The Saint Sees It Through (11 page)

“Blackmail,” he said finally.

“Ah, beg pardon?” Avalon murmured.
“Understanding not.”

“It’s in the picture somewhere,” he
insisted. “I don’t care how
free from inhibition she may be, she wouldn’t
be as bitter as
she was unless he’s bleeding her in some fashion. How, is
the
question.”

“I don’t expect to be of any help,”
Avalon said meekly, “but
I suspect the lady has played fast and loose
at one time or another
with the doctor—or others.”

“Could be,” Simon answered.
“And you are a help, you
know, just by being.”

That line of thought occupied them
shamelessly during the
remainder of the ride.

James Prather they found to occupy an
expensive flat in an
expensive neighborhood. He gave them a rather
nervous wel
come,
bade them be seated, and did not offer a drink. James
Prather paced the floor in house slippers, smoking jacket, and
fawn-colored slacks. He was a man middling
thirty, with great blue eyes that reminded you of a lobster. His chin was a
hue,
neither pale nor blue.

He twisted the question out between writhing
fingers.

“Yes? What is it?”

The Saint represented himself again as a
Time
magazine
man, and named the subject of his research.

“Yes, yes,” Prather said.
“What about Dr. Zellermann? What
kind of a man, or what kind of a
doctor?”

“Both,” said the Saint.

“Ah, well——
” The telephone
rang. “Excuse me.” Prather
answered, listened intently for a
moment. Then he shot a glance
at the Saint. “Yes,” he said.
“Yes. I see. Goodbye.”

He turned to Simon. “Will you please get
out of here?”

The Saint watched Mr. Prather at first with a
mild disdain,
as if he were watching a caterpillar in somebody else’s
salad;
then with mild amusement, as if he had discovered the owner
of the salad to be his
dipsomaniac Uncle Lemuel; then with
concern,
as if he had remembered that Uncle Lem was without
issue, and might
leave that handpainted cufflink to his only
nephew;
then with resignation, as if it were suddenly too late
to rescue Uncle—or the caterpillar.

Simon motioned Avalon to a tasteful divan,
and seated himself. His eyes were now mocking and gay, with blue lights. His
smile was
as carefree and light as a lark at dawn. He took a gold
pencil and
a pad from his pocket.

“You were saying,” he prompted,
“about Dr. Zellermann?”

James Prather’s fingers were like intertwined
pallid snakes,
writhing in agony.

“Please,” he begged. “You must
go at once. I have no time
for you now. Come back tomorrow, or next
week. An important
appointment, unexpected. Sorry, but——
”

He went to the door, and held it open.

The Saint considered, and after due and
deliberate considera
tion rose and helped Avalon to her feet.

“I’d like to come back,” he told
Prather at the door.

Prather nodded nervously, watched the Saint
and Avalon
walk toward the elevator for a few feet, then almost
slammed
the door. Simon pushed the elevator button, and just before the door
opened, planted a swift kiss on her startled but quickly
responsive
mouth.

“Wait for me in the lobby,
darling,” he whispered, and hand
ed her inside the car.

He took up a post of observation further down
the hall, so
that the elevator door was halfway between him and
Prather’s
door. He
suspected he would not have long to wait before something happened. What that
something might be, he was
unable to
predict.

He thought of the false trails he had run
down before he began to sniff around Cookie’s Cellar. He wondered if this
would turn
out to be another. Each of his previous attempts to
locate the object of
his search had uncovered one or more nests
of illegality.

One had led him to a sort of warehouse, a huge
structure
where
vast numbers of bottles of bona fide liquors were made
less intoxicating by the simple addition of faintly colored dis
tilled water. All very healthful, no doubt, and
tending to reduce the incidence of drunkenness among habitues of clip clubs
like
Cookie’s—where, incidentally,
one of the delivery trucks had
led
him. This wholesale watering of drinks had another humanitarian aspect: it
saved work for the bartenders. Still, when he
remembered the quality of Cookie’s drinks, the Saint concluded
that she and/or her bartenders had initiative along
that same line. The Saint felt that there was room for reasonable doubt
that the reduction of the alcoholic potency of the
drinks
stemmed from compassionate
motives, cynical though that con
clusion
might be.

Another trail had dragged across it a
herring that had turned out to be the numbers racket. During his brief
examination of
exponents
of mathematical larceny, he had been led again, by
one of the collectors, to Cookie’s.

He had run down a couple of false leads that
led nowhere
except to the decision that this was a Mecca for the
chiseller,
and that some of almost everybody’s best friends are
petty crooks
at
bottom.

The Saint was looking for bigger game.
Perhaps the rising elevator would bring some.

It regurgitated two young men who were
beyond doubt fresh
in from the sea. They wore shore clothes, but the sea was
in
their tanned
faces, their hard hands, and the set of their legs,
braced automatically for the roll of a deck. The Saint couldn’t
see their eyes in the hall’s gloom, but he knew
they would have the characteristic look of those who gaze habitually on
circular
horizons.

They walked without speaking to James
Prather’s door,
thumbed the button, were admitted. The Saint moved
catlike
to the door, but listening brought nothing. The door was heavy,
the walls
designed to give privacy to the occupant. Simon sighed,
summoned
the elevator, and joined Avalon, who was sitting in one of those chairs that
clutter the lobbies of apartment houses and gazing at the uninspiring wallpaper
with a forlorn expres
sion.

“I beg your pardon, Miss,” he said,
“but I was attracted by
your beauty, and can’t help asking you a
question. I am a rep
resentative of Grimes Graphite, Inc—‘Grimes’ gets the grime,’ you
know—and felt certain that you must use it. Is that what makes your skin glow
so?”

“My mother before me, and her mother
before her, rubbed
their faces each night with Grimes’s graphite. But I
don’t use
it myself. I loathe it.”

“That is hardly the point at issue, is
it? We can use that line
about your maternal progenitors, run a photo of yourself—do
you ski?—no matter, we can fix that. And we might
even be
persuaded to raise the
ante.”

“You twisted my bankbook,” Avalon
said. “I’m your gal.”

“Really?”

She smiled. “Really.”

They looked at each other for a long moment,
until several
persons came through the front door in a group, of which
the
male members stared at Avalon with very obvious admiration.
The Saint
took her outside.

“An idea has slugged me,” he said,
“and I don’t want you to be seen talking to me until we’re ready. I just
hope our sailor boys give me a couple of minutes to tell you.”

“What are you talking about?” she
demanded as he hailed a passing taxi.

He helped her in.

“Wait,” he told the driver, and
closed the glass panel separat
ing the production end of the cab from the
payload.

“I have a faint hunch,” he told Avalon in a low voice.
“Two
young men will presently issue
from that door. Possibly you
saw them come in. Tanned, one in a
freshly-pressed gray suit,
the other in
blue? Did they notice you?”

“Looked right through me.”

“Don’t be bitter, darling. They had big things on their
minds.
On their way down, they’ll be free of
care and ready to paint
the town. On
the way down, they’ll remember you, and would be anxious to spend their
newly-acquired wealth on you.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking
about.”

By not so much as the twitch of a nerve end
did the Saint re
veal his thoughts. He had not talked too much; he never
talked
too much. But if Avalon were among the Ungodly—and his
every red
corpuscle stood up on its hind feet and howled at the
thought—she would
know whether he was breathing hard on
the heels of truth or not. Her
knowledge would then be com
municated to the Boys Above.

He hoped, and was not prepared to admit even
to himself
how much he hoped, that his shadowy objectivity had no
foun
dation in
fact. But in his unorthodox plan of maneuvering, a failure to appraise
situations and people with a fishy eye often
led
to the filling of mourners’ benches. He’d helped to fill a few
himself in his day.

And so the smile he gave Avalon was gay as
confetti on New
Year’s Eve.

“I’m not so sure, old thing, that I
myself know what I’m
talking about. But if I do, those boys will
come out of there
with one single first desire: transportation to
celebration. And
I’d rather they kept greedy eyes off our cab.” He
opened the
glass
panel. “Pull up to the corner and wait,” he told the driver.

With one of those lightning decisions that
was the despair of
his enemies and the envy of his friends, Simon Templar
reor
ganised his offense. He wanted to talk to those two young men who had
gone a-knocking at James Prather’s door, but he didn’t
want them to know
that he wanted to talk to them.

He looked gravely at Avalon.

“Will you do something for me?”

“I’ll make a cake or slice a
throat,” she said softly. “Or cross Fortysecond and Broadway against
the traffic light at Saturday
noon.”

“This is an even greater
sacrifice,” he said mockingly. “I want
you to go back into
that apartment house and do some lobby
loitering.”
 

Avalon didn’t frown, didn’t raise her
eyebrows. She meditated
for the space of ten seconds. Then she raised her eyes to his.

“I get the pitch, except for one thing.
Who are you?”

“Your agent, of course.”

“Of course. So I manage to be seen when they come down,
and will be here at the curb with them when you
drive up. I’ll
be telling them I
can’t go with them, but you’ll allow me to be
persuaded, provided you come along. Then we all go off in your
cab.”
She gave him a quick kiss. “I should fall for a ten percenter yet.
Everything happens to me.”

She was out and clicking along the sidewalk on slim heels. The
Saint watched her for a moment and wondered. What a
partner she would make! She had divined his scheme of action,
and with no prompting. She had known, without
words, what
his plan was. All he had
had to do was sketch the bare outlines,
and she had filled in the details.

“Drive around the block,” he told the driver.

It was on the third circumnavigation that the
Saint saw
Avalon and the two seamen at the curb in front of the
apart
ment house. He amused himself with the idea that these were
the only
live persons he had seen on his rounds: all others had
been members of the Bronx nobility walking
their dogs.

“Stop there,” he commanded, and the
cab driver drew up
with
a satisfying squeal of rubber.

“Darling,” the Saint said to
Avalon, “I was afraid you’d have
gone. I’m horribly late.”

“Aren’t you, just?” she said.
“I was about to take off. Well,
since you’re here——
By the
way, these are Joe Hyman and Sam
Jeffries. Joe is the one with the
glint.”