ungodly trail him when one of them was already with him to note all his movements? He had left Olga Ivanovitch in his car outside the Times-Tribune building, as he said, for a front and a cover: it hadn't occurred to him that she might be a front and a cover for others of the ungodly. She sat there covering the front while they took the precaution of covering the other exits. When he came out by the back alley, they followed. When he went to the City Jail, they remembered Vaschetti and knew that that must have been the man he had gone to see. Therefore one of them had waited for a chance to silence Vaschetti; and when Vaschetti was released and led back to the Campeche, the opportunity had been thrown into their laps. It had been as mechanically simple as that.
And Olga Ivanovitch had done a swell job all the way through. All those items went interlocking through his mind as he stood at the desk inside and faced an assistant manager who was trying somewhat flabbily to look as though he had everything under perfect control.
Simon flipped his lapel in a conventional gesture, but without showing anything, and said aggressively: 'Police Department. What room was Vaschetti in?'
'Eight-twelve,' said the assistant manager, in the accents of a harassed mortician. 'The house detective is up there now. I assure you, we----'
'Who was with him when he jumped?'
'No one that I know of. He was brought in by one of the men from the Times-Tribune, who redeemed his check. Then the reporter left, and------'
'He didn't have any visitors after that?'
'No, nobody asked for him. I'm sure of that, because I was standing by the desk all the time. I'd just taken the money for his check, and told Mr Vaschetti that we'd like to have his room in the morning; and I was chatting with a friend of mine----'
'Where are the elevators?'
'Over in that corner. I'll be glad to take you up, Mr----'
'Thanks. I can still push my own buttons,' said the Saint brusquely, and headed away in the direction indicated, leaving the assistant manager with only one more truncated sentence in his script.
He had very little time to spare, if any. It could be only a matter of seconds before the accredited constabulary would arrive on the scene, and he wanted to verify what he could before they were in his hair.
He went up and found 812, where the house detective could be seen through the open door, surveying the scene with his hands in his pockets and a dead piece of chewing cigar in the corner of his mouth.
Simon shouldered in with exactly the same authoritative technique and motion of a hand towards the flap of his buttonhole.
'What's the bad news?' he demanded breezily.
The house detective kept his hands in his pockets and made a speech with his shoulders and the protruding cud of his cigar that said as eloquently as anything: 'You got eyes, ain'tcha?'
Simon fished out a pack of cigarettes and let his own eyes do the work.
It didn't take more than one wandering glance to rub in the certainty that he was still running behind schedule. Although not exactly a shambles, the room showed all the signs of a sound working over. The bed was torn apart, and the mattress had been slit open in several places, as had the upholstery of the single armchair. The closet door stood wide, and the few garments inside had been ripped to pieces and tossed on the floor. Every drawer of the dresser had been pulled out, and its contents dumped and pawed aver on the carpet. The spectacle was reminiscent of the Saint's own room at the Alamo House--with trimmings. He wouldn't have wasted a second on any?searching of his own. The search had already been made, by experts.
So someone already had Vaschetti's diary; or else no one was likely to come across it there.
The Saint scraped a match with his thumbnail and let the picture shroud itself in a blue haze.
'What about the men who were up here with Vaschetti?' he asked.
'I never saw anyone with him,' responded the house dick promptly.
He had a broad beam and an advancing stomach, so that he had some of the air of a frog standing upright.
'I didn't get your name,' he said. 'Mine's Rowden.'
'You didn't hear any commotion up here, Rowden?'
'I didn't hear a thing. Not until the crash Vaschetti made going through the marquee. I didn't even know he was back out of jail until just now. Where's Kinglake? He usually comes out on death cases.'
'He'll be along,' Simon promised, with conviction.
There was one fascinating detail to consider, Simon observed as he narrowed down the broad outlines of the scene. In the middle of the strewn junk on the floor there was an almost new gladstone bag, empty and open, lying on its side. He moved to examine it more closely.
'Anybody else been up here?' he inquired.
'Nope. You're the first. Funny I don't know you. I thought I'd met all the plainclothes men in Galveston.'
'Maybe you have,' said the Saint encouragingly.
Indubitably that was the gladstone which he had heard about. It even had the initials 'HSM' gold-stamped beside the handle. But if there had ever been an ostrich-skin leather case in the lining, it wasn't there any more. The lining had been slashed to ribbons, and you could have found a long-lost pin in it.
It was a picturesque mystery-museum piece, but that was all The current questions were, how had it come to rest there, and why? Johan Blatt had removed it from the Ascot; and by no stretch of imagination could his description have been confused with that of the latest failure in the field of empirical levitation. Vaschetti and Blatt were even more different than chalk and cheese: they didn't even begin with the same letter.
Simon Templar pondered that intensely for a time, while the house detective teetered batrachianly on his heels and gnawed on his bowsprit of cigar. The house detective, Simon thought, would surely have been a big help in detecting a house. Aside from that, he was evidently content to let nature and the Police Department take their course. He would have made Dick Tracy break out in a rectangular rash.
They remained in that sterile atmosphere until the sound of voices and footsteps in the corridor, swelling rapidly louder, presaged the advent of Lieutenant Kinglake and his cohorts.
'Ah,' said Detective Yard wisely, as he sighted the Saint.
Kinglake didn't even take time out to show surprise. He turned savagely on the frog-shaped house detective.
'How in hell did this bird get in here?'
'I came in under my own power,' Simon intervened. 'I was thinking of moving, and I wanted to see what the rooms were like. Don't blame Rowden. He was trying to tell me about the wooden mattresses. If you look again, you'll see where he was even ripping them open to show me the teak linings.'
The Lieutenant was not amused. He had never looked like a man who was amused very often, and this was manifestly not one of his nights to relax in a bubble bath of wit and badinage.
He glared at the Saint balefully and said: 'All right, Templar. You asked for it. I told you what was going to happen to you if you didn't keep your nose clean in this town. Well, this is it. I'm holding you as a material witness in the death of Nick Vaschetti.'
The arch of the Saint's brows was angelic.
'As a witness of what, Comrade? The guy bumped himself off, didn't he? He stepped out of a window and left off his parachute. He'd heard about the Galveston Police, and he knew that the most precious legacy he could bequeath them was an absolutely watertight suicide. What makes you leave your ever-loving wife warming her own nightie so you can come here and improve your blood pressure?'
Kinglake's mouth became a thin slit in his face, and his neck reddened up to his ears; but he kept his temper miraculously. The blood stayed out of his slate-gray stare.
'Why don't you save the wisecracks for your column?' he said nastily. 'You've been mixed up in too many fishy things since you've been here----'
'What makes you assume that I was mixed up in this?'
'You talked to Vaschetti in the City Jail this evening. You arranged for him to be sprung, and you arranged to meet him here. I call that being mixed up in it.'
'You must be psychic,' Simon remarked. 'I know I got rid of your Mr Callahan. Or who told you?'
'I did,' said the voice of the Times-Tribune.
He stood in the doorway with a vestige of apology on his mild stolid face. Simon turned and saw him, and
