The Saint to the Rescue (23 page)

She recited her conversation with Mr. Powls
almost ver
batim, but without any commentary.

“Is that all he said?”

“Yes—as far as I can remember.”

Aunt Flo’s bright birdlike eyes raked through
her like
affectionate needles.

“I think he’s a crank,” she said.
“He tried to insist that he
knew us, but none of us ever saw him before.
We couldn’t
all three be mistaken. You’d better watch out if you see
him again. It’s those kind of people who are never suspected until
they turn
out to be Monsters.”

Although the word Monster was no more than an
earlier synonym for Creep, it was not that echo of her own thinking that
brushed Kathleen with a clammy chill. It was the in
controvertible
certainty, after what she had recently witnessed, that Aunt Flo was lying.

Four days passed before she saw Mr. Powls
again. She happened to look up, and he was back in Ye Needle Nooke,
talking to
the three ladies. He seemed to have been showing
them something like a
fairly large newspaper clipping, which
he took back and
folded carefully and put away in his wallet.
Only a few more words
were spoken after that, before he
turned and came out; she could see
very little of how they
acted after his exit, for he blocked the view
almost com
pletely by walking straight across the patio to her
office.

She tried not to appear too hurried over her conventional
“Good afternoon” but couldn’t help going on, disingenuous
though it had to sound, with: “I hear you
didn’t know the
Warsheds after
all.”

“Oh, but I do,” he said. “And
they remember me now. I’ve been able to convince them.”

She flicked a glance through the window, but
could only
see that the ladies were in some kind of huddle at the
back
of the shop.

“I’ve been back to Kansas City since I
saw you last,” he
said. “But I’ve decided that Santa
Barbara has it beat. I think I’ll
settle down here. Could you show me a very small fur
nished cottage or a nice little apartment?”

She took him to a couple of places she had
listed, and he
was delighted with the second, a sub-let that had been
put
in her hands only the previous day. Then came the routine questions of
references.

“The Misses Warshed should be good
enough for anyone here, shouldn’t they?” he said blandly, and she would
have
sworn that he struggled to hide his malicious enjoyment of
a private
joke.

However, she now had an unimpeachable reason for re
opening the subject with Aunt Flo.

“We were mistaken,” Aunt Flo said
with tight lips. “It’s
terribly easy to forget things after twenty
years, especially
when you get to be my age. But of course we knew Mr. P
owls back
in Kansas City. I hope you’ll be able to put out
of your mind the
things I said about him the other day,
because it’s most
embarrassing to me to think that I could
have been so
wrong.”

She was very gallant, very much the
grande dame.
Beside
her, the sisters nodded in docile corroboration.

“Then I can take it that he’s all right—I
mean, he’ll be
good for the rent, and all that sort of thing?”

“Yes, dear, he will be,”

“What kind of business was he in, in
Kansas City?”

Violet and Ida looked at each other, and then
mutely at
Aunt Flo, leaving her to answer.

“He was a general business man,”
Aunt Flo said firmly.
“He was mixed up in lots of big deals. I
don’t profess to
understand these things that men get involved in. But he
was very successful.”

“He was a big spender, too,” Ida
put in.

Violet nodded. And that was all they had to
say. Which
in itself was strange enough, for normally they loved to
gossip
about people—of course in the nicest way.

Mr. Powls himself was no more communicative
when Kath
leen tried to question him.

“I’ve been in and out of so many
things,” he said, with a
carefully impressive air of modesty in his
vagueness. “Buying and selling—importing and exporting—stocks and bonds.
But
I’m retired now. So it would bore me as much to tell you
my life
story as you’d be bored Listening to it. And it doesn’t
really
matter, does it? You only want to be sure that I won’t
have wild parties or
move out with the landlord’s furniture,
and I know the Misses
Warshed have vouched for that.”

She did not know how to press the question
further with
out seeming gratuitously impertinent.

“So,” she told the Saint,
“he’s been here ever since. He
pays his rent on the dot, and he takes
good care of the place.
He asked me to get him a cleaning woman to
come in once
a week, so I was able to check on that through her. Some
times I see
him around town, and he’s always perfectly at
ease and polite.
Perhaps he
is
just a retired business man leading a quiet bachelor life,
but—”

Simon drew another circle on his card.

“Presumably he pays the rent by,
check—you wouldn’t have
thought of making any inquiries at his
bank?”

She actually giggled.

“Touch
é
.
That’s how horribly inquisitive I can be when I start. I told them I’d been
asked to get a bank reference on
him, but between what they didn’t know and
what they
weren’t allowed to say I didn’t get very much. But his ac
count is
quite small, and he mostly deposits cash.”

The Saint’s brows suddenly drew together.

“Cash? You have an item there.”

“That’s what I thought. He isn’t working
in any job, that
I know of.”

“Does he see much of the Warsheds, since they’ve decided
they know him?”

“I’ve seen him at their house twice,” Kathleen said.
“They
invite me sometimes, when they
have a little party. You
wouldn’t
think they’d want an extra girl, but they’re very
considerate about things like that, and if for any
reason
they’ve got a man coming who’s
younger than any of them,
they beg me
to come and prove that they aren’t ganging up
on him themselves. Well, each time, it was obvious that the idea was to
help Mr. Powls meet some local people.
And
yet I just
knew
that they weren’t a bit happy about it.
Not that they didn’t try to do it well. In fact,
they were
trying too hard—they were
much too busy and eager and
chattery,
even for them. As if they were under a frightful
strain and trying to cover up. And yet he wasn’t point
ing a gun at them, like the gangsters did at the
family
in that movie.”

“There are metaphorical guns, too,”
Simon said. “How
did the Creep behave?”

“Just like anybody else. Only he kept
making
me
think of
a cat watching a cage of birds. I suppose by this time you’re
convinced that I’m thoroughly neurotic and—”

The Saint said, abruptly: “Bingo!”

He stood up, waving his card.

“Would you bring your card up here,
please,” said Aunt
Flo.

Kathleen recovered from her momentary
blankness and
went to the dais with him to introduce him.

“A friend of yours? How nice,
dear,” said Aunt Flo, never
theless checking the numbers which the Saint
had ringed
with the emotionless efficiency of a seasoned cashier.
“Yes,
this is
right.” She said into her microphone: “We have a win
ner, girls. Pick up the old cards, and we’ll start
a new game.”
She counted out
fifty dollars from a partitioned tray in front
of her, and gave them to the Saint, and said: “Congratula
tions, Mr. Templeton. Are you having a good
time?”

“So good that it doesn’t seem right to
make a profit out
of it.” Simon shuffled the prize money, put half of
it in his
pocket, refolded the rest, and held it out to the old
lady.
“May I put this back in the fund, as a
donation?”

“You’re very generous. That’s the kind of
man to look
for, Kathleen, dear—one who has fun with his money.”
She
looked at the
Saint again with her keen bright eyes, for the
first time as if she were seeing him personally. “And this is a
real man, too. I can tell. If I were forty years younger, I’d
be after him myself.”

“You don’t have to be a day younger,
Aunt Flo,” said the
Saint genially. “I’m a charter member of
the Chesterfield
Club.”

The little color that was in Miss Warshed’s
face drained
out, leaving it a white mask in which the discreetly
applied
rouge over her cheeks stood out like patches of raw paint.
Her lips
quivered, and she held on to the table as if to steady
herself in her chair, so tightly that even
her knuckles and
fingertips blanched under
the pressure. “I don’t think I quite follow that,” she said.
“Oh, hadn’t you heard of it?” said the
Saint innocently,
apparently unaware
even of the bewildered way that Kath
leen
looked from Aunt Flo to him. “Lord Chesterfield was
an English pundit who was rated pretty hippy a
hundred
or two years ago. He gave his
name to the sofa but not to
the
cigarette. He also wrote a series of letters to his son, full
of profound advice and wisdom, which were
published in
book form and bestowed
by doting parents on Heaven knows how many other equally bored young men. One
of his best
remembered tips was that
older ladies were the best ones
to
fall in love with, because they appreciated it so much
more. I’ve always been a rooter for his club for
that.”
Aunt Flo relaxed quite
slowly.

“Indeed.” Her lips cracked in a
smile, but her eyes were
still haunted. “For a moment I simply couldn’t imagine what
you were talking about. That’s very charming. And
so true.
But I’m sure the young ones
already appreciate you more
than it’s
good for you. Are you staying here long?”

“Only a day or two.”

“I’m sorry—it was nice meeting you.”

She gave him her hand, all graciousness and
poise again,
and by then it was hard to believe that only a few seconds
ago she had seemed to be transfixed with stark terror.

“What on earth is this Chesterfield Club business?” Kath
leen demanded as soon as they were at a safe
distance.

“You heard me,” Simon said.
“As a student of all the great
philosophers and bores—”

“Don’t give me that,” she said.
“I saw what it did to her when you first mentioned it.”

Simon handed over a dollar in exchange for
two ice-cream
cones which were being practically forced into their
hands. He gave his to the first infant that passed, who promptly
squashed
it on its mother’s best afternoon dress.

“You’re much too young to remember,”
said the Saint
happily,
“but back in the wildest Prohibition days of Kansas
City, the Chesterfield Club was an institution
that travelers
came from all over to
see. It was a place where the tired
business man could really get a lift
with his lunch. All the waitresses were stark naked.”

“Oh.” Kathleen gulped. “Now I
can see why Aunt Flo was
shocked.”

“Would you say ‘shocked’ was the
word?” Simon asked
gently.

He lighted a cigarette and stared through a
veil of smoke
at the edifying spectacle of a bejeweled dowager leaning
over
the rail of an enclosure called Fortune’s Fishpond, cane
pole in
hand, angling with intense concentration for a bottle
of Bollinger.

“Even the most sheltered ladies in town
at the time must
have heard of it,” he said. “If a man referred
to it in front
of them, I can picture them being righteously
scandalized,
or freezing into the We Are Not Amused reaction. But can
you see
any of them looking downright terrified, as if the next thing they heard might
be the end of the world?”