Free Saint Goes West by Leslie Charteris Page A

too, Esther.”
    Reluctantly, hesitantly, his harem melted away.
    Simon strolled leisurely across to a side table and lighted himself a cigarette as Freddie closed the door. He genuinely wasn’t perturbed, and he couldn’t look as if he was.
    “Well,” Freddie said finally, “how does it look now?” His voice was surprisingly negative, and the Saint had to make a lightning adjustment to respond to it.
    He said: “It makes you look like quite a bad risk. So do you mind if I collect for today and tomorrow? Two Gs, Fredнdie. It’d be sort of comforting.”
    Freddie went to the dressing-table, peeled a couple of bills out of a litter of green paper and small change, and came back with them. Simon glanced at them with satisfaction. They had the right number of zeros after the 1.
    “I don’t blame you,” said Freddie. “If that snake had bitten me—”
    “You wouldn’t have died,” said the Saint calmly. “Unless you’ve got a very bad heart, or something like that. That’s the silly part of it. There are doctors within phone call, there’s sure to be plenty of serum in town, and there’s a guy like me on the premises who’s bound to know the first aid. You’d have been rather sick, but you’d have lived through it. So why should the murderer go through an awkward routine with a snake when he had you cold and could’ve shot you or slit your throat and made sure of it? … This whole plot has been full of silly things, and they’re only just starting to add up and make sense.”
    “They are?”
    “Yes, I think so.”
    “I wish I could see it.”
    Simon sat on the arm of a chair and thought for a minute, blowing smoke-rings.
    “Maybe I can make you see it,” he said.
    “Go ahead.”
    “Our suspects were limited to six people the first night, when we proved it was someone in the house. Now, through various events, every one of them has an alibi. That would make you think of a partnership. But none of the servants could have poisoned your drink this afternoon, and it wasn’t done by the waiter or the bartender-they’ve both been at the club for years, and you could bet your shirt on them, Therefore somebody at the table must have been at least part of the partnership, or the whole works if there never was a partnerнship at all. But everyone at the table has still been alibied, somewhere in the story.”
    Freddie’s brow was creased with the strain of following the argument.
    “Suppose two of the girls were in partnership?”
    “I thought of that. It’s possible, but absolutely not probable. I doubt very much whether any two women could collaboнrate on a proposition like this, but I’m damned sure that no two of these girls could.”
    “Then where does that get you?”
    “We have to look at the alibis again. And one of them has to be a phony.”
    The corrugations deepened on Freddie’s forehead. Simon watched him silently. It was like watching wheels go round. And then a strange expression came into Freddie’s face. He looked at the Saint with wide eyes.
    “My God!” he said. “You mean-Lissa …”
    Simon didn’t move.
    “Yes,” Freddie muttered. “Lissa. Ginny’s got a perfect alibi. She couldn’t have shot at me. You were with her yourself. Esther might have done it if she’d hidden a gun there before. But she was in your room when somebody threw that snake at me. She couldn’t have faked that. And the servants have all gone … The only alibi Lissa has got is that she was the first one to be attacked. But we’ve only got her word for it. She could have staged that so easily.” His face was flushed with the excitement that was starting to obstruct his voice. “And all that criminology of hers … of course … she’s the one who’s always reading these mysteries-she’d think of melodramatic stuff like that snake-she’d have the sort of mind…”
    “I owe you an apology, Freddie,” said the Saint, with the utmost candor. “I didn’t think you had all that