Simon reached for a cigarette, and suddenly sniffed it suspiciously before he put it in his mouth. If some joker, either in fun or malice, had adulterated his tobacco with some more exotic herb... But that, too, was absurd. A jag of those dimensions would surely bequeath a hangover to match, but his head was as clear as the mountain air.
He fumbled in his pockets for a match. Instead, his questing fingers touched something solid, a shape that was oddly familiar — yet impossibly alien. The tactile sensation lasted only for an instant, before his hand recoiled as if the thing had been red hot. He was afraid, actually afraid, to take it out.
The address of Andrew Faulks was in the Glendale directory. The house was a modest two-bedroom affair on a side street near Forest Lawn Memorial Park. A wreath hung on the door. A solemn gentleman who looked like, and undoubtedly was, an undertaker opened the door. He looked like Death rubbing white hands together.
“Mr Faulks passed on last night,” he said in answer to the Saint’s query. Unctuous sorrow overlaid the immediate landscape.
“Wasn’t it rather sudden?”
“Ah, not exactly, sir. He went to sleep last Saturday, passed into a coma, and never awakened.”
“At what time,” Simon asked, “did he die?”
“At ten-forty,” the man replied. “It was a sad death. He was in a delirium. He kept shouting about shooting someone, and talked about a saint.”
Simon had moved into the house while listening to the tale of death and found himself looking off the hallway into a well-lighted den. His keen eyes noted that while most of the shelves were gay with the lurid jackets of adventure fiction, one section was devoted to works on psychology and psychiatry.
Here were the tomes of Freud, Adler, Jung, Brill, Bergson, Krafft-Ebing, and lesser lights. A book lay open on a small reading table.