The Saint in Action (14 page)

There was someone in the porch by the front door.

The Saint stopped motionless, with a flitter of impalpable hailstones sweeping up his spine. As he walked with the torch swinging loosely in his hand, its arc of light had passed over a pair of feet, cutting them out of the darkness at the ankles. The glimpse had only been instantaneous, before the moving splash of light lost it again; but Simon knew that he had not been mistaken. He had switched out the torch instinctively before he grasped the full significance of what he had seen.

After a moment he took three soundless steps to the side and switched the light on again, holding it well away from his body. And for a second time he experienced that ghostly tingle of nerves.

For the man was sitting, not standing, on a low bench in the alcove beside the door, with his hands hanging down by his sides and his body hunched forward so that his face was buried in his knees. But although his features were hidden, there was something about the general appearance of the man that struck Simon with a sudden shock of recognition.

“Pargo!” said the Saint sharply.

The figure did not move, and Simon stepped quickly forward and raised its head. One look was enough to tell him that Ernie Pargo was dead.

VI

About the manner of his dying Simon preferred not to speculate too profoundly. He had actually been strangled by the cord that was still knotted around his throat so tightly that it was almost buried in the flesh of his neck, but other things had happened to him before that.

“I see anudder guy like dis once,” said Mr Uniatz chattily. “He is one of Dutch Kuhlmann’s mob, an’ de Brooklyn mob takes him over to Bensenhoist one night to ask him who squealed on Ike Izolsky. Well, when dey get t’ru wit’ him he is like hamboiger wit’out de onions–-“

“You have such fascinating reminiscences, Hoppy,” said the Saint.

He was laying Pargo’s limp body on the settee and arranging the relaxed limbs for the rough examination which he felt had to be made. It was not a pleasant task, and for all the Saint’s hardened cynicism it made his mouth set in a stony line as he went on.

In the brightness of the living room the dead man looked even more ghastly than he had looked outside —and that had been enough to make the darkness around the house suddenly seem to be peopled with ugly shadows and to make the soft stir of the leaves sound like cackles of ghoulish laughter. The Brooklyn mob could have learnt very little from whoever had worked on Pargo—Simon did not have to ask himself how they had known where to leave his body.

But when had it been done? There was no sign of rigor mortis, and Simon thought that he could still detect some warmth under the man’s clothes. The body certainly hadn’t been in the porch when they first arrived at the Old Barn. It might have been there when he went out only a few minutes ago, but it would have been easy not to notice it when going out of the door and moving away from the house. It seemed impossible that it could have been placed there during the short time he had been away; but he had circled around the building for some minutes to make sure, like a prowling cat, with every nerve and sense pricked for the slightest vestige of any lurking intruder, until he had to admit that it was a hopeless quest. If it had not been done then it could only have been done while he was talking to Jopley—or while the girl was there talking to him.

Whatever the answers were to those riddles, the happy-go-lucky irrelevance of the adventure had been brought crashing down to earth as if some vital support in it had been knocked away. There was no longer any question of coming in for the fun of the game: Simon Templar was in it now, up to the neck, and as he went further with his investigation of Pargo’s mangled body the steel chilled colder in his eyes.

Hoppy Uniatz, however, having possessed himself of a bottle from the kitchen during the Saint’s absence, was prepared to enjoy himself.

“Dat’s a funny t’ing now, boss,” he resumed brightly. “Dey is a dame wit’ de Brooklyn mob what is Izolsky’s moll, an’ she helps de boys woik on dis guy. She tells him funny stories while dey go over him wit’ an electric iron. She had class, too, just like dis dame tonight.”

The Saint straightened up involuntarily as Hoppy’s grisly memoirs hit a mark which he himself had been unconsciously avoiding. Now that the point was brought home to him, his first impulse was to shut it out again; and yet nagging little needle points of incontrovertible logic went on fretting at the opening that had been made.

The timetable made it impossible for her to have deliberately co-operated from the start in dumping the body where he had found it. But she might have met the dumping party on their way to the house and come in to hold him up while they were doing their job. She might have known from the beginning that the dumping was to be done. She might have had the information that had been tortured out of Pargo to lead her there, without the necessity of following the lorry as she said she had done. She might have seen the body in the porch before she let herself in through the unlocked door and come in unperturbed by it. In any case, as a confessed member of the gang that had done the job, was there any logical reason to presume that she knew nothing about their methods? Unsentimentally the Saint acknowledged that golden hair and a face like a truant princess were no proof of a sensitive and lovable character. It was a pity, but the world was like that… . The expression on his face did not change.

“She must have been a beauty,” he murmured absently.

“Sure, boss, she wuz de nuts. She wuz like a real lady. But I never could make de grade wit’ dese ritzy dames.” Mr Uniatz sighed lugubriously in contemplation of the unappreciativeness of the female sex, and then his gaze reverted to the figure on the couch. “Dis guy,” he said, gesturing with his bottle, “is he de guy we’re waitin’ for tonight?”

The Saint lighted a cigarette and turned away.

“That’s right,” he said. “Only we don’t have to wait any longer.”

“De guy from de goil’s mob?”

“Yes.”

“De guy who drives de foist truck we hijack?”

“Yes.”

“De guy who gives us de wire about dat truck tonight?”

“Yes.”

“De guy,” said Mr Uniatz, making sure of his identification, “what is goin’ to find out who is de big shot in dis racket?”

“That was the idea,” said the Saint curtly. “But I suppose he found out too much. He won’t tell us anything now, I’m afraid.”

Mr Uniatz wagged his head.

“Chees,” he said sympathetically, “dat’s too bad.”

For the first time he seemed to visualize the passing of Mr Pargo as a subject for serious regret. He studied the body with a personal interest which had been lacking in him before and reached for his bottle again to console himself.

Simon drew smoke monotonously into his lungs and breathed it out in slow trailing streamers. Pargo’s death was something that was passing into his own background by then. Anger and pity would do nothing now: his troubles were over, whatever they had been. There remained revenge—and that would be taken in due time, inexorably. The Saint was grimly resolved about that… . But that was another part of the background, an item in the unalterable facts of existence like the rising of the sun the next morning, too obvious to require dwelling on in the abstract.

Nor was he thinking of the chance that the same rising sun might find him taking no more active share in the proceedings than Pargo was. Certainly the dumping of the body was a proof that his anonymity was gone forever; but he had taken that risk voluntarily, before he knew about Pargo, when he let the girl and Jopley go. With his almost clairvoyantly accurate understanding of the criminal mind, he wasn’t expecting any further demonstrations that night: the body had been left there for an effect, and nothing more would be done until the effect had had time to sink in.

What he was thinking, with a different kind of coldbloodedness from that of Mr Uniatz, was that the passing of Mr Pargo was a setback which it wouldn’t be easy to make good. He had now the possible cooperation of Jopley, but that would be suspect for some time even if it materialized. The one proved spy he had had in the enemy’s camp had been hideously eliminated.

The Saint sat on the edge of the table and stared abstractedly at the body on the settee. If only Pargo could have got through to him before that happened with the information which he had paid for at such a price …

Pargo’s left arm slid off the edge of the sofa, and his hand flopped onto the carpet so that his limp wrist turned over at a horribly unnatural angle.

Simon went on looking at it, with his face as impassive as a mask of bronze.

“Some guy tells me once,” went on Mr Uniatz, seeking a solution, “dat if you look in a guy’s eyes what’s been moidered …”

The Saint seemed suddenly to have become very still, with his cigarette poised half an inch from his lips.

His examination of Pargo had been confined to the body itself and the contents of the pockets. The former had given nothing but confirmation to his first impressions, and the latter had been emptied of everything that might have given him any kind of information. Now with a queer feeling of breathless incredulity he was staring at something so obvious that he could hardly understand how he had overlooked it before, so uncannily like a direct answer from the dead that it made the blood race thunderously in his veins.

As the arm had fallen the sleeve had been dragged back from the grimy shirt cuff. And on the shirt cuff itself there were dark marks too distinct and regularly patterned to be entirely grime.

Simon moved forward and lifted the lifeless hand with a sense of dizzy unreality.

He was barely able to decipher the lines of cramped and twisted writing.

Their onto me Im done for—The stuff comes in Brandy bay His name is LASSER—I had to tell them—if you–-

There was no more than that; and even in the way it was written the Saint could feel the agony of the man scrawling those words with broken and shaking fingers, driven by who could tell what delirious impulse of ultimate loneliness.

Simon’s voice trailed away as the message trailed away, into a kind of formless silence.

Hoppy Uniatz gaped at him and then put down his bottle. He crowded over to squint at the writing with his own eyes.

“Say, ain’t dat a break?” he demanded pachyderma-tously. “Now if we knew who dis guy Lasser is–-“

“There’s one Lasser you ought to know,” said the Saint acidly. “He keeps you supplied with your favourite food. … My God!”

The immensity of the idea he had stumbled over almost rocked him on his feet, and a blaze came into his eyes as he recovered himself.

”Lasser—Lasser’s Wine Stores—the biggest liquor chain in the country! It’d be perfect! … Wait a minute—I’ve just remembered. There’s a picture of him somewhere–-“

He picked up a copy of the Sporting and Dramatic News from the table and tore through it in search of the correlation of that flash of random memory. It was on a page of photographs headed “The Atlantic Yacht Club Ball at Grosvenor House”—one of those dreary collections of flashlight snapshots so dear to the peculiar snobbery of the British public. One of the pictures showed a group taken at their table, with a fat, bald-headed, jolly-faced man on the left. The caption under it ran:

Among Those Present: Mr Grant Lasser, Miss Brenda Marlow …

The Saint had not read any farther. His eyes were frozen on the picture of the girl next to Lasser, for it was also the picture of the girl who had been holding him up half an hour ago.

VII

“Yes, I checked up on her,” said Peter Quentin, sipping his whisky and soda. “She lives in Welbeck Street, and she runs one of those ultra dress shops in Bond Street. You know the kind of thing—an enormous window with nothing in it but a chromium-plated whatnot with one evening wrap hanging on it and no price tickets.”

“It all fits in,” said the Saint soberly. “That load of dresses and whoosits that we knocked off a fortnight ago—that’s where they would have gone. She probably took a trip to Paris herself and spent a gorgeous week getting them together. What about Lasser?”

“Nothing that isn’t public property anyway. But I found out from Lloyd’s that he’s the owner of a 300-ton steam yacht called the Valkyrie. He’s also the owner of a house on Gad Cliff, and if you look at the map you’ll see that it overlooks Brandy Bay. It’s supposed to have been unoccupied and left in charge of a caretaker for about a couple of years, but we don’t have to take the caretaker too seriously.”

Peter Quentin had been a rather serious young man since the Saint had told him the complete story over the telephone that morning, and curiously enough he had refrained from making any of the obvious gibes which Simon had been fully prepared for. He had arrived late in the afternoon after what clearly could not have been an idle morning.

The Saint moved up and down the long living room of the Old Barn for a moment with the silent restlessness and pent-up energy of a caged tiger.

“I’ve been going over all that we had from Pargo,” he said, “and all the things we’d been trying to get sorted out before. And it all seems so simple now that it almost makes you howl.”

Peter didn’t interrupt him; and the Saint took another turn round the room and went on:

“What we’ve been up against all the time was that there seemed to be three separate gangs without any connecting link. There was one gang that brought the stuff across the Channel in some sort of ship. The stuff was brought ashore in small boats and handed over to the shore gang, and none of ‘em ever saw the ship that brought it in daylight. The ship always had her lights out, and they could never even find out the first thing about her. Pargo was one of the shore gang, and I’m beginning to think now that he ought to have known where the stuff was stored; but probably he was holding out on us to get as much money as he could. Anyway all the rest he knew was that the shore gang drove trucks to London and parked them wherever they’d been told to and went away, and somebody else came along later and picked up the truck and took it wherever it was going. That, presumably, was the third gang— the distributing gang. And none of the three gangs met anywhere except at the top, which we couldn’t get near.”