He was also important enough to be able to dictate his own working conditions, which he took advantage of to do his show for nine months in the year from Miami Beach, where he had established his legal residence for the two most seductive reasons that Florida could offer: its climate and its freedom from state income tax. As a result, several members of his permanent team had been constrained (perhaps not too reluctantly) to follow suit and had moved their homes to the same fortunate area, though not to the identical gilded neighborhood. Perhaps the most inevitable of these was Paul Zaglan, a brother, who had the main writing credit on the show.
“I’ve always wondered,” said the Saint. “Who was the brains of the act? Granting that some kind of brains were involved, of course.”
“It wasn’t Paul,” she said. “Paul was a wonderful guy, and a terrific worker, and he had lots of brilliant flashes. But the personality that came over to the public was always Ziggy’s. Paul was the carpenter. He gave Ziggy scripts with a solid framework and lots of interesting angles, but they’d never have got off the ground until Ziggy added his own curlicues and all those zany touches that seem to send wild half the half-witted public.”
“I gather that this doesn’t include you.”
She shrugged.
“Would anyone buy curlicues with nothing to hang ’em on?”
“Or scaffolding with nothing on it?”
“All right,” she said sharply. “Maybe I just liked Paul better as a person. I used to know him fairly well in New York, before Ziggy was big enough to move down here — before I even went to work for Fame.”
Simon slanted an idle eyebrow at her.
“Okay, what happened last night?”
“Ziggy and Paul had been working on the show all afternoon, except when they were being interrupted by Ted Colbin — that’s Ziggy’s agent — and the man from the network, Ralph Damian. There’s a big hassle going on about a new contract, so they’re both down here to fight it out, so that every time they reach a compromise on something they can take it straight to Ziggy and see if he’ll buy it.”
“Ziggy is so biggie?”
“With a hey-nonny-nonny and a cha-cha-cha. So Monty and I—”
“Take it easy,” pleaded the Saint. “I’m meeting people too fast. Who’s Monty?”
“Montague Velston,” she said. “My partner on this assignment. This is the third Fame Portrait we’ve worked on as a team... We’d just been stooging around, watching the antics and making our own notes. That’s the way we operate when we’re getting; one of those candid snapshots of an alleged genius at work.”
“Thank you for warning me,” Simon said. “I had a hunch all along that—”
“We had dinner rather late, about a quarter of nine. After coffee Paul said he was bushed and went home. Ziggy was just warming up — he starts nibbling Dexedrine after lunch, and by the time everyone else is folding he’s opening up. He went in the den and started his final rewrite on the next script. He always does that himself, after everything’s been hashed out with Paul and the rest of the gang. That’s when he adds those unique touches that make the Ziggy Zaglan show.”
“So everyone else went home too?”
“No no. After all, we only had hotels to go to, and it was cozy enough at Ziggy’s, and the drinks were free. And he’d said, ‘Don’t go away, I’ll be through in an hour or two, and you won’t even miss me.’ Monty and Ted started playing gin rummy, and Ralph went on the make for me.”
The Saint remained politely expressionless.
“And?”
“It could only be verbal skirmishing, of course, with Monty and Ted in the room. He turned the radio on to an FM station that was playing Viennese waltzes, very softly, so it wouldn’t disturb Ziggy, who was typing a blue streak in the next room, and gave me his best intellectual line. I kept him going for almost an hour, for my own education, but when he realized it was only an academic interest he got restless.”
“Men are so selfish, aren’t they?”
“About the same time Ted Colbin was getting tired of losing to Monty, so he was quite receptive when Ralph suggested they ought to catch the last show at the Latin Quarter and case the talent.”
“That sounds a trifle unchivalrous,” Simon remarked.
“Oh, naturally I was invited to go along, which gave me the chance to beg off without costing him any face. Monty was still in a sport shirt and said if he went back to the hotel and changed at that hour it would be into his pajamas. So Ralph and Ted went off, leering and wisecracking.”
“Without saying good-bye?”
Another voice said sepulchrally: “When Ziggy Zaglan is creating, nobody but nobody interrupts him.”
They both turned to see the slight dapper man who had come strolling around the corner of the house. He wore gray suede shoes, charcoal doeskin slacks, and a pearl-colored silk shirt with gunmetal-tinted collar and pocket hems. Even against this carefully neutral background his face seemed colorless. He had wavy black hair, black eyes set rather close together, a pencil-thin line of black mustache, and a smooth, sallow complexion. He looked like a man that prudent strangers would hesitate to play cards with.
“This is Monty,” Lois Norroy said, and introduced the Saint.
Montague Velston shook hands very gently.
“Pardon the interruption,” he said, “but I’m an amateur detective myself. When I heard that Lois had gone off with you, something told me this was where you’d be.”
“Since you caught up with us,” Lois said, “you go on with the story.”
“As far as I’m concerned,” Velston said, “it’s strictly filler. Lois and I sat hashing over our notes and a few other things for about an hour, and then Ziggy came out waving a script and saying he had the show wrapped up and now we should all relax. His idea of relaxing was to pick up Ted and Ralph from the Latin Quarter, and then we should all go on to some all-night strip-clip emporium out towards Hialeah where we wouldn’t need coats and ties or practically anything else except money. This I wanted like a brain tumour, but I figured that it might be part of our assignment to observe Ziggy on a bender, so I agreed to be sacrificed.”
He had a soft and languid way of speaking which combined with his total lack of facial vivacity to keep you belatedly groping back for some mordant phrase that he had almost smuggled past you.
“Was it worth it?” Simon inquired.
“You would expect a constructive answer from a burnt offering? Ziggy played host to all the disengaged hostesses and bought, by my count, twenty-five gallons of alleged Bollinger. In between contour chasing at the table, he got into every act on the floor. If he hadn’t been the great Ziggy Zaglan, it would have been embarrassing. Since I’m not the great Ziggy Zaglan, I was embarrassed anyhow, but everyone else thought it was as funny as a case of hives. There were a few high spots which would slay the lads at a college reunion but which would hardly get a good yawn from the sophisticated editors of Fame. Finally Ziggy fell asleep, about five a.m., and Ted paid out a few hundred dollars from his account and we took him home. Since then I’ve only been trying to scratch the fungus off my palate.” Monty Velston took out a thin cigar, gazed at it mournfully, and put it back in his pocket. He turned patiently to Lois again. “I still haven’t heard what really happened with you after we dropped you off at the hotel. Or was I too groggy to assimilate it when you phoned?”