Simon meditated over his cigarette. It was a question that he had been about ready to ask himself.
“Partly because I don’t have anything much else to do just at this moment,” he said at length. “And this is pretty much in my lap. Partly because the guy who bumped off Byron has probably cheated me out of an amusing experience — not to mention an interesting amount of dough. Partly because it’s a rather fascinating problem, in a very quiet way. A murder without clues and without alibis — so beautifully simple and so beautifully insoluble. There has to be a catch in it somewhere, and I collect catches.”
“But you aren’t a policeman. You’re supposed to have very unconventional ideas about justice. Suppose you decided that the murderer had a thoroughly good reason to kill Mr Ufferlitz?”
“I’d still want to know who did it. It’s like having to know the answer to a riddle.”
He couldn’t tell her that while all that was true, the most important reason was that in everything but the leaving of a skeleton Saint figure pinned to Mr Ufferlitz’s back, the murder seemed to have been staged with the considered intention of having the Saint accused of it, and to Simon Templar that was a challenge which could not be let pass. The Saint had for once been minding his own inoffensive business, and somebody had gratuitously tried to get him into trouble. Therefore somebody had got to be shown what an inferior inspiration that had really been.
His financial interest was actually the least of all, but there were other reasons why he was anxious to hear the official statement of Mr Braunberg that afternoon.
The attorney arrived almost as soon as they got back, and hurried busily into the late Mr Ufferlitz’s private office, calling Peggy Warden after him and closing the door.
The Saint sat on a corner of Peggy Warden’s desk and eased open the nearest drawer. He knew that he would not have to look far for what he wanted, and as it happened he found it at the first try — an indexed loose-leaf book of private addresses and telephones. He could probably have asked her for the information, but it was even more convenient to get it without advertising. He copied the locations of Lazaroff and Kendricks, Orlando Flane, and Jack Groom on to a slip of paper, and he had just finished and put the directory back when Lazaroff and Kendricks came in.
Kendricks shook his hand solemnly and said, “Congratulations, pal. I knew you’d do it. What a masterful way to deal with a producer! You should have come to Hollywood sooner — it would have been a different town.”
“About four weeks sooner would have suited me,” said Lazaroff. “When I think of all the cooperation we put in on that lousy script—”