The Saint to the Rescue (26 page)

149

“T
HE
law is a
wonderful thing, I suppose,” Simon Templar
said in one of his
oracular moods. “I’ve done a lot of com
plaining about it in
my time, but if it had never existed I
wouldn’t have had all
the fun of breaking it. And it’s probably
a very fine idea that
all the wretched little people who can’t
take care of
themselves should be able to get a fair shake.
The trouble is that
the same machinery that prevents in
justice can also prevent justice.”

He could be more specific about this if
anybody wanted
to listen:

“If you want to guarantee a man the
benefit of any rea
sonable doubt, you also get a system with built-in
loopholes
that a sufficiently cunning lawyer can drive a bus
through.
And then you’ll have a certain number of lawyers who
specialize
in doing just that—who don’t give a damn how
guilty they know their
clients are as long as they can pay
the bill. In fact, who’d rather defend
a man who’s guilty as
hell, because the fee can be so much fatter.
There’s a lot of
boils on the cosmos alive and free today who’d be behind
bars or
under a slab if it weren’t for that kind of shyster.
Sometimes I think
those professional cheaters of the Law
should be hanged even
higher than their customers.”

The Saint did not have to mention what he had
done
himself to remedy some of the failures of formal jurispru
dence, for
by that time quite as much as was safe for him
was already known
about his freewheeling interpretation of
justice.

In those days, Mr. Carlton Rood was an
outstanding ex
ample of the type of attorney whose neck might have been
in
frequent jeopardy if the Saint’s heterodox theories of legal
responsibility
had prevailed in the statute books.

From the foundation of his first two
spectacular acquittals
had been built up a reputation for court-room
invincibility
that had become a legend of his generation. It was a
legend
that enjoyed some of the advantages of a chain reaction, for
every
successful defense could be counted on to draw new
crops of desperate
defendants to his office, and by this date
it had reached a
point where in any
cause
sufficiently
c
é
l
è
bre
it was
almost mandatory to retain Carlton Rood. Among his
grateful clients could
be listed some of the biggest names
that ever adorned a theatre marquee or
a police dossier, and
there is no doubt that they all received value
for their
money.

If there were any tricks of delay, confusion,
objection, and
obfuscation which Mr. Rood did not know, nobody else had
ever
thought of them either. On the principle that no case
was lost until the
last appeal had failed, he approached every
assignment with a
dazzling variety of technical devices pri
marily designed to
postpone any irrevocable result to the
remotest possible
future, before which prosecutors could lose their steam, judges could grow numb
with boredom, and inconvenient witnesses could be overtaken by clouding of the
memory or simply die of old age—if not otherwise helped off
the scene
by interested parties. But when in spite of all shenanigans he was brought to a
showdown, he had no peer
in the forensic techniques and pyrotechnics
of leading, mis
leading, tripping, trapping, twisting, bamboozling,
pleading,
bullying, hand-wringing, gamut-running, and plain ham
acting
that can be employed to obscure an issue or distort a fact.

He was a heavy-set heavy-featured man with a
luxurious
growth of silver hair which he cultivated to the
proportions
of a mane. The combination gave him a leonine and states
manlike
aspect of which he was fully aware and which he
exploited to the
utmost, enhancing them with.the gold-rimmed
pince-nez dangling on
a wide black ribbon, the string ties,
and the dark clothes of slightly
old-fashioned cut which are
part of the stock cartoon of a Southern
senator. On him they
looked right and extraordinarily impressive,
so that the most
hostile jury usually ended up listening to him with
respect,
in spite of the skeptical attitude which his own
publicity
had inspired in large cynical sections of the population,
which
inclined to the view that anyone who went to the expense
of hiring Carlton Rood should
be presumed guilty until ir
refutably proved
otherwise.

The verdict in Mr. Rood’s latest headline trial was being
awaited hourly on a certain day when Simon stopped
in
Biloxi on the Gulf Coast for gas.
While he was waiting for
his tank to
be filled, he saw a newspaper van pull up at a
tiny shop next door while the driver delivered a bundle of
papers. Simon walked over and went in as the van
drove
away, and found a stout
middle-aged woman fumbling with
the
string that held the package together.

“Can I help you?” he said
gallantly.

He deftly loosened the knot, and turned over the top paper.
The black type leaped to his eye like a blow:

SHOLTO ACQUITTED

It was a result that the Saint would have bet
considerable
odds
against, but for once his gift of prophecy must have
succumbed, to wishful thinking. Carlton Rood had done it
again. But the achievement was so startling that
Simon was
conscious of suppressing a
gasp, and may not have com
pletely
succeeded.

“Did he get off?” asked the woman.

She was looking right across the newspaper
when she
spoke, and Simon suddenly understood why she wore dark
glasses in
spite of the gloom inside the shop.

“I’m afraid so,” he said gently.
“Would you like to know
all the grisly details?”

“Thank you, but my niece’ll read it to me
when she gets
here from school. It doesn’t really matter how he did it,
if
he got off. I
thought this might be one time when he wouldn’t,
but I suppose that was too much to hope. I
have
been
hoping it, though—ever since he blinded me.”

She said this in such a matter-of-fact tone
that he won
dered momentarily if one or the other of them had slipped
a cog.

“How was that?” he prompted
cautiously.

“Oh, it was nearly twelve years ago,
when he was still
doing some of his own dirty work. They might have got him
for murder
then, if it hadn’t been for what happened to me.
You probably read
about it at the time. My name’s Agnes
Yarrow.”

Although there was little criminal news that
he had missed
since he began to make a notable amount of it himself,
and
his memory was prodigious, he would have had to admit
that he
could not always recall everything that had ever
happened in the annals
of gangsterism from a single refer
ence. But the blind woman quickly
relieved him of the need to ply her with questions.

“My husband and I had a small dry
cleaning business in
Mobile. Sholto was organizing a Laundry and
Cleaning Asso
ciation, as he called it. It was just a racket for him to
get ten
per cent of everybody’s business, but he let you know that
if you
didn’t sign up with the Association you wouldn’t have
any business. We were
the first to refuse to join. One day
Sholto came in and started spraying
acid out of a flit gun
over all the, clothes that were waiting to be
picked up. I
tried to stop him, and I got a squirt of acid in my face.
I
fell down screaming, and my husband came out of the back
room and
grabbed him. He took the flit gun away from him
and he could have
held him, he was a big strong man, but
Sholto pulled out a
gun and shot him dead and ran away.”

“But he was arrested later, and— Yes, I
remember now.
Carlton Rood defended him. It was one of his first
important successes. But now it comes back, it seems to me that Sholto
wasn’t
even tried for murder, only for the attack on you.”

“That’s right. I still don’t understand
it all, but the Dis
trict Attorney seemed to get an idea that if he could
convict
him of the attack first, it’d be much easier to convict him
of murder
afterwards. But if they couldn’t, they’d save the
expense of a much
bigger trial.”

“A fascinating idea,” said the
Saint. “I wonder if Carlton
Rood helped to give it to him.”

“I don’t know. But Sholto got off. He had
some sort of
alibi, and they couldn’t find anyone who’d seen him
leaving
the shop, I was the only one who could have identified him— and I’d lost
my sight. Of course, I’d heard his voice, too, but
that’s much harder.
His attorney made a complete fool of
me in court when it came to picking out
his voice from a
lot of others.”

Simon nodded.

“That seems to ring a bell. He had
private detectives with
tape recorders all over the country, scouting
for people with
voices like Sholto’s. He even hired professional mimics.
It
was one of the tricks that made him famous.”

“It worked, anyhow,” Mrs. Yarrow
said with a kind of
weary resignation. “It was months afterwards, and
you don’t
remember a voice the same as you do a face, at least not
when you’re more used to relying on your eyes.”

“But you’re absolutely sure, in your own
mind, that it was
Sholto?”

“I was absolutely certain, the first time
the police let me hear him talk. It was only afterwards that the lawyers con
fused me.
And it must have been him, mustn’t it? Look at
everything he’s done
since.”

The Saint could not bring himself to point
out that this
argument was the direct antithesis of some of the
fundamental
tenets of civilized legal doctrine, for it was an
attitude which
he had often taken himself.

Instead, he said: “Isn’t there any
chance of doing anything
for your eyes?”

“Nothing. They told me before I left the
hospital that I’d
never see again.”

“But that was a long time ago,” he
persisted. “Haven’t you
tried again since?”

She shook her head.

“I don’t see any use trying to keep
giving myself false
hopes. They were much too definite. And I’ve learned to
live
with it. But I still can’t stop wishing Sholto would get what
he
deserves.”

Simon paid for the paper and went back to the
car which
he seemed to have left in another chapter of his
existence,
so much had changed since he walked into the little
sundries
store.

It was not really such a wild coincidence
that he had thus
met Mrs. Yarrow and heard her story, for at the time he
had not been personally preoccupied with either Rood or Sholto.
Although he
could visualize them as theoretically intriguing
subjects for future
attention, his interest at the moment had
been only the lively
but abstract interest of any wide-awake
citizen, which would
also have encompassed the latest Holly
wood marriage or the latest
South American revolution. It
would have been no more important a
coincidence, mathematically, if the news vendor had turned out to have once
manicured
the film star or nursed the deposed President or
had any distant
connection with anyone else in the news.
The difference was
that in any other such situation the
Saint would have murmured some polite
cliches and quickly
forgotten the whole thing. Agnes Yarrow fell into another
cate
gory only because this was the kind of encounter which so
often
brought the Saint’s catholic but diffused concern for the Ungodly into sharp
focus on one or two particular specimens.