The Saint met Otis Q Fennick on the fire escape of the Hotel Mercurio, in San Francisco at about four o’clock in the morning.
Like many another eminently simple statements, the foregoing now involves an entirely disproportionate series of explanations.
Simon Templar was staying at the Mercurio, which was a long way from attaining the luxurious standards of the kind of hotel that he usually frequented, because when he headed for San Francisco he had neglected to inform himself that a national convention of the soft-drink and candy industry was concurrently infesting that otherwise delightful city. After finding every superior hostelry clogged to the rafters with manufacturers and purveyors of excess calories, he had decided that he was lucky to find a room in any hotel at all.
The room itself was one of the least desirable even under that second-rate roof, being situated at the back of the building overlooking a picturesque alley tastefully bordered with garbage cans and directly facing an eye-filling panorama of grimy windows and still grimier walls appertaining to the edifice across the way. The iron steps of the outside fire escape partly obscured this appealing view by slanting across the upper half of the window, and it was there that Simon first heard the stealthy feet of Mr Fennick, and a moment later, being of a curious disposition, saw them through a gap at the edge of the ill-fitting blind. He had dined at his friend Johnny Kan’s temple of oriental gastronomy on Grant Avenue for old times’ sake, and afterwards Johnny had insisted that they should go out together and look for some late entertainment that might not have been discovered by the assembled exploiters of appetizing toothache, and what with one thing and another it had been very late when he got home, and he had only just shed most of his clothes and brushed his teeth when he heard the furtive scuffling outside which was the surreptitious descent of Mr Fennick.
In such a situation, the ordinary sojourner in even a second-rate hotel would either have remained gawking in numb perplexity or have started howling an alarum, with or without the intermediacy of the house phone. Not being ordinary in any way, Simon Templar rolled up the shade with a craftsman’s touch which almost miraculously silenced its antique mechanism — he had already switched off the lights in order to see out better, and the window had never been closed since he accepted the room, on account of the stuffiness of its location — and swung himself across to the nearest landing of the fire escape with the deceptively effortless grace of a trained gymnast, having reacted with such dazzling speed that he arrived there simultaneously with the cautiously groping prowler.
“Me Tarzan,” said the Saint seductively. “You Jane?”
His voice should not have been at all terrifying — in fact, it was carefully pitched low enough to have been inaudible to anyone who had not already been disturbed by Mr Fennick’s rather clumsy creeping. But Mr Fennick was apparently unused to being accosted on fire escapes, or perhaps even to being on them at all, at any rate, it was immediately obvious that no intelligible sound was going to emerge for a while from the fish-like opening of his mouth. It became clear to Simon that the acquaintance would have to be developed in a more leisurely manner and less unconventional surroundings.
“You’d better come in before you catch cold or break your neck,” he said.
Mr Fennick gave him no struggle. He was a small man, and the Saint’s steel fingers almost met their thumb around the upper arm that they had persuasively clamped on. He squeezed his eyes very tightly shut, like a little boy, as Simon half lifted him across the space to the window sill, which was really no more than a long stride except for having about forty feet, of empty air under it.
With the blind drawn and the lights on again, the Saint inspected his catch with proprietary interest. Mr Fennick wore a well-pressed brown double-breasted suit of conservative tailoring, a white stiff-collared shirt, a tie very modestly patterned with neutral greens, and even a clean felt hat of sedate contour. To match his skinny frame, he had a rather wizened face with a sharp thin nose, a wide thin mouth, and lively intelligent brown eyes when he opened them. He looked much more like a member of some Chamber of Commerce and pillar of the Community Church than a felonious skulker on fire escapes.
“You know,” said the Saint at last, “I don’t think you’re a burglar after all. And this would be a rather desperate hour for a Peeping Tom. I guess you must be a candy cooker.”
“That’s right,” Mr Fennick said eagerly. “The Fennick Candy Company. You must have heard of it.”
He whipped out a wallet and extracted a card from it with an automatic dexterity which even his temporarily shattered condition could not radically unhinge. He went on, in a kind of delirious incantation: “Jumbo Juicies, Crunchy Wunchies, Crackpops, Yummigum—”
“That sounds like a powerful spell,” said the Saint respectfully. “Now are you supposed to vanish in a puff of smoke, or am I?”
“I wish I could,” said Mr Otis Q Fennick, President, forlornly.
Having read everything on the card, Simon put it down on the dresser and picked up a cigarette.
“It begins to seem as if you have a problem,” he said. “But presumably it isn’t anything so sordid as not being able to pay your bill. You weren’t doing the moonlight flit, were you?”
“Oh, dear me, no! I’m quite comfortably well off, I assure you. In fact, I was most upset with the convention Committee for booking me into a place like this. Of course, they said that all the rooms were allotted by drawing names out of a hat, but I noticed that they all got the Mark Hopkins or the Drake. This isn’t at all the class of hotel I’d choose for myself.”
“We have that in common, anyhow.”
“I don’t remember seeing you at any of the meetings. What’s your line?”
“I was referring to our taste in hotels, Otis. I’ve never taken much interest in candy, unless it happened to be poisoned.”
“Oh.” Mr Fennick looked pardonably vague. “Well, I am attending this soft-drink and candy convention which you may have heard of—”
“I could hardly help it. It stuck me with this dump — and me not even a delegate. So what were you doing just now? Trying to sneak in on one of your competitors and steal his secret formula for the ultimate frightful blend of peppermint, popcorn, and peanut butter, with the miracle self-inflating ingredient and the atomic crackle?”
“No, nothing like that—”
“Then it must have been his new sales gimmick to top your offer of a rocket trip to Venus in exchange for fifty million Crunchy Wunchy wrappers.”
Mr Fennick blinked at him.
“You must be misinformed, sir. The Fennick Candy Company never made any such offer.”
“Then I’ll make you a present of the idea. So what were you doing?”
“Well, I suppose I was just in a panic. I knew I was being framed.”
“Maybe you were,” said the Saint cheerfully. “But I still don’t get the picture. Why don’t you begin at the beginning?”
Mr Fennick gulped, wriggled miserably, and took a deep breath like a diver about to plunge.
“All right. I was out last night — it would be last night, wouldn’t it? I was out with some business connections. We had dinner at the Sheraton Palace, and went to some night clubs. We were at the Forbidden City, and Bimbo’s.
Of course, we drank quite a lot—”
“Coke, or chemical fruit punch?”
“No, I like a real drink when I go out. But I wasn’t drunk. You must believe me. I only mentioned it to explain why I must have fallen asleep especially soundly when I got to bed, which was about two o’clock.”
“Why must you?”
“Because when I woke up, there was this girl in bed with me, with nothing on. And I hadn’t heard her come in, or get undressed, or anything.”
The Saint’s blue eyes became slightly wider.
“Wow!.. I mean, that must have been disappointing. You probably missed the best strip-tease of the evening.”
“I give you my word, sir, I’m not used to anything like that. At least, not at such close quarters.”
“Don’t be discouraged, chum. It may grow on you yet. The savoir faire comes with practice. What did you do — offer her some Yummigum?”
“I think I woke up when the lights suddenly went on. Or when she leaned over and put her arms around me. Both things seemed to happen together. I was completely fuddled, of course. And then, before I could really get my bearings at all, the light blinded me. I think there was someone else in the room, but I was too dazzled to have anything more than an impression. And then, something hit me on the head, and it hurt terribly, and everything went black. It all seems like a bad dream now, except...”
The little man took off his prim felt hat and gingerly touched the upper side of his cranium. The mousy hair had ebbed far enough from that region for the Saint without even coming closer to authenticate a swelling that was already making its first experiments with the palette of color effects.
“What happened when you woke up again?” Simon asked.
“There wasn’t anyone there. Except me, of course. And as soon as I could think it out, I knew I’d been framed. That blinding light — obviously, a flash bulb. Somebody had taken a picture of me, in that awful situation.”
“Was this doll really gruesome?”
“No. No, not at all. That’s what makes it so dreadful. In fact, she was... well, er...”
“Stacked?”
Mr Fennick winced, his pallor taking on a definite tint of rose.
“I don’t particularly like such vulgar expressions. But, yes, if someone was planning to blackmail me, I suppose she’d be the type they’d use.”
“Then all may not be lost,” said the Saint consolingly. “If some prankster in this Convention is trying to sabotage your bid to be elected Supreme Lollipop by charging you with dissolute habits, the foul conspiracy may yet boomerang. With your new reputation as the Confectionery Casanova, you might become the hero of the Convention. Think what a few shots like that did for Brigitte Bardot.”
“I am hardly in the same category,” said Mr Fennick severely. “And in my case, that’d be all my wife would need.”
Simon Templar nodded.
“Aha. Now it starts to make sense. I gather that Mrs Fennick isn’t here with you.”
“No, she’s home in New York.”
“Enjoying the Theatre, the Ballet, and the Mink, no doubt.”
“Yes, she likes all those things. And she thinks conventions are just an excuse for a lot of men to cut loose and... well, you know...”
“Get into the sort of mischief you were photographed in?”
“Exactly.”
“So that if you tried to explain that snapshot the way you’ve told it to me, you’d expect a fairly hilarious reception.”
“I wouldn’t have the least chance of convincing her.”
“I see.” The Saint produced a thoughtful aureole of smoke. “But at the risk of seeming to harp on the subject, chum, I’m still trying to find out why you were cavorting on the fire escape.”
Mr Fennick wrung his hands — it was the first time Simon had seen that well-worn cliché actually performed, and it corrected his lifelong delusion that it was merely a slightly archaic figure of speech.
“As I told you, I went into a funk. The only thing I could think of was to find the young woman and try to persuade her that whatever she’d been paid for playing her part, I could make it a little more worth her while to testify to the truth.”
“Because that’d certainly be less than half what the photographer or his boss would be expecting to collect. Not bad thinking, for a guy who just came out of a conk on the noggin. But what made you think she’d be hanging on the wall outside?”
“Nothing. But I had an idea where to begin looking.”
The Saint’s eves narrowed fractionally.
“So you did know her, after all.”
“I had seen her once before,” Mr Fennick said precisely. “As a matter of fact, that’s what made it seem so specially shocking and like a dream when I woke up and saw her without — um — the way I described her. She works in the bar downstairs, in the hotel, with one of those flashlight cameras, getting customers to have souvenir pictures taken.”
“Then why didn’t you go down in the elevator, like any respectably indignant customer, and start yelling for the manager?”
“Because I felt certain that somebody on the staff must have been in on the plot. I’m always very careful about locking my door in hotels. Somebody must have given those people a key, or let them into my room. It might have been the elevator boy, or the night clerk—”
“Why couldn’t they have used the fire escape, too?”
“My window was only open a few inches, and there’s a safety chain on the inside. I expect yours has one, too, because of the fire escape being so close. I remembered to make sure the chain was fastened before I went to bed — I don’t carry an excessive amount of cash with me, but I don’t believe in taking unnecessary chances... Well, I thought, if any of the other accomplices sees me looking for the girl, they’ll know I recognized her, and they’d do anything to keep us apart.”
“Didn’t you think anyone would see you talking to her in the bar?”
“That’s why I had to take such extreme steps to avoid the lobby. I intended to wait outside, hoping to follow her when she went home.”
Simon regarded Mr. Fennick with increasing respect. It was becoming indisputably manifest that in spite of his somewhat dehydrated aspect, prissy personality, and fluttering agitation, this bonbon baron had something more active than nougat in his noodle.
“I couldn’t have figured it any better myself if I’d had all the facts,” he murmured, picking up his recently discarded shirt and sliding an idle arm into a sleeve. “But by the same logic, Otis, old bean, I think this is where I’ll have to take over.”
The little man stared.
“You?”
“There’s nothing wrong with your analysis except that it stops short. Never mind about being seen talking to this chick — you can’t even afford to let her hear you. Suppose she doesn’t go for your bid, which could happen for a whole flock of reasons. You’d only have told the Ungodly how scared they’ve got you, and bang goes any chance of bluffing them out of a showdown. Whereas someone else could move in as your representative, proving you’re not all alone in the world, and talking tough, and maybe give ’em some worries they weren’t expecting.”
Mr Fennick pursed his lips, with commendable acuteness for a man in his disconcerting predicament.
“Quite possibly, but why should you, Mr—”
“Templar. Simon Templar.”
In those later days of the Saint’s career, it was no longer such a potentially interesting moment when he gave his real name to a stranger for the first time. The range of possible reactions had become rather standardized. Still, there was always the hope of evoking some absolutely novel response.
Mr Fennick inclined his head with mechanical politeness.
“—Mr Templar,” he continued, with hardly a break. “I’ve already imposed on you enough—”
“But I insist,” said the Saint genially. “And if you give me any trouble, I might have to call the house detective, if this roach farm has such a person, and turn you in as a captured burglar.”
He had tucked in his shirt tails and almost absent-mindedly knotted a tie while this part of the conversation went on, and now by simply shrugging into a coat he was suddenly so completely dressed and ready for any eventuality that his uninvited guest could only open and shut his mouth ineffectually.
“Don’t go away, Otis,” he said from the door. “Just in case your pals haven’t run out of cute tricks, or in case we might have to pull some quaint switch of our own, it might be clever not to give anyone a chance to prove you’ve been in your room lately. Who knows — we might even dare them to prove that that picture wasn’t taken years before you got married, or even that it’s your picture at all. Anyhow, wait till I bring you the first bulletin.”
He was gone before he could be delayed by any further argument.
The elevator was piloted by the same jockey who had taken him up only a little while ago, an elderly individual with drooping shoulders and an air of comatose resignation to the infinite monotony of endlessly identical vertical voyages. He revealed no curiosity or interest whatsoever in why the Saint should want to ride down again at such an hour: one felt that he had long since been anesthetized against anything that could happen in a hotel during a convention, and perhaps at any other time.
“Tell me,” said the Saint, with elaborately casual candor. “If I wanted to play a joke on one of the fellows — a friend of mine — could you let me into his room?”
The man did not even turn his head. In fact, for a number of seconds he appeared to have been afflicted with deafness, until at the ultimate limit of plausible cogitation he wrung from himself a single word of decision:
“Depends.”
“On what?”
The instant the words were out of his mouth, Simon knew he had been too fast. The man pointedly made him wait even longer for the next reply, as a form of corrective discipline.
“Plenty.”
The lift shuddered to a stop at the ground floor, and the gate rumbled open. The pilot held it, waiting for the Saint to disembark, with such a total lack of eagerness to pursue the conversation that except for his minimal movements it would have been easy to believe that he was stuffed.
Simon got out, and followed the direction of a neon arrow which proclaimed that it pointed to The Rowdy Room. This proved to be a depressing, under-lighted cavern decorated in blood red and funeral black, with a dance floor large enough for a minuet by four midgets and an orchestra alcove furnished with an upright piano and stands for two other instrumentalists, all of whom had obviously racked up all the overtime they wanted and called it a day. The only rowdiness left was being provided by a quartet of die-hards in one corner, two of whom were foggily listening to some obscure argument being loudly elaborated by the third, while the fourth was frankly falling asleep. The bartender, listlessly polishing glasses, accepted the Saint’s arrival with a disinterested stare which barely suggested that if Simon wanted anything he could ask for it.
Simon ordered a Peter Dawson on the rocks, and after he had tasted it, he said, “Where’s the gal who takes the pictures?”
“Norma? She ain’t here.”
“That settles one thing,” said the Saint mildly. “I was wondering if she’d become invisible.”
The barman squinted at him suspiciously, and said, “She went home early. Had a headache or sump’n.”
“Would you know where I can get in touch with her?”
“She’ll be here tomorrow.”
“That’s the trouble — I may be leaving in the afternoon, much earlier than she’d come to work. I wanted to see her about some pictures that were taken the other night.”
“Well, whyncha say so?” demanded the bartender aggrievedly.
He fumbled through some litter beside the cash register, and turned back with a card. The ornate printing on it could be reduced to “VERE BALTON, Photography,” and an address, “685 Scoden Street.”
“I thought you called her Norma,” Simon said.
“I did. Balton is the guy who has the concession. She works for him.”
“Where is Scoden Street?”
“About five-six blocks from here, on the left off of Geary.”
“And what’s her name?”
“I tolja, Norma,” said the other, with obviously increasing impatience with so much stupidity.
“Nothing else?”
“You tell ’em Norma took the pitchers here,” said the bartender. “They’ll take care of ya.”
“Thank you,” said the Saint.
He finished his drink, put down the exact price and a minimum tip, and sauntered back to the lobby.
If the shapely Norma was not averse to providing certain extracurricular services of the type indicated by Mr Fennick’s story, it was highly implausible that the bartender would know nothing about it. Indeed, it was most probable that he would sometimes help to procure them. Therefore the Saint couldn’t insist on getting in touch with her too urgently, or pressing the questioning too hard, without the risk of telegraphing a warning to the quarry he had yet to identify.
Behind the reception desk, the night clerk, a weedy young man with long hair and acne, was totting up stacks of vouchers on an adding machine. He kept Simon waiting while he ducked his way stubbornly through to the end of a pile, and then looked up with an unctuous affectation of attentiveness.
“Yes, sir?”
“I’m afraid I left my key upstairs,” said the Saint “Can you let me have a spare? Room 409.”
“What is the name, sir?”
“Templar.”
The clerk ducked aside behind a screen that blocked one end of the counter, but he could be heard flipping the pages of an index. After some further groping in a drawer he bobbed back, holding a key.
“Could you show me anything with your name on it, sir?”
Simon impassively produced a driver’s license, and the clerk handed over the key.
“Do you put everyone through this when they lock themselves out?” Simon inquired mildly.
“Yes, sir, if I don’t know them. You can’t be too careful, at this hour of the night, I always say. Especially during a convention.”
“Why especially during a convention?”
“When they get too full of the spirit of the thing, sir, delegates often think of practical jokes to play on each other — all in good fun, of course, but not always appreciated by the victim. You yourself, sir, mightn’t be amused if you found a live seal in your bathtub, and found out that my negligence had enabled your friends to plant it there.”
“I guess you have a point.”
The pimply one bared his yellow teeth ingratiatingly.
“I knew you’d see it, sir. Thank you. Goodnight, sir,” he said, and picked up another sheaf of checks and resumed the busy tapping of his calculator keys without another upward glance.
Simon stepped into the elevator, and the lugubrious liftman let go a carpet sweeper which he was pushing lethargically about the foyer and started the ascent in stoic silence.
Finally the Saint asked, “Plenty of what?”
After another floor had gone by, it transpired that the driver had not lost the thread of his lucubrations.
“Things,” he opined darkly.
They were at the fourth floor again. He held the gate open, without looking at the Saint, but with a rugged air of self-satisfaction with his achievements in both navigation and diplomacy. Simon got out, and headed back to his room.
His excursion had yielded nothing sensational, but at least he had half a name, an address which might be the start of a trail, and some observations which might interest Mr Fennick.
The trouble was that Otis Q Fennick was not there to hear about them.
The room was not big enough to hide even such a slight man as Mr Fennick anywhere except in the closet or under the bed. But if he had been even more jittery than he had shamelessly confessed, it was remotely possible that he could be terrified of anyone who might enter.
“Otis, old marshmallow,” said the Saint reassuringly. “It’s only me — Templar.”
There was no answer.
The bathroom door was ajar. Simon looked inside. Mr Fennick was not there. Nor was he in the closet, or under the bed — Simon ultimately forced himself to verify both places, foolish though it made him feel. But in about half the detective stories that the Saint had read, one of those locations could have been practically counted on to reveal Mr Fennick’s freshly perforated corpse. None of them did. It was almost disappointing.
Simon went to the dresser for the pack of cigarettes which he had left where he put down Mr Fennick’s business card. Now he found the card tucked half into the opening of the package, in such a way that he couldn’t have extracted a cigarette without having his attention focused on it. On the back had been written, in a cramped but meticulous script:
I simply can’t let you bother with my problems. I’ll just have to pay up and make the best of it. Please forget the whole thing.
Simon sat down on the bed and picked up the telephone.
“Mr Fennick, please,” he said.
“One moment, sir.” It was the oleaginous voice of the night clerk, who was evidently entrusted with several chores by a thrifty management. Then, “I’m sorry, sir, but Mr Fennick’s line still has a Do Not Disturb on it.”
“Since when?”
“He asked me to put it on when he came in, sir, at one-thirty.”
“I see... Would you give me his room number?”
The pause this time was almost imperceptible.
“I’m afraid I couldn’t take the responsibility for that, sir. He might be very annoyed if you disturbed him by knocking on his door.”
“What makes you think I’d do that?”
“I’m sure you wouldn’t want to, sir. So you won’t mind asking the manager for the information, will you? He comes on at eight o’clock. Thank you, sir.”
“Invite me to your funeral,” said the Saint sweetly, but he said it after a click in the receiver had announced that the clerk had already terminated the discussion.
For a few minutes, in a simmer of sheer exasperation, he contemplated some quite extravagant forms of retaliation against everyone who had contributed to wasting his time for the past hour. But at the end of a cigarette he laughed, and fell asleep thinking it was lucky he hadn’t gone any farther on a wild-goose chase with such a protégé.
If Mr Otis Q Fennick was such an eviscerated marvel that he insisted on submitting to the crudest kind of contrived shakedown, without even a struggle, after having been offered the best advice and assistance, then he deserved to stew in his own syrup.
The Saint slumbered on his relaxing justification for precisely three hours and seventeen minutes, at which time a crew of civic servants arrived under his window with some raspingly geared conveyance and began to decant into it the garbage cans which had previously been only silent ornaments of the alley, clanging and crashing them back and forth as a tympanic accompaniment to their mutual shouts of encouragement and impromptu snatches of vocalizing.
By the time they had moved on he was wide awake and knew that he had no hope of feeling drowsy again that morning. But as he lay still stretched out with his eyes closed the entire Fennick episode unrolled again in his memory, and the earlier mood of exasperation crept back. Only instead of being a petulant flash of anger, it was now a considered and solid resentment that could not be dismissed.
He tried to dismiss it while he got up and showered and shaved and went down to the coffee shop for breakfast, but it refused to go away.
“You’ve got every excuse to duck this,” he had to tell himself finally, “except one that’ll let you forget it.”
If Mr Fennick consented to pay blackmail, it could well be maintained that this was Mr Fennick’s own private business, and the hell with him. But if a blackmailer got away with blackmail, that had always been the Saint’s self-appointed business, as had any kind of unpunished evil. And it was doubly so when the circumstances ruled out any possibility of legal retribution.
Simon finished his second cup of coffee and went back through the lobby, where a totally different staff had taken over. This time he had no difficulty in getting Mr Fennick’s room number, which was 607, but the switchboard operator told him that the Do Not Disturb was still on the phone. For a moment he contemplated going up and banging on the door, but then he reflected that Mr Fennick, in the shattered condition in which the sweetmeat sachem must have regained his room, had probably taken a sleeping pill and would not exactly scintillate if he were prematurely aroused.
Meanwhile, the Saint had in his pocket the card which the uncooperative bartender had given him. It might not be much, but it was something. And at least it might help to pass the time constructively.
Scoden Street was a narrow turning off one of the drabber stretches of Geary, given over to a few small dispirited neighborhood shops jumbled among other nondescript buildings of which some had been converted into the dingier type of offices and some still offered lodgings of dubious desirability. Number 685 seemed to combine the two latter types, for a window on the street level was lettered with the words “VERE BALTON STUDIOS” on the glass, behind which an assortment of arty enlargements were attached to a velvet backdrop, while on the entrance door was tacked a large printed card with the legend “APARTMENT FOR RENT.”
The door was open, though only a couple of inches.
Simon pushed it with his toe and went in.
He found himself in a small dark hallway, at the rear of which a flight of worn wooden stairs started upwards, doubtless to the vacant apartment. Immediately on his right was a door, also ajar, with a shingle projecting from the lintel on which the “VERE BALTON STUDIOS” sign was repeated. He went through into a sort of reception room formed by the space between the shoulder-height back drop of the front window and a set of full-length drapes which shut off the rest of the premises. It contained a shabby desk and three equally shabby chairs, but none of them was occupied.
“Hi,” said the Saint, raising his voice. “Anybody home?”
There was no reply, or even any sound of movement. But the long drapes were not fully drawn, and through the aperture he could see a yellowness of artificial light.
He went to the opening and looked into a small studio equipped with a dais, a tripod camera, and the usual clutter of lamps, screens, and props to sit on or lean against. But nobody was utilizing the props, and the only lamp alight was a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling.
Simon stepped on through the curtains. The near corner inside had been partitioned off with Beaverboard into a cubicle which from the sinks and shelves of bottles that could be seen through its wide open door was obviously used as a darkroom, but no one was using it. At the opposite end of the studio was another door, half open.
“Anybody home?” Simon repeated.
Nobody acknowledged it.
He crossed the studio quietly, cutting a zigzag course between the paraphernalia, and his second tack put him at an angle from which he could see the body that lay on the floor of the back room.
It belonged to a fat man of medium height with dirty gray hair and a rather porcine face to which death had not added any dignity. There were three bullet holes in the front of his patchily reddened white shirt, loosely grouped around the “VB” monogram placed like a target over his heart, and two of them were ringed with the powder burn and stain of almost contact range.
Simon bent and touched the back of his hand to one of the flabby cheeks — not to verify the fact of death, which was unnecessary, but to determine if it was very recent. The skin was cold.
The room was an office, furnished with an antique roll-top desk, a hardly less antique typewriter, and a bank of unmatched filing cabinets. Nude color-calendar photos were pinned up on much of the wall space, interspersed with glossy monochromes of similar esthetic subjects. The desk was littered with a hodgepodge of correspondence, bills, prints, and negatives, and about half the filing drawers were open to varying extents, many of them with folders partly raised out of them. Nevertheless, the general impression, strengthened by the film of dust that could be observed on many surfaces, was not so much that of a recent ransacking as of an ancient and incurable disorder.
But why should there have been any ransacking? With his rolled-up sleeves and his coat over the back of the chair, Vere Balton hadn’t surprised any intruder — he had been surprised. And with a gun in his chest, he would have been glad to produce whatever the intruder wanted in exchange for his life, hoping he would not be cheated...
All this went through the Saint’s mind in a consecutive rush, like a cascade through a sieve. But before it had finished draining through, one scrap of flotsam was caught: Mr Otis Q Fennick was entangled, consciously or not, with something bigger than a candid shot of himself in the hay with a buxom brunette whose name was not on his marriage license.
Simon backed out of the office on tiptoe, and retraced his steps even more circumspectly between the obstacles and over the coiling cables of the studio lights, being careful to leave no clumsy traces of his visit. But in the anteroom in front he stopped by the desk on which he had seen the telephone. That was the logical place to look for one item of information that he had come for, and he found it in the first drawer he opened with a handkerchief wrapped around his fingers. There was an address book, precisely where one would expect it to be kept, and he turned the pages with the same precaution against leaving fingerprints, scanning each one swiftly but completely.
He had to go nearly all the way through the book before he came to a Norma, and not much farther to be positive that there were no others. He turned back and memorized the entry with a second glance:
Norma Uplitz
5 De Boer Lane — Apt. 2
AG 2-9044
Not the most likely name for the sexily constructed siren that Mr Fennick had indicated, but a lot of Hollywood queens had started life even less glamorously baptized.
He had not touched either of the entrance doors with his hands when he came in, he recalled, and he went out without touching them. He did pull the front door almost shut, before he put his handkerchief away, leaving it as nearly as possible in the same position as he had found it. Let the police have the benefit of any clues that might be latent in the set-up; the Saint’s only concern was not to interpolate any new ones which might point misleadingly to himself.
The greatest risk seemed to be that someone might remember seeing him going in or coming out. That was a hazard which he shared with the real killer. But the ultimate danger to himself was much less, for if that hypothetical witness took any note of the time, it would prove that the Saint had been there several hours after the autopsy would show that Vere Balton had died. So he took his departure boldly and unhurriedly, making no special effort to avoid being observed — which was perhaps the best of all guarantees against being noticed.
He walked back to the Mercurio and took the elevator directly to the sixth floor, without wasting any time on the house phone. He did not have to hesitate over the route to Room 607, for the number told him that it must be next door to the same relative location as his own room.
There was no “Do Not Disturb” card hung on the door knob, but it would not have moderated his peremptory knock if there had been.
The door opened almost instantly, and for one of the few times in his life Simon Templar felt that only the sangfroid of a sphinx saved him from falling over backwards.
It was not Otis Q Fennick who opened the door. It was a blonde. And no part of her configuration remotely resembled that of the creator of Crackpops.
It was, however, strikingly reminiscent of the general impression that Mr Fennick had haltingly conveyed of his unauthorized cot companion. But one specification that Simon was unshakably clear about was that Mr Fennick’s surprise package had been distinctly described as a brunette.
This blonde had not been manufactured in the past few hours. She might have owed something to tints and rinses, but the foundation was genetic. The Saint could tell. And as other minutiae gradually registered on him, they declined unanimously to fit into the reconstruction of a frill who hustled photos in a joint like the Rowdy Room and would blow more than a flash bulb for a fast bill. This one’s dress had the unmistakable cachet of expensive exclusiveness, and any one of the small ornaments she wore would have out-valued Norma Uplitz’s whole treasure chest of jewels. This one might be available too, for the right proposition, but the price tag would be liable to sift the boys by their tax brackets.
“I beg your pardon,” said the Saint, with a sensation of laboriously cranking his chin up off his necktie, “I was looking for Mr Fennick.”
“He isn’t here.”
“But this is his room?”
“Yes. He just happens to be out.”
“Oh.”
“It’s perfectly respectable,” said the blonde. “I’m his wife.”
“His...”
“Wife. You must have heard the expression. Are you feeling all right? You look rather glassy-eyed.”
Simon strove valiantly to unglaze. It required an abnormal effort, but the multiplication of shocks was proceeding a trifle rapidly even for him. And the day had scarcely begun.
“I was a bit startled,” he admitted. “I understood you were in New York.”
“I was — yesterday. But these new jets are so sudden. Do you have some business with him, or are you a friend?”
“To tell you the truth, I only met him last night. But we became quite chummy.”
“I can imagine it. Do you sell candy, or is it soda pop?”
“Neither. We just happened to be at the same hotel, and we bumped into each other. One of those things.”
“I thought you looked different from most of his business buddies. Come in.”
Simon had intended to from the moment he saw her.
The room was virtually a facsimile of his own, and the blonde looked as out of place in it as a piece of Cartier hardware in a junk yard. But the observation he wanted to make was that Mr Fennick really wasn’t there. The closet was open, and he was able to check under the bed by clumsily dropping the pack of cigarettes he slipped out of his pocket.
“As a matter of fact, you might be able to help me to catch up with him,” said the blonde. “I only arrived late last night myself — it was all on the spur of the moment, and I didn’t even try to call him till this morning. I know what these conventions are like. I spent the night with an old girlfriend who lives here.”
“I was wondering how you got in. That’s why I looked so dazed when I saw you.”
“They gave me a key at the desk, of course, as soon as I proved I was Mrs Fennick. Why shouldn’t they?”
“I called him less than an hour ago,” said the Saint, “and his phone was still shut off.”
“It was shut off when I called from downstairs ten minutes ago. So I came on up anyhow. Exercising a marital privilege. I didn’t see why I should have to sit in the lobby till he condescended to regain consciousness. But no Otis.”
“He must have gone out and forgotten to clear the line.”
“Do you solve crossword puzzles, too?” Simon had been opening his cigarette package, which was a fresh one, with unhurried neatness. He offered her the first of its contents, which she accepted.
“I can’t solve any puzzle about where he may have gone,” he said, striking a match. “He didn’t tell me anything about his plans for the day.”
“May I ask why you thought he wouldn’t mind your waking him up, if he was trying to sleep late?”
“I happened to have dug up a hot lead on something he was telling me he was very concerned about financially. I thought he ought to know it at once, so I took a chance.”
On the pretext of looking for a safe place to get rid of the match, he contrived to work himself around to a sufficient glimpse of the bathroom to confirm that Mr Fennick was not hiding out there, or stashed there as a corpse. He was aware that he might begin to seem obsessed with such possibilities, but he could certainly have offered a doozy of an excuse.
“Well,” she said, “that seems to leave us both in the same boat. He’s probably lost for the day now. They have meetings and lunches and speeches and more meetings, from the first hangover till it’s time to start the next one, don’t they, on these conventions?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Simon grinned. “I’ve never been part of one.”
“Ah, yes. I said that you didn’t look like the type.”
“Neither do you, Mrs Fennick.”
She had been studying him with unmistakably increasing interest for the last few minutes, and her appraising eyes did not waver by a fraction of a degree at the intangible hint of audacity in his tone.
She said, “Did you get chummy enough, as you put it, to call my husband Otis?”
“I guess I did.”
“Then you needn’t be so formal with me. If he didn’t tell you, the name is Liane. Do you have a name, too? Or a number?”
“Simon Templar.”
“The Saint, of course. All right, I can enjoy a joke. But eventually you’ll have to explain why it’s funny. And what type don’t I look like?”
“The wife of a marzipan magnate,” said the Saint, unabashed. “You look more like a glamour model.”
“I was, not so many centuries ago. Lots of magnates pick up that type. Didn’t you know? It adds prestige, like a Cadillac. Why don’t we spend the day together, waiting for Otis, and I’ll explain it all.”
He would have had to be very much younger, very much older, or very much more naïve, to misunderstand the whole of her implication, and he let her know that he was weighing all of it in the long cool glance that he rested on her before he answered.
“It might be fun,” he said, and he did not have to pretend to mean it. “But—”
“Don’t tell me that Otis became your best friend overnight. And you don’t look like a man who’d have any other objection to taking pity on a lady’s boredom.”
“He didn’t, and I haven’t. But I’d hate to help spoil a good thing for you.”
“Did Otis give you the idea, in his cups, that we held hands every night while we made plans for our silver wedding honeymoon?”
“No. In fact, he gave me the impression that you were the rolling-pin type, just waiting for him to come home with a smudge of lipstick under his ear. If you’ve got him as housebroken as that, it could be moderately catastrophic if he picked up the ammunition to shoot back at you.”
“My good man, since we’ve suddenly become so very businesslike, let me remind you that the Fennicks are legal residents of the sovereign State of New York, which is also the legal domicile of the Fennick Candy Company. Have you ever heard any betting on a rich man’s chances in a New York divorce court?”
“You sound as if you’d talked to some good lawyers.”
She came so close, deliberately, that the first time they both inhaled simultaneously would have caused a most stimulating collision.
“Then why don’t you let me worry about my own problems?”
He bent and carefully kissed her motionlessly upturned mouth. Then he stepped back and glanced at his watch.
He was not aware until afterwards of how cold-blooded he must have seemed. He didn’t intend it as a rebuff. It was a long time since he had abjured any profound amazement at the strange impulses of women. Perhaps he had been exposed to too many of them. But in an oddly unegotistical way, for him, he was inclined to respect the privacy of their motives, and to enjoy the pleasant surprise without criticizing the donor. He had no moralistic resistance to Liane Fennick as an unexpected diversion, but there was a one-track quirk in his psychology that would not let him enjoy the best of it while he was still wound up with something else.
“There’s another problem I’ve got to take care of,” he said. “Let’s make it a date for lunch.”
She was palpably baffled by his restraint, but he couldn’t help that. If he could have seen only a few hours into the future, he might have played it differently. But she took it well.
“Twelve-thirty?”
“I’ll pick you up here.”
“This time you’d better use the phone first,” she said. “If it doesn’t answer, or if Otis happens to come back, I’ll meet you at the Drake.”
“But now,” said the Saint regretfully, “I have got to duck.”
He brushed her lips once more, with impudent promise, and went out.
An ingrained pattern of cautiousness that had become second nature made him walk down two flights of stairs before taking the elevator. It was not a question of exaggerated apprehensiveness, but a simple automatism of eliminating unnecessary risks. Whatever the intrusion of Liane Fennick might lead to, he could lose nothing by impressing the elevator boy with the fact that he rode down from his own floor, which should suffice to supplant any recollection of the floor he had gone up to.
The same habit made him ask the bell captain in the lobby for a street map of the city, instead of asking the whereabouts of De Boer Lane. There was no point in gratuitously enlarging the number of witnesses who might recall that he had inquired about that address.
And having located that short blind alley on one of the southern slopes of Telegraph Hill, he also picked out a convenient intersection three blocks away, and directed a taxi there, for the same good reason. From the intersection, after the taxi was out of sight, he walked. There was nothing prescient about it, except a logic which assumed that something had to be rotten in the state of Fennick. He didn’t exhaust himself with trying to guess what it was. But after a very short stroll, he knew that his instincts had been impeccable at least on the score of procedure.
His taxi couldn’t have reached De Boer Lane if he had begged it to. The street that it opened from was almost solid with police cars at that point, and an ambulance backed into the narrow turning blocked it completely. The lane was only about forty yards long, and was lined with small unmatched houses jammed shoulder to shoulder, none of them more than two stories high, the kind of cottages that lend themselves to cramped but quaint conversions and are therefore highly esteemed by would-be Bohemian types. It was the ideal backwater for a girl of Norma Uplitz’s unconventional mores, where odd goings-on at odd hours would be so normal as to attract no attention. All except one aberration about which even the most sophisticated neighborhoods are seldom blasé...
The inevitable crowd of passers-by who had flowed in from the street was giving the native colony plenty of competition for the best view of the shrouded shape which at that moment was being carried out on a stretcher from a house halfway up the cul-de-sac.
The Saint did not need any parapsychic gifts to anticipate what the number of the building would be before he located it. And as he edged inconspicuously closer, he did not really need his exceptional visual acuity to decipher the name of Norma Uplitz on one of the mailboxes at the entrance. As for the infinitely ultimate possibility that the body on the stretcher would have come from the other of the two apartments, he had only to keep his ears open as he filtered through the morbid mob with the nearest approximation he could make to invisibility.
It was an alabaster-faced woman with mauve lipstick and stringy hair who said to a fellow colonist, an elderly bearded man with a gold earring, “Of course I heard the shots, dahling. How could I help it, living right underneath her? But I haven’t the faintest idea what time it was, except that it was daylight. I only half woke up, and I thought she was probably slamming doors or hitting a paramour with a frying pan or some ordinary thing like that. I’ve had the most frightful job trying to explain to some yokel detective that I couldn’t leap out of bed and start investigating every time there was an uproar in Norma’s apartment, I’d never have got a good night’s sleep...”
Simon drifted on, melting out of the crowd as self-effacingly as he had joined it.
He walked, down past the limits of the old Barbary Coast of legendary times, now sanitized into something called an “International Settlement,” on into the bustling exotically scented streets of Chinatown which looked much less exotic in the watery sunlight which was struggling to penetrate the dank mistiness of a fine San Francisco morning.
Johnny Kan was already at work in his back office, ploughing into the myriad unepicurean details of restaurant management of which his evening customers would be as unconscious as they would be of the activities of the cleaning crew which was just as busy restoring the dining rooms to the virginal freshness which they would thoroughly debauch before midnight. But he showed no impatience at being interrupted.
“You must have been cheating last night,” he said, “or you couldn’t look so much better than I feel. Can I do anything for you, or did you only come here to gloat?”
“You can do something for me,” said the Saint. “I could do it myself if I had to, but I’m feeling lazy. I’m sure you’ve got all the connections. Just find out today’s schedule for these caramel-cookers that we lost so much beauty sleep dodging last night.”
“I must be an all-day sucker,” Johnny Kan said, reaching for the phone. “But you had me convinced that it was just a coincidence that you hit San Francisco in the middle of their convention, and you didn’t want any part of them.”
“I wasn’t trying to kid you. The important coincidences have all happened since we said goodnight.”
The schedule was forthcoming in a few minutes.
“Ten o’clock, Paramount Theater, a movie: New Methods of Merchandising, followed by a lecture on Taxation Aspects of the Bottling Industry. Twelve o’clock, St Francis Hotel, lunch: guest speaker, the President of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce. Three o’clock, forum: Soda Fountains and Juvenile Delinquency. Five o’clock—”
“Whoa,” said the Saint. “That’s plenty. I only want to know where to look for a guy, and I should be able to find him long before five.”
“Would it be very indiscreet to ask which of the caramel-cookers had incurred this unprecedented interest?”
“No. I don’t think so. The name is Otis Q Fennick.”
“Oh. Of the Fennick Candy Company?”
“Why — do you know him?”
“No. But I know their West Coast representative. A Mr Smith. He eats here sometimes. They have a sales office here, you know.”
“I didn’t.”
“When you want to know anything in a foreign city, you should always consult the natives. Let me look up the address for you. Right now, I should think that’s where you’d be most likely to find him. They don’t make any soft drinks, so he’d hardly be interested in the tax problems of bottling — if I may presume to offer my amateurish deduction.” Kan turned the pages of a city phone book. “Ah, here it is. On Suiter Street — it should be only a block or two from Union Square.”
He jotted down the address, and Simon took it gratefully.
“You’re right, I’m glad I asked you.”
“Doesn’t that entitle me to know what this is about?”
“Perhaps, before I leave town, Johnny. But not just yet. There’s still too much I haven’t figured out myself.”
Simon continued his walk, down to Union Square and west on Sutter. The number that Kan had given him was a modern office building, and the directory board in the lobby showed that the Fennick Candy Company was on the second floor. He went up.
From the sequence of doors on the corridor, the West Coast office appeared to take up only two rooms, but they were doubtless sufficient for their purpose. The outer room which he entered contained, besides the standard furniture, a large glass-case display of samples, and a middle-aged woman with an efficient but forbidding air who was typing rapidly at the dictation of some tinny disembodied voice that came through an earphone clamped to her head. Electrically recorded sounds entered her ears and emerged through her fingertips as transformed impulses to be electrically recorded in legible form: she was the only human link in this miracle of technology, and she seemed to bear a deep-rooted grudge against this incurable frailty of hers and to have dedicated herself to suppressing every trace of it that she could.
“Mr Fennick is busy,” she said, with a kind of malevolent satisfaction. “Can I help you?”
“I’m afraid not.” Simon glanced at the communicating door. “Is he with somebody?”
“Mr Fennick is working on a speech he has to make to the convention tomorrow. He gave the strictest orders that he was not to be disturbed for any reason whatever.”
“This is very, very important.”
“For any reason whatever,” the woman repeated smugly.
She was a type that Mrs Fennick would have approved of thoroughly, according to Mr Fennick’s thumbnail sketch of his ever-loving spouse. It was as certain as anything humanly could be that she had not sat on anybody’s lap since she was knee-high. The paradox that didn’t fit at all was that the Liane Fennick whom Simon had met was so utterly unlike his mental picture of a tyrannically jealous wife. But in any puzzle, when all the paradoxes were straightened out, the solution was often absurdly easy.
He inquired patiently, “How long will Mr Fennick be incommunicado?”
“Until five minutes to twelve, when he has to leave for a luncheon.”
“Is he always so hard to see?”
“Mr Fennick isn’t here very often. And this is a very busy time.”
“Is Mr Smith just as busy?”
“Not as a rule. But at present he’s covering a meeting for Mr Fennick, since Mr Fennick has to work on his speech. If you’ll leave your name and tell me your business, I’ll try to arrange an appointment for you.”
“Thanks, gorgeous,” said the Saint, with beatified earnestness. “I may take you up on that. But later.”
He sauntered out.
The next door along the corridor, which displayed only the word “PRIVATE” under its number, could only be the private entrance to the inner office so zealously guarded by the misanthropic matron with the headset. Even so has many a citadel with intimidating moat and drawbridge had an unguarded postern gate.
Simon leaned an ear against the upper panel. He heard no resonance of rounded phrases in rehearsal, or even the mutter of tentative phrases being fed into a dictating device. Of course, the door might have been exceptionally soundproof, or Mr Fennick might have been a purely cerebral worker. But Simon did not intend to be put off from seeing him, if he was there. It would be easy for the Saint to apologize for having come to the wrong door, which must have been inadvertently left unlocked.
He took from his wallet a wafer-slim implement which he kept there as routinely as another man might have kept a nail file. At this period he seldom needed it as often as twice a year, but he would not have been surprised to have used it twice already that day. And yet on this third possible occasion it finally proved that the Boy Scouts were right and preparedness would always pay off sometime. It slid back the spring lock with less fuss than its own key, and Simon walked in with all the disarming insouciance of the excuse that he had prepared.
He could have saved himself the histrionic warm-up, for there was no audience to be disarmed by it.
The office, except for the traditional appointments of such sancta, was empty.
Simon set the spring lock in the off position, as his story required it, closed the door, and conscientiously forced himself to make another of the definitive checks which seemed to be foisting themselves on him with irksome regularity. Mr Fennick was not in the conveniently coffin-sized coat closet. He was not under or behind the desk. Unless he had been cremated like a moth on the quarter-smoked but cold cigar in the ash tray, or ingested by the mouth-piece of the recording machine which still purred electronically beside the desk, or sucked out through the air conditioner which effectively blockaded the window, he must simply have gone out. Whether his antipathetic amanuensis knew it or not.
The Saint thought that she couldn’t know. If she had known, it would have been just as easy to say he was out, and should have given her the same orgasm of unhelpfulness.
The clock that formed the centerpiece of the onyx inkstand on the desk showed that it still lacked more than twenty minutes of noon.
Simon sat down in one of the guest armchairs, lighted a cigarette, and thought a lot more. For a full two minutes.
Then the outer door opened with the click of a key, and Otis Q Fennick came in.
After the first bounce of his entrance had ploughed to a soggy halt, as if he had bumped into an invisible wall of half-congealed treacle, the lordling of the lollipops looked almost exactly the same as he had when Simon pulled him off the hotel fire escape. That is, he wore the same clothes and the same expression of paralytic befuddlement. The only material difference was that on the former occasion he had been empty-handed, whereas at this moment he was awkwardly lugging under one arm a cardboard carton about the size of a case of Old Curio. This he very nearly dropped as he gaped at the Saint with the reproachful intensity of a gaffed goldfish.
What he said can be loosely reproduced as, “Wha... well... I mean... how...”
“Greetings again, Otis,” said the Saint amiably. “I hope you’ll forgive me waiting for you like this. Your devoted watchbitch (is that the correct feminine?) insisted that you were busy and wouldn’t let me in, but I couldn’t tell her why I was sure you wouldn’t be too busy to see me. So I toddled around and came in this other door which was fortunately unlatched.”
Mr Fennick pushed the door shut, frowning at it.
“I could have sworn I—”
“It must’ve fooled you,” Simon said calmly. “Locks will do that sometimes.”
The candy caliph put down his box. It seemed to be moderately heavy, and gave a faint metallic rattle when it tipped.
“Perhaps I didn’t check it too carefully,” he said. “I only went to the men’s room.”
“Do you have to take your own potty?” Simon inquired, gazing pointedly at the carton. “I thought this was quite a modern building.”
Mr Fennick also glanced at the box, but seemed to decide against pursuing that subject. He straightened his coat and tie and moved to his desk, pulling himself together with the same air of forced resolution as he might have brought to a difficult business situation.
“Well, now, since you’re here,” he said, “I hope you didn’t think I was ungrateful last night. But the note I left you was intended to be my last word on the subject, Mr Templar.”
“That’s what I thought,” said the Saint. “But what you forgot was that it mightn’t necessarily be mine.”
“That is what I was afraid of. And that is why I hoped you would be saintly enough to accept my refusal of your services in the spirit in which it was made.”
“So you did recognize my name.”
“After you’d left me in your room. I had nothing to do but keep on thinking, and it all fitted so well with what I’ve heard of your reputation. But it also meant that I couldn’t afford to be mixed up with you.”
“Do you mean because of your reputation, or your bank roll?”
“Frankly, because I didn’t know how long I could count on your sympathy. If you went on to take an active interest in my problem, I thought, you’d be bound to want to meet my wife eventually, and then she might get you on her side, and I’d be worse off than before. You don’t know her, you see, in the same way as I do.”
Simon ran lean brown fingers through his dark hair in a vaguely weary gesture.
“As a psychologist, you’re a terrific taffy puller,” he said. “When I get nosey, it takes more than a polite note to cool me off. And you had me thoroughly intrigued with the plot against your marital honor. So right after breakfast I was baying on the scent you’d let me sniff last night. As a matter of fact, I’ve just come from the pad of your buxom bedmate, the flashbulb gal.”
The other’s mouth sagged open to about the same extent as his eyes.
“You saw her?”
“On her way to the morgue. Someone else had been there first, and shot her.”
“Are you sure?”
“I didn’t see the bullet holes, if that’s what you mean. But I saw her carried out, and a neighbor said that’s what she died of. However, before that I’d been to the studio of the guy she worked for, to get her address. I had to look it up for myself, in his book. I can vouch for him.
Someone made so sure of not missing him that they singed his shirt.”
Mr Fennick was still staring rigidly.
“This is shocking!”
“Isn’t it?... My theory, of course, is that this person went to see Balton for the same reason that I did — to get the gal’s address. And also, perhaps, to get the negative of a certain picture. Was the photographer who snapped you in the Don Juan pose a fat fellow with a face like a rather lecherous pig?”
“I was dazed, and blinded by the light, as I told you,” Mr Fennick said carefully. “And the man’s face was hidden by his camera. But I have a sort of impression that he was stout.”
“I’m assuming that Balton was the guy. And since the gal was on his regular payroll, it would tie in. I also think that with a gun in his ribs he was persuaded to hand over the film, before he got mowed down anyhow.”
“Why?”
“Because if he hadn’t, there wouldn’t’ve been any point in killing Norma. She was only worth killing if she’d become the only other person who could swear that there’d ever been such a photo. And with the photo gone, it won’t help the police much to be told — as their laboratory boys probably will tell ’em — that the same gun did both jobs. They’ll be stuck for a motive, not having the inside dope like us... But I saw how you reacted when I told you I’d come from Norma’s apartment, before I ever said she’d been shot. And I’ve noticed that you haven’t queried my use of her name and Balton’s, although last night you didn’t seem to know either one.”
Mr Fennick, groping for some occupation for his hands, picked up the spoiled cigar from his ash tray and clamped it between his teeth with a practically unconscious automatism, made a grimace, but re-lighted it anyhow.
“After what I told you last night, Mr Templar, you could make it look very bad for me.”
“I could,” said the Saint detachedly. “But my problem is that I somehow can’t visualize you becoming a murderer just to get out of a phony blackmail jam.”
“That’s very kind of you.”
“So I’ve been thinking about your wife, and a few things I’ve learned about her that you didn’t tell me. For instance, that she has an old girlfriend here, good enough to drop in and stay with. Was this friend’s name Uplitz?”
“Oh, no. No. But she does have an old friend here, married to a very successful man in the chemical business.”
“Which sounds as if your wife may have lived in San Francisco herself once.”
“Yes, indeed. This is her home town.”
“And she used to be a model.”
“Yes.”
“So she could have known Vere Balton professionally.”
“I suppose it’s possible.”
“I have another hunch about her. I don’t think your married life is exactly blissful. Not that you ever said it was. But I think she’d be happy to get rid of you — if she could only keep enough of the heavy sugar from those Crunchy Wunchies. And you know it, because you’re no fool. For the same reason, I think you’d give her her freedom if she’d take a fair settlement. But she’s too greedy, so you’ve been holding out. You could do that if you’d been a good husband and had never given her the usual grounds for divorce.”
Mr Fennick’s thin mouth was grim and tight around his cigar.
“You’re making a lot of personal assumptions, Mr Templar.”
“Let me make some more. You weren’t worried about her jealous nature, as you led me to believe, but about how much she could take you for if she had the goods on you. And when you recovered from that hit on the head, you figured she’d got ’em. Perhaps you put in a call to your home in New York and found that she’d flown out here yesterday, but without getting in touch with you. That would have cinched it. She could have identified herself as your wife so that even that supercilious young jerk on the desk last night would have given her a spare key to your room, which was all Balton and Norma needed. And you knew you couldn’t buy them off, because with that evidence she could match any bid you made. She was all set to take you for everything you’ve got.”
The candy company’s president had his fingertips pressed to his temples and his thumbs on his cheeks, his hands lightly covering his eyes, in an attitude of intense concentration, and he took no advantage of the moment of silence that Simon offered him.
The Saint got up and walked over to the carton that the other had brought in, giving him time, and lifted the lid inquisitively. What he saw first was a mechanic’s cap on top of a crumpled suit of coveralls, which made him suddenly and purposefully delve further. Underneath them he came to the source of the muffled clanking he had heard, a well-worn set of plumber’s tools in an open carrier, on top of which was a cheap pair of tinted glasses.
“Well, this fills in a few more blanks,” he murmured. “You could have bought the tools at any second-hand store, and the overalls and glasses anywhere, and they make a much better disguise than a false beard. Even if anyone noticed you, the description would never fit Otis Q Fennick, the genius behind Jumbo Juicies. Even your colleagues on the convention probably wouldn’t recognize you on a fast walk-through. And yet you’d only need a minute in a booth in any public john to change into it or out again. You’re just loaded with wasted talent, daddy-o. The only flaw is that you’re still stuck with Liane, who could still give the cops that missing motive. One thing leads to another, as the actress tried to warn the bishop when he helped her off with her galoshes.”
Mr Fennick sat perfectly still, so that for a second or two Simon seriously wondered whether the accumulated shocks and strains could have been too much for a weak heart.
Then the communicating door burst open, and the surly duenna of the outer office burst in.
For an instant the sheer outraged astonishment of seeing the Saint standing by the desk made her falter in her tracks and almost choked off the words that were piled up to burst from her mouth, but the pressure behind them was too strong.
“I’m sorry, Mr Fennick, but I knew you’d want me to disobey you about this. The hotel called. It’s about Mrs Fennick. They were trying to locate you through the convention, and finally they got Mr Smith at the lecture, and he told them you were here. I must warn you, it’s something awful—”
“What is it?” Fennick asked.
“She fell out of the window, Mr Fennick. Or she jumped. They seem to think it was suicide!”
“Good God,” Fennick said huskily.
Simon stepped forward, between him and his secretary.
“I’ll go with him.” he said. “You’d better get ready to cope with the reporters. They’ll be calling up and flocking around like vultures in no time. But I know you can handle them.”
Without actually touching her, he moved her firmly back to the outer office again by the force of proximity alone, and in default of any supporting intervention by her employer she was helpless. The Saint returned her last venomous glare with a winning smile and closed the door on her.
Then he turned back to Fennick and lighted another cigarette.
“I guess I underrated you,” he murmured. “You didn’t forget about Liane. I suppose she phoned you to gloat over what she thought she’d got and ask if you were ready to talk business again, and you said you’d be right over. The Mercurio is only about three blocks from here, I think, and you could count on that dragon you keep outside to prevent anyone upsetting your alibi. If you had to tap Liane on the head with a wrench to make her easy to push out, the mark wouldn’t be noticed after she’d hit the ground, any more than you’d be noticed scooting back down the stairs in your plumber’s outfit. You’d reduced all the risks to a minimum, which is the best anyone can do. It was just plain bad luck about me.”
The manufacturer moved stiffly around the desk, white-faced but with a certain dignity.
“I’ll give myself up,” he said. “You needn’t come to see that I don’t run away.”
Simon shook his head reproachfully.
“You’re wrong about me again, Otis, old jujube. I think capital punishment is a fine cure for blackmailers. Vere Balton and Norma Uplitz aren’t any loss to the community. And that makes your late wife even guiltier than they were. If you can get away with it, good luck to you. The cops won’t get any hints from me. I’m only coming along to check out of that crummy hotel and be on my way.”