“Stacked?”
Mr Fennick winced, his pallor taking on a definite tint of rose.
“I don’t particularly like such vulgar expressions. But, yes, if someone was planning to blackmail me, I suppose she’d be the type they’d use.”
“Then all may not be lost,” said the Saint consolingly. “If some prankster in this Convention is trying to sabotage your bid to be elected Supreme Lollipop by charging you with dissolute habits, the foul conspiracy may yet boomerang. With your new reputation as the Confectionery Casanova, you might become the hero of the Convention. Think what a few shots like that did for Brigitte Bardot.”
“I am hardly in the same category,” said Mr Fennick severely. “And in my case, that’d be all my wife would need.”
Simon Templar nodded.
“Aha. Now it starts to make sense. I gather that Mrs Fennick isn’t here with you.”
“No, she’s home in New York.”
“Enjoying the Theatre, the Ballet, and the Mink, no doubt.”
“Yes, she likes all those things. And she thinks conventions are just an excuse for a lot of men to cut loose and…well, you know…”
“Get into the sort of mischief you were photographed in?”
“Exactly.”
“So that if you tried to explain that snapshot the way you’ve told it to me, you’d expect a fairly hilarious reception.”
“I wouldn’t have the least chance of convincing her.”
“I see.” The Saint produced a thoughtful aureole of smoke. “But at the risk of seeming to harp on the subject, chum, I’m still trying to find out why you were cavorting on the fire escape.”
Mr Fennick wrung his hands—it was the first time Simon had seen that well-worn cliché actually performed, and it corrected his lifelong delusion that it was merely a slightly archaic figure of speech.
“As I told you, I went into a funk. The only thing I could think of was to find the young woman and try to persuade her that whatever she’d been paid for playing her part, I could make it a little more worth her while to testify to the truth.”
“Because that’d certainly be less than half what the photographer or his boss would be expecting to collect. Not bad thinking, for a guy who just came out of a conk on the noggin. But what made you think she’d be hanging on the wall outside?”
“Nothing. But I had an idea where to begin looking.”
The Saint’s eves narrowed fractionally.
“So you did know her, after all.”
“I had seen her once before,” Mr Fennick said precisely. “As a matter of fact, that’s what made it seem so specially shocking and like a dream when I woke up and saw her without—um—the way I described her. She works in the bar downstairs, in the hotel, with one of those flashlight cameras, getting customers to have souvenir pictures taken.”
“Then why didn’t you go down in the elevator, like any respectably indignant customer, and start yelling for the manager?”
“Because I felt certain that somebody on the staff must have been in on the plot. I’m always very careful about locking my door in hotels. Somebody must have given those people a key, or let them into my room. It might have been the elevator boy, or the night clerk—”
“Why couldn’t they have used the fire escape, too?”
“My window was only open a few inches, and there’s a safety chain on the inside. I expect yours has one, too, because of the fire escape being so close. I remembered to make sure the chain was fastened before I went to bed—I don’t carry an excessive amount of cash with me, but I don’t believe in taking unnecessary chances…Well, I thought, if any of the other accomplices sees me looking for the girl, they’ll know I recognized her, and they’d do anything to keep us apart.”
“Didn’t you think anyone would see you talking to her in the bar?”
“That’s why I had to take such extreme steps to avoid the lobby. I intended to wait outside, hoping to follow her when she went home.”
Simon regarded Mr. Fennick with increasing respect. It was becoming indisputably manifest that in spite of his somewhat dehydrated aspect, prissy personality, and fluttering agitation, this bonbon baron had something more active than nougat in his noodle.
“I couldn’t have figured it any better myself if I’d had all the facts,” he murmured, picking up his recently discarded shirt and sliding an idle arm into a sleeve. “But by the same logic, Otis, old bean, I think this is where I’ll have to take over.”
The little man stared.
“You?”
“There’s nothing wrong with your analysis except that it stops short. Never mind about being seen talking to this chick—you can’t even afford to let her hear you. Suppose she doesn’t go for your bid, which could happen for a whole flock of reasons. You’d only have told the Ungodly how scared they’ve got you, and bang goes any chance of bluffing them out of a showdown. Whereas someone else could move in as your representative, proving you’re not all alone in the world, and talking tough, and maybe give ’em some worries they weren’t expecting.”
Mr Fennick pursed his lips, with commendable acuteness for a man in his disconcerting predicament.
“Quite possibly, but why should you, Mr—”
“Templar. Simon Templar.”
In those later days of the Saint’s career, it was no longer such a potentially interesting moment when he gave his real name to a stranger for the first time. The range of possible reactions had become rather standardized. Still, there was always the hope of evoking some absolutely novel response.
Mr Fennick inclined his head with mechanical politeness.
“—Mr Templar,” he continued, with hardly a break. “I’ve already imposed on you enough—”
“But I insist,” said the Saint genially. “And if you give me any trouble, I might have to call the house detective, if this roach farm has such a person, and turn you in as a captured burglar.”
He had tucked in his shirt tails and almost absent-mindedly knotted a tie while this part of the conversation went on, and now by simply shrugging into a coat he was suddenly so completely dressed and ready for any eventuality that his uninvited guest could only open and shut his mouth ineffectually.
“Don’t go away, Otis,” he said from the door. “Just in case your pals haven’t run out of cute tricks, or in case we might have to pull some quaint switch of our own, it might be clever not to give anyone a chance to prove you’ve been in your room lately. Who knows—we might even dare them to prove that that picture wasn’t taken years before you got married, or even that it’s your picture at all. Anyhow, wait till I bring you the first bulletin.”
He was gone before he could be delayed by any further argument.
The elevator was piloted by the same jockey who had taken him up only a little while ago, an elderly individual with drooping shoulders and an air of comatose resignation to the infinite monotony of endlessly identical vertical voyages. He revealed no curiosity or interest whatsoever in why the Saint should want to ride down again at such an hour: one felt that he had long since been anesthetized against anything that could happen in a hotel during a convention, and perhaps at any other time.
“Tell me,” said the Saint, with elaborately casual candor. “If I wanted to play a joke on one of the fellows—a friend of mine—could you let me into his room?”
The man did not even turn his head. In fact, for a number of seconds he appeared to have been afflicted with deafness, until at the ultimate limit of plausible cogitation he wrung from himself a single word of decision:
“Depends.”
“On what?”
The instant the words were out of his mouth, Simon knew he had been too fast. The man pointedly made him wait even longer for the next reply, as a form of corrective discipline.
“Plenty.”
The lift shuddered to a stop at the ground floor, and the gate rumbled open. The pilot held it, waiting for the Saint to disembark, with such a total lack of eagerness to p
ursue the conversation that except for his minimal movements it would have been easy to believe that he was stuffed.
Simon got out, and followed the direction of a neon arrow which proclaimed that it pointed to The Rowdy Room. This proved to be a depressing, under-lighted cavern decorated in blood red and funeral black, with a dance floor large enough for a minuet by four midgets and an orchestra alcove furnished with an upright piano and stands for two other instrumentalists, all of whom had obviously racked up all the overtime they wanted and called it a day. The only rowdiness left was being provided by a quartet of die-hards in one corner, two of whom were foggily listening to some obscure argument being loudly elaborated by the third, while the fourth was frankly falling asleep. The bartender, listlessly polishing glasses, accepted the Saint’s arrival with a disinterested stare which barely suggested that if Simon wanted anything he could ask for it.
Simon ordered a Peter Dawson on the rocks, and after he had tasted it, he said, “Where’s the gal who takes the pictures?”
“Norma? She ain’t here.”
“That settles one thing,” said the Saint mildly. “I was wondering if she’d become invisible.”
The barman squinted at him suspiciously, and said, “She went home early. Had a headache or sump’n.”
“Would you know where I can get in touch with her?”
“She’ll be here tomorrow.”
“That’s the trouble—I may be leaving in the afternoon, much earlier than she’d come to work. I wanted to see her about some pictures that were taken the other night.”
“Well, whyncha say so?” demanded the bartender aggrievedly.
He fumbled through some litter beside the cash register, and turned back with a card. The ornate printing on it could be reduced to “VERE BALTON, Photography,” and an address, “685 Scoden Street.”
“I thought you called her Norma,” Simon said.
“I did. Balton is the guy who has the concession. She works for him.”
“Where is Scoden Street?”
“About five-six blocks from here, on the left off of Geary.”
“And what’s her name?”
“I tolja, Norma,” said the other, with obviously increasing impatience with so much stupidity.
“Nothing else?”
“You tell ’em Norma took the pitchers here,” said the bartender. “They’ll take care of ya.”
“Thank you,” said the Saint.
He finished his drink, put down the exact price and a minimum tip, and sauntered back to the lobby.
If the shapely Norma was not averse to providing certain extracurricular services of the type indicated by Mr Fennick’s story, it was highly implausible that the bartender would know nothing about it. Indeed, it was most probable that he would sometimes help to procure them. Therefore the Saint couldn’t insist on getting in touch with her too urgently, or pressing the questioning too hard, without the risk of telegraphing a warning to the quarry he had yet to identify.
Behind the reception desk, the night clerk, a weedy young man with long hair and acne, was totting up stacks of vouchers on an adding machine. He kept Simon waiting while he ducked his way stubbornly through to the end of a pile, and then looked up with an unctuous affectation of attentiveness.
“Yes, sir?”
“I’m afraid I left my key upstairs,” said the Saint “Can you let me have a spare? Room 409.”
“What is the name, sir?”
“Templar.”
The clerk ducked aside behind a screen that blocked one end of the counter, but he could be heard flipping the pages of an index. After some further groping in a drawer he bobbed back, holding a key.
“Could you show me anything with your name on it, sir?”
Simon impassively produced a driver’s license, and the clerk handed over the key.
“Do you put everyone through this when they lock themselves out?” Simon inquired mildly.
“Yes, sir, if I don’t know them. You can’t be too careful, at this hour of the night, I always say. Especially during a convention.”
“Why especially during a convention?”
“When they get too full of the spirit of the thing, sir, delegates often think of practical jokes to play on each other—all in good fun, of course, but not always appreciated by the victim. You yourself, sir, mightn’t be amused if you found a live seal in your bathtub, and found out that my negligence had enabled your friends to plant it there.”
“I guess you have a point.”
The pimply one bared his yellow teeth ingratiatingly.
“I knew you’d see it, sir. Thank you. Goodnight, sir,” he said, and picked up another sheaf of checks and resumed the busy tapping of his calculator keys without another upward glance.
Simon stepped into the elevator, and the lugubrious liftman let go a carpet sweeper which he was pushing lethargically about the foyer and started the ascent in stoic silence.
Finally the Saint asked, “Plenty of what?”
After another floor had gone by, it transpired that the driver had not lost the thread of his lucubrations.
“Things,” he opined darkly.
They were at the fourth floor again. He held the gate open, without looking at the Saint, but with a rugged air of self-satisfaction with his achievements in both navigation and diplomacy. Simon got out, and headed back to his room.
His excursion had yielded nothing sensational, but at least he had half a name, an address which might be the start of a trail, and some observations which might interest Mr Fennick.
The trouble was that Otis Q Fennick was not there to hear about them.
The room was not big enough to hide even such a slight man as Mr Fennick anywhere except in the closet or under the bed. But if he had been even more jittery than he had shamelessly confessed, it was remotely possible that he could be terrified of anyone who might enter.
“Otis, old marshmallow,” said the Saint reassuringly. “It’s only me—Templar.”
There was no answer.
The bathroom door was ajar. Simon looked inside. Mr Fennick was not there. Nor was he in the closet, or under the bed—Simon ultimately forced himself to verify both places, foolish though it made him feel. But in about half the detective stories that the Saint had read, one of those locations could have been practically counted on to reveal Mr Fennick’s freshly perforated corpse. None of them did. It was almost disappointing.
Simon went to the dresser for the pack of cigarettes which he had left where he put down Mr Fennick’s business card. Now he found the card tucked half into the opening of the package, in such a way that he couldn’t have extracted a cigarette without having his attention focused on it. On the back had been written, in a cramped but meticulous script:
I simply can’t let you bother with my problems. I’ll just have to pay up and make the best of it. Please forget the whole thing.
Simon sat down on the bed and picked up the telephone.
“Mr Fennick, please,” he said.
“One moment, sir.” It was the oleaginous voice of the night clerk, who was evidently entrusted with several chores by a thrifty management. Then, “I’m sorry, sir, but Mr Fennick’s line still has a Do Not Disturb on it.”
“Since when?”
“He asked me to put it on when he came in, sir, at one-thirty.”
“I see…Would you give me his room number?”
The pause this time was almost imperceptible.
“I’m afraid I couldn’t take the responsibility for that, sir. He might be very annoyed if you disturbed him by knocking on his door.”
“What makes you think I’d do that?”
“I’m sure you wouldn’t want to, sir. So you won’t mind asking the manager for the information, will you? He comes on at eight o’clock. Thank you, sir.”
“Invite me to your funeral,” said the Saint sweetly, but he said it after a click in the receiver had announced that the clerk had already terminated the discussion.
&n
bsp; For a few minutes, in a simmer of sheer exasperation, he contemplated some quite extravagant forms of retaliation against everyone who had contributed to wasting his time for the past hour. But at the end of a cigarette he laughed, and fell asleep thinking it was lucky he hadn’t gone any farther on a wild-goose chase with such a protégé.
If Mr Otis Q Fennick was such an eviscerated marvel that he insisted on submitting to the crudest kind of contrived shakedown, without even a struggle, after having been offered the best advice and assistance, then he deserved to stew in his own syrup.
The Saint slumbered on his relaxing justification for precisely three hours and seventeen minutes, at which time a crew of civic servants arrived under his window with some raspingly geared conveyance and began to decant into it the garbage cans which had previously been only silent ornaments of the alley, clanging and crashing them back and forth as a tympanic accompaniment to their mutual shouts of encouragement and impromptu snatches of vocalizing.
By the time they had moved on he was wide awake and knew that he had no hope of feeling drowsy again that morning. But as he lay still stretched out with his eyes closed the entire Fennick episode unrolled again in his memory, and the earlier mood of exasperation crept back. Only instead of being a petulant flash of anger, it was now a considered and solid resentment that could not be dismissed.
He tried to dismiss it while he got up and showered and shaved and went down to the coffee shop for breakfast, but it refused to go away.
“You’ve got every excuse to duck this,” he had to tell himself finally, “except one that’ll let you forget it.”
If Mr Fennick consented to pay blackmail, it could well be maintained that this was Mr Fennick’s own private business, and the hell with him. But if a blackmailer got away with blackmail, that had always been the Saint’s self-appointed business, as had any kind of unpunished evil. And it was doubly so when the circumstances ruled out any possibility of legal retribution.
Simon finished his second cup of coffee and went back through the lobby, where a totally different staff had taken over. This time he had no difficulty in getting Mr Fennick’s room number, which was 607, but the switchboard operator told him that the Do Not Disturb was still on the phone. For a moment he contemplated going up and banging on the door, but then he reflected that Mr Fennick, in the shattered condition in which the sweetmeat sachem must have regained his room, had probably taken a sleeping pill and would not exactly scintillate if he were prematurely aroused.
The Saint to the Rescue (The Saint Series) Page 2
