The Saint to the Rescue (27 page)

Mr. Carlton Rood, as a result of such an
accidental conversation, was suddenly promoted into this inauspicious spot
light.

Simon Templar traveled no farther that day
than one of
the motels facing the Gulf west of town, where he read the
complete newspaper story and then spent two or three hours
in intense
meditation. The stratagems by which Mr. Rood had
won another acquittal
for his client need not be retold here
in laborious detail:
it is sufficient for this story, as it was
for the Saint’s
motivation, that they were typically ingenious, immoral, and successful.
Nothing else was needed to qualify Mr. Rood for immediate retribution, in the
Saint’s judgment;
but the manner of providing for it required inventiveness
and
planning.

After dinner that night he made a
long-distance phone
call, and the next morning he drove back to Biloxi and
Mrs.
Yarrow’s little shop.

“I took what you may think was rather a
liberty last night,”
he told her. “I talked about your case to
a friend of mine in
Santa Barbara, California, who’s one of the best
ophthalmolo
gists in the country. I must tell you bluntly that he
wasn’t
very optimistic. But he would like to see you.”

“It’s very kind of you,” she said.
“But I just can’t afford
a trip like that.”

“I’d like to pay for it—please don’t be
offended. If that
sounds too much like charity, I promise that if he is
able
to restore your sight I’ll let you pay me back every penny.
I know
you’d think that was worth the money. But if he
can’t do anything for
you it won’t cost you a cent. Let me
take the gamble, and I give you my
word it won’t hurt my
bank account a bit if I lose.”

“But I told you I didn’t want to torment
myself with false
hopes.”

“You want something done about Sholto,
don’t you? If you had your sight back, you could identify him again—
and he
could still be tried for the murder of your husband.
That would mean
something to you, wouldn’t it?”

As she wavered, he took her hand and put an
envelope
into it.

“This is a plane ticket I bought this
morning, in your
name, from New Orleans to Santa Barbara,” he said.
“The
reservation is for Sunday—that gives you three days to
make
your personal arrangements, and it should be a good day for
you to get
someone to drive you to the airport. You have to
change planes in Los
Angeles, but the airline will look after
you there. And I’ll
have my doctor friend send someone
to meet you at Santa Barbara airport.
His name and address
are written on the envelope, if you want to
tell your friends
where you’re going.”

“But what about
your
name?”
she protested weakly. “And
why do you want to do this for me? I don’t
know anything
about you except that you’ve got a nice voice!”

“That’s all I intend you to know right
now,” said the Saint.
“But if you must think of me by some
label, you may call me
Santa Claus.”

He drove to New Orleans himself the same
morning and
took the next plane to New York, where Mr. Rood had long
since transferred his headquarters from his more pastoral be
ginnings in
the South.

One of the Saint’s intangible assets, and one
of incalculable
value in his peculiar activities, was the vast and variegated
collection of acquaintances that he had accumulated and
cultivated
over the years, a roster of trades and professions that was a unique classified
directory in itself. Besides a
friend who was a distinguished ophthalmologist
he could have
produced with equal facility an ophicleidist, an oil
rigger, or,
probably, an orangoutang. Another man whose talents he
needed
lived in New York when not working elsewhere, and
Simon was fortunate to
find him at liberty.

In the course of the following week, Mr. Rood
received
certain visitors at his office whose rô1es in his destiny
he did
not perceive.

The first was a new client who sought his
advice about
making a will which would distribute his fortune fairly
among
his wife and daughters, protect them from fortune-hunters,
ensure a
substantial inheritance for his still unborn grand
children, and yet not
leave his heirs under a state of absolute tutelage. Mr. Rood discoursed for
some time on the theoreti
cal problems involved, until he learned that
about 99% of
the million-dollar estate which the man was so worried
about
was contingent on his successful marketing of the idea of
making
automobiles impervious to minor collisions by build
ing the bodies
entirely out of soft rubber. Whereupon Mr. Rood briskly recommended him to
consult first with a pat
ent attorney, and never thought about him
again.

The second caller presented himself as a
free-lance journal
ist who specialized in writing autobiographies, speeches,
or
any other kind of material for celebrities who were, if not otherwise
unqualified, too busy for the dull toil of capturing
their scintillating
thoughts in page after page of readable
prose. If he could
not name any names whom he had served
in this capacity, he could claim this
reticence as proof of
his inviolable discretion: part of his
service was to avert even
the slight stigma of the “as told
to” type of by-line, and those
who wanted to claim his articles as
their own original work
could do so without fear that any other person
would ever
hear who really wrote them. Reassuringly, he was asking
nothing
more than permission to approach certain editors
with the idea of a
series of the great lawyer’s reminiscences
of his famous cases;
if the work was commissioned, Mr.
Rood would simply supply him with court
records and spend
a few hours talking them over, and of course the finished
stories would be completely subject to Mr. Rood’s editing
and
approval. It was an unexceptionably straightforward-
sounding proposition, and Mr. Rood was
quite interested in discussing it. The Saint could be disarmingly flattering
and
persuasive when he tried, even when
wearing a rumpled
suit and a studious-looking pair of horn-rimmed
glasses and
using the undistinguished name
of Tom Simons.

After their talk had reached an encouraging
stage of
warmth and relaxation, the Saint was able to say in the
most
spontaneous
conversational manner:

“One thing I’ve often wondered about, Mr.
Rood. Aren’t
you ever afraid that some of your ex-clients might start
worrying
about you as a sort of security risk?”

“Good heavens, no!” responded the
advocate, in genuine astonishment. “They were all innocent men,
wrongfully accused,
and so proven by due process of law, as the records
show.”

“Naturally. But many of them were at
least generally rumored, shall we say, to have been involved in some rather
dubious activities aside from
the crimes they were actually
charged with.
In preparing their defense, you may easily
have had access to a lot of incidental information about
other associations or misbehaviors which could be
very em
barrassing for them if you
talked too much.”

“That might be true. But an ethical
lawyer’s confidence is
as sacred as the confessional.”

“The underworld doesn’t put much faith in
lofty princi
ples,” said the Saint. “I must be a little more
frank. Because
of my job, I have some rather peculiar contacts. The
other
day I happened to mention you and the idea we’ve been
discussing
to a man whom of course I can’t name, who has
some rather special connections of his
own. He told me he’d
heard that some big
fellows were wondering if you weren’t getting to know too much for your own
good, and that you
mightn’t be around
so much longer.”

Mr. Rood rubbed his chin.

“That’s an extraordinary notion. I can
think of no reason
why anyone would doubt me.”

“But of course you’ve taken
precautions, just in case some
trigger-happy mobster got ideas.”

“What sort of precautions?” asked
the attorney guardedly.

“Like making a list of the men most
likely to worry about
you, with some notes on the reasons why, and
leaving it in
safe hands with instructions to deliver it to the police
if you
should die of anything but the most incontestably natural
causes,
and dropping a tactful word in the right places about
what you’ve
done.”

“Oh, that, obviously,” said Mr.
Rood, in a tone which betrayed to Simon’s hypersensitive ear that the thought
had just begun to commend itself.

The Saint had achieved his object, and there
was no
point in prolonging the interview.

“Then I won’t worry about being able to
finish this job,
once we get it started,” he said cheerfully, and
stood up. “I
hope I’ll have some news for you in a week or two. And
thanks for
sparing me so much of your valuable time.”

“You have a very interesting proposition,
Mr. Simons,”
said Carlton Rood heartily, shaking his hand with a large
and
adhesive paw. “I’ll look forward to hearing more from you.”

Yet another visitor came late that night,
by-passing the
janitor and climbing ten flights of emergency stairs to
unlock
the office through a neat hole cut in the glass upper panel
of the
entrance door. This visitor broke into several filing
cabinets and strewed
their contents over the floor, but did
not try to tackle the
massive safe in which all really im
portant papers were kept. He took
nothing except about $200
which he found in the petty cash box—the
Saint could be
munificently generous when he chose, but could never
resist
the smallest tax-free contribution towards his non-deductible
expenses
when it could be taken from the right coffers.

Mr. Rood was not unduly perturbed by this
minor larceny
and vandalism, but nevertheless it aggravated an irksome
hangnail of
dubiety which had been scuffed up by the affable
“Tom
Simons.” And he was enough of a believer in symbols
to take it
as a direct providential nudge to procrastinate no
longer over the simple
practical suggestion that had been
made to him. He canceled a dinner
engagement the next
night, and spent the evening at work on a highly inflam
mable
document intended only for posthumous publication.

Long before that, Simon Templar had
telephoned Santa Barbara again.

“She seems to be doing all right,”
said his friend. “But it
will still be three or four days before we
know if we have any luck. Don’t count on it too much. I told you that the
chance was
very small.”

“But not hopeless.”

“No, not hopeless, or I would not have
operated. You must try to be patient.”

“You know that isn’t my long suit,
Mickey. However—did
everything else go according to plan?”

“Yes, just as we talked about it. I was
able to move her
from the hospital yesterday, in Georgia’s car, so they
don’t
know where she went, and in the private nursing home she
has another
name, under which I opened a separate file in
my office records, so
there is no trace of the connection.”

“Thanks, pal,” said the Saint.
“Take care to keep it that
way. For the time being, her life may depend
on it.”

By the time Mr. Rood embarked on his secret
literary en
deavor, the Saint had flown back to New Orleans,
reclaimed
his car at the airport, and taken the road to Atlanta,
where
the beneficiary of Mr. Rood’s latest legal triumph made his
home.
Simon was not only temperamentally short on patience,
but he had even less
inclination to let an act of justice that
he had decided upon
teeter on the outcome of a medical
long shot of which the surgeon himself
was less than optimistic about the result.