Thanks to the Saint (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  The owner frowned sharply.

  “You’re talking about Irv Jardane—the fellow in the next cottage to yours?”

  “None other. A postgraduate psychologist, although maybe not quite so smooth as Brother Quigg.”

  “I don’t quite get you, but I know he can be pretty gruff at times—”

  “What else do you know about him—aside from what he wrote on the card when he registered?”

  The proprietor blinked in a shocked but rather puzzled way.

  “He was a classmate of mine in college. Worked his own way through—the real hard-driving kind. I watched him start with one truck that he drove himself, and build up that Transamerican Transport system, while I was in business in Portland. He’s been coming here for the last five years, ever since I retired and bought this place.”

  An oddly empty sensation lodged in Simon Templar’s stomach like a bullet and expanded hollowly. He lighted a cigarette, moving rather slowly and stiffly, while a clammy chill stroked his skin into goose-pimples.

  “Thanks, Ben,” he said at length. “You just saved me from pulling the most fabulous boner of all my life. Some day I may tell you both how gorgeously ghastly it could have been, but right now I don’t feel strong enough. However, I just changed my mind again, and I’m going to stay out the week in the cottage.”

  “Whatever you say,” answered the other agreeably, if in some pardonable fog.

  Simon drove back to his cabin, unloaded his gear again, and took from his suitcase the checkbook of a Swiss bank in which, for many obvious reasons, he had for some time found it convenient to carry an account in the name of Sebastian Tombs. He wrote a check for ten thousand dollars and made another pilgrimage to the cottage at the other end of the camp.

  “Your bank should be able to get this cleared by airmail and cable within three days,” he said. “Meanwhile we’ll get some professional to draw up whatever you ought to sign, and as soon as you can give me a valid receipt, I’ll take everything to Portland myself and get Jardane started. The sooner he gets going, the sooner you start collecting. For the time being, here’s the three thousand option money he was talking about.”

  The little man peered at the crumpled cash mistily through his bifocals.

  “But according to our verbal agreement, half of this is yours.”

  “You know how you feel about your ex-wife?” said the Saint lightly. “That’s how I feel about tax collectors. I’m going to do this for free. Call it my contribution to the cause of the downtrodden male, which wouldn’t normally be a deductible item. Or a sop to my own conscience. Just do me a favor and stop dropping your wallet and telling the story of your life to anyone who picks it up. You might make some innocent con man feel like a perfect sucker.”

  “I don’t understand this at all,” said Mr Quigg.

  THE CAREFUL TERRORIST

  The explosion that killed Lester Boyd blew out a couple of windows in his West Side apartment and narrowly missed some passers on the sidewalk below with a shower of falling glass, but otherwise its force was so accurately calculated that it endangered nobody but its intended victim. The apartments across the landing and directly overhead felt only a dull concussion, and a little plaster fell from a ceiling underneath; that was all. But all that was left of Lester Boyd was a gory pulp and the memory of a crusading journalist who had taken one dare too many.

  Two days after it happened Chief Inspector Fernack came striding out of The New York Herald Tribune by the back way on Fortieth Street, swung to his left, and collided with Simon Templar with a force that would have sent most men spinning. But the momentum of Fernack’s rugged beef and bone was absorbed almost casually by a deceptively lean frame of spring steel and leather, and the Saint smiled and said, “Why, John Henry, haven’t you heard that it isn’t supposed to be good for men of your age to gallop around like Boy Scouts on a treasure hunt?”

  Fernack recognized him with delayed surprise, bit off the churlish execration which like any healthy New Yorker he was instinctively prepared to launch at any stranger who obstructed his own fevered shuttlings, and said almost lamely, “Oh, it’s you.” Then, with renewed irascibility, “When did you get back in town? And what are you up to now?”

  The Saint suppressed a sigh—just enough for it to be still irritatingly perceptible.

  “Yesterday,” he replied methodically. “And nothing. But I don’t need to ask you silly questions, John Henry. I’m just an amateur detective—not a pampered civil servant. I observe that you’re slightly overwrought. I see where you’ve come from.” He glanced up at the grimy building beside them. “I read newspapers. I know that Lester Boyd worked here. I deduce that you’re working on his murder and that you’re still trying to tag a Clue.”

  “Have you got one?” Fernack growled.

  “I’ve got the price of a drink,” Simon said. “You look as if you could use one—and why should we stand being jostled on a hot pavement outside Bleeck’s when it’s cooler and quieter inside?”

  The detective offered only token resistance to being steered through the unpretentious door of the famous tavern. Simon found a sufficiently secluded space for them at one end of the age-mellowed bar, for they were still more than half an hour ahead of the vanguard of artists and writers and big and little wheels of the newspaper world who had given the place its name as their informal club and who by lunch time would have jam-packed it to the first of its two daily peaks of convivial frenzy. He ordered Dry Sack for himself and Peter Dawson on the rocks for Fernack, and under the soothing influence of the smooth Scotch nectar Fernack almost apologized, in a grudging and indirect way.

  “This isn’t just a routine case to me,” he said. “I knew the guy. Some of the stuff he printed was what I told him. He was doing a good job.”

  Originally assigned to do a short series on the rackets that still flourished in a United States that had become progressively less conscious of them as they became more deeply embedded in the political and economic system, Lester Boyd had pursued his researches with such zeal and proficiency, and had written about them with such trenchant clarity and wit, that the initial articles had stretched out into a syndicated column which had been running for more than six months with no diminution of reader interest when an expertly measured quantity of dynamite brought it to an abrupt conclusion.

  The subjects of Boyd’s investigations were not the illicit distillers and unlicensed gamblers and peddlers of forbidden pleasures, the violators of fairly simple laws which could be enforced by any moderately efficient police force with the ambition to do it. He pointed out that the victims of that group of malefactors were mostly eager customers by their own choice, or at best had been susceptible to relatively little coaxing to step off the straight and narrow path. The targets that he had made his specialty were the crooked union bosses and masterminds of devious extortion who defrauded and disfranchised the “working man” at the same time as they professed to be championing his cause, and who simultaneously used the threat of strikes and riots to saddle legitimate business with a hidden tax which, he argued, was eventually paid by almost every citizen in the form of the extra pennies which as a result had to be added to the majority of things that people buy.

  This is such an ingeniously subtle and diffused form of blackmail, embezzlement, and larceny that most public prosecutors—to say nothing of the rank-and-file union members and the realistic business men on the other side of the table—had long since given up hope of any practical solution except to continue the payment of tribute and charge it off to modern overhead. But Lester Boyd’s pertinacious studies had contrived to detail and document so many case histories and specific shakedowns that they had started a rumble of rising indignation across the land which the sensitive ears of its politicians could not ignore. And as a corollary, the parasites who saw their immunity and fat living menaced stopped sneering and began to snarl.

  “He was warned to lay off,” Fernack said. “He got messages stuffed in his m
ailbox, phone calls in the middle of the night. Then a coupla goons were waiting outside his apartment building once when he came home, but the cop on the beat happened to come around the corner just as they started slugging him. After that I tried to make him call Headquarters whenever he was going any place where there wasn’t bright lights and plenty of people, and we’d have a radio car cruise by and watch for him. Sometimes he’d do it and sometimes he wouldn’t bother, but I made him have it put in the paper anyway and I figured it’d make those bastards think twice about trying to beat him up again. But he wouldn’t lay off, of course. So they laid him off.”

  “You know the characters he was attacking,” Simon said. “Have you had any of them in and asked them questions?”

  “Oh, sure, I’ve had ’em in. And asked ’em stupid questions. And got the stupid answers I deserved.” The detective’s voice was harsh with corrosive acid. “If you mean did I give ’em a good old-fashioned going over, you know damn well I didn’t. You remember how in Prohibition nobody could lay a hand on a top gangster for all the shyster attorneys around him and the crooked politicians spreading their pocket handkerchiefs for him to walk on so’s his shoes wouldn’t get dusty? Well, these mugs make those old-time mobsters look like punks. They got twice as many lawyers and half the time they don’t even bother with the politicians. These guys are legitimate—at least until somebody proves otherwise. They got fancy offices an’ secretaries an’ all the trimmings, just like the president of General Motors. They go to conventions an’ banquets and make speeches. Suppose we caught some goon who beat somebody up, and maybe twisted his arm a bit till he named one of the bosses who hired him to do it? The boss would laugh at us. Just some overenthusiastic union member trying to talk himself out of an assault rap, he’d say—and what other proof do we have?”

  “Who would you use your rubber hose on if you could get away with it?” Simon asked sympathetically, but with just enough hint of an underlying taunt to be sure of stinging Fernack out of any imminent reversion to the discreet habits of the clam. “Boyd was shooting at so many guys. Did he have anyone in his sights sharply enough to make himself an obvious murder risk?”

  “Yeah. Just one guy that I put him on the tail of. But what he dug up, after the lead I gave him, was all his own. He said it was hot enough that if it wouldn’t get this guy at least five years in a Federal pen it could only be because the Attorney General was fixed. Anyway, he had somebody worried enough to want him bumped off.”

  “Where did he keep this information?”

  “That’s what I was up to the Syndicate office trying to find out. But they don’t have it. Nobody seems to know where it is—unless, probably, it was all in his head. But it don’t mean the same any more. Suppose anybody found it now and this louse did draw a five-year stretch. That only pays for some of his past racketeering. The murder is still on the house.” Fernack’s big knuckles whitened around his glass in a contraction of coldly suppressed fury that threatened to crush it like an eggshell. “There’s only one way he’s ever likely to be tied into that bombing, and that’d be if someone backed him up to a wall and beat a confession out of him. Which the judge would throw out anyhow. But I can remember a time when I’d of done it just the same, just for the satisfaction of seeing he didn’t beat the rap without even getting his hair mussed.”

  “What’s his name?” Simon persisted.

  “Nat Grendel,” Fernack said, almost defiantly. “You’ve heard of him.”

  The Saint nodded.

  “I read Boyd’s articles. But I didn’t think Grendel would go all the way to murder.”

  “Some guys will go a long way to stay out of Leavenworth.”

  Simon lighted a cigarette.

  “I never get enough exercise in this effete city. How would you feel if I did some of the old-fashioned brutal things to Brother Grendel that they won’t let you do, now that Centre Street has become so correct and maidenly?”

  The detective glared at him in what anyone who had not followed their long acquaintance through all its vicissitudes would certainly have considered a disproportionately apoplectic reaction to such a friendly offer.

  “You stay out of this! If somebody takes Nat Grendel for a ride, in the name of some kind o’ justice above the Law, like you did to some other guys in this town once, I’ll know it was you and I’ll send you to the electric chair and I’ll pull the switch myself, so help me. I got enough trouble already—and you can’t get away with that stuff any more.” He drained his glass violently and added, with what seemed like a somewhat naive superfluity, “Anyhow, Grendel’s only the guy who wanted Boyd wiped out. The guy whose trademarks were all over that bomb job is the Engineer.”

  In the underworld’s roster of peculiar specialists the man who was usually referred to as the Engineer was perhaps the most sinister and shadowy. The latter adjective is applicable to his reputation and modus operandi rather than to his physical aspect, which was anything but wraithlike.

  His real name was Herman Uberlasch, and he had the bullet head, stolid features, and bovine build with which any cartoonist would have automatically endowed a character intended to represent a typical Teuton. A straggly mustache masked the ruthless line of a bear-trap mouth, and gold-rimmed glasses of unfashionable shape maintained a deceptive screen of gentle helplessness before his very pale blue eyes. Ostensibly he operated a watch, clock, and small-appliance repair shop on a shabby corner of Third Avenue, but his unsuspecting neighbors would have been amazed to see the figures on the income-tax returns which he meticulously filed each year. To the inspectors, who were also amazed and slightly incredulous, he explained unblinkingly that he was sometimes paid quite fantastic fees for overhauling priceless antiques and heirlooms, and beyond that, since there was no evidence that he had been unwise enough to conceal any income, they had no authority to go.

  But in more sophisticated circles, Herman Uberlasch was widely believed to have been the first practical joker to wire a bundle of dynamite and a detonator to the ignition system of a car in such a way that the next person attempting to start it would simultaneously eliminate both himself and his vehicle from the automobile market. That story may belong strictly to folklore. But even if there is any truth in it, he progressed rapidly to more complex and ingenious conceptions. He was more plausibly credited with inventing a cigarette lighter which could actually be lighted for demonstration purposes, but which exploded like a grenade when operated by anyone who did not know its secret, and there is no longer much doubt that he originated the prank of mounting a .45 cartridge inside a telephone receiver with such a cleverly sprung firing mechanism that as far as the victim was concerned its message literally went in one ear and out of the other. He had a solution for almost any problem that could be handled mechanically, and he was always alert for ways to adapt the latest advances of science and technology to his work: when television came in, he was the first to think of fitting a picture tube with a special cathode that in one or two sessions would give its audience a dose of X-rays which would soon place them beyond the reach of the most insistent commercial.

  It was for achievements thus unsung, or at least vocalized only in very limited choral society, that Uberlasch won his reputation as the Engineer, but as the time-honored and straightforward custom of taking troublesome individuals for a ride became somewhat outmoded or less practical, his unusual talents were increasingly in demand, and to his great disgust his name was bandied about among the cognoscenti, and a man who heard that the Engineer had been assigned to him would scarcely dare to strike a match for fear that it might kindle his own funeral pyre. But still it was all only accepted rumor and furtive whisperings, for the Engineer himself never boasted, nor did his gadgets leave any evidence that could embarrass him.

  If the police raided his humble premises (as one rash officer did once) he had the ideal legitimate justification for any springs, cogs, timing devices, electrical parts, tools or instruments that might be found there; the explosives nev
er entered his shop but were always added on the job at the last moment.

  “It might be five or ten years before a combo like that makes a slip that would stick in court, Bill—if they ever make it,” Simon argued. “I just want to speed up the odds.”

  This was after Fernack had refused another drink and departed for his office downtown, muttering further threats of what would happen if the Saint presumed to take the law into his own hands, and Simon had waited for the editor of the syndicate which Boyd had been working for, with whom he already had a date for lunch.

  “I couldn’t get away with setting you up to be shot at,” was the answer. “Even if you talked me into it, my boss wouldn’t let me go through with it.”

  “You could hire me to continue Boyd’s column,” Simon wheedled. “Any self-respecting newspaper should refuse to let itself be bullied into dropping this subject just because the goons have hit back once, and my reputation as an expert on skulduggery and dirty pool is certainly good enough to account for picking me to carry on. Then when you start publishing me, and I say in my first article that by an odd coincidence I was the little bird who told Boyd where to dig up the dirt that he was going to publish on Grendel, and that I’m just as qualified to go on raking it out—well, you could hardly refuse to print that, because for all you know it might be the truth. And then if anything unfortunate did happen to me as a result, nobody could blame you, because obviously I’d asked for it myself.”

  “But what you’re thinking is that they’ll have to try to give you something like the same treatment they gave Lester, but you’re going to be fast enough to duck.”

  “And maybe catch them off base, too—if you don’t mind how a metaphor gets mangled. You’d go a long way to see that somebody pays for Boyd’s murder, wouldn’t you?”

  The editor rubbed his chin.

  “I don’t think Fernack is going to like this,” he said.