The Saint to the Rescue (8 page)

“Just don’t try to send us everyone you
meet,” he said good-humoredly. “We’ve had some good sportsmen and
fish
ermen from down there, but there’s some kind that expect
more than
we’re set up to give ‘em.”

“I know what you mean,” Simon said.
“A strike on every
cast, air-conditioned skiffs, and a gaudy
night club to come
home to.”

They were sitting out on the high bluff
overlooking the
river, under the magnificent oaks that shaded it in the
day
time, after the last dinner of that visit, watching the lights
of a tug
with a train of barges plodding up the channel and
swapping the lazy
post-mortems and promises that friends
and fishermen swap at
such times. At that latitude and inland, the first cold front of fall had
spoiled the appetites of
the mosquitoes, although it was still only a
temporary dis
pensation that made it enjoyable to stay out after dark.

“On a night like this,” Simon
murmured idly, “here and
now, it’s hard to remember what it must have
been like for
the pioneers who hacked their way through the swamps and
jungles of
this entomologist’s paradise, and made it fit for
the non-insect pests
to move in.”

“I don’t think the Spaniards made much
out of it,” Harris
said. “But some of the later
carpetbaggers did all right.”

“You can say that again,” put in
his wife, with sudden
unwonted vehemence. She turned to the Saint.
“Yes, there is something you can do—for me, anyway. When you get down
around Palm
Beach, look up a fellow called Ed Diehl.”

“Now, Ernestine—”

“Well, why shouldn’t he? The Saint
likes
a good crook
to go after, doesn’t he? And he might just happen to run
short of
crooks some wet weekend. And this Diehl’s
 
cer
tainly a prize
one.”

“Now, Ernestine, we can’t expect the
Saint to take off
after any little chiseler who took advantage of—”

“Little chiseler? He’s a big chiseler.
‘Square’
Diehl, he
calls himself, Simon. Hah!”

One of the Saint’s redeeming graces was that
he knew
when he had hooked himself and could accept the conse
quences
gracefully.

“All right,” he said placatingly.
“I asked for it. What was
the deal this merchant got you into?”

“Well, it wasn’t long after we started
building this place,”
Jim Harris said. “An aunt of mine back
in Texas died and
left me four lots she owned somewhere around Lake Worth.
We were
much too busy getting this place in shape to go down and look at ‘em, though I
know we could’ve done it
all in a day. We kept telling ourselves we’d
have to do it,
but somehow we never could find that whole day to spare. A
lot of people think that running a camp like this is all play
and no
work, but you’d be surprised how it ties you down.”

“So one day we get a letter from this
Diehl,” Ernestine said. “He says he’s had an inquiry about these
lots, and
would we be interested in selling. If so, call him
collect.
He’s a regular real-estate broker with a fancy
letterhead, so we didn’t think there’d be any harm in talking to him.”

“He’s a real smooth operator,” her
husband resumed reminiscently
. “He soon found out that we’d never
been down
that way and didn’t know much about conditions there, and
while he was doing that he’d made himself sound so honest
and
helpful, I just didn’t even doubt him when I asked
him what sort of
property it was and he said it was in a
poor section of town
that never had done much good and
lots were only fetching about a
thousand dollars. I didn’t
see what he was doing at the time, but I’ve
thought about it
since. Right then, when he said he had a customer
offering five thousand for the four lots just because they were all
together
and he was a cranky old guy who didn’t want
any near neighbors, he
made it sound like the last chance
we’d ever have to get that kind of
price.”

“And I can’t even say ‘I told you so,’
” lamented the
distaff side of the record. “It sounded just as
convincing to me,
as you told it, and we thought we were lucky to get a
windfall
like that just when we could use it.”

Simon lighted a cigarette.

“And then you finally made the safari
South and saw
what you’d sold—”

“No, we still haven’t been able to take
that day off,” Jim
said. “But one day we had a couple
staying here from
Lake Worth, and we got to talking, and right off they
said
they hoped we hadn’t been given a fast shuffle like it seems
this Ed
Diehl is known for. So I got out the papers, and they
knew exactly where
these lots were, on a main-road corner
right in the middle of
a lot of new building developments,
and there was a big new supermarket
going up now on
those very same lots we sold.”

“And the old codger who just wanted his
privacy?”

“They recognized his name, too. Seems
he’s a pretty active
attorney, not very old, and also a cousin of
Mrs. Diehl’s.”

The Saint nodded sympathetically.

“Yes, of course. If a supermarket had
appeared as the
buyer, you couldn’t have helped knowing your property was
worth more.
They probably sold it to the market out of the
same escrow, at a fat
profit, without even putting up a
dime of their own. And after that first
vague letter, I bet
you never had anything else from Diehl in writing except
the formal ‘I enclose herewith’ kind of stuff.”

“That’s right. I realized that when I
got mad and started
wondering how much I could sue him for. Of all the lies
he’d
told me, he’d told every one on the telephone. I couldn’t prove
one thing
in a courtroom, except with my word against his.”

“He’s a sharp operator, all right,”
Ernestine said. “This
couple told us a lot more stories about him.
He learned
his tricks from his father, who started the business,
selling
swampland by mail to suckers who never saw it, during the
first
Florida boom. They had a few square miles that they
bought for a dollar
an acre, all laid out on paper with streets
and business and
residential districts and even a city hall,
yet, which hasn’t been
lived in by anything but alligators
to this day; but they called it
Heavenleigh Hills”—she spelled
it out—“and I believe Diehl is
still advertising ‘retirement
farms’ there in newspapers far enough away to
reach the
sort of buyers who’d make a down payment and not come
looking for
a long while. Anyway, that’s the reputation he
has locally. But we
were the hicks who hadn’t heard about it.”

“Sure taught me a lesson I won’t
forget,” Jim said ruefully.

“I wish I could be as philosophical as
that,” said his wife.
“I’d just like to see him get his
comeuppance, the way the
Saint would give it to him.”

“I’m the victim of publicity agents I
never hired,” sighed
the Saint. “But for two swell people like
you—and in
memory of a couple of lunkers that did
not
get
away—I’ll
keep an eye peeled for this square, Diehl.”

It was an easy promise to make, of a kind
that he had
learned to make rather easily in those days when so many
people
recognized his name or his face and expected miracles
of freebooting to be
performed instantly. It gave him a
respectful inkling of what God must
have to cope with if
He heard all the prayers. But being only
human, in spite
of his sobriquet, it must be admitted here and now that
Simon
sometimes forgot such promises after they had served
their first soothing
purpose.

The case of Mr. Edmund S.Diehl happened not to
be
one of those examples of Saintly fallibility; and that was
entirely
the fault of Mr. Diehl himself. That is, if Mr. Diehl
had decided at some
earlier date to retire with his ill-gotten
inheritance added to
his own ill-gotten gains and live out
his remaining years in luxury in some
remote refuge from
the tax collectors, the Saint might never have been
reminded
of him again. Possibly. But Mr. Diehl was not a retiring
type,
and he was entrenched in one of the privileged fields in
which
tax-heavy Income can be almost effortlessly transmuted
into tax-light
Capital Gains.

Also, and even more to this point, Mr. Diehl
had not been
raised on poetry. Any landscape, to him, was simply an
area of
real estate which could be subdivided into smaller
areas, with an
automatic profit on each reduction, and
eventually peddled in
convenient building lots at about the
same price per foot as it had once
brought by the acre. If only
God could make a tree, as Mr. Diehl had heard
it said, Mr.
Diehl had plenty of bulldozers to knock them down, in his
own territory, a lot faster than God could make them. Mr.
Diehl had
effectively demonstrated this over great swaths of
fertile soil which his
machinery had scraped bare of its
natural growth to make room for stark
forests of power poles and television antennae brooding over regimented rows of
standardized, bleakly functional, and uniformly faceless liv
ing-boxes
available on a nominal down payment and easy
terms. Like almost
every other fast-buck Florida developer,
Mr. Diehl knew exactly
what percentage could be saved
by scarifying a tract from end to end in
steam-roller sweeps
instead of wasting time for the blades to maneuver in and
out among the trees and skin out only the ugly undergrowth.
“Landscape,” in the only sense he understood it, then became
simply a
dignified verb for the operation of selling the incoming settlers nursery
shrubs and saplings to restock the scorched earth which he had created—a side
line which was
not to be sneezed at.

Simon Templar had friends of his own to visit
in Delray
on his way down, and thus it was that his route took him
past a pine
wood off the main highway which was in course of being swiftly and efficiently
razed in the interest of such
an improvement as has just been described. He
slackened
his foot on the speed pedal as he saw the tallest tree in
the
grove, already canted at a crazy angle, rocking under the
ruthless onslaughts
of the gas powered monster butting at
its base.

The Florida native pine is a commercially
useless tree, dis
dained as timber, pulpwood, and even fireplace logs. But
it will
grow, slowly, to a fifty-foot height of massive broad-
branched thick-leaved
evergreen that is one of the few ar
boreal majesties in a land of shallow
contours and generally
shallow vegetation. It may take twenty years
to do this, so
that it is not exactly expendable, except in the most
coldly
materialistic
philosophy.

The Saint thought of himself poetically
quite as seldom as
Edmund Diehl, but the creaks and groans of the tree and
the roars and growls of the steel behemoth worrying it
pierced his ears like the sounds of an
animate conflict, as his
car drifted slowly
by; and as the struggle reached its foregone conclusion and the tree toppled
and gave up the ghost
in a great
rending shuddering crash like a stentorian death-
rattle, an actual physical hurt seemed to strike deep through
his own body. He even trod the car to an abrupt
full stop,
with a savage insensate
impulse to get out and go over and
drag
the driver out of the bulldozer and smash him down
with a fist in the face and drive the bulldozer
slowly over
him. But he knew just as
quickly as he controlled the reflex how stupid and unjust that would have been:
the driver was
only an innocent and
earnest Negro, capably and methodi
cally
doing the job that he was paid to do. The man who
Simon realized he really wanted was the one who
hired the
driver and gave him his
instructions.