8
He was alone in the house. Freddie Pellman had taken the girls off to the Coral Room for dinner, and Simon’s stall was that he had to wait for a long-distance phone call. He would join them as soon as the call had come through.
“You’ll have the place to yourself,” Freddie had said when he suggested the arrangement, still glowing from his recent accolade. “You can search all you want. You’re bound to find something. And then we’ll have her.”
Simon finished glancing through a copy of Life, and strolled out on the front terrace. Everything on the hillside was very still. He lighted a cigarette, and gazed out over the thin spread of sparkling lights that was Palm Springs at night. Down below, on the road that led east from the foot of the drive, a rapidly dwindling speck of red might have been the tail light of Freddie’s car.
The Saint went back into the living-room after a little while and poured himself a long lasting drink of Peter Dawson. He carried it with him as he worked methodically through Esther’s and Ginny’s rooms.
He wasn’t expecting to find anything in either of them, and he didn’t. But it was a gesture that he felt should be made.
So after that he came to Lissa’s room.
He worked unhurriedly through the closet and the chest of drawers, finding nothing but the articles of clothing and personal trinkets that he had found in the other rooms. After that he sat down at the dresser. The center drawer contained only the laboratory of creams, lotions, powders, paints, and perfumes without which even a modern goddess believes that she has shed her divinity. The top right-hand drawer contained an assortment of handkerchiefs, scarves, ribbons, clips, and pins. It was in the next drawer down that he found what he had been waiting to find.
It was quite a simple discovery, lying under a soft pink froth of miscellaneous underwear. It consisted of a .32 automatic pistol, a small blue pharmacist’s bottle labeled “ Prussic Acid — POISON,” and an old issue of Life. He didn’t really need to open the magazine to know what there would be inside, but he did it. He found the mutilated page, and knew from the other pictures in the layout that the picture which had headed the letter that Freddie had shown him at their first meeting would fit exactly into the space that had been scissored out of the copy in front of him.
He laid the evidence out on the dresser top and considered it while he kindled another cigarette.