Saint Steps In (26 page)

“Several people do. I’ve heard that it’s getting quite com
mon.”

The detective
kept his hands down with a heroic effort.

“And
on top of all that,” he said, “you knew he was dead
before I told you.”

“You did
tell me,” said the Saint. “There’s a special tone of
voice you have that fairly screams homicide—particularly
when
you’re hoping to send me to the
chair for it. I’ve heard it so
often
that I can pick it out like a siren.”

Fernack drew a
deep labored breath.

“Now let me
tell you what I think,” he said crunchingly. “I
think you know a hell of a lot too much about this.
I think
you’re in plenty of trouble again——”

Simon blew an impudent smoke-ring straight at him.

“Henry,”
he said reasonably, “doesn’t this dialogue remind
you of something we’ve been through before?”

The detective swallowed.

“You’re damn right it does! But this time——
”

“This time it’s going to be bigger and better. This time it’s
going to stick. This time you’ve got
me. We’ve played that
scene
before too, but I don’t like to bring that up. A guy has been rubbed out, and
so I did it. Because everyone knows that
I have an exclusive concession to do all the rubbing out that’s
done in New York.”

“All you’ve got is a lot of smart answers——
”

“To a lot of
moronic questions. Imberline gets himself mur
dered
here, and I’m handy, so why not convict me?”

“When it turned out to be a murder,” Fernack said ponder
ously, “I had to check up on the
other guests in the hotel. I
came
to your name, and there you were—practically next
door. Now be smart about that!”

The
Saint took a long draught of smoke and smiled at him
with tolerant affection. He cast around for a chair
and sat
down with a ghost of a
sigh.

“Henry,”
he said, “I’m just not smart any more. I wanted
to murder Imberline, and I found out he was staying
here and
what room he was in, and I
made quite a little fuss about get
ting a room as close to him as I could. I wasn’t smart
enough
to just ride up in the
elevator and give him the works and go
away again. I had to move in on the job. I didn’t want
you to
have a mystery on your
hands——
”

“Where were you last night?”

“Oh, I was out to dinner with a babe and then over at her
apartment looking at her etchings, and whatever time the
night
clerk says I came in is probably about
right. I didn’t notice
it exactly
myself. I just wasn’t smart enough to bother about
an alibi. I bashed Imberline’s head in; and even
then I wasn’t
bright enough to get
the hell out. I went to bed and went to
sleep and waited for you to find me.” Simon flipped over his
hole card with a silent thanksgiving for the
unconsidered de
cision that had dealt
it into his hand. “I knew that wouldn’t
take you long, because I’d
registered in my own name to make
sure you
wouldn’t be
put off by any aliases. I’m just not smart
any more,
Henry—that’s all there is to it.”

Fernack gloomed
at him waveringly. It seemed that this also
was
part of a familiar scene. He was convinced that there was
something wrong with it, as he always had been;
but the trou
ble was that he could never put a finger on it. He only had
an
infuriating and dismal foreboding that he
was going to find
himself on the
same lugubrious merry-go-round again.

“You’re just too smart,” he said suspiciously. “You’re
trying
to sell me the same bill
of goods——
”

“I’m
trying to show you what your evidence would sound
like to a jury.”’

The detective rubbed his suffering gray hairs.

“Then what the hell do you know about this?” he demanded
almost pleadingly.

“Now you’re being rational, dear old bloodhound. So I’ll let
you into a secret. I did know Imberline
was here, and I did
come
here to see him—among other things.”

Fernack jerked as
if a hot needle had penetrated his gluteus
maximus.
The smouldering embers flared up in his eyes.

“Then you
are trying to make a goat out of me!” he bawled.
“You’re giving me the same old baloney——
”

The Saint groaned.

“You ought to take sedative pills,” he said. “Your
stomach
must have ulcers like the
craters on the moon. I’m trying to
set you on the right track. I did come here to talk to
Imber
line; that’s all. I didn’t
make much of a secret of it, either—
long before you ever thought you’d be interested. So for
any
one who wanted to ease him
into his next transmigration, it
could
have been almost irresistible. I thought of everything
else, and I was too dumb to think of that. Maybe I
ought to go
to the chair for it, but
there’s no law that says so.” The Saint’s
face was like stone. “It would have been perfectly easy to do.
Your murderer could even have come into the hotel with Im
berline. They just didn’t ride up in the same
elevator. The guy
suddenly leaves him
in the lobby and says he wants to buy a
paper or say hullo to a friend or something, and he’ll be right
up. He takes the next car, chats for a while,
waits till Imber
line goes to the can, follows him, and flattens his
skull on the floor. Then he waits and watches for me to come in, and when
he’s sure that I’m parked for the night he picks
up the phone
and leaves the morning
call, just to prove that Imberline was alive then and try to make sure he’d be
found before I was up.
He had a very sound idea of the way a policeman
would think, with all due respect, Henry.”

The Saint’s voice
was light and soothing, but the detachment
of
his gaze was not part of any clairvoyant trance. He was only
hanging
words on to something that had long ago become concrete in his subconscious. He
was thinking about very different things—that this must have been the trap
that Andrea
Quennel had tried too hard to
keep him away from, and that
she had
looked like a sculpture in alabaster even when she
toppled so foolishly on the bed, and that one day
he would
really be as clever as he
tried to be.

Fernack
was still clamping his jaw and struggling morosely
to stare him down.

“That’s all
very fine,” he persisted obstinately. “But coming
from you——
”

“Some of it might even be in evidence,” said the Saint.
“If
Imberline made that morning
call, his fingerprints would be
on the telephone. Unless the telephone was wiped. The murderer
wouldn’t wipe the telephone unless he’d used it. Unless
there were any other calls from this
room after that—or are
you ahead of me?”

Simon knew from the detective’s face that he had rung a
bell.

“I
had thought of that,” Fernack prevaricated valiantly.
“But in that case, who
did
kill
Imberline?”

“Probably some disgruntled manufacturer of coil-spring cor
sets who objected to having rubber
released for making gir
dles.”

Inspector Fernack’s sensitive scrutiny started to become congested
again.

“If you’re amusing yourself, I’d rather go and laugh at a
good funeral. Imberline was one of
these Government men.
I’m going to have
all of Washington riding me as well as the
Mayor.
If you don’t know anything, get the hell out of here.”

“I might be able to put you in touch with the right people
if you were more polite. But I’ll have to make a call to
New Haven.”

“Go ahead.”

Simon reached for the telephone.

He had no doubt
that Fernack followed all the steps of his
threading
through Information and the FBI to Jetterick; and
he didn’t try to rush the machinery.

After a few
minutes he had Jetterick on the wire.

“This is the Templar Corpse-Finding and Marching Club,”
he said. “How are things with you?
… Much the same. I
haven’t been up long enough to check with Stamford yet—
you haven’t had any bad news from
there? … Good. Noth
ing on Morgen yet, I suppose? … Mmm. One of those unco
operative bastards. I didn’t really
think he’d have a record— he wouldn’t have been so much use if he had …
Well, what
I called you for was to
find out whether a bureau bigwig by
the name of Frank Imberline tracked you down last night to
find out if there was any truth in what
I’d told him about
some of
the ramifications of our country picnic yesterday …
Oh, he did, did he? … That must
have been fun … No,
I don’t think I’d better tell you why. I’m going to turn you
over to Inspector John Henry Fernack
of the woodcraft con
stabulary
down here—a maestro of mystery who wants to put
me in a striped zoot suit. Tell him whatever you
think would
be safe for his little pink ears.”

He handed the
phone over to Fernack and strolled with his
cigarette
to the window, floating evanescent blue wreaths
against the pane and
contemplating the dubious rewards of
unswerving
but unsophisticated righteousness.
  

4

He didn’t know what story Jetterick would be telling, and
he didn’t pay much attention. He
imagined it would be pretty
complete
as Jetterick knew it. The one lead that Jetterick
didn’t have, aside from the later developments of the
day before, was the one that ran to Andrea Quennel and through her
to Hobart Quennel and Walter
Devan—Simon felt sure that
Walter
Devan himself was the actual killer in this case. He
couldn’t see the introduction of any more outside
talent, and
he couldn’t see Hobart
Quennel personally engaged in may
hem either. If Morgen had been traced to Devan, Jetterick
would have had a pointer in that direction from another an
gle; but even that hadn’t happened.
And the Saint had prac
tically discounted Morgen altogether by then, except as an accessory:
the man’s Nazi affiliations might be another story,
but they were not this one.

Simon
Templar had met property dragons before, often
enough to feel almost sentimental about the smell of
paint and papier-m
â
ch
é
that came with them; but now he had a
pellucid and vertiginous certainty that his quarry was darker and dead
lier than any of those hackneyed horrors.

He couldn’t have explained very succinctly why he kept the
whole trail of Quenco to himself. He
knew that that wasn’t
in line with the most earnest pleas of the Department of
Justice—but Simon Templar had always
had an indecorous
disdain for such appeals. It
might have been an incorrigible
reversion
to his old lawless habits, overriding the new r
ô
le
into
which the fortunes of another war
had conscripted him. It
still wasn’t
because of Andrea’s long rounded legs. It might
have been because he knew in cold logic how flimsy his own
evidence was, even flimsier than the gauze he had
just made
out of Fernack’s case
against him; because he knew that
there
were no statutory weapons to pierce that statutory armor
of a man in Hobart Quennel’s position, because in
spite of his
challenge to Andrea he knew how Fernack and even Jetterick
would have laughed at him, because he was afraid of
the
morass of red tape that could tie
him up until his own phan
tom sword
was blunt … He didn’t know, and he didn’t
think about it much.

He waited until
Fernack’s mostly monosyllabic conversation
was
finished. It took an unconscionable time, and he wondered
whether it would be included in the bill charged
to the late
Frank Imberline’s estate.
He couldn’t see much to worry about
in that, when he reviewed it; and
his brow was serene and
unfurrowed when he
turned to look at the detective again.