The candy company’s president had his fingertips pressed to his temples and his thumbs on his cheeks, his hands lightly covering his eyes, in an attitude of intense concentration, and he took no advantage of the moment of silence that Simon offered him.
The Saint got up and walked over to the carton that the other had brought in, giving him time, and lifted the lid inquisitively. What he saw first was a mechanic’s cap on top of a crumpled suit of coveralls, which made him suddenly and purposefully delve further. Underneath them he came to the source of the muffled clanking he had heard, a well-worn set of plumber’s tools in an open carrier, on top of which was a cheap pair of tinted glasses.
“Well, this fills in a few more blanks,” he murmured. “You could have bought the tools at any second-hand store, and the overalls and glasses anywhere, and they make a much better disguise than a false beard. Even if anyone noticed you, the description would never fit Otis Q Fennick, the genius behind Jumbo Juicies. Even your colleagues on the convention probably wouldn’t recognize you on a fast walk-through. And yet you’d only need a minute in a booth in any public john to change into it or out again. You’re just loaded with wasted talent, daddy-o. The only flaw is that you’re still stuck with Liane, who could still give the cops that missing motive. One thing leads to another, as the actress tried to warn the bishop when he helped her off with her galoshes.”
Mr Fennick sat perfectly still, so that for a second or two Simon seriously wondered whether the accumulated shocks and strains could have been too much for a weak heart.
Then the communicating door burst open, and the surly duenna of the outer office burst in.
For an instant the sheer outraged astonishment of seeing the Saint standing by the desk made her falter in her tracks and almost choked off the words that were piled up to burst from her mouth, but the pressure behind them was too strong.
“I’m sorry, Mr Fennick, but I knew you’d want me to disobey you about this. The hotel called. It’s about Mrs Fennick. They were trying to locate you through the convention, and finally they got Mr Smith at the lecture, and he told them you were here. I must warn you, it’s something awful—”
“What is it?” Fennick asked.
“She fell out of the window, Mr Fennick. Or she jumped. They seem to think it was suicide!”
“Good God,” Fennick said huskily.
Simon stepped forward, between him and his secretary.
“I’ll go with him.” he said. “You’d better get ready to cope with the reporters. They’ll be calling up and flocking around like vultures in no time. But I know you can handle them.”
Without actually touching her, he moved her firmly back to the outer office again by the force of proximity alone, and in default of any supporting intervention by her employer she was helpless. The Saint returned her last venomous glare with a winning smile and closed the door on her.
Then he turned back to Fennick and lighted another cigarette.
“I guess I underrated you,” he murmured. “You didn’t forget about Liane. I suppose she phoned you to gloat over what she thought she’d got and ask if you were ready to talk business again, and you said you’d be right over. The Mercurio is only about three blocks from here, I think, and you could count on that dragon you keep outside to prevent anyone upsetting your alibi. If you had to tap Liane on the head with a wrench to make her easy to push out, the mark wouldn’t be noticed after she’d hit the ground, any more than you’d be noticed scooting back down the stairs in your plumber’s outfit. You’d reduced all the risks to a minimum, which is the best anyone can do. It was just plain bad luck about me.”
The manufacturer moved stiffly around the desk, white-faced but with a certain dignity.
“I’ll give myself up,” he said. “You needn’t come to see that I don’t run away.”
Simon shook his head reproachfully.
“You’re wrong about me again, Otis, old jujube. I think capital punishment is a fine cure for blackmailers. Vere Balton and Norma Uplitz aren’t any loss to the community. And that makes your late wife even guiltier than they were. If you can get away with it, good luck to you. The cops won’t get any hints from me. I’m only coming along to check out of that crummy hotel and be on my way.”
THE FRUITFUL LAND
Even a champion leads with his chin sometimes, and this was one time when the Saint did it with a flourish and fanfares. He hadn’t even been feinted out of position.
“Is there anything I can do for you down in the playgrounds of the Gilded Schmoe?” he asked.
Coming from anyone else, it would have been only a conventional and harmless way of saying thanks for the long weekend of bass fishing that he had enjoyed on the St Johns River between Welaka and Lake George, on his way South to the more sophisticated and in many ways less charming resorts of Florida’s Gold Coast. And Jim Harris, the lean and leathery owner of the lodge where Simon Templar always stopped, would have taken it the same way.
“Just don’t try to send us everyone you meet,” he said good-humouredly. “We’ve had some good sportsmen and fishermen from down there, but there’s some kind that expect more than we’re set up to give ’em.”
“I know what you mean,” Simon said. “A strike on every cast, air-conditioned skiffs, and a gaudy night club to come home to.”
They were sitting out on the high bluff overlooking the river, under the magnificent oaks that shaded it in the daytime, after the last dinner of that visit, watching the lights of a tug with a train of barges plodding up the channel and swapping the lazy post-mortems and promises that friends and fishermen swap at such times. At that latitude and inland, the first cold front of fall had spoiled the appetites of the mosquitoes, although it was still only a temporary dispensation that made it enjoyable to stay out after dark.
“On a night like this,” Simon murmured idly, “here and now, it’s hard to remember what it must have been like for the pioneers who hacked their way through the swamps and jungles of this entomologist’s paradise, and made it fit for the non-insect pests to move in.”
“I don’t think the Spaniards made much out of it,” Harris said. “But some of the later carpetbaggers did all right.”
“You can say that again,” put in his wife, with sudden unwonted vehemence. She turned to the Saint. “Yes, there is something you can do—for me, anyway. When you get down around Palm Beach, look up a fellow called Ed Diehl.”
“Now, Ernestine—”
“Well, why shouldn’t he? The Saint likes a good crook to go after, doesn’t he? And he might just happen to run short of crooks some wet weekend. And this Diehl is certainly a prize one.”
“Now, Ernestine, we can’t expect the Saint to take off after any little chiseler who took advantage of—”
“Little chiseler? He’s a big chiseler. ‘Square’ Diehl, he calls himself, Simon. Hah!”
One of the Saint’s redeeming graces was that he knew when he had hooked himself and could accept the consequences gracefully.
“All right,” he said placatingly. “I asked for it. What was the deal this merchant got you into?”
“Well, it wasn’t long after we started building this place,” Jim Harris said. “An aunt of mine back in Texas died and left me four lots she owned somewhere around Lake Worth. We were much too busy getting this place in shape to go down and look at ’em, though I know we could’ve done it all in a day. We kept telling ourselves we’d have to do it, but somehow we never could find that whole day to spare. A lot of people think that running a camp like this is all play and no work, but you’d be surprised how it ties you down.”
“So one day we get a letter from this Diehl,” Ernestine said. “He says he’s had an inquiry about these lots, and would we be interested in selling. If so, call him collect. He’s a regular real-estate broker with a fancy letterhead, so we didn’t think there’d be any harm in talking to him.”
“He’s a real smooth operator,” her husband resumed reminiscently. “He soon found out t
hat we’d never been down that way and didn’t know much about conditions there, and while he was doing that he’d made himself sound so honest and helpful, I just didn’t even doubt him when I asked him what sort of property it was and he said it was in a poor section of town that never had done much good and lots were only fetching about a thousand dollars. I didn’t see what he was doing at the time, but I’ve thought about it since. Right then, when he said he had a customer offering five thousand for the four lots just because they were all together and he was a cranky old guy who didn’t want any near neighbors, he made it sound like the last chance we’d ever have to get that kind of price.”
“And I can’t even say ‘I told you so,’ ” lamented the distaff side of the record. “It sounded just as convincing to me, as you told it, and we thought we were lucky to get a windfall like that just when we could use it.”
Simon lighted a cigarette.
“And then you finally made the safari south and saw what you’d sold—”
“No, we still haven’t been able to take that day off,” Jim said. “But one day we had a couple staying here from Lake Worth, and we got to talking, and right off they said they hoped we hadn’t been given a fast shuffle like it seems this Ed Diehl is known for. So I got out the papers, and they knew exactly where these lots were, on a main-road corner right in the middle of a lot of new building developments, and there was a big new supermarket going up now on those very same lots we sold.”
“And the old codger who just wanted his privacy?”
“They recognized his name, too. Seems he’s a pretty active attorney, not very old, and also a cousin of Mrs Diehl’s.”
The Saint nodded sympathetically.
“Yes, of course. If a supermarket had appeared as the buyer, you couldn’t have helped knowing your property was worth more. They probably sold it to the market out of the same escrow, at a fat profit, without even putting up a dime of their own. And after that first vague letter, I bet you never had anything else from Diehl in writing except the formal ‘I enclose herewith’ kind of stuff.”
“That’s right. I realized that when I got mad and started wondering how much I could sue him for. Of all the lies he’d told me, he’d told everyone on the telephone. I couldn’t prove one thing in a courtroom, except with my word against his.”
“He’s a sharp operator, all right,” Ernestine said. “This couple told us a lot more stories about him. He learned his tricks from his father, who started the business, selling swampland by mail to suckers who never saw it, during the first Florida boom. They had a few square miles that they bought for a dollar an acre, all laid out on paper with streets and business and residential districts and even a city hall, yet, which hasn’t been lived in by anything but alligators to this day, but they called it Heavenleigh Hills”—she spelled it out—“and I believe Diehl is still advertising ‘retirement farms’ there in newspapers far enough away to reach the sort of buyers who’d make a down payment and not come looking for a long while. Anyway, that’s the reputation he has locally. But we were the hicks who hadn’t heard about it.”
“Sure taught me a lesson I won’t forget,” Jim said ruefully.
“I wish I could be as philosophical as that,” said his wife. “I’d just like to see him get his comeuppance, the way the Saint would give it to him.”
“I’m the victim of publicity agents I never hired,” sighed the Saint. “But for two swell people like you—and the memory of a couple of bankers that did not get away—I’ll keep an eye peeled for this square, Diehl.”
It was an easy promise to make, of a kind that he had learned to make rather easily in those days when so many people recognized his name or his face and expected miracles of freebooting to be performed instantly. It gave him a respectful inkling of what God must have to cope with if He heard all the prayers. But being only human, in spite of his sobriquet, it must be admitted here and now that Simon sometimes forgot such promises after they had served their first soothing purpose.
The case of Mr Edmund S Diehl happened not to be one of those examples of Saintly fallibility, and that was entirely the fault of Mr Diehl himself. That is, if Mr Diehl had decided at some earlier date to retire with his ill-gotten inheritance added to his own ill-gotten gains and live out his remaining years in luxury in some remote refuge from the tax collectors, the Saint might never have been reminded of him again. Possibly. But Mr Diehl was not a retiring type, and he was entrenched in one of the privileged fields in which tax-heavy Income can be almost effortlessly transmuted into tax-light Capital Gains.
Also, and even more to this point, Mr Diehl had not been raised on poetry. Any landscape, to him, was simply an area of real estate which could be subdivided into smaller areas, with an automatic profit on each reduction, and eventually peddled in convenient building lots at about the same price per foot as it had once brought by the acre. If only God could make a tree, as Mr Diehl had heard it said, Mr Diehl had plenty of bulldozers to knock them down, in his own territory, a lot faster than God could make them. Mr Diehl had effectively demonstrated this over great swaths of fertile soil which his machinery had scraped bare of its natural growth to make room for stark forests of power poles and television antennae brooding over regimented rows of standardized, bleakly functional, and uniformly faceless living-boxes available on a nominal down payment and easy terms. Like almost every other fast-buck Florida developer, Mr Diehl knew exactly what percentage could be saved by scarifying a tract from end to end in steam-roller sweeps instead of wasting time for the blades to maneuver in and out among the trees and skin out only the ugly undergrowth. “Landscape,” in the only sense he understood it, then became simply a dignified verb for the operation of selling the incoming settlers nursery shrubs, and saplings to restock the scorched earth, which he had created—a sideline which was not to be sneezed at.
Simon Templar had friends of his own to visit in Delray on his way down, and thus it was that his route took him past a pine wood off the main highway which was in course of being swiftly and efficiently razed in the interest of such an improvement as has just been described. He slackened his foot on the speed pedal as he saw the tallest tree in the grove, already canted at a crazy angle, rocking under the ruthless onslaughts of the gas-powered monster butting at its base.
The Florida native pine is a commercially useless tree, disdained as timber, pulpwood, and even fireplace logs. But it will grow, slowly, to a fifty-foot height of massive broad-branched thick-leaved evergreen that is one of the few arboreal majesties in a land of shallow contours and generally shallow vegetation. It may take twenty years to do this, so that it is not exactly expendable, except in the most coldly materialistic philosophy.
The Saint, thought of himself poetically quite as seldom as Edmund Diehl, but the creaks and groans of the tree and the roars and growls of the steel behemoth worrying it pierced his ears like the sounds of an animate conflict, as his car drifted slowly by, and as the struggle reached its foregone conclusion and the tree toppled and gave up the ghost in a great rending shuddering crash like a stentorian death-rattle, an actual physical hurt seemed to strike deep through his own body. He even trod the car to an abrupt full stop, with a savage insensate impulse to get out and go over and drag the driver out of the bulldozer and smash him down with a fist in the face and drive the bulldozer slowly over him. But he knew just as quickly as he controlled the reflex how stupid and unjust that would have been: the driver was only an innocent and earnest Negro, capably and methodically doing the job that he was paid to do. The man who Simon realized he really wanted was the one who hired the driver and gave him his instructions.
And at that susceptible moment, the Saint looked farther down the road and saw the enormous billboard which proclaimed that this was to be the site of “BLISS HAVEN VILLAGE—Another Contribution to Florida’s Future by ED (Square) DIEHL.”
Even if Mr Diehl had been psychically aware of the extra special attention which he had attracted, it is doub
tful if it would have perturbed him. Although he had never outgrown an unquestioning loyalty to his father’s corny touch in the naming of projects, he had come a long way since the precarious days of the Heavenleigh Hills promotion. In fact, he had often thought of taking that skeleton out of his closet and burying it, but a certain stubborn cupidity could never quite let him renounce the small but steady revenue that still flaked off its bones. Aside from that, the new boom in Florida land values which began in mid-century had made fabulous profits possible even by legitimate methods, so that Mr Diehl was even accepted as an upstanding member of the community by many citizens with short memories. His dishonesties were mostly neater and mellower than they had formerly been, and always cautiously covered by shrewd legal advice, and such a brazen piece of chicanery as he had perpetrated on Jim Harris was due more than anything to an incurable attitude of mind that would always get the same kind of egotistical lift out of horn-swoggling an unsuspecting victim that a Don Juan type derives from a callous seduction.
Mr Diehl had little else in common with the picture of a Don Juan, being a large gross man with a beefy red face and small piggy eyes as bright as marbles. He wore a very large diamond ring with apparent disregard for the fact that its flashing drew particular attention to his hands, which nearly always featured a set of grimy fingernails, and he had other unpleasant personal habits which would hardly have made him welcome in the best boudoirs. But Mr Diehl, who preferred to base his self-satisfaction on his reception at the bank, was contemplating nothing but rosy futures on a certain morning when one of his underlings idled into his private office and told him that there was a potential client outside whom he might want to see.
“The Count of Cristamonte, yet. And he’s looking for a big deal.”
Mr Diehl had a plentiful staff of salesmen and secretaries to handle routine and minor transactions, but he had it understood that the most important properties were handled by himself personally. In this way he could entitle himself to pocket more of the commission, and also give himself more to brag about at the Golf Club bar.
The Saint to the Rescue (The Saint Series) Page 5
