by Greenberg
The Saint blew a careful smoke ring to bridge another uncomfortable gap; but this time he bowed to a rare dignity that he had seldom met, and would never have looked for in the Blue Goose.
“Did Henry tell you anything about himself?”
“Nothing much that I can remember. Perhaps I didn’t pay enough attention. But men tell you so many things. I think he said he’d been working in a defense plant somewhere – I think it was near St. Louis.”
“Did he say anything about where he was going next, or what his plans were?”
“He said he was going to work in another plant in Mexico. He said he was waiting for a ship to Tampico or Vera Cruz.”
“What sort of people was he with?”
“All sorts of people. He drank a lot, and he was very generous. He was – what do you call it? – a Good Time Charlie.”
“He had plenty of moula?”
“Please?”
“Dough. Cabbage. The blue chips.”
“Yes, he seemed to have plenty of money. And he bought plenty of drinks, so of course he made many friends.”
“Can you remember any particular guy with a name like Black?”
She wrinkled her brow.
“I don’t think so.”
“Tall and thin, with sort of gray-blond hair cut very short.”
“How can I be sure?” she said helplessly. “I see so many people.”
The Saint drew a long breath through his cigarette that was not audibly a sigh, but which did him as much good.
He was very humbly baffled. He knew that Olga Ivanovitch had told him almost as little as he had told her; he knew at the same time that she was holding back some of the things she knew, exactly as he was. He knew that she had probably told him precisely as much as she had told Kinglake. But there was nothing that he could do about it. And he guessed that there had been nothing that Kinglake had been able to do about it either. She had a good straight story in its place, and you couldn’t shake it. It was quite simple and plausible too, except for the omissions. The only thing a police officer could have done about it was to obscure the issue with some synthetic charges about morals and the illegality of the Blue Goose, which Kinglake probably wouldn’t stoop to even if the political system would have let him.
And yet the Saint knew to his own satisfaction that Olga Ivanovitch was watching and measuring him just as he was watching and measuring her. And if he was tired of being told how fascinating he was, she was indubitably just as tired of hearing about her exotic harmonies of ivory skin and flaxen hair, and the undeniable allure that they connived at. He took stock of the plain pagan perfection of her lip modeling, and could have done without the illegitimate ideas it gave him.
“In that case,” he said, “let’s have some more colored water and go on seeing each other.”
The small hours of the morning were starting to grow up when he finally admitted that he was licked. By that time he must have bought several gallons of the beige fluid which was sold by the Blue Goose as Scotch, and it made no more impression on Olga Ivanovitch than it had on himself. He decided that if the late Mr. Matson had cut a wide swath there, he must have worked diligently over lubricating his mower before he went in. But Olga Ivanovitch had given out nothing more. She had been gay and she had been glowing, and with her poise and intelligence she had really been a lot of fun; but every time the Saint had tried to cast a line into the conversation she had met him with the same willing straightforward gaze and been so genuinely troubled because she could add nothing to what she had already told.
“So,” said the Saint, “I’m going to get some sleep.”
They were back at the bar, after some time of sitting at a table through a floor show of special talent but questionable decorum. Simon called for his check, and decided that by that time he should own everything in the place except possibly the ceiling. But he paid it without argument, and added a liberal percentage.
“I’m going to check out too,” Olga said. “Would you give me a lift?”
The square-faced bartender gave them his big quick skin-deep smile.
“Come again, folks,” he said, and made it sound almost like a pressing invitation.
“Goodnight, Joe,” said the Saint, and made it sound almost like a promise.
He took the girl out to a taxi that was providentially waiting outside. It was so providential that he was prepared to believe that some less altruistic agency had brought it there; but that detail didn’t distress him. If the ungodly wanted to find out what they would have a chance to find out that night, it wouldn’t be hard for them to find it out anyway. When he seriously wanted to exercise them, he would do a job on it.
After they had gone a short way, Olga Ivanovitch said very prosaically: “You owe me ten dollars for the evening.”
In identically the same prosaic manner, he peeled a ten-dollar bill out of his pocket and handed it to her.
She put it away in her purse.
After a while she said: “I don’t know what you’re trying to find in Galveston, Saint, but don’t find anything you don’t want.”
“Why should you care?” he inquired mildly.
He had his answer in something yielding and yearning that was suddenly all over him, holding his mouth with lips that fulfilled all the urgent indications that he had been doing his earnest best to ignore.
It was more or less like that until the cab stopped again on Seawall Boulevard.
“Won’t you come in for a nightcap?” she said.
Her face was a white blur in the dark, framed in shadow and slashed with crimson.
“Thanks,” he said, “but I have to think of my beauty. So do you.”
“You won’t have to spend any more.”
“I’ll see you again,” he said.
“Are you sure?”
“Quite sure.”
“You’ll remember the address?”
“Yes.”
He took the taxi back to the Alamo House, and found Detective Yard snoring in a leather armchair in the lobby. It grieved him sincerely to have to interrupt such a blissful orchestration; but these were circumstances in which he felt that noblesse obliged.
“Good evening, Brother Yard,” he murmured. “Or, if you want to be literal, good morning. And don’t tell me your first name is Scotland, because that would be more than I could bear at this moment . . . I trust you have enjoyed your siesta.”
The field representative of the Kinglake Escort Service had a chance to gather his wits together during the speech. He glared at the Saint with overcooked malignance which was only to have been expected of a man who had been rudely awakened with such a greeting.
“What’s your name, anyhow?” he growled indignantly. “Giving your name as Sebastian Tombs at the Ascot! Telling that taxi driver you was Sugarman Treacle!”
“Oh, you tracked him down, did you?” said the Saint interestedly. “So by this time you know that I’ve been to the Blue Goose. Wait till you check back there and find that I’ve been masquerading all evening as Shirley Temple.”
“What,” demanded the detective cholerically, “is the idea of all these names?”
Simon shook a disappointed head at him.
“Tut, Mr. Yard. In fact, a trio of tuts. How can a man with a name like yours ask such kindergarten questions? Don’t all suspicious characters use aliases? Isn’t it an inviolable rule on page thirty-six of the Detective Manual that a fugitive may change his name but will always stick to his proper initials? I was merely following the regulations to make things easy for you. I could just as well have told any of these people that my name was Montgomery Bairnworth Wobblehouse, and loused the hell out of things. The trouble is, you don’t appreciate me.”
Detective Yard explained in a few vivid phrases just how much he appreciated Simon Templar.
“Thank you,” said the Saint gratefully. “And now if you’d like to rest for a while, you can go back to sleep. Or go home to your wife, if she’s attractive enough. I promise
you that I’m going to bed now and stay there for several hours. And if it’ll help you at all, I’ll phone you before I go out again.”
He stepped into the elevator and departed toward his floor with the depressing conviction that he had added one more notch to his record of failing to Win Friends and Influence Policemen. More practically, he knew that his visit to the Blue Goose was now certain to be misinterpreted.
He consulted the mirror in the elevator about wiping lipstick off his mouth, and hoped that Detective Yard had had as much fun out of noting it as he himself had had out of acquiring it.
4
In spite of the lateness of his bedtime, the Saint was up reasonably early the next morning. He was expecting to be officially annoyed before noon, and he preferred to get some breakfast under his belt first.
Jones met him as he stepped out of the elevator.
“Mawnin’, Mistah Templah, sah, Ah been waitin’ for you. One of them gennelmen you was askin’ about is sittin’ in the co’nah of the lobby.”
“I know, said the Saint. “His name is Yard. He’s worried about me.” The bellboy’s grin shrank so abruptly that Simon was sorry for him.
He said: “Never mind Jones. Here’s five dollars anyway. Keep up the counter-espionage.”
The Negro beamed again.
“Yes, sah, thank you, sah. And there was somethin’ else –”
“What?’’
“Another gennelman was nosin’ around this mawnin’, askin’ questions about you. He didn’t give no name, and Ah never saw him befo’.”
“Was he tall and thin, with gray-blond hair cut very short?”
“No, sah. He was kinda short and fat, and he had a red face and red hair and pale gray eyes. Ah dunno nothin’ ’bout him, but he wasn’t no Galveston policeman.”
“Jones,” said the Saint, “you have exceeded my fondest hopes. Here is another V for Victory. Carry on.”
He went into the coffee shop and ordered tomato juice and ham and eggs. His mind revolved ineffectually while he fortified himself with them.
The late Mr. Matson had considerately bequeathed him three names, besides Olga Ivanovitch. Blatt, Weinbach, Maris. Blatt, who sounded like Black, was probably the tall thin gray-blond one who had been seen at the Ascot. The guy with the red face and red hair was one of the other two. So there was still one without any kind of identification. But even that made very little difference. There was no other detail in their pictures – no links, no attachments, no place to begin looking for them. Unless it was the Blue Goose. But unless they were very stupid or very well covered, they wouldn’t be going back there.
He certainly had something on his hands, and all he could do was to wait for something to leap at him.
It did, while he was smoking a cigarette and stretching out his coffee. It looked just like Detective Yard, in a different suit that needed pressing just as badly as the last one.
“If you’ve finished,” Yard said heavily, standing over him, “Lieutenant Kinglake would like to see you at Headquarters.”
“That’s fine,” said the Saint. “I was only waiting for you to issue the invitation, so I could get a ride in a police car or make you pay for the taxi.”
They traveled together in an uncongenial aloofness which the Saint’s efforts at light badinage did nothing to alleviate.
The atmosphere at Headquarters was very similar; but the Saint continued to hand it to Kinglake for a restraint which he hadn’t anticipated from a man with that air of nervous impatience. The Lieutenant looked just as tough and irascible, but he didn’t rant and roar.
He let the official authority behind him make the noise for him, and said with impeccable control: “I hear you were getting around quite a bit last night.”
“I tried to,” said the Saint amiably. “After all, you remember that survey I told you about. If the Blue Goose meant things to you, you should have tipped me off. You could have saved me a lot of dollars and a slight hangover.”
“I didn’t think it was any of your business,” Kinglake said. “And I still want to know why it was.”
“Just curiosity,” said the Saint. “In spite of anything you may have read, it isn’t every day that I pick up a lump of talking charcoal on the highway. So when it says things to me, I can’t just forget them.”
“And you didn’t forget Ivanovitch, either.”
“Of course not. She was mentioned too. I’m sure I told you.”
“According to Yard, you came home last night with lipstick on you.”
“Some people are born gossips. But I think he’s just jealous.”
Lieutenant Kinglake picked up a pencil from his desk and fondled it as if the idea of breaking it in half intrigued him. Perhaps as an act of symbolism. But he still didn’t raise his voice.
“I’m told,” he said, “that you asked a lot of questions about this Henry Stephens – only you knew that his name was Matson. And you were asking about him all over town under that name. Now you can explain that to me, or you can take your chance as a material witness.”
Simon rounded a cigarette with his forefingers and thumbs.
“You want to ask me questions. Do you mind if I ask a couple? For my own satisfaction. Being as I’m so curious.”
Kinglake’s chilled gimlet eyes took another exploratory twist into him.
“What are they?”
“What did Quantry get out of his autopsy?”
“No traces of poison or violence – nothing that came through the fire, anyway. The guy burned to death.”
“What about the newspaper and the matches?”
“Just a piece of local paper, which anybody could have bought or picked up. No fingerprints.”
“And where did you get the idea that I was a salesman?”
“I didn’t give out anything about you. if some reporter got that idea, he got it. I’m not paid to be your press agent.” Kinglake was at the full extension of his precarious control. “Now you answer my question before we go any further.”
The Saint lighted his cigarette and used it to mark off a paragraph.
“The deceased’s name,” he said, “was Henry Stephen Matson. Until recently, he was a foreman at the Quenco plant near St. Louis. You may remember that Hobart Quennel got into a lot of trouble a while ago, on account of some fancy finagling with synthetic rubber – and mostly because of me. But that hasn’t anything to do with it. The Quenco plants are now being run by the government, and the one outside St. Louis is now making a lot of soups that go bang and annoy the enemy. Matson pulled out a while ago, and came here. He used his real name at the Ascot, because he’d applied for a passport to Mexico and he wanted to get it. But in his social life he called himself Henry Stephens, because he didn’t want to die.”
“How do you know all this?” Kinglake rapped at him. “And why didn’t you – ”
“I didn’t tell you yesterday, because I didn’t know,” said the Saint tiredly. “The thing I found on the road said it was Henry Stephens, and it was all too obvious to bother me. So I was too smart to be sensible. It wasn’t until I started hunting for Matson that it dawned on me that coincidences are still possible.”
“Well, why were you hunting for Matson?”
The Saint pondered about that one.
“Because,” he said, “a Kiwanis convention just picked him as Mr. Atlantic Monthly of 1944. So in the interests of this survey of mine I wanted to get his reaction to the Galveston standards of strip-teasing. Now, the grade of g-string at the Blue Goose . . .”
There had to be a breaking point to Detective Yard’s self-control, and it was bound to be lower than Kinglake’s. Besides, Mr. Yard’s feet had endured more.
He leaned down weightily on the Saint’s shoulder.
“Listen, funny man,” he said unoriginally, “how would you like to get poked right in the kisser?”
“Pipe down,” Kinglake snarled; and it was an order.
But he went on glaring at the Saint, and for the first time his
nervous impatience seemed to be more nervous than impatient. Simon was irresistibly reminded of his own efforts to cover confusion with a poker pan, only the night before.
“Let me tell you something, Templar,” Kinglake said dogmatically. “We’ve made our own investigations; and no matter what you think, our opinion is that Stephens, or Matson, committed suicide by pouring gasoline on himself and setting himself alight.”
It took a great deal to shatter the Saint’s composure, but that was great enough. Simon stared at the Lieutenant in a state of sheer incredulity that even took his mind off the crude conventional ponderance of Detective Yard.
“Let me get this straight,” he said slowly. “Are you going to try and work off Henry as a suicide?”
Lieutenant Kinglake’s hard face, if anything, grew harder.
“On all the evidence, that’s what it looks like. And I’m not going to make a monkey out of myself to get you some headlines. I told you, I don’t want any trouble in this town.”
“So what’re you gonna do about it?” demanded Detective Yard, with an aptness which he must have learned from the movies.
Simon didn’t even notice him.
“Evidence my back door,” he said derisively. “So this guy who was so reckless with his gas ration was careful enough to swallow the flask he carried it in so it could eventually be recovered for the scrap drive.”
“We just didn’t happen to find the container yesterday. But if we search again, we may find it.”
“Probably the Coke bottle that Scotland Yard takes out with him to keep his brain watered.”
“One more crack like that outa you,” Yard said truculently, “an’ I’ll – ”
“You might just tell me this, Kinglake,” said the Saint bitingly. “Is this your idea of a brilliant trick to trap the killers, or are you just a hick cop after all? The only thing you’ve left out is the standard suicide note. Or have you got that up your sleeve too?”
The Lieutenant’s thin lips tightened, and his battleship jaw stuck out another half inch. He had all the chip-on-the-shoulder characteristics of a man in the wrong who wouldn’t admit it while there was a punch left in him; yet he met the Saint’s half jeering and half furious gaze so steadily as to almost start Simon out of countenance.
