“I didn’t do a thing but sleep, and I was having breakfast by the pool when Ziggy arrived and told me about Paul. The police had called him, and he was on his way over here. I threw some clothes on and came with him. They’d taken down the... the body, by that time, but everything else was just the way they’d found it.”
“Which was how?” Simon asked.
The young woman shrugged.
“Just about like now. Except for the stepladder. That was lying down. He must have kicked it over when he... jumped off.”
She wasn’t altogether the invulnerably case-hardened reporter that she liked to pretend, he realized. There were words which evoked mental images that made her flinch momentarily before she consciously toughened herself to go on.
The ladder was about six feet high, Simon judged, as he strolled past it. The top platform was just below his eye level. Some tidy soul had righted it and set it over some distance from the lamppost with which it must have been used.
“The colored woman who works — worked for Paul every day came in at nine o’clock and found him,” Lois concluded. “The police lieutenant who sent for Ziggy only wanted to ask some routine questions, mostly to find out if we had any idea why Paul did it. He didn’t get much help.”
Simon walked slowly around the structure that had triggered the whole weird episode, examining it more closely. The resemblance to the traditional primitive gibbet was almost ludicrously exact, for essentially it consisted simply of a square upright post about eight feet high with a single thirty-inch arm projecting from the top, like an inverted L, and a diagonal strengthening brace between the two members: it was easy to see how any imagination could have been carried away by the train of macabre humor which had ended in such a deadly joke. But a detailed study compelled one to add that even if it had fallen into an artistic pitfall it had been designed with some mechanical ingenuity and constructed with professional skill. There was an electrical outlet fitted flush in the underside of the crossbar, self-protected from rain, which was evidently intended to service the lamp which was planned to hang from the bar, but the wiring to it could only pass through the centre of the arm and the upright. Simon saw that each of these members was actually made from two pieces of wood which must have been grooved down their inside length and then joined together to form the necessary tunnel for the concealed wire, but the halves had been so carefully matched and finished that only the keenest scrutiny could detect the joint.
“You were right,” Simon observed. “He was certainly an amateur in one sense only.” He went on staring emotionlessly at the noose which still dangled from the stout iron hook under the end of the crossbar, where the lantern was obviously meant to hang, adding the last gruesome touch to the gallows outline that turned similarity into solid fact. “And a jack of many trades, apparently. Carpenter, electrician — and rope handler. How many suicides would you think could tie a correct hangman’s knot? I’ll give any odds you like that ninety-nine per cent of hanged suicides swing themselves off on any old slipknot that they can fumble up. But the authentic legal knot is quite tricky, at least tricky enough that I’m sure nobody ever hit on it by accident, except maybe the inventor. And this is a perfect specimen that you could use in a textbook for executioners.”
“Very interesting,” Velston said in his toneless voice that made it impossible to tell whether he was serious or sarcastic. “Do you get any other associations?”
“The rope is fine, new, expensive white nylon — the very best. One loose end is bound with Scotch tape, the way the chandlers do it to prevent it unraveling; the other end is raw. So it was cut off a longer piece, and whoever cut it figured this piece was expendable.”
“This is deduction?” Velston said tiredly. “But it makes sense too. What, after all, is the current market for a loose end of rope that just hung somebody?”
“Put that needle down, Monty,” Lois snapped. “Could you do any better?”
“That is not in my contract. I observe and report. This material I may need some day. Mr Templar cannot possibly live for ever without being taken for a Fame treatment.”
“Children,” Simon interposed pacifically, “I may have an inspiration. Let’s pull a switch. I think I could sell Fame a portrait of two of its distinguished collaborators at work on a Fame Portrait. Let me go to work on it and give you a rest from observing me. After all, I still haven’t anything to work on here.”
“Wouldn’t you like to look around the house?” she asked.
“Not particularly. I wish I could convince you that I’m not the Sherlock type. Cigarette ash to me is just cigarette ash. I probably wouldn’t recognize a clue unless it was labeled. I’ve bumbled around a few times and come up with some answers, but they were mostly psychic. And here I don’t even know what crime I’m expected to investigate. Are you sure you aren’t just trying to dream one up, so you can grab a fast and phony vignette of the Saint in action? If so, you should let me in on it, and I might go along with the gag — for a percentage.”
Lois Norroy bit her lip.
There was a moment in which both she and Velston seemed to teeter in search of a balance that had been unfairly undermined. It was Montague Velston, expectably, who recovered first.
“This would require a fiat from the board of directors, with whom we hirelings do not sit except at bars and usually when we’re buying,” he said. “Under the circumstances, we’d better accept your proposition, Mr Templar. Anyhow, as Lois points out, we should keep our noses to the current gallstone. The reason I’m here, in fact, is because Ziggy has called a press conference at which he will distribute his quotes on the subject of Paul’s suicide without playing any favorites, and I think we should have this performance in our file. You’re welcome to join us, Mr Templar.”
“I wouldn’t know how to turn down an invitation like that,” said the Saint, in a perfectly dead-pan facsimile of Velston’s tone.
He took them both in his car, since Velston had found his way there by taxi. They were only a few blocks from the western end of Broad Causeway, and on the beach side Lois gave an address which the Saint’s elephantine memory for local topographies could place within a block or two. Otherwise she sat rather quietly between the two men, as if each of them inhibited her from naturalness with the other. The Saint was correspondingly restrained by the hope of maintaining a neutrality which he did not feel. He had been aware of a certain warmth of unspoken friendliness growing between himself and Lois which might go on beyond this episode, but about Velston he was not so sure.
Ziggy Zaglan’s home was almost completely hidden from the street by a high wall draped with blazing bougainvillea, and uninvited admirers were still further discouraged by a pair of massive wrought-iron gates that blocked the driveway. Velston got out and gave his name to a microphone set in one of the gateposts, and after a brief pause the gates swung open in response to some electric remote control. The house that came in sight as they followed the drive around the curve of a tall concealing hedge was in the tropical-modern style, with wide cantilevered overhangs to shade its expanses of glass and screened breezeways that sometimes made it hard to see exactly where the outside ended and the interior began.
The front door was opened as they reached it by a white-haired Negro butler who should have been posing for bourbon advertisements, who said, “Good afternoon, ma’am and gentlemen. Mist’ Zaglan is out by the pool.”
They went out of the central hall around a baffle of glass brick and indoor vines and came into the living room. At least, it had three-quarters of the conventional number of walls for a living room, and towards the back or inner wall it had many of the usual appurtenances, including some recessed shelves of surrealist bric-a-brac, some overstuffed furniture, a card table, a large portable bar, and an enormous edifice of bleached oak centered around a television screen supported by several loud-speaker grilles and buttressed by cabinets which undoubtedly contained as good a collection of records and hi-fi reproductive equipment as a dilettante with money could assemble. What would have been the fourth wall consisted only of ceiling-high panels of sliding glass, through which with the help of bamboo furniture an almost unnoticed transition could be made to the preponderant outdoorsiness of the swimming-pool area, which in turn expanded through almost invisible screens of the lot’s western frontage on upper Biscayne Bay and the sea wall and walk where a shiny thirty-foot express cruiser was tied up.