Thanks to the Saint (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  “Fellow from back East built it and tried to raise a few horses, but mostly it was because he had TB and the climate was supposed to be good for him,” Tanner said. “Maybe he came here too late, but he didn’t last long. Nobody else wanted the place until somebody from the Government came around shopping for a location for these scientists. Seems this was just what they wanted, perhaps because, except the way we come from, there’s nothing but desert and jack-rabbits around for fifty miles or more.”

  The only visibly new feature of the establishment was a conspicuously shiny wire-mesh fence about nine feet high, which contained the ranch house in the approximate center of what looked to be a square of about two hundred yards on each side, with the barn quite close to one corner where there was a steel-framed gate to which the washboard track they were following led.

  Tanner braked the truck with its fenders only inches from the gate, and Simon’s ears became aware of a thin squealing sound which he could not associate with any of the diverse mechanical protests emanating from the innards of the aging pickup. Almost immediately a man in a nondescript gray uniform came out of the barn, waved to the marshal in recognition, and came to open the gate. Another man, similarly uniformed, stood in the doorway that the first man had emerged from and watched.

  “You hear that noise?” Tanner asked, and the Saint nodded.

  “Yes.”

  “That’s the fence. Anything or anyone comes near it, they don’t even have to touch it, but it sets up that whining. Acts like a sort of condenser. Nobody could get close enough to climb over or cut the wire without starting it oscillating. It can’t even be switched off when they want to open the gate. And it sounds loudest right inside those old stables. That’s where the guards live—the Government made it over into living quarters for ’em. And not more than two of ’em are allowed to be off the station at the same time: that way, there’s always an extra man on call besides the one who’s on duty. So even if the man on duty wanted to sneak the gate open, for any reason, he couldn’t do it without the other fellow hearing it.”

  “Unless the electricity were cut off altogether,” Simon suggested.

  “In that case an emergency system cuts in and also starts up a siren on top of the main building, so the whole place would be alerted.”

  Tanner let in the clutch and drove through the gate and stopped again a few yards inside.

  “In other words,” said the Saint, “this is the old reliable inside-job type of mystery, with the latest electronic guarantees.”

  Tanner grunted.

  “I guess you can call it that, if you want to.”

  He shut off the engine and climbed out, and Simon stepped out the other door and strolled around to join him. The guard finished closing the gate and started towards them. As soon as he had taken two steps from it, the high-pitched wailing note that had been quivering remorselessly in the air stopped suddenly.

  “Hi, Chief,” the guard said.

  “This is Frank Loretto,” Tanner said. “He’s the senior guard.” With only the necessary turn of his head he went on: “You were the stand-by man on Ingram’s watch when it happened—that right, Frank?”

  “Right, Chief.”

  Loretto was square-built and square-faced, with wiry black hair liberally necked with white, a hard-looking man with a soft agreeable voice. He studied the Saint curiously with discreet dark eyes, but Tanner either preferred to ignore the invitation to complete the introduction or was unaware of it.

  “Tell me again how it happened, Frank.”

  “Jock relieved me at seven o’clock. Klein had been on stand-by during my watch; as soon as that let him out, he took off for Tucson to see a dentist—he had a toothache all yesterday. Burney had been sleeping; he got up and had breakfast with me.”

  “That’s Burney,” Tanner explained to the Saint, with a jerk of his thumb towards the other guard who still stood in the doorway of the converted stables.

  “The Professors got here just after eight, as usual, all together—Dr Soren and Oakridge, in Rand’s car.”

  “They all three board at the hotel in town—I mean, they did,” Tanner amplified. “They only come out here to work.”

  “Jock let ’em in, and then he set off to make his round,” Loretto went on. “That is, all the checks every man is supposed to make when he comes on duty. Burney and I sat around and made some more coffee. About nine o’clock Marj got here in her car, and I let her in.”

  “Marjorie starts an hour after the scientists,” Tanner told the Saint, “because she usually has to work at least an hour after they quit.” He shifted his ponderous direction once again. “Okay, Frank, what then?”

  “You’d better get it from Jock, Chief,” Loretto said gently. “He called me on the intercom at nine-fifty-two and told me he’d found Oakridge dead and he was staying to see nothing got moved. Then I phoned you. Being his stand-by, I had to stay here on the gate. Besides, I’m a cop too…But Burney went and had a look.”

  Tanner glanced again at the man in the stable doorway—he was tall and thin, with a sallow complexion and a long pessimistic face—and hitched up his pants stolidly.

  “We’ll look for ourselves,” he said. “See you later, Frank.” He turned and lumbered on towards the house, and Simon followed him.

  Something was beginning to nag the Saint’s sensitive perceptions like a tiny splinter, and he had to get it out.

  “Does everybody around here have some sort of complex about being a cop?” he asked. “I can’t remember when I’ve heard quite so much self-conscious talk about it.”

  “Right here and now, there’s a reason.” Tanner looked at the Saint with another of his probing dead-pan stares. “Most cops would say I was crazy to bring you here. I’ve heard a lot of people say that you hate cops.”

  “Only particularly stupid cops, and crooked cops,” Simon said, answering what sounded almost like a question. “And I’ve had to do a few unkind things to fairly good cops, who were just too ambitious about adding my scalp to their trophies. But I didn’t hate them.”

  “That’s the way I got it,” Tanner said. “From a cop named Inspector Fernack, of New York. He was our guest of honor at a Police Association dinner in Cleveland once, and your name came up, I forget how, in a bull session afterwards. I figured he knew what he was talking about.”

  “That was nice of John Henry,” Simon murmured. “I must try to be kinder to him next time I’m in his bailiwick…But I still don’t get the connection.”

  “You will in just a minute,” Tanner said. He opened the front door of the house and went in. They stepped directly into the living room, without any intervention of a hallway. It was a large room which seemed lofty because no ceiling intruded between the floor and the rough-hewn beams and rafters of the roof. There was a broad picture window on the other side framing a panorama of pale grays and olive green that ended in a low line of corrugated purple hills, and a big smoke-blackened stone fireplace at one end. The solid Spanish-derivative furniture, Navaho rugs on the floor, and copper and Indian pottery ornaments had obviously been left unchanged since the departure of the ill-starred original owner, and it had been kept as a common room for some of the very different breed of pioneers who had infiltrated the Southwest since the dawn of the Atomic Age.

  The Professors, as the guards seemed to have aptly christened them—or, at least, the two who were left—were typical of the New Order, which at that time still seemed disconcertingly untypical of the Old. As befitted the priests of a Science separated by multiple walls of electronic computers from the gropings of the dreamy medieval alchemist, they would have seemed much more at home in a small-town bank than stirring a smelly caldron on some blasted heath. The one who bustled instantly into the foreground, forestalling any possible query as to who was the ranking spokesman, was so executive that it crackled.

  “Glad you got here at last, Marshal,” he said.

  The way he uttered the words “at last,” with bell-like clarity,
yet with a total lack of inflection, so that the implied censure was unmistakable and yet, if challenged, he could unassailably disclaim any such intention, was as much a triumph of technique as the way he turned the compliment of giving Tanner his correct title into a subtle reminder of a class difference between them. He was a short rotund man with rimless glasses and a tight mechanical smile and wispy brown hair stretched thinly over the places where it had stopped growing, whose neat business suit was a final incongruity against the décor of the room and the scenery outside.

  “Professor Walter Rand,” Tanner said introductorily.

  Rand shook hands heartily and vacantly, like a politician.

  Tanner continued, pointing at the others in turn with a thick, uncourtly forefinger: “Dr Conrad Soren. My daughter Marjorie. Jock Ingram.”

  Dr Soren inclined his head stiffly. His costume was almost as inappropriate as Rand’s, in a different direction, consisting of unbleached linen slacks and an exuberantly flowered shirt that would have been more at home on the beach at Waikiki. He had a short nose and a long upper lip and a brush of thick straight wiry hair, all of which might have given him a rather simian aspect if it had not been for his large and extremely intelligent eyes.

  Marjorie Tanner was a pretty girl with nice brown hair and nice brown eyes and a nice figure. She was not the type that was likely to launch a thousand ships, or even a thousand feet of motion-picture film, but she had a wholesome air of being nice to know and even nice to live with. Jock Ingram was a few years older but well under thirty, a well-knit young man with crew-cut sandy hair and pleasantly undistinguished features but very earnest eyes, the type that most parents of daughters would be happy to see calling. Already they managed to look like a couple, and they looked at the Saint together in the same politely puzzled way.

  The marshal, however, had again conveniently forgotten to complete the other side of the introduction.

  “Let’s see the body, Jock,” he said bluntly.

  “Yes, sir.”

  The young man in uniform headed towards an open arch in the wall opposite the fireplace. It was the end of a corridor that ran lengthways through the house, with doors on each side and another door across the far end. Ingram led the way past two doors on the right and opened the third room.

  It faced the same view as the living room and had obviously once been a bedroom, but it had been stripped of all household furniture. Instead, it held a workbench littered with an assortment of small tools, an engineer’s drawing board under the window, a bookcase with rolls of drafting paper and other stationery on the shelves, and the body.

  The body lay on the floor near the middle of the room, belly down, the head turned to the right so that the left cheek rested on the bare floor. Of all the workers in that converted Western setting, Edward Oakridge, even in death, looked the least out of place, for he wore a plaid shirt and blue jeans secured by a tooled leather belt, although he had not gone so far as to wear cowboy boots but had his feet in comfortable sneakers. He was a short burly man, and what could be seen on his face had some of the same Neanderthal ruggedness as his physique. His head was completely hairless, so that the blood-clotted wound slightly above and behind his right ear could be plainly seen, but even more conspicuous and more gruesome was the screwdriver handle that stuck out at an angle from his powerful neck, directly over the jugular vein.

  It was the latter wound which had done the most bleeding, to form a pool on the bare tile floor. Into that pool of ghastly ink the dying man had dipped a finger, and with it had traced three capital letters close to his face, which spelled a word. And as he gazed down at it, the earliest of the Saint’s perplexities was answered.

  The word was: “COP.”

  “Now I get it,” said the Saint at last. “Why didn’t you tell me, Harry?”

  “Jock told Loretto and Loretto told me when he phoned,” Tanner said. “But that was double hearsay. I hadn’t seen it myself.”

  He squatted to make a closer examination, and Simon leaned over to confirm it.

  “Somebody hit him when he wasn’t looking, with something with a sort of cornered edge,” Tanner said. “It may have cracked his skull, but it doesn’t seem to have crushed it in. The murderer wasn’t certain that that killed him either, so he stuck the screwdriver in his throat to make sure.”

  “There’s a soldering iron here on the workbench with what looks like blood on the tip,” Ingram said. “The guy could’ve put it back down there when he picked up the screwdriver.”

  They went over and looked, without touching.

  “But Oakridge still wasn’t quite dead,” Simon said slowly. “He came to again for a few seconds, before he passed out for keeps. He couldn’t even yell, with that thing in his gullet. But he tried to leave a message.”

  Then all three of them sensed the presence of Professor Rand in the doorway and turned before he spoke, but it was the Saint who was the objective of his busy bright eyes.

  “Are you from the FBI?” he inquired.

  “He’s assisting me,” Tanner pre-empted the reply calmly. “But the FBI have been notified. They’re sending a man from Tucson.”

  “Then wouldn’t it be better to leave everything undisturbed till he gets here? After all, this establishment is under the Federal Government—”

  “It may sound crazy, Professor, and it likely is, but this is also inside the town limits of Primrose Pass, which were drawn by some optimist who figured it didn’t cost anything to think big. I haven’t been told anything by the Federal Government which says I shouldn’t bother about a murder committed anywhere in my territory.”

  “I’m only thinking, Marshal, that the FBI will have all the latest equipment and can probably save you a lot of trouble.”

  “My trouble is what the town pays me for,” Tanner said equably. “But don’t worry, we won’t disturb anything. You didn’t disturb anything, did you, Jock?”

  “No, sir.”

  “You didn’t have a chance to wipe up that word on the floor, before you called anyone?”

  Ingram’s straightforward eyes did not waver, but a flush crept into his face.

  “I could have, I suppose. I didn’t think of it.”

  “Did anyone else have a chance to mess up anything?”

  Ingram hesitated, and Rand said, “Yes, I did.”

  He was sublimely unabashed by the reactions that simultaneously converged upon him.

  “There was a diagram pinned on that board,” he said. “I noticed that it included the fullest details of…of our most recent advances in…in the problems we have been working on. I’m sorry I can’t be more specific. This is such a highly classified project that I mustn’t even say what it’s about, except to someone with special credentials.”

  “I don’t think that matters to us,” said the Saint. “So it’s the long awaited Death Ray, or a gizmo that transmutes red tape into blue ribbons. The only point we’re concerned with is that it would be of incalculable value to the Enemy.”

  “Exactly.”

  “And it’s gone,” Simon said, glancing at the uncluttered drafting table.

  “That’s what I was telling you,” Rand said testily. “I removed it and locked it in my safe. Not knowing who might be brought here by an inevitable investigation, it was my duty to keep it out of sight of any unauthorized person. However, it may be pertinent for you to know that it was there.”

  Tanner’s stolid bulk quivered momentarily with what in any less undemonstrative individual would have been taken for the vibration of a chuckle.

  “Well,” he said, “thanks anyway for giving us the motive.” He gazed woodenly at the Saint. “You want to look around here any more?”

  “I don’t think so,” Simon said, after doing exactly that for several seconds, but without shifting from where he stood. “I guess I’ve seen all I’m going to. I’ll leave the magnifying-glass and vacuum-cleaner work to the Sherlock squad. Now what about this door here?”

  “The bathroom,” R
and said.

  Simon opened the door and looked in. The room had been used for some minor laboratory work, and there were a dozen chemical bottles on the tile-topped counter in which the washbasin was set. There was another door on the opposite side of it.

  “I suppose that goes to another former bedroom?”

  “Yes. We’re using all the rooms. As a matter of fact, I was working in there myself from about eight-fifteen on.”

  Simon tried the handle.

  “It’s locked.”

  “I’m afraid it will have to remain so,” Rand said, with a tightening of his thin lips. “Except to the FBI, or someone properly authorized by the Department of Defense. The same applies to the other rooms where we have—er—experimental assemblies. However, if you’ll step outside, I’ll tell you all that you need to know.”

  They filed out into the corridor again.

  “The door at the end used to be the master bedroom; now it’s our main workshop. The room you were just in, as you saw, is a drafting and general utility room.” Rand was leading them briskly back along the passage. “Then the room you were asking about, which communicates through the bathroom. Then this”—Rand opened the door nearest the living room—“used to be the den. We use it as an office and for some of our paperwork. Miss Tanner works here.”

  It was a completely unremarkable room, to all appearance, except for being somewhat overcrowded by a secretary’s desk, typewriter stand, and filing cabinets which had been added to the normal furniture.

  “The other doors are just powder room—storage closets—linen closet, and so on,” said Professor Rand, dismissing them with a flick of his hand, and led the way back through the arch into the living room where Soren and the girl were still waiting.