Catch the Saint (16 page)

It was not extraordinary that a girl with the
background of
Carole Angelworth should have
had no inkling that any night
out
with him had a built-in risk of getting involved with more exciting, and more
dangerous, things than talk.

CHAPTER 2

He would have bet that to
a girl of her type “ten minutes” was
only
a figure of speech which might have covered any period
up to a half or three
quarters of an hour. But she was precisely as good as her word, having simply
shucked the low-cut silver
lam
é
creation in exchange for a plain sweater and
skirt, in the
same time as he had swapped his tuxedo for a jacket and
slacks.

His knowledge of
Philadelphia geography was minimal, and
he
let her direct him through rain-wet streets for something over
twenty minutes in a direction that began well enough but be
came progressively more sordid, until they turned a corner close
to some pretzels of garish red neon a little down the block which
proclaimed
the exotic ambience of
SAMMY’S BOOZE & BILLIARDS.

Carole pointed.

“Let’s go in
there.”

Simon’s brows slanted in a
half rise, half frown. But he
slowed up and pulled over
to the kerb, not directly under the
twisted neon but
not many yards beyond. As they passed, he ob
served
that to enhance the inspired title of the place there was
an ornamental drunk sleeping propped up beside the entrance.

At that hour there was
hardly any traffic, and finding parking space was not the problem.

“It looks
delightful,” Simon said, “but I thought we were
hunting for some place quiet and cosy.”

“I love
slumming,” Carole said. She suddenly snuggled up
against
him and looked up fiendishly into his eyes. “You’re not scared to take me
in there, are you?”

“I’m sure you’ll
protect me,” Simon drawled. “On the other hand, I’m sure you must
know a place or two that might be a
little more
romantic.”

“I’ve never felt more
romantic in my life,” Carole insisted. “
And
I can’t imagine anything that would bore me more than on
e of those conventional all-night supper clubs.”

And so, against his better
judgement, Simon Templar found h
imself escorting Carole
Angelworth into Sammy’s Booze & Billiards
on a particular night at a particular time, which proved once again that even
in his most off-guard and idle moments the Saint could not escape the currents
of destiny that sucked hi
m involuntarily into
adventure.

They tiptoed around the sloshed
Cerberus couched beside the
threshold, opened the
door, and faced the dense dark atmosphere
like a pair of divers
suddenly plunged into a gloomy pond.

It soon became moderately
clear that there was a bar with
stools down to the right,
booths along the wall paralleling it, and in a larger space to the left a pair
of pool tables occupying the
earnest attention of several men. Sammy’s
pool-playing clientele
varied from flashily
over-dressed to shirt-sleeves and khakis. The
trio at the nearest table fell into the flashy category—quick
money,
low taste. Simon would normally have regarded them as
part of the furniture, but he hesitated and looked at one of them
again. A look of slightly puzzled concentration
came over his
face, tentative
recognition mixed with uncertainty.

The Saint’s brain had a
fantastic capacity for keeping vast
quantities of
stored information available for conscious recall.
Thousands of faces,
names, aliases, and case histories swarmed
beneath
the surface of his everyday awareness, ready to be netted and re-examined on an
instant’s notice. The very fact
that
Simon hesitated at all after spotting a face that looked
vaguely
familiar meant that the identity belonging to the face had
never played an important part in his own
experience. But Si
mon’s natural
inquisitiveness, and his dislike of unsolved puz
zles, kept him standing just inside the entrance until seconds
later an invisible index flipped over in his head
and matched the
face. Just a name,
with an undefined favourable feeling attached
to it, but enough to make the Saint impulsively take Carole’s
arm and step over to the pool table.

“Brad Ryner,” he
said.

There had been a lull in
the game, and the man to whom he
spoke looked up from
chalking his cue. The look was not one of
friendly recognition,
or even of ready interest. The other’s face—
broken-nosed,
ruddy, rough-skinned, surmounted by curly red
hair—was immediately
hostile.

“Who’re you talking
to?” he asked angrily.

When confronted with animosity, the Saint’s
self-imposed discipline was to relax rather than to let himself get nettled.

“To you,” he
said easily. “Aren’t you Brad Ryner?”

“No, I’m not, and I
never heard of him.” Fingers gripped the
billiard
cue so tightly that knuckles were white. “You’ve got
your wires crossed, buster. The name’s Joe, and I don’t
like people interrupting me when I’m trying to concentrate on a game.”

If Carole had known more
about Simon Templar, she would have realised that his response was
uncharacteristically apolo
getic.

“Sorry,” he
said. “I made a mistake.”

“Okay, okay!”
the other man snarled. “Do me a favour and
cut
out the yapping or you’re gonna wreck my concentration.”

His two companions at the
table were watching him and the Saint with more interest now than at the
beginning. One was a
stout, bald, seal-like
character with chocolate-coloured eyes and
very
small ears. The other had the build of a professional foot
ball tackle, but the unhealthy pallour of his skin hinted that not many
of his activities took place out of doors. He scratched the
back of his neck as he studied the face of the man Simon
had
called Brad Ryner.

Simon took Carole by the
arm and moved away from the pool table.

“Nice friends you
have,” Carole said in a loud voice. “Or non-
friends.”

“Never mind,”
the Saint said firmly, steering her to a booth
at
the other end of the bar. “You picked the place, so you
shouldn’t be surprised to meet down-to-earth types. Or did
you expect we’d be recognised and given the V.I.P. treatment?”

“That comes very
close to sounding snide.”

“Nothing snide intended,” Simon said
abstractedly. As he
slipped into the dark
booth next to the girl he could see that the
three pool players had resumed their game. “I just pulled a
boner, and I’m annoyed with myself.”

Carole shrugged.

“Well, anybody could
mistake a face in this light, so don’t let
it
spoil our evening.”

“I won’t if you
won’t.”

The unshaven
shirt-sleeved counterman came and took their
order
for coffee.

“I still don’t see
why he had to be so rude,” Carole said while
they
waited. “Or why you let him get away with it.”

“Forget it,” Simon answered. “I
don’t want to talk about it
here.”

They never did recapture the playfulness and
gaiety of the
earlier part of the evening.
Simon parried Carole’s questions
about
his own life by drawing her out about her own. It had been
a sheltered existence. Her mother had died while
Carole was still
a child. She had
been nurtured by nannies, maids, and govern
esses. Her teens had unfolded trivially in a setting of sail-boats,
tennis, house-parties, and debutante balls.
Self-mocking, she de
scribed herself
as a violet blossoming in the shade of a great oak.

The great oak was her
father. He had not had her advantages
when he was young, and typically he had
tried to insulate her
from the harsh
realities which he had overcome.

“So it was rags to
riches,” Simon prompted her, thinking how
refreshing
it was in these days to meet a rich girl who so positively and genuinely
admired and adored the parent whose up
ward
struggle had given her so much.

“Well, not exactly
rags,” Carole replied. “Just the ordinary
lower-middle-class
slog, cutting corners and keeping a beady
eye
on the budget. Until he struck it rich when I was going to
college. I was a spoiled brat, and for a long time I just
rebelled
against him, but I’ve finally gotten
old enough to appreciate
what he’s done. I can
even admit how proud I am of him. When
you
have time, I’d like to show you a couple of places he’s re
sponsible for creating.”

She turned her thick
coffee-cup in its stained saucer and
frowned slightly.

“Of course sometimes
he goes too far. You’d think from all
his law-and-order
talk, and what a hardheaded businessman he
is,
that he’d be more careful. But he’s a great one for rehabilitat
ing
people—like that Richard Hamlin you met tonight. Rich
ard’s an ex-convict. Embezzlement and who knows what else.
But Daddy took him under his wing and made him his
personal
secretary.”

“Hire the handicapped,
huh? I thought the casting director
had done an off-beat job including
Hamlin in that group. Still,
he must have a
fair set of brains. Embellishing books can be a
fine art.”

“Oh, I don’t think
he’s dumb,” Carole said. “I just don’t trust
him.”

“Why?” he asked
with new interest.

But her dislike of Hamlin
turned out to be based more on
instinctive prejudice and
unconscious snobbery (and perhaps a little jealousy of the secretary’s close
and confidential relation
ship with her father) than
on facts. It was a prejudice that
many a wife has
indulged—and usually denied—against the
other
woman in her husband’s office.

“Helping a lame dog
over a stile is supposed to be good boy-
scout
Christianity,” Simon remarked judiciously. “Although personally I’ve
always thought it was one of the silliest precepts ever
coined. Did you ever look at a stile? I never saw one yet that a
lame dog couldn’t wriggle over much faster than you could
lift
him over it.”

“Are you being
symbolic or just smart?”

“Could be
either.”

“I suppose you don’t
believe in women’s intuition.”

“I pass.”

She caught Simon glancing
at his watch.

“Am I boring
you?” she enquired with some acidity.

“No, you’re not, but if you’ve finished
your coffee I’d like to
get out of
here.”

Her reply was to push her
empty cup away and pick up her
bag from the seat beside
her. As he walked with her to the door,
Simon
noted that the same groups were round the pool tables,
and
that the seal and the football tackle watched him as he left
the bar.

Carole slumped
disconsolately as he drove her back towards
the
New Sylvania.

“We were having such a good time,”
she pouted. “What’s
wrong? Did I say
something? Are you just upset because you
thought that man back there was somebody you knew?”

Seeing her stripped of
her protective irony, admitting that her
relationship
with him meant enough to depress her, Simon felt
that
he owed her an honest answer.

“All right,” he” said.
“I’ll tell you. It has nothing to do with
you, and I don’t think you could bore me if you recited the tele
phone directory. I’m still kicking myself because
of that imbecilic
thing I did back in
that bar.”

“What’s imbecilic
about mistaken identity?” she demanded.
“I’m surprised a
man like you would worry about a thing like
that.
Male vanity?”

“It wasn’t a case of
mistaken identity,” said the Saint. “It was
a
case of the mouth outrunning the brain. That man I spoke to
really is
named Brad Ryner. At least he was a couple of years
ago when I met him out in California. And since he had a wife
named
Doris Ryner, and three kids with the same surname, I
don’t think I need his birth certificate to prove the point.”