Thanks to the Saint

The unescapable word

“In spite of everything I’ve tried to say,” Simon Templar complained once, in a reminiscent vein, “I keep falling over people who insist on thinking of me as a sort of freelance detective. They’ve read so many stories about private eyes that they simply can’t get the picture of a privateer. And when they do get me hooked into a mystery, they always expect me to solve it in about half an hour, with a couple of shiny clues and a neat speech tying them together, just like the wizards do it in those stories — and it’s no use trying to tell ’em that what cracks most cases in real life is ninety-five per cent dull and patient routine work... But there have been a few hallowed occasions when I was able to do it just like a magazine writer. And I can think of one that was practically a classic example of the formula. It even has the place where you could stop and say, ‘Now, dear stupid reader, you have been given all the facts which should enable you to spot the culprit, and if you can’t put your finger on him and give a reason which proves you aren’t only guessing, you should be hit on the head with the collected works of Conan Doyle.’ Incidentally, it’s also a completely uncensorable cop story — because no matter how much anyone disapproves of the word, it would have been a hell of a lot tougher to solve without it.”

This was not long after one of America’s most distinguished law enforcers had stirred up a mild furor in a lull between world crises by stating for publication that in his opinion the time-honored word “cop” was derogatory and should be excised from the vocabulary of all police-respecting citizens.

To Simon, when he stopped at sunset at the neat little adobe motel on Highway 80, on the outskirts of a village with the improbably romantic name of Primrose Pass, mainly because it seemed pointless to load an already long day with another hour’s twilight driving when he would have to sleep somewhere in the Arizona desert anyhow and was in no hurry to get anywhere anyway, Harry Tanner had not been instantly identifiable either as a Cop or as a Police officer, but only as a muscular man with a traitorous bulge in front, stripped to blue jeans and undershirt, who was pushing a mower over a small area of tenderly cherished grass in front of the half-dozen cottages arranged like a miniature hacienda. But in the morning, when Simon stopped by the “office” to beg some ice cubes for his thermos, the same individual was turning over the registration cards from the night before and looked at him with the peculiarly and unmistakably challenging stare of the traditional policeman.

“Anybody ever call you the Saint?” the man asked, with a voice blunt and uncompromising enough to match the stare.

“A few,” Simon murmured neutrally.

The other finished pulling on a khaki shirt, buttoned it, and pinned on a badge which he took from his pants pocket.

“My name’s Harry Tanner. I help my wife run this joint sometimes. The rest of the time I’m the town marshal. Would you be interested in a murder we just had here?”

“If I’m going to need an alibi,” said the Saint gloomily, “I can only hope that either you or your wife stays up all night to watch for any guest who might try to sneak out with the furniture. I don’t know how else I could prove that I didn’t leave my cottage all night.”

Tanner’s mouth barely cracked in the perfunctory sketch of a smile.

“I know you didn’t do this one. I just thought you might help me solve it.”

Simon was so astounded by the novelty of the first sentence that he did not even think of his habitual answer to the second until he was sitting in the marshal’s battered pickup and being driven at exactly the posted twenty-five-miles-per-hour limit through the business center of Primrose Pass, which extended for three whole blocks.

“No point in cutting loose with a siren and getting ever’body all stirred up, when we wouldn’t get there two minutes quicker,” Tanner said. “I had enough of that when I was a cop in Cleveland, Ohio. That’s where I used to read about you, and I hoped I’d meet you, but you never came our way.”

“Did I hear you call yourself a cop?” Simon inquired with discreet interest.

“Yup. Been a cop all my life, practically. They even made me an MP in the Army. Only I always wanted to get out West, ever since I saw my first cowboy picture. So when I happened to read about this town looking for a trained officer, right after I was discharged, it was just what I wanted... But don’t let that word give you any ideas.”

He spun the wheel and steered the truck around a gas station to a dirt road that intersected the highway, with a certain physical grimness which left the Saint confused and wary all over again.

To get the conversation back on more solid ground, Simon asked, “Who’s been murdered?”

“Fellow named Edward Oakridge, out at the Research Station, where we’re going.”

“People always expect me to know everything. It’s very flattering but hard to live up to. What is this Research Station?”

“It’s something run by the Government. They got three scientists working out there — or it was three, up till now — and they monkey around with a lot of electrical stuff. Had to put in special power lines to carry all the juice they use. But not even the guards out there know what they’re researching. I don’t know either — and my own daughter works there.”

Simon instinctively checked the reflex upward movement of an eyebrow, but Tanner did not look at him.

“Is she a scientist or a guard?”

“She types reports for the scientists. But she hardly understands a word of ’em herself. At least, that’s all she’s allowed to say.”

“But don’t tell me they hired her for a top-secret job like that just because they met her in the local drugstore.”

“No. Walter Rand — that’s Professor Rand, he’s the head man on this project — happened to tell me one day that they had too much paperwork and he was going to have to send for a secretary. Marjorie had a secretarial job in the FBI office in Cleveland when I pulled up stakes, and she’d stayed there. There wasn’t anything for her in a town like this when I came here. But her mother always hated her being so far away, so I asked Rand if he’d take her if she’d take the job. She liked the idea of being near us again, too, and of course her security clearance was ready made.”

“It sounds like a lucky break. With this leaning towards cop-dom that she seems to have inherited from you, she’d probably have ended up a full-fledged G-woman if you hadn’t rescued her.”

“Well, instead of that, she inherits something from her mother that makes her fall in love with a cop,” Tanner said dourly. “Hadn’t been here a month before she was going steady with one of the guards out at the Research Station. Young fellow by the name of Jock Ingram. You’ll meet him. He’s the one that found the body.”

His heavy face, with the eyes narrowed into the glare from the dusty road, invited neither sympathy nor humorous appreciation. He was a man who had spent so many years giving a professional imitation of a sphinx that the pose had taken root.

The Saint lighted a cigarette.

“This murder is starting to sound like a rather family affair,” he remarked. “You said there were three scientists. What about the third?”

“His name is Dr Conrad Soren.”

“And they don’t have any assistants?”

“No. Whatever they’re experimenting with, I guess it’s something they can handle between themselves.”

“But there are other guards, besides Ingram.”

“Yup. Three of ’em. But only one of ’em is on duty at a time. They each have eight hours on and twenty-four hours off, in turn, so none of ’em gets stuck with the night shift all the time.”

“And when was the murder committed?”

“That’s one thing we got to find out,” the marshal said.

The road, whatever its ultimate destination, still stretched ahead in a straight line to the bare horizon, but Tanner slowed up suddenly and made an abrupt turn onto a narrower and even more rutted trail that was marked only by a stake with a small weathered shingle nailed to it on which could barely be read the crude and faded letters that spelled out “Hopewell Ranch.”

In less than a quarter of a mile the ranch came in sight, as they rattled around one of those low deceptive contours which can hide whole townships in an apparently empty plain. The Hopewell Ranch was in no such category of size, in fact it consisted of only two buildings: the long rambling ranch house with an attached garage, and a barn-like structure not far from it. A few palms and cottonwoods and eucalyptus trees lent some of the atmosphere of an oasis to the shallow pocket where the buildings stood, in contrast to the drab sage and greasewood and sahuaro that eked some desiccated sustenance from the arid wilderness around, but it still had a rather pathetically abandoned and defeated air that was in even sharper contrast with its name.

“Fellow from back East built it and tried to raise a few horses, but mostly it was because he had TB and the climate was supposed to be good for him,” Tanner said. “Maybe he came here too late, but he didn’t last long. Nobody else wanted the place until somebody from the Government came around shopping for a location for these scientists. Seems this was just what they wanted, perhaps because, except the way we come from, there’s nothing but desert and jack-rabbits around for fifty miles or more.”

The only visibly new feature of the establishment was a conspicuously shiny wire-mesh fence about nine feet high, which contained the ranch house in the approximate center of what looked to be a square of about two hundred yards on each side, with the barn quite close to one corner where there was a steel-framed gate to which the washboard track they were following led.

Tanner braked the truck with its fenders only inches from the gate, and Simon’s ears became aware of a thin squealing sound which he could not associate with any of the diverse mechanical protests emanating from the innards of the aging pickup. Almost immediately a man in a nondescript gray uniform came out of the barn, waved to the marshal in recognition, and came to open the gate. Another man, similarly uniformed, stood in the doorway that the first man had emerged from and watched.

“You hear that noise?” Tanner asked, and the Saint nodded.

“Yes.”

“That’s the fence. Anything or anyone comes near it, they don’t even have to touch it, but it sets up that whining. Acts like a sort of condenser. Nobody could get close enough to climb over or cut the wire without starting it oscillating. It can’t even be switched off when they want to open the gate. And it sounds loudest right inside those old stables. That’s where the guards live — the Government made it over into living quarters for ’em. And not more than two of ’em are allowed to be off the station at the same time: that way, there’s always an extra man on call besides the one who’s on duty. So even if the man on duty wanted to sneak the gate open, for any reason, he couldn’t do it without the other fellow hearing it.”

“Unless the electricity were cut off altogether,” Simon suggested.

“In that case an emergency system cuts in and also starts up a siren on top of the main building, so the whole place would be alerted.”

Tanner let in the clutch and drove through the gate and stopped again a few yards inside.

“In other words,” said the Saint, “this is the old reliable inside-job type of mystery, with the latest electronic guarantees.”

Tanner grunted.

“I guess you can call it that, if you want to.”

He shut off the engine and climbed out, and Simon stepped out the other door and strolled around to join him. The guard finished closing the gate and started towards them. As soon as he had taken two steps from it, the high-pitched wailing note that had been quivering remorselessly in the air stopped suddenly.

“Hi, Chief,” the guard said.

“This is Frank Loretto,” Tanner said. “He’s the senior guard.” With only the necessary turn of his head he went on: “You were the stand-by man on Ingram’s watch when it happened — that right, Frank?”

“Right, Chief.”

Loretto was square-built and square-faced, with wiry black hair liberally necked with white, a hard-looking man with a soft agreeable voice. He studied the Saint curiously with discreet dark eyes, but Tanner either preferred to ignore the invitation to complete the introduction or was unaware of it.

“Tell me again how it happened, Frank.”

“Jock relieved me at seven o’clock. Klein had been on stand-by during my watch; as soon as that let him out, he took off for Tucson to see a dentist — he had a toothache all yesterday. Burney had been sleeping; he got up and had breakfast with me.”

“That’s Burney,” Tanner explained to the Saint, with a jerk of his thumb towards the other guard who still stood in the doorway of the converted stables.

“The Professors got here just after eight, as usual, all together — Dr Soren and Oakridge, in Rand’s car.”

“They all three board at the hotel in town — I mean, they did,” Tanner amplified. “They only come out here to work.”

“Jock let ’em in, and then he set off to make his round,” Loretto went on. “That is, all the checks every man is supposed to make when he comes on duty. Burney and I sat around and made some more coffee. About nine o’clock Marj got here in her car, and I let her in.”

“Marjorie starts an hour after the scientists,” Tanner told the Saint, “because she usually has to work at least an hour after they quit.” He shifted his ponderous direction once again. “Okay, Frank, what then?”

“You’d better get it from Jock, Chief,” Loretto said gently. “He called me on the intercom at nine-fifty-two and told me he’d found Oakridge dead and he was staying to see nothing got moved. Then I phoned you. Being his stand-by, I had to stay here on the gate. Besides, I’m a cop too... But Burney went and had a look.”

Tanner glanced again at the man in the stable doorway — he was tall and thin, with a sallow complexion and a long pessimistic face — and hitched up his pants stolidly.

“We’ll look for ourselves,” he said. “See you later, Frank.” He turned and lumbered on towards the house, and Simon followed him.

Something was beginning to nag the Saint’s sensitive perceptions like a tiny splinter, and he had to get it out.

“Does everybody around here have some sort of complex about being a cop?” he asked. “I can’t remember when I’ve heard quite so much self-conscious talk about it.”

“Right here and now, there’s a reason.” Tanner looked at the Saint with another of his probing dead-pan stares. “Most cops would say I was crazy to bring you here. I’ve heard a lot of people say that you hate cops.”

“Only particularly stupid cops, and crooked cops,” Simon said, answering what sounded almost like a question. “And I’ve had to do a few unkind things to fairly good cops, who were just too ambitious about adding my scalp to their trophies. But I didn’t hate them.”

“That’s the way I got it,” Tanner said. “From a cop named Inspector Fernack, of New York. He was our guest of honor at a Police Association dinner in Cleveland once, and your name came up, I forget how, in a bull session afterwards. I figured he knew what he was talking about.”

“That was nice of John Henry,” Simon murmured. “I must try to be kinder to him next time I’m in his bailiwick... But I still don’t get the connection.”

“You will in just a minute,” Tanner said. He opened the front door of the house and went in. They stepped directly into the living room, without any intervention of a hallway. It was a large room which seemed lofty because no ceiling intruded between the floor and the rough-hewn beams and rafters of the roof. There was a broad picture window on the other side framing a panorama of pale grays and olive green that ended in a low line of corrugated purple hills, and a big smoke-blackened stone fireplace at one end. The solid Spanish-derivative furniture, Navaho rugs on the floor, and copper and Indian pottery ornaments had obviously been left unchanged since the departure of the ill-starred original owner, and it had been kept as a common room for some of the very different breed of pioneers who had infiltrated the Southwest since the dawn of the Atomic Age.

The Professors, as the guards seemed to have aptly christened them — or, at least, the two who were left — were typical of the New Order, which at that time still seemed disconcertingly untypical of the Old. As befitted the priests of a Science separated by multiple walls of electronic computers from the gropings of the dreamy medieval alchemist, they would have seemed much more at home in a small-town bank than stirring a smelly caldron on some blasted heath. The one who bustled instantly into the foreground, forestalling any possible query as to who was the ranking spokesman, was so executive that it crackled.

“Glad you got here at last, Marshal,” he said.

The way he uttered the words “at last,” with bell-like clarity, yet with a total lack of inflection, so that the implied censure was unmistakable and yet, if challenged, he could unassailably disclaim any such intention, was as much a triumph of technique as the way he turned the compliment of giving Tanner his correct title into a subtle reminder of a class difference between them. He was a short rotund man with rimless glasses and a tight mechanical smile and wispy brown hair stretched thinly over the places where it had stopped growing, whose neat business suit was a final incongruity against the décor of the room and the scenery outside.

“Professor Walter Rand,” Tanner said introductorily.

Rand shook hands heartily and vacantly, like a politician.

Tanner continued, pointing at the others in turn with a thick, uncourtly forefinger: “Dr Conrad Soren. My daughter Marjorie. Jock Ingram.”

Dr Soren inclined his head stiffly. His costume was almost as inappropriate as Rand’s, in a different direction, consisting of unbleached linen slacks and an exuberantly flowered shirt that would have been more at home on the beach at Waikiki. He had a short nose and a long upper lip and a brush of thick straight wiry hair, all of which might have given him a rather simian aspect if it had not been for his large and extremely intelligent eyes.

Marjorie Tanner was a pretty girl with nice brown hair and nice brown eyes and a nice figure. She was not the type that was likely to launch a thousand ships, or even a thousand feet of motion-picture film, but she had a wholesome air of being nice to know and even nice to live with. Jock Ingram was a few years older but well under thirty, a well-knit young man with crew-cut sandy hair and pleasantly undistinguished features but very earnest eyes, the type that most parents of daughters would be happy to see calling. Already they managed to look like a couple, and they looked at the Saint together in the same politely puzzled way.

The marshal, however, had again conveniently forgotten to complete the other side of the introduction.

“Let’s see the body, Jock,” he said bluntly.

“Yes, sir.”

The young man in uniform headed towards an open arch in the wall opposite the fireplace. It was the end of a corridor that ran lengthways through the house, with doors on each side and another door across the far end. Ingram led the way past two doors on the right and opened the third room.

It faced the same view as the living room and had obviously once been a bedroom, but it had been stripped of all household furniture. Instead, it held a workbench littered with an assortment of small tools, an engineer’s drawing board under the window, a bookcase with rolls of drafting paper and other stationery on the shelves, and the body.

The body lay on the floor near the middle of the room, belly down, the head turned to the right so that the left cheek rested on the bare floor. Of all the workers in that converted Western setting, Edward Oakridge, even in death, looked the least out of place, for he wore a plaid shirt and blue jeans secured by a tooled leather belt, although he had not gone so far as to wear cowboy boots but had his feet in comfortable sneakers. He was a short burly man, and what could be seen on his face had some of the same Neanderthal ruggedness as his physique. His head was completely hairless, so that the blood-clotted wound slightly above and behind his right ear could be plainly seen, but even more conspicuous and more gruesome was the screwdriver handle that stuck out at an angle from his powerful neck, directly over the jugular vein.

It was the latter wound which had done the most bleeding, to form a pool on the bare tile floor. Into that pool of ghastly ink the dying man had dipped a finger, and with it had traced three capital letters close to his face, which spelled a word. And as he gazed down at it, the earliest of the Saint’s perplexities was answered.

The word was: “COP.”

“Now I get it,” said the Saint at last. “Why didn’t you tell me, Harry?”

“Jock told Loretto and Loretto told me when he phoned,” Tanner said. “But that was double hearsay. I hadn’t seen it myself.”

He squatted to make a closer examination, and Simon leaned over to confirm it.

“Somebody hit him when he wasn’t looking, with something with a sort of cornered edge,” Tanner said. “It may have cracked his skull, but it doesn’t seem to have crushed it in. The murderer wasn’t certain that that killed him either, so he stuck the screwdriver in his throat to make sure.”

“There’s a soldering iron here on the workbench with what looks like blood on the tip,” Ingram said. “The guy could’ve put it back down there when he picked up the screwdriver.”

They went over and looked, without touching.

“But Oakridge still wasn’t quite dead,” Simon said slowly. “He came to again for a few seconds, before he passed out for keeps. He couldn’t even yell, with that thing in his gullet. But he tried to leave a message.”

Then all three of them sensed the presence of Professor Rand in the doorway and turned before he spoke, but it was the Saint who was the objective of his busy bright eyes.

“Are you from the FBI?” he inquired.

“He’s assisting me,” Tanner pre-empted the reply calmly. “But the FBI have been notified. They’re sending a man from Tucson.”

“Then wouldn’t it be better to leave everything undisturbed till he gets here? After all, this establishment is under the Federal Government—”

“It may sound crazy, Professor, and it likely is, but this is also inside the town limits of Primrose Pass, which were drawn by some optimist who figured it didn’t cost anything to think big. I haven’t been told anything by the Federal Government which says I shouldn’t bother about a murder committed anywhere in my territory.”

“I’m only thinking, Marshal, that the FBI will have all the latest equipment and can probably save you a lot of trouble.”

“My trouble is what the town pays me for,” Tanner said equably. “But don’t worry, we won’t disturb anything. You didn’t disturb anything, did you, Jock?”

“No, sir.”

“You didn’t have a chance to wipe up that word on the floor, before you called anyone?”

Ingram’s straightforward eyes did not waver, but a flush crept into his face.

“I could have, I suppose. I didn’t think of it.”

“Did anyone else have a chance to mess up anything?”

Ingram hesitated, and Rand said, “Yes, I did.”

He was sublimely unabashed by the reactions that simultaneously converged upon him.

“There was a diagram pinned on that board,” he said. “I noticed that it included the fullest details of... of our most recent advances in... in the problems we have been working on. I’m sorry I can’t be more specific. This is such a highly classified project that I mustn’t even say what it’s about, except to someone with special credentials.”

“I don’t think that matters to us,” said the Saint. “So it’s the long awaited Death Ray, or a gizmo that transmutes red tape into blue ribbons. The only point we’re concerned with is that it would be of incalculable value to the Enemy.”

“Exactly.”

“And it’s gone,” Simon said, glancing at the uncluttered drafting table.

“That’s what I was telling you,” Rand said testily. “I removed it and locked it in my safe. Not knowing who might be brought here by an inevitable investigation, it was my duty to keep it out of sight of any unauthorized person. However, it may be pertinent for you to know that it was there.”

Tanner’s stolid bulk quivered momentarily with what in any less undemonstrative individual would have been taken for the vibration of a chuckle.

“Well,” he said, “thanks anyway for giving us the motive.” He gazed woodenly at the Saint. “You want to look around here any more?”

“I don’t think so,” Simon said, after doing exactly that for several seconds, but without shifting from where he stood. “I guess I’ve seen all I’m going to. I’ll leave the magnifying-glass and vacuum-cleaner work to the Sherlock squad. Now what about this door here?”

“The bathroom,” Rand said.

Simon opened the door and looked in. The room had been used for some minor laboratory work, and there were a dozen chemical bottles on the tile-topped counter in which the washbasin was set. There was another door on the opposite side of it.

“I suppose that goes to another former bedroom?”

“Yes. We’re using all the rooms. As a matter of fact, I was working in there myself from about eight-fifteen on.”

Simon tried the handle.

“It’s locked.”

“I’m afraid it will have to remain so,” Rand said, with a tightening of his thin lips. “Except to the FBI, or someone properly authorized by the Department of Defense. The same applies to the other rooms where we have — er — experimental assemblies. However, if you’ll step outside, I’ll tell you all that you need to know.”

They filed out into the corridor again.

“The door at the end used to be the master bedroom; now it’s our main workshop. The room you were just in, as you saw, is a drafting and general utility room.” Rand was leading them briskly back along the passage. “Then the room you were asking about, which communicates through the bathroom. Then this” — Rand opened the door nearest the living room — “used to be the den. We use it as an office and for some of our paperwork. Miss Tanner works here.”

It was a completely unremarkable room, to all appearance, except for being somewhat overcrowded by a secretary’s desk, typewriter stand, and filing cabinets which had been added to the normal furniture.

“The other doors are just powder room — storage closets — linen closet, and so on,” said Professor Rand, dismissing them with a flick of his hand, and led the way back through the arch into the living room where Soren and the girl were still waiting.

“In fact,” Simon observed, “this must be one of the smallest Defense establishments in the country.”

“It isn’t a factory,” Rand said severely. “It’s purely a Research Station. And the — er — device we are working on is quite small. But I assure you, its size is in no proportion to its importance. I think I can say that without betraying any official secrets.”

From Harry Tanner came the kind of subsonic rumble that might have been emitted by a volcano that was trying not to erupt.

“Official shinplasters,” he said obscurely. “What I’d like to know, Professor, is how you expect me to investigate a murder without investigating anything around it.”

“What I’ve been trying to tell you, Marshal, is that I don’t expect you to. That is no slight, but—”

“But you think I’m just a dumb village cop, eh?”

“I know your record, Marshall, but I’m sure you don’t claim to have the same facilities here that you had in Cleveland.”

“That’s right,” Simon interposed quietly. “And we probably don’t even need them.”

All of them looked at him in a puzzled but guarded way, irresistibly drawn by an elusive quality of assurance that emanated from him, but uneasy as to what it might portend for any of them individually. Tanner in particular had a shocked and resentful expression, as if one ally that he had counted on was deserting him at the first shot.

The Saint lighted a cigarette as if he were quite unaware of being saddled with so much responsibility and went on: “After all, there might be a clue anywhere in the house. Perhaps in the kitchen. I’m sure Professor Rand wouldn’t object if we searched the kitchen. But if we aren’t looking for anything definite, I’m damned if I know what we’re likely to find. The clue might just as well be a bottle of Escoffier Sauce as an electrode... And the same with the fingerprint routine. There doesn’t seem to be any possibility that this wasn’t an inside job. Therefore everyone at the Station is theoretically suspect. But so far as I know, everyone at the Station could have a legitimate excuse for having been anywhere or touched anything.”

“Except the cops,” Soren said.

He had a very deep voice that reverberated disproportionately from his narrow chest and a meticulous way of articulating every syllable that made him sound rather like a talking robot.

“Beg your pardon, sir,” Ingram put in. “The guards are supposed to check all the rooms, twice in each watch, at night and on weekends or whenever there’s nobody working.”

“Okay,” said the Saint. “So no fingerprints mean a thing, anywhere, except maybe on the soldering iron or the screwdriver — and you can bet the murderer wiped those.”

“Precisely,” Rand agreed, but in a somewhat defensive way, as if he wondered what his concurrence might be letting him in for.

Simon took a long drag at his cigarette and half sat on one corner of a sturdy antique table.

“That brings us,” he said, “to the next standard routine: alibis.”

There was a brief silence, until it became apparent that he was waiting for answers.

“Klein’ll have the best one,” Ingram said. “He left the Station soon after seven, to drive to Tucson.”

“So I heard,” Tanner confirmed. “And Loretto and Burney sat chewing the fat after you started your round until you found the body and called ’em. So they rule out each other.”

“Unless they were in cahoots,” Soren said, with the punctilious enunciation that gave such an odd effect to his choice of vocabulary.

Tanner said, with studied reasonableness, “All these guards must’ve had the hell of a check-up by the FBI you’re so sold on before they qualified for this job. Sure, any security system can slip up. But for it to slip twice on four men is mighty long odds for me to swallow. I’d rather see if ever’body else has an alibi first. Like you gentlemen, for instance.”

Professor Rand made a little sound that was almost a polite snort.

“Really, Marshal, if you think the guards were so carefully checked, you can imagine the kind of clearance we must have had, to be actually working on this project.”

“I remember a scientist named Klaus Fuchs,” Simon murmured, “who went over to the Russians with stuff that’s supposed to have cut down our lead in atomic weapons by five years. Why shouldn’t you give the marshal your alibis — if you have any?”

There was another, more searching pause.

“I suppose I had better come clean,” Soren boomed at last. “I have none. Oakridge and I were working in the main workshop. He went to the drafting room to check some specifications on a final drawing, and I went on with what I was doing. But of course, you have only my word for it.”

“When I came in,” Marjorie Tanner said, speaking for the first time in a clear, impersonal voice, “I went straight to the office and went on with some typing that I hadn’t finished yesterday. But I couldn’t prove that I stayed there.”

“I heard the typewriter,” said Rand. “But I couldn’t swear that it never stopped. For that matter, I couldn’t prove what I was doing myself. While Soren and Oakridge went to the main workshop, I had something to do in the other room where I told you I was. But I haven’t any witness.”

“And anyone,” said the Saint, “could have gone up or down that corridor, from any room to another, without being seen and probably without being heard.”

Tanner threw Simon a grateful glance of restored confidence.

“There you are,” he said. “It sets up four possible suspects, including my own daughter.”

“You needn’t be quite so generous, Marshal,” Rand said with scarcely veiled sarcasm. “It’d be hard to make anyone believe that Miss Tanner committed murder in the horrible way that we’ve seen. And there’s still only one of us who can be called a cop.”

Tanner turned heavily to the young man in uniform.

“Well, Jock,” he said, “if you don’t have an alibi, you’re no worse off than anybody else.”

“I don’t,” Ingram said steadily. “After I left the gate, I made the round of the fence. I didn’t hurry — there wasn’t any reason to. Then I went most of the way around again the way I’d just come — that’s a trick we pull sometimes. Then I came up to the house and checked the emergency light plant and batteries. Then I went in the kitchen and got a coke—”

“We keep soft drinks and stuff to make sandwiches for lunch in the icebox,” Marjorie Tanner said, telling it to the Saint.

“Then I came in and talked to Marj for a few minutes. That was about nine-thirty. I stayed five or ten minutes—”

“It was nearer fifteen,” she said.

“Then I walked out around the house, and I happened to look in a window and saw Mr Oakridge on the floor, and I came back in and found he was dead.”

“So for ten or fifteen minutes, anyway, you two got alibis for each other,” the marshal said.

Simon shook his head.

“Don’t let’s kid ourselves, Harry,” he said with genuine regret. “You know as well as I do that that doesn’t mean a thing. No autopsy is going to fix the time of death as accurately as that.”

“I am not sure,” Soren said with measured resonance. “We all know how it is between Miss Tanner and this guard. We can only sympathize with Mr Tanner’s natural instinct to give his prospective in-law every legal break.”

“But not with trying to cover up for him,” Rand said, his eyes snapping hard and bright behind his glasses. “I’ve tried to be patient, but I’m finding it more difficult all the time to understand your reluctance to concentrate on the most obvious suspect. I’ll tell you frankly that from the moment we saw the circumstances of the murder, Dr Soren and I have felt it our duty to drop everything else and keep this young man under our personal surveillance. If you’re so anxious to take a hand in this investigation, I suggest that your first and most useful contribution would be to take him into custody.”

“If I’m investigating, I’ll do it my own way,” Tanner growled. “I saw that word COP, too, but I didn’t see any proof Oakridge wrote it. Somebody else could of dipped Oakridge’s finger in the blood and done it.”

It was a weak try, and they all knew it. Rand simply clamped his lips tighter, in an expression of pitying impatience. Soren condescended to consider it more respectfully, his lustrous eyes peering up intently from under lowered brows, but he finally said, “I would not have tried to frame him like that. A clever killer would feel safer if everyone could be suspected. Why narrow it down to only one — who might have been the one to have a perfect alibi?”

“That’s pretty good criminal thinking,” said the Saint, with the detached appreciation of a connoisseur. “I’ll take it a little further, for what it’s worth. I think the murderer’s instinct would be to get away as quickly as possible — at least to be somewhere else when the body was found, even if he didn’t have an alibi—”

“Then how can anyone have this stupid idea that Jock did it,” said the girl quickly, “when he found the body?”

“There are exceptions,” Soren said, not unkindly. “He is one person who might have thought he could get away with it.”

“With what? Writing something on the floor that would only point to himself?”

For a moment everything sagged into the vertiginous hiatus which can yawn before the most brilliant minds in the presence of a feminine lunge towards total confusion.

Simon took a final pull at his cigarette and chuckled. He put it down and said, “Let’s stay on the rails. With that screwdriver still in the wound, Oakridge would have taken a few minutes to bleed as much as we saw externally. Of course, the murderer might have had the nerve to stand there and wait till there was enough blood to write with; anything’s possible. But let’s try the things that are easier to believe first. Assuming that Oakridge wrote the word, is there anything else he could have been trying to say, besides accusing Ingram?”

Tanner swung around towards Soren.

“Your first name is Conrad, isn’t it?” he said. “He could just as well have been starting to try to write that, and his hand slipped—”

“No,” said the Saint scrupulously. “It’s as definite a ‘P’ as I ever saw. It could never by any stretch of imagination have set out to be an ‘N.’ ”

“But it might perhaps have been an unfinished ‘R,’ ” Soren retorted. “And if the ‘C’ was really a crude ‘L,’ the finger would be on Loretto.”

“No again,” said the Saint judicially. “The ‘C’ is round and positive — almost a complete circle. It couldn’t be anything else.”

The marshal turned to Rand almost pleadingly.

“Could those letters stand for anything to do with your work?” he asked. “I mean, if they were chemical symbols, or something mathematical...”

Rand stared at him without any softening but visibly forced himself to give the suggestion a conscientious mental review. Then he glanced at Soren, who responded only with a slight blank shrug.

“No,” Rand said, turning back to Tanner more stonily than ever. “I’m sorry — absolutely nothing.”

Tanner took a compulsive lumbering step in one direction, then in another, not going anywhere, but rather in helpless stubborn rebellion against the inexorable walls of logic that were crowding him closer on every side except one. But his resistance was beginning to have some of the tired hopelessness of the last minutes of a beleaguered bull.

Ingram’s and the girl’s glances met, in a simultaneous reaching towards each other of complete unison.

Ingram looked up again and said, “Thanks for trying to give me a fair break, sir. But neither of us want you to get yourself in Dutch for me. Go ahead and arrest me, if you think you ought to. I’ll prove I didn’t do it, somehow.”

The girl reached up and took his hand as he stood beside her and said, “I know he will, Dad.”

Simon slid another cigarette into his mouth and struck a match. Inwardly he was approaching the same state of baffled frustration as the marshal, even if his purely intuitive inability to visualize Jock Ingram as this kind of murderer was perhaps even greater, but no one could have guessed it from his cool and nerveless exterior. That aura of unperturbed relaxation was the only authority he had to keep everyone answering his questions, but he intended to exploit it to the last second — even though he still seemed to be groping in unalleviated darkness.

“Just one last little detail before we call the paddy wagon,” he intruded. “I said there couldn’t be any argument that Oakridge wrote the letters C-O-P. But from the position of his hand, and the fresh blood on his finger — it looked to me as if he’d dipped it again after he wrote the “P” — I’d say there were good grounds to believe that he was trying to add something more when he passed out. Now, I don’t imagine he wanted to say that everything was copacetic, or put in a dying plug for the Copacabana. But can any of you think of anything else beginning with the same letters that has anything to do with this project here? Have you done any experimenting in a place that could be called a copse?”

“No,” Rand said promptly.

But in spite of themselves they could all be seen gazing into space and trying out tentative syllables.

“Cope,” said the girl. “Copious...”

The words died forlornly, inevitably.

“Copper,” Ingram said, and immediately reddened. “I mean—”

“The metal is used in most electrical work, of course,” Soren said kindly. “It has no unusual significance in what we are doing.

“Copra?” Tanner said.

“A coconut product, I believe,” Rand said witheringly, “which, without asking for any official clearance, I can say that we do not use.”

“Copy,” Soren said.

There was a moment’s breathless hush.

Marjorie Tanner’s hand tightened on Ingram’s fingers, and her father’s baggy eyes began to light up; even Rand pursed his small mouth hesitantly.

“But after all,” Soren said, with sadness in his sonorous bass, “if poor Oakridge was worried about a copy, even of a vital diagram — we have all thought of that motive. He was not telling us anything.”

The room sighed as a multiple of separately inaudible deflations.

“Copulation, anyone?” flipped the Saint.

He should have known better than that. The silence this time was deafening.

“I really think we’re entitled to know the name of your new assistant, Marshal,” Rand said at last, with the smoothness of a wrapped package of razor blades, and Simon decided that the marshal had carried him long enough.

“The name is Templar,” he said. “More often called the Saint.”

He had seen all the conceivable reactions to that announcement so often that they were seldom even amusing any more. This time he only hoped they would be disposed of quickly.

“Did you know this, Marshal?” Rand was the one who finally cracked the new stillness, in a voice of shaky incredulity.

“Yes, Professor,” Tanner said.

“And knowing it, you brought him here and let him pretend to be your assistant?”

“Yes, sir.”

“The FBI will be very interested.”

“I don’t think it’ll surprise ’em much,” Tanner said, with the first real satisfaction he had permitted himself. “When I was calling Tucson, I thought to mention that I’d got a fellow named Simon Templar registered at the motel. It turned out the FBI man I was talking to had had something to do with clearing Mr Templar for some special work during the war. He said if I could get the Saint to come out here with me it wouldn’t hurt anything, at least.”

Simon let an embryo smoke ring disintegrate at his lips as he paid Tanner the salute of a half-surprised, half-laughing flicker of his brows and hitched himself with the flowing movement of a gymnast off the table where he had been perched.

“And for the record,” he said, to put all the cards down together, “I don’t think Jock Ingram did it either.”

“Indeed.” Rand had been shaken, but flint sparked behind his prim, scholarly eyeglasses. “According to your analysis, then, you must think it was either Dr Soren or myself, because that’s what you’ve reduced the list of suspects to.”

“Maybe I do,” said the Saint cheerfully. “It wouldn’t make any difference if it were reduced to only one other suspect. In detective stories I’ve noticed they like to confuse you with a lot of possibilities, but in real life it isn’t any easier if you only have two alternatives. I mean to pick the right one honestly, for sure, and so that you can make it stick — not taking a fifty-fifty chance on a guess, or flipping a coin.”

He made a slight arresting gesture with his cigarette to forestall the interruptions he could see formulating.

“Let’s reconstruct the crime. It doesn’t seem difficult. Oakridge went into that room and caught somebody doing something he shouldn’t. According to Professor Rand, there was a very important drawing on the board. Very likely someone was photographing it. Not copying” — he gave Soren a nod of acknowledgement — “because that would be easier for this Someone to explain away. It had to be so blatant that Someone knew that his goose was cooked the minute Oakridge got out of the room to tell his story. So Someone picked up the nearest blunt instrument, a soldering iron, and hit Oakridge on the head from behind as he started for the door. The position of the wound on his skull confirms that. Then, wanting to make sure that if Oakridge wasn’t dead he would die quickly, and without being able to talk, and not wanting to do it by hammering away at his skull until he smashed a hole in it — which, if you’ll take my word for it, is a messy and uncertain business for a guy who isn’t a very muscular and physical type — he shoved a screwdriver in through his jugular vein and his throat.”

Simon angled a hand towards Ingram, who stood rather stiffly but unfalteringly at a kind of attention beside Marjorie Tanner’s chair, but with her fingers still firmly locked in his.

“Now I’ll admit that, of all of us here, Jock is one of the most likely to beat a man’s head to a pulp, if he had enough provocation. But that is exactly how Oakridge wasn’t killed. And if any of you can visualize this lad in the rest of the part, the essential part, as the master spy who infiltrates a top-secret project and photographs the priceless plans — even if, with the best will in the world, you believe he could tell a priceless plan from the blueprint for a washing machine—”

“Please, may I butt in?” Soren said, with his sepulchral precision. “All your deductions are dandy, Mr. Templar, but they are all tinted by your own rather melodramatic personality. You could be passing up a much less exciting reconstruction and motive.”

“Such as?”

“I don’t like to bring this up,” Soren said, looking around with his deeply earnest eyes, “and I would not, except in these circumstances. But most of us know that there were other complications about poor Oakridge. The popular picture of a scientist shows him as a kind of disembodied, dedicated priest. Sometimes this is true. But there are exceptions. Oakridge was one. His glands were fully as active as his brains. Not to mince words, he was a wolf. He gave Miss Tanner quite a bit of trouble.”

With her cheeks coloring under the glances that could not help converging on her, the girl said, “Oh yes, but—”

“But at least once your fiancé was annoyed enough to warn him.”

“I told him to keep his hands off her,” Ingram blurted straightly, “or he and I would have to talk it over somewhere outside. But I wouldn’t’ve jumped him from behind like that, like Mr Templar says it happened.”

“I don’t think there was any need to bring that up,” Rand interposed fussily. “It’s true that Oakridge was quite difficult in some ways. Not the scientific type that we’re used to in this country. I was strongly opposed to having him on this project at all, as a Russian, but his qualifications were so outstanding—”

“Hey!” Tanner almost bellowed suddenly. “You say he was a Russian?”

Professor Rand blinked at him irritably.

“Yes, but the FBI gave him a full clearance. He escaped into Poland from the Russian army that was invading it from one side while Hitler was driving in from the other — that was before Stalin suddenly changed allies. From there he got away to England and then to America. He worked on the Manhattan Project, which developed the A-bomb. His name was Dmitri Okoloff. He took the name of Edward Oakridge when he became a citizen — from Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where he’d worked.”

“You squawk about me bringing the Saint here,” Tanner grumbled ominously, “and you had him working — a Russian!”

“Shut up, Harry,” said the Saint with unexpected sharpness. “This is the slob who got murdered. Not a suspect. Get it?’

He had drawn all the eyes again, but they held him like nails, uncertain and exasperated in diverse ways, but nearly all ready to crucify him. And he felt astonishingly unconcerned.

“Had Oakridge learned English very well?” he asked, with his gaze on Rand like a blue flame.

“Quite well,” Rand said. “Without as much — er — vernacular as Dr Soren. But he was always trying. Except when he got excited. Then he’d blow up and start screaming in Russian.”

“Listen,” said the Saint tensely. “Oakridge had been conked on the head and a screwdriver rammed through his throat. He’s knocked out with a severe concussion, and he’s also bleeding to death. But the human body is awful tough — and from what I saw of him, Okoloff-Oakridge had an extra tough one. His brain recovered from the hit on the head before he bled to death through his gullet. But he knew he was gone, and he couldn’t yell, and he wanted to say who did it. He was only an adopted American, but he was going to write the name of a traitor, if it was the last thing he did.”

“You don’t have to be so theatrical,” Professor Rand said edgily. “We’ve all seen what he wrote.”

“But you couldn’t read it,” said the Saint. “It never occurred to anyone — including me — until this moment, that he was writing in Russian. Waking up from a crack on the head, dazed and dizzy and knowing that he was dying, he blew up. As you said, Professor. And in that foggy state he reverted to the writing that was most natural to him... And if this were one of those detective stories, I guess this is where everybody would be asked to take a deep breath and try to beat the Great Sleuth to the sniff.”

For enough seconds to be counted there were no takers. Then Harry Tanner said, almost as if he had been accepting a dare, “Does COP mean something else in Russian?”

“If it does, I wouldn’t know,” said the Saint. “About all I know besides tovarisch and vodka is some of the alphabet. But anyone who’s ever seen a newsreel or a news photo from behind the Iron Curtain must have noticed a word that’s bound to crop up in a lot of their posters, which looks like PYCCKU, and if they had an inquiring mind they could have figured out that it stood for Russky. You see, in Russian letters, ‘G’ is ‘S,’ and ‘P’ is ‘R,’ and if Oakridge had been starting to write, in his way, S-O-R-E-N—”

Tanner and Ingram began to move at the same time, in an oddly synchronized and yet spontaneous way.

Simon Templar eased the ash from his cigarette.

“I could make quite a phony production,” he said, “about who felt obliged to suggest the word COPY, and then had to knock it down, and who was so very intellectual about the kind of false clue that a clever murderer wouldn’t leave, and who had to try to drag in the angle of Jock and Marj’s romance and Oakridge’s wolfiness, and so on, but I will feel rather let down if they don’t find a Minox camera, or some prototype which the Russians must have invented first, on Dr Soren.”

Soren stood his ground until Tanner and Ingram put their hands on him, and then he started to thunder something incoherent about the Constitution.

They found the camera on him, anyhow.

It was the kind of evening in Harry Tanner’s home that Simon Templar heartily detested, even though Mrs Tanner, the inevitable plump, motherly woman, cooked an excellent dinner.

Marjorie Tanner was very eager and pretty and held hands a great deal of the time with Jock Ingram, who was very stalwart and modest and sincere. They would make a dream couple like the ideal Boy Scout and Girl Guide, and he could only wish every blessing on them.

Harry Tanner, bovinely exhilarated and unbent, said, “Anybody tell me you aren’t a detective, I’ll punch him right in the nose.”

“A dying man writes out the name of his murderer, and when someone tells us the alphabet he wrote in I’m just lucky enough to be able to read it,” said the Saint sourly. “That should qualify me as an Honorary Cop anywhere.”

Not to anyone would he ever admit that far more fragile threads of discernment had started to bring his sights to bear on Dr Soren before ever an alphabetical coincidence gave him the ammunition to fire a decisive challenge. If any such legend got around, he might never be able to shake off the stigma of being a natural detective.