was where you’d be.”

“Since you caught up with us,” Lois said, “you go on with the story.”

“As far as I’m concerned,” Velston said, “it’s strictly filler. Lois and I sat hashing over our notes and a few other things for about an hour, and then Ziggy came out waving a script and saying he had the show wrapped up and now we should all relax. His idea of relaxing was to pick up Ted and Ralph from the Latin Quarter, and then we should all go on to some all-night strip-clip emporium out towards Hialeah where we wouldn’t need coats and ties or practically anything else except money. This I wanted like a brain tumour, but I figured that it might be part of our assignment to observe Ziggy on a bender, so I agreed to be sacrificed.”

He had a soft and languid way of speaking which combined with his total lack of facial vivacity to keep you belatedly groping back for some mordant phrase that he had almost smuggled past you.

“Was it worth it?” Simon inquired.

“You would expect a constructive answer from a burnt offering? Ziggy played host to all the disengaged hostesses and bought, by my count, twenty-five gallons of alleged Bollinger. In between contour chasing at the table, he got into every act on the floor. If he hadn’t been the great Ziggy Zaglan, it would have been embarrassing. Since I’m not the great Ziggy Zaglan, I was embarrassed anyhow, but everyone else thought it was as funny as a case of hives. There were a few high spots which would slay the lads at a college reunion but which would hardly get a good yawn from the sophisticated editors of Fame. Finally Ziggy fell asleep, about five a.m., and Ted paid out a few hundred dollars from his account and we took him home. Since then I’ve only been trying to scratch the fungus off my palate.” Monty Velston took out a thin cigar, gazed at it mournfully, and put it back in his pocket. He turned patiently to Lois again. “I still haven’t heard what really happened with you after we dropped you off at the hotel. Or was I too groggy to assimilate it when you phoned?”

“I didn’t do a thing but sleep, and I was having breakfast by the pool when Ziggy arrived and told me about Paul. The police had called him, and he was on his way over here. I threw some clothes on and came with him. They’d taken down the... the body, by that time, but everything else was just the way they’d found it.”

“Which was how?” Simon asked.

The young woman shrugged.

“Just about like now. Except for the stepladder. That was lying down. He must have kicked it over when he... jumped off.”

She wasn’t altogether the invulnerably case-hardened reporter that she liked to pretend, he realized. There were words which evoked mental images that made her flinch momentarily before she consciously toughened herself to go on.

The ladder was about six feet high, Simon judged, as he strolled past it. The top platform was just below his eye level. Some tidy soul had righted it and set it over some distance from the lamppost with which it must have been used.

“The colored woman who works — worked for Paul every day came in at nine o’clock and found him,” Lois concluded. “The police lieutenant who sent for Ziggy only wanted to ask some routine questions, mostly to find out if we had any idea why Paul did it. He didn’t get much help.”

Simon walked slowly around the structure that had triggered the whole weird episode, examining it more closely. The resemblance to the traditional primitive gibbet was almost ludicrously exact, for essentially it consisted simply of a square upright post about eight feet high with a single thirty-inch arm projecting from the top, like an inverted L, and a diagonal strengthening brace between the two members: it was easy to see how any imagination could have been carried away by the train of macabre humor which had ended in such a deadly joke. But a detailed study compelled one to add that even if it had fallen into an artistic pitfall it had been designed with some mechanical ingenuity and constructed with professional skill. There was an electrical outlet fitted flush in the underside of the crossbar, self-protected from rain, which was evidently intended to service the lamp which was planned to hang from the bar, but the wiring to it could only pass through the centre of the arm and the upright. Simon saw that each of these members was actually made from two pieces of wood which must have been grooved down their inside length and then joined together to form the necessary tunnel for the concealed wire, but the halves had been so carefully matched and finished that only the keenest scrutiny could detect the joint.

“You were right,” Simon observed. “He was certainly an amateur in one sense only.” He went on staring emotionlessly at the noose which still dangled from the stout iron hook under the end of the crossbar, where the lantern was obviously meant to hang, adding the last gruesome touch to the gallows outline that turned similarity into solid fact. “And a jack of many trades, apparently. Carpenter, electrician — and rope handler. How many suicides would you think could tie a correct hangman’s knot? I’ll give any odds you like that ninety-nine per cent of hanged suicides swing themselves off on any old slipknot that they can fumble up. But the authentic legal knot is quite tricky, at least tricky enough that I’m sure nobody ever hit on it by accident, except maybe the inventor. And this is a perfect specimen that you could use in a textbook for executioners.”

“Very interesting,” Velston said in his toneless voice that made it impossible to tell whether he was serious or sarcastic. “Do you get any other associations?”

“The rope is fine, new, expensive white nylon — the very best. One loose end is bound with Scotch tape, the way the chandlers do it to prevent it unraveling; the other end is raw. So it was cut off a longer piece, and whoever cut it figured this piece was expendable.”

“This is deduction?” Velston said tiredly. “But it makes sense too. What, after all, is the current market for a loose end of rope that just hung somebody?”

“Put that needle down, Monty,” Lois snapped. “Could you do any better?”

“That is not in my contract. I observe and report. This material I may need some day. Mr Templar cannot possibly live for ever without being taken for a Fame treatment.”

“Children,” Simon interposed pacifically, “I may have an inspiration. Let’s pull a switch. I think I could sell Fame a portrait of two of its distinguished collaborators at work on a Fame Portrait. Let me go to work on it and give you a rest from observing me. After all, I still haven’t anything to work on here.”

“Wouldn’t you like to look around the house?” she asked.

“Not particularly. I wish I could convince you that I’m not the Sherlock type. Cigarette ash to me is just cigarette ash. I probably wouldn’t recognize a clue unless it was labeled. I’ve bumbled around a few times and come up with some answers, but they were mostly psychic. And here I don’t even know what crime I’m expected to investigate. Are you sure you aren’t just trying to dream one up, so you can grab a fast and phony vignette of the Saint in action? If so, you should let me in on it, and I might go along with the gag — for a percentage.”

Lois Norroy bit her lip.

There was a moment in which both she and Velston seemed to teeter in search of a balance that had been unfairly undermined. It was Montague Velston, expectably, who recovered first.

“This would require a fiat from the board of directors, with whom we hirelings do not sit except at bars and usually when we’re buying,” he said. “Under the circumstances, we’d better accept your proposition, Mr Templar. Anyhow, as Lois points out, we should keep our noses to the current gallstone. The reason I’m here, in fact, is because Ziggy has called a press conference at which he will distribute his quotes on the subject of Paul’s suicide without playing any favorites, and I think we should have this performance in our file. You’re welcome to join us, Mr Templar.”

“I wouldn’t know how to turn down an invitation like that,” said the Saint, in a perfectly dead-pan facsimile of Velston’s tone.

He took them both in his car, since Velston had found his way there by taxi. They were only a few blocks from the western end of Broad Causeway, and on the beach side Lois gave an address which the Saint’s elephantine memory for local topographies could place within a block or two. Otherwise she sat rather quietly between the two men, as if each of them inhibited her from naturalness with the other. The Saint was correspondingly restrained by the hope of maintaining a neutrality which he did not feel. He had been aware of a certain warmth of unspoken friendliness growing between himself and Lois which might go on beyond this episode, but about Velston he was not so sure.

Ziggy Zaglan’s home was almost completely hidden from the street by a high wall draped with blazing bougainvillea, and uninvited admirers were still further discouraged by a pair of massive wrought-iron gates that blocked the driveway. Velston got out and gave his name to a microphone set in one of the gateposts, and after a brief pause the gates swung open in response to some electric remote control. The house that came in sight as they followed the drive around the curve of a tall concealing hedge was in the tropical-modern style, with wide cantilevered overhangs to shade its expanses of glass and screened breezeways that sometimes made it hard to see exactly where the outside ended and the interior began.

The front door was opened as they reached it by a white-haired Negro butler who should have been posing for bourbon advertisements, who said, “Good afternoon, ma’am and gentlemen. Mist’ Zaglan is out by the pool.”

They went out of the central hall around a baffle of glass brick and indoor vines and came into the living room. At least, it had three-quarters of the conventional number of walls for a living room, and towards the back or inner wall it had many of the usual appurtenances, including some recessed shelves of surrealist bric-a-brac, some overstuffed furniture, a card table, a large portable bar, and an enormous edifice of bleached oak centered around a television screen supported by several loud-speaker grilles and buttressed by cabinets which undoubtedly contained as good a collection of records and hi-fi reproductive equipment as a dilettante with money could assemble. What would have been the fourth wall consisted only of ceiling-high panels of sliding glass, through which with the help of bamboo furniture an almost unnoticed transition could be made to the preponderant outdoorsiness of the swimming-pool area, which in turn expanded through almost invisible screens of the lot’s western frontage on upper Biscayne Bay and the sea wall and walk where a shiny thirty-foot express cruiser was tied up.

In the area which clung hardest to the time-honored tenets of living-room decor, two men disengaged themselves somewhat laboriously from the plushiest armchairs. One of them was slim and wiry, with a seamed sunburnt face and crew-cut blond hair; the other was tall and moonfaced, with a hairline that receded to the crown of his head and very bright eyes behind large thick glasses.

“This is Ted Colbin, Ziggy’s agent,” Velston introduced the wiry one, who looked like a retired lightweight fighter. “And Ralph Damian, of UBC.” He indicated the moonfaced one, who looked like a junior professor of mathematics. “May I present Simon Templar?”

The name registered on them visibly, but not beyond the bounds of urbane interest.

“Not the Saint?” Damian said, looking more than ever like a recent and still eager college graduate, and not at all like the lecherous executive that Simon had visualized.

“Guilty.”

“I’ve had so many people tell me there ought to be a TV series about you that I’ve sometimes wondered whether you were fact or fiction.”

“Before you sign anything, Mr Templar, if you haven’t already,” Colbin said, “I wish you’d talk to me. I’d like to give you my impartial advice, and it needn’t cost you a cent.”

“Mr Templar insists that he has nothing to sell,” Lois said. “Not even to anything as painless as a Fame interview, with me doing it. He’s only here now to watch Monty and me in action. But if you work on him, you’ll probably wake up and find him starting his own network and charging agents ten per cent for selling them to sponsors.”

The Saint grinned.

“This is a wicked libel,” he said. “I only came here because Lois promised I could meet Ziggy in person and perhaps get his autograph.”

“He’s out there,” Damian said, “giving his all, putting a protractor on the angles.”

His thumb twisted towards the pool area, where all that the uninitiated eye could see was a group of half a dozen nondescript men clustered around a focal point which their own semicircle of backs concealed from view.

“How do you know that’s what he’s doing?” Simon asked curiously.

“That’s easy. Would you like to hear it?”

He opened a panel in the bank of record cabinets, flipped a switch, and turned some dials. In a few seconds the cracked plaintive voice familiar to everyone who had been within range of a radio or TV set, which to millions of fanatical adorers was capable of eliciting every nuance of response from guffaws to tears, came through the multiple speakers a little louder than life.

“I’m not going to speculate on Paul’s reasons for doing what he did. Let the people who don’t really care have a field day with their guesses and gossip.” This was the dignified, the earnest Ziggy, who sometimes came out for a curtain speech in which he begged people to give generously to the Red Cross, or to remember an orphanage at Christmas, his plea made all the more cogent by that hoarse and helpless delivery, reminding them that under the motley of a clown might beat the heart of a frustrated crusader. “Everyone knows that I’ve always maintained that an artist’s private life should be private — that after he delivers his manuscript, or walks off the stage, the world should let him alone. Paul never short-changed any of us who depended on the material he gave us. But his own life was his own show — to coin a phrase — and if he chose to finish the script where he did, we haven’t any right to ask why.” Here came the gravelly catch in the throat, burlesqued by a hundred night-club comedians in search of something foolproof to caricature. “The only sponsor he had to please is the One who’ll eventually check on all our ratings... How does that sound?” Another voice, less readily identifiable as Damian’s said, “Pretty lustrous, Ziggy. I only wonder if that last touch isn’t extra cream on the cereal—”

Damian flicked the switch again, silencing the record, and said himself, “We ran it through a couple of times before the newsboys got here, of course. With a property as big as Ziggy, you can’t shoot off the cuff.”

“May we quote you?” Velston asked.

“I’d be wasting my breath if I asked you not to, so I only hope you’ll do it correctly. I shall repeat my exact words to your charming collaborator, as a precaution.” Damian glanced around, but Ted Colbin had edged Lois away to the other side of the room, where they seemed to be talking very intensely but inaudibly. He turned back to the Saint, with a disarmingly juvenile kind of naughtiness sparkling in his eyes. “Are you shocked, Mr Templar? I’ve admitted that Ziggy Zaglan’s interview on his brother’s death was rehearsed like any other public appearance. Isn’t that a sensational revelation?”

“You must wait till I try out a few answers to that,” said the Saint amiably.

Outside, the group of men by the pool was breaking up. They began to straggle away towards some exit which bypassed the living room. One figure was left behind, the smallest of them all, a somber silhouette in dark-blue slacks and polo shirt gazing into the sunset.

Then, a moment after the last reporter disappeared, the lone little man turned and began walking towards the house, with increasing briskness, until he rolled aside one of the screen doors and almost bounced into the living room.

“It was all right,” he wheezed. “It played like an organ. I could feel it. But I need a drink.”

His skin was tanned to the healthy nut-brown which was everything that the Florida Chamber of Commerce could ask of a professional resident with a yacht and a pool, but his build was a trifle pudgy and he had a little pot which he did not try to disguise. In fact, it was an asset when he slumped his shoulders and assumed the dejected question-mark stance which was one of his most effective mannerisms. His face could best be compared to that of a dyspeptic dachshund. He had hair that looked like the first attempt of an untalented wigmaker. This is not to say that he had a comedian’s natural advantage of looking funny. He looked like a mess, a rather unpleasant mess with a bad disposition, whose hangdog air was a shield that only served to ward off the indignation of bigger and better men. This at least was the screen personality that the American public had taken to its bosom in one of those absolutely implausible weddings of mother instinct and perversity which have been the Waterloo of every would-be prognosticator of the entertainment market. This was Ziggy Zaglan, in whom almost nobody could find any requisite of success except that millions of people were crazy about him.

He was halfway to the portable bar when he noticed Simon and skidded to a stop. He elected to play this in dumb show, with pointing finger and interrogative eyebrows.

“Mr Simon Templar,” Damian said. “Your summer replacement.”

“I brought him,” Lois said, detaching herself from Colbin. “He wanted to meet you,” she said rather lamely.

Zaglan got it. He drew circles over his head with one forefinger, his eyebrows still questioning. The Saint nodded.

Ziggy scuttled behind the pushcart bar and cowered there, peering from behind it in abject terror. Then he picked up a bottle, aimed it like a gun, pulled an invisible trigger, and staggered from the imaginary recoil. Recovering, he inflated his chest, preened himself, and drew more halos over his head, only this time as if they belonged to him.

It was as corny as that, but everyone had some kind of smile.

“Have a drink, Saint,” Ziggy said, putting out his hand. “Scotch, bourbon, or shine?”

“I’ll take some of that Peter Dawson you just blasted me with.”

Ziggy dropped ice cubes into glasses with one hand while he simultaneously poured with the other.

“The first one, you’re a guest. After that it’s every man for himself. Nice to have you aboard.”

He raised his glass, saluted quiveringly, and turned back to Ralph Damian. As if nothing had interrupted him and the Saint had been disposed of like the turned page of a magazine, he went on: “Listen, Ralph, it came to me out there: this ties in perfectly with a new opening I had in mind for the next show. We know that by then the whole world has heard about Paul. Why isn’t there something better than the old Pagliacci routine and the show must go on? Why not come out and face it? Now suppose I opened the show with something like I had for this press-conference bit. Then I go on: But you’ve all read how Paul didn’t seem depressed when he said goodnight to us. So whatever else was on his mind, he must have been satisfied with the ending of the script he’d written for himself. Just as he was satisfied with the script we’re going to do tonight—”

Simon felt a nudge and turned to find Colbin at his elbow.

“Can I talk to you for a minute?” said the agent.

“Why not?” said the Saint. “Everyone else has.”

Colbin steered him out on to the pool terrace, deftly collecting a highball along the way.

“I hate bullshooting,” Colbin said bluntly. “So I’ll come right out with it. What are you doing here?”

“You heard—”

“I heard what Lois said, and what you said, which was two loads of nothing. The way I dope it out, Norroy and Velston are dragging you along just to see if you’ll stir up anything they can use. Even if you don’t do anything, they can hang half a dozen speculations and innuendoes on you, and since it’s a fact you were here the readers will believe that where there’s smoke there’s fire. That’s Fame oldest trick. I think you’re smart enough to know that. So I dope it that either you’ve got nothing but time to waste, or you think there may be something crooked in the deal.”

“Why do you dope it that I’d tell you?”

“Because I might be useful.”

The Saint’s blue eyes probed him dispassionately.

“You’ve got an investment here,” he said. “Ten per cent — maybe more — of an awful lot of money. Why would you want to help anyone who might even accidentally turn up something that might jeopardize it?”

“Because I’m an old-fashioned big-dealing sonovabitch,” Colbin said without animosity. “I play all the old copybook maxims, right down the line, ‘If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em.’ I know that nobody ever scared you off or bluffed you off, if you thought you had hold of something. So why should I beat my brains out trying to be the first? So I’ll help you. I’m hoping there’s nothing you can dig up that’ll damage my property. But if there is, I want to be the first to know. Perhaps I could show you a deal.”

“I haven’t offered anything.”

“Okay. ‘Nothing venture, nothing gain.’ What can you lose? I’ll play my hand, you play yours. But I’m putting my cards on the table. Help yourself. From all I’ve heard about you, if anyone gives you a square shake, you do them the same courtesy. That’s all I’m asking.”

“Since we’ve agreed to no bullshooting, Ted — how do I know about your shake?”

“Try me.”

Simon took out a cigarette and lighted it, taking plenty of time.

“Well, Ted,” he said, “what’s all this about how happy Paul Zaglan was, just before he topped himself?”

“I’d say he was walking on air,” Colbin answered. “I mean metaphorically, before he tried it for real. He’d just delivered his last script and quit his job with Ziggy.”

Simon raised his eyebrows.

“Was that something to celebrate?”

“Now he was going to write what he’d always wanted to.”

“The Great American Novel — or The Play?”

“Anything, later. But first he was going to get eating money by selling his memoirs of Life With Ziggy.”

“It sounds like a nice fraternal parting gesture.”

“They were only legally brothers. You could find that out quick enough. Paul was the elder, but he was adopted. Later on the parents were surprised to discover that they could make one of their own, after all. That was Ziggy. But all his life Paul took care of him. He’d promised the mother he would — the father died while they were kids. It was Paul’s way of paying her back for taking him out of an orphanage and raising him in a real home.”

“Until last night he decided he was all paid up?” Simon murmured.

“Until the day before yesterday, when she died. I guess that’s when he really started to feel happy.”

The Saint was luckily accustomed to surviving jolts that would have staggered the ordinary mortal.

“No doubt he was anticipating a humdinger of a wake,” he said.

“She’d been very sick for a long time,” Colbin said stonily. “Cut out the phony bullshooting sentiment and anyone would call it a merciful release. But it was a release for Paul too. He could stop being a brother to Ziggy.”

Two thin parenthetic wrinkles cut between the Saint’s brows.

“I must have missed that — at least, I didn’t notice anything about it in the papers.”

“You wouldn’t have. It wasn’t the same name. She married again after the boys were grown up.”

“Even so, I’d’ve thought—”

“Her second husband went to jail as a Red spy. Very likely it was as big a shock to her as anyone — anyhow, she wasn’t indicted with him — but you know how these things go with the public. It wasn’t a relationship that Ziggy would want to advertise.”

Simon released a very long slow trail of smoke.

“But you knew it”

“Ziggy got drunk and cried it out on my shoulder when the story broke. About the husband, I mean. He thought his career was finished, and I was ten per cent as worried myself. But somehow the connection never came out.”

“Then why are you telling me?”

“To prove I’m leveling with you,” Colbin said, and took a swallow from his glass. “Norroy and Velston may trip over it someday, by accident, but they won’t find it by hard work because they don’t work like that. You’ll find out, if you cared enough, so I’m only saving you the trouble. But you won’t spill it to Lois or Monty just for kicks. ‘The leopard doesn’t change his spots.’ ”

“Some great philosopher launched that one,” said the Saint. “When did Ziggy see his mother last?”

“I don’t think he ever saw her after that. He couldn’t risk it, could he? Be reasonable, man. But I know he called her on the phone quite often. She understood.”

Simon Templar took a last deep pull at his cigarette and put it down in the ashtray on one of the marble poolside tables. He stared abstractly at the darkening blue bay, beyond which the deceptive sky-line lights and neon tints of Miami were beginning to twinkle, striking the high points off the gleaming chrome and glistening varnish of Ziggy Zaglan’s trim speed cruiser tied alongside the sea wall. Now he could read the name lettered on her transom: she was called, almost inevitably, the Zig Zag.

“Yeah,” said the Saint vaguely. “I’m sure.” He could have been talking to himself, until he turned. “Do you know where I can make a quiet phone call?”

Colbin pointed, with an air of complete confidence.

“Over there, the way the reporters left. Around the corner, you’re in the hall, and the phone’s in an alcove on the right. I’ll wait here for you.”

Simon made no commitment but threaded his way between a vine trellis and some potted palms and located the phone without much difficulty. He had a little more trouble finding the man he wanted to talk to, but there were few places where the Saint did not have his own odd connections, and in Miami they were especially various.

In a comparatively few minutes he had been deviously and electronically introduced to the Beach medical examiner.

“Certainly he was hanged, Mr Templar,” was the official statement. “Any other injuries? Nothing that I noticed, though of course I didn’t look very hard. The larynx was ruptured, but that often happens, particularly with a heavy man.”

“There’s no chance that he was throttled first and then hung up there?”

“Not unless he was garrotted with the same rope. And I think even that would have left a different kind of mark. Yes, I’m sure of it. But death was definitely due to strangulation.”

“His neck wasn’t broken?”

“No.” An increasingly pulled note crept into the doctor’s voice. “May I ask what you’re driving at?”

“I’ll tell you at the morgue tomorrow,” said the Saint. “I think you’ll be there again.”

He went back out to the pool terrace, where he found that Lois had joined Colbin. They both dropped anything they might have been discussing as soon as he came in sight and waited expectantly for him to talk first. It happened to be conveniently easy to address them together.

“You were both right,” he said. “I was led into this by the nose, so it’s too late to tell me to keep my nose out of it. But I soon found there were so many paradoxes in this set-up that I was very nearly ready to believe that one more would turn out to be like the rest — just normal. Until it dawned on me that I’d only been looking at it upside down.”

“I have to read this sort of thing every time I pick up a paperback book,” Colbin complained. “I guess it must be the only way to do it.”

He had made himself comfortable on an aluminum and plastic long chair, and Lois was sitting on the end where his feet were up. The whole setting, from the boat at one side to the living room in which the other three men were now lighted as if on a stage, was straight out of House & Garden.

“Everyone here is a fugitive from type-casting,” Simon explained imperturbably. “Lois could be taken for a lot of things, none of which is a female writer. Her partner, Monty Velston, looks like the popular picture of a cardsharp or a con man. You’re a big-time agent, but you might be an ex-jockey. Ralph Damian is a network vice-president, but he could pass for a junior-college teacher. Ziggy looks like — well, frankly, nothing. Maybe it should have a big “N”... What did Paul look like?”

“A bear,” Lois said.

“Weighing?”

“Oh, more than two hundred.”

“About two-thirty,” Colbin estimated.

The Saint kindled another cigarette.

“All right. Among all these contradictions, I couldn’t go up like a rocket over a suicide that didn’t look like a suicide. Even though Lois tried to tell me he was too happy. After all, I thought, maybe that’s the way they kill themselves in show business. But you added a lot of detail, Ted, that I couldn’t slough off. And about that time the light struck me. I try to tell everyone I’m a mystery moron, but it finally got even me. It wasn’t a suicide that didn’t look like a suicide. It was a murder that didn’t look like a murder.”

“Ah.” The ice cubes rattled in Colbin’s glass as he drained it. “Thanks for the elucidation. And you know who?”

“I think so.”

“Do we have a deal to talk over?”

“No deal, Ted. Not for the cold-blooded murder of a happy man. There are too few of them.”

“Okay. If it’s a square shake, okay. Let’s have it”

“Let’s go inside,” Simon said.

Lois Norroy got to her feet, her eyes fixed on him frantically as if she was dying to ask something but couldn’t. Simon took her arm and turned her quietly towards the living room. The deck chair creaked as Colbin hoisted himself up with a sigh and followed them.

Plate glass sliding on noiseless rollers let them into another world as silently as a film dissolves.

Zaglan and Damian stood with highball glasses in hand, listening raptly to a voice which came from the battery of speakers, which was still Ziggy’s but with improved resonance. Velston sat in a chair a little apart, also nursing a tumbler and listening with no less attention, if with a more cynical air.

The voice was saying: “It’s the oldest cliché there is in the theater, that the show must go on. But we’ll try to give it a different reading, which I think would be more like what Paul would have told us: Let’s go on with the show!”

Ralph Damian was rubbing his chin, pursing his lips judicially, saying, “I don’t know, Ziggy. It still sounds a bit—”

“Flatulent?” Colbin rasped.

For a stunned second after that he had everyone’s undivided attention, and he did not waste it. He said, “Anyhow, the Saint’s got another different idea of what Paul would want. He thinks Paul was murdered.”

Since the bombshell had been dropped for him, Simon Templar resignedly made the best use he could of it and took a moment to observe the reactions. Ziggy’s, almost fatefully, was the most stereotyped and the most exaggerated. His eyes bugged and his mouth fell open. Damian switched off the playback machine, and his eyes sparkled fascinatedly. Montague Velston even looked interested.

The Saint tidily eased some ash off his cigarette and said deprecatingly, “It wasn’t my original idea, but it grew on me. I didn’t start turning psychological handsprings the first time I heard that Paul seemed too happy to commit suicide. However, I’ve heard a few important details since which made it pretty unarguable.”

Ziggy brought his chin up off his chest at last, so abruptly that it squeezed the horizontal lines of his mouth.

“What details?” he demanded, and his eyes turned so that they almost switched the question to Colbin.

“Nothing that would have to come out if the rest of the case was clean,” said the Saint quietly. “But I’d already started squinting sideways at some of the other details. First, Paul’s lamppost — or gallows, as it turned out to be. An unusually neat and ingenious piece of homework, certainly put together by someone with a good mechanical mind. Then the noose — if you’ll pardon my enthusiasm — a beautiful professional job, which very few amateurs could tie, not even good carpenters like Paul. But the gallows was already there, and it wasn’t planned for a gallows. Someone else might have tied the noose. Someone else who had an interest in knots and who’d bothered to learn some.”

“Like me?” Damian suggested, the edge of derision barely showing through a mask of polite intelligence. “How did you know I kept a little sailboat on Long Island Sound?”

“Shoot me,” Colbin said. “I should of kept quiet about the stretch I did in the Navy in the last war, after the draft caught me.”

“Tell him about me, fellers,” Ziggy implored frantically. “Tell him how I can’t even tie up a Christmas package. Tell him I only have a boat because it looks good out there in the publicity pictures. Tell him I can’t even wear a clip-on bow tie without it coming undone.”

The Saint smiled, with a patience he did not feel.

“To be more concrete,” he said, “I just talked to the medical examiner who did a pro forma autopsy on Paul. He confirmed that Paul died by strangulation, which could include hanging. He wasn’t throttled by hand. His larynx was ruptured — if you’ll all pardon the gruesome details. But his neck wasn’t broken.”

“What is this supposed to mean to us laymen?” Velston asked, with strenuously inoffensive tolerance.

“Only that a guy who apparently liked to do everything just right, whether it was putting together a lamppost or a scaffold, and who must have been one of the few suicides who ever swung in a genuine hangman’s knot, must’ve turned awful clumsy and stupid at the last moment if he couldn’t think of any better way to finish the job than to step off a low rung of a six-foot stepladder and choke himself slowly and miserably to death, instead of jumping off the top and getting it done with a quick, clean broken neck.”

“Would you expect a man who’s upset enough to commit suicide to be as rational about it as that?” Damian objected.

“If he was calm enough to tie that knot, I would,” Simon replied.

Colbin crossed to the liquor trolley and refilled his glass.

“What the man means,” he said, “is that someone grabbed hold of Paul, who was twice as big as any of us, and hung him up there.”

“After hitting him a judo chop on the Adam’s apple which would make him helpless and also start his strangling,” Simon said calmly.

They all thought about it with reluctant but increasing soberness.

“Did you tell him we once did a Portrait on a judo expert, Lois?” Velston asked. “With his hints on self-defense for determined spinsters. I remember, that was one of them. But of course, two million other people read it in Fame,” he added hopefully.

The attempt fell rather flat.

“When did Paul die, Saint?” Lois asked.

“That was my first question,” Simon answered. “As practically everyone knows now, no doctor can examine a corpse and say, ‘He died three hours and twenty minutes ago,’ like they used to in the old detective stories. How closely they can hit it depends on the climate, and what the body died of, and a lot of other things. The guy I talked to wouldn’t stick his neck out — if you’ll pardon the expression — any further than that it was somewhere between eleven last night and one this morning, give or take an hour or so at either end.”

Everyone could be seen doing mental arithmetic on that.

“Then that clears all of us, at least,” Damian said in a tone of relief. “We were all together, more or less, for hours before and after that margin.”

“That’s true,” said the Saint. “But if this was a premeditated job, it was meditated by someone who knew about that gallows-lamppost. And the advertisement I saw only came out yesterday, and it was under a box number. That doesn’t make it top secret, but it does limit the field.”

“We all knew about it,” Lois said. “Paul had us all over to his place for cocktails two days ago, and that’s when we were kidding about it and the idea for the advertisement came up.”

“Except me,” Ziggy put in quickly. “I wasn’t there. I had a date with—”

“But you heard about it.”

Colbin turned around with a sudden angry break in his dour composure.

“Where are we getting at with all this bullshooting?” he snarled. “Let’s say it and the hell with it: most of us had some reason to shut Paul up, because of the damage he was threatening to do Ziggy—”

“Not me,” Velston said. “I love Ziggy like Pasteur loved rabies, but for him I wouldn’t murder a maggot.”

“How do I know what you wouldn’t do to stop someone scooping you with a scandal?” the agent retorted. “How do I know you weren’t jealous because Lois was getting too chummy with him? Or if Lois had a grudge against him for something that happened when they knew each other before? And who the hell cares? We don’t have to go through all this crap about motives, because all of us have got perfect alibis.”

All of them turned to the Saint again, only now they seemed far more comfortable than they had been for some time. It was as if Colbin’s outburst had enabled them to throw off a lurking doubt which had been privately oppressing each of them, letting them take deep breaths and begin to relax again.

But, somewhat disconcertingly, Simon Templar was still the most confident and relaxed of all.

“Therefore,” he said equably, “the alibis may not all be perfect.”

“Mine is,” Ziggy croaked. “It must be good for about twelve hours. I was here before dinner, and all through dinner, and then I was working for a bit, and then—”

“You went into the den, but can you prove that you stayed there and worked?”

A stricken expression that was unintentionally one of the funniest grimaces he ever made came over Zaglan’s face.

“I was belting the typewriter all the time. Everyone must of heard me.” He appealed to the others. “You all heard me, didn’t you?”

“They heard a typewriter,” said the Saint. “For about an hour — which was enough time for you to have run over to Paul’s, by car or even across the bay in your boat, and done everything we’ve talked about, and come back. May I look in your den?”

Zaglan nodded, dumbly, pointing to a door in a side wall.

Simon opened it, glanced in, and came back. He said, “There’s a tape recorder on the desk, which I suppose you use to try routines out for sound. You seem very fond of that method. But it could just as easily have played back an hour of typewriter music which you’d recorded in advance, and you already had everyone scared to death of interrupting you when you’re having an inspiration, so there was no risk that anyone would even knock on the door.”

“You’re nuts,” Zaglan said hoarsely. “If you can find a tape recording anywhere in this house with typewriters clicking on it, I’ll eat it. I’ll be the first guy to have a tapeworm with sound effects.”

“That’s not the right answer, Ziggy,” Damian said, his eyes glittering with alert anxiety. “Everyone knows you can run a tape back and erase everything on it in a few seconds.”

“Whatya trying to do, frame me?” Ziggy squealed. “You sold out to another network?”

He tore at his hair in quietly cosmic desperation, his rubbery features contorting like those of a baby preparing to cry, until a brain wave rolled over him as transparently as an ocean comber.

“So after I knocked Paul out with the judo, I dragged him up a ladder and stuck his head through a noose. Me, weighing a hundred and twenty pounds soaking wet. Tell ’em, Ted,” he pleaded desperately. “Tell ’em how I sprain my wrist if I swat a fly. Tell ’em about my hernia—”

“Take it easy, little man,” said the Saint hastily. “I’d already thought of that. I suppose you could theoretically have done it all, but only with the help of a lot of gadgets and gimmicks which are much too complicated for my simple mind. I’ve only put you through the wringer this much because by all accounts you seem to be rather a heel, and it may do you some good. But I was using you mainly to prove how deceptive an alibi can be. Now I have to wreck the whole time-honored alibi system.”

Ziggy Zaglan was too dazed, or relieved, to be insulted. He sagged back against the nearest supporting piece of furniture and gulped, “You do?”

“I mean, according to the tired old detective-story rules. If any of you ever read them, which I suspect you have, you know the convention. An alibi is an alibi is an alibi. Even if only one other character corroborates it, it’s an alibi. In detective stories, for some reason, it isn’t supposed to be kosher to have two characters in cahoots. The villain is always a lone wolf. But in real life it’s usually the opposite. When a good police officer hears a cast-iron alibi, the first thing he wonders is what might be in it for the supporting witness. I keep telling everyone I’m a lousy detective, but I have talked to some good ones.”

Montague Velston tugged some folded paper and a ballpoint pen out of his pockets.

“This,” he said, “I have got to get verbatim.”

“So I started thinking about the other alibis where they were thin. For instance, while there was an hour where Ziggy was only represented by a tapping typewriter, there was also an hour where you and Lois only have each other to testify that you were both sitting around here.”

“But even if we’d wanted to... to do it, for any reason,” Lois said breathlessly, “we couldn’t have. I mean, how could we tell when Ziggy would decide to quit working? It might’ve been in two hours, or ten minutes, or even in ten seconds he might’ve come bouncing out to get a drink or ask us to listen to something!”

The Saint nodded cheerfully.

“I thought of that too. And I may say, darling, that I felt a lot better when I convinced myself that you weren’t in on the deal. But then I had to start thinking about Ted and Ralph, who also were their own best witnesses for more than an hour. And when Ted took me aside and began selling Ziggy shorter than anyone, it made more sense all the time.

“Sure,” Colbin scoffed. “That’s how I got to be a big agent, selling my clients short.”

“You could always get other clients, but you only had one neck. You’d try almost anything to protect your property, but if it went sour the property could take the rap. You thought you had it made until I showed up, and then you got a wee bit panicky and started coppering your bet too fast. You always had that way out in mind, of course, from the time you swiped a piece of new rope from Ziggy’s boat. But you were hottest of all when you sized up Ralph Damian as a bird of your own feather. He’d provide the alibi you thought you ought to have — according to all those paperbacks you read — and on top of that you could see how useful it might be to have a big wheel at UBC tied to your wagon. What percentage of your percentage of Ziggy did you have to promise him to sell the deal?”

“This is all delightfully libelous,” Damian said, with his bright eyes dancing. “Does he have any assets, Ted? We should be able to sue him for everything he’s got.”

The Saint sighed. It was a pity, he thought, that there were still a lot more detective-story clichés which he hadn’t yet had time to extirpate. But he could keep working at it.

“You must talk it over with your lawyers,” he said agreeably. “I know they’ll be glad to hear that you expect to have some way of paying them. But first they’ll have to get you off this murder rap. Perhaps you’d better phone them right away, because the cops are planning to pick you both up after you leave here. The only reason they aren’t banging on the door now is because the Ziggy Zaglan show is such good publicity for Miami Beach that they want to keep him out of it as much as possible.”

“Who did you talk to when you went to the phone?” Colbin challenged shrilly. “Anyone but this hick medical examiner?”

“Only an old friend of mine, the sheriff Newt Haskins. He told me that a more elaborate autopsy, with an analysis of Paul’s digestive tract, which I didn’t mention before, had pinned down the time of death pretty closely around midnight,” said the Saint prophetically. “At that time you two were supposedly on your way to the Latin Quarter. But then they checked the car-park attendants,” he went on mendaciously, but with unwavering assurance, “and found that you didn’t get there until very much later, in fact only a short while before Ziggy and Monty came to drag you out. And then they went back to make another check at Paul’s — they must have arrived right after Lois and Monty and I left — and they found that like any good gadget man he also was wired for sound. He had his plaything running when someone dropped in last night, and the sound track is a bit confusing, but—”

“You moronic crummy little fast-buck promoter,” spat out the network executive, glaring brilliantly at the haggard little agent. “You said it was foolproof, but—”

“I didn’t know there were such fools as you,” Colbin said wearily.

Simon Templar shrugged, and backed away from the argument, and went in search of the telephone again to call an old friend, the sheriff, Newt Haskins, whom he had not yet talked to. It was not altogether unfortunate, he thought, that some of the oldest clichés were still paying off. As long as they could still be used to make the ungodly trip over their own tongues, he would probably have to go on taking advantage of them.

He also hoped he would be able to get his part wrapped up in time to move on to an equally venerable but more pleasurable cliché, which would call for taking Lois Norroy off to dinner as a preliminary.