The Saint on Guard (The Saint Series) Page 14

  “Who did?” Simon insisted. “What happened?”

  “Three men…Met last night…in bar…Blatt…Weinbach…And Maris…going to party…at Olga’s…”

  “Where?”

  “Don’t know…”

  “What’s your name? Who are you?”

  “Henry…Stephens,” croaked the dying man. “Ostrich skin leather case…in gladstone lining…Get case…and send…send…”

  His voice trailed off into an almost inaudible rasp that was whisked away along with his spirit on the wings of the wind that swept across the flats. Henry Stephens was dead, mercifully for him, leaving Simon Templar with a handful of unexplained names and words and a decided mess.

  “And damn it,” said the Saint unreasonably, to no better audience than the circling gulls, “why do people like you have to read that kind of mystery story? Couldn’t one of you wait to die, just one, until after you’d finished saying what you were trying to get out?”

  He knew what was the matter with him, but he said it just the same. It helped him to get back into the shell which too many episodes like that had helped to build around him.

  And then he lighted a cigarette and wondered sanely what he should do.

  Any further identification of Henry Stephens was impossible. His hair was all burned off, his hands were barbecued from trying to beat out the flames of his own pyre, and the few remnants of his clothes were charred to him in a hideous smelting. Simon debated whether to take the body with him or leave it where it was. He glanced at his watch and surveyed the lonely country about him. There was still no living person in sight, although in the distance he could see a couple of summer shacks and the indications of a town beyond.

  Simon moved the body gently to one side of the road, re-entered his car, and drove carefully around it. Then his foot grew heavy on the accelerator until the side road eventually merged with the main highway and took him on to Virginia Point.

  It was inevitable that the Saint’s irregular past should have given him some fundamental hesitations about going out of his way to make contact with the Law, and on top of that he had projects for his equally unpredictable future which argued almost as strongly against inviting complications and delays, but he heaved a deep sigh of resignation and found his way to the local police station.

  The sergeant in charge, who was sticking his tongue out over a crossword puzzle in a prehistoric and dog-eared magazine, listened bug-eyed to the report of his find, and promptly telephoned the police across the Causeway in Galveston proper.

  “I’ll have to ask you to stay here until the Homicide Squad and the ambulance comes over to pick up the corpse,” he said as he hung up.

  “Why?” Simon asked wearily. “Don’t you think they’ll bring enough men to lift him? I’ve got business in Galveston.”

  The sergeant looked apologetic.

  “It’s…it’s a matter of law, Mr…er—”

  “Templar,” supplied the Saint. “Simon Templar.”

  This apparently meant no more to the local authority than John Smith or Leslie Charteris. He excavated a sheet of paper and began to construct a report along the lines which he had probably memorised in his youth, which had been a long time ago.

  “You’re from where, Mr Temple?” he asked, lifting his head.

  “Tem-plar,” Simon corrected him, with his hopes beginning to rise again. “I just came from St. Louis, Missouri.”

  The sergeant wrote this down, spelling everything carefully.

  “You got any identification papers on you?”

  “What for?” Simon inquired. “It’s the corpse you’re going to have to identify, not me. I know who I am.”

  “I reckon so, but we don’t,” the other rejoined stolidly. “Now if you’ll just oblige me by answering my questions—”

  Simon sighed again, and reached for his wallet.

  “I’m afraid you’re going to be difficult, so help yourself, Lieutenant.”

  “Sergeant,” maintained the other, calmly squinting at the Saint’s draft-cards and driving licences and noting that the general descriptions fitted the man in front of him.

  He was about to hand the wallet back without more than glancing into the compartment comfortably filled with green frogskins of the realm quaintly known as folding money when his eye was caught by the design stamped on the outside of the leather where a monogram might ordinarily have been. It was nothing but a line drawing of a skeletal figure with a cipher for a head and an elliptical halo floating above it. The pose of the figure was jaunty, with a subtle impudence that amounted almost to arrogance.

  The sergeant examined it puzzledly.

  “What’s this?”

  “I’m a doodler,” Simon explained gravely. “That is my pet design for telephone booths, linen tablecloths, and ladies’ underwear.”

  “I see,” said the sergeant quite blankly, returning the wallet. “Now if you’ll just sit down over there, Mr Templar, the Galveston police will be here directly. It’s only a couple of miles across the Causeway, and you can lead the way to the spot.”

  “Aren’t you going to call out the posse to chase the murderers?” Simon suggested. “If they brought a horse for me, I could save some of my gas ration.”

  “You got something there,” said the sergeant woodenly. “I’ll call the sheriff’s office while we’re waitin’.”

  Simon Templar groaned inwardly, and saw it all closing around him again, the fantastic destiny which seemed to have ordained that nothing lawless should ever happen anywhere and let him pass by like any other peaceful citizen.

  He fished out another cigarette while the second call was being made, and finally said, “I’m beginning to hope that by the time you get out there the seagulls will have beaten you to it and there won’t be anybody.”

  “There’ll be one if you saw one,” opined the sergeant confidently. “Nobody’ll likely come along that beach road again today. Too early in the season for picnics, and a bad day for fishin’.”

  “I trust your deductive genius is on the beam, Captain, but at least two other parties have been on that road today already—the victim and the murderers.”

  “Sergeant,” grunted the other. “And I don’t know how you come to be on that road yet.”

  Simon shrugged, and spread his hands slightly to indicate that under the laws of mathematical probability the point was unanswerable. Silence fell as the conversation languished.

  Presently there was a noise of cars arriving, and instalments of the Law filtered into the house. The sergeant put down his crossword puzzle and stood up to do the honours.

  “Hi, Bill…Howdy, Lieutenant Kinglake…’Lo, Yard…Hiyah, Dr Quantry…This is the man who reported that burned corpse. His name is Templar and he’s a doodler.”

  Simon kept his face perfectly solemn as he weighed the men who were taking charge of the case.

  Lieutenant Kinglake was a husky teak-skinned individual with gimlet grey eyes and a mouth like a thin slash above a battleship prow of jaw. He looked as if he worked hard and fast and would want to hit things that tried to slow him up. Yard, his assistant, was a lumbering impression from a familiar mould, in plain clothes that could have done nicely with a little dusting and pressing. Dr Quantry, the coroner, looked like Dr Quantry, the coroner. Bill, who wore a leather wind-breaker with a dusty sheriff’s badge pinned on it, was middle-aged and heavy, with a brick-red face and a moustache like an untrimmed hedge. He had faintly popped light-blue eyes with a vague lack of focus, as if he was unused to seeing anything nearer than the horizon: he moved slowly and spoke even slower when he spoke at all.

  It didn’t take Kinglake more than a minute to assimilate all the information that the sergeant had gathered, and to examine Simon’s identification papers. He stopped over the line drawing which reminded him of the figures of boxers which he used to draw in the margins of successive pages of his Fiske’s history and riffle to simulate a sparring match.

  “Doodler?” he said in a sharp voice
. “I—” He broke off as his eyes widened and then narrowed. “I’ve seen this picture before, Simon Templar, eh? Are you the Saint?”

  “I bow to your fund of miscellaneous information,” Simon responded courteously.

  “Meaning?”

  “That I am known in certain strata of society, and to a goodly number of the carriage trade, by that cognomen.”

  “Ah.” Detective Yard spoke with an air of discovery, “A funny man.”

  “The Saint, eh?” rumbled the sheriff’s deputy, with a certain deliberate awe. “Gee, he’s the Saint.”

  “He said he was a doodler,” persisted the sergeant.

  Dr Quantry consulted a gold watch in exactly the way that Dr Quantry would have consulted a gold watch, and said, “Gentlemen, how about getting on?”

  Lieutenant Kinglake held the Saint’s eyes for another moment with his hard stare, and gave back the wallet.

  “Right,” he snapped. “Cut out the eight-cylinder words, Mr Templar, and lead us to the body. You can leave your car here and ride with us. Yard, tell the ambulance driver to follow us. Come on.”

  Simon turned back to the sergeant as the party trooped out.

  “By the way,” he said, “the word for ‘hole in the ground’ is w-e-l-l, not what you have. Good-bye, Inspector.”

  He climbed into the seat beside Kinglake, reflecting that there was nothing much you could do when Fate was running a private feud against you, and that he must be a congenital idiot to have ever expected that his business in Galveston would be allowed to proceed as smoothly as it should have for anyone else. He got a very meagre satisfaction out of rehearsing some of the things he would have to say to a certain Mr Hamilton in Washington about that.

  2

  The mortal remains, as our school of journalism taught us not to call them, of Mr Henry Stephens lay precisely where Simon had left them, proving that the sergeant at Virginia Point had been right in one contention and no one had come along that road in the meantime.

  Lieutenant Kinglake and the coroner squatted beside the body and made a superficial examination. Detective Yard took his cue to demonstrate that he was something more than window-dressing. He began searching the area close to the body, and then thoroughly quartered the surrounding acre in ever-widening circles like a dutiful mastiff. Slow and apparently awkward, perhaps a little on the dull side, he was meticulous and painstaking. Bill the deputy sheriff found a convenient horizon and gazed at it in profound meditation.

  Simon Templar stood patiently by while it went on. He didn’t want to interfere any more than he had already, and for all his irrepressible devilment he never made the mistake of underestimating the Law, or of baiting its minions without provocation or good purpose.

  Dr Quantry eventually straightened up and wiped his hands on his handkerchief.

  “Death by carbonisation,” he announced. “Gasoline apparently. It’s a miracle that he was able to speak at all, if this is how Mr Templar found him…Autopsy as a matter of course. Give you a full report later.”

  The hard-eyed Lieutenant nodded and got to his feet, holding out the Saint’s top-coat.

  “This is yours, Templar?”

  “Thanks.”

  Dr Quantry beckoned to the ambulance crew.

  “Remove,” he ordered briskly. “Morgue.”

  Kinglake made his own inspection of the crown of the road where Simon showed him he had first seen the body.

  “He didn’t do all that burning here—the surface is hardly scorched,” he concluded, and turned to wait for the approach of his assistant.

  Detective Yard carried some souvenirs carefully in his handkerchief. They consisted of a partly burned crumple of newspaper, and an ordinary match folder bearing the name of the 606 Club in Chicago. Kinglake looked at the exhibits without touching them.

  “Galveston paper,” he said, and then: “When were you last in Chicago, Templar?”

  “A few days ago.”

  “Ever been to the 606 Club?”

  “As a matter of fact, I have,” said the Saint coolly. “I’m making a survey of the United States on the subject of stage and floor-show nudity in the principal cities in relation to the per capita circulation of the Atlantic Monthly. It’s a fascinating study.”

  Lieutenant Kinglake was unruffled.

  “What’s the story, Yard?”

  “There’s a spot about twenty yards in off the Gulf side of the road where the reeds are all trampled down and burned. Can’t tell how many men made the tracks, and they’re all scuffed up by the deceased having crawled back over them. Looks as if a couple of men might have taken the deceased in there, and one of them could have poured gas or oil over him while the other lit the paper to set fire to him so as not to have to get so close like he would’ve had to with a match. Then they scrammed, but there ain’t any distinguishable tyre marks. Victim must have staggered around, trying to beat out the flames with his hands, and found his way back to the road where he collapsed.”

  It was a pretty shrewd reconstruction, as Simon recognised with respect, and it only left out one small thing.

  “What about the bottle or container which held the gasoline?” he inquired.

  “Maybe we’ll find that in your car,” Yard retorted with heavy hostility. “You were at this club in Chicago where the matches came from—”

  “The dear old match folder clue,” said the Saint sadly. “Detective Manual, chapter two, paragraph three.”

  The deputy sheriff removed his eyes wistfully from the horizon, cleared his throat, and said weightily, “It ain’t so funny, pardner. You’re tied up closer’n anybody with this business.”

  “We’ll check the newspaper and the match book for fingerprints,” Kinglake said shortly. “But don’t let’s go off at half cock. Look.”

  He reached into his own pocket and brought out three match folders. One carried the advertisement of a Galveston pool hall, one spoke glowingly of the virtues of Tums, and the other carried the imprint of the Florentine Gardens in Hollywood.

  “See?” he commented. “Where did I get this Florentine Gardens thing? I’ve never been to Hollywood. Advertising matches are shipped all around the country nowadays. This is as good a clue as saying that the other book proves I must have a bad stomach. Let’s go back and get Templar’s statement.”

  “Just so I get to Galveston before I’m too old to care,” said the Saint agreeably.

  But inwardly he took a new measure of the Lieutenant. Kinglake might be a rough man in a hurry, but he didn’t jump to conclusions. He would be tough to change once he had reached a conclusion, but he would have done plenty of work on that conclusion before he reached it.

  So the Saint kept a tight rein on his more wicked impulses, and submitted patiently and politely to the tedious routine of making his statement while it was taken down in laboured long-hand by Detective Yard and Bill the deputy simultaneously. Then there were a few ordinary questions and answers on it to be added, and after a long time it was over.

  “Okay, Bill,” Kinglake said at last, getting up as if he was no less glad than the Saint to be through with the ordeal. “We’ll keep in touch. Templar, I’ll ride back to Galveston in your car, if you don’t mind.”

  “Fine,” said the Saint equably. “You can show me the way.”

  But he knew very well that there would be more to it than that, and his premonition was vindicated a few seconds after they got under way.

  “Now,” Kinglake said, slouching down in the seat beside him and biting off the end of a villainous-looking stogie, “we can have a private little chat on the way in.”

  “Good,” said the Saint. “Tell me about your museums and local monuments.”

  “And I don’t mean that,” Kinglake said.

  Simon put a cigarette in his mouth and pressed the lighter on the dashboard and surrendered to the continuation of Fate.

  “But I’m damned if I know,” he said, “why the hell you should be so concerned. Brother Stephens wasn’t
cremated within the city limits.”

  “There’s bound to be a hook-up with something inside the city, and we work with the Sheriff and he works with us. I’m trying to save myself some time.”

  “On the job of checking up on me?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Then why not let Yard worry about it? I’m sure he’d love to pin something on me.”

  “Yeah,” Kinglake assented between puffs of smoke. “He could get on your nerves at times, but don’t let him fool you. He’s a first-rate detective. Good enough for the work we do here.”

  “I haven’t the slightest doubt of it,” Simon assured him. “But I’ve told you everything I know, and every word of it happens to be true. However, I don’t expect that to stop you trying to prove I did it. So get started. This is your inspiration.” Kinglake still didn’t start fighting.

  “I know that your story checks as far as it goes,” he said. “I smelt the liquor on that dead guy’s mouth, and I saw your coat. I’m not believing that you’d waste good whisky and ruin a good coat just to build up a story—yet. But I do want to know what your business is in Galveston.” The Saint had expected this.

  “I told you,” he replied blandly. “I’m making this survey of American night life. Would you like to give me the low-down on the standards of undress in your parish?”

  “Want to play hard to handle, eh?”

  “Not particularly. I just want to keep a few remnants of my private life.”

  Kinglake bit down on his cigar and stared impartially at the Saint’s tranquil profile.

  After a little while he said, “From what I remember reading, your private life is always turning into a public problem. So that’s why I’m talking to you. As far as I know, you aren’t wanted anywhere right now, and there aren’t any charges out against you. I’ve also heard a lot of officers here and there leading with their chins by thinking too fast as soon as they saw you. I’m not figuring on making myself another of ’em. Your story sounds straight so far, or it would if anybody else told it. It’s too bad your reputation would make anybody look twice when you tell it. But okay. Until there’s evidence against you, you’re in the clear. So I’m just telling you. While you’re in Galveston, you stay in line. I don’t want your kind of trouble in my town.”