The Saint to the Rescue (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  Violet put down her sewing and came over, wearing the same perfunctory smile in her more fragile and wispier way. Mr Powls spoke again. Violet froze as Ida had done, and then looked at Ida helplessly. Then both of them, by simultaneous consent, looked appealingly at Aunt Flo.

  Aunt Flo put down her pen and came over from her desk. But on her candid competent face there was no more immediate response than had been shown by either of her nieces. Until Mr Powls repeated something that he had obviously said before.

  Aunt Flo also froze, momentarily. But there was no one beyond her to appeal. And so after that moment she began to talk, quite volubly, in a tone that the frequent shakings of her head made vehemently negative. But Mr Powls seemed only to persist with whatever he was maintaining. There was another Creepy quality, Kathleen thought, in the implacable way he stood his ground, answering mostly with shrugs that somehow had an offensive insincerity.

  Presently he turned and left the shop and sauntered away. But after his departure there was none of the complacency of three embattled women who had triumphantly repulsed an obnoxious male. There was the inevitable first minute when they all talked at once, but it quickly subsided into a bleak despondency in which they all seemed at a total loss for anything to say. Ida kicked moodily at a chair-leg, Violet dabbed the corners of her eyes with a handkerchief, and Aunt Flo sat down at her desk again, heavily, and rested her forehead on her clenched hands.

  Then Violet happened to glance straight across the patio at Kathleen, and said something to Ida, who glanced in the same direction, and Kathleen suddenly felt like an eavesdropper and buried herself in the papers she had been working on before the interruption.

  Later that afternoon, as the shops on the patio were preparing to close up, Aunt Flo came over on the pretext of asking if Kathleen could recommend a part-time gardener to take over some of the heavy work on the flower beds which were the Warshed’s principal hobby and exercise as well as their most harmless pride. After that gambit had served its purpose, she said with transparent casualness, “What did you think of that man who came looking for us a little while ago?”

  “I didn’t know he was looking for you,” Kathleen said. “He told me he thought he knew you from somewhere away back.”

  She recited her conversation with Mr Powls almost verbatim, but without any commentary.

  “Is that all he said?”

  “Yes—as far as I can remember.”

  Aunt Flo’s bright birdlike eyes raked through her like affectionate needles.

  “I think he’s a crank,” she said. “He tried to insist that he knew us, but none of us ever saw him before. We couldn’t all three be mistaken. You’d better watch out if you see him again. It’s those kind of people who are never suspected until they turn out to be Monsters.”

  Although the word Monster was no more than an earlier synonym for Creep, it was not that echo of her own thinking that brushed Kathleen with a clammy chill. It was the incontrovertible certainty, after what she had recently witnessed, that Aunt Flo was lying.

  Four days passed before she saw Mr Powls again. She happened to look up, and he was back in Ye Needle Nooke, talking to the three ladies. He seemed to have been showing them something like a fairly large newspaper clipping, which he took back and folded carefully and put away in his wallet. Only a few more words were spoken after that, before he turned and came out, she could see very little of how they acted after his exit, for he blocked the view almost completely by walking straight across the patio to her office.

  She tried not to appear too hurried over her conventional “Good afternoon” but couldn’t help going on, disingenuous though it had to sound, with, “I hear you didn’t know the Warsheds after all.”

  “Oh, but I do,” he said. “And they remember me now. I’ve been able to convince them.”

  She flicked a glance through the window, but could only see that the ladies were in some kind of huddle at the back of the shop.

  “I’ve been back to Kansas City since I saw you last,” he said. “But I’ve decided that Santa Barbara has it beat. I think I’ll settle down here. Could you show me a very small furnished cottage or a nice little apartment?”

  She took him to a couple of places she had listed, and he was delighted with the second, a sub-let that had been put in her hands only the previous day. Then came the routine question of references.

  “The Misses Warshed should be good enough for anyone here, shouldn’t they?” he said blandly, and she would have sworn that he struggled to hide his malicious enjoyment of a private joke.

  However, she now had an unimpeachable reason for re-opening the subject with Aunt Flo.

  “We were mistaken,” Aunt Flo said with tight lips. “It’s terribly easy to forget things after twenty years, especially when you get to be my age. But of course we knew Mr Powls back in Kansas City. I hope you’ll be able to put out of your mind the things I said about him the other day, because it’s most embarrassing to me to think that I could have been so wrong.”

  She was very gallant, very much the grande dame. Beside her, the sisters nodded in docile corroboration.

  “Then I can take it that he’s all right—I mean, he’ll be good for the rent, and all that sort of thing?”

  “Yes, dear, he will be.”

  “What kind of business was he in, in Kansas City?”

  Violet and Ida looked at each other, and then mutely at Aunt Flo, leaving her to answer.

  “He was a general business man,” Aunt Flo said firmly. “He was mixed up in lots of big deals. I don’t profess to understand these things that men get involved in. But he was very successful.”

  “He was a big spender, too,” Ida put in.

  Violet nodded. And that was all they had to say. Which in itself was strange enough, for normally they loved to gossip about people—of course in the nicest way.

  Mr Powls himself was no more communicative when Kathleen tried to question him.

  “I’ve been in and out of so many things,” he said, with a carefully impressive air of modesty in his vagueness. “Buying and selling—importing and exporting—stocks and bonds. But I’m retired now. So it would bore me as much to tell you my life story as you’d be bored listening to it. And it doesn’t really matter, does it? You only want to be sure that I won’t have wild parties or move out with the landlord’s furniture, and I know the Misses Warshed have vouched for that.”

  She did not know how to press the question further without seeming gratuitously impertinent.

  “So,” she told the Saint, “he’s been here ever since. He pays his rent on the dot, and he takes good care of the place. He asked me to get him a cleaning woman to come in once a week, so I was able to check on that through her. Sometimes I see him around town, and he’s always perfectly at ease and polite. Perhaps he is just a retired business man leading a quiet bachelor life, but—”

  Simon drew another circle on his card.

  “Presumably he pays the rent by check—you wouldn’t have thought of making any inquiries at his bank?”

  She actually giggled.

  “Touché. That’s how horribly inquisitive I can be when I start. I told them I’d been asked to get a bank reference on him, but between what they didn’t know and what they weren’t allowed to say I didn’t get very much. But his account is quite small, and he mostly deposits cash.”

  The Saint’s brows suddenly drew together.

  “Cash? You have an item there.”

  “That’s what I thought. He isn’t working in any job that I know of.”

  “Does he see much of the Warsheds, since they’ve decided they know him?”

  “I’ve seen, him at their house twice,” Kathleen said. “They invite me sometimes, when they have a little party. You wouldn’t think they’d want an extra girl, but they’re very considerate about things like that, and if for any reason they’ve got a man coming who’s younger than any of them, they beg me to come and prove that they aren’t ganging up on him them
selves. Well, each time, it was obvious that the idea was to help Mr Powls meet some local people. And yet I just knew that they weren’t a bit happy about it. Not that they didn’t try to do it well. In fact, they were trying too hard—they were much too busy and eager and chattery, even for them. As if they were under a frightful strain and trying to cover up. And yet he wasn’t pointing a gun at them, like the gangsters did at the family in that movie.”

  “There are metaphorical guns, too,” Simon said. “How did the Creep behave?”

  “Just like anybody else. Only he kept making me think of a cat watching a cage of birds, I suppose by this time you’re convinced that I’m thoroughly neurotic and—”

  The Saint said, abruptly, “Bingo!”

  He stood up, waving his card.

  “Would you bring your card up here, please,” said Aunt Flo.

  Kathleen recovered from her momentary blankness and went to the dais with him to introduce him.

  “A friend of yours? How nice, dear,” said Aunt Flo, nevertheless checking the numbers which the Saint had ringed with the emotionless efficiency of a seasoned cashier. “Yes, this is right.” She said into her microphone, “We have a winner, girls. Pick up the old cards, and we’ll start a new game.” She counted out fifty dollars from a partitioned tray in front of her, and gave them to the Saint, and said, “Congratulations, Mr Templeton. Are you having a good time?”

  “So good that it doesn’t seem right to make a profit of it.” Simon shuffled the prize money, put half of it in his pocket, refolded the rest, and held it out to the old lady. “May I put this back in the fund, as a donation?”

  “You’re very generous. That’s the kind of man to look for, Kathleen, dear—one who has fun with his money.” She looked at the Saint again with her keen bright eyes, for the first time as if she were seeing him personally. “And this is a real man, too. I can tell. If I were forty years younger, I’d be after him myself.”

  “You don’t have to be a day younger, Aunt Flo,” said the Saint genially. “I’m a charter member of the Chesterfield Club.”

  The little color that was in Miss Warshed’s face drained out, leaving it a white mask in which the discreetly applied rouge over her cheeks stood out like patches of raw paint. Her lips quivered, and she held on to the table, as if to steady herself in her chair, so tightly that even her knuckles and fingertips blanched under the pressure.

  “I don’t think I quite follow that,” she said.

  “Oh, hadn’t you heard of it?” said the Saint innocently, apparently unaware even of the bewildered way that Kathleen looked from Aunt Flo to him. “Lord Chesterfield was an English pundit who was rated pretty hippy a hundred or two years ago. He gave his name to the sofa but not to the cigarette, He also wrote a series of letters to his son, full of profound advice and wisdom, which were published in book form and bestowed by doting parents on Heaven knows how many other equally bored young men. One of his best remembered tips was that older ladies were the best ones to fall in love with, because they appreciated it so much more. I’ve always been a rooter for his club for that.”

  Aunt Flo relaxed quite slowly.

  “Indeed.” Her lips cracked in a smile, but her eyes were still haunted. “For a moment I simply couldn’t imagine what you were talking about. That’s very charming. And so true. But I’m sure the young ones already appreciate you more than it’s good for you. Are you staying here long?”

  “Only a day or two.”

  “I’m sorry—it was nice meeting you.”

  She gave him her hand, all graciousness and poise again, and by then it was hard to believe that only a few seconds ago she had seemed to be transfixed with stark terror.

  “What on earth is this Chesterfield Club business?” Kathleen demanded as soon as they were at a safe distance.

  “You heard me,” Simon said. “As a student of all the great philosophers and bores—”

  “Don’t give me that,” she said. “I saw what it did to her when you first mentioned it.”

  Simon handed over a dollar in exchange for two ice-cream cones which were being practically forced into their hands. He gave his to the first infant that passed, who promptly squashed it on its mother’s best afternoon dress.

  “You’re much too young to remember,” said the Saint happily, “but back in the wildest Prohibition days of Kansas City, the Chesterfield Club was an institution that travelers came from all over to see. It was a place where the tired business man could really get a lift with his lunch. All the waitresses were stark naked.”

  “Oh.” Kathleen gulped. “Now I can see why Aunt Flo was shocked.”

  “Would you say ‘shocked’ was the word?” Simon asked gently.

  He lighted a cigarette and stared through a veil of smoke at the edifying spectacle of a bejeweled dowager leaning over the rail of an enclosure called Fortune’s Fishpond, cane pole in hand, angling with intense concentration for a bottle of Bollinger.

  “Even the most sheltered ladies in town at the time must have heard of it,” he said. “If a man referred to it in front of them, I can picture them being righteously scandalized, or freezing into the We Are Not Amused reaction. But can you see any of them looking downright terrified, as if the next thing they heard might be the end of the world?”

  “But it couldn’t have meant anything personal to Aunt Flo! I mean—”

  “No, not that.” He grinned. “I don’t think she was ever a waitress at the Chesterfield Club. Even that long ago, she’d’ve been a bit old for the job.”

  “Then what do you make of it?”

  “You wanted to get me interested,” he said, “and you have. How can I meet Brother Powls?”

  This could not have been an insuperable problem at the worst, but since it was that kind of charity fair, and Santa Barbara is that kind of place, it proved even easier than he would have anticipated. They were continuing their idle stroll through the grounds, discussing the best pretext they might use for dropping in at Mr Powls’s apartment, when Kathleen suddenly clutched Simon’s arm.

  “Talk of the devil,” she said, “there he is—over there, in the light gray jacket.”

  Mr Alton Powls did not look much like a devil, except as he might be depicted in the more sophisticated modern type of fantasy. From his mildly jaunty Panama hat down to his polished black and white shoes, he looked like a typical member of the county set in which he was imperturbably working for acceptance. His attendance at this garden carnival, properly viewed, was not even surprising at all: on the contrary, it was a social obligation which he could hardly have avoided.

  Only the Saint’s peculiarly analytic eye would have noted, as they approached on a calculated collision course, a certain revealing shuffle in the way Mr Powls walked, and the no less typical way his glances roved restlessly over a wide area with little corresponding movement of his head.

  “Why, good afternoon, Mr Powls,” Kathleen said as they met.

  He had seen them coming already, but he raised his hat with the most urbane spontaneity.

  “Miss Holland. How nice to see you taking a day off.”

  He was probably not much over sixty, a thin man with a sedate little bulge below his belt. His somewhat lumpy face was clean shaven and pallid, his hair sparse and lank. His lips were tight and gristly, and scarcely moved when he spoke. Simon could see the superficial reasons for describing him as a Creep, but his manner was easy and polite.

  Kathleen said, “This is Mr Tem—”

  “Templar,” said the Saint. He amplified it, very clearly: “Simon Templar.”

  “Simon Templar,” Mr Powls repeated. “Somehow, the name sounds familiar.”

  His fingers, which had gone out automatically to meet the Saint’s cordial hand, lay in the Saint’s grasp like cold sausages.

  “You could have heard it,” Simon said affably.

  “You couldn’t—by any chance—be any relative of that man they call the Saint?”

  “I am the Saint,” Simon beamed.


  Those who know the Saint at all well will recognize at once that this was totally unlike him. But he did it this time, and Mr Powls retrieved his hand quickly, as if afraid that it might not be given back.

  “Are you really?” said Mr Powls. He coughed, to clear a trace of hoarseness from his voice. “But you aren’t expecting to find anything to merit your attention here, are you?”

  “I never know where I’ll find those things,” said the Saint cheerfully. “But I’m always on the lookout for them. And there’s no place like a town full of respectable retired people. They all buy each other’s stories, but whoever checks on them? A guy could come here straight from Leavenworth and give out that he was a retired Bible salesman, and no one would even ask him to prove it by naming the four Gospels.”

  “That’s very interesting,” said Mr Powls faintly.

  “Not that I think there’s anything crooked about this shindig,” Simon went on exuberantly. “In fact, it must be on the level, because they just let me win a pot at Bingo. Look.”

  He pulled out of his pocket the card which he had kept as a souvenir, and thrust it upon Mr Powls in such a way that the other was virtually forced to take it from him.

  “That’s wonderful,” said Mr Powls, returning the card as quickly as he could. “Really, it gives me an inspiration. I must go there and try my luck. If you’ll excuse me.” He raised his hat to Kathleen again, and inclined his head to the Saint. “Perhaps we’ll meet again later.”

  “I hope so,” Simon said heartily. “Let me know if you see any other old lags around.”

  Mr Powls moved away, not hurriedly, but without looking back.

  “I’m getting rather baffled,” Kathleen said, “and now I don’t think I’m enjoying it.”

  “You got me started,” Simon reminded her. “And I got some results.”

  “I didn’t see much, except that you upset him.”

  “Does that matter? You said he was a Creep, anyway.”