“But that makes the other time all haywire.”
“Could be. I said, maybe the cook never heard the shot. She went to sleep again.”
Simon consumed his cigarette meditatively for a few seconds. Then he looked at Condor again with a slight lift of one eyebrow.
“On the other hand,” he remarked, “can anyone swear that Ufferlitz made that call? Maybe the murderer made it himself, just to confuse you. Maybe you ought to be very suspicious of anybody who has got a perfect alibi for eight minutes of two.”
Condor stared at him for a while with unblinking intentness, and then the barest vestige of a smile moved in under his long drooping features. It literally did that, as if the surface of his face was too stiffly set in its cast of abject melancholy to relax perceptibly, and the smile had to crawl about under the skin.
“That,” he said, “is the first thing you’ve said that sounds like some of the stuff I’ve heard about you.”
“So far,” murmured the Saint, “you’ve seemed to want me for a suspect more than a collaborator.”
“I gotta suspect everybody.”
“But be reasonable. Ufferlitz just gave me a job for a thousand dollars a day. I don’t know now whether I’ve got a job any more. Why would I kill that sort of meal ticket? Besides, I never met him before lunch-time yesterday. I’d have to have hated him in an awful hurry to work up to shooting point by last night.”
Condor wrinkled his nose.