The Saint in the Sun (17 page)

“Do you have a picture of him?”

Mrs Yanstead looked around vaguely. There were a few framed photographs on walls and ledges; but the Saint’s surreptitiously wandering glances had identified most of them as plates from a sentimental biography of a woman who could only have been Mr Cardman’s mother, a recurrent face from an old misty-edged sepia vignette of a demure young girl to a modern skilfully-retouched portrait of a prim old matriarch. Mr Cardman’s inclusion in a group with his sisters, gathered around her in their self-consciously angelic adolescence, was not what Simon had in mind; but Mrs Yanstead’s obliging exploration discovered a very contemporary snapshot tucked into one corner of phonus-period velvet frame.

“He never was one to have his picture taken,” she said, “but this is one that Miss Winchester took right after she came down this season.”

It was the typical box-camera enlargement, obviously taken against one side of the house, with Mrs Yanstead and Mr Cardman standing awkwardly side by side (but at a discreet distance) and both looking straight into the lens and grinning in the pointless mechanical way beloved of the amateur artists who are the bread and butter of the photographic-supply industry; but partly on that account it had the virtue of presenting a facial facsimile that was recognizable in the same brutal way that a passport photo or a prison mug shot may be recognizable. It showed Mr Cardman with a predatory nose but a weak chin, a cocky but frail figure beside the foster-mother of his senility, who seemed to make an earthily honest effort to hold back and avoid eclipsing him with her superior bulk and vitality.

“May I borrow this?” Simon asked. “It won’t be damaged, and I’ll send it back in a day or two.”

“I suppose so.”

“One other thing,” he said as he was leaving: “where can I find Mr Otterly?”

“He went to the Tradewind-that’s the first motel you come to down the road. I expect he’ll have plenty to say about me.” She pursed her lips, then shrugged and smiled again. “Well, I don’t live in a glass house, so I shouldn’t worry about who throws stones.”

Simon drove on to the motel, and after inquiring at the office he was directed to the Terrace Snack Bar, which was beside the swimming pool, which had considerately been provided for the indulgence of guests who either found a hundred-yard walk to the beach too fatiguing or were appalled by the potential perils of the rippling ocean. There he found Cousin Henry eating an improbably early lunch, or more likely a very belated breakfast, consisting of corned beef hash and black coffee.

Henry Otterly was a broad-shouldered young man with a premature paunch bulging over the top of his Hawaiian-print shorts. His black hair was slicked down in graceful sweeps over his head and his ears, but below that it sprouted in thin curls all over him except in the conventionally scraped facial areas, which had the dark sheen of gun-metal. He had the still red and unfinished tan of the typical tourist, and another rosy tinge in his eyeballs which some Yankee visitors acquire under the palm-trees and others bring with them from a lunch diet of dry martinis. This season he still had a certain fast and superficial charm; and in a very few years, unless he found the end of his rainbow, he could be just another slob.

He received the Saint with practised Madison-Avenue affability-a blend of pressurized brightness and defensive flexibility.

“The Guardian? Of course, the best newspaper in the South, I tell everybody-except people from the other papers. But are you selling space or trying to fill some?”

“Would you like to make any statement about your late uncle’s will?” Simon asked.

“I’d like to make several, but not to you. I don’t want to have something printed that I could be sued for.”

“I suppose we could safely say that you were surprised.”

“I think so. Also astounded, staggered, flabbergasted-and perhaps even incredulous.”

“And if you did make a statement it might be uncomplimentary to someone?”

“It might be,” Mr Otterly said. He tugged at his lower lip with mock judiciousness. “Yes, I think you can safely say that. Very uncomplimentary. Would you like some mocha, java, or just any coffee?”

“I’m a bit farther ahead in the day,” Simon said negatively. “But a Dry Sack on the rocks would go down nicely.”

“Good idea.” Otterly repeated the order to a waitress, adding: “And I’ll have a Bloody Mary.”

Simon resumed: “I can understand that you’d want to be careful, Mr Otterly, but it’s true that you’re thinking of contesting the will, isn’t it?”

“I’ve discussed it with my attorneys, yes. We’re having another meeting on it this afternoon. It’s in what I would call the survey stage. We turn the pros and cons loose in the pond and see what they spawn.”

“Are you hoping to prove the will was forged?”

“That might be difficult. I’m not giving much away, but everyone concerned knows that my uncle had a fairly bad stroke a few years ago, and his right hand and arm never recovered completely. So it might be a bit marginal to rely on handwriting experts. On the other hand, anyone with enough motive to forge a will would be even more capable of getting the old man to write it himself.”

“You mean what they call ‘undue influence’?”

“That’s something like the beat of the legal jazz.”

Simon circulated his drink in the glass which had been delivered to him, and sipped it appreciatively.

“Did that stroke affect Mr Cardman anywhere besides the arm?” he inquired, without flippancy.

“Like in the head? Now you approach the cosmic. You invoke the definition that makes politics, religion, philosophy, and low comedy. Who is nuts and who isn’t? Well, I’d hate to claim that my own uncle was insane, but he’d reached an age when his mind was certainly not as sharp as it was when he was younger. There’s plenty of evidence that he was eccentric, to say the least. Even Mrs Yanstead, unless she perjures herself, will have to admit that he had to be coaxed or bullied to take his doctor’s medicine, but he’d try anything he heard of from some quack advertisement.”

“And she says you encouraged him, sending him all kinds of health foods and herb remedies and what not.”

Otterly shot him a hard stare, without a flicker of embarrassment.

“Oh, you’ve already talked to her.” It was a statement, not a question. “I don’t deny it. Harmless placebos-I made sure of that. Things that I knew couldn’t hurt him, and may even have given him a few extra vitamins. I went along with the gag; and if it made him happy, what was wrong with that?”

“And since you’re a relative, that couldn’t be called ‘undue influence’ in your case,” Simon said.

His tone was so impeccably neutral that for the first time Henry Otterly seemed uncertain-but whether of himself or of the Saint’s intention would have been a very ticklish nuance to bet on.

“My dear sir, you’re not aiming a muckraker at the American Family image? Making subversive suggestions that the affection they lavish on Rich Uncle is magnetized by his credit rating? Don’t apologize. Even if that’s what you were thinking, it’s obvious that I didn’t try too hard-even if I did commit the crime of trying to be more sympathetic than my cousin Betty. The proof is that neither of us got in the real money. We were left out in the pasture by a nag with no form at all-pardon my choice of metaphor. And we hadn’t even thought she was in the running. Therefore one may legitimately wonder if the race was fixed. But in such a case one suspects the winner, not the losers. Do you excavate, gate?”

“I dig,” said the Saint, but regretfully decided that it would not be in keeping with his role to complete the rhyme. “Although it’s still hard for me to see how a man can be influenced into actually making a will like that, cutting off his own family in favor of a comparative stranger. I mean, without thumbscrews, or that sort of persuasion.”

Otterly waved his hands with a commanding eloquence that was somehow reminiscent of an orchestra conductor in full flourish.

“Psychology, my friend.” He was genial again, as his confidence recovered and re-inflated. “That’s something I understand. It’s my business. Why do you smoke what you smoke, shave with whatever you use, brush your teeth with that toothpaste? Because they were sold to you. Now don’t be offended; you think you chose them. But I have news for you. You only chose what you chose because somebody knew how to get through your resistance and make you want it. My uncle was conditioned for twenty years and more to a Mother fixation. He was a pushover for the next person who came along who could fit into that Mother-image.”

“And all your psychology couldn’t compete with her?”

“Does my cousin Betty look like a Mother? Only if you include the kind that you find in homes for wayward girls. Do I look like a Mother? Be careful how you answer that.” Otterly grinned, and emptied his Bloody Mary. By now he was hugely pleased with himself. “You know we didn’t stand a chance against a real Mother-type, if she went out to exploit it. Whether a Court will agree is another matter. So I don’t think I can say any more without the risk of damaging my own case. You understand?”

“Yes, but—”

“Then goodbye.” Otterly stood up, holding out his hand, pleasantly, but offensively secure in his privilege and his savoir faire, “Call me after the verdict, and I might have some more Pulitzer material for you.”

He turned away and plunged into the pool, ungracefully but finally enough; and Simon let it go at that. The Saint was not yet prepared, for purely private satisfaction, to explode the innocuous anonymity with which he seemed to have saddled himself. But only a much more rarified objective could have controlled the temptation.

And now he had one, beyond any doubt, for he was sure that Mr Ernest Cardman’s death, though it could hardly be called untimely, had nevertheless been artificially expedited.

But cerebral certainty is not proof; and even the Saint in his most lawless days, with all his impatience with the finicky rules of legal evidence and his delight in clearing his own short cuts to justice, had always required some positive verification, satisfactory at least to him if not to all technical criteria. And nobody knew better than he that any law-abiding police agency would be still more hesitant to turn on the sirens and rush hither and yon merely because he, Simon Templar, walked in and said he felt sure he had discovered a murder.

Luckily (and if this sounds like one more coincidence, let the statisticians make the most of it) he had a fairly direct access to the next facility he needed which for a while at least allowed him to be himself again. The Saint had friends, acquaintances, and contacts everywhere: they were a sort of human stock-in-trade, a fringe of his life which made much of the core possible. He had acquired many of them in highly improbable ways, haphazard as often as adventurous, but when it was necessary he had no compunction about calling on any of them.

He had met Julian D Corrington, Professor Emeritus and at that time head of the Zoology Department of the University of Miami, by correspondence over a magazine article that Dr Corrington had written about Sherlock Holmes; for Dr Corrington, in a small part of his spare time, happened also to be one of the many distinguished intellectuals who have made a whimsical cult of studying the detective writings of Conan Doyle as minutely as a theologian analyzes the scriptures, and often with resultant discoveries which must exert as much graveyard torque on that Master as similar diversions may apply to this chronicler in due time.

A person-to-person phone call established at no cost that Dr Corrington was still tied up with his bi-weekly Histology class, but would be in his office in the afternoon; and Simon shamelessly cheated the telephone company to the enrichment of the petroleum industry by driving down to Coral Gables and presenting himself in person after lunch, which he ate rather late but unhurriedly before heading down LeJeune Road to the University.

Directed to a room on the third floor of the Anastasia Building, on the North Campus, he found an alert good-natured man with plentiful gray hair and gray mustache, whose trim and erect figure belied the seventy years he laid claim to.

“Are you really the man I’ve read so much about?” he said. “I never thought I’d actually meet you in person.”

They chatted for a while in generalities, until Simon felt he could broach the purpose of his call without sounding too cavalier about it.

The Professor listened to him thoughtfully, and said: “I think I should take you to see the head of the Department of Anatomy -it would be under his jurisdiction, and he knows all the law about these things. I expect you’ll find you have to get a court order, or at least a formal request from the police.”

“Knowing who I am, can you see the police doing me any favors?” Simon objected. “And I haven’t enough to go on to get a court order, at this moment. I doubt if I could even impress the head of your Anatomy Department. And yet this is urgent. If anything happens to that body, it’ll be almost impossible to make it a murder case.”

“It may be hard to locate the body even now,” Corrington said. “As I understand the procedure, they try to make a cadaver anonymous as soon as possible.”

“But somebody must sign a receipt for it when it’s delivered,” Simon argued. “Somebody must unpack it and put it wherever they keep the supplies for the dissecting rooms. This was so recent that it might still be possible to trace it-if only too much time isn’t wasted.”

“I suppose we can make inquiries. I can take you over there, at any rate, unofficially of course, like any personal friend I’m showing around, and you can see what answers you get.”

“That ‘d be a step forward, anyhow. If it isn’t asking too much.”

“It would be amusing to be the Saint’s Dr Watson, even in such a minor way.” Corrington’s eyes twinkled. “And I can’t be held responsible for what questions you ask the janitor, or what he chooses to tell you.”

He steered the Saint briskly out to his car in the parking lot behind the building, and chauffeured him a half-dozen blocks along Riviera Drive to a building which to Simon looked reminiscent of the pre-war Coral Gables Biltmore Hotel, a sister caravanserai of Miami Beach’s Roney Plaza which somehow got separately orphaned when the Coral Gables development failed to match the Beach as another southern Samarkand.