Authors: Leslie Charteris
“But
needs must,” said the Saint firmly, “when the devil
drives.”
He allowed Imberline to follow him into the room, and
helped himself to the most inviting
chair.
Imberline stood in front of him, bulging like a pouter
pigeon.
“Young man, if you don’t get out of here at once I’ll pick
up the telephone and have you thrown
out.”
“You can do that, of course. But I’ll still have time to say
what I want to say before the bouncers
arrive. So why not just
let me say it,
and save a lot of commotion?”
The
rubber rajah made the mistake of trying to find an answer to that one, and
visibly wrestled himself to a standstill.
He inflated himself another notch to try and distract
attention
from that.
“Well, what is it?” he barked.
“A few things have happened since last night,” said the
Saint. “I don’t know what all of
them add up to, but they do
make it seem very probable that Calvin Gray’s invention isn’t
a crackpot dream.”
“The proof of the pudding is in the eating,” Imberline pro
nounced sententiously. “We’ve already discussed
that——”
“But that was before Calvin Gray was kidnaped.”
Imberline
had his mouth open for a retort before he fully
realised what he was replying to.
He
swallowed the unborn epigram, and groped for some
thing else. It came out explosively enough, but the
roar in his
voice lacked its normal
fullness.
“What’s that?”
“Kidnaped.”
“I didn’t see anything about it in the papers.”
“It’s being kept as quiet as possible. So is the fact that a
man was murdered during the return
engagement this morn
ing.”
Imberline’s jowls swelled.
“Mr. Templar, if this is some cock-and-bull story that you’ve
concocted to try and stampede me, let me tell you——”
“You don’t have to,” said the Saint quietly. “If you
want to confirm it, call the FBI in New Haven. They’ll probably admit
it to you if you identify yourself.
Tell them you’re interested
on
behalf of the WPB.”
“Who was
murdered?”
“A
man named Angert, employed by Schindler, who was
employed by some party unknown to trail Calvin Gray’s
daughter.”
“I never heard of him.”
“I’m
afraid that doesn’t make him any less dead.”
Imberline glared at him with unreasonable indignation.
“This is a civilised country,” he proclaimed. “We don’t
ex
pect our system to be
disrupted by violence and gangsterism.
If there has been any official negligence——
”
“Something
ought to be done about it,” Simon assented
tiredly. “I know. Personally, I’m going to write
to the Presi
dent. What are you going to
do?”
“What
am I going to do?”
“Yes. You.”
“What do you expect me to do? If your story is true, the
proper authorities——
”
“Of
course, I’d forgotten the dear old Proper Authorities.
But you were a Proper Authority who was supposed to
find out
what Calvin Gray had on the
ball. And apparently some Improper Authority thinks a lot more of him than you
did—so
much that they’re prepared
to go to most violent and gang
ster
lengths to put him on ice.”
Imberline fumbled a handkerchief out of his trouser pocket and mopped
his heavy face. He went over to another chair and
made it groan with his weight.
“This is terrible,” he said. “It’s—it’s shocking.”
“It’s
all of that,” said the Saint. “And it stinks for you.”
“What
do you mean?’
Simon
slung one leg over the arm of his chair and settled deeper into it. He was no
longer worried about being thrown
out.
“Madeline
Gray had an appointment with you last night,”
he said. “You’ll remember I asked you about it.
You said you
didn’t make it. But she
thought she had it. And she was on her
way to your house when there was an attempt to kidnap
her—
which I happened to louse
up. But it was rather obvious that
the appointment, phony or not, was planned to put her on
the
spot for kidnaping. If
anyone wanted to jump to conclusions,
they could make your position look slightly odd.”
The
other stiffened as if he had been goosed, and a tint of maroon crept into his
complexion.
“Are
you daring to insinuate——
”
“I’m not insinuating anything, Frankie. I’m just telling you
what any dumb cop would think of.
Especially after you’d been
so
bull-headed about dodging Gray and his daughter. Almost
as if you didn’t want them to get a
hearing.”
“I told you, there is an established procedure—a well-
planned system——
”
“And
there is Consolidated Rubber, which I hear was rather late in climbing on the
synthetic bandwagon.”
Imberline
drew himself up.
“Young man,” he said, with indomitable dignity, “I have
never made any secret of my views on the subject of
synthetic
rubber. If Nature had intended us
to have synthetic rubber,
she would
have created it in the first place. But only God can
make a tree. However,” he conceded
magnanimously, “in the present Emergency I have not been influenced by my
personal
opinions. My life has always
been an open book. I am pre
pared to
match my principles with any man’s. If anyone wishes
to impugn my honesty, I cannot prevent him, but I
can assure
you that he will live to
eat his words.”
Simon put a match to a cigarette and regarded him with
unconcealable awe.
“Incredible”
was the adjective which he had spontaneously
tacked on Imberline in the Shoreham, without knowing
any
thing about him or having
heard more than two sentences of
his
dialogue. He couldn’t improve on it now.
“You ought
to be in a glass case,” he said.
The
pattern snapped into place. And once there, it was im
movable. His ruthless eyes had held Imberline under a
micro
scope for every instant of
the interview, and they wouldn’t
have missed even the cobwebby shred of a frayed edge. Even less than in
their first conversation, when he had been com
pletely baffled. But there had been no such thing. The
pr
é
cis
he had studied hadn’t lied—as he should have known it
couldn’t. He had jabbed Imberline calculatingly
with facts, information, insinuations, names and knowledge, without rattling
him for a split second on any score except his own sonor
ous self-esteem. No cornered conspirator could
ever have been
that brilliant. Not even the dean of all professional
hypocrites
could have been so unpuncturable.
Histrionic masterpieces
like that were
performed daily in detective stories; never in
real life. And this was very much a time for realism, no matter
what
pet postulates went down in the crash.
“Frankie,” said the Saint carefully, “I’m afraid I’m
going to
have to shake your foundations
a bit. I’m beginning to wonder
if you haven’t been too much an open book for your own
good.”
“Honesty is the best policy—the only policy,” insisted Im
berline, putting a fine ring into his
new coinage. Then sud
denly he was a
rather helpless and flabby man staring wistfully
at a bottle and a syphon on the bureau. “I was going to have
a drink when you came in,” he said, as if he
had been cheated.
“Fix me one while you’re up,” said the Saint congenially.
He let Imberline muddle through the mechanics of bar
tending, without moving until a glass
was put into his hand.
Then
he said, trying to walk the tight wire between candor
and offense, between toughness and tact: “Let’s
face it. You
are an honest man. But
everyone you meet in this evil world
may not be
such an idealist as you are. You may have been a
sucker for some people who needed a front man whose life was
an
open book.”
“My associates,” stated Imberline, “are business men of
the
highest standing——
”
“And Sing Sing,” drawled the Saint, “has several alumni
and post-graduate students who got used to hearing the same
things said about them.”
“You’re letting your imagination run away with you. This
dreadful coincidence—suppose I accept
your statement that
there
has been foul play——
”
“Let me ask you a couple of questions.”
“What about?”
Simon
absorbed from his drink and then from his cigarette.
“You said last night that Calvin Gray was a nut. Why?”
“That was on
the basis of my information.”
“You said
that his invention had been investigated.”
“It has been.”
“Who by?”
“I told you—there is an established procedure. You probably
haven’t had much to do with modern
business methods, but I
can assure you that the best brains in the country have evolved
a system of——
”
“I just asked you: Who? What is the guy’s name, where did
you dig him up, and which side does
he dress on?”
Imberline blinked, and then rubbed his rectangular wattled
chin.
“If it’s of any importance,” he said, “I don’t think
Gray’s
case went through the
regular channels. I’m trying to remem
ber. No, perhaps it didn’t. I think I was quite impressed
with
him at first, and the very same day I was in a
position to men
tion Gray’s claims to someone
else who is one of the biggest
men in that field. This expert told me
that Professor Gray had already tried to sell him the same formula, and he had
made
exhaustive tests and established beyond
any doubt that the whole thing was a fraud. So naturally, in order not to place
any unnecessary burdens on our system
of investigation——
”
“You killed it then and there.”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“And then
talked yourself into believing that it had been
thoroughly investigated by your tame experts——
”
“Mr.
Templar,” said Imberline crushingly, “my information
in this case came from an expert whom my Department would
be proud to employ if we could afford him. A
self-made man,
of course, but the most
important figure in his field today.”
“And what is his name? inquired the Saint, with a little
pulse beating behind his
temples—“Joe Palooka?”
“Mr.
Hobart Quennel, the President of Quenco.”
Imberline said it somewhat as if he had been the toastmaster at a
diplomatic banquet, and Quenco was a South American
republic which recently decided to become a Good
Neighbor.
The Saint’s glass traveled very leisurely to his mouth again,
and his cigarette visited there after
it, while his amiably sar
donic blue eyes surveyed the dollar-a-year deacon with un
subdued delight.
Another piece had clicked into its niche, and the threads
were sorting out. Calvin Gray had been
a shrewder diagnosti
cian than Simon had given him credit for. In fact, Simon had
to face the realisation that a great deal of the tangle had
been woven out of his own refusal to accept the obvious. Too de
terminedly on the alert for tortuous scheming, he
had only
succeeded in snarling his
own skein. Now he was finally cured,
he
hoped, and this—this lovely and luminous simplicity—could
chart a
straight course between way stations to the end.
“So Hobart Quennel was your authority,” said the Saint
dreamily. “And Quenco has two
million dollars invested al
ready in a plant that’s laid out to use the old butadiene proc
ess.”
Imberline snorted at him.
“Mr. Quennel is one of the most prominent industrialists in
the country. I may not approve of his perpetual squabbles with
some other Government departments, but in my own dealings w
ith him he has always been most pleasant and
co-operative.
The mere suggestion that
a man in his position would
be
prejudiced——
”