The Saint to the Rescue (22 page)

“And they are sweet, too,” Kathleen
said. “It just breaks
your heart sometimes to think how much they
could’ve
given some man and never had a chance to. All right, so I
should go
back to the bottom of the grammar class. But
you’ve got to meet
them yourself. Come on over here.”

Before he could mount an effective delaying
action she was
practically dragging him through the crowd again on an
other
tangent that led to a concession which could be in
stantly identified as
one of the prime attractions of the affair.
All it was actually
selling was cheaply printed cards ruled
into squares in each
of which appeared some random num
ber; but the sign over the entrance said
bingo, and this
magic word seemed to have been sufficient to enchant an
extraordinary
number of devout numerologists into purchas
ing one or more of
these mystic plaques.

“Just one thing—don’t give my real
name,” was about all
the Saint had time and presence of mind
enough to throw
into her ear, before they were being welcomed into the
fold
by a delightfully frail and faded blonde in pastel-flowered
chiffon
who said: “Why Kathleen, honey, are you going to
try your luck with
us? That’s what I call doing double your
duty.”

“This is Violet Warshed,” Kathleen
said, and completed
the introduction with: “This is Mr.—er—Templeton.
He’s been
such a good customer for the champagne punch that I
thought I
ought to share him a bit.”

“Why, that’s what I call giving till it
must hurt, honey.”
Violet Warshed put out a soft hand that would
have been
only perfunctory if it had not had a slight tendency to
cling.
“I hope this is your lucky day, Mr. Templeton, truly I do.”

She must have been quite a doll thirty-five
years ago, Simon
thought without disparagement. A Marilyn Monroe type in
her generation, probably, wide
open to caricature, but overflowing with everything that it took to evoke the
protective
instincts of the male. It was
almost incredible that that ap
peal
should have failed to inglutinate a husband when it
was at its lushest,
but it was still working in an entirely wist
ful
way which Simon could see would only confirm the local
assumption that the Warshed waifs had to be Taken
Care Of.

He sat down with Kathleen at the end of one
of the long
tables which were occupied to the verge of capacity by a
horde of
philanthropists brooding over their charts of destiny
and marking off
occasional rectangles on them as the fateful numbers boomed out through a badly
adjusted complex of
loudspeakers. An iron-gray woman in the same indefinite
fifties as Violet Warshed
bustled up and down the aisles be
tween the
tables, repeating the numbers that were called
and helping the more
dim-sighted devotees of this intoxicat
ing
sport to mark the right squares on their cards. As she
got down to the end of the next table she
recognized Kath
leen and said:
“Oh, a trespasser.” Then she saw the Saint and linked them together,
and said: “Well, it’s about time
you
had a good man, Kathy. Where did you find him?”

“This is Ida Warshed,” Kathleen
said. With the facility
of practice, she went on: “And this is
Mr. Templeton. He’s been such a good customer that I thought—”

“Don’t ever stop to think, dearie. If he
looks like a good
customer, he’s in. What was that name again?”

Even at her age Ida Warshed had a twinkle in her eye, and
one got an impression that in her extreme youth
she might
have been quite a handful.
She was as buxom and earthy as
Violet
was ethereal. In fact, if they had not been introduced
as sisters no one would have been likely to guess
that they were even remotely related. The only theory Simon could
hazard
was that by some freak of genetics each of them had inherited the
characteristics of one parent to the almost com
plete exclusion of the other—Ida perhaps being predomi
nantly the
image of the scapegrace father, while Violet might
have mirrored the abandoned mother who had pined away.

“Now do you have an idea what they’re
like?” Kathleen
asked, as Ida went on her busy way.

“Well, vaguely,” said the Saint,
mechanically circling a
number on his card with one of the colored
crayons provided
for the purpose. “But—”

“That’s Aunt Flo,” she said,
“up there on the platform.” At the focal point of the long tables
where the congregation sat there was a high dais draped in bunting, not much
larger than was necessary to accommodate a small table and
a
straight-backed chair. In the chair sat a large angular
woman
whose back was just as straight, even if braced by
obvious tight-drawn
corsets. Over the corsets she wore a
black satin dress that made no attempt
to be modern in
length or cut, with a high boned collar of white lace and
matching
frills of lace at the wrists. To offset this austerity,
however,
her fingernails were lacquered pearl-gray, her lip
stick was dark red,
and her white hair had been rinsed with
blue. Her face must
once have been handsome rather than
pretty, but age had not hardened it;
indeed, the wrinkles
it had acquired seemed to have engraved it
with an indelible
pattern of kindliness and serenity.

She twirled a wire cage filled with numbered
balls, and
when it came to rest she manipulated a sort of valve at
the
bottom which laid a single ball on the table like an egg;
she read
the number without glasses, and called it into her
microphone in a strong
firm voice. Simon drew another
circle on his card.

“For a dame of her age, she seems to be
in rare shape,”
he remarked.

“You don’t know the half of it,”
Kathleen said. “She must
be at least seventy-five, but she drives the
car to market
and does all the shopping and most of the cooking at
home.
And don’t let that Whistler’s-Mother look fool you—she’s never stopped
being the head of the family. Violet and Ida
still do what she
tells them, just as if they were nearer sixteen than sixty. It’s almost funny
to hear them ask her
if they may go to a movie, if she doesn’t want
to see it her
self, and she tells them what time they have to be
home.”
“But,” said the Saint, “I still don’t see
what all this has
to do with the creep you started with, Brother
Powls.”

“Because ever
 
since he came here they’ve been under
some awful
strain, as if—well, it’s silly, but I can only say
as if he was
haunting
them. I don’t
believe in that kind of
hypnotism, but if it
isn’t that, he must have some other hold
over them, and now that you’ve met them you can see that sounds almost as
ridiculous.”

Mr. Alton Powls had come upon the scene by
simply
walking
into the office where Kathleen Holland worked. The office opened on a
pseudo-Andalusian inside patio which it
shared
with about a dozen shops mostly dedicated to the sale of antiques, jewelry,
objets
d’art,
paintings, books, and simi
lar
preciosa, all enterprises ideally suited to a location close
to but architecturally shut off from the
commercial hurly-
burly of State
Street, where shoppers could browse at leisure in an atmosphere of olde-worlde
tranquillity which did much to blunt their apperception of the fact that they
were being charged strictly new-world prices. Directly across the patio
were the premises of Ye Needle Nooke; and through
its large plate-glass window, from Kathleen’s window, could be plainly
seen the Warshed sisters at work, Violet sewing
and Ida
rearranging the displays of
merchandise, while Aunt Flo
busied
herself with correspondence or bookkeeping at a desk
in the background.

“Do you happen to know those ladies
across the way?” he
asked.

She had not yet identified him as a Creep, but
only as an
elderly gentleman not especially different from any of
the
other idle strollers in the courtyard, and so she agreeably
told him
the names. The first evidence of Creepiness he gave
was in his reaction to
them: she was sure that they brought
a gleam of recognition which was
instantly veiled.

“Would they be from Milwaukee?” he
queried.

“No, they came from Kansas City.”

“Was that long ago?”

“It was soon after I was born,
anyway.”

He looked at her calculatingly.

“They remind me of some people I knew a long time ago,”
he said. “I think I’ll go and talk to
them.”

He went out and across the patio, and she
could not help
watching the rest from her desk. It was as graphic and at
the
same time as baffling as a movie on which the sound track had gone dead.

He went into Ye Needle Nooke, and Ida Warshed
met him
with the mechanical cordiality with which she would have
greeted
any stranger who walked in. She could only have
asked, quite
impersonally, what she could do for him. But
his answer seemed to
stop her cold. She stood there, trans
fixed, all the life fading out of her
face. For the longest time,
she seemed bereft of any power of movement,
as well as
speech. Then, in a most uncharacteristically feeble and
help
less way, she made a beckoning gesture at Violet.

Violet put down her sewing and came over,
wearing the
same perfunctory smile in her more fragile and wispier
way.
Mr. Powls spoke again. Violet froze as Ida had done, and
then
looked at Ida helplessly. Then both of them, by simul
taneous consent,
looked appealingly at Aunt Flo.

Aunt Flo put down her pen and came over from
her desk.
But on her candid competent face there was no more immediate
response than had been shown by either of her nieces.
Until Mr. Powls
repeated something that he had obviously
said before.

Aunt Flo also froze, momentarily. But there
was no one
beyond her to appeal. And so after that moment she began
to talk,
quite volubly, in a tone that the frequent shakings
of her head made
vehemently negative. But Mr. Powls
seemed only to persist with whatever he
was maintaining.
There was another Creepy quality, Kathleen thought, in the
implacable way he stood his ground, answering mostly with shrugs that
somehow had an offensive insincerity.

Presently he turned and left the shop and
sauntered away.
But after his departure there was none of the complacency
of three
embattled women who had triumphantly repulsed
an obnoxious male.
There was the inevitable first minute
when they all talked at once, but it
quickly subsided into a
bleak despondency in which they all seemed at
a total loss
for anything to say. Ida kicked moodily at a chair-leg,
Violet
dabbed the corners of her eyes with a handkerchief, and
Aunt Flo
sat down at her desk again, heavily, and rested
her forehead on her
clenched hands.

Then Violet happened to glance straight across
the patio
at Kathleen, and said something to Ida, who glanced in the
same direction; and Kathleen suddenly felt like an eaves
dropper
and buried herself in the papers she had been
working on before the
interruption.

Later that afternoon, as the shops on the
patio were pre
paring to close up, Aunt Flo came over on the pretext of
asking if
Kathleen could recommend a part-time gardener to take over some of the heavy
work on the flower beds which
were the Warsheds’ principal hobby and
exercise as well
as their most harmless pride. After that gambit had served
its purpose, she said with transparent casualness: “What did you
think of
that man who came looking for us a little while
ago?”

“I didn’t know he was looking for
you,” Kathleen said.
“He told me he thought he knew you from
somewhere away
back.”