"You've got quite a sense of humor, Mr—"
"Simon Templar," he said quietly, while the bartender was turning away to select a bottle.
Her perfectly penciled eyebrows rose in perfectly controlled surprise.
"Simon Templar?" she repeated accurately. "Then you must be — Here, let me show you."
She reached away to remove a newspaper from under the nose of a recuperating Rotarian on the other side of her. After a moment's search, she re-folded it at an inside page and spread it in front of the Saint.
Simon saw at a glance that it was the early morning edition of the Times-Tribune, and read the item with professional appraisal.
It was not by any means the kind of publicity that he was accustomed to, having been condensed into four paragraphs of a middle column that was overshadowed on one side by the latest pronunciamento of the latest union megaphone, and on the other by a woman in Des Moines who had given birth to triplets in a freight elevator. But it did state quite barrenly that an unidentified burned body had been found on the shore road east of Virginia Point by "Simon Temple, a traveling salesman from Chicago". The police, as usual, had several clues, and were expected to solve the mystery shortly.
That was all; and the Saint wondered why there was no mention of the name that the dying man had given him, or his gasped reference to the Blue Goose, and why Lieutenant Kinglake had been so loath to give out with any leads on the night life of Galveston. Perhaps Kinglake hadn't taken the Saint's question seriously at all…
Simon turned his blue steel eyes back to Olga Ivanovitch again, and gave her a light for her cigarette. Once more he was aware of her statuesque perfection — and perfect untrustworthiness.
He lifted his newly delivered dilution of anonymous alcohol.