The Saint to the Rescue (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  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 would have come from the other of the two apartments, 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 frightful 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, ploughing into the myriad unepicurean details of restaurant management of which his evening customers would be as unconscious 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 interrupted.

  “You must have been cheating last night,” he said, “or you couldn’t look so much better than I feel. Can I do anything for you, or did you only come here to gloat?”

  “You can do something for me,” said the Saint. “I could do it myself if I had to, but I’m feeling lazy. I’m sure you’ve got all the connections. Just find out today’s schedule for these caramel-cookers that we lost so much beauty sleep dodging last night.”

  “I must be an all-day sucker,” Johnny Kan said, reaching for the phone. “But you had me convinced that it was just a coincidence that you hit San Francisco in the middle of their convention, and you didn’t want any part of them.”

  “I wasn’t trying to kid you. The important coincidences have all happened since we said goodnight.”

  The schedule was forthcoming in a few minutes.

  “Ten o’clock, Paramount Theater, a movie: New Methods of Merchandising, followed by a lecture on Taxation Aspects of the Bottling Industry. Twelve o’clock, St Francis Hotel, lunch: guest speaker, the President of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce. Three o’clock, forum: Soda Fountains and Juvenile Delinquency. Five o’clock—”

  “Whoa,” said the Saint. “That’s plenty. I only want to know where to look for a guy, and I should be able to find him long before five.”

  “Would it be very indiscreet to ask which of the caramel-cookers had incurred this unprecedented interest?”

  “No. I don’t think so. The name is Otis Q Fennick.”

  “Oh. Of the Fennick Candy Company?”

  “Why—do you know him?”

  “No. But I know their West Coast representative. A Mr Smith. He eats here sometimes. They have a sales office here, you know.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “When you want to know anything in a foreign city, you should always consult the natives. Let me look up the address for you. Right now, I should think that’s where you’d be most likely to find him. They don’t make any soft drinks, so he’d hardly be interested in the tax problems of bottling—if I may presume to offer my amateurish deduction.” Kan turned the pages of a city phone book. “Ah, here it is. On Suiter Street—it should be only a block or two from Union Square.”

  He jotted down the address, and Simon took it gratefully.

  “You’re right, I’m glad I asked you.”

  “Doesn’t that entitle me to know what this is about?”

  “Perhaps, before I leave town, Johnny. But not just yet. There’s still too much I haven’t figured out myself.”

  Simon continued his walk, down to Union Square and west on Sutter. The number that Kan had given him was a modern office building, and the directory board in the lobby showed that the Fennick Candy Company was on the second floor. He went up.

  From the sequence of doors on the corridor, the West Coast office appeared to take up only two rooms, but they were doubtless sufficient for their purpose. The outer room which he entered contained, besides the standard furniture, a large glass-case display of samples, and a middle-aged woman with an efficient but forbidding air who was typing rapidly at the dictation of some tinny disembodied voice that came through an earphone clamped to her head. Electrically recorded sounds entered her ears and emerged through her fingertips as transformed impulses to be electrically recorded in legible form: she was the only human link in this miracle of technology, and she seemed to bear a deep-rooted grudge against this incurable frailty of hers and to have dedicated herself to suppressing every trace of it that she could.

  “Mr Fennick is busy,” she said, with a kind of malevolent satisfaction. “Can I help you?”

  “I’m afraid not.” Simon glanced at the communicating door. “Is he with somebody?”

  “Mr Fennick is working on a speech he has to make to the convention tomorrow. He gave the strictest orders that he was not to be disturbed for any reason whatever.”

  “This is very, very important.”

  “For any reason whatever,” the woman repeated smugly.

  She was a type that Mrs Fennick would have approved of thoroughly, according to Mr Fennick’s thumbnail sketch of his ever-loving spouse. It was as certain as anything humanly could be that she had not sat on anybody’s lap since she was knee-high. The paradox that didn’t fit at all was that the Liane Fennick whom Simon had met was so utterly unlike his mental picture of a tyrannically jealous wife. But in any puzzle, when all the paradoxes were straightened out, the solution was often absurdly easy.

  He inquired patiently, “How long will Mr Fennick be incommunicado?”

  “Until five minutes to twelve, when he has to leave for a luncheon.”

  “Is he always so hard to see?”

  “Mr Fennick isn’t here very often. And this is a very busy time.”

  “Is Mr Smith just as busy?”

  “Not as a rule. But at present he’s covering a meeting for Mr Fennick, since Mr Fennick has to work on his speech. If you’ll leave your name and tell me your business, I’ll try to arrange an appointment for you.”

  “Thanks, gorgeous,” said the Saint, with beatified earnestness. “I may take you up on that. But later.”

  He sauntered out.

  The next door along the corridor, which displayed only the word “PRIVATE” under its number, could only be the private entrance to the inner office so zealously guarded by the misanthropic matron with the headset. Even so has many a citadel with intimidating moat and drawbridge had an unguarded postern gate.

  Simon leaned an ear against the upper panel. He heard no resonance of rounded phrases in rehearsal, or even the mutter of tentative phrases being fed into a dictating device. Of course, the door might have been exceptionally soundproof, or Mr Fennick might have been a purely cerebral worker. But Simon did not intend to be put off from seeing him, if he was there. It w
ould be easy for the Saint to apologize for having come to the wrong door, which must have been inadvertently left unlocked.

  He took from his wallet a wafer-slim implement which he kept there as routinely as another man might have kept a nail file. At this period he seldom needed it as often as twice a year, but he would not have been surprised to have used it twice already that day. And yet on this third possible occasion it finally proved that the Boy Scouts were right and preparedness would always pay off sometime. It slid back the spring lock with less fuss than its own key, and Simon walked in with all the disarming insouciance of the excuse that he had prepared.

  He could have saved himself the histrionic warm-up, for there was no audience to be disarmed by it.

  The office, except for the traditional appointments of such sancta, was empty.

  Simon set the spring lock in the off position, as his story required it, closed the door, and conscientiously forced himself to make another of the definitive checks which seemed to be foisting themselves on him with irksome regularity. Mr Fennick was not in the conveniently coffin-sized coat closet. He was not under or behind the desk. Unless he had been cremated like a moth on the quarter-smoked but cold cigar in the ash tray, or ingested by the mouth-piece of the recording machine which still purred electronically beside the desk, or sucked out through the air conditioner which effectively blockaded the window, he must simply have gone out. Whether his antipathetic amanuensis knew it or not.

  The Saint thought that she couldn’t know. If she had known, it would have been just as easy to say he was out, and should have given her the same orgasm of unhelpfulness.

  The clock that formed the centerpiece of the onyx inkstand on the desk showed that it still lacked more than twenty minutes of noon.

  Simon sat down in one of the guest armchairs, lighted a cigarette, and thought a lot more. For a full two minutes.

  Then the outer door opened with the click of a key, and Otis Q Fennick came in.

  After the first bounce of his entrance had ploughed to a soggy halt, as if he had bumped into an invisible wall of half-congealed treacle, the lordling of the lollipops looked almost exactly the same as he had when Simon pulled him off the hotel fire escape. That is, he wore the same clothes and the same expression of paralytic befuddlement. The only material difference was that on the former occasion he had been empty-handed, whereas at this moment he was awkwardly lugging under one arm a cardboard carton about the size of a case of Old Curio. This he very nearly dropped as he gaped at the Saint with the reproachful intensity of a gaffed goldfish.

  What he said can be loosely reproduced as, “Wha…well…I mean…how…”

  “Greetings again, Otis,” said the Saint amiably. “I hope you’ll forgive me waiting for you like this. Your devoted watchbitch (is that the correct feminine?) insisted that you were busy and wouldn’t let me in, but I couldn’t tell her why I was sure you wouldn’t be too busy to see me. So I toddled around and came in this other door which was fortunately unlatched.”

  Mr Fennick pushed the door shut, frowning at it.

  “I could have sworn I—”

  “It must’ve fooled you,” Simon said calmly. “Locks will do that sometimes.”

  The candy caliph put down his box. It seemed to be moderately heavy, and gave a faint metallic rattle when it tipped.

  “Perhaps I didn’t check it too carefully,” he said. “I only went to the men’s room.”

  “Do you have to take your own potty?” Simon inquired, gazing pointedly at the carton. “I thought this was quite a modern building.”

  Mr Fennick also glanced at the box, but seemed to decide against pursuing that subject. He straightened his coat and tie and moved to his desk, pulling himself together with the same air of forced resolution as he might have brought to a difficult business situation.

  “Well, now, since you’re here,” he said, “I hope you didn’t think I was ungrateful last night. But the note I left you was intended to be my last word on the subject, Mr Templar.”

  “That’s what I thought,” said the Saint. “But what you forgot was that it mightn’t necessarily be mine.”

  “That is what I was afraid of. And that is why I hoped you would be saintly enough to accept my refusal of your services in the spirit in which it was made.”

  “So you did recognize my name.”

  “After you’d left me in your room. I had nothing to do but keep on thinking, and it all fitted so well with what I’ve heard of your reputation. But it also meant that I couldn’t afford to be mixed up with you.”

  “Do you mean because of your reputation, or your bank roll?”

  “Frankly, because I didn’t know how long I could count on your sympathy. If you went on to take an active interest in my problem, I thought, you’d be bound to want to meet my wife eventually, and then she might get you on her side, and I’d be worse off than before. You don’t know her, you see, in the same way as I do.”

  Simon ran lean brown fingers through his dark hair in a vaguely weary gesture.

  “As a psychologist, you’re a terrific taffy puller,” he said. “When I get nosey, it takes more than a polite note to cool me off. And you had me thoroughly intrigued with the plot against your marital honor. So right after breakfast I was baying on the scent you’d let me sniff last night. As a matter of fact, I’ve just come from the pad of your buxom bedmate, the flashbulb gal.”

  The other’s mouth sagged open to about the same extent as his eyes.

  “You saw her?”

  “On her way to the morgue. Someone else had been there first, and shot her.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I didn’t see the bullet holes, if that’s what you mean. But I saw her carried out, and a neighbor said that’s what she died of. However, before that I’d been to the studio of the guy she worked for, to get her address. I had to look it up for myself, in his book. I can vouch for him.

  Someone made so sure of not missing him that they singed his shirt.”

  Mr Fennick was still staring rigidly.

  “This is shocking!”

  “Isn’t it?…My theory, of course, is that this person went to see Balton for the same reason that I did—to get the gal’s address. And also, perhaps, to get the negative of a certain picture. Was the photographer who snapped you in the Don Juan pose a fat fellow with a face like a rather lecherous pig?”

  “I was dazed, and blinded by the light, as I told you,” Mr Fennick said carefully. “And the man’s face was hidden by his camera. But I have a sort of impression that he was stout.”

  “I’m assuming that Balton was the guy. And since the gal was on his regular payroll, it would tie in. I also think that with a gun in his ribs he was persuaded to hand over the film, before he got mowed down anyhow.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if he hadn’t, there wouldn’t’ve been any point in killing Norma. She was only worth killing if she’d become the only other person who could swear that there’d ever been such a photo. And with the photo gone, it won’t help the police much to be told—as their laboratory boys probably will tell ’em—that the same gun did both jobs. They’ll be stuck for a motive, not having the inside dope like us…But I saw how you reacted when I told you I’d come from Norma’s apartment, before I ever said she’d been shot. And I’ve noticed that you haven’t queried my use of her name and Balton’s, although last night you didn’t seem to know either one.”

  Mr Fennick, groping for some occupation for his hands, picked up the spoiled cigar from his ash tray and clamped it between his teeth with a practically unconscious automatism, made a grimace, but re-lighted it anyhow.

  “After what I told you last night, Mr Templar, you could make it look very bad for me.”

  “I could,” said the Saint detachedly. “But my problem is that I somehow can’t visualize you becoming a murderer just to get out of a phony blackmail jam.”

  “That’s very kind of you.”

  “So I’ve been thi
nking about your wife, and a few things I’ve learned about her that you didn’t tell me. For instance, that she has an old girlfriend here, good enough to drop in and stay with. Was this friend’s name Uplitz?”

  “Oh, no. No. But she does have an old friend here, married to a very successful man in the chemical business.”

  “Which sounds as if your wife may have lived in San Francisco herself once.”

  “Yes, indeed. This is her home town.”

  “And she used to be a model.”

  “Yes.”

  “So she could have known Vere Balton professionally.”

  “I suppose it’s possible.”

  “I have another hunch about her. I don’t think your married life is exactly blissful. Not that you ever said it was. But I think she’d be happy to get rid of you—if she could only keep enough of the heavy sugar from those Crunchy Wunchies. And you know it, because you’re no fool. For the same reason, I think you’d give her her freedom if she’d take a fair settlement. But she’s too greedy, so you’ve been holding out. You could do that if you’d been a good husband and had never given her the usual grounds for divorce.”

  Mr Fennick’s thin mouth was grim and tight around his cigar.

  “You’re making a lot of personal assumptions, Mr Templar.”

  “Let me make some more. You weren’t worried about her jealous nature, as you led me to believe, but about how much she could take you for if she had the goods on you. And when you recovered from that hit on the head, you figured she’d got ’em. Perhaps you put in a call to your home in New York and found that she’d flown out here yesterday, but without getting in touch with you. That would have cinched it. She could have identified herself as your wife so that even that supercilious young jerk on the desk last night would have given her a spare key to your room, which was all Balton and Norma needed. And you knew you couldn’t buy them off, because with that evidence she could match any bid you made. She was all set to take you for everything you’ve got.”