The Saint in the Sun (15 page)

“Poor Simon,” Betty Bethell said. “Now you’ll be hounded to death by grateful women.”

The Saint grinned untroubledly, and waved a languid hand at a white-coated waiter who was conveniently headed in their direction across the Country Club lounge.

“Let’s have another round of that Old Curio,” he said.

“Yes, Mr Templar,” said the man. “Right away, sir. But I was comin’ to tell you you’re wanted on the phone, sir. Some lady callin’, sir.”

Copyright Š 1962 by Fiction Publishing Company.

FLORIDA:THE JOLLY UNDERTAKER

“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 Seventyninth 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.