The Saint Sees It Through (5 page)

“No, thank you,” said the Saint
calmly. “I’ve already had several of your drinks, and I want to get my
tummy pumped
out before goldfish start breeding in it.”

He peeled a bill off his roll and handed it to
the waiter with
a gesture which dismissed the change.

“Of course you
thought you were doing the right thing,”
Cookie persisted.
“But if you only knew the trouble I’ve had
with that little
tramp, I’m sure——
”

“I’m quite sure,” said the Saint,
with the utmost charm, “that I’d take Avalon’s suggestion—and throw Dr.
Zellermann
in for a bonus.”

He turned on his heel and sauntered away—he seemed tired
of the whole thing and full of time to spare, but
that effect
was an illusion. He
wanted very much indeed to catch Avalon
Dexter before he lost her, and his long lazy stride took him
to the door without a wasted movement.

The check-room girl was helping him into his
coat when
Ferdinand Pairfield, on his way to the gents’ room, edged
past him at
a nervous distance that was not without a certain coy concupiscence. The Saint
reached out and took his hand.

“Don’t you think that nail polish is a
bit on the garish side,
Ferdy?” he asked gravely.
“Something with a tinge of violet
in it would look much
cuter on you.”

Mr. Pairfield giggled, and disengaged his fingers as shyly
and
reluctantly as a debutante.

“Oh,
you!”
he carolled.

Slightly
shaken, Simon let himself out and went up the short f
light of steps to the street.

Avalon Dexter was on the sidewalk, talking to
the doorman
as he held the door of a taxi for her. Even with her back
to
him, the Saint couldn’t have mistaken the long bronze hair
that hung
over the shoulders of her light wolf coat. She got into the cab as he reached
the street level; and before the
doorman could close the door Simon took two
steps across the
pavement, ducked under the man’s startled nose, and sat
down beside her.

He held
out a quarter, and the door closed.

She gazed
at him in silence.

He gazed
at her, smiling.

“Good morning,” she said.
“This is cosy.”
                

“I thought I might buy you a drink
somewhere,” he said,
“and wash the taste of that dump out of
our mouths.”

“Thanks,” she said. “But I’ve
had all I can stand of creep joints for one night.”

“Then
may I see you home?”

Her candid
eyes considered him for a bare moment.

“Why
not?”

She gave the driver an address
on Sutton Place South.
       

“Do you make all that money?” Simon
asked interestedly,
as
they moved off.

“The place I’ve got isn’t so expensive. And I work pretty
regularly. At least,” she added, “I used
to.”

“I hope I didn’t louse everything up for you.”

“Oh, no. I’ll get something else. I was
due for a change
anyway.
I couldn’t have taken much more of Cookie without going completely nuts. And I
can’t think of any happier finale
than
tonight.”

Simon stretched out to rest his heels on the
folding seat
opposite him, and drew another eighth of an inch off his
cigarette.

He said
idly: “That was quite an exit line of yours.”

“They
got the idea, did they?”

“Very definitely. You could have heard a
pin drop. I heard
one.”

“I’d
give a lot to have seen Cookie’s face.”

“She looked rather like a frog that was
being goosed by
an electric eel.”

The girl
laughed quickly; and then she stopped laughing.

“I
hope I didn’t louse everything up for
you.”

“Oh, no.” He doubled her tone
exactly as she had doubled
his. “But it was just a little
unexpected.”

“For
a great detective, you’ve certainly got an awful memory.”

He arched
an eyebrow at her.

“Have
I?”

“Do you remember the first crossing of
the
Hindenburg
—
the year before it blew up?” She was
looking straight ahead,
and he saw her profile intermittently as the
dimmed street
lights touched it. “You were on board—I saw your
picture in
a newsreel when you arrived. Of course, I’d seen pictures
of
you before, but that reminded me. And then a couple of nights later you
were in a place called the Bali, opposite El Morocco.
Jim Moriarty had
it—before he had the Barberry Room. I was
bellowing with the
band there, and you came in and sat at
the bar.” She
shrugged, and laughed again. “I must have made
a tremendous
impression.”

He didn’t remember. He never did remember, and
he never ceased to regret it. But it was one of those things.

He said lamely: “I’m sorry—that was a
lot of years ago, and
I was crashing all over town and seeing so
many people, and I can’t have been noticing much.”

“Oh, well,” she said, with a stage
sigh. “Dexter the For
gotten Girl. What a life! … And I thought
you came to my
rescue tonight because you remembered. But all the time
you
were taken up with so many people that you never even saw
me.”

“I’m sorry,” he said again. “I
must have been taken up with
too many people. And I’ll never forgive any
of them.”

She looked
at him, and her smile was teasing and gay, and
her eyes were
straight and friendly with it, so that it was all
only chatter and she was not even trying
to sell him anything;
and he could only
smile back and think how much better it
could have been if he remembered.

“Maybe
you don’t know how lucky you were,” she said.

“Maybe
I don’t,” he said.

And it was a curious thing that he only half
understood
what he was saying, or only half meant what he said; it
was
only a throwaway line until after it was spoken, and then it
was
something that could never be thrown away.

This was something that had never been in his
mind at all
when he abandoned himself to the simple enjoyment of
smack
ing Dr. Ernst Zellermann in the smooch.

He lighted another cigarette with no less care than he had
devoted to the other operation, and said nothing
more until the taxi drew up outside a black and white painted brick
building on the river side of Sutton Place South.
He got out and helped her out, and she said: “Come in for a minute and
let me fix you a real drink.”

“That’s
just what I needed,” he said, and paid off the taxi,
and
strolled up beside her as casually as if they had known,
each other
for a hundred years, and it was just like that, and
that was how it
was.
 

4

The living-room was at the back. It was big and quiet and
comfortable.
There was a phonoradio and a record cabinet,
and a big bookcase,
and another tier of shelves stacked with
sheet music, and a
baby piano. The far end of it was solid with tall windows.

“There’s a sort of garden outside,”
she said. “And the other
end of it falls straight down on to East River
Drive, and
there’s nothing beyond that but the river, so it’s almost
rustic.
It only took me about three years to find it.”

He nodded.

“It
looks like three well-spent years.”

He felt at home there, and easily relaxed.
Even the endless
undertones of traffic were almost lost there, so that the
city they had just left might have been a hundred miles away.

He strolled by the bookcase, scanning the
titles. They were
a patchwork mixture, ranging from
The African Queen
to
The Wind in the Willows,
from Robert Nathan to Emil Ludwig
, from
Each
to the Other
to
Innocent Merriment.
But they
made a
pattern, and in a little while he found it.

He said:
“You like some nice reading.”

“I have to do something with my feeble brain every so often.
I may be just another night-club singer, but I did go to Smith
College and I did graduate from University of
California, so
I can’t help it if I
want to take my mind off creep joints some
times. It’s really a great handicap.”

He smiled.

“I
know what you mean.”

He prowled on, came to the piano, set his
drink on it, and
sat down. His fingers rippled over the keys, idly and
aimlessly,
and then crept into the refrain of
September Song.

She sat on the couch, looking at him, with
her own glass
in her hand.

He finished abruptly, picked up his drink
again, and crossed
the room to sit down beside her.

“What
do you know about Zellermann?” he asked.

“Nothing much. He’s one of these Park
Avenue medicine
men. I think he’s supposed to be a refugee from Vienna—he
got out
just before the Nazis moved in. But he didn’t lose
much. As a matter of
fact, he made quite a big hit around here.
I haven’t been to
his office, but I’m told it looks like something
off a Hollywood set.
His appointment book looks like a page
out of the Social
Register, and there’s a beautifully carved
blonde
nurse-receptionist who’d probably give most of his male
patients a
complex if they didn’t have any to start with. He’s
got a private
sanitarium in Connecticut, too, which is supposed
to be quite a place.
The inmates get rid of their inhibitions by
doing exactly what they please and then
paying for any special
damage.”

“You mean if they have a secret craving
to tear the clothes
off a nurse or throw a plate of soup at a waiter, they
can be
accommodated—at a fancy tariff.”

“Something like that, I guess. Dr. Zellermann says that all
mental troubles come from people being thwarted
by some
convention that doesn’t agree with their particular personality.
So the cure is to take the restriction away—like taking a tight
shoe off a corn. He says that everyone ought to do
just what
their instincts and
impulses tell them, and then everything
would be lovely.

“I notice he wasn’t repressing any of
his impulses,” Simon
remarked.

The girl
shrugged.

“You’re always meeting that sort of creep
in this sort of
business. I ought to have been able to handle him. But
what
the hell. It just wasn’t my night to be tactful.”

“You’d
met him before, of course.”

“Oh, yes. He’s always hanging around the joint. Cookie
introduced him the other night. He’s one of her
pets.”

“So I gathered. Is it Love, or is he
treating her? I should
think a little deep digging into her mind
would really be
something.”

“You said it, brother. I wouldn’t want
to go in there without an armored diving suit.”

He cocked a
quiet eye at her.

“She’s
a bitch, isn’t she?”

“She
is.”

“Everybody’s backslapper and good egg,
with a heart of garbage and scrap iron.”

“That’s
about it. But people like her.”

“They would.” He sipped his drink.
“She gave me rather
a funny feeling. It sounds so melodramatic,
but she’s the first
woman
I ever saw who made me feel that she was completely
and frighteningly evil. It’s a sort of psychic feeling, and I got
it all by myself.”

“You’re
not kidding. She can be frightening.”

“I can see her carrying a whip in a
white-slave trading post,
or running a baby farm and strangling the
little bastards and
burying them in the back yard.”

Avalon laughed.