The Saint to the Rescue (21 page)

“Then what actually did make you
suspicious?”

“First off, only my own low dishonest
mind. If I’d stood
and watched the Red Sea open for the Israelites, the
first thing I’d’ve wondered about was how it might have been
faked. Now,
the way that pier of yours is built is probably
a perfectly common
method of construction, but to me it
suggested plumbing. And that gave me
the idea that in a
tubular tangle of that kind, nobody else might notice a
couple of
extra pipes—one of ‘em joined into a piling to take
the pumped-up bay
water back where it came from, and
the other running back to shore to
connect with your house
supply. Then I tried to figure out how a crook
could switch
the flow—”

“And how could he?”

“With a base plate set in the dock, to
which he would bolt
the base of his ingenious gizmo, using outsize bolts that
he
took from his pocket and put back there, and which were
the only
incidental equipment that nobody got a good look at. Bolts which I’m certain
are hollow, with outlets in the
right places, so that when you screw them
down they be
come the most miraculous part of your invention. One of
‘em
side-tracks the salt water you’re pumping up, and the
other takes in the
fresh water which is one of the civic
amenities for which you are privileged to pay taxes on this
dump.”

“And on this imaginative basis
alone—”

“No, I’m not supernatural. I didn’t have
any more to start
with than an interesting doubt. But before I carried it to
the bitter end—which included a rather minute study of
the pipe connections
underneath your pier last night—I’d
convinced myself with a rather more
arbitrary test.”

“And what was that?” Nemford
inquired, with the in
tensest unfeigned interest.

“I’d tasted your manufactured fresh
water,” said the Saint. “I happen to have rather sensitive taste
buds, which I have
raised on a diet of the best vintage wines. They aren’t so
familiar with water, unless it was splashing down a mountain trout
stream. But they can still recognize the tang of
chlorine in a city
supply.”

Nemford sucked at his pipe, holding a match steadily over
the bowl.

“You deserve all the things I’ve heard
about you,” he said.
“But why didn’t you say any of this
yesterday?”

“I was interested to see how the scenario
would work out.
If you won’t think I’m being patronizing, I’d call it a
kind
of nostalgia. I admired a lot of touches in your technique.
You handled the financial
angles brilliantly—just the right
pressure
where it would do the most good. And I know
you’ll do well with those
traveler’s checks you were talking
about—you
can cash them abroad in so many places where
they don’t ask questions.”

Doc Nemford made a deprecating gesture.

“I’m trying to make a living, like the
rest of us, Saint.”

“And I’m not greedy. I told Jobyn I
thought you had a
good deal, because I figured that would bring Hamzah back
with a higher bid, and so I’d be keeping Jobyn out of trou
ble. But
at the same time it was a help to you, and my dear
old grandmother taught
me never to take part in a swindle
unless I made something out of it for
myself.”

Doc Nemford nodded philosophically.

“How much do you want?”

“I’ll settle for fifty thousand dollars,
which I earned for
you anyhow, so you shouldn’t begrudge it. And you can
write
Jobyn a letter and tell him you’re sorry to renege on the
deal but
you couldn’t resist that extra dough—and see that
you’ve left town
before he receives it.”

Nemford took from his wallet a small sheaf of
cashier’s checks, selected one, and indorsed it on the back to the order
of Simon
Templar.

“You’re a lot fairer than I thought you’d
be,” he said. “In
fact, I didn’t think you’d let me get away
with anything if
you were wise to me.”

“Frankly, if the victim had been almost
anyone else, I
wouldn’t, Doc. But now for the rest of my life I can dream
of the expression on Nasser’s face, when Hamzah arrives with
his
trophies and they find out what they’ve bought. I shall
feel that
I’ve personally done something about Foreign Aid,”
said the
Saint.

121

“A
LL
I can
say,” Kathleen Holland said inadequately, “is that he’s a
creep.”

“The world is crawling with them,”
smiled the Saint sym
pathetically. “But unfortunately it isn’t a statutory offense
yet.
And if I tried to exterminate them all
myself, just on general
principles, I
wouldn’t have any time left to steal a living.
There has to be something specific about his creepiness.”

“But I thought that’s what you’d be able
to find out!”

Simon Templar looked at her again. She had a
face with
bone in
it: definite cheekbones and a strong jaw, a nose short
but sculptured. She wore her thick chestnut hair almost with
out a wave, in a kind of abbreviated pageboy
bob—obviously
not because it was
fashionable at the time, which it wasn’t,
but because it suited her. Her hazel eyes were very lively
and
her chiseled lips framed a wide and potentially careless
mouth.

“You’d have to tell me a lot more about
him,” he said.
“Perhaps if you weren’t so tied up with this
charitable den
of iniquity—”

“I can soon fix that,” she said.
“There are more gals trying
to help around here than you could shake a
swizzle stick at.
I’ll just tell the Mother Superior that I’m taking time
out, and I’ll be all yours.”

She left him in the crepe-paper arbor where
he had had
her alone for a few minutes, and headed quickly and de
cisively
for the gingham-clothed central table where a bevy
of other eager
maidens were cajoling the wandering citizenry
to buy dollops of
what the hand-lettered signs proclaimed
to be champagne punch,
ladled from a cut-glass bowl the
size of a bathtub in which had been stirred
together with
several gallons of miscellaneous sodas and fruit juices
(the Saint’s sensitive palate assured him) at least a magnum of
genuine Bollinger.

Of all the unlikely surroundings in which the
Saint might
be discovered, a church bazaar, despite his canonical
nickname, is certainly as implausible as any; but by this time he was getting
so used to finding himself in improbable places
that he had developed
a form of philosophical passivity
which might as well be emulated, if only in self-defense,
by
anyone who intends to follow him through
many of these
episodes.

The town of Santa Barbara, little more than
two hours of
freeway driving up the coast from Los Angeles, is California’s
most jealous
curator of its Spanish heritage. While the great
sprawling monster that was once leisurely known as “El
Pueblo de Nuestra Se
ñ
ora
la Reina de los Angeles” has lopped off all but the last two words of its
historic name
and surrendered itself to modern industry and smog, Santa
Barbara seems to have decided that the twentieth
century
is the transient guest, and
to be trying like a good house
keeper to keep things as much as possible
the way the Con
quistadors would like to
find it when they come back. In the
whole
city not a tenth of the streets have North American
names, the most conspicuous of them being State
Street,
which appropriately enough is
the main stem of shops and
offices
and suchlike parvenu incursions. But flanking it are
Chapala and Anacapa, and the streets crossing it
ring with
such names as Cabrillo,
Figueroa, Ortega, and Gutierrez.
And
yet with all this Hispanic tradition there is also a social
cult which
leans towards institutions more commonly asso
ciated
with the squirearchy of Old England, such as horse
shows, flower shows, garden parties, fund-raising
teas, and
parochial fetes like the
one which had ensnared such an
unprecedented
patron as Simon Templar.

The better-looking half of the couple of old
friends he was
visiting had said firmly: “I’ve been roped into
running the
popgun shooting gallery all day long at this brawl, and
the
least you can do is drop by and relieve me for half an hour.”

But when he dutifully showed up, she had
inspected him again and said: “There’s a wicked gleam in your eye that
makes me
suspect that you’d be telling the kids to turn the
popguns on the behinds
of some of the passing dowagers.
I’ll let you buy me a champagne punch
instead, and intro
duce you to a pretty girl who’ll keep your mind on more
grown-up
ways of getting into trouble.”

Thus he had met Kathleen Holland; and, after
his hostess
had excused herself to hurry back to her stall, what
might
have been a more idly flirtatious encounter had become a half-serious
discussion of the creepiness of Mr. Alton Powls.

The Saint was almost automatically prejudiced
against Mr. P
owls, but he could be impersonal enough to realize that
Mr. Powls
might never even have squeezed his name into the conversation but for the
reaction that the Saint’s own
name evoked from most people who heard it.
Kathleen Holland was a real estate agent and by all ordinary criteria a
down-to-earth
young business woman; but she was no less
ordinary in assuming
that the Saint was ready to take off
like a bloodhound on any scent that
was offered him. How
ever, in her case the presumption was not so
hard to take.

“You see,” she said, when she
returned without the apron
that was her badge of office, and was thereby
transformed
into another customer like himself, and they were
strolling anonymously through the crowd in search of a more secluded
place to
continue the session, “I feel I’m partly responsible.
I should
have known there was something wrong when he
asked so many
questions about Aunt Flo.”

“The world seems to be infested with
Aunts, too,” Simon
observed philosophically. “But it isn’t
necessarily a felony to
ask questions about them. What has this one
done?”

“Nothing, of course. I know you don’t
live here, but when
you meet her you’ll know how ridiculous that sounds. But
you can say
anything you think, because she isn’t really
my
aunt.”

Miss Florence Warshed, it appeared, was known
to every
one within her social stratum in Santa Barbara as
“Aunt
Flo,” because that was the way she was known to the
two
nieces who lived with her, and that was the way she liked
it, and
whatever Aunt Flo liked had a way of becoming the
way things were done,
at least in her nearest vicinity.

Miss Warshed had settled herself immovably
upon the
Santa
Barbara landscape about twenty years ago, escorted by
the two nieces from whom she derived her popular title,
with the purchase of a large rambling house in the
older
but most respectable section of
town, where they set up a
m
é
nage which in some other localities might have
been
deemed at least eccentric but
which in the cloistered atmos
phere of
that corner of that city was only considered quaint
and nostalgically delightful. For the two junior
Misses
Warshed, it was soon revealed
to those who pursued the in
quiry,
were the daughters of a vaguely disreputable elder
brother of Aunt Flo who abandoned them to the care
of a
wife who soon afterwards died of
mortification or some such
obsolete
ailment, thus leaving their maiden aunt Flo to rear
them, which she had done more devotedly than any
natural
mother. If Aunt Flo had ever
had any procreative urges of her own, they seemed to have been completely
sublimated
by the responsibilities of
this foster brood; and if some local
amateur
psychologists surmised that she had subtly instilled her own spinsterish
diathesis into her charges, it could have
been just as validly argued that they had grown up with
androphobic prejudices of their very own,
germinating from
the embarrassment of
having a father whom they could not even identify in a picture and whose name
they had never heard mentioned except with the most icily significant re
straint. At any rate, their lives had never been
overtly complicated by romance, let alone marriage; Aunt Flo had been
safely past her half-century when she hit the town,
and both her protegees had been well into their late thirties,
so that
there had been no immediate problem of fending off
slavering suitors. And seemingly content to age gracefully as they had
arrived, they had remained an inviolable trio
while Aunt Flo decayed gradually into her more obstreperous
seventies and the waifs she had sponsored faded
gracefully
into their late but unlamented fifties, all of them being
wist
fully but intolerably charming all the
time. To keep them
selves healthily
occupied and also pay the rent, they had opened a shop in the bypassed suburb
of Montecito, in
evitably named Ye
Needle Nooke, where the products of
their
knitting and crochet implements were on sale at out
rageous prices and were regularly bought by
transient tourists
and an
indispensable core of locals who thought that the
Warshed Sisters were just
too
sweet and
should be sub
sidized on principle.