The Saint to the Rescue

The gentle ladies

“All I can say,” Kathleen Holland said inadequately, “is that he’s a creep.”

“The world is crawling with them,” smiled the Saint sympathetically. “But unfortunately it isn’t a statutory offense yet. And if I tried to exterminate them all myself, just on general principles, I wouldn’t have any time left to steal a living. There has to be something specific about his creepiness.”

“But I thought that’s what you’d be able to find out!”

Simon Templar looked at her again. She had a face with bone in it: definite cheekbones and a strong jaw, a nose short but sculptured. She wore her thick chestnut hair almost without a wave, in a kind of abbreviated pageboy bob — obviously not because it was fashionable at the time, which it wasn’t, but because it suited her. Her hazel eyes were very lively and her chiseled lips framed a wide and potentially careless mouth.

“You’d have to tell me a lot more about him,” he said. “Perhaps if you weren’t so tied up with this charitable den of iniquity—”

“I can soon fix that,” she said. “There are more gals trying to help around here than you could shake a swizzle stick at. I’ll just tell the Mother Superior that I’m taking time out, and I’ll be all yours.”

She left him in the crepe-paper arbor where he had had her alone for a few minutes, and headed quickly and decisively for the gingham-clothed central table where a bevy of other eager maidens were cajoling the wandering citizenry to buy dollops of what the hand-lettered signs proclaimed to be champagne punch, ladled from a cut-glass bowl the size of a bathtub in which had been stirred together with several gallons of miscellaneous sodas and fruit juices (the Saint’s sensitive palate assured him) at least a magnum of genuine Bollinger.

Of all the unlikely surroundings in which the Saint might be discovered, a church bazaar, despite his canonical nickname, is certainly as implausible as any, but by this time he was getting so used to finding himself in improbable places that he had developed a form of philosophical passivity which might as well be emulated, if only in self-defense, by anyone who intends to follow him through many of these episodes.

The town of Santa Barbara, little more than two hours of freeway driving up the coast from Los Angeles, is California’s most jealous curator of its Spanish heritage. While the great sprawling monster that was once leisurely known as El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles has lopped off all but the last two words of its historic name and surrendered itself to modern industry and smog, Santa Barbara seems to have decided that the twentieth century is the transient guest, and to be trying like a good housekeeper to keep things as much as possible the way the Conquistadors would like to find it when they come back. In the whole city not a tenth of the streets have North American names, the most conspicuous of them being State Street, which appropriately enough is the main stem of shops and offices and suchlike parvenu incursions. But flanking it are Chapala and Anacapa, and the streets crossing it ring with such names as Cabrillo, Figueroa, Ortega, and Gutierrez. And yet with all the Hispanic tradition there is also a social cult which leans towards institutions more commonly associated with the squirearchy of Old England, such as horse shows, flower shows, garden parties, fund-raising teas, and parochial fêtes like the one which had ensnared such an unprecedented patron as Simon Templar.

The better-looking half of the couple of old friends he was visiting had said firmly, “I’ve been roped into running the popgun shooting gallery all day long at this brawl, and the least you can do is drop by and relieve me for half an hour.” But when he dutifully showed up, she had inspected him again and said, “There’s a wicked gleam in your eye that makes me suspect that you’d be telling the kids to turn the popguns on the behinds of some of the passing dowagers. I’ll let you buy me a champagne punch instead, and introduce you to a pretty girl who’ll keep your mind on more grown-up ways of getting into trouble.”

Thus he had met Kathleen Holland, and, after his hostess had excused herself to hurry back to her stall, what might have been a more idly flirtatious encounter had become a half-serious discussion of the creepiness of Mr Alton Powls.

The Saint was almost automatically prejudiced against Mr Powls, but he could be impersonal enough to realize that Mr Powls might never even have squeezed his name into the conversation but for the reaction that the Saint’s own name evoked from most people who heard it. Kathleen Holland was a real estate agent and by all ordinary criteria a down-to-earth young business woman, but she was no less ordinary in assuming that the Saint was ready to take off like a bloodhound on any scent that was offered him. However, in her case the presumption was not so hard to take.

“You see,” she said, when she returned without the apron that was her badge of office, and was thereby transformed into another customer like himself, and they were strolling anonymously through the crowd in search of a more secluded place to continue the session, “I feel I’m partly responsible. I should have known there was something wrong when he asked so many questions about Aunt Flo.”

“The world seems to be infested with Aunts, too,” Simon observed philosophically. “But it isn’t necessarily a felony to ask questions about them. What has this one done?”

“Nothing, of course. I know you don’t live here, but when you meet her you’ll know how ridiculous that sounds. But you can say anything you think, because she isn’t really my aunt.”

Miss Florence Warshed, it appeared, was known to everyone within her social stratum in Santa Barbara as “Aunt Flo,” because that was the way she was known to the two nieces who lived with her, and that was the way she liked it, and whatever Aunt Flo liked had a way of becoming the way things were done, at least in her nearest vicinity.

Miss Warshed had settled herself immovably upon the Santa Barbara landscape about twenty years ago, escorted by the two nieces from whom she derived her popular title, with the purchase of a large rambling house in the older but most respectable section of town, where they set up a ménage which in some other localities might have been deemed at least eccentric but which in the cloistered atmosphere of that corner of that city was only considered quaint and nostalgically delightful. For the two junior Misses Warshed, it was soon revealed to those who pursued the inquiry, were the daughters of a vaguely disreputable elder brother of Aunt Flo who abandoned them to the care of a wife who soon afterwards died of mortification or some such obsolete ailment, thus leaving their maiden aunt Flo to rear them, which she had done more devotedly than any natural mother. If Aunt Flo had ever had any procreative urges of her own, they seemed to have been completely sublimated by the responsibilities of this foster brood, and if some local amateur psychologists surmised that she had subtly instilled her own spinsterish diathesis into her charges, it could have been just as validly argued that they had grown up with androphobic prejudices of their very own, germinating from the embarrassment of having a father whom they could not even identify in a picture and whose name they had never heard mentioned except with the most icily significant restraint. At any rate, their lives had never been overtly complicated by romance, let alone marriage: Aunt Flo had been safely past her half-century when she hit the town, and both her protégées had been well into their late thirties, so that there had been no immediate problem of fending off slavering suitors. And seemingly content to age gracefully as they had arrived, they had remained an inviolable trio while Aunt Flo decayed gradually into her more obstreperous seventies and the waifs she had sponsored faded gracefully into their late but unlamented fifties, all of them being wistfully but intolerably charming all the time. To keep themselves healthily occupied and also pay the rent, they had opened a shop in the bypassed suburb of Montecito, inevitably named Ye Needle Nooke, where the products of their knitting and crochet implements were on sale at outrageous prices and were regularly bought by transient tourists and an indispensable core of locals who thought that the Warshed Sisters were just too sweet and should be subsidized on principle.

“And they are sweet, too,” Kathleen said. “It just breaks your heart sometimes to think how much they could’ve given some man and never had a chance to. All right, so I should go back to the bottom of grammar class. But you’ve got to meet them yourself. Come on over here.”

Before he could mount an effective delaying action she was practically dragging him through the crowd again on another tangent that led to a concession which could be instantly identified as one of the prime attractions of the affair. All it was actually selling was cheaply printed cards ruled into squares in each of which appeared some random number, but the sign over the entrance said “Bingo,” and this magic word seemed to have been sufficient to enchant an extraordinary number of devout numerologists into purchasing one or more of these mystic plaques.

“Just one thing — don’t give my real name,” was about all the Saint had time and presence of mind enough to throw into her ear, before they were being welcomed into the fold by a delightfully frail and faded blonde in pastel-flowered chiffon who said, “Why, Kathleen, honey, are you going to try your luck with us? That’s what I call doing double your duty.”

“This is Violet Warshed,” Kathleen said, and completed the introduction with, “This is Mr... er... Temple-ton. He’s been such a good customer for the champagne punch that I thought I ought to share him a bit.”

“Why, that’s what I call giving till it must hurt, honey.” Violet Warshed put out a soft hand that would have been only perfunctory if it had not had a slight tendency to cling. “I hope this is your lucky day, Mr Templeton, truly I do.”

She must have been quite a doll thirty-five years ago, Simon thought without disparagement. A Marilyn Monroe type in her generation, probably, wide open to caricature, but overflowing with everything that it took to evoke the protective instincts of the male. It was almost incredible that that appeal should have failed to agglutinate a husband when it was at its lushest, but it was still working in an entirely wistful way which Simon could see would only confirm the local assumption that the Warshed waifs had to be Taken Care Of.

He sat down with Kathleen at the end of one of the long tables which were occupied to the verge of capacity by a horde of philanthropists brooding over their charts of destiny and marking off occasional rectangles on them as the fateful numbers boomed out through a badly adjusted complex of loudspeakers. An iron-gray woman in the same indefinite fifties as Violet Warshed bustled up and down the aisles between the tables, repeating the numbers that were called and helping the more dim-sighted devotees of this intoxicating sport to mark the right squares on their cards. As she got down to the end of the next table she recognized Kathleen and said, “Oh, a trespasser.” Then she saw the Saint and linked them together, and said, “Well, it’s about time you had a good man, Kathy. Where did you find him?”

“This is Ida Warshed,” Kathleen said. With the facility of practice, she went on, “And this is Mr Templeton. He’s been such a good customer that I thought—”

“Don’t ever stop to think, dearie. If he looks like a good customer, he’s in. What was that name again?”

Even at her age Ida Warshed had a twinkle in her eye, and one got an impression that in her extreme youth she might have been quite a handful. She was as buxom and earthy as Violet was ethereal. In fact, if they had not been introduced as sisters no one would have been likely to guess that they were even remotely related. The only theory Simon could hazard was that by some freak of genetics each of them had inherited the characteristics of one parent to the almost complete exclusion of the other — Ida perhaps being predominantly the image of the scapegrace father, while Violet might have mirrored the abandoned mother who had pined away.

“Now do you have an idea what they’re like?” Kathleen asked, as Ida went on her busy way.

“Well, vaguely,” said the Saint, mechanically circling a number on his card with one of the colored crayons provided for the purpose. “But—”

“That’s Aunt Flo,” she said, “up there on the platform.”

At the focal point of the long tables where the congregation sat there was a high dais draped in bunting, not much larger than was necessary to accommodate a small table and a straight-backed chair. In the chair sat a large angular woman whose back was just as straight, even if braced by obvious tight-drawn corsets. Over the corsets she wore a black satin dress that made no attempt to be modern in length or cut, with a high boned collar of white lace and matching frills of lace at the wrists. To offset this austerity, however, her fingernails were lacquered pearl-gray, her lipstick was dark red, and her white hair had been rinsed with blue. Her face must once have been handsome rather than pretty, but age had not hardened it, indeed, the wrinkles it had acquired seemed to have engraved it with an indelible pattern of kindliness and serenity.

She twirled a wire cage filled with numbered balls, and when it came to rest she manipulated a sort of valve at the bottom which laid a single ball on the table like an egg, she read the number without glasses, and called it into her microphone in a strong firm voice. Simon drew another circle on his card.

“For a dame of her age, she seems to be in rare shape,” he remarked.

“You don’t know the half of it,” Kathleen said. “She must be at least seventy-five, but she drives the car to market and does all the shopping and most of the cooking at home. And don’t let that Whistler’s Mother look fool you — she’s never stopped being the head of the family. Violet and Ida still do what she tells them, just as if they were nearer sixteen than sixty. It’s almost funny to hear them ask her if they may go to a movie, if she doesn’t want to see it herself, and she tells them what time they have to be home.”

“But,” said the Saint, “I still don’t see what all this has to do with the creep you started with, Brother Powls.”

“Because ever since he came here they’ve been under some awful strain, as if — well, it’s silly, but I can only say, as if he was haunting them. I don’t believe in that kind of hypnotism, but if it isn’t that, he must have some other hold over them, and now that you’ve met them you can see that that sounds almost as ridiculous.”

Mr Alton Powls had come upon the scene by simply walking into the office where Kathleen Holland worked. The office opened on a pseudo-Andalusian inside patio which it shared with about a dozen shops mostly dedicated to the sale of antiques, jewelry, objets d’art, paintings, books, and similar preciosa, all enterprises ideally suited to a location close to but architecturally shut off from the commercial hurly-burly of State Street, where shoppers could browse at leisure in an atmosphere of olde-worlde tranquillity which did much to blunt their apperception of the fact that they were being charged strictly new-world prices. Directly across the patio were the premises of Ye Needle Nooke, and through its large plate-glass window, from Kathleen’s window, could be plainly seen the Warshed sisters at work, Violet sewing and Ida rearranging the displays of merchandise, while Aunt Flo busied herself with correspondence or bookkeeping at a desk in the background.

“Do you happen to know those ladies across the way?” he asked.

She had not yet identified him as a Creep, but only as an elderly gentleman not especially different from any of the other idle strollers in the courtyard, and so she agreeably told him the names. The first evidence of Creepiness he gave was in his reaction to them: she was sure that they brought a gleam of recognition which was instantly veiled.

“Would they be from Milwaukee?” he queried.

“No, they came from Kansas City.”

“Was that long ago?”

“It was soon after I was born, anyway.”

He looked at her calculatingly.

“They remind me of some people I knew a long time ago,” he said. “I think I’ll go and talk to them.”

He went out and across the patio, and she could not help watching the rest from her desk. It was as graphic and at the same time as baffling as a movie on which the sound track had gone dead.

He went into Ye Needle Nooke, and Ida Warshed met him with the mechanical cordiality with which she would have greeted any stranger who walked in. She could only have asked, quite impersonally, what she could do for him. But his answer seemed to stop her cold. She stood there, transfixed, all the life fading out of her face. For the longest time, she seemed bereft of any power of movement, as well as speech. Then, in a most uncharacteristically feeble and helpless way, she made a beckoning gesture at Violet.

Violet put down her sewing and came over, wearing the same perfunctory smile in her more fragile and wispier way. Mr Powls spoke again. Violet froze as Ida had done, and then looked at Ida helplessly. Then both of them, by simultaneous consent, looked appealingly at Aunt Flo.

Aunt Flo put down her pen and came over from her desk. But on her candid competent face there was no more immediate response than had been shown by either of her nieces. Until Mr Powls repeated something that he had obviously said before.

Aunt Flo also froze, momentarily. But there was no one beyond her to appeal. And so after that moment she began to talk, quite volubly, in a tone that the frequent shakings of her head made vehemently negative. But Mr Powls seemed only to persist with whatever he was maintaining. There was another Creepy quality, Kathleen thought, in the implacable way he stood his ground, answering mostly with shrugs that somehow had an offensive insincerity.

Presently he turned and left the shop and sauntered away. But after his departure there was none of the complacency of three embattled women who had triumphantly repulsed an obnoxious male. There was the inevitable first minute when they all talked at once, but it quickly subsided into a bleak despondency in which they all seemed at a total loss for anything to say. Ida kicked moodily at a chair-leg, Violet dabbed the corners of her eyes with a handkerchief, and Aunt Flo sat down at her desk again, heavily, and rested her forehead on her clenched hands.

Then Violet happened to glance straight across the patio at Kathleen, and said something to Ida, who glanced in the same direction, and Kathleen suddenly felt like an eavesdropper and buried herself in the papers she had been working on before the interruption.

Later that afternoon, as the shops on the patio were preparing to close up, Aunt Flo came over on the pretext of asking if Kathleen could recommend a part-time gardener to take over some of the heavy work on the flower beds which were the Warshed’s principal hobby and exercise as well as their most harmless pride. After that gambit had served its purpose, she said with transparent casualness, “What did you think of that man who came looking for us a little while ago?”

“I didn’t know he was looking for you,” Kathleen said. “He told me he thought he knew you from somewhere away back.”

She recited her conversation with Mr Powls almost verbatim, but without any commentary.

“Is that all he said?”

“Yes — as far as I can remember.”

Aunt Flo’s bright birdlike eyes raked through her like affectionate needles.

“I think he’s a crank,” she said. “He tried to insist that he knew us, but none of us ever saw him before. We couldn’t all three be mistaken. You’d better watch out if you see him again. It’s those kind of people who are never suspected until they turn out to be Monsters.”

Although the word Monster was no more than an earlier synonym for Creep, it was not that echo of her own thinking that brushed Kathleen with a clammy chill. It was the incontrovertible certainty, after what she had recently witnessed, that Aunt Flo was lying.

Four days passed before she saw Mr Powls again. She happened to look up, and he was back in Ye Needle Nooke, talking to the three ladies. He seemed to have been showing them something like a fairly large newspaper clipping, which he took back and folded carefully and put away in his wallet. Only a few more words were spoken after that, before he turned and came out, she could see very little of how they acted after his exit, for he blocked the view almost completely by walking straight across the patio to her office.

She tried not to appear too hurried over her conventional “Good afternoon” but couldn’t help going on, disingenuous though it had to sound, with, “I hear you didn’t know the Warsheds after all.”

“Oh, but I do,” he said. “And they remember me now. I’ve been able to convince them.”

She flicked a glance through the window, but could only see that the ladies were in some kind of huddle at the back of the shop.

“I’ve been back to Kansas City since I saw you last,” he said. “But I’ve decided that Santa Barbara has it beat. I think I’ll settle down here. Could you show me a very small furnished cottage or a nice little apartment?”

She took him to a couple of places she had listed, and he was delighted with the second, a sub-let that had been put in her hands only the previous day. Then came the routine question of references.

“The Misses Warshed should be good enough for anyone here, shouldn’t they?” he said blandly, and she would have sworn that he struggled to hide his malicious enjoyment of a private joke.

However, she now had an unimpeachable reason for re-opening the subject with Aunt Flo.

“We were mistaken,” Aunt Flo said with tight lips. “It’s terribly easy to forget things after twenty years, especially when you get to be my age. But of course we knew Mr Powls back in Kansas City. I hope you’ll be able to put out of your mind the things I said about him the other day, because it’s most embarrassing to me to think that I could have been so wrong.”

She was very gallant, very much the grande dame. Beside her, the sisters nodded in docile corroboration.

“Then I can take it that he’s all right — I mean, he’ll be good for the rent, and all that sort of thing?”

“Yes, dear, he will be.”

“What kind of business was he in, in Kansas City?”

Violet and Ida looked at each other, and then mutely at Aunt Flo, leaving her to answer.

“He was a general business man,” Aunt Flo said firmly. “He was mixed up in lots of big deals. I don’t profess to understand these things that men get involved in. But he was very successful.”

“He was a big spender, too,” Ida put in.

Violet nodded. And that was all they had to say. Which in itself was strange enough, for normally they loved to gossip about people — of course in the nicest way.

Mr Powls himself was no more communicative when Kathleen tried to question him.

“I’ve been in and out of so many things,” he said, with a carefully impressive air of modesty in his vagueness. “Buying and selling — importing and exporting — stocks and bonds. But I’m retired now. So it would bore me as much to tell you my life story as you’d be bored listening to it. And it doesn’t really matter, does it? You only want to be sure that I won’t have wild parties or move out with the landlord’s furniture, and I know the Misses Warshed have vouched for that.”

She did not know how to press the question further without seeming gratuitously impertinent.

“So,” she told the Saint, “he’s been here ever since. He pays his rent on the dot, and he takes good care of the place. He asked me to get him a cleaning woman to come in once a week, so I was able to check on that through her. Sometimes I see him around town, and he’s always perfectly at ease and polite. Perhaps he is just a retired business man leading a quiet bachelor life, but—”

Simon drew another circle on his card.

“Presumably he pays the rent by check — you wouldn’t have thought of making any inquiries at his bank?”

She actually giggled.

“Touché. That’s how horribly inquisitive I can be when I start. I told them I’d been asked to get a bank reference on him, but between what they didn’t know and what they weren’t allowed to say I didn’t get very much. But his account is quite small, and he mostly deposits cash.”

The Saint’s brows suddenly drew together.

“Cash? You have an item there.”

“That’s what I thought. He isn’t working in any job that I know of.”

“Does he see much of the Warsheds, since they’ve decided they know him?”

“I’ve seen, him at their house twice,” Kathleen said. “They invite me sometimes, when they have a little party. You wouldn’t think they’d want an extra girl, but they’re very considerate about things like that, and if for any reason they’ve got a man coming who’s younger than any of them, they beg me to come and prove that they aren’t ganging up on him themselves. Well, each time, it was obvious that the idea was to help Mr Powls meet some local people. And yet I just knew that they weren’t a bit happy about it. Not that they didn’t try to do it well. In fact, they were trying too hard — they were much too busy and eager and chattery, even for them. As if they were under a frightful strain and trying to cover up. And yet he wasn’t pointing a gun at them, like the gangsters did at the family in that movie.”

“There are metaphorical guns, too,” Simon said. “How did the Creep behave?”

“Just like anybody else. Only he kept making me think of a cat watching a cage of birds, I suppose by this time you’re convinced that I’m thoroughly neurotic and—”

The Saint said, abruptly, “Bingo!”

He stood up, waving his card.

“Would you bring your card up here, please,” said Aunt Flo.

Kathleen recovered from her momentary blankness and went to the dais with him to introduce him.

“A friend of yours? How nice, dear,” said Aunt Flo, nevertheless checking the numbers which the Saint had ringed with the emotionless efficiency of a seasoned cashier. “Yes, this is right.” She said into her microphone, “We have a winner, girls. Pick up the old cards, and we’ll start a new game.” She counted out fifty dollars from a partitioned tray in front of her, and gave them to the Saint, and said, “Congratulations, Mr Templeton. Are you having a good time?”

“So good that it doesn’t seem right to make a profit of it.” Simon shuffled the prize money, put half of it in his pocket, refolded the rest, and held it out to the old lady. “May I put this back in the fund, as a donation?”

“You’re very generous. That’s the kind of man to look for, Kathleen, dear — one who has fun with his money.” She looked at the Saint again with her keen bright eyes, for the first time as if she were seeing him personally. “And this is a real man, too. I can tell. If I were forty years younger, I’d be after him myself.”

“You don’t have to be a day younger, Aunt Flo,” said the Saint genially. “I’m a charter member of the Chesterfield Club.”

The little color that was in Miss Warshed’s face drained out, leaving it a white mask in which the discreetly applied rouge over her cheeks stood out like patches of raw paint. Her lips quivered, and she held on to the table, as if to steady herself in her chair, so tightly that even her knuckles and fingertips blanched under the pressure.

“I don’t think I quite follow that,” she said.

“Oh, hadn’t you heard of it?” said the Saint innocently, apparently unaware even of the bewildered way that Kathleen looked from Aunt Flo to him. “Lord Chesterfield was an English pundit who was rated pretty hippy a hundred or two years ago. He gave his name to the sofa but not to the cigarette, He also wrote a series of letters to his son, full of profound advice and wisdom, which were published in book form and bestowed by doting parents on Heaven knows how many other equally bored young men. One of his best remembered tips was that older ladies were the best ones to fall in love with, because they appreciated it so much more. I’ve always been a rooter for his club for that.”

Aunt Flo relaxed quite slowly.

“Indeed.” Her lips cracked in a smile, but her eyes were still haunted. “For a moment I simply couldn’t imagine what you were talking about. That’s very charming. And so true. But I’m sure the young ones already appreciate you more than it’s good for you. Are you staying here long?”

“Only a day or two.”

“I’m sorry — it was nice meeting you.”

She gave him her hand, all graciousness and poise again, and by then it was hard to believe that only a few seconds ago she had seemed to be transfixed with stark terror.

“What on earth is this Chesterfield Club business?” Kathleen demanded as soon as they were at a safe distance.

“You heard me,” Simon said. “As a student of all the great philosophers and bores—”

“Don’t give me that,” she said. “I saw what it did to her when you first mentioned it.”

Simon handed over a dollar in exchange for two ice-cream cones which were being practically forced into their hands. He gave his to the first infant that passed, who promptly squashed it on its mother’s best afternoon dress.

“You’re much too young to remember,” said the Saint happily, “but back in the wildest Prohibition days of Kansas City, the Chesterfield Club was an institution that travelers came from all over to see. It was a place where the tired business man could really get a lift with his lunch. All the waitresses were stark naked.”

“Oh.” Kathleen gulped. “Now I can see why Aunt Flo was shocked.”

“Would you say ‘shocked’ was the word?” Simon asked gently.

He lighted a cigarette and stared through a veil of smoke at the edifying spectacle of a bejeweled dowager leaning over the rail of an enclosure called Fortune’s Fishpond, cane pole in hand, angling with intense concentration for a bottle of Bollinger.

“Even the most sheltered ladies in town at the time must have heard of it,” he said. “If a man referred to it in front of them, I can picture them being righteously scandalized, or freezing into the We Are Not Amused reaction. But can you see any of them looking downright terrified, as if the next thing they heard might be the end of the world?”

“But it couldn’t have meant anything personal to Aunt Flo! I mean—”

“No, not that.” He grinned. “I don’t think she was ever a waitress at the Chesterfield Club. Even that long ago, she’d’ve been a bit old for the job.”

“Then what do you make of it?”

“You wanted to get me interested,” he said, “and you have. How can I meet Brother Powls?”

This could not have been an insuperable problem at the worst, but since it was that kind of charity fair, and Santa Barbara is that kind of place, it proved even easier than he would have anticipated. They were continuing their idle stroll through the grounds, discussing the best pretext they might use for dropping in at Mr Powls’s apartment, when Kathleen suddenly clutched Simon’s arm.

“Talk of the devil,” she said, “there he is — over there, in the light gray jacket.”

Mr Alton Powls did not look much like a devil, except as he might be depicted in the more sophisticated modern type of fantasy. From his mildly jaunty Panama hat down to his polished black and white shoes, he looked like a typical member of the county set in which he was imperturbably working for acceptance. His attendance at this garden carnival, properly viewed, was not even surprising at all: on the contrary, it was a social obligation which he could hardly have avoided.

Only the Saint’s peculiarly analytic eye would have noted, as they approached on a calculated collision course, a certain revealing shuffle in the way Mr Powls walked, and the no less typical way his glances roved restlessly over a wide area with little corresponding movement of his head.

“Why, good afternoon, Mr Powls,” Kathleen said as they met.

He had seen them coming already, but he raised his hat with the most urbane spontaneity.

“Miss Holland. How nice to see you taking a day off.”

He was probably not much over sixty, a thin man with a sedate little bulge below his belt. His somewhat lumpy face was clean shaven and pallid, his hair sparse and lank. His lips were tight and gristly, and scarcely moved when he spoke. Simon could see the superficial reasons for describing him as a Creep, but his manner was easy and polite.

Kathleen said, “This is Mr Tem—”

“Templar,” said the Saint. He amplified it, very clearly: “Simon Templar.”

“Simon Templar,” Mr Powls repeated. “Somehow, the name sounds familiar.”

His fingers, which had gone out automatically to meet the Saint’s cordial hand, lay in the Saint’s grasp like cold sausages.

“You could have heard it,” Simon said affably.

“You couldn’t — by any chance — be any relative of that man they call the Saint?”

“I am the Saint,” Simon beamed.

Those who know the Saint at all well will recognize at once that this was totally unlike him. But he did it this time, and Mr Powls retrieved his hand quickly, as if afraid that it might not be given back.

“Are you really?” said Mr Powls. He coughed, to clear a trace of hoarseness from his voice. “But you aren’t expecting to find anything to merit your attention here, are you?”

“I never know where I’ll find those things,” said the Saint cheerfully. “But I’m always on the lookout for them. And there’s no place like a town full of respectable retired people. They all buy each other’s stories, but whoever checks on them? A guy could come here straight from Leavenworth and give out that he was a retired Bible salesman, and no one would even ask him to prove it by naming the four Gospels.”

“That’s very interesting,” said Mr Powls faintly.

“Not that I think there’s anything crooked about this shindig,” Simon went on exuberantly. “In fact, it must be on the level, because they just let me win a pot at Bingo. Look.”

He pulled out of his pocket the card which he had kept as a souvenir, and thrust it upon Mr Powls in such a way that the other was virtually forced to take it from him.

“That’s wonderful,” said Mr Powls, returning the card as quickly as he could. “Really, it gives me an inspiration. I must go there and try my luck. If you’ll excuse me.” He raised his hat to Kathleen again, and inclined his head to the Saint. “Perhaps we’ll meet again later.”

“I hope so,” Simon said heartily. “Let me know if you see any other old lags around.”

Mr Powls moved away, not hurriedly, but without looking back.

“I’m getting rather baffled,” Kathleen said, “and now I don’t think I’m enjoying it.”

“You got me started,” Simon reminded her. “And I got some results.”

“I didn’t see much, except that you upset him.”

“Does that matter? You said he was a Creep, anyway.”

“But you were almost objectionable.”

“No. A bit corny and collegiate, maybe. A shade heavy-handed with the humor. But I had to be. I wanted to start something. A respectable citizen may be bored by the kind of kidding that suggests he’s an old jailbird, but he isn’t offended, because it’s too ridiculous to take seriously. Only an old lag would be jolted, because it’s too close to home.”

“You think he is an ex-convict?”

“I’ve no more doubt about it. But I saw it first in the way he walks and talks and looks around.”

“Then why did you go on — the way you did?”

Simon shrugged. His sky-blue eyes were altogether lazy now, and seemed to be ranging perspectives far outside the eucalyptus trees and formal hedges of the manorial grounds which had been turned over to the benefit.

“I’m a catalyst,” he said. “You know what that is, in chemistry? You throw a certain catalyst into a certain mixture, and nothing happens to it itself, but all hell breaks loose around it. All the other ingredients seethe up and do back-flips into new transformations. That’s me. Half the time I don’t have to do anything except be around. Somebody hears I’m the Saint, and I shoot a few arrows in the air, and the fireworks start. Like this. It’s no crime to be an ex-convict, unless you got out through a tunnel. Or to be a Creep, even. And I don’t know what Aunt Flo is sweating out. So there’s nothing much I could do about ’em. And yet I’ve got an idea that events are already on the march.”

She was almost exasperatedly incredulous.

“And now they’ll take care of themselves. There must be more to it than that!”

“Well, there may be a little more,” he smiled. “Let’s go and get a real drink somewhere, and on the way you could show me where Brother Powls lives.”

But when they parted later he had still managed to evade being pinned down to anything more positive than a promise to pick her up for lunch the next day.

He was obligated to dine with his friends at their home, but afterwards — having made conversation about everything except the problem with which Kathleen Holland had presented him — he made the excuse of having to take an important letter to the post office to make sure it would go out by the earliest possible mail. He had no such letter and did not even go near the post office, but drove instead to the small new building that Kathleen had shown him, which was pleasantly situated a block from Cabrillo Boulevard within sight of the ocean and the pier and yacht harbor. There was a light in the upper corner that she had pointed out, and he went up the outside stairway and knocked on the door.

Mr Powls opened it, and his jaw dropped.

“What... Yes, Mr Templar. I was hardly expecting—”

“May I come in?” said the Saint, and went in irresistibly.

“What can I do for you, sir?”

“For a start,” said the Saint, “you can give me any folding money you’ve got on you.”

He kept one hand deep in his jacket pocket, not being so crude as to stretch it out of shape by making anything point through it, but the suggestion was just as effective to Mr Powls’s flickering eyes.

“What is this — a stick-up?”

“Call it what you like, Alton, but sprout the lettuce.”

“I think it’d be better if I called the police. You wouldn’t shoot me for the few dollars I’ve got on me.”

“Do you remember me making you admire my Bingo card this afternoon, chum?” Simon said. “I did that to get your fingerprints on it. You may not believe it, but I have all sorts of useful connections — even here. Those prints are already on their way to Washington,” he elaborated mendaciously, “only I haven’t told anyone yet where they came from. If you feel like calling the police, I won’t stop you. By the time we all get to the station there should be a make from the FBI, and we can go on from there.”

Mr Powls took a crumpled fold of currency from his trouser pocket and passed it over.

“Nobody ever told me the Saint went in for this kind of thing,” he sneered.

“These are rugged days, Alton. What with inflated prices and a confiscatory income tax, it isn’t so easy to live like a millionaire any more without a little side money.”

“But why pick on me?”

Simon had been scrutinizing each piece of paper money in the roll he had taken and separating it into two slim packs clipped between different fingers. Now he fanned out one sheaf like a poker hand.

“I marked all these bills with two little tears close together near one corner, just before I gave them to Aunt Flo this afternoon as a charity donation. How did you get them?”

“She gave them to me. I was lucky, too.”

“You certainly were. But that goes back to when you first hit Santa Barbara and ran into a meal ticket when you were just window-shopping. What were you in stir for, comrade?”

“You’ll find out soon enough. It was about some uranium stock I sold. There shouldn’t have been any squawk at all, but I wrote something in a letter and they used it to hang a federal rap on me.”

“And now you’re out, you’ve switched from the bunco racket to blackmail. That sums it up, doesn’t it?”

“You’re talking to yourself.”

“And even taking it out of charity donations.”

“She gave it to me,” Powls repeated. “I don’t know where it came from. If she snitched it where she shouldn’t, what does that make her?”

“A scared old lady,” said the Saint. “What have you got on her?”

Mr Powls’s cartilaginous lips curled. He was regaining confidence quickly.

“I should tell you — so that you can take over. You dig that up for yourself, if you’re so wise. You can’t beat it out of me here, without one of the neighbors’ll call the cops, and you don’t want that any more than I do. Leave me alone to handle it, and I might even give you a little cut.”

The Saint’s smile was terribly benevolent.

“I’m only humanly inquisitive about Aunt Flo,” he said. “But I’m just as humanly certain that whatever her guilty secret is she’s done a great job of living it down for twenty years. And you should have heard that blackmail is one of the crimes I rate among the wickedest in the world and among the least adequately punished by the law.”

He held Mr Alton Powls by the coat lapel and shook him back and forth quite gently, while the forefinger of his other hand tapped him on the chest for emphasis, and his eyes were sword-points of sapphire in the angelic kindliness of his face.

“I shall give you twelve hours to get out of Santa Barbara, and a few more to be out of the state of California,” he said. “And if I run into you after that, the only cut I shall take will be in your throat.”

He went out without a backward glance.

He got into his car and drove purposefully away, knowing full well that he was watched from the window above, but after four blocks he circled around and came quietly down an alley to coast to a stop with his lights out in its blackest patch of shadow from which he could watch the building he had just left.

When Mr Powls came out a few minutes later, and drove off in a small car from an open garage under one end of the building, Simon did not even have to be cautious about following him. Unburdened with luggage of any kind, Mr Powls was certainly not rushing to beat the liberal deadline he had been given. There was only one place where he could have been headed, other than the one which could have been generically described as Out of There, and Simon set his own course for it by another route.

If the Saint had not been quite so confident about it, it is barely possible that Mr Alton Powls might be alive today. Simon knew the address of the Warshed ménage, which was available to anyone who could read a telephone directory, and having ascertained that, he had not bothered to ask Kathleen Holland to show it to him. He thought he knew his way around the Montecito district fairly well, and he had driven a score of times over the road on which the house stood. The one thing he had overlooked was that he had only driven over it and not in search of a specific destination on it, and he had temporarily forgotten the penchant of denizens of even less traditionally aloof areas than this for secreting their street numbers in minuscule figures in the obscurest possible location, whether to discourage process servers or poor relations. Thus he made two abortive passes at his target, each time made slower by the fact that he did not want to arrive with a triumphant roar, before he positively identified the right entrance. And then he had to drift two hundred yards past it, and find a wider place in the road to park, before he could walk back and enter the rustic gates on foot. By which time, perhaps, Mr Alton Powls had already been gathered to his fathers, if an overworked recording angel could put the finger on them.

At any rate, he looked dead enough, as the Saint saw him after threading a catlike way to the house which stood completely secluded from the road within its ramparts of tall clipped hedges — after circumnavigating Mr Powls’s small car which by this time was cooling in the driveway, and high-stepping delicately over odorous flower beds, and almost falling into a treacherous excavation in the middle of a small patch of lawn, and finally reaching the draped living-room window from which the light came, and selecting the one marginal crack in the curtains through which he could steal the widest wedge-shaped view of the interior.

Mr Alton Powls was dead on the carpet, with blood welling from a dent in his cranium, and Aunt Flo standing over him with a poker in her hand, and the two comparatively junior Misses observing the scene with respectful approbation.

In contravention of all the time-honored legends about old maids, the French windows were not even latched. Simon opened them at once, and made an inevitably sensational entrance through the drapes which wrung stifled screams from Violet and Ida. Only Aunt Flo stood silent and undaunted.

“I’m very sorry,” he said. “This is entirely my fault.”

“What are we to understand by that, Mr Templar? — he told us your real name.”

“I knew he was blackmailing you, but I was curious to know how. The easiest way to find out seemed to be to follow him here and eavesdrop a little. But when I started the routine that I figured would make him come here, I didn’t know that I’d have the answer even before he arrived. I picked his pocket just before I left him a few minutes ago, and here’s what I found when I had a chance to look.”

He produced Mr Powls’s wallet and unfolded a newspaper clipping from it, which he had read under a shielded flashlight while he waited in the alley. It could only be the same clipping which Kathleen Holland had described Mr Powls exhibiting in Ye Needle Nooke. It was from The Kansas City Star, under a 1930 dateline, and described a raid on one of the most elegant local brothels. There was also a picture of some of the principal culprits being arraigned in night court. The accused madam was plainly identified as Florence Warshed, and the likeness was unmistakable even after more than a quarter-century. Among the other girls, less easily recognizable, were two others modestly named as Violet Smith and Ida Jones.

Simon handed the clipping to Aunt Flo, who barely glanced at it and let Ida take it and pass it to Violet.

“I thought you’d like to burn it yourselves,” said the Saint.

Aunt Flo had not let go the poker, but her grip was perceptibly less rigid.

“I’ve heard that you’re a man who might understand some things that ordinary people wouldn’t,” she said steadily. “I always ran a good house, if you know what I mean. But after Repeal I could see the handwriting on the wall. I could afford to retire. Violet and Ida were getting a bit too old for the best clients, and yet it wasn’t a good time for them to take over a house on their own. They’d been with me longest of all my girls — in fact, they might just as well have been my own nieces. When the time came, we found that none of us wanted to split up and go it alone. After all, we didn’t have any place to go — we were the only real family any of us had left. So we decided to stick together. We got in my car and headed west, and soon after we found this town we knew it was for us. We could settle down and nobody would ever dream we’d ever been any different from all we wanted to be from there on.”

“You only made one slip that might have started me wondering before I tried you on the Chesterfield Club,” Simon remarked with incurably professional acuity. “The slant you all have about people being good spenders. But not many people would notice it — and you were right, this is one of the last places in the country where you’d be likely to run into an old client. Even that mightn’t’ve been fatal — most pillars of this community would be too worried about whether you’d keep your mouth shut to open their own. But it had to be this Alton Powls.”

“He was always a cheap grifter and I’d be ashamed to class him with my good clients,” said Aunt Flo. “But after he had the luck to spot us, and even went back and dug up that newspaper article to make sure he could rub it in, he’s been taking us for a hundred dollars a week.”

Simon nodded.

“Kathleen guessed he was giving you trouble, but she was only worried about you. She thinks you’re wonderful, and so do I. So I took it upon myself to give him my best warning, to lay off you and chisel his chips somewhere else. I was betting that this would send him hustling right over here to put the last big bite on you, but I was planning to be in the wings myself.”

He bent and examined what was left of Mr Powls more conscientiously, for pulse and heartbeat, of which he verified that there were neither.

“He phoned and said he had to see us at once,” Aunt Flo related. “Then when he got here he told us something about you calling on him. He wanted to see our bank books — he said we’d have to draw out every cent we could raise and give it to him before he left in the morning. And then we could get a mortgage on this place, which would take longer, and send him some more when he wrote to us.”

“That’s what I expected.”

“The girls were trying to talk him out of it, but I knew he’d never lay off as long as he lived, so I picked up the poker and fixed that,” said Aunt Flo defiantly, but her voice broke for the first time.

The Saint took the poker from her without resistance, wiped it carefully on Mr Powls’s neat gray jacket, and put it back in the fireplace.

“I’d probably have done the same thing myself, if I’d got here in time,” he said. “Or something like it. There are only three ways to stop a blackmailer, but only fools go on paying him, and it would be asking too much for you to dare him to tell the worst... I noticed an interesting hole in your lawn as I was sneaking up on you, Did you have any plans for it?”

“We were getting ready to plant a Chinese elm,” said Aunt Flo wistfully. “Quite a large and expensive one, but we need more shade for the fuchsias.”

“I’m afraid you’ll just have to make it another flower bed now,” said the Saint sympathetically. He searched for Mr Powls’s keys and thoughtfully took possession of them before he picked up the body, “I won’t try to cover him very deeply tonight, because I’ll have to run back to his apartment and pack up all his personal things to bury with him, so that it’ll look as if he simply blew town for mysterious reasons of his own. Also the people I’m staying with are expecting me back, and I can’t stretch a story about a flat tire too far. But I’ll be here first thing in the morning with some plants from a nursery, and make a slap-up job of it. Why don’t you all go to bed and get a good sleep?”

The account he gave Kathleen Holland the next day of his final interview with Mr Alton Powls was not fundamentally fictitious, but it took advantage of certain major omissions.

“I don’t think we should pry too hard into Aunt Flo’s awful secret,” he said. “It probably isn’t anything that’d scare anybody but her, anyhow. All I know is that I put the fear of God into your creepy friend, and if you drop by his apartment this afternoon I bet you’ll find he’s already done a flit.”

Having left Mr Powls’s car parked near the railroad station, he was prepared to let any other perfunctory inquirers take the trail from there.

“I almost feel let down,” Kathleen said disappointedly. “I was half hoping you’d do something brilliant and discover that he was Violet and Ida’s black-sheep father.”

“If I had, I wouldn’t even tell you,” said the Saint darkly. “And don’t even hint to Aunt Flo that I’ve talked to you at all. It would only worry her. But between you and me, I stopped at her house this morning and told her who I was and that I was sure she wouldn’t have any more trouble.”

“You looked so hot when you got here,” Kathleen said, “I thought you’d been doing something much more violent than that.”

“Believe it or not,” said the Saint complacently, “before I was through she had me with a spade in my hands working like a bloody grave-digger. I tell you, I get into the damnedest things.”