The Saint Sees it Through (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  “He begins to sound like not our kind of man,” the Saint put in.

  “Oh, go ahead and pick him,” said the Egyptian princess. “Who the hell cares? He wouldn’t be the first mass of psychic trauma picked as an outstanding jerk. No inhibitions, says he. It’s a little tough on somebody who’s put inhibitions by the board for these many moons to go to him as a patient. Shooting fish down a barrel, I call it. Another drink? Of course. Mix it yourself.”

  She crossed her lovely legs in such a fashion that a good portion of thigh was visible. She didn’t bother to pull down her dress. She seemed tired of the discussion, even a trifle embittered, and a pattern began to form in the Saint’s mind. He put early conclusions aside in the interest of conviviality and mixed drinks.

  “Tell me,” he said, “how you expect to get psychiatric help from a man you hold in such disregard?”

  She straightened up.

  “Disregard? Nothing of the sort. He knows the patter, he has the desk-side manner. He can make you tell things about yourself you wouldn’t tell yourself. Maybe it helps, I don’t know. Yes, I must admit it does.

  It helped me to understand myself, whatever small consolation that may be. I didn’t want to understand myself. But Gerry insisted. He wants to keep up with things. Like mink coats on dogs.”

  “You would say, then, that your relations with Dr Zellermann have been pleasant?”

  She looked at him steadily as he handed her a drink. “Pleasant? What’s that? Sometimes you get caught up in an emotion. Emotion is a driving power you can’t ignore. When you get caught up in it, whatever you do seems pleasant at the time. Even if you curse yourself afterwards, and even if you don’t dare talk about it.”

  “Do you mean, then, he isn’t ethical?”

  She twisted a smile.

  “What’s ethical? Is being human ethical? You’re born human, you know. You can’t help certain impulses. See Freud. Or Krafft-Ebing. To err is human.”

  “And he errs?”

  “Of course he does. Even if he is a so-called witch doctor of the mind. Even if he has studied Adler and Brill and Jung and Jones. You don’t change a character. All the things that went into making him what he is are unalterable. They’ve happened. Maybe some of his professors, or fellow psychiatrists, have helped him to evaluate those factors in their proper perspective, but he’s still Homo sapiens and subject to the ills they’re heir to.”

  The Saint drank his drink, set the empty glass on the elaborate portable bar.

  “We’ve taken enough of your time. Thanks for being so helpful.”

  Mrs Meldon rose to her full and lovely height.

  “I’m no cross section on the man. Many more think he’s wonderful than not. And in some ways,” she said thoughtfully, “he’s quite a guy, I guess.”

  The Saint did not ask what those ways were. He took himself and Avalon away, and hailed a taxi. When they were in it, and he had given the address of James Prather to the driver, he let himself consider Mrs Meldon.

  “Blackmail,” he said finally;

  “Ah, beg pardon?” Avalon murmured. “Understanding not.”

  “It’s in the picture somewhere,” he insisted. “I don’t care how free from inhibition she may be, she wouldn’t be as bitter as she was unless he’s bleeding her in some fashion. How, is the question.”

  “I don’t expect to be of any help,” Avalon said meekly, “but I suspect the lady has played fast and loose at one time or another with the doctor—or others.”

  “Could be,” Simon answered. “And you are a help, you know, just by being.”

  That line of thought occupied them shamelessly during the remainder of the ride.

  James Prather they found to occupy an expensive flat in an expensive neighbourhood. He gave them a rather nervous welcome, bade them be seated, and did not offer a drink. James Prather paced the floor in house slippers, smoking-jacket, and fawn-coloured slacks. He was a man middling thirty, with great blue eyes that reminded you of a lobster. His chin was a hue, neither pale nor blue.

  He twisted the question out between writhing fingers.

  “Yes? What is it?”

  The Saint represented himself again as a Time magazine man, and named the subject of his research.

  “Yes, yes,” Prather said. “What about, Dr Zellermann? What kind of a man, or what kind of a doctor?”

  “Both,” said the Saint.

  “Ah, well—” The telephone rang. “Excuse me.”

  Prather answered, listened intently for a moment. Then he shot a glance at the Saint.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes. I see. Good-bye.”

  He turned to Simon.

  “Will you please get out of here?”

  The Saint watched Mr Prather at first with a mild disdain, as if he were watching a caterpillar in somebody else’s salad; then with mild amusement, as if he had discovered the owner of the salad to be his dipsomaniac Uncle Lemuel; then with concern, as if he had remembered that Uncle Lem was without issue, and might leave that hand-painted cuff-link to his only nephew; then with resignation, as if it were suddenly too late to rescue Uncle—or the caterpillar.

  Simon motioned Avalon to a tasteful divan, and seated himself. His eyes were now mocking and gay, with blue lights. His smile was as carefree and light as a lark at dawn. He took a gold pencil and a pad from his pocket.

  “You were saying,” he prompted, “about Dr Zellermann?”

  James Prather’s fingers were like intertwined pallid snakes, writhing in agony.

  “Please,” he begged. “You must go at once. I have no time for you now. Come back tomorrow, or next week. An important appointment, unexpected. Sorry, but—”

  He went to the door, and held it open.

  The Saint considered, and after due and deliberate consideration rose and helped Avalon to her feet.

  “I’d like to come back,” he told Prather at the door.

  Prather nodded nervously, watched the Saint and Avalon walk toward the elevator for a few feet, then almost slammed the door. Simon pushed the elevator button and, just before the door opened, planted a swift kiss on her startled but quickly responsive mouth.

  “Wait for me in the lobby, darling,” he whispered, and handed her inside the car.

  He took up a post of observation farther down the hall, so that the elevator door was half-way between him and Prather’s door. He suspected he would not have long to wait before something happened. What that something might be, he was unable to predict.

  He thought of the false trails he had run down before he began to sniff around Cookie’s Cellar. He wondered if this would turn out to be another. Each of his previous attempts to locate the object of his search had uncovered one or more nests of illegality.

  One had led him to a sort of warehouse, a huge structure where vast numbers of bottles of bona-fide liquors were made less intoxicating by the simple addition of faintly coloured distilled water. All very healthful, no doubt, and tending to reduce the incidence of drunkenness among habitués of clip clubs like Cookie’s—where, incidentally, one of the delivery trucks had led him. This wholesale watering of drinks had another humanitarian aspect: it saved work for the bartenders. Still, when he remembered the quality of Cookie’s drinks, the Saint concluded that she and/or her bartenders had initiative along that same line. The Saint felt that there was room for reasonable doubt that the reduction of the alcoholic potency of the drinks stemmed from compassionate motives, cynical though that conclusion might be.

  Another trail had dragged across it a herring that had turned out to be the numbers racket. During his brief examination of exponents of mathematical larceny, he had been led again, by one of the collectors, to Cookie’s.

  He had run down a couple of false leads that led nowhere except to the decision that this was Mecca for the chiseller, and that some of almost everybody’s best friends are petty crooks at bottom.

  The Saint was looking for bigger game. Perhaps the rising elevator would bring some.
r />   It regurgitated two young men who were beyond doubt fresh in from the sea. They wore shore clothes, but the sea was in their tanned faces, their hard hands, and the set of their legs, braced automatically for the roll of a deck. The Saint couldn’t see their eyes in the hall’s gloom, but he knew they would have the characteristic look of those who gaze habitually on circular horizons.

  They walked without speaking to James Prather’s door, thumbed the button, were admitted. The Saint moved cat-like to the door, but listening brought nothing. The door was heavy, the walls designed to give privacy to the occupant. Simon sighed, summoned the elevator, and joined Avalon, who was sitting in one of those chairs that clutter the lobbies of apartment houses and gazing at the uninspiring wallpaper with a forlorn expression.

  “I beg your pardon, Miss,” he said, “but I was attracted by your beauty, and can’t help asking you a question. I am a representative of Grimes Graphite, Inc.—‘Grimes gets the grime,’ you know—and felt certain that you must use it. Is that what makes your skin glow so?”

  “My mother before me, and her mother before her, rubbed their faces each night with Grimes’s Graphite. But I don’t use it myself. I loathe it.”

  “That is hardly the point at issue, is it? We can use that line about your maternal progenitors, run a photo of yourself—do you ski?—no matter, we can fix that. And we might even be persuaded to raise the ante.”

  “You twisted my bank-book,” Avalon said. “I’m your gal.”

  “Really?”

  She smiled.

  “Really.”

  They looked at each other for a long moment, until several persons came through the front door in a group, of which the male members stared at Avalon with very obvious admiration. The Saint took her outside.

  “An idea has slugged me,” he said, “and I don’t want you to be seen talking to me until we’re ready. I just hope our sailor boys give me a couple of minutes to tell you.”

  “What are you talking about?” she demanded as he hailed a passing taxi.

  He helped her in.

  “Wait,” he told the driver, and closed the glass panel separating the production end of the cab from the payload.

  “I have a faint hunch,” he told Avalon in a low voice. ‘Two young men will presently issue from that door. Possibly you saw them come in. Tanned, one in a fresh-pressed grey suit, the other in blue? Did they notice you?”

  “Looked right through me.”

  “Don’t be bitter, darling. They had big things on their minds. On their way down, they’ll be free of care and ready to paint the town. On the way down, they’ll remember you, and would be anxious to spend their newly-acquired wealth on you.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  By not so much as the twitch of a nerve did the Saint reveal his thoughts. He had not talked too much; he never talked too much. But if Avalon were among the Ungodly—and his every red corpuscle stood up on its hind feet and howled at the thought—she would know whether he was breathing hard on the heels of truth or not. Her knowledge would then be communicated to the Boys Above.

  He hoped, and was not prepared to admit even to himself how much he hoped, that his shadowy objectivity had no foundation in fact. But in his unorthodox plan of manoeuvring, a failure to appraise situations and people with a fishy eye often led to the filling of mourners’ benches. He’d helped to fill a few himself in his day.

  And so the smile he gave Avalon was gay as confetti on New Year’s Eve.

  “I’m not so sure, old thing, that I myself know what I’m talking about. But if I do, those boys will come out of there with one single first desire: transportation to celebration. And I’d rather they kept greedy eyes off our cab.”

  He opened the glass panel.

  “Pull up to the corner and wait,” he told the driver.

  With one of those lightning decisions that was the despair of his enemies and the envy of his friends, Simon Templar reorganised his offence. He wanted to talk to those two young men who had gone a-knocking at James Prather’s door, but he didn’t want them to know that he wanted to talk to them.

  He looked gravely at Avalon.

  “Will you do something for me?”

  “I’ll bake a cake or slice a throat,” she said softly. “Or cross Forty-second and Broadway against the traffic light at Saturday noon.”

  “This is an even greater sacrifice,” he said mockingly. “I want you to go back into that apartment house and do some lobby loitering.”

  Avalon didn’t frown, didn’t raise her eyebrows. She meditated for the space of ten seconds. Then she raised her eyes to his.

  “I get the pitch, except for one thing. Who are you?”

  “Your agent, of course.”

  “Of course. So I manage to be seen when they come down, and will be here at the kerb with them when you drive up. I’ll be telling them I can’t go with them, but you’ll allow me to be persuaded, provided you come along. Then we all go off in your cab.” She gave him a quick kiss. “I should fall for a ten per center yet. Everything happens to me.”

  She was out and clicking along the sidewalk on slim heels. The Saint watched her for a moment and wondered. What a partner she would make! She had divined his scheme of action, and with no prompting. She had known, without words, what his plan was. All he had had to do was sketch the bare outlines, and she had filled in the details.

  “Drive around the block,” he told the driver.

  It was on the third circumnavigation that the Saint saw Avalon and the two seamen at the kerb in front of the apartment house. He amused himself with the idea that these were the only live persons he had seen on his rounds: all others had been members of the Bronx nobility walking their dogs.

  “Stop there,” he commanded, and the cab driver drew up with a satisfying squeal of rubber.

  “Darling,” the Saint said to Avalon, “I was afraid you’d have gone. I’m horribly late.”

  “Aren’t you, just?” she said. “I was about to take off. Well, since you’re here—By the way, these are Joe Hyman and Sam Jeffries. Joe is the one with the glint.”

  Simon shook hands.

  “Simon Simplon, I,” he said. “Hullo, kids. Where away?”

  Avalon looked dubious.

  “I’m not sure you’re invited on this jaunt, Simon. The boys and I were just setting out to give the town a reddish hue.”

  The Saint said, “But I’m your agent. You can’t do anything without me.”

  She raised her eyebrows.

  “Anything?”

  “Well—?”

  The sailors snickered.

  Avalon stamped a foot.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Miss Dexter,” Simon told her sternly, “according to law, I am your agent. Perhaps that phrase carries implications which need not be considered here. I still say that I should be able to advise you on your goings about.”

  She put a curl into her lip.

  “Because you’re my agent?”

  “Lowly though that may be, yes.”

  Joe Hyman, stocky, grey-suited, and Sam Jeffries, tall in blue, shifted from one foot to the other.

  The Saint could have kissed her. She showed that perfect combination of camaraderie and contempt, of distrust and declination, that a temperamental artist exhibits toward her agent.

  “How do you do?” the Saint said, and shook hands.

  Joe Hyman was inarticulate, with small hard hands. He shook as if his life depended upon it. Sam Jeffries gave the Saint a handful of limp bananas.

  “We were just about to go out and put an edge on the town,” Jeffries said.

  The Saint appeared to consider.

  “A sound idea, seems to me. Why don’t we all do it?”

  Each of the boys looked at Avalon. They obviously didn’t relish extra company. She looked at them, then at the Saint. She shrugged. Sam Jeffries said, “Why not?”

  So they all climbed into the Saint’s cab. As Simon fol
lowed them into the interior, he glanced upward. He saw peering from a window the face of James Prather.

  4

  The first thing the Saint noticed, when he was seated in the jump seat—so he could watch through the rear window to see if they were being followed—was that Sam Jeffries had drawn from his pocket a snub-nosed revolver and pointed it unwaveringly at the vitals of Simon Templar.

  “My goodness,” the Saint ejaculated mildly.

  The revolver was held so that Avalon couldn’t see it. She elevated exciting eyebrows. The Saint looked at her, then at Sam Jeffries. He shrugged.

  “The meter,” he said, gesturing at his back. “It clicks and clicks.”

  The revolver seemed to waggle approbation.

  Sam Jeffries eyed Simon for a long time.

  “You’re quite a guy, ain’t you, bud?”

  Simon shrugged.

  “Oh—I wouldn’t go that far.”

  “We think you’re quite a guy,” Sam insisted. “We’ve been told you’re more’n that. You see, I recognised you. You’ve had too many photos printed in the papers—Saint.”

  Simon smiled, a devil-may-care smile, a smile as light as butterflies’ worries.

  “So? And now that we’re putting everything on the barrel-head, why are you holding that cannon on me?”

  Avalon gasped, and glanced side wise.

  “Well,” Sam Jeffries said, “I guess it ain’t necessary. I really wouldn’t shoot you without’n you done more’n you’ve did.”

  Simon grinned.

  “Thanks. Just to get the record straight, I really am this young lady’s agent. She’s a night-club singer.”

  Stocky Joe Hyman said, “Huh?”

  Sam Jeffries made a threatening motion at his pal.

  “’F she says she’s a singer, she’s a singer, see? ’N ’f he says he’s her agent, well, shaddup, see?”

  “I didn’t mean nothing,” Joe said.

  “Well, Mister?” Sam said to Simon.

  The Saint eyed the gun, the neat blue suit, the maroon tie, the long tanned face of Sam Jeffries. He began to move one hand toward his inner coat pocket.