The Saint in the Sun (16 page)

“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 twentyfive 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.”