Authors: Leslie Charteris
“Sure,” he said, with just the right amount of politely mean
ingless promise.
“Let me give you our number in Westport.”
He wrote it down.
“Your father isn’t going home till late?” he said idly.
“No.
He’s got one of those awful business conferences. I’d
have waited for him if I had anything to do.”
She pouted at
her empty glass. “Why
don’t you get me another drink,
sweetie?”
“I’m
sorry.”
He
gave the order; and she sat back and reflected his gaze
with blue eyes as pale and vacant as a
clear spring sky.
“Are you staying in town tonight?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“Here.”
He
had only just decided that, but it struck him as a con
venient step with a multitude of enticing
possibilities.
She brightened her cigarette with a deep fretful inhalation.
“Why
do you have to play so hard to get?” she demanded abruptly.
“I suppose I must be anti-social.”
“I think you’re wonderful.”
“So do I. But maybe I have eccentric tastes.”
“You.don’t
like me.”
“I
don’t really know you.”
“You
could do something about that.”
It
was quite plain to him that he could. It had been just as
plain at their first meeting; but he
hadn’t given it any serious
thought.
Now he knew exactly why he had kept Andrea Quennel
for his own special assignment, and what he had to do
about it, because this was
the part he had been cast for with
out even asking for it. Perhaps in a way he had known for
sev
eral hours that it would
come to this, without thinking about
it, so that there was no shock when he had to realise that
the
time was there.
Two
more dry Martinis arrived, and he raised his glass to the
level of his mouth again; but this
time he knew that it was a
sword.
“Here’s to crime,” he said, and she smiled back.
“That
sounds more like you.”
Deliberately
he let his eyes survey her again, and they did
not stop at the neck. There wasn’t a blush in her.
She gave him back glance for glance, her red lips moist and parted. He let
about half the calculated reserve
soften out of his face.
“I
told you I’d been a bit slow,” he murmured. “Maybe I’ve
been missing something.”
“Want to reform?”
“It
seems as if it might be more fun to degenerate.”
“I
could have fun watching you degenerate.”
Then she pouted again.
“But,” she said, “you’re so frightfully busy …”
He knew just where he was going now, and he had no
scruples about it. He was even going
to enjoy it if he could.
“I’ve
got some things that I must do,” he said. “I can’t get out of that.
But I could get through a lot of them by eight
o’clock. If you’d like to meet me then, we could nibble a ham
burger and spend a few hours making up some lost
time.
Would that tempt you?”
“My resistance has been low ever since I met you,” she said,
and touched his hand with her fingers.
His mind was totally dispassionate, but there were human
responses over which the mind held
very nominal control. He
was very much
aware of the way her breathing lifted the round
ness under her clinging sweater, and the eagerness that went
out to him from her face. And he had a disturbing
intuition,
against all cynical
argument, that her part in the game was no harder for her to play than his was
for him.
Which was a good idea to forget quickly.
He said: “I’ll have to get started if I’m not going to keep
you waiting at eight o’clock. Let’s
meet at Louis-and-
Armand’s.
We can fight out the rest of it over dinner.”
“We
won’t fight,” she said. “I’ll chase around and see if I
can find Daddy and tell him I’m not
going straight home: And
I’ll
see you at eight.”
“I always seem to be giving you a sort of bum’s rush,” he
remarked, “and here it is
again.”
She shook her head. She was suddenly very gay.
“Tonight is different, darling. Do you think it was Fate that
made me see you outside the Roosevelt?”
“It could have been.”
They drained their glasses while he waited for the check, and
presently he took her outside and
opened the door of her car
for
her. She got in and adjusted her skirt without any particu
lar haste.
“I’ll wait for you,” she said. “You wouldn’t stand me
up,
would you?”
“Not tonight, for a dictator’s ransom,” he answered lightly,
and watched her drive away with the lines around his mouth
smoothed in sober introspection.
He went back into the lobby, found a writing table, and
enclosed a postcard announcing the
forthcoming appearance of
Larry
Adler in an envelope which he addressed to Mr. Frank
Imberline. He took the envelope over to the desk and
put it
down there, moving away at
once and unnoticed behind the
ample cover of the woman to whom the room clerk was talk
ing. From the other side of the lobby
he watched until the
woman
billowed off, and the clerk found the envelope, glanced
at the name, time-stamped it, and put
it in one of the pigeon
holes behind him.
The Saint strolled back to the desk without taking his eyes
off the pigeonhole until he could read
the number on it. The
number was 1013.
“Can you find me a room for tonight?” he asked. “Some
thing about the tenth floor—I like to
be fairly high up, but
not too high.”
He
was about to register in the name of Sebastian Tombs,
from nothing but automatic caution, when he remembered
that Andrea Quennel might
call him. He wrote his own name
instead,
and never guessed how he was to remember that de
cision.
After some discussion he settled for 1017, which seemed al
most like divine intervention.
Having no luggage, he made a cash deposit, and went up
stairs at once. He sent for ice and a
bottle of Peter Dawson. By the time it came he already had his coat and tie
off, and he was
stretched
out comfortably with his feet up, poring over the
contents of Hamilton’s envelope.
3
He took the report on Calvin Gray first, since it was the
shortest. And it only amplified with
dates and places the kind
of picture which he had sketched by then for himself.
Old New England family. Graduated from Harvard,
magna
cum laude.
Member of
the faculty of Middleburg College, five
years.
Married; one daughter, Madeline, later B. Sc. at Co
lumbia. Wife died in childbirth. Member of the
faculty of
Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, nine years. Then a pro
fessorship
at Harvard for six years. Inherited California gold
mine at death of father. Check, check, and check.
Retired, and
devoted himself to
private research. Author of one book,
Molecular Principles of Chemical Synthesis,
and sundry contributions to scientific journals.
No political affiliation. A quiet
modest
man, well liked by the few people who got to know
him.
Nothing
much more than could have been found in
Who’s
Who,
if Calvin Gray had ever bothered to seek an entry
there.
But enough to confirm the
Saint’s information and his own
final estimate.
He
turned next to Walter Devan. He had recalled a few
associations of that name since their meeting, and he
found
them verified and
extended.
Born in a small town in Indiana,
father a carpenter. Ran
away to Chicago at sixteen. Newsboy, Postal Telegraph mes
senger, dishwasher, car washer. A few preliminary bouts as
fall
guy for rising middleweights.
professional football. A broken
leg.
Garage mechanic; night school. Machinist in an automo
bile factory in Detroit. Repair man in the Quenco
plant at
Cincinnati. Repair foreman.
Then, in a series of rapid promotions, engineering manager, assistant plant
superintendent at
Mobile, personnel
manager for the entire organization of the Quennel Chemical Corporation.
And
that was where the biography became quite interesting,
for Walter Devan’s conception of personal management,
which apparently had the
approval of Quenco to the extent of
raising
his salary to an eventual high of $26,000 a year, was
something new even in that comparatively youthful industry.
He was credited with having become the field
commander of
Quennel’s long and bitter
fight against unionism, a miniature
civil
war which had only been ended by congressional legisla
tion. He had been accused in a Senate investigation
of institut
ing an elaborate system
of spies and stoolpigeons, of coercing employees with threats and blackmail, of
saying that any union
organizers
caught on Quenco property would be qualified for
a free funeral at the corporation’s expense. Certainly he had
more than once imported regiments of
strike-breakers, and
been the
generalissimo of pitched battles in which several lives
had been lost. But he had easily cleared himself of
one indict
ment for manslaughter, and
the blackest mark on his legal
record
was an order to cease and desist. Entrenched behind his
own taciturnity and protected by all the power of
Quenco, he
had become a semi-mythical
bogey man, an intermittent
subject
for attacks by such writers as Westbrook Pegler, a name
that the average public remembered without being
quite sure
why; but even if the papers
in Simon’s hands only collated
facts
and rumors which had already been found inadequate by
the Law, they still solidified into a portrait
which was realistic and three-dimensional to him.
It was, he meditated, a portrait that was well worth setting
beside Walter Devan’s very timely
arrival on the scene of the
attempted
kidnaping, and the misunderstanding through
which Morgen and his chunky companion had been enabled
to make their getaway. Not
to mention the Saint’s impression that Devan could have been the man who
squeezed by him in
the
cocktail lounge of the Shoreham, who could have slipped a
note in his pocket if Morgen
hadn’t—but he wasn’t sure about
that.
The
only thing missing was any special connection between
Devan and Morgen. Devan, from his dossier, was no
more con
cerned with politics than
Calvin Gray. The only club he be
longed
to was the Elks. His only quoted utterances were on the subject of unions, and
obvious sturdy platitudes about
Capital and Labor, and, under examination, hardly less obvious
defenses of the Quenco policy and methods. A pre-war
attempt to link him with the German-American Bund had
collapsed quite ridiculously. He was a man who worked at his job
and kept his mouth shut, and didn’t
seem to divide his loyalty
with anything
else.
“And yet,” Simon thought, “if he doesn’t know more about
at least some of this
charade than I do, I will devote the rest
of my life to curling the hair on eels.”
He
built himself another highball, and turned logically to
the file summary on Hobart Quennel.
This
was another of those superficially straightforward his
tories which any sound citizen is supposed to have.
Quennel
was the son of a
respectable middle-class family in Mobile,
Alabama. His father owned a prosperous drug store, in
which
Quennel worked after he
left high school. Out of this ordi
nary origin, perhaps, in some deep-rooted way, might have
stemmed both Quennel’s ultimate
aggrandisement of the chemical industry and his choice of Mobile for the
establishment of
one of
Quenco’s newest and largest plants.