Call for the Saint (14 page)

The action of that fatal second round leading up to Torpedo Smith’s collapse passed through the Saint’s memory again, slowed down to a measured succession of mental images.

“Hoppy,” the Saint reflected, “did you see that first blow which started the Torpedo on his way out?”

“Sure, boss.” Hoppy nodded positively. “Barrelhouse catches him in de ropes.”

“Did he hit him with a right or a left?”

“He hits him wit’ both hands-lotsa times. You seen it.”

The Saint said: “I know. But I mean that very first punch-the one that dazed Smith and laid him open for the other blows. Did you see that particular punch?”

“Sure I see it, boss. We bot’ see it.”

Hoppy yanked the car around a final corner and slid it to a halt in front of a canopy that stretched from the Gothic doorway of a skyscraper apartment building to the curb.

“If you remember it so well,” Simon pursued patiently, “what was it-a right or a left?”

“Why, it wuz a right, a-no,’ it wuz a left. A hook. Or maybe—” Hoppy hesitated, his vestigial brow furrowing painfully. “Maybe it wuz an uppercut dere against de ropes. He is t’rowin’ so many punches, I wouldn’t know.”

“That’s what I thought.”

The memory of Connie Grady’s enigmatic anxiety and her confused half-explained fears for Steve Nelson’s life rose in swelling reprise, cued in with the discord of tonight’s events like the opening movement of a concerto that gave promise of more-much more-to come.

Simon got out, the gloves dangling from his hand by their laces, entered the lobby of the building with Hoppy at his heels, and headed for the elevators.

“Maybe we oughta send out for sump’n to drink, huh, boss ?” Hoppy suggested
The Saint glanced at him. “Send who?”

Hoppy glanced around, becoming aware that the lobby was deserted, the desk man and lift operators off duty.

“It’s after midnight, chum,” the Saint pointed out as they entered the automatic elevator. He pressed the button marked Penthouse. The doors closed softly and the elevator purred skyward. “Besides,” the Saint added as an afterthought, “I believe there’s half a bottle of bourbon left.”

Mr. Uniatz looked at him gloomily. “Yeah, boss. I know. Half a bottle-and me wit’ a t’oist!”

“Mix it with a little water and make it go farther,” Simon suggested helpfully.

“Water?” Hoppy stared incredulously. “De stuff what you wash wit’?”

The Saint smiled absently, thinking of other things.

“You’re definitely no child of Aquarius, Hoppy!”

Hoppy blinked with mild stupefaction, pondered a moment and gave up.

“No, I guess not,” he sighed. “I wuz de child of Mr. an’ Mrs. Uniatz.”

The elevator stopped and they stepped out.

“I meant the sign you were born under.” Simon unlocked the door and entered the apartment. “From the way you drink, you must have been born under Pisces.”

Hoppy’s eyes widened in wonder at this hitherto unimagined vista of biological phenomena.

“Who, me? How did dat happen?”

The Saint shrugged, tossing the gloves on the living-room divan as he turned on lights*.

“I don’t know,” said the Saint. “It must have been shady there.”

He flung himself down on the divan and stretched his long legs luxuriously, while Hoppy struggled briefly with his Delphic observation, and then discarded the entire subject as the bottle on the sideboard caught his eye.

“Keerist!” he muttered. “Me tongue’s hangin’ out.”

He made a beeline for the half bottle of Kentucky dew, throttling it with an enormous hairy paw as he lifted it to his mouth, back-tilted like the maw of a baying wolf. His Adam’s apple plunged in convulsive rhythm as the contents lowered an inch a second, a full four seconds elapsing before he straightened his neck again, halted in mid-swallow by the pop of a cork.

The Saint had a fresh bottle of Old Forester on his lap and was reaching for a glass from the top of a cabinet by the divan.

Hoppy’s mouth pursed in hurt reproach.

“So dat’s why it’s locked,” he deduced aggrievedly.

“And a good thing, too,” the Saint said.

He recorked the bottle, gathered the Angel’s gloves on his lap, and savored the drink with sybaritic enjoyment. Then he proceeded to re-examine the gloves; not that he expected them to yield any more secrets, but he had to be quite sure.

“Ja figure de mitts is loaded, boss?” Hoppy picked up one of the gloves. “Is dat why you want ‘em?”

Simon considered him.

“Did you work that out all by yourself?”

He tossed the remaining glove aside and picked up his glass again. Hoppy took the glove he had thrown down and felt that one too.

“Ain’t nutt’n de matter wit’ dese gloves, boss.”

The telephone rang.

It was Pat, her voice a stiletto in a silken sheath.

“Simon dear, it isn’t that I mind being abandoned like a sinking ship—”

“Darling,” said the Saint, “I’ve never been called a rat more delicately. However—”

“However,” she interrupted determinedly, “you could at least have phoned me as soon as you got home. I’ve been sitting here expecting a call every minute. What happened? Where did you go? I waited at the Arena until the cleaning people nearly swept me out.”

“Good Lord! I told you to go on home.”

“I know, but after you disappeared down that ramp I figured you to come up again. You never did.”

“Darling—”

“Don’t darling me. After the police went down and never came up again either, I went out to find your car, and that was gone too.”

“You poor baffled child,” he commiserated tenderly. “Hoppy and I took it. There was another exit. Several, in fact—”

“I happen to have figured that out quite some time ago,” she said sweetly. “What happened? What was that shouting and crashing going on down there?”

“Oh, that,” the Saint murmured. “Doc Spangler lost his key, so I suppose the police had to break down the door.”

“Lost his key! What key?”

“The key I have in my pocket.”

“B-but—” She broke off. “Simon, if you’re going to be coy—”

“Not at all. Come over for breakfast, and I’ll try to give you a general idea what happened.”

“And just what has your little colleen, Connie Grady, got to do with all this?”

“I haven’t decided yet. We’ll talk about it at breakfast.”

“I’ll be there,” she said ominously. “And it had better be good.”

“It will be. The freshest eggs, the crispest bacon, the best butter—”

“I don’t mean that. Good night, Lothario.”

Simon thoughtfully pulled off a shoe.

Hoppy Uniatz had disposed of the remains of his pint, and had taken advantage of the interruption to begin a strategic circling maneuver towards the Saint’s bottle. There was a more or less instinctive gravitation; his receding brow was grooved by a stream of excogitation that flowed with all the gusto of a glacier towards its terminal moraine.

“Boss,” Hoppy ruminated, “I got an idea.”

The Saint kicked off the other-shoe.

.“Be kind to it, Hoppy,” he yawned, “it’s in a strange place.”

But Hoppy, lost in contemplation of a glorious tomorrow evolving from the stuff of his dreams, went on unheeding.

“Dis fat slob, Bilinski, who is de Masked Angel. He beats de Champ. Dat makes him de Champ, don’t it?”

The Saint eyed him curiously. “He hasn’t beaten him yet.”

“But if Barrelhouse Bilinski gets de crown,” Hoppy continued with growing inspiration, “dey is one guy who can take it away from him. Dey is one guy who can knock him on his can any day in de week. Dat’s me, boss! If dat fat slob gets de champeenship, I’m de guy what can take it away from him. Den I’ll be de champ and you’ll be my manager!”

The telephone rang again.

“Excuse me,” said the Saint. “My bottle seems to be moving towards your hand.”

He rescued it in the nick of time, and picked up the phone.

He recognized at once the soft husky lilt of the voice.

“I-I do hope you’ll forgive my calling you at this hour,” Constance Grady apologized hurriedly. “I called several times after I-I thought you might have gotten home, but there was no answer.”

“I just got in,” Simon explained. “I didn’t have a chance to call you right after the fight as I’d promised, and I thought it was rather late to phone you now. But,” he added quickly, “I’m glad you called. Thanks for the tickets.”

“Thank you for using them.” She hesitated, her voice dropping almost to a whisper. “You-you saw what happened …”

“Yes. Very interesting.”

A slight pause.

“Daddy—” she began, and stopped. “My father came home a few minutes ago. He’s very upset. I-I made an excuse that I had to go to an all-night drugstore on the corner to get some aspirin. I’m talking to you from there.”

“I see.” The Saint’s voice was speculative. “Naturally he would be upset by tonight’s accident.”

“Accident? … Yes, I know.” She hesitated again. “There was something else-something about you and that-that man you call Hoppy—”

“Oh?”

“You went into the Masked Angel’s dressing room after the fight. Daddy said there was a brawl.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” Simon said gravely. “One of Dr. Spangler’s assistants happened to trip on one of Hoppy’s big feet and knock himself out. The Angel fell over a table, causing Dr. Spangler to get the wind knocked out of him.”

“But … You-didn’t go down to see this-Masked Angel because you saw something-something wrong?”

“Wrong? No, Connie, if you mean fouling or anything like that, I didn’t see a thing. By the way, it seems the Masked Angel is one of Hoppy’s old chums.”

“Oh.”

“What makes you think there was anything wrong?”

“I-I don’t know. I’m-I’m just afraid.” Her answer was just as vague now as it had been the first time. “I thought you might have been able to-to see something, or-or figure something out. I—”

“Why not drop in for breakfast and we’ll talk it over?”

“All right.” She seemed reluctant to finish, and yet unable to find an excuse to go on. “And thanks again.”

The Saint poured himself another drink, and surrendered the bottle.

“Who was dat, boss?” Hoppy asked.

“A lady,” Simon replied, “who is holding out on me.”

“You can’t trust ‘em, boss,” Hoppy affirmed, shaking his head. “None of ‘em. I know a doll once.” He sighed, shaking his head like a wistful grizzly. “She has coives like a-a—”

“A scenic railway?” Simon suggested.

Hoppy beamed.

“Dat wuz Fanny, boss! All over! I can see her now.” He sighed with the stentorian nostalgia of a libidinous walrus. “She was de goil of my dreams!”

The Saint yawned and turned to the bedroom.

“Then let’s go see her there,” he said.

The doorbell rang a sudden prolonged pizzicato.

Simon halted in his tracks. Ghostly caterpillars crawled along his backbone. Instinct, sensitive and prescient, had whispered its warning of further explosions in the chain reaction he had started that night; the clamor of the bell came as if on a long-awaited cue. A faint smile flitted over his reckless mouth.

“Who da hell is dat dis time of night?” Hoppy wondered.

“Open the door and find out,” Simon told him.

Mr. Uniatz slipped a meaty hand into his gun pocket and strode out into the foyer to the doorway. The Saint heard the door open fractionally; he grinned slowly as he recognized the impatient imperative voice that answered Hoppy’s gruff inquiry. The door opened all the way … The determined clomp of hard-heeled brogans entered the foyer, heading for the living-room door.

“Boss,” Hoppy trumpeted in warning, “it’s—”

“Don’t tell me,” the Saint broke in cheerfully. “Give me one guess-Inspector Fernack!”:

CHAPTER FOUR
Devoted students of our hagiography who have been following these chronicles for the past several years may be a little tired of reading the exposition of Inspector John Henry Fernack’s emotional state which usually punctuates the narrative at moments like this. Your favorite author, to be perfectly candid, is a little tired of writing it. Perhaps this is one occasion when he might be excused. To compress into a few sentences the long epic of failures, disappointments, and frustrations which made up the history of Inspector Fernack’s endless pursuit of the Saint is a task before which the staunchest scribe might quail. And it is almost ludicrous to attempt to describe in mere words the quality of incandescent ire that seethed up in him like a roiled volcano as the Saint’s welcoming smile flashed in the chiseled bronze of that piratical face.

“Of course,” Simon murmured. “I knew it.”

The detective glowered at him.

“How did you know?”

“My dear John Henry!” the Saint grinned. “That concerto you played on my doorbell was unmistakably a Fernack arrangement.” He waved him to a chair. “Sit down, won’t you? Let me pour you a drink-if Hoppy can spare it.”

“Sure,” said Mr. Uniatz hospitably. “Just don’t take all of it.”

Inspector Fernack did not sit down. In fact, he looked more as if he might easily rise into the air, from the sheer pressure of the steam that seemed to be distending his chest.

For the same routine was going to be played out again, and he knew it, without being able to do anything to check or vary its course. It was all implicit in the Saint’s gay and friendly smile; and the bitterness of the premonition put a crack in his voice even while he plowed doggedly onwards to his futile destiny.

“Never mind that!” he squawked. “What were you and this big baboon raising Cain about in the Masked Angel’s dressing room tonight?”

“You mean last night, don’t you? It happens to be tomorrow morning at the moment.”

“I’m asking you,” Fernack repeated deliberately, “what were you doing—”

“It’s funny,” the Saint interjected, “all the places where a flying rumor will land.”

“It’s no rumor!” Inspector Fernack said trenchantly. “I was at the fight myself.” He removed the stogie from his mouth and took a step forward, his gimlet eyes challenging. “Why did you steal those gloves?”

The Saint’s brows lifted in polite surprise.

“Gloves?”

“Yes, gloves! The gloves that killed Torpedo Smith! Doc Spangler told me what happened. Why’d you take ‘em?”