The Saint to the Rescue (3 page)

He had tucked in his shirt tails and almost
absent-mindedly
knotted
a tie while this part of the conversation went on; and
now by simply shrugging into a coat he was suddenly so com
pletely dressed and ready for any eventuality that
his unin
vited guest could only open
and shut his mouth ineffectually.

“Don’t go away, Otis,” he said from
the door. “Just in
case your pals haven’t run out of cute
tricks, or in case we might have to pull some quaint switch of our own, it
might
be clever not to give anyone a chance to prove you’ve been
in your
room lately. Who knows—we might even dare them
to prove that that
picture wasn’t taken years before you
got married, or even that it’s your
picture at all. Anyhow,
wait till I bring you the first
bulletin.”

He was gone before he could be delayed by any
further
argument.

The elevator was piloted by the same jockey
who had
taken him up only a little while ago, an elderly individual
with
drooping shoulders and an air of comatose resignation
to the infinite
monotony of endlessly identical vertical voyages.
He revealed no
curiosity or interest whatsoever in why the
Saint should want to
ride down again at such an hour: one felt that he had long since been
anesthetized against any
thing that could happen in a hotel during a
convention, and
perhaps at any other time.

“Tell me,” said the Saint, with
elaborately casual candor.
“If I wanted to play a joke on one of
the fellows—a friend
of mine—could you let me into his room?”

The man did not even turn his head. In fact,
for a number
of seconds he appeared to have been afflicted with deaf
ness, until
at the ultimate limit of plausible cogitation he
wrung from himself a
single word of decision:

“Depends.”

“On what?”

The instant the words were out of his mouth,
Simon knew
he had been too fast. The man pointedly made him wait
even
longer for the next reply, as a form of corrective discipline.

“Plenty.”

The lift shuddered to a stop at the ground
floor, and the
gate rumbled open. The pilot held it, waiting for the
Saint
to disembark, with such a total lack of eagerness to pursue
the
conversation that except for his minimal movements it
would have been easy
to believe that he was stuffed.

Simon got out, and followed the direction of
a neon arrow which proclaimed that it pointed to The Rowdy Room. This
proved to
be a depressingly under-lighted cavern decorated
in blood red and
funeral black, with a dance floor large
enough for a minuet by four midgets and an
orchestra alcove
furnished with an upright
piano and stands for two other
instrumentalists,
all of whom had obviously racked up all the overtime they wanted and called it
a day. The only
rowdiness left was
being provided by a quartet of die-hards
in one corner, two of whom were foggily listening to some
obscure
argument being loudly elaborated by the third, while
the fourth was frankly falling asleep. The bartender, list
lessly polishing glasses, accepted the Saint’s
arrival with a
disinterested stare
which barely suggested that if Simon
wanted
anything he could ask for it.

Simon ordered a Peter Dawson on the rocks,
and after he
had tasted it, he said: “Where’s the gal who takes
the
pictures?”

“Norma? She ain’t here.”

“That settles one thing,” said the
Saint mildly. “I was
wondering if she’d become invisible.”

The barman squinted at him suspiciously, and
said: “She
went home early. Had a headache or sump’n.”

“Would you know where I can get in touch
with her?”

“She’ll be here tomorrow.”

“That’s the trouble—I may be leaving in
the afternoon,
much earlier than she’d come to work. I wanted to see her
about some pictures that were taken the other night.”

“Well, whyncha say so?” demanded the
bartender ag-
grievedly.

He fumbled through some litter beside the
cash register,
and turned back with a card. The ornate printing on it
could be
reduced to V
ERE
B
ALTON
,
Photography,
and an ad
dress, 685 Scoden Street.

“
I
thought you
called her Norma,” Simon said.

“I did. Balton is the guy who has the
concession. She
works for him.”

“Where is Scoden Street?”

“About five-six blocks from here, on the left off of
Geary.”

“And what’s her name?”

“I tolja, Norma,” said the other, with obviously
increasing
impatience with so much
stupidity.

“Nothing else?”

“You tell ‘em Norma took the pitchers
here,” said the bartender. “They’ll take care of ya.”

“Thank you,” said the Saint.

He finished his drink, put down the exact
price and a minimum tip, and sauntered back to the lobby.

If the shapely Norma was not averse to providing certain
extracurricular services of the type indicated by
Mr. Fen
nick’s story, it was highly
implausible that the bartender
would know
nothing about it. Indeed, it was most probable
that he would sometimes help to procure them. Therefore
the Saint couldn’t insist on getting in touch with
her too urgently, or pressing the questioning too hard, without the
risk of telegraphing a warning to the quarry he had
yet to
identify.

Behind the reception desk, the night clerk, a weedy young
man with long hair and acne, was totting up stacks
of
vouchers on an adding machine. He
kept Simon waiting while
he clicked
his way stubbornly through to the end of a pile,
and then looked up with an unctuous affectation of attentiveness
.

“Yes, sir?”

“I’m afraid I left my key
upstairs,” said the Saint. “Can you
let me have a spare?
Room four-o-nine.”

“What is the name, sir?”

“Templar.”

The clerk ducked aside behind a screen that
blocked one end of the counter, but he could be heard flipping the pages
of an
index.
 
After some further groping
in
 
a drawer he
bobbed back, holding a
key.

“Could you show me anything with your
name on it, sir?”
Simon impassively produced a driver’s
license,
 
and the
clerk
handed over the key.

“Do you put everyone through this when
they lock them
selves out?” Simon inquired mildly.

“Yes sir, if I don’t know them. You can’t
be too careful,
at this hour of the night, I always say. Especially during
a convention.”

“Why especially during a
convention?”

“When they get too full of the spirit of
the thing, sir, dele
gates often think of practical jokes to play
on each other-
all in good fun, of course, but not always appreciated by
the victim. You yourself, sir, mightn’t be amused if you found a
live seal
in your bathtub, and found out that my negligence
had enabled your
friends to plant it there.”

“I guess you have a point.”

The pimply one bared his yellow teeth
ingratiatingly.
“I knew you’d see it, sir. Thank you. Goodnight,
sir,” he
said, and picked up another sheaf of checks and resumed
the
busy tapping of his calculator keys without another upward
glance.

Simon stepped into the elevator, and the
lugubrious lift
man let go a carpet sweeper which he was pushing lethar
gically
about the foyer and started the ascent in stoic silence.

Finally the Saint asked: “Plenty of
what?”

After another floor had gone by, it transpired
that the
driver had not lost the thread of his lucubrations.

“Things,” he opined darkly.

They were at the fourth floor again. He held
the gate open,
without looking at the Saint, but with a rugged air of
self-
satisfaction with his achievements in both navigation and
diplomacy.
Simon got out, and headed back to his room.

His excursion had yielded nothing
sensational, but at least
he had half a name, an address which might be
the start
of a trail, and some observations which might interest Mr.
Fennick.

The trouble was that Otis Q. Fennick was not
there to hear
about them.

The room was not big enough to hide even such
a slight
man as Mr. Fennick anywhere except in the closet or under
the bed.
But if he had been even more jittery than he had
shamelessly confessed,
it was remotely possible that he could
be terrified of
anyone who might enter.

“Otis, old marshmallow,” said the
Saint reassuringly. “It’s
only me—Templar.”

There was no answer.

The bathroom door was ajar. Simon looked
inside. Mr.
Fennick was not there. Nor was he in the closet, or under
the bed—Simon ultimately forced himself to verify both
places,
foolish though it made him feel. But in about half
the detective stories
that the Saint had read, one of those
locations could have been practically
counted on to reveal Mr. Fennick’s freshly perforated corpse. None of them did.
It was almost disappointing.

Simon went to the dresser for the pack of
cigarettes which he had left where he put down Mr. Fennick’s business card.
Now he
found the card tucked half into the opening of the
package, in such a
way that he couldn’t have extracted a
cigarette without having his attention
focused on it. On the
back had been written, in a cramped but
meticulous script:

I simply can’t let you bother with my
problems. I’ll
just have to pay up and make the best of it.
Please forget
the whole thing.

Simon sat down on the bed and picked up the
telephone.

“Mr. Fennick, please,” he said.

“One moment, sir.” It was the
oleaginous voice of the night
clerk, who was evidently entrusted with
several chores by a
thrifty management. Then: “I’m sorry, sir, but Mr.
Fennick’s
line still has a Do Not Disturb on it.”

“Since when?”

“He asked me to put it on when he came
in, sir, at one-
thirty.”

“I see… . Would you give me his room
number?”

The pause this time was almost imperceptible.

“I’m afraid I couldn’t take the
responsibility for that, sir.
He might be very annoyed if you disturbed him
by knocking
on his door.”

“What makes you think I’d do that?”

“I’m sure you wouldn’t want to, sir. So
you won’t mind
asking the manager for the information, will you? He
comes
on at eight o’clock. Thank you, sir.”

“Invite me to your funeral,” said
the Saint sweetly, but he
said it after a click in the receiver had announced
that the
clerk had already terminated the discussion.

For a few minutes, in a simmer of sheer
exasperation, he
contemplated some quite extravagant forms of retaliation
against
everyone who had contributed to wasting his time
for the past hour. But
at the end of a cigarette he laughed,
and fell asleep thinking it was lucky
he hadn’t gone any
farther on a wild-goose chase with such a protege.

If Mr. Otis Q. Fennick was such an
eviscerated marvel that he insisted on submitting to the crudest kind of contrived
shakedown, without even a struggle, after having been of
fered the
best advice and assistance, then he deserved to
stew in his own syrup.

The Saint slumbered on this relaxing
justification for pre
cisely three hours and seventeen minutes, at
which time a
crew of civic servants arrived under his window with some
raspingly
geared conveyance and began to decant into it
the garbage cans
which had previously been only silent orna
ments of the alley,
clanging and crashing them back and forth as a tympanic accompaniment to their
mutual shouts
of encouragement and impromptu snatches of vocalizing.