"Sometimes," Simon Templar pronounced once, "I think that critics make far too much fuss about the use of coincidence in detective stories. In real life, mysteries are solved by coincidence at least half the time — because some chance witness happened to notice and remember something, or the criminal accidentally lost a button at the scene. An alibi goes blooey because an unpredictable fire stops the schemer getting back to his apartment in time for the phone call he's arranged to answer. And how many plays and movies have you seen where the perfect crime was all laid out at the start, and you sat happily on the edge of your seat waiting for the inevitable coincidence to foul it up — the incalculable old lady who comes looking for her wandering Fido, or the power failure that stops the electric clock that should have fired the bomb? The plain truth is that without some sort of fluke there'd usually be no story or no suspense. Coincidences happen to everyone, but they're only branded as far-fetched when somebody does something with one."
One such coincidence which he might have been recalling was not really extravagant at all, reduced to its prime essentials, which consisted of
A: reading about, and being mildly intrigued by, a minor offense committed against an individual of no obvious importance and certainly unknown to him; and
B: having that victim pointed out to him less than 48 hours later, before he had time to forget the association.
That is, if you exclude the third factor, that such coincidences seemed to happen to the Saint with exceptional frequency. But modern insurance studies have revealed that it is not purely accidental that some people have more accidents than others, and can be properly called "accident‑prone". In the same way, Simon Templar seemed to attract interesting coincidences, perhaps because he made better use of them than ordinary people. This, therefore, on the best actuarial authority, should not even be called a coincidence.
The first ingredient, then, was an item in a Palm Beach, Florida, newspaper reporting that a Funeral Home in Lake Worth operated by an undertaker with the rather delightful name of Aloysius Prend had been broken into during the night, but appeared to have rewarded the robbers with no more than $7.18 and some postage stamps, the contents of a petty cash box in an office drawer.
"Now, what would give any burglar the idea of cracking an undertaker's shop?" Simon apostrophized the counter girl in the coffee shop where he was eating breakfast.
"Those guys 've got more money than anybody," she said darkly. "Inflation, depression, recession, whatever, people keep dying just the same. There's one business can always be sure of customers."
"And the worse a depression gets, the more it might boom, with more people committing suicide," Simon admitted, following her cheerful trend of thought. "But no matter how fast the bodies roll in, an undertaker doesn't normally ring up cash sales like a supermarket. He presents a nice consolidated bill for his assorted services, which is pretty certain to be big enough to be paid by check. So why would anyone expect to find any more in his desk than small change?"
"Could be they were looking for gold teeth in the stiffs."
Simon found himself liking her more every minute, but he had to point out: "It says here, there was no other damage except the window they broke to get in."
"I bet he's got plenty of it socked away, anyhow," she said, reverting to her original thesis. "You only got to walk around Lake Worth and see 'em tottering about the shuffleboard courts or sitting in those everlasting auction rooms. It should make an undertaker feel like Moses with a claim staked in the Promised Land. Everyone ninety years old, and just waiting to keel over till maybe they're driving a car and can take someone else with them."
"Honestly, I'm disgustingly healthy. And I can still lick all my grandchildren."
"Oh, I can see that. I just wish I saw more fellows around here like you."
She was a comely wench, and she had that look in her eye, but he already had a fairly promising social calendar for that visit, and he decided not to complicate it with this additional prospect, at least for the present.
The established playgrounds of the spoiled sophisticates, socially registered or columnist-created, are forced to struggle with one perennial blight: a dearth of eligible playboys. This may be because the widows and divorcees are too durable, or the influx of their would-be successors too torrential; or because the men who have yet to earn their own wherewithal are still tied to their jobs and projects in less glamorous but more lucrative centers, or those who inherited it have been decimated by a preference for mixed drinks and/or mixed genders; there is a whole rubric of hypotheses which this chronicler may examine at some other time. The fact remains that in such places any unattached male with reasonable manners, charm, alcoholic tolerance, stamina, and affinity for empty chatter, can be assured of enough invitations to guarantee him his choice of gastritis or cirrhosis, or both; and what is so descriptively called the Florida Gold Coast is no exception.
Simon Templar had never made any systematic effort to crash this exclusively dubious society, but there were times when it amused him to be a fringe free-loader, and he had not fled from the northern blizzards to the subtropical sunshine to enjoy himself like a hermit. He shared any intelligent man's disdain for cocktail parties, in principle; but he knew no easier way for a comparative stranger in town to make a lot of assorted acquaintances quickly.
"This is my house guest, Betty Winchester," said his hostess.
"How do you do," murmured the Saint, like anyone else.
"You're going to take her to dinner," his hostess informed him regally; then she saw some more guests arriving. "Oh, excuse me — you tell him about it, Betty."
The girl was actually blushing — an olde-worlde phenomenon which Simon found quite exotic.
"You don't really have to, of course," she assured him. "She's worried because she has to leave me tonight — an emergency meeting of some charity committee she's on — and she thinks it's dreadful to have to abandon me to myself. Please don't think any more about it."
She had black hair and very large hazel eyes in a face that was pert and appealing now, and within the next seven years would decide whether to be stodgy or sensual or sulky, just as her nubile figure might become voluptuous or gross. But at that moment Simon was not shopping for futures. He estimated her age at a barely possible 22.
"But I'd like to think about it," he said. "I didn't have any better ideas. Unless you did?"
"No. I haven't been going out much. I came down here to stay with my uncle, who'd been very sick, and when he died these nice people insisted that I move in with them till after the funeral."
"Had you known them before?" he asked. The usual small talk.
"I went to high school with their daughter, and we still see each other sometimes."
"Where do you live, then?"
"In New York. And she's married and living in Philadelphia. Do you live here?"
"No. I'm just another tourist, too… When was this funeral?"
"Yesterday."
"I'm sorry. But I take it you're not in total mourning."
"Oh, no. Although my cousin and I were his only last relatives. But we weren't really so close to him, all the same. And I don't think it would do him any good now if I went around being tragic for months, would it?"
"With all due respect to Uncle, I agree," Simon said. "So about this dinner — is there anything special you feel an appetite for?"
She thought.
"Only one thing I haven't been able to get, at least not the way I remember them: stone crabs! We used to go to a place, Joe's, right at the south end of Miami Beach—"
"That's a lot longer haul than it used to be, since this coast got practically built up all the way. But I discovered another place last season, a bit closer, on the Seventy-ninth Street Causeway, where the claws are just as luscious and sometimes even bigger." He consulted his watch. "I could get you there in not much more than an hour on the Parkway, and if you had one more good drink before we took off you'd hardly know you'd missed anything. That is, unless there's something about this brawl that we mustn't miss?"
The answer was that they dined sumptuously at Nick & Arthur's, stifling for temporary logistic reasons the nostalgic loyalty to Joe's, and sentimentally comparing the size and succulence of the specimens served by both establishments.
"Anyway," Simon concluded, "they are Florida's unique and wonderful contribution to the hungry tummy. And what more could Lucullus ask?"
She didn't try to answer that, most probably having never heard of Lucullus, but she happily finished everything that could be put on her plate, and had some coconut cream pie after it while he finished the bottle of Deinhard Steinwein '59 with which they had launched those supreme crustaceans. After which it ultimately and inevitably came to a question of what they should do next.
Since the Saint's adventures nearly always seem to get dated by something or other, it may as well be stated right away that this happened during the epoch when a so-called dance called the Twist had spread like an epidemic from a place called the Peppermint Lounge in New York where it first broke out, across the United States and even beyond the seas; and on countless nightclub floors devotees who had hitherto seemed at least superficially rational were disjointing vertebrae and spraining knees in frenzied attempts to imitate the writhings of an inexpert Fijian fire-walker trying to help himself across the coals by holding on to a live wire.
As they came out of the restaurant, Simon noticed that they were next door to a new manifestation which had moved in since the last time he had been there: an establishment which proclaimed itself, in splendid neon, to be "New York's Peppermint Lounge". Discounting any fantastic possibility that the original New York incubator of the current mania had physically uprooted itself and followed its vacationing, habitués to Miami Beach, it seemed as if this must at least be an authorized and authentic branch of the mother lodge; and he was reminded of a shocking deficiency in his spectrum of experience.
"Do you know, Betty," he said, "that you are out tonight with not just a square, but a four-dimensional cube? I still haven't seen a Twist session in full swing. Would you chaperone me in there for just long enough to see what it's all about?"
"That's the last thing I'd have expected you to suggest," she said respectfully. "Let's try it."
It was still early enough for the place to be packed only halfway to suffocation, but they were able to find one stool to share at the bar while they waited for a table which Simon felt cynically prepared to decline if and when it was finally offered. Meanwhile he absorbed the scene which he had come in to see, endeavoring in what he felt must have been a rectangular way to fathom the motivations of the customers who wriggled and twitched to a simple monotonous beat like a horde of frenetic dervishes freshly sprinkled with itching powder.
"Well?" she teased at last. "Don't you want to try it?"
"Thank you," sighed the Saint. "But I'm oldfashioned. Dancing went out for me when it stopped being an excuse to snuggle a girl up close and whisper wicked suggestions in her ear with a helpful background of seductive music. These arm's-length athletics — the jitterbug, the rumba, and now this — seem like an awful waste of energy and opportunity."
"You sound as if you had a one-track mind," she said; but she smiled.
"Doesn't everyone, any more? In my young days, they did. "
Suddenly she was no longer listening. She was staring into the quivering mob with a fixity that seemed scarcely justified by any of their individual contortions. Her hand fell on his arm.
"Look — over there! The elderly man in the Madras jacket, with the platinum babe in the red sweater."
Simon found it easier to track the assigned target through the babe, who stood out not only because of the color of her sweater but by reason of what filled it. Even at his most chivalrous, he could not take issue with the "Babe" description, which fitted not only the artificial whiteness of the hair but the blend of hardness and looseness in the face. If she was not the kind of company available to any lonesome visitor for a phone call and a fee, she had certainly made a democratic effort to look like it.
Her partner, who was identifiable mainly because she looked and shook in his direction more than in any other, was a man of entirely average size with rimless glasses and insufficient strands of gray hair meticulously plastered over the top of his head in a laborious but absurdly vain attempt to disguise the fact that there was no supporting growth underneath them. His other features somewhat resembled those of a puritanical rabbit, with a reservation that at that moment it was apparently playing truant. Simon guessed him to be no older than 50, and reflected sadly that the adjective "elderly" was as descriptive of the person who used it as of the person it was applied to.
"Anybody you know?" he asked.
"It's Mr. Prend — the undertaker who handled my uncle's funeral!"
"Not Aloysius?"
"Yes. Did you ever hear of such a name?"
He decided that it was hardly worth giving her a discourse on St Aloysius Gonzaga of Castiglione, who died of the plague in Rome in 1591 at the tender age of 23, and was designated the patron saint of young people; but Mr. Aloysius Prend was certainly doing credit to his name in the youthful if untrained exuberance with which he quivered and cavorted in uninhibited emulation of his tarty companion.
"After all," Simon reasoned at length, "I suppose even undertakers have to relax sometimes. He wouldn't dare be seen looking anything but solemn and mournful around Lake Worth, so he has to go out of town to let off steam. And it's a million to one that none of his prospective customers would catch him in a place like this."
"And that babe he's with!"
"I expect he has to take what he can get. It wouldn't be too easy for him to date a nice home-town gal who knew what business he was in. Be charitable, and try not to let him see you. It 'd only ruin his evening."
"It seems almost indecent," she persisted. "You'd think he was celebrating something. And his place was burgled only the other night. Who on earth would do a thing like that?"
"Most likely some juvenile delinquents on a dare," said the Saint. "And he's celebrating because they didn't drink up his expensive embalming fluid. Now could you stand it if we moved on to some joint with a floor show more suitable for my hardening arteries?"
He was able to get her out before Mr. Prend seemed to have noticed her; but his flippant dismissal of the subject of Mr. Prend's incongruous relaxation was activated only by a reluctance to argue about it with an interlocutor who was not likely to contribute any more to his peculiar sensitivities.
But the truth was that he had become intensely interested in Mr. Aloysius Prend.
The Saint had an apperception of oddities of behavior and circumstance like the reaction of a musician to a false note. It was nothing that could be taught or acquired, or explained to anyone whose inner hearing was not so finely tuned. Nor was he governed by the sterile assumption that anything unusual or unconventional must have some reprehensible connection; far from it. But he conceded that all crime is a deviation from the current norm, and it was his instinct for the kind of abnormality most likely to be linked with skullduggery in the process of cooking-up or concealment that had led him into more strange situations perhaps than any other single factor in the complex equation of his life.
During the next few hours, he tried to fill in a picture of the uncle whose mortal disposition had accidentally enabled Betty Winchester to discover the incongruous other side of Mr. Prend.
Ernest Cardman, he learned by assembling and coordinating a great variety of disorganized and personalized information which he coaxed from her as innocuously as possible, as the elder brother of two sisters who had selfishly flipped off and got married before he felt qualified for such a plunge, had been left holding the bag (if we may be excused the expression in this context) and had been forced to become the comforter, counsellor, and companion of their widowed mother, who had lingered through manifold ailments until she was well over 80. By that time, Uncle Ernest had either become habituated to his way of life or had decided that he liked it, for he took no advantage of his belated liberation. He went on living in the same modest beach house on South Ocean Boulevard down towards Lake Worth, although the land it stood on could by then have been sold to a hotel or motel for five times the value of the building, with no friends and no apparent ambition to make any, poring endlessly over the charts and analyses supplied by a dozen or more stock market advisory services to which he subscribed, which were his only recreation and his only reading except for the world news which had to be studied for its potential reflection in the markets.
He punctiliously invited Betty and her cousin, the son of his other sister, to visit him for a week each year during the season, but made no effort to give them entertainment, and seemed to derive nothing from their company except the relief they volunteered him from his household chores. He still did his own shopping, cooking, and housekeeping, as he had done it for his mother, who in her later years became so temperamental and exacting that no paid servant would stay with her. That was, until a couple of years ago, when his own health betrayed him and he had been obliged to hire a former hospital nurse who was willing to double as housekeeper to take care of him.
"She's quite a jewel — not that she doesn't know it," was the description of Mrs. Velma Yanstead. "The motherly sort, even though she's a good deal younger than Uncle Ernest. But I suppose that was just what he wanted."
At any rate, Mrs. Yanstead had stayed on, even after he made a partial recovery from the "intestinal flu" which had brought her in, and cared for him solicitously through the increasingly frequent gastric upsets which he became prone to, until the final acute attack to which he succumbed.
"I guess you could qualify for the Freud Trophy," Simon concurred gravely, and then hastily explained — "that's a sort of head-shrinkers' Oscar. He should have been grateful to find another apron-string."
"He was," Betty said, so bitterly that he now understood the tinge of spite that had faintly discolored her previous praise. "He left her practically everything!"
"He did?"
"Well, he left me and my cousin two thousand dollars each, like showing he hadn't forgotten us. But she got the house and all the rest."
"And there was a lot more?"
"His attorney said he had stocks worth about a quarter of a million."
Ernest Cardman's single-minded study of the oscillations of Wall Street had not been unprofitable. Yet with perhaps typical parsimony, he had saved himself a legal fee by disposing of that considerable estate in a simple one-page will written in his own crabbed and shaky hand. As a holograph will, it required no witnesses, and had been sent by ordinary mail to his attorney, who had been out of town at the time and who had not even seen it until he returned the day after his client died.
"Was it a shock to your?"
"Was it! We had no idea he was so well off, but still he'd always let us understand that whatever there was would come to us. In fact, I can remember him saying he wouldn't even waste his time making a will at all, because as his next-of-kin we'd automatically inherit anyhow. And all he'd done before that was leave a letter with his attorney willing his body to the University of Miami medical school. Henry — my cousin — was fit to be tied.
He was staying with Uncle Ernest before I came down, and he never got any kind of idea what was cooking. He says we ought to contest the will."
The phantom electric needles of unfocused intuition tried to stitch their way up the Saint's spine.
"I believe there is something called 'undue influence'," he hazarded.
"So Henry says. But I must admit, I never saw her get out of line when I was there. She was always sweet."
"Doesn't Henry think it was forged, then?"
"He's talked about that too. But Velma said she wished it could be checked by a handwriting expert. I couldn't help feeling sorry for her, in a way."
Most of this was not actually a connected conversation, as it appears — which would have been difficult in some of the places and situations they were in — but it is so presented to spare the reader all the irrelevant interruptions. And the Saint had his own way of teasing out information over a period of time, without seeming to cross-examine as it might sound from nothing but the relevant exchanges.
They were driving unhurriedly back to Palm Beach on the coast road before he brought the topic casually back to the background of her cousin.
"Was Henry at the party tonight? I don't remember meeting him."
"No. He isn't staying there. He moved out to a motel after the will was read, though Velma did say he was welcome to stay. I expect he had some other date — he'd like to be a playboy, but he can't often afford it."
"And now at least he's got two thousand to play with. What does he do for money between legacies?"
"He has a job in an advertising agency."
"And thinks he should be an account executive — with a fat expense account?"
"He'd like to be."
Simon looked at her again from another angle.
"And what about you, Betty? What do you do in New York?"
"I'm a cosmetician," she said, and added defensively: "That doesn't mean I work in a beauty parlor. I advise people what to buy, what would do the most for them, and I probably help more men than women — about choosing those kind of gifts, I mean."
She named the Fifth Avenue department store where she performed this invaluable service, but it did not awe him out of kidding her most irreverently about the qualifications for her profession and its importance to the economy.
Nevertheless, when they got back to the mansion where she was staying, she was the one who said: "Shall I be seeing you again?"
"When are you going back to the magic mud-packs?" he asked.
"On Sunday. I can't take another week off, the way it's turned out."
"How about dinner tomorrow?" He glanced pointedly at his watch. "I mean really tomorrow, not a little later today."
"Go."
(We already warned that this incident would be bound to get dated, like all the others.)
At the door, she kissed him spontaneously on the lips, but with a swiftness that was there and gone before anything but surmise could be made of it; and he drove away with one more question raised instead of answered in his mind.
In the morning, however, he was out at a very reasonably early hour, heading for the address of the late Ernest Cardman, which he located with no trouble in the phone book — he had interrogated Betty Winchester quite enough not to want to have overloaded his inquisition with that last detail.
As he had been told, it was a comparatively modest house for its prime location; and when his ring on the bell was answered he found Mrs. Velma Yanstead no less modest, in a neck-high housecoat of some starchy material which was so studiously respectable that it proclaimed almost aggressively that her virtue mattered more to her than her comfort. And yet, somewhat paradoxically, that did not make her forbidding. She was fat and forty and heartily uncomplicated.
"I'm from the Miami Guardian," he said, with conscienceless aplomb. "As you know, we have a Palm Beach section in our Sunday edition, and of course we'll have to print something about Mr. Cardman and his will. Is there anything you'd like to say about it for publication?"
"Well, really!" She was neither coy nor antagonistic, but just diffident enough to be likeable. "I'd no idea that would be news."
"A quarter of a million dollars is still news, Mrs. Yanstead, even in these inflated times. May I come in for a few minutes?"
The living-room was like a million middle-class Florida living-rooms, undistinguished by planned interior decoration or obtrusive eccentricity. It was furnished with what can best be described as furniture — more or less functional things with legs, arms, seats, or flat surfaces. The general tone, especially of the bric-a-brac, perhaps had a grandmotherly or old-maidish tinge which Mr. Cardman had clearly had no solitary urge to change; but it was not strenuously slanted towards the antique, and it certainly did not suggest wealth or extravagance.
"You sound rather like him," Mrs. Yanstead said amiably. "Always talking about inflation, he was, and twenty-five cent dollars and recessions and I don't know what else. I never argued with him — that was his hobby, and it was none of my business."
"You had no idea how wealthy he was?"
"I never thought about it. I knew he must 've been fairly comfortably off, but he didn't spend as if he had it to throw away."
"You weren't in his confidence at all personally?"
The question could hardly have been phrased more perfectly, without the slightest hint at which she could have taken offense, but open to her to answer as fully as she might be inclined.
"He was just like any other patient; but I've always got on well with my patients." She stated it as a matter of professional pride warmed by human satisfaction. "You can't do them much good if you don't get on with them. I wasn't like a servant, of course — we played cribbage and watched television together, and everything like that. But there was nothing romantic about it."
"Then the will was as much a surprise to you as to anyone?"
"You could 've knocked me down with a feather."
Simon scribbled solemnly on the back of an envelope, like a stage reporter, recording the brilliant cliche for quotation, in case he forgot it.
He changed the subject for a moment:
"What exactly did Mr. Cardman die of?"
"Acute gastro-enteritis. He'd suffered a lot with it, off and on, ever since he got that intestinal virus that had me brought in."
"There wasn't anything the doctor could do?"
"He had prescriptions. But I suppose his insides were damaged more than they could repair, at his age. And he was always trying out diets on his own, or dosing himself with medicines and health syrups that he saw advertised. I think they did him more harm than good. I used to get quite cross with Mr. Otterly for encouraging him."
The Saint was briefly puzzled.
"Mr. Otterly?"
"His nephew."
"Oh, yes. There's a niece, too, isn't there?"
"Miss Winchester. A pretty girl, and I think she was Mr. Cardman's favorite. But Mr. Otterly was naughty, always encouraging him by sending him things from New York — seaweed pills and grass powder and I don't know what else. Just trying to make up to his uncle, I know, but it was no help."
"You were always on good terms with both of them — I mean, the nephew and niece?"
"I thought so."
"So you thought they'd be understanding about being sort of disinherited in your favor?"
This time perhaps he was not quite subtle enough, for he struck a spark from her deep-set black eyes before the plump wrinkles creased around them again.
"I did feel badly at first," she said. "Until Mr. Otterly turned rather nasty — have you seen him?"
"No."
"Well, he said some very nasty things, about me taking advantage of his uncle. So then I stopped feeling sorry for him. I thought, if he's going to be a bad sport, because he didn't manage to cut out his cousin with those pills and things that he kept working on Mr. Cardman with, then why should I get in a family battle? I thought, Mr. Cardman made up his own mind, and if this is what he wanted I've got a right to take it, and bless him."
"Do you have a picture of him?"
Mrs. Yanstead looked around vaguely. There were a few framed photographs on walls and ledges; but the Saint's surreptitiously wandering glances had identified most of them as plates from a sentimental biography of a woman who could only have been Mr. Cardman's mother, a recurrent face from an old misty-edged sepia vignette of a demure young girl to a modern skilfully-retouched portrait of a prim old matriarch. Mr. Cardman's inclusion in a group with his sisters, gathered around her in their self-consciously angelic adolescence, was not what Simon had in mind; but Mrs. Yanstead's obliging exploration discovered a very contemporary snapshot tucked into one corner of phonus-period velvet frame.
"He never was one to have his picture taken," she said, "but this is one that Miss Winchester took right after she came down this season."
It was the typical box-camera enlargement, obviously taken against one side of the house, with Mrs. Yanstead and Mr. Cardman standing awkwardly side by side (but at a discreet distance) and both looking straight into the lens and grinning in the pointless mechanical way beloved of the amateur artists who are the bread and butter of the photographic-supply industry; but partly on that account it had the virtue of presenting a facial facsimile that was recognizable in the same brutal way that a passport photo or a prison mug shot may be recognizable. It showed Mr. Cardman with a predatory nose but a weak chin, a cocky but frail figure beside the foster-mother of his senility, who seemed to make an earthily honest effort to hold back and avoid eclipsing him with her superior bulk and vitality.
"May I borrow this?" Simon asked. "It won't be damaged, and I'll send it back in a day or two."
"I suppose so."
"One other thing," he said as he was leaving: "where can I find Mr. Otterly?"
"He went to the Tradewind — that's the first motel you come to down the road. I expect he'll have plenty to say about me." She pursed her lips, then shrugged and smiled again. "Well, I don't live in a glass house, so I shouldn't worry about who throws stones."
Simon drove on to the motel, and after inquiring at the office he was directed to the Terrace Snack Bar, which was beside the swimming pool, which had considerately been provided for the indulgence of guests who either found a hundred-yard walk to the beach too fatiguing or were appalled by the potential perils of the rippling ocean. There he found Cousin Henry eating an improbably early lunch, or more likely a very belated breakfast, consisting of corned beef hash and black coffee.
Henry Otterly was a broad-shouldered young man with a premature paunch bulging over the top of his Hawaiian-print shorts. His black hair was slicked down in graceful sweeps over his head and his ears, but below that it sprouted in thin curls all over him except in the conventionally scraped facial areas, which had the dark sheen of gun-metal. He had the still red and unfinished tan of the typical tourist, and another rosy tinge in his eyeballs which some Yankee visitors acquire under the palm-trees and others bring with them from a lunch diet of dry martinis. This season he still had a certain fast and superficial charm; and in a very few years, unless he found the end of his rainbow, he could be just another slob.
He received the Saint with practised Madison-Avenue affability — a blend of pressurized brightness and defensive flexibility.
"The Guardian? Of course, the best newspaper in the South, I tell everybody — except people from the other papers. But are you selling space or trying to fill some?"
"Would you like to make any statement about your late uncle's will?" Simon asked.
"I'd like to make several, but not to you. I don't want to have something printed that I could be sued for."
"I suppose we could safely say that you were surprised."
"I think so. Also astounded, staggered, flabbergasted — and perhaps even incredulous."
"And if you did make a statement it might be uncomplimentary to someone?"
"It might be," Mr. Otterly said. He tugged at his lower lip with mock judiciousness. "Yes, I think you can safely say that. Very uncomplimentary. Would you like some mocha, java, or just any coffee?"
"I'm a bit farther ahead in the day," Simon said negatively. "But a Dry Sack on the rocks would go down nicely."
"Good idea." Otterly repeated the order to a waitress, adding: "And I'll have a Bloody Mary."
Simon resumed: "I can understand that you'd want to be careful, Mr. Otterly, but it's true that you're thinking of contesting the will, isn't it?"
"I've discussed it with my attorneys, yes. We're having another meeting on it this afternoon. It's in what I would call the survey stage. We turn the pros and cons loose in the pond and see what they spawn."
"Are you hoping to prove the will was forged?"
"That might be difficult. I'm not giving much away, but everyone concerned knows that my uncle had a fairly bad stroke a few years ago, and his right hand and arm never recovered completely. So it might be a bit marginal to rely on handwriting experts. On the other hand, anyone with enough motive to forge a will would be even more capable of getting the old man to write it himself."
"You mean what they call 'undue influence'?"
"That's something like the beat of the legal jazz."
Simon circulated his drink in the glass which had been delivered to him, and sipped it appreciatively.
"Did that stroke affect Mr. Cardman anywhere besides the arm?" he inquired, without flippancy.
"Like in the head? Now you approach the cosmic. You invoke the definition that makes politics, religion, philosophy, and low comedy. Who is nuts and who isn't? Well, I'd hate to claim that my own uncle was insane, but he'd reached an age when his mind was certainly not as sharp as it was when he was younger. There's plenty of evidence that he was eccentric, to say the least. Even Mrs. Yanstead, unless she perjures herself, will have to admit that he had to be coaxed or bullied to take his doctor's medicine, but he'd try anything he heard of from some quack advertisement."
"And she says you encouraged him, sending him all kinds of health foods and herb remedies and what not."
Otterly shot him a hard stare, without a flicker of embarrassment.
"Oh, you've already talked to her." It was a statement, not a question. "I don't deny it. Harmless placebos — I made sure of that. Things that I knew couldn't hurt him, and may even have given him a few extra vitamins. I went along with the gag; and if it made him happy, what was wrong with that?"
"And since you're a relative, that couldn't be called 'undue influence' in your case," Simon said.
His tone was so impeccably neutral that for the first time Henry Otterly seemed uncertain — but whether of himself or of the Saint's intention would have been a very ticklish nuance to bet on.
"My dear sir, you're not aiming a muckraker at the American Family image? Making subversive suggestions that the affection they lavish on Rich Uncle is magnetized by his credit rating? Don't apologize. Even if that's what you were thinking, it's obvious that I didn't try too hard — even if I did commit the crime of trying to be more sympathetic than my cousin Betty. The proof is that neither of us got in the real money. We were left out in the pasture by a nag with no form at all — pardon my choice of metaphor. And we hadn't even thought she was in the running. Therefore one may legitimately wonder if the race was fixed. But in such a case one suspects the winner, not the losers. Do you excavate, gate?"
"I dig," said the Saint, but regretfully decided that it would not be in keeping with his role to complete the rhyme. "Although it's still hard for me to see how a man can be influenced into actually making a will like that, cutting off his own family in favor of a comparative stranger. I mean, without thumbscrews, or that sort of persuasion."
Otterly waved his hands with a commanding eloquence that was somehow reminiscent of an orchestra conductor in full flourish.
"Psychology, my friend." He was genial again, as his confidence recovered and re-inflated. "That's something I understand. It's my business. Why do you smoke what you smoke, shave with whatever you use, brush your teeth with that toothpaste? Because they were sold to you. Now don't be offended; you think you chose them. But I have news for you. You only chose what you chose because somebody knew how to get through your resistance and make you want it. My uncle was conditioned for twenty years and more to a Mother fixation. He was a pushover for the next person who came along who could fit into that Mother-image."
"And all your psychology couldn't compete with her?"
"Does my cousin Betty look like a Mother? Only if you include the kind that you find in homes for wayward girls. Do I look like a Mother? Be careful how you answer that." Otterly grinned, and emptied his Bloody Mary. By now he was hugely pleased with himself. "You know we didn't stand a chance against a real Mother-type, if she went out to exploit it. Whether a Court will agree is another matter. So I don't think I can say any more without the risk of damaging my own case. You understand?"
"Yes, but—"
"Then goodbye." Otterly stood up, holding out his hand, pleasantly, but offensively secure in his privilege and his savoir faire, "Call me after the verdict, and I might have some more Pulitzer material for you."
He turned away and plunged into the pool, ungracefully but finally enough; and Simon let it go at that. The Saint was not yet prepared, for purely private satisfaction, to explode the innocuous anonymity with which he seemed to have saddled himself. But only a much more rarified objective could have controlled the temptation.
And now he had one, beyond any doubt, for he was sure that Mr. Ernest Cardman's death, though it could hardly be called untimely, had nevertheless been artificially expedited.
But cerebral certainty is not proof; and even the Saint in his most lawless days, with all his impatience with the finicky rules of legal evidence and his delight in clearing his own short cuts to justice, had always required some positive verification, satisfactory at least to him if not to all technical criteria. And nobody knew better than he that any law-abiding police agency would be still more hesitant to turn on the sirens and rush hither and yon merely because he, Simon Templar, walked in and said he felt sure he had discovered a murder.
Luckily (and if this sounds like one more coincidence, let the statisticians make the most of it) he had a fairly direct access to the next facility he needed which for a while at least allowed him to be himself again. The Saint had friends, acquaintances, and contacts everywhere: they were a sort of human stock-in-trade, a fringe of his life which made much of the core possible. He had acquired many of them in highly improbable ways, haphazard as often as adventurous, but when it was necessary he had no compunction about calling on any of them.
He had met Julian D Corrington, Professor Emeritus and at that time head of the Zoology Department of the University of Miami, by correspondence over a magazine article that Dr. Corrington had written about Sherlock Holmes; for Dr. Corrington, in a small part of his spare time, happened also to be one of the many distinguished intellectuals who have made a whimsical cult of studying the detective writings of Conan Doyle as minutely as a theologian analyzes the scriptures, and often with resultant discoveries which must exert as much graveyard torque on that Master as similar diversions may apply to this chronicler in due time.
A person-to-person phone call established at no cost that Dr. Corrington was still tied up with his bi-weekly Histology class, but would be in his office in the afternoon; and Simon shamelessly cheated the telephone company to the enrichment of the petroleum industry by driving down to Coral Gables and presenting himself in person after lunch, which he ate rather late but unhurriedly before heading down LeJeune Road to the University.
Directed to a room on the third floor of the Anastasia Building, on the North Campus, he found an alert good-natured man with plentiful gray hair and gray mustache, whose trim and erect figure belied the seventy years he laid claim to.
"Are you really the man I've read so much about?" he said. "I never thought I'd actually meet you in person."
They chatted for a while in generalities, until Simon felt he could broach the purpose of his call without sounding too cavalier about it.
The Professor listened to him thoughtfully, and said: "I think I should take you to see the head of the Department of Anatomy — it would be under his jurisdiction, and he knows all the law about these things. I expect you'll find you have to get a court order, or at least a formal request from the police."
"Knowing who I am, can you see the police doing me any favors?" Simon objected. "And I haven't enough to go on to get a court order, at this moment. I doubt if I could even impress the head of your Anatomy Department. And yet this is urgent. If anything happens to that body, it'll be almost impossible to make it a murder case."
"It may be hard to locate the body even now," Corrington said. "As I understand the procedure, they try to make a cadaver anonymous as soon as possible."
"But somebody must sign a receipt for it when it's delivered," Simon argued. "Somebody must unpack it and put it wherever they keep the supplies for the dissecting rooms. This was so recent that it might still be possible to trace it — if only too much time isn't wasted."
"I suppose we can make inquiries. I can take you over there, at any rate, unofficially of course, like any personal friend I'm showing around, and you can see what answers you get."
"That 'd be a step forward, anyhow. If it isn't asking too much."
"It would be amusing to be the Saint's Dr. Watson, even in such a minor way." Corrington's eyes twinkled. "And I can't be held responsible for what questions you ask the janitor, or what he chooses to tell you."
He steered the Saint briskly out to his car in the parking lot behind the building, and chauffeured him a half-dozen blocks along Riviera Drive to a building which to Simon looked reminiscent of the pre-war Coral Gables Biltmore Hotel, a sister caravanserai of Miami Beach's Roney Plaza which somehow got separately orphaned when the Coral Gables development failed to match the Beach as another southern Samarkand.
"That's what it is," Corrington told him. "And this first building we're coming to was the old servants' quarters. Now it's part of our Medical School, temporarily, until they finish the new buildings."
"How are the mighty fallen," Simon murmured, thinking also of Mr. Cardman, who despite his thriftiness, when the hotel and himself were equally in flower, would probably never have dreamed of using any entrance but the front.
The semi-basement storage room to which they were admitted by recognition of Dr. Corrington had even fewer prospects as a tourist attraction, having been converted into something like a giant filing or safe-deposit vault smelling of formaldehyde and the clammy by-products of refrigeration. The individual in charge, however, was contrastingly warm and cheerful — perhaps because, as he immediately explained, he was only temporarily replacing the regular incumbent, hospitalized for a minor ailment, and did not think he wanted to make a career of it.
"Yeah, I remember that one, because I'm still lookin' to see where they come from," he said without hesitation. "Like kids collect stamps or car tags. This was the only one I had from Lake Worth since I been on the job. Come in only yesterday. I know exactly where I put him."
Simon said to Corrington: "Would there be any chance of getting some friendly pathologist on the faculty to take a look at it? I don't mean a regular autopsy, but enough to see if there might be prima facie grounds to ask for one."
"Good heavens, that would be completely out of order! I couldn't ask anyone to risk losing his job like that."
"Well, then, at least see if you can't get this body put on one side for a few days, just long enough for me to—"
"Here," said the temporary custodian of cadavers.
He had pulled out one of the oversize drawers banked along one wall, in which the pathetic but essential materials for scientific study were impersonally stored.
Simon looked in, at the naked corpse of a short flabby male in his fifties, with a round face and a snub Irish nose, and felt for a second as if the terrazzo floor was falling from under him.
He finally recovered his voice.
"That isn't Cardman," he stated.
"Are you sure?" Corrington asked dubiously. "Death sometimes seems to change people—"
Simon took out the snapshot that he had borrowed from Mrs. Yanstead, and showed it.
"As much as that?"
"This is the one from Lake Worth, anyhow," said the custodian.
"Couldn't you possibly be mistaken?" insisted the Saint. "May I look in the other drawers?"
"If you think I'm an idiot," was the aggrieved retort, "help yourself. And I'll get my book and look up the record."
Simon accepted the invitation literally, and pulled open every other drawer. There was no face in any of them that could ever have been the face in the snapshot, even allowing for the maximum transfigurations of death. But the custodian returned more stubbornly affirmative than ever.
"That's the one," he said. "Come from Prend's Funeral Home in Lake Worth."
"Could it by any chance have been taken out for dissection and another body put in the same drawer since?"
"Not by any chance. There's been no cadavers taken out for two days."
Simon caught the Professor's eye and indicated with a slight motion of his head that they should leave.
Outside, he said: "I think we've got to believe him. On the other hand, I'm not mistaken either. Which leaves only one possible explanation. Cardman's body was switched for another one before the coffin was delivered here."
"In order to hide something?"
"Exactly. Because somebody was afraid that when it was taken apart in the lab, some professor or precocious student might notice that there was something wrong with it — something that didn't gibe with the assigned diagnosis. I suppose that in spite of the anonymity angle, a body would have to go to the lab with some presumed cause of death attached to it, so that the students could be warned about what was normal and what was abnormal?"
"I don't really know how they handle that here. But—"
"Anyhow, all that matters now is to prevent the trail getting any more confused. The guy in charge in there positively identifies the body he showed us as the one he received from Lake Worth. I have a picture that contradicts him. It shouldn't be any problem to decide who's right, with witnesses who knew Cardman, dental charts, maybe even fingerprints — just so long as nothing is messed up. Now, surely you can arrange somehow to get this body put on ice, so to speak, for at least twenty-four hours, till I fill in the holes that the police would pick on."
"Why don't you let me take you to the head of the Department—"
"Because it would take too long, and I'd start getting entangled in red tape, which makes me break out in a rash. And if the police clomp into this too soon, with their big boots, they could still louse it up or be too late. Just give me this much leeway, Dr. Corrington. Make sure, somehow, that nothing happens to that body. Even if I'm as wrong as anyone can be, it'll be just as useful a cadaver tomorrow. And what on earth could you be accused of if you merely helped to keep it untouched for one day?"
The Professor Emeritus cogitated this carefully and profoundly, and finally came up with a grin that was as young as the season.
"They're going to retire me as it is," he said. "Now they'll have to accuse me of being a juvenile delinquent."
When Simon Templar got back to Palm Beach, it was late enough for the telephone to report no reply from Mr. Prend's Funeral Home (as he found it was actually listed) or from Ernest Cardman's recent number, now maintained by Mrs. Yanstead. He was less surprised to learn from the Tradewind Motel that Mr. Otterly's room also did not answer, and did not even bother to try the minor palazzo where Betty Winchester was guesting.
He called Corrington's home and learned that the body which was not Cardman's had been set aside pending further developments; and with that reassurance he was able to enjoy a quiet dinner at the Petite Marmite, and go to bed early with a book for company, and sleep for eight hours without a troublesome thought about death, murder, or deceit. Some of which stemmed from a hunch hardening into certainty that he now had all the threads of this incident gathered up and ready to be tied.
At ten o'clock in the morning, which seemed to him a safe and uncomplicating time, he arrived at Prend's Funeral Home. This was an edifice of modest but calculated dignity, rather suggestive of a miniature White House, located far enough from any cemetery to offer a choice of processional routes to suit all budgets. A touch on the bell button elicited a deep tolling from within, of a cathedral solemnity which could only irreverently have been called a chime; and after a suitable pause the door oozed ponderously open, disclosing the over-extended hair and rabbit features of Mr. Prend himself.
Except for the physical shell, however, it was an effort to connect this apparition with the celebrant whom Simon had seen Twisting at the Peppermint Lounge. In vocational costume, instead of a snazzy Madras jacket and light tight pants, Mr. Prend wore a suit of dull definitive black and sufficiently antique cut to underline its impregnable propriety. His face was composed into pliable blobs and blanks of potential compassion, attention, tolerance, efficiency, sympathy, and a ruthless ability to distinguish the cheapskates from the sincere mourners who would blow the works for a properly expensive casket. Only the red-rimmed eyes behind his semi-invisible bifocals might have caused an initiated cynic to wonder if he had spent another night at the Peppermint Lounge or elsewhere, but to less mundane observers they could still have passed for nothing worse than the penalties of excessive condolence.
"Good morning, sir," intoned Mr. Prend, with infinite discretion. "Can I help you?"
His voice was as consciously deep as the door-bell, and the Saint was hard put to sustain his own gravity.
He used his Miami Guardian masquerade again to get as far as the reception room, which was furnished in ebony wood and black leather, with a very deep purple carpet and matching velvet drapes, and gray walls on one of which hung a large chromolithograph of the Resurrection.
"There are not many questions I can answer," Mr. Prend warned him. "As far as most details are concerned, I am bound by professional secrecy, just like a doctor or a lawyer."
"As a matter of general principle," Simon said, "how do you handle a body that's been willed to a hospital?"
"No differently from any other, for most of the proceedings. We embalm it and dress it and lay it in a casket for those who may wish to look their last on the remains—"
"Why embalm it, if it's going to be dissected anyway?"
"That makes the preservation even more important. And the institutions prefer us to do it. It is an art which we are highly trained for and experienced in."
"Is the body complete? I mean, with all its innards?"
Mr. Prend winced.
"Of course. Without the internal organs, it would be of much less value for research."
"So then do they have a regular funeral?"
"That is entirely at the option of the relatives. There can be a procession to a church, if they wish, or a ceremony can be performed in the chapel which is attached to most of the better Funeral Homes. If the purpose of your article is to enlighten readers who may be thinking of bequeathing their remains to a research institution, you can assure them that everything can be handled with dignity and as reverently as any other disposal."
"Up to the point where the coffin isn't buried or cremated."
"That is the only difference. The mourners leave, having paid all their respects to the loved one, and as far as they are concerned it is all over. The Funeral Director then takes charge of the remains and delivers them as soon as possible to the designated institution, from whom he obtains a receipt. And that is the end of it."
It was coming to one of those situations where the Saint mentally craved the gesture of lighting a cigarette, but he knew that a genuine reporter from the Miami Guardian would have been too respectful of his surroundings and the pompous side of Mr. Prend to succumb to it.
"In the case of Mr. Cardman, whom you processed recently," he said, "how did that work out?"
"There was a simple service in our chapel, attended only by his immediate kin. And the remains were delivered to the University of Miami, as he wished, the next day."
"So they were here overnight, after any of the relatives saw them."
"Yes."
"The night during which your place was burgled, wasn't it?"
Mr. Prend seemed to make an effort of recollection.
"Yes, it would have been that night."
"Then is it possible," said the Saint, "that the real object of whoever broke in was to switch Cardman's body for another one that you had here?"
"Preposterous!" Prend ejaculated. "What makes you think—"
"The body that you delivered to the University of Miami has already been un-identified: whoever it is, it isn't Cardman."
Mr. Prend stared at him stiffly.
"But why would anyone do that?" he protested mechanically.
"To destroy the evidence of a murder. Someone who knew the ropes realized that if Cardman's body went to the University — which was something they hadn't counted on till that part of the will showed up — somebody in the lab might spot the signs of poisoning in those internal organs. The easy answer was a switch to another coffin that was booked for something final like a crematorium."
Mr. Prend's roseate optics kindled at last like the tail lights of a car whose driver has belatedly trampled the brakes.
"That could explain it!" he gasped. "I never thought of it before. But who? Mr. Cardman's niece was so charming. His nephew was a little difficult. But—"
"Neither of them made the funeral arrangements, did they? Being comparative strangers in town, they'd have had to ask someone who lived here to recommend an undertaker. Someone with previous experience."
"Yes, I suppose so. We rely a great deal on recommendations."
"In Cardman's case, it was probably Mrs. Yanstead."
"Yes — yes, I suppose it was."
"Aloysius," said the Saint chummily, "how much of the take did she cut you in on for shuffling the bodies?"
Mr. Prend remained rigid for so long that Simon wondered briefly whether he had inadvertently become a candidate for his own services. But at last his catalepsy resolved itself into the wrathful indignation which after all was the only plausible form it could have taken.
"How dare you—"
"Aloysius," said the Saint, still more mildly, "according to your own explanation, Cardman's body would have to be switched for another one which wasn't going to be inspected by tender-hearted relatives who might actually look at it and start screaming about the new face you put on Uncle George. Nobody who busted in here out of the blue would know which of the corpses you had in stock would be good for the switch. Only the boss could have handled everything — but also been smart enough to set up some evidence of a bogus burglary to make it look like an outside job, just in case something went sour and he had to answer embarrassing questions. Should I take it that you're all organized and set up and ready to take a murder rap?"
"What gives you the right to talk about a murder?"
"I believe that's called an educated guess. First, you look for a motive. Anyone who expected to inherit his money could have that. And might have had an awful shock when a will turned up that left it all to somebody else. Then we ask, if he was poisoned — and he certainly wasn't shot or stabbed — who had the best chance to do it? At least two people. But who would have been most aware of the risks of poisoning, which have tripped up so many amateurs? Who would have been best placed to mislead the doctor about symptoms? Who would have realized first that Cardman's surprise bequest of his body to the University could upset the whole beautiful applecart, who would know enough about the routines to see how it could still be propped up, who would know the local undertakers and which one would be most likely to go along with a little persuasion—"
"That's all," said a voice behind him.
Simon turned.
It was Velma Yanstead, as his ears had already told him; but his ears could not have told him that she would be holding an automatic in her pudgy hand, levelled at him from a distance at which it would be difficult to miss.
"I thought you were too smooth and goodlooking to be a real reporter," she said libellously. "But you don't talk like a policeman, either. What's your real name and what's your business?"
"Madam," Simon replied courteously, "I'm best known as The Saint. I'm a meddler."
The name registered visibly on both of them, in different ways. Mr. Prend seemed to wilt and deflate as if struck by a dreadful blight, but Mrs. Yanstead seemed to swell and harden in the same proportion. There must have been something after all, Simon reflected with incurable philosophy, in that old adage about the female of the species.
"Well, you meddled once too often this rime," she said. "I've read enough about you to know how you work. You're on your own, and you keep everything to yourself till you think it's all wrapped up. So you can just disappear, and it'll be months before anyone even wonders where you went."
"Such is fame," sighed the Saint.
Mrs. Yanstead was no more amused than Queen Victoria. She had come in from the hallway, as had the Saint, but now she indicated a door on the other side of Mr. Prend.
"We got to get rid of him now," she said sternly. "And you'll be no worse off than you are already."
She was now addressing Mr. Prend, who gulped and swallowed his tonsils, his larynx, and possibly other things.
"But—"
"Go along with it, Al," Simon advised him kindly. "Surely you can find room for me in there, in one of your king-sized caskets, alongside some scrawny stiff who's paid for a cremation. And no one will ever know. Except you might have to marry her, and give up that bleached blonde you've been dating in Miami Beach—"
"That's quite enough," Mrs. Yanstead said, and prodded the Saint with her gun.
This was one of the most foolish things she ever did. Not because Simon was unduly stuffy or ticklish about being prodded, but because the touch of the gun enabled him to locate its position exactly without telegraphing any hint of his intention by glancing at it. His hands moved together like striking snakes, his left hand catching her wrist, his right hand striking the gun and bending her hand backwards with it. The one shot she fired shook the room like a thunderclap, but the muzzle of the automatic was already deflected before she could react and pull the trigger.
Simon Templar sat down in Mr. Aloysius Prend's place at the desk, using the same gun to cover the two of them, and picked up the telephone.
"We can deny all of this," Mrs. Yanstead said to her accomplice, who was now visibly trembling with a subtle but definite vibration that might have started a new wave at the Peppermint Lounge if it could only have been demonstrated there. "It's only his word against ours, and there are two of us—"
"I wouldn't bet too much on that," said the Saint dishearteningly. "I didn't wear a jacket on a warm day like this just to look like the correct respectable costume for visiting Funeral Homes. I wanted a place to hang a microphone and carry a miniature tape recorder, because I know how skeptical some authorities are about my unsupported testimony." He opened his coat and showed them. "Wonderful things, these transistors. I wonder what Sherlock Holmes would have done with them — I must ask a friend of mine. Now would you like to give me the police number or have I got to ask the operator?"