The Saint to the Rescue (6 page)

“You must have been cheating last
night,” he said, “or
you couldn’t look so much better than I feel.
Can I do any
thing for you, or did you only come here to gloat?”

“You can do something for me,” said
the Saint. “I could
do it myself if I had to, but I’m feeling
lazy. I’m sure you’ve
got all the connections. Just find out today’s
schedule for
these caramel-cookers that we lost so much beauty sleep
dodging last night.”

“I must be an all-day sucker,”
Johnny Kan said, reaching
for the phone. “But you had me convinced
that it was just
a coincidence that you hit San Francisco in the middle of
their convention, and you didn’t want any part of them.”

“I wasn’t trying to kid you. The
important coincidences have all happened since we said goodnight.”

The schedule was forthcoming in a few minutes.

“Ten o’clock, Paramount Theater: a
movie,
New Methods
of Merchandising,
followed
by a lecture on
Taxation Aspects of the Bottling Industry.
Twelve
o’clock, St. Francis Hotel,
lunch: guest speaker, the President of the
San Francisco
Chamber of Commerce. Three o’clock, forum:
Soda Foun
tains and
Juvenile Delinquency.
Five o’clock—”

“Whoa,” said the Saint. “That’s
plenty. I only want to
know where to look for a guy, and I should be
able to find
him long before five.”

“Would it be very indiscreet to ask
which of the caramel-
cookers has incurred this unprecedented
interest?”

“No, I don’t think so. The name is Otis
Q. Fennick.”

“Oh. Of the Fennick Candy Company?”

“Why—do you know him?”

“No. But I know their West Coast
representative. A Mr.
Smith. He eats here sometimes. They have a
sales office here,
you know.”

“I didn’t.”

“When you want to know anything in a
foreign city, you
should always consult the natives. Let me look up the address
for you. Right now, I should think that’s where you’d
be most likely to find
him. They don’t make any soft drinks,
so he’d hardly be interested in the
tax problem of bot
tling—if I may presume to offer my amateurish
deduction.”
Kan turned the pages of a city phone book. “Ah, here
it is.
On Sutter Street—it should be only a block or two from
Union
Square.”

He jotted down the address, and Simon took it
grate
fully.

“You’re right, I’m glad I asked
you.”

“Doesn’t that entitle me to know what
this is about?”

“Perhaps, before I leave town, Johnny.
But not just yet.
There’s still too much I haven’t figured out
myself.”

Simon continued his walk, down to Union Square
and
west on Sutter. The number that Kan had given him was a
modern
office building, and the directory board in the lobby showed that the Fennick
Candy Company was on the second
floor. He went up.

From the sequence of doors on the corridor,
the West
Coast office appeared to take up only two rooms, but they
were doubtless sufficient for their purpose. The outer room
which he
entered contained, besides the standard furniture,
a large glass-case
display of samples, and a middle-aged
woman with an efficient but forbidding
air who was typing
rapidly at the dictation of some tinny disembodied voice
that came
through an earphone clamped to her head. Elec
trically recorded
sounds entered her ears and emerged through
her fingertips as
transformed impulses to be electrically re
corded in legible form:
she was the only human link in
this miracle of technology, and she seemed to
bear a deep-
rooted grudge against this incurable frailty of hers and
to have dedicated herself to suppressing every trace of it that
she could.

“Mr. Fennick is busy,” she said,
with a kind of malevolent
satisfaction. “Can I help you?”

“I’m afraid not.” Simon glanced at
the communicating
door. “Is he with somebody?”

“Mr. Fennick is working on a speech he
has to make to
the convention tomorrow. He gave the strictest orders
that
he was not to be disturbed for any reason whatever.”

“This is very very important.”

“For any reason whatever,” the woman
repeated smugly.
She was a type that Mrs. Fennick would have approved
of
thoroughly, according to Mr. Fennick’s thumbnail sketch
of his
ever-loving spouse. It was as certain as anything
humanly could be that
she had not sat on anybody’s lap
since she was knee-high. The paradox that
didn’t fit at all
was that the Liane Fennick whom Simon had met was so
utterly unlike his mental picture of a tyrannically jealous
wife. But
in any puzzle, when all the paradoxes were straight
ened out, the
solution was often absurdly easy.

He inquired patiently:
 
“How long will Mr. Fennick be
incommunicado?”

“Until five minutes to twelve, when he
has to leave for
a luncheon.”

“Is he always so hard to see?”

“Mr. Fennick isn’t here very often. And
this is a very
busy time.”

“Is Mr. Smith just as busy?”

“Not as a rule. But at present he’s
covering a meeting
for Mr. Fennick, since Mr. Fennick has to work on his
speech. If
you’ll leave your name and tell me your busi
ness, I’ll try to arrange an appointment
for you.”

“Thanks, gorgeous,” said the Saint, with beatified
earnest
ness. “I may take you up on
that. But later.”

He sauntered out.

The next door along the corridor, which
displayed only
the word private under its number, could only be the pri
vate
entrance to the inner office so zealously guarded by
the misanthropic
matron with the headset. Even so has many
a citadel with
intimidating moat and drawbridge had an
unguarded postern
gate.

Simon leaned an ear against the upper panel.
He heard
no resonance of rounded phrases in rehearsal, or even the
mutter of tentative phrases being fed into a dictating device.
Of course,
the door might have been exceptionally sound
proof, or Mr. Fennick
might have been a purely cerebral
worker. But Simon did not intend to be
put off from seeing
him, if he was there. It would be easy for the Saint to
apologize
for having come to the wrong door, which must
have been
inadvertently left unlocked.

He took from his wallet a wafer-slim implement
which he kept there as routinely as another man might have kept
a nail
file. At this period he seldom needed it as often as
twice a year, but he
would not have been surprised to have
used it twice already that day. And yet
on this third pos
sible occasion it finally proved that the Boy Scouts were
right and preparedness would always pay off sometime. It slid
back the
spring lock with less fuss than its own key, and
Simon walked in with
all the disarming insouciance of the
excuse that he had prepared.

He could have saved himself the histrionic
warm-up, for there was no audience to be disarmed by it.

The office, except for the traditional
appointments of such
sancta, was empty.

Simon set the spring lock in the off
position, as his story
required it, closed the door, and
conscientiously forced
himself to make another of the definitive
checks which
seemed to be foisting themselves on him with irksome
regu
larity. Mr. Fennick was not in the conveniently coffin-sized
coat
closet. He was not under or behind the desk. Unless
he had been cremated
like a moth on the quarter-smoked
but cold cigar in the ash tray, or
ingested by the mouthpiece of the recording machine which still purred
electronically
beside the desk, or sucked out through the air
conditioner
which effectively blockaded the window, he must simply
have gone
out. Whether his antipathetic amanuensis knew
it or not.

The Saint thought that she couldn’t know. If
she had
known, it would have been just as easy to say he was out, and should have
given her the same orgasm of unhelpful-
ness.

The clock that formed the centerpiece of the
onyx ink
stand on the desk showed that it still lacked more than
twenty
minutes of noon.

Simon sat down in one of the guest armchairs,
lighted
a cigarette, and thought a lot more. For a full two minutes.

Then the outer door opened with the click of
a key,
and Otis Q. Fennick came in.
         

After the first bounce of his entrance had
ploughed to a
soggy halt, as if he had bumped into an invisible wall
of
half-congealed treacle, the lordling of the lollipops looked
almost
exactly the same as he had when Simon pulled him
off the hotel fire
escape. That is, he wore the same clothes
and the same expression of paralytic
befuddlement. The only
material difference
was that on the former occasion he had been empty-handed, whereas at this
moment he was awk
wardly lugging under
one arm a cardboard carton about
the
size of a case of Old Curio. This he very nearly dropped
as he gaped at the Saint with the reproachful
intensity of
a gaffed goldfish.

What he said can be loosely reproduced as:
“Wha—well—
I mean—how—”

“Greetings again, Otis,” said the
Saint amiably. “I hope
you’ll forgive me waiting for you like this. Your devoted
watchbitch (is that the correct feminine?)
insisted that you were busy and wouldn’t let me in, but I couldn’t tell her why
I was sure you wouldn’t be too busy
to see me. So I toddled
around and came in this other door which was
fortunately
unlatched.”

Mr. Fennick pushed the door shut, frowning at
it.

“I could have sworn I—”.

“It must’ve fooled you,” Simon said
calmly. “Locks will
do that sometimes.”

The candy caliph put down his box. It seemed
to be
moderately heavy, and gave a faint metallic rattle when it tipped.

“Perhaps I didn’t check it too
carefully,” he said. “I only
went to the men’s
room.”

“Do you have to take your own pottie?” Simon inquired,
gazing pointedly at the carton. “I thought
this was quite a
modern
building.”

Mr. Fennick also glanced at the box, but
seemed to de
cide against pursuing that subject. He straightened his
coat
and tie and moved to his desk, pulling himself together with
the same
air of forced resolution as he might have brought
to a difficult
business situation.

“Well, now, since you’re here,” he
said, “I hope you
didn’t think I was ungrateful last night. But
the note I left
you was intended to be my last word on the subject, Mr.
Templar.”

“That’s what I thought,” said the
Saint. “But what you
forgot was that it mightn’t necessarily be
mine.”

“That is what I was afraid of. And that
is why I hoped
you would be saintly enough to accept my refusal of your
services
in the spirit in which it was made.”

“So you did recognize my name.”

“After you’d left me in your room. I had
nothing to do but
keep on thinking, and it all fitted so well with what
I’ve
heard of your reputation. But it also meant that I couldn’t
afford to
be mixed up with you.”

“Do you mean because of
your
reputation,
or your bank
roll?”

“Frankly, because I didn’t know how long
I could count
on your sympathy. If you went on to take an active
interest
in my problem, I thought, you’d be bound to want to meet
my wife
eventually, and then she might get you on her side,
and I’d be worse off
than before. You don’t know her, you
see, in the same way as I do.”