The Saint to the Rescue (25 page)

“I shall give you twelve hours to get
out of Santa Bar
bara, and a few more to be out of the state of
California,”
he said. “And if I run into you after that, the only
cut I shall
take will be in your throat.”

He went out without a backward glance.

He got into his car and drove purposefully
away, knowing
full well that he was watched from the window above; but
after four
blocks he circled around and came quietly down
an alley to coast to a
stop with his lights out in its blackest
patch of shadow from
which he could watch the building
he had just left.

When Mr. Powls came out a few minutes later,
and drove
off in a small car from an open garage under one end of
the
building, Simon did not even have to be cautious about
following
him. Unburdened with luggage of any kind, Mr. P
owls was certainly
not rushing to beat the liberal deadline
he had been given.
There was only one place where he could
have been headed,
other than the one which could have
been generically described as Out of
There, and Simon set
his own course for it by another route.

If the Saint had not been quite so confident
about it, it is barely possible that Mr. Alton Powls might be alive today.
Simon
knew the address of the Warshed menage, which was
available to anyone
who could read a telephone directory;
and having ascertained that, he had
not bothered to ask
Kathleen Holland to show it to him. He thought he knew
his
way around the Montecito district fairly well, and he had
driven a
score of times over the road on which their house
stood. The one thing
he had overlooked was that he had
only driven over it and not in search
of a specific destination
on it; and he had temporarily forgotten the
penchant of
denizens
of even less traditionally aloof areas than this for
secreting their street numbers in minuscule figures in the
obscurest possible location, whether to discourage
process
servers or poor relations.
Thus he made two abortive passes
at
his target, each time made slower by the fact that he
did not want to arrive with a triumphant roar,
before he
positively identified the
right entrance. And then he had to
drift
two hundred yards past it, and find a wider place in
the road to park, before he could walk back and
enter the
rustic gates on foot.

By which time, perhaps, Mr. Alton Powls had
already
been gathered to his fathers, if an overworked recording angel
could put
the finger on them.

At any rate, he looked dead enough, as the
Saint saw him
after threading a catlike way to the house which stood
completely
secluded from the road within its ramparts of
tall clipped hedges—after circumnavigating
Mr. Powls’ small
car which by this time was
cooling in the driveway, and
high-stepping
delicately over odorous flower beds, and almost
falling into a treacherous excavation in the middle of a
small patch of lawn, and finally reaching the
draped living-
room window from which
the light came, and selecting the
one
marginal crack in the curtains through which he could
steal the widest wedge-shaped view of the interior.

Mr. Alton Powls was dead on the carpet, with
blood well
ing from a dent in his cranium, and Aunt Flo standing
over
him with a poker in her hand, and the two comparatively
junior
Misses observing the scene with respectful approba
tion.

In contravention of all the time-honored legends about old
maids, the french windows were not even latched.
Simon
opened them at once, and made an
inevitably sensational
entrance
through the drapes which wrung stifled screams
from Violet and Ida. Only Aunt Flo stood silent and un
daunted.

“I’m very sorry,” he said.
“This is entirely my fault.”

“What are we to understand by that, Mr.
Templar?—he
told us your real name.”

“I knew he was blackmailing you, but I
was curious to
know how. The easiest way to find out seemed to be to
follow him
here and eavesdrop a little. But when I started
the routine that I
figured would make him come here, I
didn’t know that I’d have the answer
even before he arrived.
I picked his pocket just before I left him a
few minutes
ago, and here’s what I found when I had a chance to
look.”

He produced Mr. Powls’ wallet and unfolded a newspaper
clipping from it, which he had read under a
shielded flash
light while he waited
in the alley. It could only be the same clipping which Kathleen Holland had
described Mr. Powls
exhibiting in Ye Needle Nooke. It was from the
Kansas City
Star,
under a 1930 dateline, and described a raid on one
of the most elegant local brothels.
There was also a picture of some of the principal culprits being arraigned in
night
court. The accused madam was
plainly identified as Florence Warshed, and the likeness was unmistakable even
after more than a quarter-century. Among the other girls, less easily
recognizable, were two others modestly named as
Violet Smith
and Ida Jones.

Simon handed the clipping to Aunt Flo, who
barely glanced
at it and let Ida take it and pass it to Violet.

“I thought you’d like to burn it
yourselves,” said the Saint.

Aunt Flo had not let go the poker, but her
grip was per
ceptibly less rigid.

“I’ve heard that you’re a man who might
understand some
things that ordinary people wouldn’t,” she said
steadily. “I
always ran a good house, if you know what I mean. But
after
Repeal I could see the handwriting on the wall. I could
afford to
retire. Violet and Ida were getting a bit too old
for the best clients,
and yet it wasn’t a good time for them to take over a house on their own.
They’d been with me
longest
of all my girls—in fact, they might just as well have
been my own nieces. When the time came, we found that
none of us wanted to split up and go it alone.
After all, we
didn’t have any place to
go—we were the only real family any of us had left. So we decided to stick
together. We got
in my car and headed
west, and soon after we found this town we knew it was for us. We could settle
down and
nobody would ever dream we’d
ever been any different from
all we
wanted to be from there on.”

“You only made one slip that might have started me wondering,
before I tried you on the Chesterfield Club,” Simon
remarked with incurably professional acuity.
“The slant you
all have about
people being good spenders. But not many
people would notice it—and you were right, this is one of the last
places in the country where you’d be likely to run
into an old client. Even that mightn’t’ve been
fatal—most
pillars of this community
would be too worried about whether
you’d
keep your mouth shut to open their own. But it had
to be this Alton Powls.”

“He was always a cheap grifter and I’d
be ashamed to
class him with my good clients,” said Aunt Flo.
“But after
he had the luck to spot us, and even went back and dug up
that newspaper article to make sure he could rub it in, he’s been taking us for
a hundred dollars a week.”

Simon nodded.

“Kathleen guessed he was giving you
trouble, but she
was only worried about you. She thinks you’re wonderful,
and so do
I. So I took it upon myself to give him my best warning, to lay off you and
chisel his chips somewhere else.
I was betting that this would send him
hustling right over
here to put the last big bite on you, but I was planning
to
be in the wings myself.”

He bent and examined what was left of Mr. Powls more
conscientiously, for pulse and heartbeat, of
which he verified
that there were
neither.

“He phoned and said he had to see us at
once,” Aunt Flo related. “Then when he got here he told us something
about
you calling on him. He wanted to see our bank books—he
said we’d
have to draw out every cent we could raise and
give it to him before
he left in the morning. And then we
could get a mortgage on this place, which would take
longer,
and send him some more when he wrote
to us.”

“That’s what I expected.”

“The girls were trying to talk him out of
it, but I knew he’d never lay off as long as he lived, so I picked up the
poker and
fixed that,” said Aunt Flo defiantly, but her
voice broke for the
first time.

The Saint took the poker from her without
resistance,
wiped it carefully on Mr. Powls’ neat gray jacket, and put
it back in the fireplace.

“I’d probably have done the same thing
myself, if I’d got
here in time,” he said. “Or something like it.
There are only
three ways to stop a blackmailer, but only fools go on
paying
him, and it would be asking too much for you to dare him
to tell the
worst.
…
I noticed an interesting hole in your lawn as I was
sneaking up on you. Did you have any plans for it?”

“We were getting ready to plant a
Chinese elm,” said
Aunt Flo wistfully. “Quite a large and
expensive one, but
we needed more shade for the fuchsias.”

“I’m afraid you’ll just have to make it
another flower bed
now,” said the Saint sympathetically. He searched for
Mr. P
owls’ keys and thoughtfully took possession of them before
he picked up the body. “I
won’t try to cover him very deeply
tonight,
because I’ll have to run back to his apartment and
pack up all his personal things to bury with him,
so that it’ll
look as if he simply blew town for mysterious reasons of
his
own. Also the people I’m staying with are
expecting me
back, and I can’t stretch
a story about a flat tire too far.
But
I’ll be here first thing in the morning with some plants
from a nursery, and make a slap-up job of it. Why
don’t you
all go to bed and get a good
sleep?”

The account he gave Kathleen Holland the next
day of his
final interview with Mr. Alton Powls was not
fundamentally
fictitious, but it took advantage of certain major
omissions.

“I don’t think we should pry too hard
into Aunt Flo’s awful
secret,” he said. “It probably
isn’t anything that’d scare any
body but her, anyhow. All I know is that I
put the fear of
God into your creepy friend, and if you drop by his apart
ment this
afternoon I bet you’ll find he’s already done a
flit.”

Having left Mr. Powls’ car parked near the
railroad sta
tion, he was prepared to let any other perfunctory
inquirers
take the trail from there.

“I almost feel let down,” Kathleen
said disappointedly. “I
was half hoping you’d do something brilliant
and discover
that he was Violet and Ida’s black-sheep father.”

“If I had, I wouldn’t even tell
you,” said the Saint darkly.
“And don’t even hint to Aunt Flo
that I’ve talked to you
at all. It would only worry her. But between
you and me,
I stopped at her house this morning and told her who I
was and
that I was sure she wouldn’t have any more
trouble.”

“You looked so hot when you got here,” Kathleen said,
“I thought you’d been doing something much more violent than
that.”

“Believe it or not,” said the Saint
complacently, “before I
was through she had me with a spade in my
hands working
like a bloody grave-digger. I tell you, I get into the
damned
est
things.”