“There wasn’t any clue,” said the Saint. “No clue at all. Every clue had been very carefully cleaned up. And I was too busy to see that the first clue might be there.”
“You’ll have to explain that.”
“When you leave clues, you don’t necessarily book yourself to the gas chamber. But when you clean up clues, you may do just that. Because the blank spaces show your own guilty conscience. A clue isn’t a death warrant, because it’s only circumstantial. If I dropped in here and killed you and went out again, I might leave a lot of clues — and none of them would mean anything. A scientific detective might sweep the carpet and put the dust under a microscope and find celluloid dust in it, and say, ‘Ha! Someone has been here who’s been in contact with motion picture film; therefore the villain is someone from a studio.’ So what? So are hundreds of people... Or I might leave a book of matches from the House of Romanoff, and the inspirational detective would say, ‘Ha! This is a man of such and such a type who goes to such and such places’ — regardless of the fact that I might have bummed the matches from a chauffeur who bummed them from somebody else’s chauffeur whose boss left them in the car. I might never have been in the House of Romanoff in my life... Now I don’t know what was cleaned off Ufferlitz’s carpet, or what matches were taken away, or anything else, but I do know one clue that was cleaned up that tells a story.”
“This is fascinating,” she said. “Go on.”
“The ashtrays were emptied,” he said.
She sipped her Martini.
“There might have been fingerprints on the cigarettes. Or... or the make of cigarette would tell who’d been there—”
“I’m not such an expert, but I wouldn’t want the job of trying to get fingerprints from old cigarette butts. They aren’t held right — you might get bits of three fingers, but never one complete impression. On top of which they’d be smudged and crushed and probably fogged up with ash. It’s a million to one you couldn’t get an identification. As for telling anything from the brand of cigarette — that may have worked for Sherlock Holmes, but you can’t think of a brand today that isn’t smoked by thousands of people. And most of them change brands pretty freely, too. But one thing could have stood out on those cigarettes, one thing that nobody could miss, that even the dumbest amateur would have had to do something about.”
“What was that?”
He said, “Lipstick.”