The Saint Sees It Through (9 page)

Once more the pencil beam slid around the
office, and
snapped out. Then the Saint moved silently—compared to
him, a
shadow would have seemed to be wearing clogs—back
into the reception room. His flash made an
earnest scrutiny of
the receptionist’s
corner and froze on a small protuberance.
Simon’s fingers were on it in a second. He pulled, then lifted—
and a section of wall slid upward to reveal a
filing cabinet, a
small safe, and a
typewriter.

The Saint sighed as he saw the aperture revealed no liquid
goods. Tension always made him thirsty, and
breaking and
entering always raised
his tension a notch.

As he reached for the top drawer of the file
to see what he
could see, the telephone on the reception desk gave out a
shrill
demand. The Saint’s reflexes sent a hand toward it, which
hovered
over the instrument while he considered the situation.
More than likely,
somebody had called a wrong number. It
was about that time
in the evening when party goers reach the
point where it seems
a good idea to call somebody, and the
somebody is often determined by
spinning the dial at random.

If it happens to be your telephone that
rings, and you struggle
out of pleasant dreams to curse any dizzy
friend who would
call you at that hour, and you say “Hello” in
churlish tones,
some oafish voice is likely as not to give you a song and
a
dance about being a telephone tester, and would you please
stand three feet away from the
phone and say “Methodist
Episcopalian”
or some such phrase, for which you get the horse
laugh when you pick up the phone again.

This is considered top-hole wit in some
circles.

If this were the case, Simon reflected, no
harm could be done
by answering. But what harm in any case? he asked
himself,
and lifted the receiver.

“Hullo.”

“Ernst?” asked a sharp and vaguely
familiar voice. “I’m glad you came early. I’ll be there immediately.
Something has arisen
in connection with Gamaliel Foley.”

Click. The caller hung up. That click was
echoed by the
Saint’s
memory, and he directed his flashlight at the appoint
ment pad to confirm it. There it was, sandwiched between
the names of Mrs. Gerald Meldon and James Prather,
Gamaliel
Foley.

The Saint was torn between two desires. One
was to remain
and eavesdrop on the approaching meeting of Dr. Z and his
caller with the vaguely
familiar voice; the other was to find
Gamaliel
Foley and learn what he could learn. The latter pro
cedure seemed more practical, since the office
offered singularly few conveniences for eavesdropping; but Simon was saddened
by
the knowledge that he would never
know what happened when
the conferees
learned that it was not Dr. Zellermann who had
answered the call.

He replaced the wall panel and went away. On
the twelfth
floor
he summoned the elevator, and he wasn’t certain whether
or not he hoped he wouldn’t encounter Park Avenue’s psyche
soother. It might have been an interesting passage
at charms,
for the doctor could give
persiflage with the best. But no such
contretemps occurred on the way
out; and Simon walked the
block to
Lexington Avenue and repaired to a drugstore stocked
with greater New York’s multiple set of telephone
directories.

He found his man, noted the Brooklyn address,
and hailed
a taxicab.

For a short while Simon Templar gave himself
over to trying
to remember a face belonging to the voice that had spoken
with
such urgency
on the telephone. The owner of the voice was
excited,
which would distort the voice to some extent; and there
was the further possibility that Simon had never
heard the voice
over the telephone
before, which would add further distortion to
remembered cadences and tonal qualities.

His worst enemies could not call Simon
Templar methodical.
His
method was to stab—but to stab unerringly—in the dark.
This characteristic, possessed to such an incredible degree by
the Saint, had wrought confusion among those same
worst
enemies on more occasions than
can be recorded here—and the
list
wouldn’t sound plausible, anyway.

So, after a few unsatisfactory sallies into
the realm of Things
To
Be Remembered, he gave up and leaned back to enjoy the
ride through the streets of Brooklyn. He filed away the incident
under unfinished business and completely relaxed.
He gave no
thought to his coming
encounter with Gamaliel Foley, of
which name there was only one in all
New York’s directories,
for he had no
referent. Foley, so far as he was concerned, might
as well be Adam, or Zoroaster—he had met neither.

When the cab driver stopped at the address the
Saint had
given, Simon got out and walked back two blocks to the
address
he wanted. This was an apartment house of fairly respectable
mien, a
blocky building rising angularly into some hundred
feet of midnight air. Its face was pocked
with windows lighted
at intervals, and its
whole demeanor was one of middle-class
stolidity.

He searched the name plates beside the door,
found Foley
on the
eighth floor. The Saint sighed again. This was his night
for climbing stairs. He rang a bell at random on
the eleventh
floor, and when the door
buzzed, slipped inside. He went up the carpeted stairway, ticking off what the
residents had had for dinner as he went. First floor, lamb, fish, and something
that might have been beef stew;
second floor, cabbage; third floor, ham flavored with odors of second floor’s
cabbage; and
so on.

He noted a strip of light at the bottom of
Foley’s door. He
wouldn’t be getting the man out of bed, then. Just what
he
would say, Simon had no idea. He always left such considera
tions to
the inspiration of the moment. He put knuckles to
the door.

There was no sound of a man getting out of a
chair to grump
to the door in answer to a late summons. There was no
sound at all. The Saint knocked again. Still no sound. He tried the
door. It
opened on to a living room modestly furnished with medium-priced overstuffed
pieces.

“Hullo,” Simon called softly.
“Foley?”

He stepped inside, closed the door. No one
was in the living
room. On the far side was a door leading into a kitchen,
the
other no doubt led into the bedroom. He turned the kitchen
light on,
looked about, switched off the light and knocked on
the bedroom door. He
opened it, flicked the light switch.

There was someone here, all right—or had been. What was
here now was not a person, it was a corpse. It
sprawled on the
rug, face down, and
blood had seeped from the back to the dark green carpet. It was—had been—a man.

Without disturbing the body any more than
necessary, Simon
gathered
certain data. He had been young, somewhere in his
thirties; he was a white-collar worker, neat, clean; he bore
identification cards which named him Gamaliel
Bradford Foley,
member of the
Seamen’s Union.

The body bore no information which would link
this man with Dr. Ernst Zellermann. Nor did the apartment, for that
matter.
The Saint searched it expertly, so that it seemed as if
nothing
had been disturbed, yet every possible hiding place
had been thoroughly
explored. Foley, it seemed, was about to
become engaged to a
Miss Martha Lane, Simon gathered from
a letter which he shamelessly read. The
comely face which smiled from a picture on Foley’s dresser was probably her
likeness.

Since no other information was to be gathered
here, the
Saint left. He walked a half dozen blocks to a crowded
all-
night drugstore and went into an empty phone booth, where
he dialled Brooklyn police.

He told the desk sergeant that at such and
such an address
“you will find one Gamaliel Foley, F-o-l-e-y,
deceased. You’ll
recognise him by the knife he’s wearing—in his
back.”

3

At the crack of ten-thirty the next morning, Avalon Dexter’s
call brought him groggily from
sleep.

“It’s horribly early,” she said, “but I couldn’t
wait any longer
to find but if you’re all
right.”

“Am I?” the Saint asked.

“I think you’re wonderful. When do you
want to see me?”

“As soon as possible. Yesterday, for
example. Did you have a
good time last night?”

“Miserable. And you?”

“Well, I wouldn’t call it exciting. I thought about you at
odd
moments.”

“Yes, I know,” she said.
“Whenever you did, I turned warm
all over, and wriggled.”

“Must have been disconcerting to your escort.”

She laughed, bells at twilight.

“It cost me a job, I think. He’d peer
at me every time it happened. I think he concluded it was St. Vitus. The job
was in
Cleveland, anyway.”

“Some of the best people live in Cleveland,” Simon said.

“But you don’t, so I didn’t go.”

“Ordinarily, I’d have a nice fast
comeback for such a leading
remark, but I seem to have trouble finding any words at all.”

“You could say ‘I love you.’ “

“I love you,” Simon said.

“Me, too, kid.”
     

“This being Friday,” Simon said,
“what do you say we go
calling on people after we have brunched
together, and then let
the rest of the day take care of
itself?”

“That scrambling sound,” she said,
“is eggs in my kitchen. So hurry.”

“Thirty minutes,” said the Saint,
and hung up.

He had never needed thirty minutes to shave,
shower, and dress, but he needed to make a call.

Hamilton said: “What kind of a jam are
you in this time?”

“If you can get anything on one Gamaliel
Bradford Foley,”
the Saint said, “it might be useful. I’d
do it myself, but you.
can do it faster, and I expect to be sort of
busy on other things.”

“What sort of things?”

“I’m going to read the papers, and take
my girl calling.”

“The same girl?”

“But definitely,” said the Saint.

“What have you learned?”

“Nothing,” the Saint said,
“that is of any specific use to us, but the wind is full of straws. I’m
watching to see how they
fall.”

“I trust you know the difference
between straws and hay,”
Hamilton said somewhat darkly, and rang off.

Simon picked up a paper on the way out of the
hotel, and
found the death of Gamaliel Bradford Foley recorded in
two
paragraphs on
an inside page.

DEATH LOOKS IN

ON TOP SEAMEN’S

UNION OFFICIAL

Gamaliel Bradford Foley,
secretary of the Seamen’s Union. Local 978 (AFL). was found stabbed to death in
his Brooklyn apartment early this morning by
police.

A telephone
tip—“You’ll recognize him by the knife
he’s
wearing, in his back”—sent patrol car 12 to the
scene.
Officers J. R. McCutcheon and I. P. Wright found
the corpse in the apartment bedroom, with a butcher knife in its back.
An arrest is expected any moment.
Inspector
Fernack told reporters today.

It wasn’t a smile that twisted the Saint’s
sensitive mouth as
the taxi took him to Avalon’s place—it was a grimace of
skep
ticism. “An arrest is expected any moment.” He shrugged. The
police
certainly knew no more than himself—not as much, as a
matter of fact. He
knew of the connection, however nebulous,
between Foley and Dr. Zellermann. How
could the police ex
pect an arrest?