The Saint to the Rescue (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  “But you were almost objectionable.”

  “No. A bit corny and collegiate, maybe. A shade heavy-handed with the humor. But I had to be. I wanted to start something. A respectable citizen may be bored by the kind of kidding that suggests he’s an old jailbird, but he isn’t offended, because it’s too ridiculous to take seriously. Only an old lag would be jolted, because it’s too close to home.”

  “You think he is an ex-convict?”

  “I’ve no more doubt about it. But I saw it first in the way he walks and talks and looks around.”

  “Then why did you go on—the way you did?”

  Simon shrugged. His sky-blue eyes were altogether lazy now, and seemed to be ranging perspectives far outside the eucalyptus trees and formal hedges of the manorial grounds which had been turned over to the benefit.

  “I’m a catalyst,” he said. “You know what that is, in chemistry? You throw a certain catalyst into a certain mixture, and nothing happens to it itself, but all hell breaks loose around it. All the other ingredients seethe up and do back-flips into new transformations. That’s me. Half the time I don’t have to do anything except be around. Somebody hears I’m the Saint, and I shoot a few arrows in the air, and the fireworks start. Like this. It’s no crime to be an ex-convict, unless you got out through a tunnel. Or to be a Creep, even. And I don’t know what Aunt Flo is sweating out. So there’s nothing much I could do about ’em. And yet I’ve got an idea that events are already on the march.”

  She was almost exasperatedly incredulous.

  “And now they’ll take care of themselves. There must be more to it than that!”

  “Well, there may be a little more,” he smiled. “Let’s go and get a real drink somewhere, and on the way you could show me where Brother Powls lives.”

  But when they parted later he had still managed to evade being pinned down to anything more positive than a promise to pick her up for lunch the next day.

  He was obligated to dine with his friends at their home, but afterwards—having made conversation about everything except the problem with which Kathleen Holland had presented him—he made the excuse of having to take an important letter to the post office to make sure it would go out by the earliest possible mail. He had no such letter and did not even go near the post office, but drove instead to the small new building that Kathleen had shown him, which was pleasantly situated a block from Cabrillo Boulevard within sight of the ocean and the pier and yacht harbor. There was a light in the upper corner that she had pointed out, and he went up the outside stairway and knocked on the door.

  Mr Powls opened it, and his jaw dropped.

  “What…Yes, Mr Templar. I was hardly expecting—”

  “May I come in?” said the Saint, and went in irresistibly.

  “What can I do for you, sir?”

  “For a start,” said the Saint, “you can give me any folding money you’ve got on you.”

  He kept one hand deep in his jacket pocket, not being so crude as to stretch it out of shape by making anything point through it, but the suggestion was just as effective to Mr Powls’s flickering eyes.

  “What is this—a stick-up?”

  “Call it what you like, Alton, but sprout the lettuce.”

  “I think it’d be better if I called the police. You wouldn’t shoot me for the few dollars I’ve got on me.”

  “Do you remember me making you admire my Bingo card this afternoon, chum?” Simon said. “I did that to get your fingerprints on it. You may not believe it, but I have all sorts of useful connections—even here. Those prints are already on their way to Washington,” he elaborated mendaciously, “only I haven’t told anyone yet where they came from. If you feel like calling the police, I won’t stop you. By the time we all get to the station there should be a make from the FBI, and we can go on from there.”

  Mr Powls took a crumpled fold of currency from his trouser pocket and passed it over.

  “Nobody ever told me the Saint went in for this kind of thing,” he sneered.

  “These are rugged days, Alton. What with inflated prices and a confiscatory income tax, it isn’t so easy to live like a millionaire any more without a little side money.”

  “But why pick on me?”

  Simon had been scrutinizing each piece of paper money in the roll he had taken and separating it into two slim packs clipped between different fingers. Now he fanned out one sheaf like a poker hand.

  “I marked all these bills with two little tears close together near one corner, just before I gave them to Aunt Flo this afternoon as a charity donation. How did you get them?”

  “She gave them to me. I was lucky, too.”

  “You certainly were. But that goes back to when you first hit Santa Barbara and ran into a meal ticket when you were just window-shopping. What were you in stir for, comrade?”

  “You’ll find out soon enough. It was about some uranium stock I sold. There shouldn’t have been any squawk at all, but I wrote something in a letter and they used it to hang a federal rap on me.”

  “And now you’re out, you’ve switched from the bunco racket to blackmail. That sums it up, doesn’t it?”

  “You’re talking to yourself.”

  “And even taking it out of charity donations.”

  “She gave it to me,” Powls repeated. “I don’t know where it came from. If she snitched it where she shouldn’t, what does that make her?”

  “A scared old lady,” said the Saint. “What have you got on her?”

  Mr Powls’s cartilaginous lips curled. He was regaining confidence quickly.

  “I should tell you—so that you can take over. You dig that up for yourself, if you’re so wise. You can’t beat it out of me here, without one of the neighbors’ll call the cops, and you don’t want that any more than I do. Leave me alone to handle it, and I might even give you a little cut.”

  The Saint’s smile was terribly benevolent.

  “I’m only humanly inquisitive about Aunt Flo,” he said. “But I’m just as humanly certain that whatever her guilty secret is she’s done a great job of living it down for twenty years. And you should have heard that blackmail is one of the crimes I rate among the wickedest in the world and among the least adequately punished by the law.”

  He held Mr Alton Powls by the coat lapel and shook him back and forth quite gently, while the forefinger of his other hand tapped him on the chest for emphasis, and his eyes were sword-points of sapphire in the angelic kindliness of his face.

  “I shall give you twelve hours to get out of Santa Barbara, and a few more to be out of the state of California,” he said. “And if I run into you after that, the only cut I shall take will be in your throat.”

  He went out without a backward glance.

  He got into his car and drove purposefully away, knowing full well that he was watched from the window above, but after four blocks he circled around and came quietly down an alley to coast to a stop with his lights out in its blackest patch of shadow from which he could watch the building he had just left.

  When Mr Powls came out a few minutes later, and drove off in a small car from an open garage under one end of the building, Simon did not even have to be cautious about following him. Unburdened with luggage of any kind, Mr Powls was certainly not rushing to beat the liberal deadline he had been given. There was only one place where he could have been headed, other than the one which could have been generically described as Out of There, and Simon set his own course for it by another route.

  If the Saint had not been quite so confident about it, it is barely possible that Mr Alton Powls might be alive today. Simon knew the address of the Warshed ménage, which was available to anyone who could read a telephone directory, and having ascertained that, he had not bothered to ask Kathleen Holland to show it to him. He thought he knew his way around the Montecito district fairly well, and he had driven a score of times over the road on which the house stood. The one thing he had overlooked was that he had only driven over it a
nd not in search of a specific destination on it, and he had temporarily forgotten the penchant of denizens of even less traditionally aloof areas than this for secreting their street numbers in minuscule figures in the obscurest possible location, whether to discourage process servers or poor relations. Thus he made two abortive passes at his target, each time made slower by the fact that he did not want to arrive with a triumphant roar, before he positively identified the right entrance. And then he had to drift two hundred yards past it, and find a wider place in the road to park, before he could walk back and enter the rustic gates on foot. By which time, perhaps, Mr Alton Powls had already been gathered to his fathers, if an overworked recording angel could put the finger on them.

  At any rate, he looked dead enough, as the Saint saw him after threading a catlike way to the house which stood completely secluded from the road within its ramparts of tall clipped hedges—after circumnavigating Mr Powls’s small car which by this time was cooling in the driveway, and high-stepping delicately over odorous flower beds, and almost falling into a treacherous excavation in the middle of a small patch of lawn, and finally reaching the draped living-room window from which the light came, and selecting the one marginal crack in the curtains through which he could steal the widest wedge-shaped view of the interior.

  Mr Alton Powls was dead on the carpet, with blood welling from a dent in his cranium, and Aunt Flo standing over him with a poker in her hand, and the two comparatively junior Misses observing the scene with respectful approbation.

  In contravention of all the time-honored legends about old maids, the French windows were not even latched. Simon opened them at once, and made an inevitably sensational entrance through the drapes which wrung stifled screams from Violet and Ida. Only Aunt Flo stood silent and undaunted.

  “I’m very sorry,” he said. “This is entirely my fault.”

  “What are we to understand by that, Mr Templar?—he told us your real name.”

  “I knew he was blackmailing you, but I was curious to know how. The easiest way to find out seemed to be to follow him here and eavesdrop a little. But when I started the routine that I figured would make him come here, I didn’t know that I’d have the answer even before he arrived. I picked his pocket just before I left him a few minutes ago, and here’s what I found when I had a chance to look.”

  He produced Mr Powls’s wallet and unfolded a newspaper clipping from it, which he had read under a shielded flashlight while he waited in the alley. It could only be the same clipping which Kathleen Holland had described Mr Powls exhibiting in Ye Needle Nooke. It was from The Kansas City Star, under a 1930 dateline, and described a raid on one of the most elegant local brothels. There was also a picture of some of the principal culprits being arraigned in night court. The accused madam was plainly identified as Florence Warshed, and the likeness was unmistakable even after more than a quarter-century. Among the other girls, less easily recognizable, were two others modestly named as Violet Smith and Ida Jones.

  Simon handed the clipping to Aunt Flo, who barely glanced at it and let Ida take it and pass it to Violet.

  “I thought you’d like to burn it yourselves,” said the Saint.

  Aunt Flo had not let go the poker, but her grip was perceptibly less rigid.

  “I’ve heard that you’re a man who might understand some things that ordinary people wouldn’t,” she said steadily. “I always ran a good house, if you know what I mean. But after Repeal I could see the handwriting on the wall. I could afford to retire. Violet and Ida were getting a bit too old for the best clients, and yet it wasn’t a good time for them to take over a house on their own. They’d been with me longest of all my girls—in fact, they might just as well have been my own nieces. When the time came, we found that none of us wanted to split up and go it alone. After all, we didn’t have any place to go—we were the only real family any of us had left. So we decided to stick together. We got in my car and headed west, and soon after we found this town we knew it was for us. We could settle down and nobody would ever dream we’d ever been any different from all we wanted to be from there on.”

  “You only made one slip that might have started me wondering before I tried you on the Chesterfield Club,” Simon remarked with incurably professional acuity. “The slant you all have about people being good spenders. But not many people would notice it—and you were right, this is one of the last places in the country where you’d be likely to run into an old client. Even that mightn’t’ve been fatal—most pillars of this community would be too worried about whether you’d keep your mouth shut to open their own. But it had to be this Alton Powls.”

  “He was always a cheap grifter and I’d be ashamed to class him with my good clients,” said Aunt Flo. “But after he had the luck to spot us, and even went back and dug up that newspaper article to make sure he could rub it in, he’s been taking us for a hundred dollars a week.”

  Simon nodded.

  “Kathleen guessed he was giving you trouble, but she was only worried about you. She thinks you’re wonderful, and so do I. So I took it upon myself to give him my best warning, to lay off you and chisel his chips somewhere else. I was betting that this would send him hustling right over here to put the last big bite on you, but I was planning to be in the wings myself.”

  He bent and examined what was left of Mr Powls more conscientiously, for pulse and heartbeat, of which he verified that there were neither.

  “He phoned and said he had to see us at once,” Aunt Flo related. “Then when he got here he told us something about you calling on him. He wanted to see our bank books—he said we’d have to draw out every cent we could raise and give it to him before he left in the morning. And then we could get a mortgage on this place, which would take longer, and send him some more when he wrote to us.”

  “That’s what I expected.”

  “The girls were trying to talk him out of it, but I knew he’d never lay off as long as he lived, so I picked up the poker and fixed that,” said Aunt Flo defiantly, but her voice broke for the first time.

  The Saint took the poker from her without resistance, wiped it carefully on Mr Powls’s neat gray jacket, and put it back in the fireplace.

  “I’d probably have done the same thing myself, if I’d got here in time,” he said. “Or something like it. There are only three ways to stop a blackmailer, but only fools go on paying him, and it would be asking too much for you to dare him to tell the worst…I noticed an interesting hole in your lawn as I was sneaking up on you, Did you have any plans for it?”

  “We were getting ready to plant a Chinese elm,” said Aunt Flo wistfully. “Quite a large and expensive one, but we need more shade for the fuchsias.”

  “I’m afraid you’ll just have to make it another flower bed now,” said the Saint sympathetically. He searched for Mr Powls’s keys and thoughtfully took possession of them before he picked up the body, “I won’t try to cover him very deeply tonight, because I’ll have to run back to his apartment and pack up all his personal things to bury with him, so that it’ll look as if he simply blew town for mysterious reasons of his own. Also the people I’m staying with are expecting me back, and I can’t stretch a story about a flat tire too far. But I’ll be here first thing in the morning with some plants from a nursery, and make a slap-up job of it. Why don’t you all go to bed and get a good sleep?”

  The account he gave Kathleen Holland the next day of his final interview with Mr Alton Powls was not fundamentally fictitious, but it took advantage of certain major omissions.

  “I don’t think we should pry too hard into Aunt Flo’s awful secret,” he said. “It probably isn’t anything that’d scare anybody but her, anyhow. All I know is that I put the fear of God into your creepy friend, and if you drop by his apartment this afternoon I bet you’ll find he’s already done a flit.”

  Having left Mr Powls’s car parked near the railroad station, he was prepared to let any other perfunctory inquirers take the trail from there.

&
nbsp; “I almost feel let down,” Kathleen said disappointedly. “I was half hoping you’d do something brilliant and discover that he was Violet and Ida’s black-sheep father.”

  “If I had, I wouldn’t even tell you,” said the Saint darkly. “And don’t even hint to Aunt Flo that I’ve talked to you at all. It would only worry her. But between you and me, I stopped at her house this morning and told her who I was and that I was sure she wouldn’t have any more trouble.”

  “You looked so hot when you got here,” Kathleen said, “I thought you’d been doing something much more violent than that.”

  “Believe it or not,” said the Saint complacently, “before I was through she had me with a spade in my hands working like a bloody grave-digger. I tell you, I get into the damnedest things.”

  THE ELEMENT OF DOUBT

  “The Law is a wonderful thing, I suppose,” Simon Templar said in one of his oracular moods. “I’ve done a lot of complaining about it in my time, but if it had never existed I wouldn’t have had all the fun of breaking it. And it’s probably a very fine idea that all the wretched little people who can’t take care of themselves should be able to get a fair shake. The trouble is that the same machinery that prevents injustice can also prevent justice.”

  He could be more specific about this if anybody wanted to listen:

  “If you want to guarantee a man the benefit of any reasonable doubt, you also get a system with built-in loopholes that a sufficiently cunning lawyer can drive a bus through. And then you’ll have a certain number of lawyers who specialize in doing just that—who don’t give a damn how guilty they know their clients are as long as they can pay the bill. In fact, who’d rather defend a man who’s guilty as hell, because the fee can be so much fatter. There’s a lot of boils on the cosmos alive and free today who’d be behind bars or under a slab if it weren’t for that kind of shyster. Sometimes I think those professional cheaters of the Law should be hanged even higher than their customers.”