Saint on Guard (8 page)

“Ten per cent of the value of the amount recovered, I believe.” Uttershaw’s glance was mildly interrogative in turn. “Is that the motive of your interest?”

“Partly,” said the Saint with a slight smile. “But only partly.”

He speared a fat young clam from its shell, dunked it in cocktail sauce, and savored its delicate succulence with unmitigated relish.

Uttershaw went through the same motions, but he went on looking at the Saint with a directness that contrived to be quite undisconcerting.

“I didn’t miss your exit line last night,” he said. “How much did the Linnet sing?”

“A little less than enough,” Simon said warily. “You heard about him?”

“I read a morning paper.”

“What did you think?”

Uttershaw hunched his shoulders faintly as he went for another clam.

“As a mere amateur at this sort of thing, I wondered whether he was punished for singing too much, or whether he was choked off before he really hit a tune. What’s your opinion?”

Simon let the question go unanswered while he tasted his sherry again, and when he put his glass down he seemed to have a convenient impression that he had already answered and could start again on another tack.

“He made quite a lot of headlines,” he observed idly.

“fie was quite a figure in his business, you know,” Uttershaw J said.

“You must have known him, of course.”

“Fairly well. He bought his iridium from my firm—in the good old days when we had some.”

“And then?”

Uttershaw spread his hands.

“Then, I suppose, the poor devil dipped into the black market, with the results already noted. You probably know much more about that than I do. How deeply was he mixed up in it?”

Simon waited until the sole was in front of them and he had enjoyed his first taste; and then he said directly, but with the same amiable presupposition of a common intelligence: “How would it be if you told me why I should tell you anything, before you ask too many questions?”

“That’s fair enough,” Uttershaw agreed easily. “As I explained last night, I’ve got a financial interest. ‘The loss of wealth is loss of dirt’, if you believe John Heywood—or should I have said Christopher Morley?—but it happens to be my dirt, and I think that’s a responsibility as well as a privilege. The other interest is —well, I’ve got to be trite and call it patriotic. Then, I like you as a person; and I’d like you to bring this off. I’d like to help you, if I could; but I don’t want to sound foolish by making great revelations which might be all old and stale to you.”

“For instance,” said the Saint, just as pleasantly, “what was the great revelation you had in mind?”

“I was wondering if you’d formed any definite conclusions about Ourley.”

Simon enjoyed more mouthfuls. He was hungry. But he didn’t miss any of the lines of sober anxiety in the other’s thinly sculptured face.

“He appears to be a little man with a large wife,” he said trivially.

” ‘And though his favorite seat be feeble woman’s breast’,” quoted Uttershaw mournfully. “Milton really does prefer them feeble, and with all that—shall we say?—giddiness of hers, Tiny Titania is as tough as her own stays. And while she likes her own dancing partners, she watches him like a hawk. He isn’t even allowed to have a typist under forty in his office.”

The Saint had a sudden strange creeping feeling in his spine.

“Does Milton take it and like it,” he asked, “or does he still manage to get his fun?”

LJttershaw shook his head deprecatingly.

“I wouldn’t know about that,” he said. “I told you we were never very close.”

“Didn’t he ever talk?”

LJttershaw pursed his lips as he brought a hand up to his lean jaw and stroked his face meditatively.

“There was one time …” he said slowly, and stopped.

“Yes?”

“Oh, hell, it doesn’t amount to anything. There was a stag affair at some escapist club for downtrodden business men that he belongs to, and he insisted on dragging me along. For some reason or other I couldn’t get out of it, or perhaps I didn’t think of an excuse quickly enough. Ourley … but it was all so alcoholic that it really doesn’t mean a thing.”

To the Saint, it felt as if the air about the table was charged with the static electricity of an approaching storm, but he knew that it was only a mystic prescience within himself which was generating that sense of overloaded tension.

“Suppose you give me a chance to decide that for myself,” he suggested genially.

“Well, Ourley was pretty tight—most of them were—and he cornered me and babbled a lot of damn foolishness. I guess getting out from under Tiny’s iron fist for even that one night had unsettled him, and given him delusions of grandeur. ‘In vino veritas’, I suppose. Anyway, he was in quite a Casanova mood. Told me he had a key that Tiny didn’t know about, and how he was really much too smart for her, and all that sort of thing. I didn’t pay much attention, and I got away as soon as I could. Next morning he called me up and explained that he’d had too much to drink, which was obvious, and said he’d been talking a lot of nonsense and would I forget it. I never gave it another thought, and of course I wouldn’t …” Uttershaw broke off, and smiled rather sheepishly. “But that’s just what I am doing, isn’t it?”

8 The Saint ate a little more, and scarcely noticed what he was doing. The creepy sensation in his backbone had spread out over his whole body, so that every bone in him felt faintly tingling and detached, and his brain was sitting up in a corner of the ceiling moving them with strings.

It was at that moment, for the first time, that a whole chain of the crazy pieces in his jigsaw fell together and began to make a section of a recognisable picture which did curious things to his breathing.

But all that was within himself again, and his face was a study in untroubled bronze.

“I wouldn’t worry about its going any further,” he said care-lessly; and the other nodded, but went on looking at him with a lightly interrogative frown.

“Naturally. But I can’t help wondering what made you ask.”

“It just came into my head,” said the Saint. “On the other hand, I’m wondering why you were thinking about Ourley.”

“This isn’t easy to say,” Uttershaw replied hesitantly. “But I do know from my business dealings with him—and you may have gathered the same impression yourself—that Milton is a bit ‘too grasping to care for mere delight’. And it seems to me that any man would need some very good reason for taking Titania to his bosom and keeping her there. … I know that some of Milton’s financial manipulations have been—well, what you might call complicated. At least, complicated enough for him to keep most of his holdings in his wife’s name.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“Quite sure. As a matter of fact, there are those who would believe that Tiny herself has had a lot to do with the planning and staging of some of those manipulations. There are skeptics who maintain that Tiny’s giddiness is more or less of a pose. Although if that’s true, the stakes must be very high for a woman to make such an awful caricature of herself.”

“If Tiny is Milton’s partner behind the scenes, and the duenna of the do-re-mi,” Simon remarked thoughtfully, “it must make his home life even more interesting.”

” ‘Dire was the noise of conflict’.” Uttershaw laughed shortly. “You know, I’m still embarrassed about going on with this.”

Simon moved his plate a little away from him with an unconscious gesture of finality, and reached for his Pall Malls. He extended the pack towards his guest, and said: “Let me try to help you. How far do you think Milton would go to create a new business life of his own?”

Uttershaw blinked before he bent to accept the Saint’s proffered light. He straightened up and exhaled his first puff of smoke a little gustily.

“I hadn’t even thought that far,” he said, and suddenly he looked shocked and strained. “Do you really mean what I think you’re getting at?”

“I was just asking.”

“But that’s unbelievable. No man could build up anything like this black market alone. He’d have to have at least some associates. And I mean plain criminal associates. A man like Ourley just wouldn’t have any connections like that.”

“Men like Ourley have had them before. It isn’t such a hell of a long time ago that speakeasy proprietors and bootleggers were quite social characters. You get to know a lot of queer people. Big business sometimes deals with queer people, when there are labor troubles or the competition gets rough. The impresarios who put on stag shows at escapist clubs for downtrodden business men move in and out of a world of queer people. Any man can make any connections he wants, if he wants them seriously enough.”

Uttershaw made a helpless sort of movement with his hands.

“It seems so fantastic—to think of Milton Ourley as a criminal master mind. Why, he’s—he’s–-“

“He’s what?” Simon prompted quietly.

“He’s such a dull, irascible, unimaginative, uninventive sort of windbag!” Uttershaw protested. “All he thinks about is how much money he’s got, or how much he might make if it wasn’t for Roosevelt; and what Tiny is doing with her latest gigolo or how he could be kept late at the office and go out on the town with the boys.”

“A master mind,” said the Saint didactically, “doesn’t always go around with an illuminated forehead. That’s the first thing to remember in this detective racket—if you read any stories. Besides which, he can really be just as stupid and boring as anyone else outside of his own field of brilliance. Why shouldn’t he be? The greatest bacteriologist in the world could look like a half-wit in a gathering of structural engineers. And he could even r be a pain in the neck at a soiree of other bacteriologists. He could be addicted to thunderous belching, or insisting on describing every stroke of his last golf game, without–-“

He broke off abruptly, and put a quick hand on the other’s arm. The warning shift of his eyes was quite a pamphlet of expla-nation.

Uttershaw looked where the Saint’s glance led him. And then his groan was so polite that it was almost inaudible.

He said, without moving his lips: “Talk of the devil.”

Simon nodded, keeping a smile of recognition on his face. He had seen her come in while he was talking, and with the grim certainty of impending doom he had watched her methodically sifting the room with her eyes like a veterinarian working over a shaggy dog with a steel comb.

Now, like a pirate galleon under full sail sweeping down upon a freshly sighted victim, Titania Ourley came cleaving through the tables, her plump and expensively painted face set in the overpowering smile of a woman who remains steadfastly convinced in spite of all discouragements that her charm and beauty will carry her serenely past all the reefs and snags in the sea of life.

” ‘Milton, thou shouldst be with us at this hour’,” Simon paraphrased under his breath, with a certain resignation.

” ‘Templar hath need of thee’,” Uttershaw continued for him sympathetically.

” ‘She is a wen’,” said the Saint, concluding the slaughter, and stood up to bow over the nearer of the two hands which she extended towards them with a prodigality that would have done credit to Mrs Siddons at her Westphalian best.

Perched on the forward top of her head she wore a confection of fur, feathers, and what appeared to be a bunch of slightly mildewed prunes. It nearly fell into the Saint’s coffee as she sat down, but she caught it in time and restored it to its point of balance with what looked like the insouciance of much practice.

“I felt I just had to see you and explain, Simon dear,” she said. “Milton’s behavior was so downright disgraceful last night— wasn’t it, Allen?”

Uttershaw tried to achieve some sort of pleasant and neutral vagueness; but the effort was hardly necessary, for Mrs Ourley had only paused for a swift breath.

“I’d thought that perhaps later we might get in a rumba or two with the Capehart—I’ve got simply stacks and stacks of records—but as it was you couldn’t even stay for dinner. And after I’d told Frankfurter—he’s our butler, and a perfect jewel of a butler if I ever saw one, and of course I’ve seen so many. But the way Milton acted. Well, really, it was a complete surprise to me. And after you’d taken the time and trouble to come all the way out to Oyster Bay and use up your gas and tires and everything to try and help him out of that terrible iridium mess. We had a dreadful spat about it last night, and I told him he was either too rude to live or as good as a traitor; and he said—well, you heard how he talks when he’s angry, and I can’t bring myself to repeat it. But I was so hoping I’d find you here so that I could tell you it wasn’t my fault.”

“I never thought it was,” said the Saint reassuringly, and was fortunately rescued from further contortions by the intrusion of a bellboy in search of Uttershaw for a telephone call.

“Excuse me,” Uttershaw said, with a tinge of humorous malice, and went gracefully away.

Mrs Ourley watched him go with a kind of middle-aged las-civiousness, dislocated her hat again as she turned back to the table, balanced it once more with the same nonchalant agility, and said: “Isn’t he the most charming man?”

“A nice character,” said the Saint.

“And he’s a divine dancer. And always so wonderfully tactful. I don’t know what I’d have done if he hadn’t been there last night. Milton is simply impossible when he gets into one of his moods. It’s a good thing they never last more than a few weeks. But really, Simon—I hope you don’t mind me calling you Simon, but I’m beginning to feel as if I’d known you for years—really, you must come out to dinner with us one night. I’ve got a simply wonderful cook—she makes pics that literally melt in your mouth, I mean literally melt.”

” ‘Simple Simon met a pieman, going to the fair’,” murmured the Saint, and immediately decided that this quotation mechanism was something that had to be taken firmly in hand.

“What? … Oh, you silly boy! Of course I didn’t mean anything like that. But my cook really is a treasure.”

“You look like a living tribute to her genius,” said the Saint with a straight face; and Mrs Ourley beamed.

“You say the sweetest things. But I was telling you about Milton. I know I shouldn’t talk about my own husband, but he’s ridiculously jealous. He …”