Call for the Saint (The Saint Series) Page 15

  On the table between them he laid the revolver which last night’s visitor had left behind.

  By no perceptible sign, the Saint sensed a sudden change in her, an inner freezing, her eyes coming in focus on the gun, her whole being gripped by that thanatoid stillness that stands on the threshold of panic.

  “Where,” she said in a small, tight voice, “did you get—that?”

  “It was left here last night as a sort of—calling card.”

  Patricia was staring at him.

  “Last night?”

  “Some hopped-up heister crashes de joint,” Hoppy snorted. “He gets away before we can even see who it is. But we give him such a scare he forgets de rod.”

  “You didn’t tell me!” Pat accused. “You finished that brawl at the Arena over here, didn’t you?” She searched Simon’s face narrowly, and sensed the truth with the swift certainty of an intuition ground to psychic fineness by the countless abrasions of past experience. “Someone followed you here and tried to kill you!”

  The Saint bowed.

  “Darling, you know our kind of friends too well.”

  Connie Grady stood up. She gathered up her purse and gloves with unsteady hands. Her face was pale, the magnolia skin drawn and haggard. She tried to ignore the revolver on the table, but her eyes kept flitting back to it, under the spell of some kind of frightening fascination.

  “I’m sorry I bothered you like this,” she said with nervous breathlessness. “It was silly, really. I—” She broke off, walking quickly to the door. “Good-bye.”

  “No, wait!”

  “Please.”

  She almost ran out of the apartment, and the front door slammed behind her.

  Patricia and Hoppy returned their blank stares to the Saint—Patricia’s tinged with irony.

  “Too bad,” she said. “And you were just starting to make such an impression.”

  “Chees,” Hoppy said between mouthfuls, resuming his assault on the food, “de Torpedo gettin’ killed last night kinda made her blow her top, huh, boss?”

  “It was that gun,” Pat stated, “that upset her. Why?”

  Simon picked up the revolver and turned it idly in his hands.

  “My crystal ball doesn’t work like yours,” he said, and he smiled at her. “Rather an attractive little thing, isn’t she?”

  “Oh, rather,” Pat agreed, her smile sweetly corrosive, “if you like them on the slightly hysterical side.”

  Simon laughed, his fingernail tracing the small intertwined letters engraved on the metal just above the stock of the gun.

  “Poor Melusina,” he sighed whimsically. “I’m afraid her dear old daddy is making her cry.”

  “Melusina? What are you talking about? I thought her name was Connie.”

  “So it is. The term was merely analogous. Melusina was a fairy. A French fairy.” Simon grinned provocatively. “If you ever delved into such matters in your youth, dear, you’ll remember the story.”

  “I never was as good at fairy tales as you,” Pat said demurely.

  “Melusina,” Simon continued imperturbably, “was no end attractive and quite easy to take—even if she was on the slightly hysterical side. However, she happened to suffer an injury from her father, for which, if memory serves, she had him imprisoned inside a mountain. She, in turn, was punished by being turned into a snake from the waist down every Saturday night.”

  “She ought to have been able to wriggle out of that one,” Patricia said dryly. “But what has it got to do with Miss Grady, if anything?”

  “Boss, don’t she t’ink Smith got killed by accident?” Hoppy demanded.

  “Inasmuch as you raise the question,” Simon said, “I’ll give you an answer. No.”

  “Obviously,” said Patricia. “But what do you think?”

  “She’s quite right. It wasn’t an accident.”

  Mr Uniatz absorbed half a cup of coffee at a gulp, scowling interestedly.

  “Ya mean de Torpedo ain’t knocked off fair and square?”

  The Saint nodded thoughtfully.

  “Indubitably not—if instinct serves, and I think it does. At any rate, we’re going to look into the matter.”

  “What are you going to do, Simon?”

  The Saint smiled at her, and then at the gun lying on the palm of his hand.

  “We’re going to call on the man who owns this,” he said. “Wish we could take you along, but unfortunately…”

  “But you said you didn’t even see who it was who left that gun here!” she exclaimed. “How do you know who—”

  “I know who owns these initials,” said the Saint patiently, lifting the gun for her inspection. He showed her the monogram in fancy script on the metal. “They’re rather difficult to untangle but I think you can make them out.”

  Hoppy leaned over.

  “Initials?” he queried, peering at the gun. “Where?”

  “M…G,” Pat read. “M. G.? But who is M. G.?”

  “Off-hand, I’d say it was Connie’s father, Michael Grady, wouldn’t you?” Simon kissed her and stood up. “Let’s get started, Hoppy. We may be able to dig her old man out of the mountain.”

  7

  The Saint entered by one of the side entrances of the Manhattan Arena and found himself, as he expected, in the office wing of the building. The corridors and reception-rooms were alive with voices and sporting gentry of varied interests and importance, for this was a cross-roads of the indoor sporting world, and through these catacombs paraded its foremost and hindmost representatives.

  Simon moved silently and inconspicuously along the shadowed wall of the main hall and stepped into the main reception-room.

  It was a bare and unkempt ante-chamber, its hard chairs and bare benches occupied by a garrulous covey of promoters, managers, sports-writers, ticket speculators, and professional athletes of varied talents and notoriety, all obviously waiting to see the great Mike Grady. A fog of tobacco smoke hung over the room like stale incense burnt to strange and violent gods; the voices of the votaries droned a ragged litany punctuated by coarse yaks of laughter. There was something about them that marked them as a distinct species of metropolitan life; each was subtly akin to the other, no matter how different their outer hides might be. It lay, perhaps, in the mutual boldness of their eyes, the uninhibited expression of primitive emotion, the corner-of-the-mouth asides and the sudden loudly profane rodomontades in lower-bracked dialects. Their eyes appraised him pitilessly as he threaded his way through them, like circus animals taking the measure of a new trainer; but in the same moment their inquisitorial glances flipped away again, as if even under his easy elegance they recognised instinctively a fellow member of their own predatory species.

  The girl at the switchboard near Grady’s office door, who doubled as receptionist, surveyed the Saint in the same way as he approached her. But even her deadpan appraisal softened responsively to the intimate flattery of his smile, the irrepressible proposition of his blue eyes, and the devil-may-care lines of chin and mouth…He was opening the door of Grady’s private office before she suddenly remembered her duties as sentry of the sanctum.

  “Hey, come back here!” she cried. “You can’t go in there!”

  Like other women who had tried to tell the Saint what he couldn’t do, she thought of her objections a little late. The Saint was already in.

  Michael Grady was sitting tilted back in his swivel chair, his feet resting on the edge of his huge desk, his broad, snub-nosed face turned upward at the ceiling as he cuddled a telephone in the crook of his jaw and shoulder. His gaze swung downward as he heard the door close, and his eyes, which matched the Saint’s for blueness, bulged with embryonic eruption.

  The Saint waved a debonair greeting and sank into a worn leather club chair facing him.

  The promoter grunted a couple of times into the telephone, his eyes fixed on Simon Templar’s, and hung up, his feet returning to the floor with a crash.

  “And who the hell might you be?” he
blasted.

  A rich brogue was still ingrained in his gravelly tenor, although as the Saint well knew it had been thirty years since he had left his native Ireland. The ups and downs of Mike Grady’s turbulent career to his present eminence as promoter of the Manhattan Arena was a familiar story to the city’s sporting gentry; it was a career which on the whole, Simon knew, had won Grady more friends than enemies—and those enemies the kind an honest but headstrong man easily makes on his way to the top.

  “The name,” Simon announced, “is Simon Templar.”

  Grady stared at him, digesting the name, seeking a familiar niche for it, his brows drawn in a guarded frown. He opened his mouth as if to speak, then closed it again as recognition dawned in his eyes and wiped away the frown. He leaned forward on his desk.

  “The Saint?” he asked unbelievingly, and sprang to his feet without waiting for a reply. “Of course! I should’ve known!” He came from behind the desk, extending an eager hand. “Glad to meet you, Saint!”

  Simon rose to his feet and allowed his arm to be used like a pump-handle.

  “And it’s a shame you’ve not visited me before,” Grady enthused. “Why, only yesterday one of the boys brings up your name as a possibility for master of ceremonies for the Summer Ice Follies we’re puttin’ on soon. The Saint and Sonja Henie! Can’t you just see that billin’! It’d be sensational! You’d pack ’em in! We’d have it all in the papers—on billboards—on the radio—”

  “And in skywriting,” said the Saint. “Well, I suppose the world will always beat a path to the door of the man who builds a better claptrap, but I didn’t come as a performer in that line. I…er…already have a…sort of profession, you know.”

  “A profession? You?” Grady smiled jestingly. “And what would that be?”

  “I’m what you might call a haunter,” said the Saint.

  Grady’s brows knitted.

  “A haunter?”

  “Of guilty consciences.”

  “That,” said Mr Grady after a pause, “I don’t get.”

  Simon helped himself to a cigarette from the dispenser on the desk.

  “Well,” he said engagingly, “take your conscience, for example.”

  Grady grinned at him.

  “And why would you be hauntin’ my conscience? It’s crystal clear.”

  Simon struck a match.

  “Is it?”

  “Indeed it is.”

  “Even about your secret partnership with Doc Spangler?”

  Grady’s grin faded. He turned abruptly, went back behind his desk, and sat down. His fingertips tapped a nervous tattoo on the top of his desk for a moment.

  “Even if that were true,” he said finally, “would it be a crime?”

  The Saint also sat down again, lowering himself through a leisured breath of smoke.

  “I always heard you were an honest man, Mike,” he said quietly. “Spangler’s a crook, and you know it.”

  Grady flushed.

  “I don’t know anything of the sort!” he snapped. “So he served time once. What of it? A man can make a mistake.”

  “I know,” Simon nodded. “And you put him back on his feet; gave him a job at the Queensbury Gym.”

  “The best damn masseur I ever had!”

  “Very likely. He was an MD before they took away his licence for peddling dope.” Simon consulted his cigarette ash. “Mike, you even advanced him money to go into business as a fight manager, didn’t you?”

  Grady stirred impatiently.

  “Well, what of it?” he demanded. “When I got this job here at the Arena I gave up the gym. Doc didn’t want to work there without me, so I loaned him a couple of grand.”

  “For which he gave you a share in Barrelhouse Bilinski as collateral.”

  “Well—” Grady chuckled, but his humour was laciniated with unease. “It didn’t seem like much collateral at the time. He wasn’t the Masked Angel then, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “Well, then,” Grady said, spreading his square freckled hands expressively, “you know how good Spangler is. A great fighter he’s made out of a broken-down stumble bum.”

  The Saint shook his head sadly.

  “Mike,” he protested, “anyone, a child—even Connie, your own daughter—might be sceptical of that. In fact, if she knew about your partnership with Spangler, she might even be afraid that you’re mixed up in something not quite—”

  Grady stiffened, his face reddening.

  “And what the hell has my daughter to do with this?”

  The Saint’s disclaimer was as bland as cold cream.

  “Why, nothing at all, Mike. I merely mentioned her as a possibility.”

  “Well, you just leave her out of this!” Grady glared at him and then looked away restlessly. “Maybe it isn’t according to Hoyle for me to have a financial interest in Bilinski,” he grumbled, “but it doesn’t matter a damn to me if he wins or loses, just so I get my two grand back.”

  “By the way,” said the Saint, “how does Spangler get away with Bilinski wearing that old sock over his head?”

  “He has special permission from the Boxin’ Commission, Grady replied curtly. “It’s a legitimate publicity stunt.”

  “If there is such a thing,” Simon admitted. “But it certainly improves his appearance.”

  “He’ll have to take it off for the championship fight,” Grady informed him sourly, “when he gives Steve Nelson the beatin’ he deserves!”

  The Saint’s probing eyes drooped with offensive restraint.

  “You seem to lack a certain enthusiasm for your future son-in-law,” he observed.

  “Not my son-in-law!” roared the promoter. “No common knuckle-head box fighter is going to marry the daughter of Mike Grady, I can tell you. I don’t know what tales you been hearing, but she’s not marrying that punk, you can depend on it!”

  “What are you going to do—forbid the banns?”

  “I’ll not see her tied to a lowser with no more future than a cake of ice,” Grady said belligerently. “I’ve seen what happens to the most of ’em after their fightin’ days are done, with their brains addled and the eyes knocked out of ’em, no money saved, and their wives drudges!”

  The Saint built an “O” with a smoke-ring.

  “So that’s why you quarrelled.”

  “I wouldn’t call it a quarrel.” The promoter’s eyes glittered. “I told him just what I’ve told you, and I told him to let Connie alone.”

  “But if Steve is retiring after his fight with the Angel, as he says—”

  “Sure! That’s what he says,” Grady snorted. “How many times have I heard that one before! So, he’s retiring. On what?”

  Simon shrugged.

  “On the purse, I suppose. Unless, of course, he gets killed before he can collect it. The way Smith was.”

  Mike Grady put his elbows on the desk and cupped his forehead in his hands, staring down at his desk.

  “That was a terrible thing to happen,” he said sombrely. “But, it was an accident.” He looked up defiantly. “It wouldn’t happen once in a million fights.”

  The Saint gazed at him thoughtfully. A pattern seemed to be unfolding. So Grady wanted no part of Connie’s fiancé. He was in semi-partnership with Doc Spangler. But did he disapprove of Nelson enough to arrange his death? Was he of the same stripe as Spangler?…Somehow the Saint couldn’t quite accept that. Grady was not wanting in the essential elements of humanity. A hot-headed, obstinate old blowhard, perhaps—but not a wicked man. Shrewd, conniving, scheming maybe—but not a crook. Somewhere the thorn of conscience pricked. Somewhere beneath the flinty carapace was the naively sentimental heart. An expert in such things, the Saint felt certain of his diagnosis. And yet…

  “Perhaps,” said the Saint. “But I collect those one-in-a-million chances.” He slipped the snub-barrelled revolver out of his pocket and laid it almost casually on Grady’s desk. “No doubt it was also one chance in a million that I found this in my apar
tment last night.”

  Grady stared at the gun in open-mouthed amazement.

  “Where the hell did you get that?” he demanded stupidly.

  “It’s yours, of course?”

  “Sure it’s mine. My initials are on it! Where’d you get it?”

  “I told you. In my apartment last night. After my little interview with Spangler last night, some character broke into our little ivory tower with the apparent idea of air-conditioning us with your heater. Unfortunately we had just booby trapped the door in preparation for a visit from the tax collector. This other character didn’t have a sense of humour so he went away in a sort of huff.”

  Grady thrust himself from his chair and walked to the window. He stared out blindly, his hands folded across his chest, his face a thundercloud.

  “I don’t understand,” he muttered. “Unless he sold it, or—”

  He turned to Simon abruptly. “That gun was stolen from me,” he said flatly, “by Steve Nelson!”

  The Saint tapped the ash from his cigarette dispassionately.

  “Stolen?” he murmured.

  “Yes, stolen!” Grady returned to his chair. “Last week. Right in this office. He took the gun and I’ve never seen it since—that is, until this moment.”

  “How do you know he took it?” the Saint asked.

  “How do I know he took it!” Grady bawled. “The lowser nearly broke my arm!”

  “Oh,” Simon deduced innocently. “This, I take it, was during the quarrel you didn’t have.”

  Grady glowered at the gun on the desk.

  “If it wasn’t a matter of business and money out of my pocket, I’d have had him thrown in jail for so long—”

  “That Connie wouldn’t even know him when he did come out?”

  “Skip it.”

  “You pulled that gun on him, didn’t you? And he took it away from you. Was that it?”

  Grady’s high blood pressure became painfully evident.

  “I said skip it!” he shouted. “I was defending myself—not that I couldn’t handle the lowser with me bare hands if I had to!”

  Simon rose to his feet and retrieved the gun.