“Hullo there,” he said quietly.
There was no answer as he crossed to the lighted doorway. As soon as he reached it he could see why. The room was Mr Ufferlitz’s study, and Mr Ufferlitz was there, but it was quite obvious that no one would have to cooperate with Mr Ufferlitz anymore.
4
Mr Ufferlitz sat at his mahogany desk, which was about the size of a ping-pong table. His head was pillowed on the blotter, which had not proved sufficiently absorptive to take care of all the blood that had run out of him. Simon walked round the desk and saw that Mr Ufferlitz’s back hair was a little singed around the place where the bullet had gone in, so that the gun must have been held almost touching his head; probably most of the upper part of his face had been blown out, because blood had splashed forward across the desk and there were little blobs of gray stuff and white chips of bone mixed with it.
The larger splotches of blood were still shiny, and the chewed end of a cigar that lay among them was still visibly damp. So the Saint estimated that the shot couldn’t have been fired more than an hour ago. At the outside.
He looked at his watch. It showed exactly two o’clock.
The house was absolutely silent. If there were any servants in, their quarters were far enough away for them to have been undisturbed.
Simon stood very quietly and looked around the room. It had an air of having been put together according to a studio designer’s idea of what an important man’s study should look like. One wall was lined with bookshelves, but most of the books wore dark impressive bindings with gilt lettering, having undoubtedly been bought in sets and most probably never read. The bright jackets of a few modern novels stood out in a clash of color. There were a couple of heavy oil paintings on the walls. Scattered between them were a number of framed photographs with handwriting on them. They were all girls. One of them was April Quest, and there was another face that seemed faintly familiar, but the inscription only said “Your Trilby.” Obviously these were symbols of Mr Ufferlitz’s new career as a producer. The room itself had the same appearance — Mr Ufferlitz had hardly been in the business long enough to have built the house himself, but he had clearly selected it with an eye to the atmosphere with which he felt he ought to surround himself.
The one thing that was conspicuously lacking was any sort of clue of the type so dear to the heart of the conventional fiction writer. There might have been fingerprints, but Simon was not equipped to look for them just then. On the desk, besides the blotter and Mr Ufferlitz’s head and samples of his blood, brains, and frontal bones, there was a fountain pen set, a couple of pencils, an evening paper, a couple of scripts and some loose script pages, a dentist’s bill, a liquor price list, and a memorandum block on which nobody had thoughtfully borne down on the last sheet torn off with a blunt pencil so that the writing would be legible on the next page in a slanting light. On a side table by the fireplace there were some old weeklies, but no copies of The Hollywood Reporter — which meant nothing, because the executive subscribers to this daily record of the movie industry usually receive it at their offices. The only indication of anything unusual at all was the ashtrays. There were three of them, and they had all been used, and they were smeared with ash and carbon to prove it, but they had all been emptied — and not into the fireplace or the wastebasket.
Simon thought mechanically, like an adding machine: “A servant didn’t empty them, because he’d have wiped them as well. Byron didn’t do it, because he wouldn’t have carried the ashes out of the room. Therefore the murderer did it, and took the debris away with him, so that his cigarette stubs wouldn’t be held against him. I guess he doesn’t believe in Sherlock Holmes and what he would do with a microscope and what’s left in the trays. He could be right, at that...”