Call for the Saint (8 page)

“Den why,” he asked, “don’t dey give ya de woiks last night?”

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” said the Saint slowly. “Unless they’re taking their time to cook up a much bigger and better frame… . Big Hazel has a whisky bottle with my fingerprints on it now, and there wasn’t a thing I could do to stop her getting away with it. She really had me off balance-I was so busy turning down a drink that I was sure would be a knockout that the other angle just went by under my nose.”

He blew another smoke ring very deliberately, devoting everything to the perfection of its rich full roundness, while he tried to make his inward thoughts match the calm of his outward movement.

“Also,” he said, and he was really talking to himself, “it seemed to me that there was just the slightest sinister emphasis -just the merest trace of it-in the way Big Hazel talked about having women in the hotel. I wonder …”

He picked up the telephone and called Monica Varing’s hotel, but her room didn’t answer.

They had parted on a tentative agreement to lunch again, and it was not likely that anyone so punctual as she was would be careless about an engagement. Probably, he told himself, she had gone shopping.

He called again every half hour until one-thirty, and stayed in his own room for fear of missing her if she called him.

It was not an afternoon to remember with any pleasure or any pride. He must have walked several miles, pacing the room steadily like a caged lion and taking months of normal wear out of the carpet. He tried to tell himself that his imagination was running away with him, that he was giving himself jitters over nothing. He told himself that he should have kept Monica entirely out of it, that he should never have let her learn anything, that he would only have himself to blame if she tried to steal the play from him. He saw her all the time in his mind’s eye, a composite of all her tantalizing facets-sultry, impish, arrogant, venturesome, languorous, defiant, tender. He felt angry and foolish and frightened in turn.

Mr. Uniatz worked on his BB marksmanship with untroubled single-mindedness. He could learn nothing from the Saint’s face, and to him the operations of the Saint’s mind would always be a mystery. It was enough for him that there was a mind there, and that it worked. All he had to do was carry out its orders when they were issued. It was a panacea for all the problems of life which over the years had never failed to pay off, and which had saved untold wear and tear on the rudimentary convolutions of his brain.

At five o’clock Simon remembered that Monica might have a matinee, and verified it from the newspaper. He walked to the Martin Beck Theatre and went in the stage door.

“Miss Varing ain’t on this afternoon,” said the doorman. “She’s sick.”

With lead settling in his heart, Simon sought out the stage manager.

“That’s right,” said the man, who remembered him. “She called me this morning and said she wouldn’t be able to go on. She said if I hadn’t heard from her by this time she wouldn’t be doing the evening performance either.”

“She isn’t sick,” said the Saint. “She hasn’t been in her hotel all day.”

The stage manager looked only slightly perturbed. He said nothing about artistic temperament; but his discretion itself implied that he could think of plausibly mundane explanations.

Simon took a taxi to the Ambassador and finally corralled an assistant manager whom he could charm into co-operation. A check through various departments established that room service had delivered breakfast to Monica Varing’s apartment at nine, that she had been gone when the maid came in at eleven. But her key had not been left at the desk, and no one had seen her go out.

“No one knows they saw her,” Simon corrected, and asked his last questions of the doorman.

Already he knew what the answer would be, and wondered what forlorn hope kept him trying to prove himself wrong.

“An old ragged woman, looked like she might be a beggar?

… Yes, sir, I did see her come out. Matter of fact, I wondered how she got in. Must have been while I was calling someone a cab.”

“On the contrary,” said the Saint, with surprising gentleness, “you opened the door for her yourself.”

He left the man gaping, and went back into the hotel to call Lieutenant Kearney.

CHAPTER TWELVE
The boiler room in the basement of the Elliott Hotel was not quite as bleak as the description implies. This was only because the description does not mention several rows of hard wooden benches, the bodies of several dozen apathetic occupants of them, a few paper decorations left over from some previous Christmas, and the platform at one end where Stephen Elliott was filling in with some merry ad-libs as the Saint found his way in.

“And-ah-as the stove said to the kettle, I hope you’re having a hot time.” Nobody laughed, and Elliott went on: “We want you to enjoy yourselves, friends, and the next item on tonight’s program is a song by Mrs. Laura Wingate.”

He handed Mrs. Wingate up to the platform, and the connection between his two statements became somewhat obscure as the piano began to tinkle out an uncertain accompaniment and Mrs. Wingate cut loose with an incredibly piercing and off-key soprano.

“My heart is like a singing bird
Whose nest is in a watershoot,
My heart is like an apple tree
Whose boughs are bent with thick-set fruit—”

Stephen Elliott was taking Mrs. Wingate’s place beside a tall thin man to whom she had been talking when she was called. As Simon edged up behind them, he recognized the tall thin shape as Lieutenant Alvin Kearney.

“I’m sure I don’t know what it’s about,” the detective was saying, in a voice that had no need to drop its level to avoid interfering with the earsplitting stridencies that were welling from Mrs. Wingate’s throat. “For all I know, it may be just another of his funny gags. But I’d look plenty silly if anything happened and I wasn’t here.”

Elliott took out a handkerchief and patted his temples, while Mrs. Wingate continued to liken her heart to various other improbable objects.

“I don’t know anything about it,” he said mildly. “But if he’s working on a case—”

“Oh, is he?” Kearney snapped that up with the avidity of a starving shark. “What case?”

Elliott hesitated.

“I really can’t say,” he replied at last. “Why don’t you ask him?”

“Yes, why not?” Simon, agreed, and they both turned.

Kearney’s lips thinned over his teeth as he met the Saint’s affable smile. There was no thoroughly defensible reason for his reaction, yet it was a basic reflex which in its time had produced fundamentally identical effects upon such widely separated personalities as Chief Inspector Teal of Scotland Yard, Inspector Fernack of New York City, Lieutenant Ed Condor of Los Angeles, Sheriff Newt Haskins of Miami, and many others who will be remembered by the unremitting followers of this saga. It was perhaps something that sprang from the primal schism of law and disorder, an aboriginal cleavage between policeman and outlaw whose roots were lost in the dank dawns of sociology.

Lieutenant Alvin Kearney of Chicago liked the Saint, admired him, respected him, envied him, and hated him with an inordinate bitterness that loaded stygian tints into his scowl as he rasped: “All right, wise guy, you tell me. What was the idea phoning me to meet you here tonight because there might be a riot?”

“I guess it was a form of stage fright,” said the Saint, with an aplomb which made Kearney feel as if he had two days’ growth of beard and a dirty neck. “I’m not very used to these personal appearances, and I felt nervous. You can’t tell what an audience like this might do, so I thought I should have some protection.”

What the detective thought would have been inaudible even in the volume of voice which his congested face portended, for at that moment Mrs. Wingate’s vocal analysis of her heart attained a screeching fortissimo that almost scraped the paint off the walls.

“My heart is gladder than all these,
Because-my lo-o-ove-has come to me!”

As silence finally settled upon tortured eardrums, there was some perfunctory applause. It was rather nicely adjusted to show grateful appreciation without encouraging an encore. Since apparently the coffee and doughnuts would not be served until after the entertainment, the audience could not walk out, but it did not have to be hysterical.

Mrs. Wingate panted and bowed twitteringly to the very last handclap, which naturally came from Stephen Elliott.

“Thank you, thank you, my dear friends… . And now I see that our special guest of the evening has arrived, and I’m going to ask him to come up here and say a few words to you. It is a great privilege to be able to introduce-Mr. Simon Templar.”

Simon stepped up on the platform to the resigned acclamation of the coffee-and-doughnuts claque. He raised Mrs. Wingate’s pudgy hand to his lips, and ushered her off in giggling confusion. Then he made a sign of dismissal to the piano player.

“I’m not going to sing,” he said.

While the accompanist withdrew, he waved cheerfully to the gaping Lieutenant Kearney, and ran friendly blue eyes over the faces of the rest of the audience. A few of them looked like the respectable struggling poor, some were ordinary shiftless down-and-outs; these would be bona fide beggars, helpless victims of the King’s racket; and undoubtedly there were others who worked directly for the King. Big Hazel Green was nowhere in evidence, but he saw Frankie Weiss sitting a few rows back from the dais.

“Ladies, gentlemen, and others,” Simon began. “Some of you may have heard of me. Some of you may not. I’m sometimes known as the Saint.”

He waited till the low resultant buzz died down, and little dancing devils of mischief showed in his eyes.

“I won’t make a long speech,” he said. “I know you’re probably anxious to get at the refreshments. Anyway, I’m no good at speeches. I’d rather show you a few tricks which might come in useful; since it’s been brought to my attention that some of you have been victimized by unscrupulous extortionists, which is a polite name for some dirty racketeering rats.”

He ignored the dead silence that suddenly brimmed the room, and went blandly on.

“Now I’m sure it wouldn’t need Detective Lieutenant Kearney, who is also here with us tonight, to remind you that carrying concealed weapons is illegal. But it’s quite possible for a man to protect himself without carrying firearms. One good judo hold is often worth as much as a gun. So for the benefit of some of you who might want to defend yourselves one day, I thought I’d demonstrate a few for you. If I’m to show them properly, of course, I’ll need a volunteer to work with.”

There was no rush to volunteer. Mrs. Wingate chirped brightly: “Come on, somebody!” Stephen Elliott stood up and beamed around with vaguely schoolmasterish encouragement.

Simon pointed a finger.

“You. No, not you-I mean the gentleman with the mustache. You look able to defend yourself. How about giving me a hand?”

Frankie Weiss huddled deeper on the bench and shook his head.

“Oh, come now,” Simon insisted. “You never know when a little judo might come in handy. How do you know you won’t meet some goon with a gun one of these days? Here!”

He bounced down from the stage and hurried up the aisle. Frankie tried to ignore everything, but the Saint was as irresistible as a radio interviewer. His hand appeared to stroke lightly over Frankie’s arm and pause there. Only those in the immediate vicinity heard Frankie’s yelp of pain, immediately smothered by the Saint’s laughter.

“The man’s got muscle!” he announced jovially. .“You’ll give me a fight, won’t you, my friend? Come on, don’t disappoint the audience.”

He practically yanked Frankie out of his chair and caught him in a hold that left the man completely helpless, his legs in the air and his neck imprisoned under the Saint’s arm.

“Just like that,” Simon proclaimed. “Let’s go up on the stage where the audience can enjoy it. We’ll try it again more slowly.”

He retraced his steps as resiliency as though he were not burdened with a tight-lipped glaring assistant.

Lieutenant Kearney moved to get a better view. His face was a study in perplexed, suspicion. Common sense told him that there was more in this than met the eye, but he couldn’t guess what it was; and Simon hoped the detective’s mind would continue, for a little while, to move slowly. He had his hands full with Frankie Weiss, who was struggling like a bear cat and growling imprintable inarticulacies which were fortunately smothered in the Saint’s coat.

Laura Wingate gazed up in a glow of girlish eagerness, twisting her hands together in her overflowing lap. Stephen Elliott clung to a benign if somewhat nervous smile. The rest of the audience was divided between those who merely sensed a welcome variation in the schedule of innocent entertainment, those who derived personal gratification from the choice of the victim, and a smaller group of hard-featured hombres who seemed to be sweating out a purely private anguish of frustrated indecision.

“Let’s do it again,” Simon lectured, releasing his victim. “More slowly now. Watch!”

Frankie showed his teeth. He ducked away from the Saint, felt a long arm snake around his waist, and, turning swiftly, drove a vicious punch at Simon’s groin. The Saint evaded it easily.

“Fine!” he exclaimed. “That’s right. Fight me-make it look realistic. Now I’ll do it slowly.”

He did it slowly; and Frankie presently found himself involved in another excruciating posture from some manual of satanic yogi.

His mouth nearly touching Frankie’s ear, Simon breathed: “Where’s Monica Varing?”

“Let go of me! You goddam—”

“Sh-h! Lieutenant Kearney’s out in front, Frankie. Don’t give him any ideas.”

The Saint wrenched slightly, eliciting a howl of pain from Frankie, and brought him back to his feet with dislocating solicitude.

“Everyone get that?” he asked. “Now let’s try another one. This is harder.”

He collared Frankie and tied him in an even more complex knot.

“What about Monica?”

“You son of a—”

“If you think I won’t break your arm,” the Saint whispered icily, “you’re crazy. I can say it was an accident. I can even break your neck.”