“Good for you, pal. But don’t feel guilty. Cynthia and I wouldn’t’ve known the difference if you’d knocked over a row of ash-cans.”
Simon lighted a cigarette.
“But when I did come home, I felt so good, and the moonlight was so fabulous, that I just couldn’t go in at once. I had to stay out in the balmy air and soak it up. That’s the thing I specially like about the Country Club, as against the other hotels: you’ve got all those rooms overlooking the beach from which you can, get straight out into the gardens, or on to a communal balcony with stairs at each end, and you can come and go as you please without having to pass through a formal lobby or be clocked in and out by any hired busy-bodies. So I was making the most of this, at about four-thirty this morning, when I saw you sneaking in…pal.”
It was one of the most outrageous lies he had ever told in his life, but to his immoral credit he achieved it without a waver of expression. It was Godfrey Quillen whose face flushed and fluctuated through a fatal pause.
“I got restless,” Quillen said. “You know, sometimes you get a bit keyed up before a big race. I went outside to smoke a cigarette, so as not to disturb Cynthia—”
“But I thought you slept like a spinning top,” said the Saint innocently, “and nothing less than the crack of doom would wake Cynthia. On the other hand, if she does sleep so soundly, you might get away to do almost anything without her knowing. But why go to such lengths for a cigarette? When I saw you, you were just getting out of a car, which you’d just driven in and parked.” With the basic fiction safely sold, there was no reason not to clinch it with trimmings. “Did you have to drive far enough away so that she wouldn’t hear you strike the match? Were you afraid she’d think you were lighting some Venezuelan oil?”
Quillen’s mouth opened and shut, without saying anything. His eyes went from side to side, from Simon to Charlie and to Peter. His face seemed uncertain whether to laugh or bluster, but it did neither, and that damning indecision was as good as a confession that was irrevocably underlined by each lengthening second of silence.
The silence was only relative, against the background of a thousand nondescript voices and noises, above which came the rising drone of more machinery approaching. Looking over Quillen’s shoulder, Simon saw a dark green car come around the Esso bend into what they call Sassoon’s Straight, which runs a furlong or so behind the box stand and very slightly off parallel to it. Teresa had stolen the lead somewhere in the back reaches. But the white Bristol was still in the running: it came out of the turn next, a couple of lengths behind and swinging a little wide and wild, but gathering itself and pouring on the coal for a screaming pursuit that began eating up the lost ground at an electrifying rate. The Saint’s stroboscopic flash of relief at seeing both cars still rolling winked out as the new picture became as clear and steady to his mind as if he had been sitting beside Cynthia in the cockpit. He could see with clairvoyant vividness her mouth drawn into a gash, her teeth clenched, her eyes blazing, her knuckles white, her right foot flat on the floor. Furious at having been passed, perhaps goaded even more by some professional trick that Teresa might have used to accomplish it, Cynthia Quillen had simply seen red and was determined to even the score regardless of anything she might have been taught about race driving. One basic tenet of which is that there may be more dangerous places in which to lose one’s temper than at the helm of a hot pan in a road race, but not much is known about them, because the experimenters who discover them seldom survive to describe them.
Cynthia was recklessly feeding her horses all the gas they needed to overtake the Maserati, and they were doing it at a rate which drew a vague kind of communal shout from the crowd. But to anyone who could make an educated estimate of the ballistic and dynamic factors involved, it was a performance to bring a cold sweat to the palms. For all straights come to an end, and this one ended at the extreme northeast tip of the course with two approximately right-angled turns which reversed it like a broad hairpin to run back into the starting and finishing stretch. At Cynthia’s rate of acceleration she could pass Teresa, all right, but in doing it she would build up a velocity that no braking system might be able to cut down again fast enough to navigate the next corner against the immutable drag of centrifugal force…even without any mechanical failure.
“He needn’t’ve gone to all that trouble,” Peter said, as if half hypnotized. “They’ll kill each other anyhow.”
“We’d better stop the race,” Charlie said, with quiet tenseness.
“You talk to the stewards,” Simon snapped.
It may have been a somewhat superfluous directive, for Charlie was already turning towards the press box. But the Saint had a chill fear that even that procedure might be too slow—might perhaps be already too late. At this stage in his career he had become a trifle diffident about some of the more flamboyant performances which he once found irresistible. But this was one situation in which what could be literally called a grandstand play seemed to be forced on him.
With an almost instantaneous assessment of the physical and formal obstacles between him and the track via the nearest stairway, he swung his long legs over the nearest balcony rail and dropped an easy ten feet to the ground between some only moderately startled camp followers. With hardly a pause in motion he raced through an empty pit stall and across the open tarmac to the assortment of signal flags in their row of sockets beside the starter’s box. He grabbed the red one which means “The race has been stopped,” and in his other hand the yellow one which says “Caution,” and stepped out into the track, waving them both frantically.
Even so, he was only just in time to get an acknowledging lift of one of Teresa Montesino’s green-gloved hands as the Maserati streaked by and he saw its brakes begin to smoke.
But the Bristol did not follow, and as he moved farther out into the fairway, ignoring the frenzied injunctions of the public-address system, his heart sank as he saw a car of a different color swooping down towards the bridge, while in the distance a few tiny figures could be seen running like perturbed ants towards some indiscernible center of fascination behind the far turn.
“The biggest joke of it is,” Peter commented later, “that if Cynthia’d tried to make that turn, at the speed she was going, she’d’ve been practically certain to spin out and roll over and probably break her neck. But that loose nut on the steering arm just happened to fall off in the straight, and she already had the brakes on as hard as she could, and when she tried to turn the wheel nothing happened at all, and so she went ploughing right on off the track into a lot of soft sand that stopped her like a feather pillow. Well, almost. Anyway, if Godfrey hadn’t been so bloody clever, she’d probably be stone cold dead in de market, instead of just nursing a few bruises.”
“That should make him feel a lot better,” said the Saint.
“What else will he have to worry about?”
“Oh, the stewards and some other people had quite a talk with him,” Charlie said impersonally. “It isn’t the sort of thing we want a lot of publicity about. He’ll be leaving the island on the next plane—but I don’t think Cynthia will be with him.”
“Or Mrs Santander either,” Brenda put in. “You may think you were awfully discreet, but I bet the story’s all over Nassau before midnight.”
“You’ve got to admit he was no piker,” Peter mused. “It even shook me a bit when we found the Montesino gal’s steering fixed the same way, except that hers was still holding by half a thread. One more rough corner, and she could’ve been another wreck. The kind of sabotage that even a first-class mechanic mightn’t spot—and him pretending he didn’t know one end of an engine from the other. If it hadn’t been for this suspicious Templar character, he might’ve got rid of all his problems in one happy afternoon.”
“Poor Simon,” Betty Bethell said. “Now you’ll be hounded to death by grateful women.”
The Saint grinned undoubtedly, and waved a languid hand at a white-coated waiter who was conveniently
headed in their direction across the Country Club lounge.
“Let’s have another round of that Old Curio,” he said.
“Yes, Mr Templar,” said the man. “Right away, sir. But I was comin’ to tell you you’re wanted on the phone, sir. Some lady callin’, sir.”
FLORIDA: THE JOLLY
“Sometimes,” Simon Templar pronounced once, “I think that critics make far too much fuss about the use of coincidence in detective stories. In real life, mysteries are solved by coincidence at least half the time—because some chance witness happened to notice and remember something, or the criminal accidentally lost a button at the scene. An alibi goes blooey because an unpredictable fire stops the schemer getting back to his apartment in time for the phone call he’s arranged to answer. And how many plays and movies have you seen where the perfect crime was all laid out at the start, and you sat happily on the edge of your seat waiting for the inevitable coincidence to foul it up—the incalculable old lady who comes looking for her wandering Fido, or the power failure that stops the electric clock that should have fired the bomb? The plain truth is that without some sort of fluke there’d usually be no story or no suspense. Coincidences happen to everyone, but they’re only branded as far-fetched when somebody does something with one.”
One such coincidence which he might have been recalling was not really extravagant at all, reduced to its prime essentials, which consisted of:
A: reading about, and being mildly intrigued by, a minor offense committed against an individual of no obvious importance and certainly unknown to him: and
B: having that victim pointed out to him less than 48 hours later, before he had time to forget the association.
That is, if you exclude the third factor, that such coincidences seemed to happen to the Saint with exceptional frequency. But modern insurance studies have revealed that it is not purely accidental that some people have more accidents than others, and can be properly called “accident-prone.” In the same way, Simon Templar seemed to attract interesting coincidences, perhaps because he made better use of them than ordinary people. This, therefore, on the best actuarial authority, should not even be called a coincidence.
The first ingredient, then, was an item in a Palm Beach, Florida, newspaper reporting that a Funeral Home in Lake Worth operated by an undertaker with the rather delightful name of Aloysius Prend had been broken into during the night, but appeared to have rewarded the robbers with no more than $7.18 and some postage stamps, the contents of a petty cash box in an office drawer.
“Now, what would give any burglar the idea of cracking an undertaker’s shop?” Simon apostrophized the counter girl in the coffee shop where he was eating breakfast.
“Those guys’ve got more money than anybody,” she said darkly. “Inflation, depression, recession, whatever, people keep dying just the same. There’s one business can always be sure of customers.”
“And the worse a depression gets, the more it might boom, with more people committing suicide,” Simon admitted, following her cheerful trend of thought. “But no matter how fast the bodies roll in, an undertaker doesn’t normally ring up cash sales like a supermarket. He presents a nice consolidated bill for his assorted services, which is pretty certain to be big enough to be paid by check. So why would anyone expect to find any more in his desk than small change?”
“Could be they were looking for gold teeth in the stiffs.”
Simon found himself liking her more every minute, but he had to point out, “It says here, there was no other damage except the window they broke to get in.”
“I bet he’s got plenty of it socked away, anyhow,” she said, reverting to her original thesis. “You only got to walk around Lake Worth and see ’em tottering about the shuffleboard courts or sitting in those everlasting auction rooms. It should make an undertaker feel like Moses with a claim staked in the Promised Land. Everyone ninety years old, and just waiting to keel over till maybe they’re driving a car and can take someone else with them.”
“Honestly, I’m disgustingly healthy. And I can still lick all my grandchildren.”
“Oh, I can see that. I just wish I saw more fellows around here like you.”
She was a comely wench, and she had that look in her eye, but he already had a fairly promising social calendar for that visit, and he decided not to complicate it with this additional prospect, at least for the present.
The established playgrounds of the spoiled sophisticates, socially registered or columnist-created, are forced to struggle with one perennial blight: a dearth of eligible playboys. This may be because the widows and divorcees are too durable; or the influx of their would-be successors too torrential; or because the men who have yet to earn their own wherewithal are still tied to their jobs and projects in less glamorous but more lucrative centers; or those who inherited it have been decimated by a preference for mixed drinks and/or mixed genders. There is a whole rubric of hypotheses which this chronicler may examine at some other time. The fact remains that in such places any unattached male with reasonable manners, charm, alcoholic tolerance, stamina, and affinity for empty chatter, can be assured of enough invitations to guarantee him his choice of gastritis or cirrhosis, or both, and what is so descriptively called the Florida Gold Coast is no exception.
Simon Templar had never made any systematic effort to crash this exclusively dubious society, but there were times when it amused him to be a fringe free-loader, and he had not fled from the northern blizzards to the subtropical sunshine to enjoy himself like a hermit. He shared any intelligent man’s disdain for cocktail parties, in principle, but he knew no easier way for a comparative stranger in town to make a lot of assorted acquaintances quickly.
“This is my house guest, Betty Winchester,” said his hostess.
“How do you do,” murmured the Saint, like anyone else.
“You’re going to take her to dinner,” his hostess informed him regally, then she saw some more guests arriving. “Oh, excuse me—you tell him about it, Betty.”
The girl was actually blushing—an olde-worlde phenomenon which Simon found quite exotic.
“You don’t really have to, of course,” she assured him. “She’s worried because she has to leave me tonight—an emergency meeting of some charity committee she’s on—and she thinks it’s dreadful to have to abandon me to myself. Please don’t think any more about it.”
She had black hair and very large hazel eyes in a face that was pert and appealing now, and within the next seven years would decide whether to be stodgy or sensual or sulky, just as her nubile figure might become voluptuous or gross. But at that moment Simon was not shopping for futures. He estimated her age at a barely possible twenty-two.
“But I’d like to think about it,” he said. “I didn’t have any better ideas. Unless you did?”
“No. I haven’t been going out much. I came down here to stay with my uncle, who’d been very sick, and when he died these nice people insisted that I move in with them till after the funeral.”
“Had you known them before?” he asked. The usual small talk.
“I went to high school with their daughter, and we still see each other sometimes.”
“Where do you live, then?”
“In New York. And she’s married and living in Philadelphia. Do you live here?”
“No. I’m just another tourist, too…When was this funeral?”
“Yesterday.”
“I’m sorry. But I take it you’re not in total mourning.”
“Oh, no. Although my cousin and I were his only last relatives. But we weren’t really so close to him, all the same. And I don’t think it would do him any good now if I went around being tragic for months, would it?”
“With all due respect to Uncle, I agree,” Simon said. “So about this dinner—is there anything special you feel an appetite for?”
She thought.
“Only one thing I haven’t been able to get, at least not the way I remember them: stone
crabs! We used to go to a place, Joe’s, right at the south end of Miami Beach—”
“That’s a lot longer haul than it used to be, since this coast got practically built up all the way. But I discovered another place last season, a bit closer, on the Seventy-ninth Street Causeway, where the claws are just as luscious and sometimes even bigger.” He consulted his watch. “I could get you there in not much more than an hour on the Parkway, and if you had one more good drink before we took off you’d hardly know you’d missed anything. That is, unless there’s something about this brawl that we mustn’t miss?”
The answer was that they dined sumptuously at Nick & Arthur’s, stifling for temporary logistic reasons the nostalgic loyalty to Joe’s, and sentimentally comparing the size and succulence of the specimens served by both establishments.
“Anyway,” Simon concluded, “they are Florida’s unique and wonderful contribution to the hungry tummy. And what more could Lucullus ask?”
She didn’t try to answer that, most probably having never heard of Lucullus, but she happily finished everything that could be put on her plate, and had some coconut cream pie after it while he finished the bottle of Dienhard Steinwein ’59 with which they had launched those supreme crustaceans. After which it ultimately and inevitably came to a question of what they should do next.
Since the Saint’s adventures nearly always seem to get dated by something or other, it may as well be stated right away that this happened during the epoch when a so-called dance called the Twist had spread like an epidemic from a place called the Peppermint Lounge in New York where it first broke out, across the United States and even beyond the seas, and on countless nightclub floors devotees who had hitherto seemed at least superficially rational were disjointing vertebrae and spraining knees in frenzied attempts to imitate the writhings of an inexpert Fijian fire-walker trying to help himself across the coals by holding on to a live wire.
As they came out of the restaurant, Simon noticed that they were next door to a new manifestation which had moved in since the last time he had been there: an establishment which proclaimed itself, in splendid neon, to be “New York’s Peppermint Lounge.” Discounting any fantastic possibility that the original New York incubator of the current mania had physically uprooted itself and followed its vacationing habitués to Miami Beach, it seemed as if this must at least be an authorized and authentic branch of the mother lodge, and he was reminded of a shocking deficiency in his spectrum of experience.
The Saint in the Sun (The Saint Series) Page 12