The Saint and the Happy Highwayman (2 page)

Simon raised his eyebrows without emotion.

“What did he do? Did he take up kidnapping, or is he another of these income-tax defaulters?”

She looked at him queerly for a moment, and when she laughed there was a sharp note of strain in the sound.

“The trouble is he knows too much about income tax. He’d be the star witness against Luckner if they could get his evidence.”

“And he doesn’t want to give it?”

“He doesn’t want to die,” said the girl brutally.

Simon put his feet up on the spare scat opposite him and smoked placidly. Coincidence was a queer thing, but he had ceased to marvel at its complexities. Once again, through that chance encounter, lie found the subject of Lucky Joe Luckner thrust into his mind, and the repetition gave it enough weight to make it stay there. But he was wise enough not to press the girl for any more details during the drive. In due course of time he would know all that he wanted to know; and he was prepared to wait. He would see Marty himself.

The cab stopped outside a dingy brick house between Ninth and Tenth avenues. A half-dozen grimy guttersnipes were playing raucous baseball in the street. The windows in the front of the house were clouded with the accumulated dirt of ages. Inside the front door, the dark hall was paved with a strip of threadbare linoleum, and Simon felt the slithery gloss of thick dust under his finger tips when he put his hand on the banister as they climbed the stairs to the second floor. His nose wrinkled in response to a faint pervasive odour of ancient cooking. And a slight frown creased itself into his forehead. He was still a long way from having all his questions answered. To find Marty O’Connor in a place like this, even as a hideout, was a mystery in itself —Marty who had always been such a swell dresser with a highly developed taste for spring mattresses and Turkey carpets and flashy decoration.

The girl opened the door and they went into the living room. The furniture there was in keeping with what anyone would have expected from a preliminary glance of the building—cheap, shoddy and shabby—but Simon noticed that unlike the rest of the place it appeared to be clean. Cora pulled off her hat.

“Hello, Marty,” she called. “I brought a friend to see you.”

Marty O’Connor appeared in the doorway of the bedroom. He was in his shirt sleeves, a shirt open at the neck, and he kept one hand in his pocket. He stared at the Saint blankly, and then his homely face broke into a slow gold-and-ivory grin.

“Well for … Where the hell did you come from?”

The Saint chuckled. Marty took his right hand out of his pocket for the first time and Simon grasped it.

“I wouldn’t have believed you could get any uglier, Marty, but you made it.”

The gunman hauled him towards a chair and sat him down. He looked a little less plump than he had been when the Saint saw him last, and there seemed to be a trace of hollowness in his unshaven cheeks; but the feckless twinkle in his faded eyes was the same as that by which Simon had first been beguiled from his antipathy for the ordinary run of hoodlums.

“I sure am glad to see you here again, Saint. It’s a long time since we had a drink together.” O’Connor dusted the table with his handkerchief and sat on it. He turned round. “Cora ! See if you got any of that gin left we had the other night … Say!” He looked at the Saint again, beaming with a simple pleasure that had temporarily wiped away the furtive defensiveness with which he had emerged from the bedroom. “Where you been all this time?”

“Here and there,” said the Saint vaguely. “I’ve covered a good deal of ground. Have you been looking after yourself ?”

“Not so badly.”

The girl came back into the room, bearing a garishly labelled bottle and three cheap glasses.

“It’s okay, Marty,” she said. “I told him.”

The gunman scratched his head. For a moment his heavy face sank back into its mask of dour suspicion. And then he grinned rather ruefully, like an unrepentant urchin.

“Well, ya know how it is, Saint,” he said apologetically.

Simon shook his head.

“That’s just what I don’t quite know.”

Marty tipped liquor into the three glasses and passed one of them over. He sat down again.

“Well …” He picked a half-smoked cigarette out of the ash tray and relighted it. “All the good business folded after repeal. Sure, you could always give somebody a bit of protection, but you couldn’t get the same dough. Besides, Luckner couldn’t keep the connections he used to have since the city got a new administration. Some of the mob took up kidnapping but that ain’t my idea of a man’s job. It got too dangerous at that. I just about decided the best thing was to go on the legit if I could find a job anywhere—and then this Luckner case blew up. Didya read about it in the papers?”

“I’ve heard of it.”

“I useta work with Luckner once—you know when. I never liked him, but it was just business. You know we nearly had a fight lotsa times when he was tryin’ to make Cora go out with him.”

“He never did any harm,” said the girl lightly.

“And that wasn’t for want of tryin’,” growled O’Connor. “Why, I never see a guy make such a play for a girl like he done for Cora. Why, he once told her he’d have me taken for a ride and marry her himself if she’d say the word.” Marty laughed in his throat, but the sound was without humour. “You only can trust that guy as far as you can trust a rattlesnake. Still, I wouldn’t stop him findin’ his own way outta this income-tax rap if he can do it. I hear the G-men wanted me for a witness—I useta keep his accounts once—so I pulled out and went underground. I know things that wouldn’t ‘ve let him get away with a hung jury last time. But what’s that worth?”

“It might have been worth a fresh start to you, Marty,” said the Saint speculatively.

The other grinned slowly.

“Yeah, a fresh start under a slab of marble. I wouldn’t lift a finger for Lucky if he was gonna burn tomorrer. But hell, I ain’t a squealer. Besides, you know what happened to Snaky Romaro and those other two guys what were going to give evidence?” Marty’s big mouth turned down at the corners with cynical significance. “I ain’t no Little Lord Fauntleroy, but I know Lucky, and I know his gang has orders what to do about any guy that turns up as a witness against him. So, Cora and me we come here where we figger nobody will ever look for us, and we stay here ever since. It ain’t been easy, with no dough comin’ in —but we’re still alive.”

The Saint’s blue eyes travelled slowly over the apartment again; took in the dingy carpet worn down almost to its backing, the wobble of the rickety table on which Marty had perched, the hideous upholstery of the gimcrack chairs.

“I suppose it would be difficult,” he said.

Marty nodded.

“We had our bit of luck,” he said. “I got a job the other day. Just wonderin’ what we we’re gonna do next. I remembered a pal of mine who went to Canada two-three years back and got himself a garage. He ain’t got so much money either, but he wrote back he could give me a job startin’ at twenny bucks a week if I could find my way up there. Cora went around and borrowed some dough—she had to be pretty careful ‘cause they’re lookin’ for her too, knowin’ she’d probably lead ‘em back to me. She went out an’ bought our tickets today—I guess that’s when you must of met her. So if I can get clear without bein’ stopped we oughta get along all right.”

Simon didn’t laugh, although for a moment the idea of Marty O’Connor, who had seen the big money and flashed it around as liberally as anyone else in his class, washing cars for twenty dollars a week was humorous enough. But he looked round the apartment again and his gaze came to rest on the face of the girl Cora with a certain understanding. He knew now what subconscious intuition had made him revise his casual opinion of her, even in those brief minutes in the taxi. Stranger things have happened in that unpredictable substratum of civilisation with which he had spent half his life.

“It’s a pity you can’t take some dough with you and buy a share in this garage business,” he said; and knew before he started to elaborate the suggestion into an offer that it would be refused.

Later on in the evening he had an even better idea, and he talked for half an hour before he was able to induce Marty to accept it. What argument it was that finally turned the scale he would have found it hard to remember. But once the Saint was on the trail of an inspiration he had a gift of persuasiveness that would have sold a line of rubber boots to a colony of boa constrictors.

Lucky Joe Luckner, recuperating from the ordeal of his trial in his hotel suite at Briarcliff, was still satisfied with his consistent good luck in spite of the two quiet and inconspicuous men who sat around in the hotel lobby all day and followed him at a discreet distance whenever he went out. He had no intention of jumping his bail. The drastic entry of the Department of Justice into the war with crime had made the role of a fugitive from justice even less attractive than it had been before. Luckner had never been a fugitive —he couldn’t imagine himself in the part. Quite confidently, he was waiting for an acquittal in his next trial which would leave him a free man without a single legal stain on his character; and if his attorney did not quite share this sublime confidence, he had to admit that the result of the first trial lent some support to it.

“Betcha they can’t box me in twenty years,” he declared boastfully, to his personal bodyguard.

The saturnine Mr Toscelli agreed encouragingly, which was one of his lighter duties, and Lucky Joe rewarded him with a slap on the back and a cigar. Few men are offended by hearing their boasts enthusiastically echoed, and Luckner was known to be rather more than ordinarily vulnerable.

He was a short, thickset man who looked rather more like a truck driver than a beer baron, with small close-set eyes and a big coarse laugh. His extravagances were of a type that ran to loud check suits, yellow spats, strangely hued hats and large diamonds; and he imagined that these outward evidences of good taste and prosperity were part of the secret of his hypnotic power over women. This hypnotic power was one of his more whimsical fantasies, but his associates had found it healthier to accept it with tactful solemnity. He boasted that he had never failed to conquer any woman whom he had desired to possess, and he had a convenient faculty for forgetting the many exceptions which tended to disprove the rule. But apart from this one playful weakness he was as sentimental as a scorpion; and the Saint estimated the probabilities with some care before he approached Lucky Joe in person.

If he had been cautious he would never have gone at all, but Simon Templar was a confirmed believer in direct action, and he knew exactly the strength of his hand.

He drove out to Briarcliff on a pleasant sunny day and sauntered up the steps under the critical eyes of a dozen disapproving residents who were sunning themselves on the terrace. The Saint could see no good reason why they should be disapproving, for he felt very contented with himself that morning and considered that he was more than ordinarily beautiful and definitely an ornament to the scenery; but he realised that the knowledge that Lucky Joe Luckner was a fellow guest must have cast a certain amount of cloud over the tranquillity of the other inmates of that highly respectable hostelry, and made his own excuses for their lack of visible appreciation. Perhaps they had some good reason to fear that a man with that loose and rather buccaneering stride and that rather reckless cut of face was only another manifestation of the underworld invasion which had disturbed the peace of their rural retreat, and in a way they were right; but the Saint didn’t care. With his hands in his pockets and his spotless white Panama tilted jauntily over one eye, he wandered on into the lounge and identified two blue-chinned individuals, who lifted flat fishlike eyes from their newspapers at his advent, as being more deserving of the reception committee’s disapproving stares than himself. There were also two large men with heavy shoulders nnd big feet sitting in another corner of the lounge, who inspected him with a similar air of inquiry; but neither party knew him, and he went up the stairs unquestioned.

The door of Luckner’s suite opened at his knock to exhibit another blue chin and flat fishlike stare similar to those which had greeted him downstairs. It stayed open just far enough for that, and the stare absorbed him with the expressionlessness of a dead cod.

“Hullo, body,” murmured the Saint easily. “When did they dig you up?”

The stare darkened, without taking on any more expression.

“Whaddaya want?” it asked flatly.

“I want to see Lucky Joe.”

“He ain’t here.”

“Tell him it’s about Marty O’Connor,” said the Saint gently. “And tell him he doesn’t know how lucky he is.”

The man looked at him for a moment longer and then closed the door suddenly. Simon lighted a cigarette and waited patiently. The door opened again.

“Come in.”

Simon went in. The man who had let him in stayed behind him, with his back to the door. Another man of similarly taciturn habits and lack of facial expression sat on the arm of a chair by the window, with one hand in his coat pocket, thoughtfully picking his teeth with the other. Luckner sat on the settee, in his shirt sleeves, with his feet on a low table. He took the cigar out of his mouth and looked at the Saint reflectively.

Simon came to a halt in front of him and touched two fingers to the brim of his hat in a lazy and ironical salute. He smiled, with a faint twinkle in his blue eyes, and Luckner glowered at him uncertainly.

“Well—what is it?”

The Saint put his cigarette to his lips.

“I just dropped in,” he said. “I wondered if you looked quite as nasty in the flesh as the stories I’ve read about you made you out to be. Also because I heard you’d be interested in any news about Marty O’Connor.”

“Where is he?”

Simon’s smile widened by a vague seraphic fraction.

“That’s my secret.”

Luckner took his feet off the table and got up slowly until he faced the Saint. He was six inches shorter than Simon but he thrust his lumpy red face up as close as he could under the Saint’s nose.