Saint Goes West (6 page)

“All right,” Freddie said gracelessly. “I dare you.”

Esther looked as if a load had been taken off her mind.

She pulled off her boots and socks. She stood up with a slight faraway smile, and unbuttoned her shirt and took it off. She took off her frontier pants. That left her in a wisp of sheer close-fitting scantiness. She took that off, too.

She certainly had a beautiful body.

She turned and walked into the pool and lowered herself into it until the water lapped her chin. It covered her as well as a sheet of glass. She rolled, and swam lazily up to the far end, and as the water shallowed she rose out again and strolled on up into the low cascade where the stream tumbled around the next curve. She waded on up through the falls, under the palms, the sunlight through the leaves making glancing patterns on her skin, and disappeared around the bend, very leisurely. It was quite an exit.-
The rustle of the water seemed very loud suddenly, as if anyone would have had to shout to be heard over it. So that it was surprising when Ginny’s voice sounded perfectly easy and normal.

“Well, folks,” she said, “don’t run away now, because there’ll be another super-colossal floor show in just a short while.” She nestled against the Saint again and said: “Hullo.” “Hullo.”

“Hullo,” said the Saint restrainedly.

Freddie Pellman got to his feet.

“Well,” he said huffily, “I know you won’t miss me, so I think I’ll take a walk.”

He stalked off up the stream the way Esther had gone, stumbling and balancing awkwardly on his high-heeled boots over the slippery rounded boulders.

They watched him until he was out of sight also.

“Alone at last,” said Ginny emotionally.

The Saint reached for a cigarette.

“Don’t you ever worry about getting complicated? he asked.

“I worry about not getting kissed,” she said.

She looked up at him from under her long sweeping lashes, with bright impudent eyes and red lips tantalisingly parted. The Saint had been trying conscientiously not to look for trouble, but he was not made out of ice cream and bubble gum. He was making good progress against no resistance when the crash of a shot rattled down the canyon over the chattering of the water and brought him to his feet as if he had actually felt the bullet.

6

HE RAN up the side of the brook, fighting his way through clawing scrub and stumbling over boulders and loose gravel. Beyond the bend, the stream rose in a long twisting stairway of shallow cataracts posted with the same shapely palms that grew throughout its length. A couple of steps further up he found Freddie.

Freddie was not dead. He was standing up. He stood and looked at the Saint in a rather foolish way, with his mouth open.

“Come on,” said the Saint encouragingly. “Give.”

Freddie pointed stupidly to the rock behind him. There was a bright silver scar on it where a bullet had scraped off a layer of lead on the rough surface before it riccocheted off into nowhere.

“It only just missed me,” Freddie said.

“Where were you standing?”

“Just here.”

Simon looked at the scar again. There was no way of reading from it the caliber or make of gun. The bullet itself might have come to rest anywhere within half a mile. He tried a rough sight from the mark on the rock, but within the most conservative limits it covered an area of at least two thousand square yards on the other slope of the canyon.

The Saint’s spine tingled. It was a little like the helplessness of his trip around the house the night before-looking up at that raw muddle of shrubs and rocks, knowing that a dozen sharpshooters could lie hidden there, with no risk of being discovered before they had fired the one shot that might be all that was necessary …

“Maybe we should go home, Freddie,” he said. “Now wait.” Freddie was going to be obstinate and valiant after he had found company. “If there’s someone up there-“

“He could drop you before we were six steps closer to him,” said the Saint tersely. “You hired me as a bodyguard, not a pallbearer. Let’s move.”

Something else moved, upwards and a little to his left. His reflexes had tautened instinctively before he recognised the flash of movement as only a shifting of bare brown flesh.

From a precarious flat ledge of rock five or six yards up the slope, Esther called down: “What goes on?”

“We’re going home,” Simon called back.

“Wait for me.”

She started to scramble down off the ledge. Suddenly she seemed much more undressed than she had before. He turned abruptly.

“Come along, then.”

He went back, around the bend, past the pool, past Ginny, to where they had left the horses, hearing Freddie’s footнsteps behind him but not looking back. There were no more shots, but he worked quickly checking the saddles and tightнening the cinches. The place was still just as picturesque and enchanting, but as an ambush it had the kind of topogнraphy where he felt that the defending team was at a great disadvantage.

“What’s the hurry?” Ginny complained, coming up beside him; and he locked the buckle he was hauling on and gave the leather a couple of rapid loops through the three-quarter rig slots.

“You heard the shot, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“It just missed Freddie. So we’re moving before they try again.”

“Something’s always happening,” said Ginny resentfully, as if she had been shot at herself.

“Life is like that,” said the Saint, untying her horse and handing the reins to her.

As he turned to the next horse Esther came up. She was fully dressed again, except that her shirt was only half buttoned; and she looked smug and sulky at the same time.

“Did you hear what happened, Ginny?” she said. “There was a man hiding up in the hills, and he took a shot at Freddie. And if he was where Simon thought he was, he must have seen me sunbathing without anything on.”

‘Tell Freddie that’s what made him miss,” Ginny sugнgested. “It might be worth some new silver foxes to you.”

A dumb look came into Esther’s beautifully sculptured face. She gazed foggily out at the landscape as the Saint cinched her saddle and thrust the reins into her limp hands.

She said: “Simon.”

“Yes?”

“Didn’t you say something last night about-about being sure it was someone in the house?”

“I did.”

“Then … then just now-you were with Ginny, so she couldn’t have done anything. And Lissa isn’t here. But you know I couldn’t-you know I couldn’t have hidden a gun anyнwhere, don’t you?”

“I don’t know you well enough,” said the Saint.

But it was another confusion that twisted around in his mind all the way home. It was true that he himself was an alibi for Ginny-unless she had planted one of those colosнsally elaborate remote-control gun-firing devices beloved of mystery writers. And Esther couldn’t have concealed a gun, or anything else, in her costume-unless she had previously planted it somewhere up the stream. But both those theories would have required them to know in advance where they were going, and the Saint had chosen the place himself … It was true he had mentioned it before they started, but mentioning it and finding it were different matters. He would have sworn that not more than a handful of people besides himself had ever discovered it, and he remembered sections of the trail that had seemed to be completely overgrown since they had last been trodden. Of course, with all his watchfulнness, they might have been followed. A good hunter might have stayed out of sight and circled over the hills-he could have done it himself…

Yet in all those speculations there was something that didn’t connect, something that didn’t make sense. If the theнoretical sniper in the hills had been good enough to get there at all, for instance, why hadn’t he been good enough to try a second shot before they got away? He could surely have had at least one more try, from a different angle, with no more risk than the first … It was like the abortive attack on Lissa -it made sense, but not absolute sense. And to the Saint’s delicately tuned reception that was a more nagging obstacle than no sense at all…

They got back to the stables, and Freddie said: “I need a drink. Let’s beat up the Tennis Club before we go home.”

For once, the Saint was not altogether out of sympathy with the exigencies of Freddie’s thirst.

They drove out to the club, and sat on the balcony terrace looking down over the beautifully terraced gardens, the palm-shaded oval pool and the artificial brook where imнported trout lurked under spreading willows and politely awaited the attention of pampered anglers. The rest of them sipped Daiquiris, while Freddie restored himself with three double brandies in quick succession. And then, sauntering over from the tennis courts with a racquet in her hand, Lissa O’Neill herself came up to them. She looked as cool and dainty as she always seemed to look, in one of those abbreviated sun suits that she always seemed to wear which some clairvoyant designer must have invented exclusively for her slim waist and for long tapered legs like hers, in pasнtel shades that would set off her clear golden skin. But it seemed as if all of them drew back behind a common barrier that made them look at her in the same way, not in admiraнtion, but guardedly, waiting for what she would say.

She said: “Fancy meeting you here.”

“Fancy meeting you,” said the Saint. “Did you get bored with your book?”

“I finished it, so I thought I’d get some exercise. But the pro has been all booked up for hours.”

It was as if all of them had the same question on their lips, but only the Saint could handle his voice easily enough to say, quite lazily: “Hours?”

“Well, it must have been two hours or more. Anyway, I asked for a lesson as soon as I got here, and he was all booked up. He said he’d fit me in if anybody cancelled, but I’ve been waiting around for ages and nobody’s given me a chance…”

A part of the Saint’s mind felt quite detached and indeнpendent of him, like an adding machine clicking over in a different room. The machine tapped out: She should have known that the pro would be booked up. And of course he’d say that he’d be glad to fit her in if he had a cancellation. And the odds are about eight to one that he wouldn’t have a canнcellation. So she could make him and several other people believe that she’d been waiting all the time. She could alнways find a chance to slip out of the entrance when there was no one in the office for a moment-she might even arrange to clear the way without much difficulty. She only had to get out. Coming back, she could say she just went to get something from her car. No one would think about it. And if there had been a cancellation, and the pro had been looking for her- well, she’d been in the johnny, or the showers, or at the botнtom of the pool. He just hadn’t found her. She’d been there all the time, A very passable casual alibi, with only a trivial percentage of risk.

But she isn’t dressed to have done what must have been done.

She could have changed.

She couldn’t have done it anyway.

Why not? She looks athletic. There are good muscles under that soft golden skin. She might have been sniping revenooers in the mountains of Kentucky since she was five years old, for all you know. What makes you so sure what she could do and couldn’t do?

Well, what were Angelo and his pal, and Louis the Italian chef, doing at the same time? You can’t rule them out.

Any good reader would rule them out. The mysterious murнderer just doesn’t turn out to be the cook or the butler any more. That was worked to death twenty years ago.

So of course no cook or butler in real life would ever dream of murdering anyone any more, because they’d know it was just too corny.

“What’s the matter with you all?” Lissa asked. “Wasn’t the ride any good?”

“It was fine,” said the Saint. “Except when your last night’s boy friend started shooting at Freddie.”

Then they all began to talk at once.

It was Freddie, of course, who finally got the floor. He did it principally by saying the same things louder and oftener than anyone else. When the competition had been crushed he told the story again, challenging different people to subнstantiate his statements one by one. He was thus able to leave a definite impression that he had been walking up the canyon when somebody shot at him.

Simon signalled a waiter for another round of drinks and put himself into a self-preservative trance until the peak of the verbal flood had passed. He wondered whether he should ask Freddie for another thousand dollars. He felt that he was definitely earning his salary as he went along.

“… Then that proves it must be one of the servants,” Lissa said. “So if we can find out which of them went out this afternoon—”

“Why does it prove that?” Simon inquired.

“Well, it couldn’t have been Ginny, because she was talking to you. It couldn’t have been me—”

“Couldn’t it?”

She looked at him blankly. But her brain worked. He could almost see it. She might have been reading everything that had been traced through his mind, a few minutes ago, line by line.

“It couldn’t have been me,” Esther insisted plaintively. “I didn’t have a stitch on. Where could I have hidden a gun?”

Ginny gazed at her speculatively.

“It’ll be interesting to see how the servants can account for their time,” Simon said hastily. “But I’m not going to get optimistic too quickly. I don’t think anything about this business is very dumb and straightforward. It’s quite the opposite. Somebody is being so frantically cunning that he must be practically tying himself-or herself-in a knot. So if it is one of the servants, I bet he has an alibi too.”

“I still think you ought to tell the police,” Ginny said.

The drinks arrived. Simon lighted a cigarette and waited until the waiter had gone away again.

“What for?” he asked. “There was a guy in Lissa’s room last night. Nobody saw him. He didn’t leave any muddy footprints or any of that stuff. He used one of our own kitchen knives. If there ever were any fingerprints on it, they’ve been ruined. So-nothing … This afternoon someнbody shot at Freddie. Nobody saw him. He didn’t leave his gun, and nobody could ever find the bullet. So nothing again. What are the police going to do? They aren’t magicians … However, that’s up to you, Freddie.”