Saint Steps In (27 page)

Fernack’s brow
was a little damp, obviously from overwork,
and
he was starting to puzzle over the pages he had scrawled
over in his
notebook. But his manner was reluctantly different
under its brittle shell.

He cleared his
throat.

“There’s just one thing nobody knows yet,” he said. “Why
did you come to New York
today?”

“To get some
dope on certain characters,” said the Saint hon
estly. “The girl was one of those things—she drifted in later.”

Fernack didn’t even respond to that. It gave the Saint’s rudi
mentary conscience a nice clean
feeling.

“Why did you
want to see Imberline?”

“I
didn’t know, when I checked in here. It depended on
what I found out about him. When his record looked
clear—
as you’ll find out when
you get it—I thought I’d just beard him in his den and see if I could make
sense with him. I
couldn’t make much at the
time, but it seems he was at least
impressed
enough to verify me. Which may have been just
too bad for him. Like me, he wasn’t smart enough. He
wasn’t smart enough to keep his mouth shut.”

“And
you don’t know who would have shut his mouth for
him?”

“I don’t know anything I’d want to have quoted now,” said
the Saint, as frankly as he could.

Fernack
closed his book and put it away. Simon felt sorry
for him.

“Well,”
said the detective dourly, “I expect you were going
somewhere. Go there.”

“It’s getting late for my breakfast. What about some lunch?”

“I’m going
to have to say something to those goddamn reporters.”

“Next
time, then.”

“I hope that won’t be for another fifty years.”

“It’s too bad, Henry,” said the Saint with almost genuine
sympathy. “This is going to be a
hell of a case for you—what with the complications of the FBI and another link
in the next state. But that’s what the Proper Authorities have badges
for.”

He went back to
his own room.

He finished dressing with his tie and coat, picked up the
remains of his ruminative bottle of
Peter Dawson, and started
back towards the
elevators. Inevitably, a loitering cub, detailed
to guard the flank, intercepted him before he got there.

“Mr.
Templar, may I ask you a question?”

“Ask
me anything you like,” said the Saint liberally. “I’m
just a perambulating ouija board.”

“Are
you helping the police in this case, or are they trying
to pin something on you?”

Simon deposited
the bottle carefully in his hands.

“The whole
solution of the mystery,” he said, “is probably
contained in this sample of the saliva of a
dromedary which
was found eating the
stuffing out of Imberline’s mattress. And if you want the truth,” he added
hollowly, “Naval Intelligence
has a theory that Fernack himself
poisoned both of them.”

The
assistant manager twittering still more anxiously, created enough diversion
for the Saint to catch a descending car
and make a solitary exit.

Simon regulated
his bill at the desk with sublime sangfroid,
since
it was a most ethical hermitage, and he might want to
use it again, and it was no fault of the
management if careless
guests asked
to be slaughtered in its upper regions, and left
its portals without a smudge on his credit rating or any visible
objection to the cloud of sleuths who might have
been following
him like a
smokescreen of bees on the scent of the last
wilting clover blossom of the season.

He went to Grand Central, enjoyed a shave at the Terminal
Barber Shop, and was driven from
there by the pangs of purely
prosaic hunger to the Oyster Bar, where he took his time over
the massacre of several inoffensive
molluscs. It was after lunch
that he became highly inconsiderate of the convenience of
possible shadows. His method, which
need not be followed in
detail,
involved some tricky work around subway turnstiles,
some fast zigzagging in the Commodore Hotel, and a short excursion
through a corner drug store; and when he re-entered
Grand Central through the Biltmore tunnel he was quite sure
that he would have shaken off anyone who wasn’t
attached to him with a rope. He found a train leaving for Stamford in five
minutes, stopped to buy a newspaper, and settled
in with it.

The
paper called itself an Extra, but the only thing extra
about it was the size of the headlines. They said
RUBBER
DIRECTOR MURDERED, and that
was approximately what
the story consisted of. The city editor had done his best to give
it a big lead with a lot of “Mystery surrounds”
and “It is suspecteds
,” but his
reporter had been able to put very few bones
into it at that point. A prefabricated sketch of Frank Imberline’s
life and career ran alongside under a
double-column
head and tried to make the story look good.

Simon glanced
through the war news, the comics, and the baseball scores, and put the paper
down.

He wondered what story Fernack would give out when they
cornered him. He wondered whether he should have asked Jetterick
to ask Fernack to keep any connection with the
Angert
murder and the Gray kidnaping
out of it, or whether Jetterick would have done that on his own. He decided
that this was
probably unnecessary
wondering. There wasn’t any real need to bring those links in, except to give a
bigger splash to the case; and Fernack wasn’t the type of officer who went in
for
that.

He opened the paper again, on a second thought, and went
through it item by item to find out
whether anything about
Angert
and/or Gray had been printed and pushed into obscur
ity by the big local break; but there wasn’t a word.
Jetterick
and Wayvern had been able to achieve that much
anyhow. But
how much longer they would be
able to keep it up was ex
tremely
problematical.

Then
he decided that that wouldn’t matter much longer. The
Ungodly might have been misled for a while; but
sooner or
later, if they were as
efficient as he thought they were, they
would investigate Stamford again, just for luck. But
he might
have gained several hours,
which had made his trip to New
York
easier; and now he was on his way back to Madeline.
Now they could find her there, and he would be looking
for
ward to it.

He checked the
new disposition again in his mind.

The
Ungodly would know now that the heat was on for
keeps. They would have been afraid of it from Morgen’s story,
and even more perturbed when Andrea Quennel reported
that
the Saint was staying at the
Savoy Plaza—where Imberline was.
They
would have had no more doubt after they spoke to Im
berline. That was
how Imberline earned his obituary. But they
had
hoped to break out of the web by throwing suspicion on
to the Saint with the inviting circumstances
which must have
seemed ready-made for
them. Now, very soon now, through a
newspaper or otherwise, they would
learn that Simon Templar
had been questioned
by the police and released. They would
know that something had gone
wrong again. And they would know that they had very little time.

Then it was all a
balance of imponderables again.

How much would
they think the Saint had told? How much, for that matter, did they believe the
Saint knew?

Simon
couldn’t hazard the second question. It depended a
little, perhaps not too much, on Andrea’s version of
the pre
vious night. And that was
something that it was impossible to
guess, for many reasons.

But they would be afraid that the Saint knew something
And he hoped that they would be good
enough psychologists
to figure that he would keep the best of it to himself. He
thought they would. He was gambling
more than he cared to
measure
on that.

They
had to argue that if he knew too much he knew that
they had Calvin Gray. Therefore his object would be
to recover
that hostage. He, on the
other hand, had Madeline Gray, who
was just as important. Each of them held one trump at par.
It was a deadlock. The only difference
was that they could
threaten
to do vicious things to Calvin Gray, and be wholly
unmoved even if the Saint fantastically threatened
reprisals on Madeline. But they could well doubt whether in the last extremity
even the Saint would let himself be
intimidated by that. Therefore, before the game could end, one side would have
to hold both trumps. The difference there was that the Saint could
wait; he had a minuscule advantage in
time. They hadn’t.

Simon hoped that was how it was.

He
had nothing to do but play chords on that until the train
stopped at Stamford.

He secured a taxi in company with a young sergeant on fur
lough and a stout woman with three
Siamese cats in a wicker
basket
who must ineluctably have been some hapless individual’s
visiting aunt, and began to fume
inwardly for the first
time
while they were dropped off at nearer destinations. After
that, it seemed almost like another
superfluous delay when he
recognized
Wayvern and another man in a dark sedan that
met and passed them out on Long Ridge Road. But
Wayvern
recognized him at the same
time, so the Saint stopped his
driver,
and the two cars slowed down a few yards past each
other and backed up until they could talk.

“What
goes?” Simon asked.

“I
was just taking my man home,” Wayvern told him. “Jerterick phoned me
and said it was all clear now.”

“And about time,” said the collector of butterflies, yawning.
“I ain’t had a night’s
sleep since Christmas.”

The
Saint didn’t know why the earth seemed to stand still.

“Where’ve you been?” Wayvern asked him.

“On
a train coming back from New York.”

“Then I guess he couldn’t get in touch with you. Better
phone him.” Wayvern put his car
in gear again and stirred the
engine. “He said he might be coming over. If I see him first,
I’ll tell him you’re back.”

Simon
nodded, and told his driver to go on.

He
could give no reason for it, and certainly there was nothing he could have
said to Wayvern, but his premonition was so
sure that it was like extrasensory knowledge. It sat
just below
his ribs with a leaden
dullness that made the plodding taxi
seem even
slower. He insulted himself in a quiet monotonous
way; but that did no good except to pass the time. What had
happened couldn’t be altered. And he knew what had
hap
pened, so positively, so
inevitably, that when he went into the
house and called Madeline, and
she didn’t answer, it wasn’t a
shock or an
impact at all, but only a sort of draining at his
diaphragm, as if he had been hit in the solar
plexus without
feeling the actual
blow.

It was Mrs. Cook who came out of the kitchen while he was
calling, and said: “I think Miss Gray went out.”

“What do you
mean, you think she went out?” Simon asked
with icy impassivity.

“Well,
after Mr. Wayvern took his man away, I heard her
saying goodbye to them, and presently there was
another car drove up and I think she went out. I’d heard them saying that
everything was all right, and she was very excited. I
thought perhaps you’d come back for her.”

“You
didn’t see this other car, or anyone else who came
here?”

“No, sir.” He had gathered that morning that she was an
optimistic creature with a happily vacant mind, but even she
must have felt something in his
stillness and the coldness of
his voice. “Why—is anything wrong?”

There was nothing that Simon could see any use in discuss
ing with her.

“No.”

He
turned on his heel and went into the living-room, and for some minutes he stood
rigidly there before he began to
pace.
He had exactly the same feeling, differently polarized,
that an amateur criminal must have who
has committed his
first
defalcation and then realized that he has made a fatal
slip and that he must be found out and that it will
only be a
matter of time before they
come for him, that he has changed the whole course of his life in a blithe
moment and now the machinery has got him and there is nothing he can do about
it. It wasn’t like that for the Saint, but it felt the same.