Saint on Guard (12 page)

“She can’t sing about us,” Varetti retorted. “She doesn’t know anything.”

There were tiny little beads of moisture on his face. Simon could see them as he drew closer still.

“Oh, no?” he said in a voice of silken needles. “What makes you think the boss never talked to anyone except you? What makes you so sure he never told her anything? Are you quite ready to take your chance on what she’ll spill when I talk to her?”

Varetti laughed, in a sort of nervous triumph.

“You won’t ever talk to her! The boss is taking care of–-“

He was exactly that far when Kestry and Bonacci arrived, turning a key in the door and entering with a rush, rather like a pair of stampeding hippopotami, which in other respects they slightly resembled.

They came in with their guns drawn, and Simon stepped back to give them room to take over, without even glancing at them or shifting his gun until they had the scene under control. There was the snick-snack of handcuffs, and the Saint still didn’t move at once.

“Thank you,” he said; and his eyes were still on Varetti.

“That’s okay, pal.” The big bulk of Kestry shouldered across his view, heavy-jawed and unfriendly-eyed. “How did you get here?”

For the first time Simon looked at him, and put the gun away in his pocket.

“It’s my room,” he mentioned calmly. “I was here when they arrived. Now you can take them away. They bother me.”

“They won’t bother you any more. They’re both three-timers, an’ they’ll get the book thrown at them.”

“That’s fine,” said the Saint cynically. “Unless they get the right lawyer. They’ve probably done it before.”

“They won’t do it this time. Not after they’ve sung. And they’ll sing.” Kestry was certain and unemotional like a rock, and no more changed or changeable. He said, without any alteration of stance or stare: “I still want to know more about you.”

“Why don’t you read a newspaper?”

“You just put a gun in your pocket. That makes it a concealed weapon. Where did you get it, an’ where’s your permit?”

The Saint put his cigarette to his lips and drew at it with a light easy breath.

“Fernack told you what to do,” he said. “If you want to write in a new scene for yourself, you’re on your own. Otherwise, I wish you’d just drag the bodies out. I’m in a hurry.”

Kestry’s eyes were bitter and glistening, the Saint’s cool and bright like chips of sapphire with indefinable gleams of insolence shifting over them. It was a clash from which tinder might have been ignited at close range. But the measure of Kestry’s defeat, and the value of its future repercussions, were plain in the heavy viciousness with which he turned back to his captives.

“Let’s get ‘em out of here, Dan,” he said.

He grasped Varetti’s arm in a ham-like fist and yanked him off the couch, while his partner performed a similar service for Walsh. Cokey let out a yelp as the steel bracelets cut into his wrists.

“Shut up, you,” growled Bonacci. “That ain’t nothing to what you’re gonna get.”

He shoved the two men roughly towards the door.

Kestry took a last pointless look around, and followed. How-evcr, he turned to favor the Saint with one lingering farewell glower.

“It still don’t seem right to be goin’ out of here without you,” he said; and the Saint smiled at him sweetly.

“You must drop in again,” he murmured, “and get used to it.”

He waited until the door had slammed after the departing populace, and then he picked up the telephone and called Centre Street.

Inspector Fernack must have gabbled his evidence and rushed back to his office like a broker returning from lunch during a boom, for he was on the wire as soon as Simon asked for him.

“This is the Voice of Experience, Henry,” he said. “Your beef trust has just oozed out, taking Cokey and Ricco with them. I think they’ll make noises eventually, so you can take your boots off and get ready to hear them vocalise. Now while you and the boys are getting cosy with them, I’ve got one final little job to do. So if you’ll excuse me …”

“Hey, wait a minute!” The anguish in Fernack’s voice was almost frantic. “If you’ve got any further information, you ought to–-“

“My dear Henry, if I waited around to do all the things I ought to, I’d be wasting as much energy as you spend on your setting-up exercises.”

“I don’t do any setting-up exercises!”

“Then you certainly ought to. That fine manly figure of yours must be preserved. Now I really must get busy, because you’ve got plenty on your hands as it is, and I don’t want you to have another murder to worry about.”

“You let me worry about my own worrying,” Fernack said grimly. “All I want to know is what else you know now.”

“You didn’t get the significance of the lock?”

“What lock?”

“Never mind,” said the Saint. “It will dawn on you one of these days. Now I really must be going.”

“But where?” wailed the detective.

The Saint smiled, and blew a slender smoke-ring through a teasing pause.

“I’ll leave a note for you at the desk here. You climb on to your little bicycle and come and pick it up.”

“Why not give it to me now?”

“Because I want to be there first. Because I want a little time to set the stage. And because cops rush in where Saints are smart enough to wait. Be patient, Henry. Everything will be under control … I hope. I’m just trying to make it easy for you. And please, when you get there, do me the favor of listening for a minute before you thunder in. I don’t want to be interrupted in the middle of a tender passage… . Goodbye now.”

He hung up in time to disconnect a jolt of verbal heat and explosion that might have threatened the New York Telephone Company with a general fusing of wires between the Murray Hill and Spring exchanges, scribbled rapidly on a sheet of paper, and sealed it into an envelope and wrote Fernack’s name on it while he waited for the service elevator.

“Get this to the desk, will you?” he said to the operator as they rode down. “To be called for.”

The timekeeper let him out, and he emerged from the side door on to Fortyfourth Street, walking east. In a few strides he turned into the Seymour Hotel, and walked quickly up the corridor towards the lobby. There he stopped for a minute, waiting to see if anyone entered after him. It was always possible that Kestry might have brooded enough to wait for him, or even that the ungodly themselves might have another representative lurking around. But no one followed him in within a reasonable time; and that part of the chase was won. For the Seymour ran cleat through the block, and he went out on to Fortyfifth Street and stepped into a passing taxi with reasonable assurance that he was alone.

The clock in his head ran with sidereal detachment and precision, and on that spidery tightrope of timing his brain balanced as lightly as a shadow.

He had had to put everything together very quickly and coldly; and yet it seemed to him now that he had always known just where each person who mattered would be, from instant to instant, as though they had been linked to him by threads of extrasensory perception. But he had to be right. He had to be right now, or else he had thrown away all the completeness of what he had tried to do.

And with that sharp sting of awareness in his mind he walked into the lobby of the hotel where he had left Barbara Sinclair.

He nodded to the desk clerk who had signed them in, and rode up in the elevator to her floor. He knocked on the door, and waited a little while. He said: “Saks Fifth Avenue, ma’am. A COD package for Mrs Tombs.”

12 He waited a little longer, and then the door opened two or three inches, and he saw a narrow panel of her face—hair like a raven’s wing, a dark eye, and carmine lips.

He went in.

“I wondered what had happened to you,” she said.

“I had lunch. I met some friends.”

His eyes strayed over the room with the most natural unconcern, but they missed nothing. Actually it was in an ashtray that he saw the proof that at least half of his timing had been right, but his glance picked up the detail without pausing.

Barbara Sinclair moved to a deep low chair by the window and sat down, curling one shapely leg under her. Her other foot swung in a short off-beat rhythm, so that every interrupted movement of it gave him a measure of the effort of will-power that was maintaining her outward composure.

“Has anything else happened?” she asked.

“Just a few things.”

“Have you found out anything?”

“A little… . You know, this isn’t such a bad place, is it? I must remember it next time some visiting fireman is asking me where to stay with his concubine.”

He was strolling about the room as if he were estimating the general comfort of it and incidentally taking his time over choosing a place to sit down.

“It’s not one of the tourist taverns, so he’d be pretty safe from the risk of an awkward meeting with one of the home-town gossips. And it’s very discreet and respectable, which ought to put the lady in the right mood. There must be nothing like a dingy bedroom and a leering bellhop to damp the fires of precarious passion.”

He arrived in front of a bookcase on which stood a tall vase of chrysanthemums filled out with a mass of autumn oak leaves. He stood with his back to the room, approving them.

“Chrysanthemums,” he murmured. “Football. Raccoon coats. The long crawl to New Haven. The cheers. The groans. The drinks.” He shook his head sadly. “Those dear dead days,” he said. “The chrysanthemums are here, but the gridiron scholars are boning up on the signals for squads right. And as for driving to New Haven without any bootleg gas coupons … But they are pretty.”

“The management sent them up,” she said. “I’m afraid I didn’t think I was spotted as a concubine. I wondered if they thought we were honeymooners.”

He laughed sympathetically, and took the automatic out of his breast pocket and nested it in amongst the leaves, still covering the vase with his back, while he was pretending to make improvements in the arrangement of the bouquet.

Then he turned again to look at her, and said: “It’s too bad, isn’t it? We never had that honeymoon.”

“We would have had it, you know, if you hadn’t been quite so clever about getting rid of me.”

“I have a feeling of irreparable loss.”

Her lovely face seemed to grow dark and warm from within as her long lashes dipped for a moment. Then she raised them again in a slow stare that could have had many sources.

“You really hate me, don’t you?”

He shook his head judicially, his brow wrinkled by a frown that was very vague and distant.

“Not so much.”

“You don’t like me.”

He smiled easily, and started to open a fresh pack of cigarettes.

“Like you? Darling, I always thought you were terrific. I would have loved our honeymoon. But unfortunately I haven’t any of the instincts of the male scorpion. I never could see consummation and immolation as interchangeable words. And I wasn’t nearly so anxious to get rid of you as you were to get rid of me— permanently.”

“I didn’t–-“

“Know?” Simon suggested. “Perhaps not. Perhaps. But your boy friend did. And you must admit that he’s clever. Within his own class, anyway. Clever enough, for instance, to set you up in that fancy tenement because it might always be useful to have a pretty girl on call to entertain the tired business man—or decoy the simple sucker. That is, when he didn’t want her himself. A very happy way of combining business with pleasure, if you ask me… . Or is it rude of me to insist on this masculine viewpoint? Should I have thought of a girl friend instead—some nice motherly creature who …”

He raised a hand as she started out of the chair with dark eyes blazing.

“Take it easy,” he drawled. “Maybe I was just kidding. It’s obvious that the bag I found in your apartment was a man’s. But so were the pajamas that were hanging in the closet where I heaved Humpty and Dumpty.”

Her hand went to her mouth, and her exquisite features suddenly sagged into a kind of blank smear. It was absurd and pitiful, he thought, how a few words could transform a lovely and vital creature into a haggard woman with neck cords that streaked her throat and eyes that were hollow and lusterless with fear.

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said.

“I’ve heard more original remarks than that,” he said. “But if it’s any help to you, I don’t know what you mean either. I didn’t say the pajamas had any name embroidered on them—or did I?”

She sank back on to the edge of the chair, her hands clasped in her lap, not comfortably or relaxed, but as if she had only paused there in the expectation of having to move again.

He slid a cigarette forward in his pack and offered it to her. In the same solicitous way, he lighted it for her and then lighted one for himself. He drew slowly at it, not savoring the smoke, and looking at her, and wondering why in a world so sadly in need of beauty he should have to be talking to her in this way and know that this was the only way to talk, and that was how it was and there was nothing else to do.

He said, with a slight but sincere shrug: “This isn’t a fight. It might have been a beautiful honeymoon. But maybe it just wasn’t in the cards. Anyway, it’ll have to wait now.”

She said: “I suppose so.”

He said: “It’s no use stalling much more. You were supposed to have made up your mind about telling me something. Have you made up your mind?”

She winced and looked down at the tangling and untangling fingers in her lap. She looked up at him, and then down again at her hands. Her mouth barely moved.

She said: “Yes.”

“Well?”

“I’ll tell you.”

He waited.

“I’ll tell you,” she said, “sometime this afternoon.”

“Why not now?”

“Because …”

The Saint took a great interest in the tip of his cigarette.

“Barbara,” he said, “it may not occur to you that I’m giving you a lot more breaks than the rules provide. I never was a nut on technicalities, but the fact remains that you’re a technical acces-sory. You know the man I want to talk to, the man who holds the key to most of this dirty business. You know that everything you keep back is helping him to get away with—literally—murder. And you spend the hours you’ve been here alone struggling with your conscience to arrive at the tremendous decision that you’ll tell me all about it—at your own convenience.”