'I see,' said the sergeant quite blankly, returning the wallet. 'Now if you'll just sit down over there, Mr Templar, the Gal-veston police will be here directly. It's only a couple of miles across the Causeway, and you can lead the way to the spot.'
'Aren't you going to call out the posse to chase the murderers?' Simon suggested. 'If they brought a horse for me, I could save some of my gas ration.'
'You got something there,' said the sergeant woodenly. 'I'll call the sheriff's office while we're waitin'.'
Simon Templar groaned inwardly, and saw it all closing around him again, the fantastic destiny which seemed to have ordained that nothing lawless should ever happen anywhere and let him pass by like any other peaceful citizen.
He fished out another cigarette while the second call was being made, and finally said: 'I'm beginning to hope that by the time you get out there the seagulls will have beaten you to it and there won't be any body.'
'There'll be one if you saw one,' opined the sergeant confidently. 'Nobody'll likely come along that beach road again today. Too early in the season for picnics, and a bad day for, fishin'.'
'I trust your deductive genius is on the beam, Captain, but at least two other parties have been on that road today already--the victim and the murderers.'
'Sergeant,' grunted the other. 'And I don't know how you come to be on that road yet.'
Simon shrugged, and spread his hands slightly to indicate that under the laws of mathematical probability the point was unanswerable. Silence fell as the conversation languished.
Presently there was a noise of cars arriving, and installments of the Law filtered into the house. The sergeant put down his crossword puzzle and stood up to do the honors.
'Hi, Bill. . . . Howdy, Lieutenant Kinglake. . . . 'Lo, Yard. . ., . Hiyah, Dr Quantry. . . . This is the man who reported that burned corpse. His name is Templar and he's a doodler.'
Simon kept his face perfectly solemn as he weighed the men who were taking charge of the case.
Lieutenant Kinglake was a husky teak-skinned individual with gimlet gray eyes and a mouth like a thin slash above a battleship prow of jaw. He looked as if he worked hard and fast and would want to hit things that tried to slow him up. Yard, his assistant, was a lumbering impression from a familiar mould, in plain clothes that could have done nicely with a little dusting and pressing. Dr Quantry, the coroner, looked like Dr Quantry, the coroner. Bill, who wore a leather windbreaker with a deputy sheriff's badge pinned on it, was middle-aged and heavy, with a brick-red face and a moustache like an untrimmed hedge. He had faintly popped light-blue eyes with a vague lack of focus, as if he was unused to seeing anything nearer than the horizon: he moved slowly and spoke even slower when he spoke at all.
It didn't take Kinglake more than a minute to assimilate all the information that the sergeant had gathered, and to examine Simon's identification papers. He stopped over the line drawing which reminded him of the figures of boxers which he used to draw in the margins of successive pages of his Fiske's history and riffle to simulate a sparring match.
'Doodler?' he said in a sharp voice. 'I----' He broke off as his eyes widened and then narrowed. 'I've seen this picture before. Simon Templar, eh? Are you the Saint?'
'I bow to your fund of miscellaneous information,' Simon responded courteously.
'Meaning?'
'That I am known in certain strata of society, and to a goodly number of the carriage trade, by that cognomen.'
'Ah.' Detective Yard spoke with an air of discovery. 'A funny man.'
'The Saint, eh?' rumbled the sheriff's deputy, with a certain deliberate awe. 'Gee, he's the Saint.'
'He said he was a doodler,' persisted the sergeant.
Dr Quantry consulted a gold watch in exactly the way that Dr Quantry would have consulted a gold watch, and said: 'Gentlemen, how about getting on?'
Lieutenant Kinglake held the Saint's eyes for another moment with his hard stare, and gave back the wallet.
'Right,' he snapped. 'Cut out the eight-cylinder words, Mr Templar, and lead us to the body. You can leave your car here and ride with me. Yard, tell the ambulance driver to follow us. Come on.'
Simon turned back to the sergeant as the party trooped out.
'By the way,' he said, 'the word for 'a hole in the ground' is w-e-1-1, not what you have. Goodbye, Inspector.'
He climbed resignedly into the seat beside Kinglake, reflecting that there was nothing much you could do when Fate was running a private feud against you, and that he must be a congenital idiot to have ever expected that his business in Galveston would be allowed to proceed as smoothly as it should have for anyone else. He got a very meager satisfaction out of rehearsing some of the things he would have to say to a certain Mr Hamilton in Washington about that.
2 The mortal remains, as our school of journalism taught us not to call them, of Mr Henry Stephens lay precisely where Simon had left them, proving that the sergeant at Virginia Point had been right in one contention and no one had come along that road in the meantime.
Lieutenant Kinglake and the coroner squatted beside the body and made a superficial examination. Detective Yard took his cue to demonstrate that he was something more than window-dressing. He began searching the area close to the body, and then thoroughly quartered the surrounding acre in ever-widening circles like a dutiful mastiff. Slow and apparently awkward, perhaps a little on the dull side, he was meticulous and painstaking. Bill the deputy sheriff found a convenient horizon and gazed at it in profound meditation.
Simon Templar stood patiently by while it went on. He didn't want to interfere any more than he had already; and for all his irrepressible devilment he never made the mistake of underestimating the Law, or of baiting its minions without provocation or good purpose.
Dr Quantry eventually straightened up and wiped his hands on his handkerchief.
'Death by carbonisation,' he announced. 'Gasoline, apparently. It's a miracle that he was able to speak at all, if this is how Mr Templar found him. . . . Autopsy as a matter of course. Give you a full report later.'
The hard-eyed Lieutenant nodded and got to his feet, holding out the Saint's topcoat.
'This is yours, Templar?'
'Thanks.'
Dr Quantry beckoned to the ambulance crew.
'Remove,' he ordered briskly. 'Morgue.'
Kinglake made his own inspection of the crown of the road where Simon showed him he had first seen the body.
'He didn't do all that burning here--the surface is hardly scorched,' he concluded, and turned to wait for the approach of his assistant.
Detective Yard carried some souvenirs carefully in his handkerchief. They consisted of a partly burned crumple of newspaper, nd an ordinary match folder bearing the name of the 606 Club in Chicago. Kinglake looked at the exhibits without touching them.
'Galveston paper,' he said; and then: 'When were you last in Chicago, Templar?'
'A few days ago.'
'Ever been to the 606 Club?'
'As a matter of fact, I have,' said the Saint coolly. 'I'm making a survey of the United States on the subject of stage and floor-show nudity in the principal cities in relation to the per capita circulation of the Atlantic Monthly. It's a fascinating study.'
Lieutenant Kinglake was unruffled.
'What's the story, Yard?'
'There's a spot about twenty yards in off the Gulf side of the road where the reeds are all trampled down and burned. Can't tell how many men made the tracks, and they're all scuffed up by the deceased having crawled back over them. Looks as if a couple of men might have taken the deceased in there, and one of them could have poured gas or oil over him while the other lit the paper to set fire to him so as not to have to get so close like he would've had to with a match. Then they scrammed; but there aren't any distinguishable tire marks. Victim must have staggered around, trying to beat out the flames with his hands, and- found his way back to the road where he collapsed.'
