“So he suggested that the two of you sneak off and see if you could catch me at it?” She nodded.
“Then,” said the Saint, “you peeked in through the window and saw me with the exhibits on the dressing-table, and he said ‘What did I tell you?’... And then he said something like, ‘Let’s really get the goods on him now. You take this gun and walk in on him and keep him talking. If he thinks you’re alone he’ll probably say enough to hang himself. I’ll be listening, and I’ll be a witness to everything he says.’ Something like that?”
“Something like that,” she said huskily.
“And then the stage was all set. He only had to wait a minute or two, and shoot you. I was supposed to have suspected you already. I’d found a lot of incriminating evidence in your room. And then you’d walked in on me with a gun... While of course his story would have been that he was suspicious when you sneaked off, that he followed you home, and found you holding me up, and you were just about to give me the works when he popped his pistol and saved my life. Everyone would have said that ‘of course’ you must have been Smoke Johnny’s moll at some time, and nobody would ever have been likely to find the record of that marriage in Yuma unless they were looking for it — and why should they look for it? So you were out of the way, and he was in the clear, and I’d personally be his best, solid, hundred-per-cent witness that it was justifiable homicide. It would have made one of the neatest jobs that I ever heard of — if it had worked. Only it didn’t work. Because just as I knew you had a good alibi all the time, I knew that all this junk in your drawer had been planted there, and so I knew that I still had something else to look for — the real motive for all these things that were going on. Maybe I was lucky to find it so quickly. But even so, from the moment when you walked in, something exciting was waiting to happen... Well, it all worked out all right — or don’t you think so, Freddie?”
“You’ve got to get me a doctor,” Freddie said hoarsely.
“Do I have all the right answers?” Simon asked relentlessly.
Freddie Pellman moaned and clutched his arm tighter and raised a wild haggard face.
“You’ve got to get me a doctor,” he pleaded in a rising shout. “Get me a doctor!”
‘Tell us first,” insisted the Saint soothingly. “Do we know all the answers?”
Pellman tossed his head, and suddenly everything seemed to disintegrate inside him.