“You’re crazy, but you did make it sound exciting and different,” she said slowly. “But this pill business—that’s the craziest of all.”
“You see how important it will be? No more people dabbing themselves with sticky, smelly things to chase the bugs, and never doing it quite enough. Just one little pill two or three times a day, and you can forget that they exist. A little aroma comes through all your pores, nothing that you or your best friends could detect, but to the nose of a bug—ppheuw!”
“I’d heard of them trying to find something like that, but I didn’t know they’d got it yet.”
He freshened the remains in the pitcher and refilled their glasses.
“I am lucky to have it first. Let me finish this full answer quickly, so that we can be gay again. My father’s hobby was exploring. He made many expeditions in South America, but because he was only a titled amateur, with no scientific qualifications, his discoveries were not taken seriously and often they were not even believed. Even the books he wrote he had to pay to have published—and of course they were not even translated in English. He was writing another when he died a few years ago. I read it, as a duty. He told how he had wondered how natives could live naked in a jungle with bugs that would drive an unprotected white man insane in a few hours, and how he could not believe the white men who thought it was only because the savages were used to it or didn’t feel it. He searched for another answer and found it in the nut of a certain tree that they eat.”
“It sure sounds nutty to me—but I’m listening.”
Simon shrugged.
“Being his son, I am a little nutty too. I went back up the Amazon where he had been—of course, it’s much easier today. I found the tribe he had visited, and the tree, which he described very well. I tried the nuts, which are so horrible that after one bite you would prefer the mosquitoes, but no mosquitoes came near me. Then I knew how I could make an honest living. Is that enough, and do we go for a picnic?”
“I suppose I should have my head examined,” she said inventively, “but this I have got to see. Only if it doesn’t live up to the billing, it could be the end of a beautiful friendship.”
“Agreed. At the very first bite of a bug, we shall throw everything in the lake and drive back to Antoine’s.”
But on the drive out to the place he had picked, she could no more resist pumping him with other questions than she could have cut out her own tongue. What was the tree? He didn’t know, he wasn’t a botanist. He’d simply gambled on having several tons of the nuts husked and powdered by cheap Indian labor, and rafted down to the coast at Belem, where he stored the sacks in a warehouse. But the pills? He’d taken a few pounds of the flour back to Europe, had tablets handmade by a pharmacist friend, even telling him that they were only supposed to be a kind of general tonic. However, he had decided that the pills could be most profitably manufactured and exploited in the United States, and he had been negotiating with four of the biggest drug companies.
“It has not been quite as easy as I expected,” he said. “You see, I couldn’t give them a regular formula, and I dared not give them samples to make their own tests, because they could analyze them, and your modern chemists are so clever that they might quickly find a way to make the same thing synthetically without even identifying the tree. So I had to make my own demonstrations and see that every pill I gave out was swallowed. It made many problems. But this company in Chicago was most interested.”
“Then what brought you to New Orleans?”
“I’d also wondered about starting a small factory myself, and I thought I might be at home here with its Continental traditions. That is why I was talking to Mr Stern. But when I went back to Chicago, these people were ready to discuss a deal, and I decided it might be wiser to let them have the headaches with the Government and the unions.”
“But Mr Stern must have told you who I was, after he introduced us the other night.”
“Yes, naturally.”
“And you never told me a word about it.”
“We were too busy, weren’t we?” he quoted her naughtily. “And if I had started trying to sell you my pills the first moment we were alone together, what would you have thought?”
She had no reply to that, but her active mind kept on working all the rest of the way to the place where he took her. Beyond any doubt he had the kind of presence and personality she had sometimes dreamed of, but she had not created and become the queen-pin of Ashville Pharmacal Products merely by dreaming.
When he stopped the car, she got out at once and strolled and stood around while he deftly and cheerfully set up lanterns, unfolded chairs and table, and unloaded boxes of utensils and provender. It was indeed a lovely spot, cool and clean-smelling, framed in ancient trees bearded with Spanish moss, with the dark mysterious expanse of Lake Pontchartrain lapping sleepily up to the shore and a round yellow moon rising high, but all she was interested in was the insect life.
Innumerable flying things fluttered and dived drunkenly around the lamps, and from the shadows came myriads of mosquitoes with a ceaseless hum of tiny tireless wings. She could even see them flickering speckily past her eyes, and hear the rise and fall of individual hungry hoverings around her, while even tinier gnats whined thinly past like diminutive rockets. But not once did the whine build into the typical infuriating crescendo of a gnat’s kamikaze plunge directly into the earhole, and she could watch her bare gleaming arms without seeing them darkened by the settling of a single mote of disrespectful voracity. Her expectant shoulders and back and legs waited for the hair-touch of an almost weightless landing and the microscopic stab of the first probing sting, but time went on and they felt nothing. And she knew that to be first on the market with a pill that would accomplish such a miracle would make what by any standards could be literally called a fortune.
There was soft music coming from the portable players and he was spooning caviar onto the first plates on the neatly laid table.
“Come, Elise, sit down and relax,” he said. “You know by now that nothing is going to bite you.”
“It’s amazing,” she said as she let him seat her. “I must know—did those pill makers give you a good deal?”
“Not too bad,” he answered with no embarrassment. “It will be a royalty of ten cents a hundred, with a guarantee of fifteen thousand dollars a year, and they pay ten thousand at once for the stuff I have in Belem—that is, if there is no hitch.”
“How do you mean? Isn’t it signed yet?”
“The president of the company has to give the final okay, and he’s been on vacation in Honolulu. He will be back tomorrow, and it will be one of the first things they put up to him. They wanted me to wait, but I told them I had a date here that I could not break. Anyway, they can phone me, and I can fly back in a few hours.”
“They’re robbing you,” she said intensely. “I’m a pill maker myself, and I know. If your pills are worth anything, they’re worth twice as much. I’ll prove it to you. I’ll double their offer right now.”
The cork popped from the bottle he was working on. “Please,” he said with a gesture. “No vinegar.”
“Baloney. If you won’t give me a business break, you’re robbing me as well as yourself, and that’d make anything sour.”
“But I’ve practically given my word—”
“They haven’t given theirs, have they? They can still back out and not owe you a nickel. So if they can’t close a deal because somebody’s on vacation, that’s their bad luck. Be an American business man. Send ’em a wire tonight and tell ’em all bets are off.”
“Elise, suppose you are only talking from the Martinis, or the moon, or because you like me a little? Suppose in the morning you wake up and decide you have been foolish? You tell me all bets are off. Then where am I?”
“You don’t know me very well, Buster, but I get your point. All right. When we get home, I’ll give you my personal check for twenty thousand. You take it to the bank as soon as they open—�
�
“And they immediately call the police.”
“Not with the note I’ll give you. There’ll be a code word that tells them it’s okay. And then right away you put in a long-distance call to Chicago and tell those jerks you already made a better deal. We’ll talk to my attorneys about the contract later in the day. Is that good enough for you?”
It was easily as good as anything he could have proposed himself, but he let her spend most of an exceptionally delightful meal selling it to him.
When Mrs Elise Ashville let herself wake up by sybaritically easy stages the next morning, and finally focused her eyes on the bedside clock, it showed ten minutes past eleven.
She squirmed, yawned, stretched, and sprawled again in the enormous bed, draining the last raptures of sleepy recollection, until she suddenly realized that some faint sounds of activity in the apartment should have aroused her somewhat before that. Either the new maid was going to prove as unreliable as her predecessors, or she was a potential jewel who crept in and moved around like a mouse.
Mrs Ashville yawned again and sat up, in an unwontedly agreeable and optimistic mood which could not have been solely due to the single pink vitamin-complex pill that Simon Templar had persuaded her to take the night before.
“Germaine,” she called—quite dulcetly, at first.
There was no response, even after louder repetitions. Germaine Ashville, having done her part by giving her sister-in-law a facial with almost pure ethylhexanediol, and pouring two full quarts of it into her bubble bath, and even spiking all her colognes and perfumes with the same popular odorless insect repellent, was already boarding a plane to Denver with her brother, and the Saint was seeing them off.
THE UNESCAPABLE WORD
1
“In spite of everything I’ve tried to say,” Simon Templar complained once, in a reminiscent vein, “I keep falling over people who insist on thinking of me as a sort of freelance detective. They’ve read so many stories about private eyes that they simply can’t get the picture of a privateer. And when they do get me hooked into a mystery, they always expect me to solve it in about half an hour, with a couple of shiny clues and a neat speech tying them together, just like the wizards do it in those stories—and it’s no use trying to tell ’em that what cracks most cases in real life is ninety-five per cent dull and patient routine work…But there have been a few hallowed occasions when I was able to do it just like a magazine writer. And I can think of one that was practically a classic example of the formula. It even has the place where you could stop and say, ‘Now, dear stupid reader, you have been given all the facts which should enable you to spot the culprit, and if you can’t put your finger on him and give a reason which proves you aren’t only guessing, you should be hit on the head with the collected works of Conan Doyle.’ Incidentally, it’s also a completely uncensorable cop story—because no matter how much anyone disapproves of the word, it would have been a hell of a lot tougher to solve without it.”
This was not long after one of America’s most distinguished law enforcers had stirred up a mild furor in a lull between world crises by stating for publication that in his opinion the time-honored word “cop” was derogatory and should be excised from the vocabulary of all police-respecting citizens.
To Simon, when he stopped at sunset at the neat little adobe motel on Highway 80, on the outskirts of a village with the improbably romantic name of Primrose Pass, mainly because it seemed pointless to load an already long day with another hour’s twilight driving when he would have to sleep somewhere in the Arizona desert anyhow and was in no hurry to get anywhere anyway, Harry Tanner had not been instantly identifiable either as a Cop or as a Police officer, but only as a muscular man with a traitorous bulge in front, stripped to blue jeans and undershirt, who was pushing a mower over a small area of tenderly cherished grass in front of the half-dozen cottages arranged like a miniature hacienda. But in the morning, when Simon stopped by the “office” to beg some ice cubes for his thermos, the same individual was turning over the registration cards from the night before and looked at him with the peculiarly and unmistakably challenging stare of the traditional policeman.
“Anybody ever call you the Saint?” the man asked, with a voice blunt and uncompromising enough to match the stare.
“A few,” Simon murmured neutrally.
The other finished pulling on a khaki shirt, buttoned it, and pinned on a badge which he took from his pants pocket.
“My name’s Harry Tanner. I help my wife run this joint sometimes. The rest of the time I’m the town marshal. Would you be interested in a murder we just had here?”
“If I’m going to need an alibi,” said the Saint gloomily, “I can only hope that either you or your wife stays up all night to watch for any guest who might try to sneak out with the furniture. I don’t know how else I could prove that I didn’t leave my cottage all night.”
Tanner’s mouth barely cracked in the perfunctory sketch of a smile.
“I know you didn’t do this one. I just thought you might help me solve it.”
Simon was so astounded by the novelty of the first sentence that he did not even think of his habitual answer to the second until he was sitting in the marshal’s battered pickup and being driven at exactly the posted twenty-five-miles-per-hour limit through the business center of Primrose Pass, which extended for three whole blocks.
“No point in cutting loose with a siren and getting ever’body all stirred up, when we wouldn’t get there two minutes quicker,” Tanner said. “I had enough of that when I was a cop in Cleveland, Ohio. That’s where I used to read about you, and I hoped I’d meet you, but you never came our way.”
“Did I hear you call yourself a cop?” Simon inquired with discreet interest.
“Yup. Been a cop all my life, practically. They even made me an MP in the Army. Only I always wanted to get out West, ever since I saw my first cowboy picture. So when I happened to read about this town looking for a trained officer, right after I was discharged, it was just what I wanted…But don’t let that word give you any ideas.”
He spun the wheel and steered the truck around a gas station to a dirt road that intersected the highway, with a certain physical grimness which left the Saint confused and wary all over again.
To get the conversation back on more solid ground, Simon asked, “Who’s been murdered?”
“Fellow named Edward Oakridge, out at the Research Station, where we’re going.”
“People always expect me to know everything. It’s very flattering but hard to live up to. What is this Research Station?”
“It’s something run by the Government. They got three scientists working out there—or it was three, up till now—and they monkey around with a lot of electrical stuff. Had to put in special power lines to carry all the juice they use. But not even the guards out there know what they’re researching. I don’t know either—and my own daughter works there.”
Simon instinctively checked the reflex upward movement of an eyebrow, but Tanner did not look at him.
“Is she a scientist or a guard?”
“She types reports for the scientists. But she hardly understands a word of ’em herself. At least, that’s all she’s allowed to say.”
“But don’t tell me they hired her for a top-secret job like that just because they met her in the local drugstore.”
“No. Walter Rand—that’s Professor Rand, he’s the head man on this project—happened to tell me one day that they had too much paperwork and he was going to have to send for a secretary. Marjorie had a secretarial job in the FBI office in Cleveland when I pulled up stakes, and she’d stayed there. There wasn’t anything for her in a town like this when I came here. But her mother always hated her being so far away, so I asked Rand if he’d take her if she’d take the job. She liked the idea of being near us again, too, and of course her security clearance was ready made.”
“It sounds like a lucky break. With this leaning towards cop
-dom that she seems to have inherited from you, she’d probably have ended up a full-fledged G-woman if you hadn’t rescued her.”
“Well, instead of that, she inherits something from her mother that makes her fall in love with a cop,” Tanner said dourly. “Hadn’t been here a month before she was going steady with one of the guards out at the Research Station. Young fellow by the name of Jock Ingram. You’ll meet him. He’s the one that found the body.”
His heavy face, with the eyes narrowed into the glare from the dusty road, invited neither sympathy nor humorous appreciation. He was a man who had spent so many years giving a professional imitation of a sphinx that the pose had taken root.
The Saint lighted a cigarette.
“This murder is starting to sound like a rather family affair,” he remarked. “You said there were three scientists. What about the third?”
“His name is Dr Conrad Soren.”
“And they don’t have any assistants?”
“No. Whatever they’re experimenting with, I guess it’s something they can handle between themselves.”
“But there are other guards, besides Ingram.”
“Yup. Three of ’em. But only one of ’em is on duty at a time. They each have eight hours on and twenty-four hours off, in turn, so none of ’em gets stuck with the night shift all the time.”
“And when was the murder committed?”
“That’s one thing we got to find out,” the marshal said.
The road, whatever its ultimate destination, still stretched ahead in a straight line to the bare horizon, but Tanner slowed up suddenly and made an abrupt turn onto a narrower and even more rutted trail that was marked only by a stake with a small weathered shingle nailed to it on which could barely be read the crude and faded letters that spelled out “Hopewell Ranch.”
In less than a quarter of a mile the ranch came in sight, as they rattled around one of those low deceptive contours which can hide whole townships in an apparently empty plain. The Hopewell Ranch was in no such category of size, in fact it consisted of only two buildings: the long rambling ranch house with an attached garage, and a barn-like structure not far from it. A few palms and cottonwoods and eucalyptus trees lent some of the atmosphere of an oasis to the shallow pocket where the buildings stood, in contrast to the drab sage and greasewood and sahuaro that eked some desiccated sustenance from the arid wilderness around, but it still had a rather pathetically abandoned and defeated air that was in even sharper contrast with its name.
Thanks to the Saint (The Saint Series) Page 10
