The Saint to the Rescue (The Saint Series) Read online

  Doc Nemford made a deprecating gesture.

  “I’m trying to make a living, like the rest of us, Saint.”

  “And I’m not greedy. I told Jobyn I thought you had a good deal, because I figured that would bring Hamzah back with a higher bid, and so I’d be keeping Jobyn out of trouble. But at the same time it was a help to you, and my dear old grandmother taught me never to take part in a swindle unless I made something out of it for myself.”

  Doc Nemford nodded philosophically.

  “How much do you want?”

  “I’ll settle for fifty thousand dollars, which I earned for you anyhow, so you shouldn’t begrudge it. And you can write Jobyn a letter and tell him you’re sorry to renege on the deal but you couldn’t resist that extra dough—and see that you’ve left town before he receives it.”

  Nemford took from his wallet a small sheaf of cashier’s checks, selected one, and indorsed it on the back to the order of Simon Templar.

  “You’re a lot fairer than I thought you’d be,” he said. “In fact, I didn’t think you’d let me get away with anything if you were wise to me.”

  “Frankly, if the victim had been almost anyone else, I wouldn’t, Doc. But now for the rest of my life I can dream of the expression on Nasser’s face, when Hamzah arrives with his trophies and they find out what they’ve bought. I shall feel that I’ve personally done something about Foreign Aid,” said the Saint.

  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 h
er 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 atmos
phere 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.