Saint Errant (8 page)

Kerr fidgeted.

“I work for Esteban, in a sort of way.”

“As a shill?” Simon inquired.

The other flushed.

“I bring people to the club and I get a small commission on the business. It’s perfectly legitimate.”

“It would be in a legitimate business. So you shill for the joint. You latch on to visiting pigeons around town and steer them in to be plucked.” Simon studied him critically. “Times must be getting tough, Maurice. I seem to remember that you used to do much better marrying them occasionally and getting a nice settlement before they divorced you.”

“That’s neither here nor there,” Kerr said redly. “I’ve told you everything I know. I’ve never been mixed up with murder, and I don’t want to be.”

The Saint’s cigarette rose to a last steady glow before he let it drop into an ash tray.

“Whether you want it or not, you are,” he said. “But we’ll take the best care we can of your tattered reputation.”

He held out his hand to Patricia and helped her up; and they went out and left Maurice Kerr on his own doorstep, looking like a rather sullen and perturbed penguin, with an empty glass still clutched in his hand.

“And that,” said Patricia, as the Saint nursed his car around a couple of quiet blocks and launched it into the southbound stream of Collins Avenue, “might be an object lesson to Dr Watson, but I left my dictionary at home.”

The Saint dipped two fingers into the open pack in his breast pocket for another Pall Mall, and his smile tightened over the cigarette as he reached forward to press the dashboard lighter.

“Aside from the fact that you’re much too beautiful to share an apartment safely with Mr Holmes,” he said, “what seems to bother you now?”

“Why did you leave Kerr like that? He was working for Esteban. He told you so himself. He was telling you the story that Esteban told him to tell you-you even made him admit that. And Lida seems to have been shot with his gun. It’s all too obvious.”

Simon nodded, his eyes on the road.

“That’s the whole trouble,” he said. “It’s all too obvious. But if she really was shot with Kerr’s gun-which seems to be as certain as any guess can be-why did the guy leave it behind to lay a trail straight to his doorstep? He may be a poop, but can you believe that he’s that half-witted? There’s nothing in his record to show that he had softening of the brain before. A guy who can work his way through four rich wives in ten years may not be the most desirable character on earth, but he has to have something on the ball. Most of these over-bank-balanced broads have been around too.”

Patricia fingered strands of golden hair out of her eyes.

“He doesn’t sound like the dream-boy of all time,” she said. “I can imagine how Dick Verity would like to hear that Lida and Maurice were a steady twosome.” Her eyes turned to him with a sudden widening. “Simon, do you think-“

“That there was blackmail in it?” The Saint’s face was dark and cold. “Yes, darling, I think we’re getting closer. But I don’t see the fine hand of Maurice in it. A man with his technique doesn’t suddenly have to resort to anything so crude as murder. But you meet all kinds of types at the Quarterdeck Club-and I think we belong there.”

The moon was the same, and the rustle of palm fronds along the tall dark margins of the road, but the night’s invitation to romance had turned into something colder that enclosed them in a bubble of silence which only broke on the eventually uprising neons of the Quarterdeck Club and the hurricane voice of the Admiral.

“Avast there!” he bellowed, as the car came to a stop. “My orders are to repel boarders.”

Simon opened the door and swung out a long leg.

“A noble duty, Horatio,” he murmured, “but we belong here -remember? The sheriff wouldn’t like it if he thought we’d jumped ship.”

The Admiral stood firmly planted in his. path. His face was no longer ruddily friendly, and his eyes were half shuttered.

“I’m sorry, sir. I don’t know how you were able to disembark, but my orders-“

That was as far as he got, for at that moment the precise section of his anatomy known to box-fighting addicts as the button came into unexpected violent contact with an iron fist which happened at that moment, by some strange coincidence, to be traveling upwards at rocket speed. For one brief instant the admiral enjoyed an entirely private fireworks display of astonishing brilliance, and thereupon lost interest in all mundane phenomena.

The Saint caught him as he crumpled and eased his descent to the gravel. There was no other movement in the parking lot, and the slow drumming of the distant surf blended with a faint filtration of music from inside the club to overlay the scene with the beguiling placidity of a nocturne. Simon took another grip and heaved the Admiral quite gently into the deeper shadows of some shrubbery, where he began to bind and gag him deftly with the Admiral’s own handkerchief, neck tie, and suspenders.

“You, too, can be a fine figure of a man, bursting with vibrant health and super strength,” recited Patricia. “Send for our free booklet, They Laughed When I Talked Back to the Truck Driver.”

“If Mary Livingstone ever loses her voice, you can get a job with Jack Benny,” said the Saint. “Now while I finish this up, will you be a good girl and go in and engage Esteban in dulcet converse-with his back to the door. I’ll be with you in two seconds.”

To be drearily accurate, it was actually sixty-eight seconds later when the Saint entered the gaming room again. He found Esteban facing a vivacious Pat, and it was clear from his back that it would take something rather important to drag him away from her.

The Saint was able to provide this. It manifested itself as a pressure in the center of Esteban’s spine. -
“This isn’t my pipe, Esteban,” he breathed in the entrepreneur’s ear. “Shall we adjourn to your private office, or would you like bits of your sacroiliac all over the joint?”

Esteban said nothing. He led the way, with the Saint walking apparently arm in arm with him, and Pat still chattering on the other side.

“-and I am going to write to my mother, Mr Esteban, and tell her what a romantic place you-“

“Now we can wash this up,” the Saint said.

He closed the door behind them. Esteban stood very still.

“What do you expect this to get you, Mr Templar?”

“A peek in your safe,” said the Saint softly.

“The safe is locked.”

“This is still the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Sacroiliacs,” Simon reminded him. “The safe can be unlocked.”

“You wouldn’t dare to shoot!”

“Not until I count to three, I wouldn’t. It’s a superstition with me. One… two…”

“Very well,” Esteban said.

Little beads of sweat stood on his olive brow as he went to the wall safe and twirled the dial.

Simon handed his gun to Pat.

“Cover him. If he tries anything, shoot him in his posterity.” He added to Esteban: “She will, too.”

Esteban stood to one side as the Saint emptied the safe of bundles of currency, account books, and sheaves of businesslike papers. He was pleased to find that Esteban was a neat and methodical man. It made the search so much quicker and easier. He had known before he started what kind of thing he was looking for, and there were not too many places to look for it. He was intent and efficient, implacable as an auditor, with none of the lazy flippancy that normally glossed his purposes.

Another voice spoke from the doorway behind him.

“So we’re havin’ a party. Put that gun down, Miss Holm. What would this all be about, son?”

“Come on in, daddy,” Simon said. “I was just deciding who you were going to arrest.”

Esteban’s sudden laugh was sharp with relief.

“I think, my friend, the sheriff knows that already. Mr Haskins, I shall be glad to help you with my evidence. They stick me up in my own club, bring toe in here, and force me to open the safe. Fortunately you catch them red-handed.”

“That’s the hell of a way to talk about a guy who’s just going to save your worthless neck,” said the Saint.

Newt Haskins pushed his black hat onto the back of his head.

“This had shuah better make a good story, son,” he observed. “But I’m listenin’.”

“It wasn’t too hard to work out,” Simon said seriously. “Lida Verity was being blackmailed, of course. That’s why she told us she was in trouble, instead of calling on you. Blackmail has been a side line in this joint for some time-and a good hunting ground this must be for it, too. This town is always full of wives vacationing from their husbands, and vice versa, and the climate is liable to make them careless. Somebody stooging around this joint could build up interesting dossiers on a lot of people. In fact, somebody did.”

He took a small notebook from his pocket.

“Here it is. Names, dates, details. Items that could be plenty embarrassing if they were used in the wrong way. I’m going to rely on your professional discretion to see that it’s destroyed when you’re through with it.”

“He’s trying to pull the fast one!” Esteban burst out. “He never found such a book in my safe-“

“I didn’t say I did,” Simon responded calmly. “I found it on somebody else. But since you were the most obvious person to be behind the operation, I wanted to nose around in your safe to see if there was anything in it that would confirm or deny. I’m afraid the results let you out. There doesn’t seem to be anything that even remotely connects you. On the other hand, I found this.”

He handed Haskins a slip of paper, and the sheriff squinted at it with his shrewd gray eyes.

“Seems to be a check made out to Esteban,” Haskins said. “It says on the voucher ‘January installment on car-park con cession.’ What do you figger that means, son?”

“It means that if the Admiral was paying Esteban for the car-park concession, Esteban could hardly have been using him as part of a blackmail racket. Otherwise the pay-off would have gone the other way. And certainly it would if the Admiral had been doing Esteban’s dirty work when he killed Lida Verity.”

“The Admiral!” Patricia exclaimed.

Simon nodded.

“Of course. Our corny nautical character. He never missed anything that went on here-including Mrs Verity’s rather foolish affair with a superior gigolo and shill named Maurice Kerr. Only she didn’t sit still for blackmail. I guess she told the Admiral she was going to have me take care of him, and she may even have tried to scare him with the gun she’d borrowed. He got mad or lost his head and grabbed the gun and shot her.” The Saint dipped in his pocket again. “Here are the white gloves he always wore. You’ll notice that there’s a tear in one of them. I’m betting that the thread you found in that trigger guard can be proved to have pulled out of that glove.”

Haskins turned the gloves over in his bony hands, and brought his eyes slowly back to the Saint.

“Reckon you done another good job, Saint,” he conceded peacefully. “We’ll soon know… . An’ this heah Esteban, he ought to stake you with blue chips all night for lettin’ him out.”

“Letting me out!” Esteban echoed indignantly. The enormity of the injustice done to him grew visibly in his mind, finding voice in a crescendo of righteous resentment. “I tell the world I am let out! That Admiral, he makes agreement with me to pay me half of everything he makes from the concession. And he never tells me-the peeg!-he never tells me anything about this blackmail at all!”

IV. Jeannine
“Wine, that maketh glad the heart of man,” quoted Simon Templar, holding his glass appreciatively to the light. “The Psalmist would have had things to talk about.”

“It would have been a love match,” said Lieutenant Wendel, like a load of gravel.

“Up to a point,” Simon agreed. “But then he goes on: And oil to make him a cheerful countenance. Here we start asking questions. Is the prescription for internal or external application? Are we supposed to swallow the oil, or rub it on the face? … I am, of course, quoting the Revised Version. The King James has it Oil to make his face to shine, but the revisers must have had some reason for the change. Perhaps they wanted to restore some element of ambiguity in the original, dividing the plug equally between mayonnaise and Max Factor.”

The detective stared at him woodenly.

“I’ve wondered a lot of things about you, Saint. But what a guy like you wants with that quiz stuff is beyond me.”

Simon smiled.

“A man in my business can never know too much. A brigand has to be just a little ahead of the field-because the field isn’t just a lot of horses trying to win a race with him, but a pack of hounds trying to run him down. Quite a lot of my phenomenal success,” he said modestly, “is due to my memory for unconsidered trifles.”

Wendel grunted.

They sat in a booth in Amaud’s, which Simon had chosen over the claims of such other temples of New Orleans cuisine as Antoine’s or Galatoire’s because the oak beams and subdued lights seemed to offer a more propitious atmosphere for a meal which he wanted to keep peaceful.

For Simon Templar was in some practical respects a devout lover of peace, and frequently tried very hard to vindicate the first person who had nicknamed him the Saint, in spite of all the legends of tumult and mayhem that had collected about that apparently incongruous sobriquet. Because a modem buccaneer in the perfect exploit would cause no commotion at all, even if this would make singularly dull reading: it is only when something goes wrong that the fireworks go off and the plot thickens with alarums and excursions, hues and cries, and all the uproar and excitement that provide such entertainment for the reader.

“Besides which,” Simon continued at leisure, “I like civilized amenities with my crime-or wine. Both of them have a finer flavor for being enriched with background.” He raised his glass again, passing it under his nostrils and admiring its ruby tint. “I take this wine, and to me it’s much more than alcoholic grape juice. I think of the particular breed of grapes it was made from, and the dry sunny slopes where they ripened. I think of all the lore of wine-making. I think of the great names of wine, that you could chant like an anthem-Chambertin, Romanée-Conti, Richebourg, Vougeot … I think of great drinkers-buveurs trés illustres, as Rabelais addresses us-of August the Strong of Saxony, who fathered three hundred and sixty-five bastards and drank himself to death on Imperial Tokay, doubtless from celebrating all their birthdays- or of the Duke of Clarence who was drowned in a butt of malmsey wine … Or, perhaps, I might think of pearls …”