The Saint on Guard (The Saint Series) Page 4

  Simon’s shoulder hit it with all his weight in about the same split second as it reversed itself.

  The door travelled some six inches back and thudded in a rather sharp crisp way against some obstacle which let out a sort of thin yipping cough. Then it went on with much less impetus, while a straggly tumbling effect peeled off behind it.

  Simon went in and shut the door behind him, flashing his light around even while he did that.

  He saw a short flight of steps with the temporary obstacle sprawled at the foot of them. The obstacle was a thin, hollow-cheeked man who looked as if he had probably shaved two days before. If he hadn’t, he should have. The point, however, was not suitable for immediate discussion, since the only potential source of first-hand evidence was not a good prospect for interrogation at that time. He had a vertical cut in his forehead where the edge of the door had hit him, and he looked very uninterested indeed.

  Simon made sure of his continued neutrality by using his necktie to bind his ankles together, and then using the man’s shoelaces to tie his wrists behind his back and link them with the Charvet hobble.

  Then he went on quickly into the house.

  He moved through a huge kitchen, a series of pantries, and up a flight of stairs to the main floor. He found himself in a bare but richly carpeted hall, with the front door facing him and a single onyx bowl of light burning overhead, and turned off his torch.

  He didn’t need any extra light to see the crudely drawn skeleton figure crowned with a symbolic halo which was chalked on one of the doors on his right.

  “What a quaint touch,” said the Saint to himself, but he was not smiling to himself at the same time.

  The door was ajar. He pushed it open with his foot, and took the one necessary step into the room. It was a slightly conventional library with built-in bookshelves and warm wood panels and deep comfortable chairs, but all of it unmistakably ringed with the vision of an interior decorator. It seemed regrettable that this was yet another subject that could not be discussed with the person who would normally have been the most likely source of information, but it was a little obvious that there was at least one linnet who would never pipe or sing any more.

  Aside from the simple probabilities, there were the initials “G. L.,” embroidered on the breast pocket of the dark brocade dressing gown which the man wore over his tuxedo shirt and trousers. He lay on the floor in the middle of the room in an attitude of curious relaxation. But the piece of blind cord which was knotted around his throat so tightly that it had almost sunk into the skin could never have done his voice any good.

  Simon Templar lighted a cigarette very carefully, and stood looking down at the body for a space that must have run into minutes, while he grimly tried to think of himself as a second-hand murderer. And all the time the doorbell was buzzing on one ceaseless monotonous note.

  And then, abruptly, it was silent. After which it gave three or four distinct irregular peremptory rasps which could only have been produced by individual action.

  The Saint came back into movement as if he had never paused, as if all those moments of intense and ugly thought had been nothing but the gap between the stopping of a cinema projector and the starting up again. In an instant he had flipped on the light switch, and he was crossing to the window. He had only to move the drapes a hair’s breadth to peep out on to the doorway porch, and what he saw there enabled him to intellectually discard the effort of doubling back to the side door. He was a great believer in the economy of effort, and he could always tell at a glance when it would be completely wasted.

  He switched the library lights on again as he went out into the hall, and opened the front door with his most disarming bonhomie.

  “Hullo, there, John Henry,” he said. “Come on in and play. Somebody seems to have been trying to frame me for a murder.”

  4

  There was no answering geniality in Inspector Fernack’s entrance. He stalked in rather heavily with two plain-clothes men following behind him like a pair of trained dogs, and his tough square-jawed face was as uncompromising as a cliff. His straight stolid eyes drove at the Saint like fists. Then, in a quick glance around, they fell on the childish sketch on the library door, and his mouth set like a ridge of granite.

  “Hold him here,” he said, and went into the room.

  He was gone only a couple of minutes, and when he came back he looked several years older. He spoke to one of his satellites.

  “Have you searched him?”

  “Yes, sir. No weapons.”

  “Go out and phone for a homicide detail—better not use any of the phones in here. Al, you go upstairs and look over the other rooms, but don’t touch anything.”

  The two men left, and Simon straightened his clothes to restore his natural elegance from the disorder which the rough search of his person had produced. He could never have looked more at ease and debonair, as if it had never occurred to him that the most diaphanous cloud of suspicion could ever cast a shadow on his unspotted probity.

  “Quite a neat little job, isn’t it?” he remarked affably.

  Fernack stared up at him, and his gaze was curiously sad.

  “If I hadn’t seen it myself, I wouldn’t have believed it,” he said, “Simon, what in God’s name did you do it for?”

  The Saint’s brows rose in balanced arcs of shocked incredulity.

  “Henry—you couldn’t possibly have some doddering notion in your dear grey head that I really did blow Gabriel’s horn?”

  “Off the record,” Fernack said, relentless, “I was hoping against hope that the tip was a phony. But I might have known it would be like this one of these days.”

  “You’ve known people to try to frame me before.”

  “I’ve never seen such a cold case as this against you before.”

  Simon flipped ashes from the shortening end of his cigarette.

  “There was a tip-off, of course,” he said languidly. “How did you get it?”

  “On the telephone.”

  “Man or woman?”

  “A man.”

  “Name and address?”

  Fernack took a breath.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did you talk to him yourself?”

  “Yes. He asked for me.”

  “Why?”

  “People do sometimes. Besides, it’s been published quite a bit that I’m the man who’s supposed to do something about you.”

  “Fame is a wonderful thing,” said the Saint admiringly. “And what did this anonymous fan of yours have to report?”

  “He said, ‘I was passing Mr Linnet’s house on East Sixty-Third Street, and I saw a man who looked as if he was breaking in. He looked just like the pictures of that fellow the Saint. I didn’t get it at first, and then when I did I walked back and there were noises in the house as if there was a fight going on.’ ”

  Simon nodded a number of times with the gravest respect.

  “I can see that I shouldn’t have underestimated your public,” he drawled. “They come from a very talented class. They know just whose house they’re passing on any street in town. With their cat-like eyes, they can recognise characters like me in dark corners in a dim-out. They can tell at a glance whether I’m trying to break in, or whether I’m just looking for the bell or the right key. And of course they know that you’re the only officer in New York to call out on a case like that. They wouldn’t dream of losing face by just mentioning it to the first cop they met on his beat.”

  The detective eased his collar with one powerfully controlled forefinger.

  “That’s all very clever,” he said stubbornly. “But I came here. And Linnet has been murdered. And you’re still here.”

  “Naturally I’m here,” said the Saint blandly. “I wanted to see him.”

  “What for?”

  “Because he manufactures electrical gadgets, and he needs iridium, and I heard he’d been buying from the black market. I thought I might persuade him to tell me
a thing or two.”

  “And he wouldn’t talk, so you strangled him.”

  “Yes,” said the Saint tiredly. “I tied a string around his larynx to ease his vocal cords.”

  “And you left your mark on his door.”

  Simon glanced critically across the hall at the ungainly pattern of chalk lines that Fernack referred to.

  “Henry,” he said reasonably, “I’m not a hell of an artist, but you’ve seen some of my early original work. Would you honestly say that that was a typical job of mine? It looks kind of shaky and spavined to me.”

  The detective glowered at the drawing, and almost wavered. You could see the doubt beginning to curdle and grow heavier inside him, like a complicated meal in a fragile stomach.

  “Besides which,” Simon mentioned diffidently, “wouldn’t it be just a little bit silly of me to leave that trade mark around at all in these days, so that you wouldn’t even waste a minute before you had the dragnet out for me?”

  “I’ve heard you say something like that before, too,” Fernack retorted. “But it isn’t my job to throw out evidence just because it looks silly. You give me your story, and we’ll start from there.”

  “Figure it for yourself,” Simon persisted inexorably. “Somebody wanted to keep me from talking to Linnet in the worst way. They wanted it badly enough to make quite sure he wouldn’t sing. And they thought they could tie it off with the corny slackness of putting me out of action at the same fell swoop. So they must be just a little bit worried about me. And it also suggests that our iridium merchants may have something quite ingenious to put over while I’m presumably languishing into the jug. Now would you like to play their game for them, or shall we try to make sense?”

  Fernack studied his face with intractable doggedness. He might have been about to make any comeback, or none at all. It was one of those teetering moments that might have toppled on either side.

  And it inevitably had to be that moment when the plain-clothes man called Al appeared at the top of the stairs with another individual who was a stranger to all of them, to whom he was probably trying to give sympathetic assistance, but who looked more as if he were being frog-marched into a back room for a friendly rubber of third degree. This specimen wore the black coat and striped trousers of a conventional butler, and his fleshy face was as distressed as the face of any conventional butler would have been at the humiliation of his production.

  “I found ’im,” Al announced cheerfully, helping his patient down the stairs with much the same tenderness as he would have helped any old drunk. “The guy slugged him when he opened the door, an’ tied ’im up an’ locked ’im in a closet.”

  There was a different and hardening detachment about the way that Fernack waited until the man had been shepherded down to his level, and said, “Would you know the man who slugged you if you saw him again?”

  “I don’t really know, sir. He had his coat collar turned up, and there wasn’t much light on the porch, but he seemed to be fairly tall and slim. He had an air-raid warden’s armlet on, and I was looking at that mostly, because he was saying we had some lights showing that shouldn’t have been, and then he pointed to something behind me, and I turned to look, and that’s when he must have hit me, because I don’t remember anything more.”

  “Could it have been this man here?” Fernack asked flatly, stabbing his thumb back at the Saint.

  The butler’s puffy eyes hesitated over actuality and recollection.

  “It could have been, sir. I wouldn’t like to be too definite, but this man was built a bit similar.”

  You could feel the weakness ebbing out of Fernack like the fluidity of setting concrete. He turned on his heels to face the Saint again, and his jaw was tightening up again like a trap.

  “Well,” he said, “you were going to tell your story. Go on with it.”

  Simon found a rim of floor that was clear of the late Mr Linnet’s beautiful carpet, and studiously trod the stub of his cigarette out on it. In the same leisured tempo, he lighted another to replace it. He had a sense of incipient anticlimax just the same.

  It was, admittedly, a little bit on the hammy side to have tried to talk himself through his contract without showing any trumps, but as a challenge to professional vanity the temptation had been irresistible. He only resigned himself to quit because he realised that time was marching on, and fun might be fun but it had to take second place to the ultimate exigencies of the clock. He could certainly have played a lot longer, but there were more urgent things to do.

  “I’m sorry to disappoint you,” he said, “but it’s really dreadfully simple. Somebody else knew I was coming here tonight. Somebody didn’t want Comrade Linnet to sing to me, and the same person wanted to stop me doing any arias of my own. It all went together into the pretty picture you see before you. As a matter of fact, I wasn’t even supposed to be caught here at all. That was just a little too tight for practical timing. But I actually was waylaid on the doorstep by a very ornamental piece of grommet, and I took her to dinner, and then the stall was to lure me to her apartment for some soft music and hard practice, and then I was supposed to have no alibi at all for these vital moments.”

  “That’s interesting,” Fernack said unyieldingly. “Go on.”

  “Unfortunately for the ungodly,” said the Saint, “I was much cleverer than they expected me to be, and I ditched my waylayer and came back here in a hurry. I got here in what the most original writers call the nick of time. As a matter of fact, the bright boy who actually garrotted Comrade Linnet was on his way out at the moment. Then he sort of collided with a door, and got tired and went to sleep, so I tied him up and kept him for you. You’ll probably even find some fresh remains of chalk on his fingertips to clinch it for you.”

  Fernack’s face underwent a series of gradual and well-rounded reconstructions that was fascinating to watch. Each phase was a complete and satisfying production in its own right, so rich and full-bodied that only the most niggling critic would have complained that their climax was something very like a simple incredulous gape.

  “Then why the hell couldn’t you say so before?” he squawked. “Where is he?”

  “You were having such a lovely time sending me to the chair, it seemed a shame to break it up,” said the Saint. “But he ought to be where I left him, in the basement. Would you like to say hullo?”

  He turned and led the way back as he had come in, and Fernack followed him without a word.

  They went down the stairs, past the series of pantries, and through the huge kitchen to the place where Simon had left his captive. And that was when the incipient anti-climax suddenly ceased to be incipient at all, and in fact turned a complete somersault and made the Saint’s stomach turn over with it.

  For the cadaverous gent with the cracked forehead wasn’t there any more.

  There was just nothing to argue about in it. He wasn’t there. The entire area of stone flooring at the foot of the back steps was burdened with nothing more substantial than a probable film of New York grime.

  Simon Templar stood and gazed down at it with the utmost restraint for several seconds, until Fernack said impatiently, “Well, where is this man?”

  “This is going to make you very unhappy, Henry,” said the Saint, raising his eyes, “but he doesn’t seem to be here any more. I’m afraid he must have had a boy friend who came back for him. The way I had him tied, he couldn’t possibly have gotten loose by himself. But he’s certainly gone away.”

  The gastric ulcers of innumerable haggard authors bear witness to the awful responsibility of attempting an adequate description of such scenes as this. The present chronicler, however, having much more respect and affection for his mucosa, intends to court no such disaster. He proposes to leave most of the detailed etching to the imagination of the reader, for whose lambent perspicacity he has the very highest regard.

  He will nevertheless go so far as to give a slight lead by mentioning that the calorific swelling of a moderately unde
rstandable indignation caused Inspector Fernack’s face to give a startling imitation of an over-ripe plum which is receiving an unexpected hypodermic from a jet of high-pressure steam.

  “All right,” Fernack said, and his voice had the slow burn of molten lava. “I can’t blame you for trying, but this is the last time you’re going to treat me like a moron.”

  “But Henry, I give you my word—”

  “You can give your word to a judge, and see what he thinks of it,” snarled the detective. “I’m through. I’m going to take you down to Headquarters and lock you up right now, and you can save the rest of it for your lawyer!”

  “And I thought you were a real professional, Henry. If you’d only stationed a man at the back door, as I was sure you would have, instead of getting so excited—”

  “Are you coming along?” Fernack asked glowingly. “Or am I going to have to use this?”

  Simon glanced down regretfully at the revolver which had appeared in the other’s fist.

  He might conceivably have been able to take it away. And apparently there was no one to stop him outside the back door. But he was reluctant to hurt Fernack seriously, and he knew that even if he succeeded the call would be out for him within a space of minutes, and that would be a handicap which might easily be crippling.

  And just the same, nothing could have been much more manifest than that the last chance of talking the situation away had departed for the night. There is such a thing as an immutably petrified audience, and Simon Templar was realistic enough to recognise one when he saw it.

  He shrugged.

  “Okay,” he said resignedly. “If you can’t help being a moron, I’ll pretend I don’t notice. But if you’ll take any advice from me at all, please don’t be in too much of a hurry to call in the reporters and boast about your performance. I don’t want you to make a public spectacle of yourself. Because I’ll bet you fifty dollars to a nickel you won’t even hold me until midnight.”

  He lost his bet by a comfortable margin, for Hamilton was away from Washington that night, and the far-reaching results of that delay were interesting to contemplate long afterwards.