Saint Goes West (12 page)

He clapped them on the shoulders again and moved away. Simon’s eyes followed him towards the bar with interested expectations, but Orlando Flane had disappeared.

“There,” said April coldbloodedly, “goes one of the prize-winning swine of this town.”

With Flane still on his mind, Simon said: “Who?”

“Ufferlitz, of course. Dear Byron.”

Their drinks came belatedly, accompanied by menus, and there was an interruption for the ordering of dinner. From the wine list, Simon added a bottle of Bollinger ‘31.

“On Byron,” he said, as the waiter removed himself. “Everyone tells me something about him. He was a stick-up man in New Orleans, but his pictures make money. He’s a retired union racketeer, but he pays his slaves. Take it away.”

“How much does he pay them?”

The Saint’s brows levelled fractionally.

“He hasn’t shown me the payroll yet,” he admitted. “But two literary gents named Kendricks and Lazaroff told me his checks were okay.”

“Listen,” she said. “Those two clowns used to be rated one of the best writing teams in Hollywood, even though they nearly drove every producer nuts that they worked for. But last year they went too far. They got in a beef with Goldwyn, and he fired them. So they bluffed their way into his house when he was out and filled all his clothes with itching powder and left ink soap in all the bathrooms. The Producers’ Association banned them and they haven’t worked since- until Byron hired them. How much d’you think he had to pay them when they were in a spot like that, and why wouldn’t they be goddamn glad to get it?”

This was a new angle.

“I didn’t know about that,” he said thoughtfully. “The deal he offered me was all right, but of course he hasn’t got anyнthing on me … yet,” he added. “What about you?”

This was a new angle.

“He expects to rape me before we start shooting, of course, but he doesn’t need much else. He got me with Jack Groom, because Jack still has my contract.”

“For twenty-five a week?”

“No, a bit more than that now. I don’t know what Jack’s deal is, but I know he hates Byron’s guts.”

“I met Comrade Groom today,” Simon remarked casually. “How do you get on with him?”

The exquisitely drawn green eyes measured him contemнplatively; and then they were bright with laughter.

“The Saint Goes On,” she quoted. “I can see it coming. Now stop being a damn detective, will you? This is your night off. We’re supposed to be having fun and romance, and we’ve hardly stopped being serious for a minute. Dance with me.”

She stood up imperiously, and he had to join her. It wasn’t hard to do. She could change her moods as quickly as light could flicker over the facets of cut crystal, and do it without seeming to leave raw edges or a sense of chill: you were not cut off or left behind, but taken with her.

They danced. And dined. And danced again. And she made it impossible to be serious any more. With all her callous cynicism and violent language, she could be a fascinating and exciting companion. The Saint found himself having a much more entertaining evening than he had expected. It was as if they instinctively recognised in each other an intense reality which in spite of all other differences made them feel as if they had known each other a hundred times longer than those few hours.

It was one o’clock when he drove her home, after a brief struggle through the regular nightly crew of autograph hunters outside.

“Come in and have a drink,” she said.

Simon thought about it, while another belated car cruised by.

“Maybe not,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Cooperation only goes so far.”

“So what?”

“So I don’t want you to call me a wolf again. But I’m human.”

“My God,” she said, “don’t you think I know the differнence? Don’t you think I could … I’d like to buy you a drink,” she said.

He kissed her, and broke it off quickly when he felt the warmth of her lips.

“Goodnight, darling,” he said.

She got out, and he drove away while he still could.

When he entered his apartment at the Chтteau Marmont there was a note in a plain envelope under the door. He opened it and frowned over the heavy sprawling hand. It seemed to have been composed very much impromptu, for it was written on a sizable blank space under the date line of the Hollywood Reporter-obviously torn out of one of those strange advertisements which say, in infinitely modest type, “Joe Doakes directed WOMEN IN ARMS,” and buy a whole page to set it off.

WHATEVER TIME you get home tonight, 1 want you to come right out and see me. Don’t tell ANYONE I sent for you. This is VERY IMPORTANT. The door will be open. Don’t ring!

BYRON UFFERLITZ.

(603 Claymore Drive)

The Saint sighed, and put the note in his pocket. A few minutes later he was retracing his tracks out Sunset Bouleнvard.

Claymore Drive was only a couple of blocks from April Quest’s house, and as he passed her street Simon smiled again over the easy way she had taken his mind from its habitual restless search for plot. She had been right, of course: so much of his life had been woven with conspiracy and dark purposes that -he had long since ceased to be as interested in the solution of past mysteries as he was in anticiнpating mysteries that had not yet shaped themselves, and that inquiring watchfulness had become so automatic that he was apt to find himself stalking the shadow of his own imagination.

Or was he? … A long time had gone by since one of those hunches had last let him down. What had Ufferlitz said? “There are plenty of people who’d hate to see me make a hit with this idea. One or two of ‘em would go a long ways to wreck it… I guess you can take care of yourself …” He had almost accepted Ufferlitz’s note as just one of those regal imнpetuosities that Hollywood producers traditionally indulge in: the thought that it might after all be more than that gave him a sudden feeling of inward stillness as if the blood momenнtarily ceased to move in his veins.

He shrugged it off as he slowed down at Mr. Ufferlitz’s numнber; and yet enough of it remained to paralyse his right foot from the reflex shift from accelerator to brake. He crawled round the next corner, and in the next few yards found several cars parked outside a house where all the lights were on. He eased in among them, and waked back to 603 Claymore Drive. He grinned derisively at himself for doing it; yet it was one of those Saintly precautions that cost nothing even if they were to prove unnecessary. So was the handkerchief with which he covered his fingers when he opened the front door.

The hall itself was unlighted, but a shaft of illumination spilled from an open doorway to his left.

“Hullo there,” he said quietly.

There was no answer as he crossed to the lighted doorway. As soon as he reached it he could see why. The room was Mr. Ufferlitz’s study, and Mr. Ufferlitz was there; but it was quite obvious that no one would have to cooperate with Mr. Ufferlitz any more.

4
MR. UFFERLITZ sat at his mahogany desk, which was about the size of a ping-pong table. His head was pillowed on the blotter, which had not proved sufficiently absorptive to take care of all the blood that had run out of him. Simon walked round the desk and saw that Mr. Ufferlitz’s back hair was a little singed around the place where the bullet had gone in, so that the gun must have been held almost touching his head: probably most of the upper part of his face had been blown out, because blood had splashed forward across the desk and there were little blobs of gray stuff and white chips of bone mixed with it.

The larger splotches of blood were still shiny, and the chewed end of a cigar that lay among them was still visibly damp. So the Saint estimated that the shot couldn’t have been fired more than an hour ago. At the outside.

He looked at his watch. It showed exactly two o’clock.

The house was absolutely silent. If there were any servants in, their quarters were far enough away for them to have been undisturbed.

Simon stood very quietly and looked around the room. It had an air of having been put together according to a studio designer’s idea of what an important man’s study should look like. One wall was lined with bookshelves, but most of the books wore dark impressive bindings with gilt lettering, having undoubtedly been bought in sets and most probably never read. The bright jackets of a few modern novels stood out in a clash of color. There were a couple of heavy oil paintings on the walls. Scattered between them were a numнber of framed photographs with handwriting on them. They were all girls. One of them was April Quest; and there was another face that seemed faintly familiar, but the inscription only said “Your Trilby”; Obviously these were symbols of Mr. Ufferlitz’s new career as a producer. The room itself had the same appearance-Mr. Ufferlitz had hardly been in the business long enough to have built the house himself, but he had clearly selected it with an eye to the atmosphere with which he felt he ought to surround himself.

The one thing that was conspicuously lacking was any sort of clue of the type so dear to the heart of the conventional fiction writer. There might have been fingerprints, but Simon was not equipped to look for them just then. On the desk, beнsides the blotter and Mr. Ufferlitz’s head and samples of his blood, brains, and frontal bones, there was a fountain pen set, a couple of pencils, an evening paper, a couple of scripts and some loose script pages, a dentist’s bill, a liquor price list, and a memorandum block on which nobody had thoughtfully borne down on the last sheet torn off with a blunt pencil so that the writing would be legible on the next page in a slanting light. On a side table by the fireplace there were some old weeklies, but no copies of the Hollywood Reporter-which meant nothing, because the executive subscribers to this daily record of the movie industry usually receive it at their offices. The only indication of anything unusual at all was the ashtrays. There were three of them, and they had all been used, and they were smeared with ash and carbon to prove it; but they had all been emptied-and not into the fireplace or the wastebasket.

Simon thought mechanically, like an adding machine: “A servant didn’t empty them, because he’d have wiped them as well. Byron didn’t do it, because he wouldn’t have carried the ashes out of the room. Therefore the murderer did it, and took the debris away with him, so that his cigarette stubs wouldn’t be held against him. I guess he doesn’t believe in Sherlock Holmes and what he would do with a microscope and what’s left in the trays. He could be right, at that…”

But the train of thought did suggest another. If the murнderer had had to take that precaution, he must have done his share of smoking; therefore he had been there for some time; therefore he was most likely someone whom Mr. Ufferlitz knew-someone who might even have talked to Mr. Ufferlitz for quite a while before putting a gun to his occiput and blowing it out through his forehead.

And that suggested something else. Simon stood behind Mr. Ufferlitz and sighted along the line that the bullet would probably have taken. It carried his eyes to a fresh scar gouged in the panelling opposite. He walked over to it, and had no doubt that it had been made by the spent bullet. But either the slug had not had enough force left to embed itself properly in the woodwork, or else it had been carefully pried out: it was not in the hole, or on the floor below it. There was no way to tell even the caliber of the gun which had been used. The murderer seemed to have been quite efficient.

And he had not left behind any muddy footprints, buttons, shreds of cloth, hairs, hats, scraps of paper, cigarette lightнers, handkerchiefs, keys, match booklets, cuff links, specнtacles, gloves, combs, wallets, rings, fraternity pins, fobs, nail files, false teeth, tie clips, overcoats, ticket stubs, hairнpins, garters, wigs, or any of the other souvenirs which murderers in fiction are wont to strew around with such self-sacrificing generosity. He had just walked in and smoked a few cigarettes and fired his gun and emptied the ashtrays and walked out again, without leaving any more traces than any normal visitor would leave.

“Which is Unfair to Disorganised Detectives,” said the Saint to himself. “If I knew where the guy lived I’d picket him.”

But the flippancy was just a ripple on the surface of his mind, and underneath it his brain was working with the steady flow of an assembly line, putting together the prefabнricated pieces that he had been collecting without knowing what they were for. If he was right, and the murderer was someone whom Mr. Ufferlitz had known well enough to enнtertain in his study at that hour, there was at least a fair chance that it was someone whom Simon had already met. It might even be more than a chance. The Saint was probing back through the threads that he had once tried to weave toнgether when there was nothing to tie them to. And the note in his pocket, the note that had brought him there, with its hurried scrawl and emphatic capitals, came into his mind as clearly as if he had taken it out to look at it. Had Byron Uffнerlitz written it because something had happened to warn him that he would be in danger that night?

Or hadn’t he written it?

Had somebody seen the Saint’s entrance-literally-into the picture as the heaven-sent gift of a readymade scapegoat, and cashed in on it without one day’s delay? Had it been sent only to bring him there at the right moment, so that…

All at once Simon was aware of the silence again. The whole house was wrapped in an empty hush that seemed to close in on him with an intangible pressure, while he tried to strain through it for any sound that would crystallise this reawakened vigilance. He was very cool now, utterly limber and relaxed, with the triggered stillness of a cat.

There was no sound even yet.

He went out of the study and crossed the hall, moving with the same supple noiselessness. The front door had a small glass panel in it, and he looked out through that without touching anything. There was a car parked outside now, withнout lights, and two dark figures stood beside it. While he looked, a flashlight beam stabbed out from one of them, swept over the lawn, flicked across the front of the house, and wavered nosily over palm trees and shrubbery. The two figures began to move up the paved walk. The Saint didn’t have to see them any better to know what they were.