The Saint Sees it Through (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  If it happens to be your telephone that rings, and you struggle out of pleasant dreams to curse any dizzy friend who would call you at that hour, and you say “Hello” in churlish tones, some oafish voice is likely as not to give you a song and a dance about being a telephone tester, and would you please stand three feet away from the phone and say “Methodist Episcopalian” or some such phrase, for which you get the horse laugh when you pick up the phone again.

  This is considered top-hole wit in some circles.

  If this were the case, Simon reflected, no harm could be done by answering. But what harm in any case? he asked himself, and lifted the receiver.

  “Hullo.”

  “Ernst?” asked a sharp and vaguely familiar voice. “I’m glad you came early. I’ll be there immediately. Something has arisen in connection with Gamaliel Foley.”

  Click. The caller hung up. That click was echoed by the Saint’s memory, and he directed his flashlight at the appointment pad to confirm it. There it was, sandwiched between the names of Mrs Gerald Meldon and James Prather. Gamaliel Foley.

  The Saint was torn between two desires. One was to remain and eavesdrop on the approaching meeting of Dr Z and his caller with the vaguely familiar voice; the other was to find Gamaliel Foley and learn what he could learn. The latter procedure seemed more practical, since the office offered singularly few conveniences for eavesdropping, but Simon was saddened by the knowledge that he would never know what happened when the conferees learned that it was not Dr Zellermann who had answered the call.

  He replaced the wall panel and went away. On the twelfth floor he summoned the elevator, and he wasn’t certain whether or not he hoped he wouldn’t encounter Park Avenue’s psyche soother. It might have been an interesting passage at charms, for the doctor could give persiflage with the best. But no such contretemps occurred on the way out, and Simon walked the block to Lexington Avenue and repaired to a drug-store stocked with greater New York’s multiple set of telephone directories.

  He found his man, noted the Brooklyn address, and hailed a taxicab.

  For a short while Simon Templar gave himself over to trying to remember a face belonging to the voice that had spoken with such urgency on the telephone. The owner of the voice was excited, which would distort the voice to some extent, and there was the further possibility that Simon had never heard the voice over the telephone before, which would add further distortion to remembered cadences and tonal qualities.

  His worst enemies could not call Simon Templar methodical. His method was to stab—but to stab unerringly—in the dark. This characteristic, possessed to such an incredible degree by the Saint, had wrought confusion among those same worst enemies on more occasions than can be recorded here—and the list wouldn’t sound plausible, anyway.

  So, after a few unsatisfactory sallies into the realm of Things To Be Remembered, he gave up and leaned back to enjoy the ride through the streets of Brooklyn. He filed away the incident under unfinished business and completely relaxed. He gave no thought to his coming encounter with Gamaliel Foley, of which name there was only one in all New York’s directories, for he had no referent. Foley, so far as he was concerned, might as well be Adam, or Zoroaster—he had met neither.

  When the cab driver stopped at the address the Saint had given, Simon got out and walked back two blocks to the address he wanted. This was an apartment house of fairly respectable mien, a blocky building rising angularly into some hundred feet of midnight air. Its face was pocked with windows lighted at intervals, and its whole demeanour was one of middle-class stolidity. He searched the name-plates beside the door, found Foley on the eighth floor. The Saint sighed again. This was his night for climbing stairs. He rang a bell at random on the eleventh floor, and when the door buzzed, slipped inside. He went up the carpeted stairway, ticking off what the residents had had for dinner as he went. First floor, lamb, fish, and something that might have been beef stew; second floor, cabbage; third floor, ham flavoured with odours of second floor’s cabbage; and so on.

  He noted a strip of light at the bottom of Foley’s door. He wouldn’t be getting the man out of bed, then. Just what he would say, Simon had no idea. He always left such considerations to the inspiration of the moment. He put knuckles to the door.

  There was no sound of a man getting out of a chair to grump to the door in answer to a late summons. There was no sound at all. The Saint knocked again. Still no sound. He tried the door. It opened on to a living-room modestly furnished with medium-priced over-stuffed pieces.

  “Hullo,” Simon called softly. “Foley?”

  He stepped inside, closed the door. No one was in the living-room. On the far side was a door leading into a kitchen, the other no doubt led into the bedroom. He turned the kitchen light on, looked about, switched off the light, and knocked on the bedroom door. He opened it, flicked the light switch.

  There was someone here, all right—or had been. What was here now was not a person, it was a corpse. It sprawled on the rug, face down, and blood had seeped from the back to the dark green carpet. It was—had been—a man.

  Without disturbing the body any more than necessary, Simon gathered certain data. He had been young, somewhere in his thirties; he was a white-collar worker, neat, clean; he bore identification cards which named him Gamaliel Bradford Foley, member of the Seamen’s Union.

  The body bore no information which would link this man with Dr Ernst Zellermann. Nor did the apartment, for that matter. The Saint searched it expertly, so that it seemed as if nothing had been disturbed, yet every possible hiding-place had been thoroughly explored. Foley, it seemed, was about to become engaged to a Miss Martha Lane, Simon gathered from a letter which he shamelessly read. The comely face which smiled from a picture on Foley’s dresser was probably her likeness.

  Since no other information was to be gathered here, the Saint left. He walked a half-dozen blocks to a crowded all-night drug-store, and went into an empty phone booth, where he dialled Brooklyn police.

  He told the desk sergeant that at such and such an address “you will find one Gamaliel Foley, F-o-l-e-y, deceased. You’ll recognise him by the knife he’s wearing—in his back.”

  3

  At the crack of ten-thirty the next morning, Avalon Dexter’s call brought him groggily from sleep.

  “It’s horribly early,” she said, “but I couldn’t wait any longer to find out if you’re all right.”

  “Am I?” the Saint asked.

  “I think you’re wonderful. When do you want to see me?”

  “As soon as possible. Yesterday, for example. Did you have a good time last night?”

  “Miserable. And you?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t call it exciting. I thought about you at odd moments.”

  “Yes, I know,” she said. “Whenever you did, I turned warm all over, and wriggled.”

  “Must have been disconcerting to your escort.”

  She laughed, bells at twilight.

  “It cost me a job, I think. He’d peer at me every time it happened. I think he concluded it was St Vitus. The job was in Cleveland, anyway.”

  “Some of the best people live in Cleveland,” Simon said.

  “But you don’t, so I didn’t go.”

  “Ordinarily, I’d have a nice fast come-back for such a leading remark, but I seem to have trouble finding any words at all.”

  “You could say ‘I love you.’ ”

  “I love you,” Simon said.

  “Me, too, kid.”

  “This being Friday,” Simon said, “what do you say we go calling on people after we have brunched together, and then let the rest of the day take care of itself?”

  “That scrambling sound,” she said, “is eggs in my kitchen. So hurry.”

  “Thirty minutes,” said the Saint, and hung up.

  He had never needed thirty minutes to shave, shower, and dress, but he needed to make a call.

  Hamilton said, “What kind of a jam are you in this time?”

/>   “If you can get anything on one Gamaliel Bradford Foley,” the Saint said, “it might be useful. I’d do it myself, but you can do it faster, and I expect to be sort of busy on other things.”

  “What sort of other things?”

  “I’m going to read the papers, and take my girl calling.”

  “The same girl?”

  “But definitely,” said the Saint.

  “What have you learned?”

  “Nothing,” the Saint said, “that is of any specific use to us, but the wind is full of straws. I’m watching to see how they fall.”

  “I trust you know the difference between straws and hay,” Hamilton said somewhat darkly, and rang off.

  Simon picked up a paper on the way out of the hotel, and found the death of Gamaliel Bradford Foley recorded in two paragraphs on an inside page.

  "DEATH LOOKS IN ON TOP SEAMEN’S UNION OFFICIAL

  Gamaliel Bradford Foley, secretary of the Seamen’s Union, Local 978 (AFL), was found stabbed to death in his Brooklyn apartment early this morning by police. A telephone tip—“You’ll recognise him by the knife he’s wearing—in his back”—sent patrol car 12 to the scene. Officers J. R. McCutcheon and I. P. Wright found the corpse in the apartment bedroom, with a butcher knife in its back. An arrest is expected any moment, Inspector Fernack told reporters today.

  It wasn’t a smile that twisted the Saint’s sensitive mouth as the taxi took him to Avalon’s place—it was a grimace of scepticism. “An arrest is expected any moment.” He shrugged. The police certainly knew no more than himself—not as much, as a matter of fact. He knew of the connection, however nebulous, between Foley and Dr Zellermann. How could the police expect an arrest?

  Ah, well. That was the sort of thing reporters put on copy paper. City editors had to be considered, too. If you, as a reporter, phoned your desk with a story, you wanted something to lead into a follow-up yarn, and “arrest expected” certainly indicated more to come.

  Avalon met him in a housecoat of greenish-blue that in a strange and not understandable way was completely right for her. She turned up her face and he kissed her on the mouth, that mouth so full of promise. They said nothing.

  She led him to a divan, where he sat wordless with her beside him. Her tawny hair was shot with glints of gold. Her eyes, he noted in passing, were dark, yet alight. He thought of a title by Dale Jennings, Chaos Has Dark Eyes.

  She said, “Hullo, boy.”

  He grinned.

  “I burgle joints and discover bodies. I am not a respectable character. You wouldn’t like me if you knew me.”

  “I know you,” she said. “I like you. I’ll demonstrate—later.”

  She got up, went into the kitchen, and brought back a bottle of beer.

  “I hope you belong to the beer-for-breakfast school.”

  “There’s nothing like it, unless it’s Black Velvet. But that’s for special breakfasts.”

  “Isn’t this?”

  “Well, not quite, you must admit.”

  ‘Yes, I must admit.” She gave him a smile, a short kiss. “Excuse me while I make eggs perform.”

  He sipped his beer and wondered about Mrs Gerald Meldon, whose Park Avenue address he had decided to visit. Gerald Meldon was a name to conjure with in Wall Street. He was at one time the Boy Wonder of the mart. If he went for a stock, it signalled a rush of hangers-on. This had caused him to operate under pseudonyms, which the Saint considered having a touch of swank—a stock-market operator using phony names. If Meldon were known to be dumping a stock, this was another signal. Everybody who could get hold of the information dumped his. The stock usually went down.

  It had been Gerald Meldon, the son—obviously—of a rich father, who had made collegiate history by dressing in white coveralls, driving along Fifth Avenue, and stealing all the street lamp bulbs one afternoon. It had been Gerald Meldon who had been chosen by Grantland Rice as All-American tackle from Harvard, accent and all.

  The Saint knew nothing of Mrs Gerald Meldon, but he could understand that reasons might exist why she should seek psychiatric help from Dr Z. Well, he would see what he would see.

  It was easy enough to find Meldon’s address in the directory, and after breakfast that was what he did.

  When he and Avalon arrived there later—she was now in a tailored suit of tan gabardine—the first thing he saw caused him to clutch her arm.

  “Sorry,” he muttered, “but my eyes have suddenly gone back on me.”

  She put a hand on his. Her dark eyes clouded.

  “What is it, darling?”

  “I’m seeing things. It must have been the beer.”

  She followed his gaze.

  “I’m seeing things too.”

  “Surely not what I’m seeing. Describe to me carefully what you think you see.”

  “Well, there’s a kind of liveried slave on the end of a dog leash. Then, on the other end of the leash is a mink coat, and inside the coat is a dachshund. The man is leading the dog—or vice versa—from, er, pillar to post.”

  The Saint sighed explosively.

  “If you see it, too, there’s nothing wrong with me I guess.”

  The sad-faced little dog led the liveried attendant nearer. The dog wagged its tail at them, the attendant elevated his nose a trifle.

  “Doesn’t the little beast find that a trifle warm, this time of year?” he asked the attendant.

  “It isn’t a question of warmth, sir—it’s—ah, shall we say face? He’s a Meldon property, you know.”

  Simon could detect no trace of irony in tone or attitude.

  “But—mink? A trifle on the ostentatious side?”

  “What else, sir?” asked the gentleman’s gentleman.

  The Saint rang the doorbell. He and Avalon were presently shown into the drawing-room, furnished in chrome and leather, lightened by three excellent Monets, hooded in red velvet drapes. Mrs Meldon came to them there.

  She was most unexpected. She did not conform. She was beautiful, but not in the fashion affected by the house. Hers was an ancient beauty, recorded by Milton, sung by Sappho. She was tall and dark. Her hair reminded you of Egyptian princesses—black and straight, outlining a dark face that kings might have fought for. She walked with an easy flowing motion in high heels that accentuated a most amazing pair of slim ankles and exciting legs. These latter were bare and brown.

  Her dress was of some simple stuff, a throw-away factor until you saw how it high-lighted such items as should be high-lighted. It clung with loving care to her hips, it strutted where it should strut. She had a placid smile, dark eyes brightened with amusement, and a firm handshake.

  Her voice held overtones of curiosity.

  “You wanted to see me?”

  The Saint introduced himself.

  “I am Arch Williams, a researcher for Time magazine. This is my wife.”

  “Quite a dish,” Mrs Meldon said. “I’ll bet you play hell with visiting firemen. I’m very happy to meet you. Drink? Of course. You look the types.”

  Her teeth, the Saint noted, were very white. She rang a bell with a brown hand. A servant appeared.

  “Move the big bar in here, Walker.”

  To the Saint, “Those monkey suits kill me. Gerry thinks they’re necessary. Prestige, you know.” She made the phrase sound like unacceptable language from a lady. “Time, hmm? What do you want from me? Never mind, yet. Wait’ll we get a drink. You have lovely legs, Mrs Williams.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Oh, don’t thank me. I had nothing to do with it. But they are pretty. I hope your husband appreciates them. So many don’t.”

  The Saint said nothing. He wanted to watch.

  “I think he appreciates them,” Avalon murmured. “Don’t you, dear?”

  Simon smiled.

  “So many don’t,” Mrs Meldon said. “You can pour yourself into a sheer tube of a dress, like mine, and a husband will look at you, glance at his watch, and give you hell for being thirty minutes late. My God, how d
o men expect us to make ourselves—Oh, here are the drinks. Name your poison.”

  When they had drinks, Mrs Meldon gave the Saint a slow smile.

  “Well, Mr Researcher, what now?”

  “I have been assigned to find out what I can about Dr Ernst Zellermann. We’re going to pick a Doc of the Year. No slow-poke, medicine, you know.”

  Mrs Meldon stared at him.

  “My God, you talk in that style! Don’t you find it nauseating?”

  “I quit,” Simon said. “But could I ask you a few questions, Mrs Meldon? We’ve picked some possible subjects from the professional standpoint, and it’s my job to find out what their patients think of them.”

  “Why pick on me?”

  “You’re a patient of Dr Zellermann’s?”

  “Well…uh, yes.”

  The Saint filed her hesitation away for future reference.

  “How do you like him?” he asked.

  “He’s rather colossal, in a nauseating way.”

  “So? I should think a feeling of that sort would hamper the…er…rapport between doctor and patient.”

  “Oh, it does,” she said, “no end. He wishes I’d like him. A phony, he.”

  “Really? I thought he was quite reputable.”

  “What is reputable?” Mrs Meldon countered. “Is it what empty-headed bitches say who are suckers for a patriarchal look and soft hands? Is it what some jerk says—‘Five hundred dollars I paid, for a single interview’—after he’s stung? He has an MD, so what? I know an abortionist who has one.”

  “It helps,” said the Saint.

  “What do you want to know about him?” Mrs Meldon asked. “When he was three years old in Vienna, a butcher slapped his hands because he reached for a sausage. As a result he puts his nurse in a blue smock. He won’t have a white uniform around him. He doesn’t know this, of course. He has no idea that the butcher’s white apron caused a psychic trauma. He says he insists on blue uniforms because they gladden the eyes.”