The Saint to the Rescue (The Saint Series) Page 16

The Saint did not have to mention what he had done himself to remedy some of the failures of formal jurisprudence, for by that time quite as much as was safe for him was already known about his freewheeling interpretation of justice.

  In those days, Mr Carlton Rood was an outstanding example of the type of attorney whose neck might have been in frequent jeopardy if the Saint’s heterodox theories of legal responsibility had prevailed in the statute books.

  From the foundation of his first two spectacular acquittals had been built up a reputation for court-room invincibility that had become a legend of his generation. It was a legend that enjoyed some of the advantages of a chain reaction, for every successful defense could be counted on to draw new crops of desperate defendants to his office, and by this date it had reached a point where any cause sufficiently célèbre it was almost mandatory to retain Carlton Rood. Among his grateful clients could be listed some of the biggest names that ever adorned a theatre marquee or a police dossier, and there is no doubt that they all received value for their money.

  If there were any tricks of delay, confusion, objection, and obfuscation which Mr Rood did not know, nobody else had ever thought of them either. On the principle that no case was lost until the last appeal had failed, he approached every assignment with a dazzling variety of technical devices primarily designed to postpone any irrevocable result to the remotest possible future, before which prosecutors could lose their steam, judges could grow numb with boredom, and inconvenient witnesses could be overtaken by clouding of the memory or simply die of old age—if not otherwise helped off the scene by interested parties. But when in spite of all shenanigans he was brought to a showdown, he had no peer in the forensic techniques and pyrotechnics of leading, misleading, tripping, trapping, twisting, bamboozling, pleading, bullying, hand-wringing, gamut-running, and plain ham acting that can be employed to obscure an issue or distort a fact.

  He was a heavy-set heavy-featured man with a luxurious growth of silver hair which he cultivated to the proportions of a mane. The combination gave him a leonine and statesmanlike aspect of which he was fully aware and which he exploited, to the utmost, enhancing them with the gold-rimmed pince-nez dangling on a wide black ribbon, the string ties, and the dark clothes of slightly old-fashioned cut which are part of the stock cartoon of a Southern senator. On him they looked right and extraordinarily impressive, so that the most hostile jury usually ended up listening to him with respect, in spite of the skeptical attitude which his own publicity had inspired in large cynical sections of the population, which inclined to the view that anyone who went to the expense of hiring Carlton Rood should be presumed guilty until irrefutably proved otherwise.

  The verdict in Mr Rood’s latest headline trial was being awaited hourly on a certain day when Simon stopped in Biloxi on the Gulf Coast for gas. While he was waiting for his tank to be oiled, he saw a newspaper van pull up at a tiny shop next door while the driver delivered a bundle of papers. Simon walked over and went in as the van drove away, and found a stout middle-aged woman fumbling with the string that held the package together.

  “Can I help you?” he said gallantly.

  He deftly loosened the knot, and turned over the top paper. The black type leaped to his eye like a blow: “SHOLTO ACQUITTED.”

  It was a result that the Saint would have bet considerable odds against, but for once his gift of prophecy must have succumbed to wishful thinking. Carlton Rood had done it again. But the achievement was so startling that Simon was conscious of suppressing a gasp, and may not have completely succeeded.

  “Did he get off?” asked the woman.

  She was looking right across the newspaper when she spoke, and Simon suddenly understood why she wore dark glasses in spite of the gloom inside the shop.

  “I’m afraid so,” he said gently. “Would you like to know all the grisly details?”

  “Thank you, but my niece’ll read it to me when she gets here from school. It doesn’t really matter how he did it, if he got off. I thought this might be one time when he wouldn’t, but I suppose that was too much to hope. I have been hoping it, though—ever since he blinded me.”

  She said this in such a matter-of-fact tone that he wondered momentarily if one or the other of them had slipped a cog.

  “How was that?” he prompted cautiously.

  “Oh, it was nearly twelve years ago, when he was still doing some of his own dirty work. They might have got him for murder then, if it hadn’t been for what happened to me. You probably read about it at the time. My name’s Agnes Yarrow.”

  Although there was little criminal news that he had missed since he began to make a notable amount of it himself, and his memory was prodigious, he would have had to admit that he would not always recall everything that had ever happened in the annals of gangsterism from a single reference. But the blind woman quickly relieved him of the need to ply her with questions.

  “My husband and I had a small dry cleaning business in Mobile. Sholto was organizing a Laundry and Cleaning Association, as he called it. It was just a racket for him to get ten per cent of everybody’s business, but he let you know that if you didn’t sign up with the Association you wouldn’t have any business. We were the first to refuse to join. One day Sholto came in and started spraying acid out of a flit gun over all the clothes that were waiting to be picked up. I tried to stop him, and I got a squirt of acid in my face. I fell down screaming, and my husband came out of the back room and grabbed him. He took the flit gun away from him and he could have held him, he was a big strong man, but Sholto pulled out a gun and shot him dead and ran away.”

  “But he was arrested later, and—Yes, I remember now. Carlton Rood defended him. It was one of his first important successes. But now it comes back, it seems to me that Sholto wasn’t even tried for murder, only for the attack on you.”

  “That’s right. I still don’t understand it all, but the District Attorney seemed to get an idea that if he could convict him of the attack first, it’d be much easier to convict him of murder afterwards. But if they couldn’t, they’d save the expense of a much bigger trial.”

  “A fascinating idea,” said the Saint. “I wonder if Carlton Rood helped to give it to him.”

  “I don’t know. But Sholto got off. He had some sort of alibi, and they couldn’t find anyone who’d seen him leaving the shop. I was the only one who could have identified him—and I’d lost my sight. Of course, I’d heard his voice, too, but that’s much harder. His attorney made a complete fool of me in court when it came to picking out his voice from a lot of others.”

  Simon nodded.

  “That seems to ring a bell. He had private detectives with tape recorders all over the country, scouting for people with voices like Sholto’s. He even hired professional mimics. It was one of the tricks that made him famous.”

  “It worked, anyhow,” Mrs Yarrow said with a kind of weary resignation. “It was months afterwards, and you don’t remember a voice the same as you do a face, at least not when you’re more used to relying on your eyes.”

  “But you’re absolutely sure, in your own mind, that it was Sholto?”

  “I was absolutely certain, the first time the police let me hear him talk. It was only afterwards that the lawyers confused me. And it must have been him, mustn’t it? Look at everything he’s done since.”

  The Saint could not bring himself to point out that this argument was the direct antithesis of some of the fundamental tenets of civilized legal doctrine, for it was an attitude which he had often taken himself.

  Instead, he said, “Isn’t there any chance of doing anything for your eyes?”

  “Nothing. They told me before I left the hospital that I’d never see again.”

  “But that was a long time ago,” he persisted. “Haven’t you tried again since?”

  She shook her head.

  “I don’t see any use trying to keep giving myself false hopes. They were much too definite. And I’ve learned to live with it. But I still can
’t stop wishing Sholto would get what he deserves.”

  Simon paid for the paper and went back to the car which he seemed to have left in another chapter of his existence, so much had changed since he walked into the little sundries store.

  It was not really such a wild coincidence that he had thus met Mrs Yarrow and heard her story, for at the time he had not been personally preoccupied with either Rood or Sholto. Although he could visualize them as theoretically intriguing subjects for future attention, his interest at the moment had been only the lively but abstract interest of any wide-awake citizen, which would also have encompassed the latest Hollywood marriage or the latest South American revolution. It would have been no more important a coincidence, mathematically, if the news vendor had turned out to have once manicured the film star or nursed the deposed President or had any distant connection with anyone else in the news. The difference was that in any other such situation the Saint would have murmured some polite clichés and quickly forgotten the whole thing. Agnes Yarrow fell into another category only because this was the kind of encounter which so often brought the Saint’s catholic but diffused concern for the Ungodly into sharp focus on one or two particular specimens.

  Mr Carlton Rood, as a result of such an accidental conversation, was suddenly promoted into this inauspicious spotlight.

  Simon Templar traveled no farther that day than one of the motels facing the Gulf west of town, where he read the complete newspaper story and then spent two or three hours in intense meditation. The stratagems by which Mr Rood had won another acquittal for his client need not be retold here in laborious detail: it is sufficient for this story, as it was for the Saint’s motivation, that they were typically ingenious, immoral, and successful. Nothing else was needed to qualify Mr. Rood for immediate retribution, in the Saint’s judgment, but the manner of providing for it required inventiveness and planning.

  After dinner that night he made a long-distance phone call, and the next morning he drove back to Biloxi and Mrs Yarrow’s little shop.

  “I took what you may think was rather a liberty last night,” he told her. “I talked about your case to a friend of mine in Santa Barbara, California, who’s one of the best ophthalmologists in the country. I must tell you bluntly that he wasn’t very optimistic. But he would like to see you.”

  “It’s very kind of you,” she said. “But I just can’t afford a trip like that.”

  “I’d like to pay for it—please don’t be offended. If that sounds too much like charity, I promise that if he is able to restore your sight I’ll let you pay me back every penny. I know you’d think that was worth the money. But if he can’t do anything for you it won’t cost you a cent. Let me take the gamble, and I give you my word it won’t hurt my bank account a bit if I lose.”

  “But I told you I didn’t want to torment myself with false hopes.”

  “You want something done about Sholto, don’t you? If you had your sight back, you could identify him again—and he could still be tried for the murder of your husband. That would mean something to you, wouldn’t it?”

  As she wavered, he took her hand and put an envelope into it.

  “This is a plane ticket I bought this morning, in your name, from New Orleans to Santa Barbara,” he said. “The reservation is for Sunday—that gives you three days to make your personal arrangements, and it should be a good day for you to get someone to drive you to the airport. You have to change planes in Los Angeles, but the airline will look after you there. And I’ll have my doctor friend send someone to meet you at Santa Barbara airport. His name and address are written on the envelope, if you want to tell your friends where you’re going.”

  “But what about your name?” she protested weakly. “And why do you want to do this for me? I don’t know anything about you except that you’ve got a nice voice!”

  “That’s all I intend you to know right now,” said the Saint. “But if you must think of me by some label, you may call me Santa Claus.”

  He drove to New Orleans himself the same morning and took the next plane to New York, where Mr Rood had long since transferred his headquarters from his more pastoral beginnings in the South.

  One of the Saint’s intangible assets, and one of incalculable value in his peculiar activities, was the vast and variegated collection of acquaintances that he had accumulated and cultivated over the years, a roster of trades and professions that was a unique classified directory in itself.

  Besides a friend who was a distinguished ophthalmologist he could have produced with equal facility an ophicleidist, an oil rigger, or, probably, an orangutan. Another man whose talents he needed lived in New York when not working elsewhere, and Simon was fortunate to find him at liberty.

  In the course of the following week, Mr Rood received certain visitors at his office whose roles in his destiny he did not perceive.

  The first was a new client who sought his advice about making a will which would distribute his fortune fairly among his wife and daughters, protect them from fortune-hunters, ensure a substantial inheritance for his still unborn grandchildren, and yet not leave his heirs under a state of absolute tutelage. Mr Rood discoursed for some time on the theoretical problems involved, until he learned that about ninety-nine per cent of the million-dollar estate which the man was so worried about was contingent on his successful marketing of the idea of making automobiles impervious to minor collisions by building the bodies entirely out of soft rubber. Whereupon Mr Rood briskly recommended him to consult first with a patent attorney, and never thought about him again.

  The second caller presented himself as a free-lance journalist who specialized in writing autobiographies, speeches, or any other kind of material for celebrities who were, if not otherwise unqualified, too busy for the dull toil of capturing their scintillating thoughts in page after page of readable prose. If he could not name any names whom he had served in this capacity, he could claim this reticence as proof of his inviolable discretion: part of his service was to avert even the slight stigma of the “as told to” type of by-line, and those who wanted to claim his articles as their own original work could do so without fear that any other person would ever hear who really wrote them. Reassuringly, he was asking nothing more than permission to approach certain editors with the idea of a series of the great lawyer’s reminiscences of his famous cases, if the work was commissioned, Mr Rood would simply supply him with court records and spend a few hours talking them over, and of course the finished stories would be completely subject to Mr Rood’s editing and approval. It was an unexceptionably straightforward-sounding proposition, and Mr Rood was quite interested in discussing it. The Saint could be disarmingly flattering and persuasive when he tried, even when wearing a rumpled suit and a studious-looking pair of horn-rimmed glasses and using the undistinguished name of Tom Simons.

  After their talk had reached an encouraging stage of warmth and relaxation, the Saint was able to say in the most spontaneous conversational manner:

  “One thing I’ve often wondered about, Mr Rood. Aren’t you ever afraid that some of your ex-clients might start worrying about you as a sort of security risk?”

  “Good heavens, no!” responded the advocate, in genuine astonishment. “They were all innocent men, wrongfully accused, and so proven by due process of law, as the records show.”

  “Naturally. But many of them were at least generally rumored, shall we say, to have been involved in some rather dubious activities aside from the crimes they were actually charged with. In preparing their defense, you may easily have had access to a lot of incidental information about other associations or misbehaviors which could be very embarrassing for them if you talked too much.”

  “That might be true. But an ethical lawyer’s confidence is as sacred as the confessional.”

  “The underworld doesn’t put much faith in lofty principles,” said the Saint. “I must be a little more frank. Because of my job, I have some rather peculiar contacts. The other day I happened to
mention you and the idea we’ve been discussing to a man whom of course I can’t name, who has some rather special connections of his own. He told me he’d heard that some big fellows were wondering if you weren’t getting to know too much for your own good, and that you mightn’t be around so much longer.”

  Mr Rood rubbed his chin.

  “That’s an extraordinary notion. I can think of no reason why anyone would doubt me.”

  “But of course you’ve taken precautions, just in case some trigger-happy mobster got ideas.”

  “What sort of precautions?” asked the attorney guardedly.

  “Like making a list of the men most likely to worry about you, with some notes on the reasons why, and leaving it in safe hands with instructions to deliver it to the police if you should die of anything but the most in-contestably natural causes, and dropping a tactful word in the right places about what you’ve done.”

  “Oh, that, obviously,” said Mr Rood, in a tone which betrayed to Simon’s hypersensitive ear that the thought had just begun to commend itself.

  The Saint had achieved his object, and there was no point in prolonging the interview.

  “Then I won’t worry about being able to finish this job, once we get it started,” he said cheerfully, and stood up. “I hope I’ll have some news for you in a week or two. And thanks for sparing me so much of your valuable time.”

  “You have a very interesting proposition, Mr Simons,” said Carlton Rood heartily, shaking his hand with a large and adhesive paw. “I’ll look forward to hearing more from you.”

  Yet another visitor came late that night, bypassing the janitor and climbing ten flights of emergency stairs to unlock the office through a neat hole cut in the glass upper panel of the entrance door. This visitor broke into several filing cabinets and strewed their contents over the floor, but did not try to tackle the massive safe in which all really important papers were kept. He took nothing except about two hundred dollars which he found in the petty cash box—the Saint could be munificently generous when he chose, but could never resist the smallest tax-free contribution towards his non-deductible expenses when it could be taken from the right coffers.