Call for the Saint (15 page)

“My hands were cold,” Simon said blandly.

An imaginative audience might have fancied that it could hear the perspiration sizzling on Inspector Fernack’s face as its rosy glow deepened to purple. He thrust the stogie back into his mouth with a violence that almost choked him, and bit into it savagely.

“You be careful, Templar!” he bellowed. “If I felt like it, I could pull you in for assault, trespass, malicious mischief, and petty larceny!”

Simon shook his head sadly.

“You disappoint me, Inspector. A hunter of your caliber talking about sparrows when there are tigers in them thar hills.”

“You don’t say!” Fernack’s cigar angled upward like a naval rifle. “Meaning what?”

The Saint shrugged.

“Well, almost anything is more interesting than—” Amusement flickering in the lazy-lidded, hawk-sharp blueness of his eyes as he enumerated on his fingers: “Assault, trespass, malicious mischief, and petty larceny.”

The cigar made another trip from Inspector Fernack’s face to his fist, and suffered further damage in transit.

“All right, Saint,” Fernack ground out, “what are you up to? And don’t give me that look of injured innocence. You didn’t crash that dressing room just for the exercise.”

“We wanted de Angel’s autograft,” Hoppy contributed helpfully.

The Inspector whirled on him.

“I didn’t ask you!” he blared, with such ferocity that even Hoppy recoiled.

“John Henry,” the Saint mused wistfully, “our association through the years has been a beautiful thing-in a futile sort of way-but there are moments when you really embarrass me.”

“I’ll bet!”

“Why should you take Spangler’s word that I stole those gloves? You know what he is. Besides, what makes you think there’s anything wrong with them? What was the doctor’s opinion as to the cause of death?”

Inspector Fernack placed the cigar in his mouth, his eyes fixed on the Saint.

“Concussion,” he said”. “We’ll get the medical examiner’s report in the morning.”

The Saint nodded.

“Concussion. Undoubtedly caused by the psychic dynamite that Doc Spangler has put in the Angel’s punch.”

“Or by a hunk of lead in one of those gloves!” the Inspector growled.

His eyes wandered searchingly about the room.

The Saint said: “You spoke to the Masked Angel, of course?”

“I spoke to him, of course. Why?”

“What is his theory, if any?”

“His theory!” Inspector Fernack snorted scornfully. “Why, that moron Bilinski doesn’t know he’s alive! But he’s staying in jail till we find those gloves, understand?” His eyes narrowed. “How long have you known Bilinski? How did you recognize him as the Masked Angel? Is he a friend of yours?”

The Saint smiled wryly.

“Please, Inspector,” he protested. “My social standing is not indestructible.” He turned to Hoppy. “Well,” he sighed, “if it’s a matter of getting your little playmate out of the cooler, you’d better bring the Inspector his souvenirs.”

“Okay, boss.”

“I thought so!” Inspector Fernack bared his teeth in uneasy triumph.

Hoppy shuffled to the divan, bent over, and reached under it.

“Here dey are,” he announced, hauling them out. He thrust the damp leather mitts at Fernack with all the graciousness of a dyspeptic mastodon. “Take ‘em!”

The Saint selected a cigarette from the silver box on the table.

“I borrowed them for the same reason you want them,” he said. “I was afraid there’d be a substitution before you thought of it.”

He held a lighter to his cigarette, smiling at the Inspector over its little golden spear point of flame.

Fernack scowled, staring at the Saint for a longish moment.

“So that’s your story!” he began with an imminent crescendo. “Now let me tell you—”

And there, in a hopeless anticlimax, he stopped. Galling memories of past pitfalls into which his headlong suspicions had tripped him in previous encounters with the Saint seemed for once to take all the conviction out of his attack. What, after all, was he going to tell the Saint? That he was under arrest for stealing a pair of boxing gloves ?

The Saint was engagingly frank.

“I examined them quite carefully, John Henry,” he said, “and they’re really quite in order, believe me. None of the stitches has been tampered with, or the lining torn, or any chemical such as oil of mustard soaked into the leather. I also had a look at Bilinski’s hand wraps. No plaster of paris, pads of tinfoil, or calking compound. No hunks of lead—”

“All right, wise guy!,” Fernack exploded. “If these are the gloves, the police lab will tell me all I want to know!”

The Saint spread his hands with mock resignation, laughter sparkling in his cobalt eyes like sunlight on an Alpine lake.

“Of course, John Henry, if you don’t believe me. However, if you should ever feel the need of any further enlightenment, always remember that our motto is service. Sure you won’t change your mind about that drink?”

“All right!” Fernack grated, repeating himself. “Be a wise guy. Play the lone wolf. But remember this, Templar. Sooner or later you’re going to make a false move, a mistake you can’t get out of. And when that happens, brother, I’ll be right there waiting to tag you for it!”

“You an’ who else?” Hoppy inquired brilliantly.

Inspector Fernack ignored him. He thrust a finger at the Saint.

“One of these days you’re going to reach out just a little too far-and you’re going to draw back a bloody stump!”

The Saint’s face crinkled in a shrugging smile as he put his cigarette to his mouth with a careless gesture. And as if by accident its glowing tip touched the finger Inspector Fernack held under his nose.

The detective jerked his hand back with a yelp.

“Oh, sorry, John!” Simon exclaimed contritely. “That should teach me a lesson, shouldn’t it?”

Fernack glared at him speechlessly. Then, thrusting the gloves under his arm, he turned and stalked out of the living room. Simon followed him politely to the apartment’s threshold.

“Good night,” said the Saint, as Fernack yanked open the door. “If you should ever need me, you know where to find me.”

“If I ever want you,” Inspector Fernack growled, “I’ll find you, don’t worry.”

He strode out; and with a cheerful grin at the two harness bulls waiting outside by the elevators, Simon quietly closed the door.

“Well,” he sighed. “Now maybe we can get some sleep at last!”

Hoppy yawned in sopprific sympathy, but had enough presence of mind to reach for the Old Forester, which still contained an appreciable amount of fluid.

“I better have a nightcap,” he explained.. “I don’t wanna stay awake t’inkin’ about Torpedo.”

“A nightcap that size,” Simon observed, watching the level of the bottle descending, “could double as a sleeping bag.”

He retrieved what was left and poured it into a glass, for a private relaxer of his own.

He tried to tot up what scores there were on hand, to determine exactly where he stood at the moment. He had to confess to himself that so far he’d been working with mists, trying to assemble a concrete pattern, a design out of stuff that emanated almost entirely from his intuitive processes. The promise of hovering danger had dissolved in two unsatisfactory climaxes: the dressing-room brawl, and Fernack’s visit. Unsatisfactory because they resolved nothing, answered no questions, gave no reason for the ghostly centipedes he still felt parading up his spine… . The mystery of Connie Grady’s disproportionate agitation, the Masked Angel’s incredible victory, still stood as prime question marks.

But perhaps, he told himself, they weren’t real question marks. Perhaps he’d been overdramatizing his perceptions.

Connie was young and in love. Her fear for Steve’s safety could well have inspired her strangely distraught plea. And the Masked Angel might have initially stunned Smith with such a short swift jab that his eye had missed it entirely.

He told himself this and knew he was kidding himself. He knew he had missed nothing in the fight. Therefore there must have been something else-something that he still had to search for.

He stood up and stretched himself.

And once again the telephone rang.

“This is getting monotonous,” said the Saint.

He lifted the instrument from its cradle.

“Templar’s Telephone Chums, Incorporated,” he said.

Silence.

It was a kind of receptive cylindrical silence, open at both ends.

“We’re having a breakfast meeting at 9 a.m.,” Simon confided into the receiver. “Would you like to come too?”

He heard a faint click-a sudden blank deadness.

The Saint hung up thoughtfully; and an airless draught prickled along his nerves like a spectral breeze. It was a well-remembered sensation, a wave length registered on the sensitive antenna of a sixth sense which selected and amplified it throughout his being into an unmistakable alarum. It had warned him before more times than he could remember of impending danger and sudden death-just as it whispered to him now.

Someone had hung up as soon as he’d recognized the Saint’s voice. Someone who wanted to make sure whether he was there.

“Hoppy,” he said, “something tells me we’re going to have more visitors tonight.”

Mr. Uniatz’s cogitative machinery ground to an excruciating halt.

“What for, boss?”

“It’s the price we pay for being so irresistibly attractive.”

He was taking a rapid mental inventory of the room, until his eyes settled on a table lamp with a fairly long cord. He pulled the plug out of the baseboard outlet and broke the lamp cord off close to the lamp, while Hoppy stared at him.

“What gives, boss? What’s dat for?”

The Saint nodded at the empty whisky bottle still clutched in Hoppy’s hand.

“Take that dead soldier, go to the bathroom, fill it with water, and bring it over here.”

Hoppy opened his mouth to speak, closed it, and lumbered off obediently, confident that on whatever path the Saint pointed for him to follow, devious though it might be, a goal would unfold somehow at the end.

From the chest of drawers in his bedroom the Saint took a slim leather case which, on being unzipped, revealed a highly specialized collection of peculiar articles. Skipping the more obviously illegal tools, he selected a small spool of copper wire, a roll of adhesive tape, and a razor-blade knife. Armed with these, he returned to the entrance hall, where Mr. Uniatz extended the whisky bottle to him as though it contained an unclean substance.

“Here’s de water, boss. Whatcha gonna do wit’ it?”

“Just hold it for me a minute,” said the Saint. He began to cut several inches of insulation from the broken end of the lamp cord. “We are preparing a phylactery against zombies,” he explained.

Hoppy’s jaw sagged.

“We’re preparin’ a what against who?”

“An apotropaion, so to speak,” the Saint elucidated.

Hoppy moved nervously aside as the Saint went to the front door and taped one of the two strands of the lamp cord against the metal doorknob. He watched in silent wonder as the Saint unrolled a length of cooper wire, wound the spool end a couple of times around the radiator pipe, and slipped the other end under the door until it projected a foot into the hall outside.

“All right, Hoppy, give me the bottle.”

Simon stepped outside and carefully poured the water on the tile floor in front of his door so that the protruding wire lay in a shallow puddle. He went a couple of paces down the corridor, turned and studied the approach to the living-room door, then came back.

“Boss,” Hoppy sighed, voicing his perennial complaint, “I don’t get it.”

“You will,” said the Saint.

He fastened the other bared end of the drop cord to the radiator with another strip of adhesive and carefully closed the door. Finally he pushed the plug into a nearby baseboard outlet and turned to Hoppy. “Well,” he said, “there it is.”

Hoppy stared at the closed door; and his lucubratory processes, oozing like a glutinous stream between narrow banks, at last achieved a spreading delta of cognition. A slow enchanted grin dissolved his facial fog like sunlight on a jungle swamp.

“Chees, boss,” he said in awesome incredulity, “I do get it!”

“Congratulations.”

“In case de zombies you’re expectin’ should touch de doorknob,” Hoppy deduced triumphantly. His eyes were worshipful. “Ya even got de water puddle grounded, huh?”

The Saint laid his hand on Hoppy’s shoulder in an accolade.

“Nothing escapes your eagle eye, does it?”

“Oh, I got experience in dis line, boss,” Mr. Uniatz acknowledged deprecatingly. “Once I do a job on a mug’s car wit’ a stick of dynamite wired to de starter. De whole mob says it’s one of de biggest laughs I ever give dem.”

The Saint surveyed his work with an artist’s satisfaction.

“That water grounded to the radiator should lend some authority even to 110 volts-especially if he’s in his stockinged feet.” He turned, picking up the wire, knife, and tape, and headed back toward his bedroom. “Let’s grab some shut-eye while we can. It’ll be daybreak in a few hours.

CHAPTER FIVE
It was two hours later when he opened his eyes, instantly and completely awake, with every nerve alive and singing. He lay motionless save for the silent closing of his fingers on the gun at his side, every sense toned to razor keenness, straining to receive consciously whatever it was that had alerted him. From the next bed Hoppy’s snoring rose and fell in majestic rhythm, its pipe-organ vibrato accompanied by a piccolo phrase with every exhalation… .

Then he heard it-a faint scratching of metal-and recognized it instantly.

A skeleton key was probing the front door lock.

He was out of bed and on his feet in one smooth soundless motion, and laying a hand on Hoppy’s mouth. The snoring ceased abruptly; Simon swiftly spoke in his ear, and Hoppy’s groggy eruption died aborning. He relaxed, and the Saint removed his hand.

“Listen.”

The faint scratching of metal was barely audible.

Hoppy nodded, one hand scratching for the gun under his pillow, his anticipatory grin almost as luminous as the moonlight that poured into the window.