Saint on Guard (2 page)

2 Mrs Milton Ourley was a great deal of woman. She was constructed according to a plan which is discreetly called statuesque. She wore brilliantly hennaed hair, a phenomenal amount of bright blue eye-shadow, and fingernails that would have done credit to a freshly blooded cheetah. Her given name, naturally, was not her fault; but it might have been prophetically inspired. If she was not actually the queen of the fairies, she certainly; impressed one as being in the line of direct succession.

She plumped herself down on the smallest available chair, which she eclipsed so completely that she seemed to be miraculously suspended some eighteen inches from the floor, and speared the Saint on an eye like an ice-pick.

“If you want to know all about iridium,” she said, “I came to tell you about my husband.”

Simon Templar had taken more obscure sequiturs than that in his stride. He offered her a cigarette, which she declined with fearful cordiality, and sank one hip on the edge of a table.

“Tell me about him.”

“He’s,been buying iridium in the black market. I heard him talking about it to Mr Linnet.”

Her voice became a little vague towards the end of the sentence, as if her mind had already begun to wander. Her eye had already been wandering, but only in a very limited way. Nevertheless, it had not taken long to lose a large part of its impaling vigor. It was, in fact, becoming almost wistful.

“Do you like dancing?” she asked.

“I can take it or leave it alone,” said the Saint cautiously. “Who is Mr Linnet?”

“He’s in the same kind of business as my husband. He makes electrical things. My husband, of course, is president of the Our-ley Magneto Company.” Her rapidly melting eye traveled specu-latively over the Saint’s tall symmetrical frame. “You look as if you could do a wonderful rumba,” she said.

Only the Saint’s incomparable valor, which is already so well known to the entire reading public of the English-speaking world, enabled him to face the revolting tenderness of her smile without quailing.

“I hope I never disappoint you,” he said ambiguously. “Now, about your husband–-“

“Oh, yes. Of course.” Her pronunciation of the last word was a caress. “Well, he uses a lot of iridium. I don’t know much about his business—I think business is so dull, don’t you?—but I know he uses it. So does Mr Linnet. Well, last night we had dinner with Mr Linnet, and—well, I had to powder my nose.”

“Not really? Even you?”

“Yes,” said Mrs Ourley vaguely. “Well, when I came back, I just couldn’t help hearing what Milton—that’s my husband, Milton—and Mr Linnet were talking about.”

“Of course not.”

“Well, Mr Linnet was saying: 1 don’t know what to do. I’ve got to have iridium to fulfil my contracts, and the market’s cornered. I don’t like any part of it, but they’ve got me over a barrel.’ Then Milton said: I’ll say they have. But you’ll buy it and pay through the nose, just like me. You can’t afford to do anything else.’ And Mr Linnet said: ‘I still don’t like it.’ Then I had to go into the room because the butler came out into the hall, so I couldn’t just stand there, and of course they stopped talking about it. But I can tell you it was a terrible shock to me.”

“Naturally,” Simon agreed sympathetically.

“I mean, if Milton and Mr Linnet are buying illegal iridium, that makes them almost criminals themselves, doesn’t it?”

Simon studied her seriously for a moment.

“Do you really want your husband to go to jail?” he asked bluntly.

“Good Heavens, no!” She was righteously pained. “That’s why I came to you instead of telling the police or the FBI. If Milton went to jail I just wouldn’t know how to look my friends in the face. But as a patriotic citizen I have my duty to do. And it wouldn’t do any harm if you frightened him a bit. I think he deserves it. He’s been so mean to me lately. If you could only have heard what he said to the nicest boy that I met in Miami Beach–-“

It seemed to the Saint, quite abstractly, that he might have enjoyed hearing that; but he was just tactful enough not to say so.

He said: “What you’ve told me isn’t exactly enough to convict him. And for that matter, it doesn’t lay the black market in my lap either. But I’d like to have a talk with your husband.”

“Oh, if you only would, Mr Templar! You’re sooo clever, I’m sure you could persuade him to tell you.”

“I could try,” he said noncommittally. “Where do you live?”

“We’ve got a little place out at Oyster Bay. Milton will be home by half past six. If you could manage to get out there—you could say you just happened to be passing and you dropped in for a drink–-“

“Tell him we met in Havana,” said the Saint, “and put him in the right frame of mind.”

He got her out of the door with some remarkably firm and adroit maneuvering, and came back to pour himself a healthy dose of Peter Dawson and restore his nerves.

The fortunes of buccaneering had brought many women out of the wide world and thrown them into Simon Templar’s life, and it is a happy fact that most of them had been what any man would agree that a woman out of the wide world ought to be, which was young and decorative and quite undomesticated. But he had to realise that sooner or later such good luck had to end; and he had no idea of ignoring Titania Ourley, in spite of her unprepossessing appearance and even more dreadful charm.

It was like that in the strange country of adventure where he had worn so many trails. When yo.u had no idea where your quarry was, there was nothing to bring it within range like the right bait. When you had no idea what your quarry was like, you had to find the right bait, and sometimes that wasn’t at all easy, but when you had the right bait you were bound to get a nibble. And when you had a nibble, the rest depended on how good you were. Mrs Milton Ourley was definitely a nibble.

He reached Oyster Bay soon after six-thirty, and after the inevitable series of encounters with village idiots, characters with cleft palates, and strangers to the district, he was able to get himself directed to Mr Ourley’s little place.

This little place was no larger than a fairly flourishing hotel, occupying the center of a small park. Simon watched the enormous iron-studded portal open as he approached it with the reasonable expectation of seeing the hallway flanked with a double line of periwigged footmen; but instead of that it was Mrs Ourley herself who stood fabulously revealed on the threshold, gowned and corseted in a strapless evening dress that made her-upper section look slightly like an overfilled ice cream cone.

“Simon! You darling boy! How wonderful of you to remember!”

She insisted on taking both his hands as she drew him in, and still holding on to them when he was inside—doubtless under the impression that this gave her some of the winsome appeal of Mary Martin in her last picture.

He found himself in an immense pseudo-baronial hall cluttered with ponderous drapes and gilt furniture, and atmospherically clogged with a concentration of perfume on which it might have’ been possible to float paper boats. As Mrs Ourley dragged him closer to her bosom, it became stiflingly plain that she herself was the wellspring of this olfactory soup.

“I was just driving by,” Simon began as arranged, “and–-“

“And of course you had to stop! I just knew you couldn’t forget–-“

“What the dabbity dab is going on here?” boomed a sudden wrathful voice from the background.

Mrs Ourley jumped away with a guilty squeal; and Simon turned to inspect Mr Ourley with as much composure as Mrs Ourley’s over-zealous interpretation of her part could leave him.

“Good evening,” he said politely.

He saw a very short man with enormous shoulders and an even more enormous stomach swelling below a stiff white shirtfront. He carried a raggedly chewed cigar in thick hirsute fingers, and his black beetling brows arched up and down in apoplectic exasperation.

“Tiny!” he roared at his wife, thereby causing even the Saint to blink. “I’ve told you before that I’ll make no effort to control your comings and goings outside of this house, but I will not have you bringing your gigolos into my home!”

Mrs Ourley bridled automatically.

“But he’s not a … I asked him to drop in.”

“So,” said Milton Ourley thunderously. “You admit it. Well, | this is just about the last–-“

“But Milton,” she protested coldly, “this is Mr Templar. Simon Templar. You know—the Saint.”

“Jumping Jehosaphat!” roared Mr Ourley. “The what?”

Simon turned back from the Beauvais tapestry which he had been surveying while he allowed the first ecstatic symptoms of marital bliss to level off.

“The Saint,” he said pleasantly. “How do you do?”

“Dabbity dab dab dab,” said Mr Ourley. A new flood of adrenalin in his blood stream caused him to inflate inwardly until he looked more than ever like a bellicose bullfrog. “Tiny, have you gone out of your mind? Asking this crook, this—this busybody–-“

“Milton,” said Mrs Ourley glacially, “I heard you and Mr Linnet talking about iridium last night. And since Simon is trying to break up that racket, I thought it would be a good idea to bring you two together.”

Milton Ourley stared at the Saint, and his broad chest seemed to shrink one or two sizes. That might have been only an impression, for he stood as solid as a sawed-off colossus on his short stocky legs. Certainly he did not stagger and collapse. His glare lost none of its fundamental bellicosity. It was only quieter, and perhaps more calculating.

“Oh, did you?” he said.

The Saint fingertipped a cigarette out of the pack in his breast pocket. For his part, the approach was all ploughed up anyhow. He had given Titania Ourley little enough script to work with, and now that she had gone defensively back into simple facts it was no use worrying about what other lines might have been developed. Simon resigned himself to some hopeful adlibbing, and smiled at Mr Ourley without the slightest indication of uncer-tainty in his genial nonchalance.

“You see?” he murmured. “Tiny has brains as well as beauty.”

Ourley’s red face deepened into purple again.

“You leave my wife out of this!” he bellowed. “And as for you, you can get out of here this minute, Mister Templar. When you’ve got any authority to come barging into other people’s affairs–-“

“You heard the name,” Simon replied softly. “Did you ever hear of the Saint asking for any authority?”

” ‘And seem a saint when most I play the devil’,” said another voice, a deep cultured voice from somewhere else in the hall.

Simon looked around for it.

He saw, in one of the doorways, a tall spare man whose dinner clothes seemed to have been poured over his figure, smiling and twirling a Martini glass in one manicured hand. Gray at the temples, his face was hard and almost unlined, cut in the aquiline fleshless pattern of a traditional Indian chief.

“I don’t want to break anything up,” he said, “but all the excitement seemed to be out here.” Ignoring Ourley, he sauntered towards the Saint with his free hand outstretched. “I’ve heard a lot about you, Mr Templar. My name’s Allen Uttershaw. I’m supposed to run that Uttershaw Mining Company. I heard somebody talking about iridium. Are you going to get that stolen shipment back for us?”

“I don’t know,” said the Saint. “I’m afraid I only heard about you a few days ago.”

” ‘Full many a flower is born to blush unseen’,” Uttershaw said tolerantly, his smile widening.

Ourley made a gesture of frightful frustration with his cigar.

“What is all this?” he barked. “Who said that?”

“John Kieran,” said Uttershaw gravely; and Simon looked at him with new interest. It began to seem as if Mr Allen Uttershaw might be quite a fellow.

Mr Ourley didn’t have the same pure intellectual detachment. He repeated his outraged gesture with italics in smoke.

“Dabbity dab dab dab!” he roared. “Has everybody gone nuts? First I find my wife has brought this meddler into my home to spy on me, and then you keep on quoting poetry. Or maybe it’s me that’s crazy.”

“Milton!” said Mrs Ourley sternly.

Uttershaw took Simon by the arm and started to lead him easily into the living room from which he had emerged.

“Milton, I’m ashamed of you,” he said. “What will Mr Templar think of your hospitality?”

“I don’t give a dab dab what he thinks,” fumed Ourley, pattering helplessly after them. “My hospitality doesn’t include welcoming crooks and spies with open arms.”

“Now, after all—surely Mr Templar is at least entitled to the chance of saying something for himself.” Uttershaw turned to a tray on which a shaker and a row of glasses were set out. “How about a drink, Mr Templar?”

“Thanks,” said the Saint, with equal urbanity.

He took the glass that Uttershaw handed him, gazed into it for a moment, and then swept his cool blue eyes again over the faces of the other two men.

“I didn’t exactly come here to spy,” he said frankly. “I didn’t actually come here with any plans at all. But after what Mrs Ourley told me, I was certainly anxious to talk to”—he inclined his head—“Mr Ourley. I thought I might possibly get you to talk to me. You know that I’m interested in the iridium situation, and it seems that you’ve had some dealings with the black market. You might like to tell me about it.”

“My wife is an irresponsible imbecile,” Ourley said balefully. “I’m just a business man with a contract to fill, and I’m filling it.”

“Anyone who buys in a black market, of course, is technically compounding some sort of misdemeanor,” Simon went on im-perturbably. “But in this case it goes a little further. Iridium isn’t so common that a black market can just scratch it up out of a junk pile. And Mr Uttershaw will certainly remember a recent robbery in which two men were killed. It seems rather obvious to me that at least some of this black market iridium is coming from that stolen shipment which started the shortage in the first place. In that case, anyone who buys it is not only receiving stolen goods, but in a sort of way he’s an accessory to murder.”

“Fiddlesticks!” exploded Ourley. “What do you propose to do when you get some information—turn it over to the Junior G-Men or cash in on it yourself?”

“Milton!” repeated Mrs Ourley, aghast from her quivering bust to the crimson-tipped toes that protruded through the front of her evening sandals.