The Saint to the Rescue (5 page)

“I can imagine it. Do you sell candy, or
is it soda pop?”

“Neither. We just happened to be at the
same hotel, and
we bumped into each other. One of those things.”

“I thought you looked different from most
of his business
buddies. Come in.”

Simon had intended to from the moment he saw
her. The room was virtually a facsimile of his own, and the blonde
looked as
out of place in it as a piece of Cartier hardware in
a junk yard. But the
observation he wanted to make was that
Mr. Fennick really
wasn’t there. The closet was open, and he
was able to check
under the bed by clumsily dropping the pack of cigarettes he slipped out of his
pocket.

“As a matter of fact, you might be able
to help me to catch
up with him,” said the blonde. “I only arrived
late last night
myself—it was all on the spur of the moment, and I didn’t
even try to
call him till this morning. I know what these conventions are like. I spent
the night with an old girl friend who
lives here.”

“I was wondering how you got in. That’s
why I looked so
dazed when I saw you.”

“They gave me a key at the desk, of
course, as soon as I
proved I was Mrs. Fennick. Why shouldn’t
they?”

“I called him less than an hour
ago,” said the Saint, “and
his phone was still shut off.”

“It was shut off when I called from
downstairs ten minutes
ago. So I came on up anyhow. Exercising a
marital privilege. I didn’t see why I should have to sit in the lobby till he
condescended to regain consciousness. But no Otis.”

“He must have gone out and forgotten to
clear the line.”

“Do you solve crossword puzzles,
too?”

Simon had been opening his cigarette package,
which was a fresh one, with unhurried neatness. He offered her the first
of its
contents, which she accepted.

“I can’t solve any puzzle about where he
may have gone,” he said, striking a match. “He didn’t tell me
anything about
his plans for the day.”

“May I ask why you thought he wouldn’t
mind your waking
him up, if he was trying to sleep late?”

“I happened to have dug up a hot lead on
something he
was telling me he was very concerned about financially. I
thought he ought to know it at once, so I took a chance.”

On the pretext of looking for a safe place to
get rid of the
match, he contrived to work himself around to a sufficient
glimpse of the bathroom to confirm that Mr. Fennick was not
hiding out
there, or stashed there as a corpse. He was aware
that he might begin to
seem obsessed with such possibilities,
but he could
certainly have offered a doozy of an excuse.

“Well,” she said, “that seems
to leave us both in the same boat. He’s probably lost for the day now. They
have meetings and lunches and speeches and more meetings, from the first
hangover
till it’s time to start the next one, don’t they, on
these conventions?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Simon grinned.
“I’ve never been part
of one.”

“Ah, yes. I said that you didn’t look
like the type.”

“Neither do you, Mrs. Fennick.”

She had been studying him with unmistakably
increasing
interest for the last few minutes, and her appraising eyes
did not waver by a fraction of a degree at the intangible hint
of
audacity in his tone.

She said: “Did you get chummy enough, as
you put it, to call my husband Otis?”

“I guess I did.”

“Then you needn’t be so formal with me.
If he didn’t tell
you, the name is Liane. Do you have a name, too? Or a
number?”

“Simon Templar.”

“The Saint, of course. All right, I can
enjoy a joke. But
eventually you’ll have to explain why it’s funny. And
what
type don’t I look like?”

“The wife of a marzipan magnate,”
said the Saint, unabashed. “You look more like a glamour model.”

“I was, not so many centuries ago. Lots
of magnates pick
up that type. Didn’t you know? It adds prestige, like a
Cadil
lac. Why don’t we spend the day together, waiting for Otis,
and I’ll
explain it all.”

He would have had to be very much younger,
very much
older, or very much more naive, to misunderstand the whole
of her implication, and he let her know that he was weighing
all of it
in the long cool glance that he rested on her before
he answered.

“It might be fun,” he said, and he
did not have to pretend
to mean it. “But—”

“Don’t tell me that Otis became your
best friend over
night.
And you don’t look like a man who’d have any other
objection to taking pity on a lady’s boredom.”

“He didn’t, and I haven’t. But I’d hate
to help spoil a good
thing for you.”

“Did Otis give you the idea, in his cups, that we held hands
every night while we made plans for our silver
wedding
honeymoon?”

“No. In fact, he gave me the impression
that you were the rolling-pin type, just waiting for him to come home with a
smudge of lipstick under his
ear. If you’ve got him as house-
broken as
that, it could be moderately catastrophic if he
picked up the ammunition to shoot back at you.”

“My good man, since we’ve suddenly
become so very busi
ness-like, let me remind you that the Fennicks are legal
residents
of the sovereign State of New York, which is also
the legal domicile of
the Fennick Candy Company. Have
you ever heard any betting on a rich man’s
chances in a
New York divorce court?”

“You sound as if you’d talked to some
good lawyers.”

She came so close, deliberately, that the
first time they both
inhaled simultaneously would have caused a most stimulating
collision.

“Then why don’t you let me worry about
my own prob
lems?”

He bent and carefully kissed her motionlessly
upturned
mouth. Then he stepped back and glanced at his watch.

He was not aware until afterwards of how
cold-blooded
he must have seemed. He didn’t intend it as a rebuff. It
was
a long time since he had abjured any profound amazement
at the
strange impulses of women. Perhaps he had been ex
posed to too many of
them. But in an oddly unegotistical way,
for him, he was
inclined to respect the privacy of their mo
tives, and to enjoy
the pleasant surprise without criticizing the donor. He had no moralistic
resistance to Liane Fennick as an unexpected diversion, but there was a
one-track
quirk
in his psychology that would not let him enjoy the best of
it while
he was still wound up with something else.

“There’s another problem I’ve got to
take care of,” he
said. “Let’s make it a date for
lunch.”

She was palpably baffled by his restraint, but
he couldn’t
help that. If he could have seen only a few hours into the
future, he might have played it differently. But she took it
well.

“Twelve-thirty?”

“I’ll pick you up here.”

“This time you’d better use the phone
first,” she said. “If
it doesn’t answer, or if Otis happens to have come back, I’ll
meet you at the Drake.”

“But now,” said the Saint
regretfully, “I have got to duck.”

He brushed her lips once more, with impudent
promise,
and went out.

An ingrained pattern of cautiousness that had
become second nature made him walk down two flights of stairs
before taking
the elevator. It was not a question of exag
gerated
apprehensiveness, but a simple automatism of elimi
nating unnecessary
risks. Whatever the intrusion of Liane
Fennick might lead to,
he could lose nothing by impressing
the elevator boy with the fact that he
rode down from his
own floor, which should suffice to supplant any
recollection
of the floor he had gone up to.

The same habit made him ask the bell captain
in the lobby
for a
street map of the city, instead of asking the whereabouts
of De Boer Lane. There was no point in
gratuitously enlarging the number of witnesses who might recall that he had
inquired
about that address.

And having located that short blind alley on
one of the
southern slopes of Telegraph Hill, he also picked out a
con
venient intersection three blocks away, and directed a taxi
there, for
the same good reason. From the intersection, after
the taxi was out of
sight, he walked. There was nothing
prescient about it, except a logic
which assumed that some
thing had to be rotten in the state of
Fennick. He didn’t
exhaust
himself with trying to guess what it was. But after a
very short stroll, he knew that his instincts had been impec
cable at least on the score of procedure.

His taxi couldn’t have reached De Boer Lane if
he had
begged it to. The street that it opened from was almost solid
with police
cars at that point, and an ambulance backed into
the narrow turning
blocked it completely. The lane was only about forty yards long, and was lined
with small unmatched
houses jammed shoulder to shoulder, none of
them more than
two stories high, the kind of cottages that lend
themselves to
cramped but quaint conversions and are therefore highly
esteemed
by would-be Bohemian types. It was the ideal
backwater for a girl
of Norma Uplitz’s unconventional mores,
where odd goings-on at
odd hours would be so normal
as to attract no attention. All except one
aberration about
which
even the most sophisticated neighborhoods are seldom
blase… .

The inevitable crowd of passers-by who had
flowed in from
the street was giving the native colony plenty of
competition for the best view of the shrouded shape which at that moment was
being carried out on a stretcher from a house halfway up
the
cul-de-sac.

The Saint did not need any parapsychic gifts
to anticipate
what the number of the building would be before he
located
it. And as he edged inconspicuously closer, he did not really
need his
exceptional visual acuity to decipher the name of
Norma Uplitz on one
of the mailboxes at the entrance. As
for the infinitely ultimate possibility
that the body on the stretcher could have come from the other of the two apart
ments, he
had only to keep his ears open as he filtered
through the morbid mob
with the nearest approximation he could make to invisibility.

It was an alabaster-faced woman with mauve
lipstick and
stringy hair who said to a fellow colonist, an elderly
bearded
man with a gold earring: “Of course I heard the shots,
dahling.
How could I help it, living right underneath her? But I haven’t the faintest
idea what time it was, except that
it was daylight. I only half woke up,
and I thought she was
probably slamming doors or hitting a paramour
with a frying pan or some ordinary thing like that. I’ve had the most fright
ful job
trying to explain to some yokel detective that I couldn’t
leap out
of bed and start investigating every time there was
an uproar in Norma’s
apartment. I’d never have got a good
night’s sleep… .”

Simon drifted on, melting out of the crowd as
self-effacingly
as he had joined it.

He walked, down past the limits of the old
Barbary Coast
of legendary times, now sanitized into something called an
“International Settlement,” on into the bustling exotically
scented streets of Chinatown which looked much less exotic
in the
watery sunlight which was struggling to penetrate the
dank mistiness of a
fine San Francisco morning.

Johnny Kan was already at work in his back
office, plough
ing into the myriad unepicurean details of restaurant
manage
ment of which his evening customers would be as uncon
scious as
they would be of the activities of the cleaning crew
which was just as
busy restoring the dining rooms to the
virginal freshness
which they would thoroughly debauch before midnight. But he showed no
impatience at being inter
rupted.