“We’re going to call on the man who owns this,” he said. “Wish we could take you along, but unfortunately...”
“But you said you didn’t even see who it was who left that gun here!” she exclaimed. “How do you know who—”
“I know who owns these initials,” said the Saint patiently, lifting the gun for her inspection. He showed her the monogram in fancy script on the metal. “They’re rather difficult to untangle but I think you can make them out.”
Hoppy leaned over.
“Initials?” he queried, peering at the gun. “Where?”
“M... G,” Pat read. “M. G.? But who is M. G.?”
“Off-hand, I’d say it was Connie’s father, Michael Grady, wouldn’t you?” Simon kissed her and stood up. “Let’s get started, Hoppy. We may be able to dig her old man out of the mountain.”
Chapter seven
The Saint entered by one of the side entrances of the Manhattan Arena and found himself, as he expected, in the office wing of the building. The corridors and reception-rooms were alive with voices and sporting gentry of varied interests and importance, for this was a cross-roads of the indoor sporting world, and through these catacombs paraded its foremost and hindmost representatives.
Simon moved silently and inconspicuously along the shadowed wall of the main hall and stepped into the main reception-room.
It was a bare and unkempt ante-chamber, its hard chairs and bare benches occupied by a garrulous covey of promoters, managers, sports-writers, ticket speculators, and professional athletes of varied talents and notoriety, all obviously waiting to see the great Mike Grady. A fog of tobacco smoke hung over the room like stale incense burnt to strange and violent gods; the voices of the votaries droned a ragged litany punctuated by coarse yaks of laughter. There was something about them that marked them as a distinct species of metropolitan life; each was subtly akin to the other, no matter how different their outer hides might be. It lay, perhaps, in the mutual boldness of their eyes, the uninhibited expression of primitive emotion, the corner-of-the-mouth asides and the sudden loudly profane rodomontades in lower-bracked dialects. Their eyes appraised him pitilessly as he threaded his way through them, like circus animals taking the measure of a new trainer; but in the same moment their inquisitorial glances flipped away again, as if even under his easy elegance they recognised instinctively a fellow member of their own predatory species.
The girl at the switchboard near Grady’s office door, who doubled as receptionist, surveyed the Saint in the same way as he approached her. But even her deadpan appraisal softened responsively to the intimate flattery of his smile, the irrepressible proposition of his blue eyes, and the devil-may-care lines of chin and mouth... He was opening the door of Grady’s private office before she suddenly remembered her duties as sentry of the sanctum.
“Hey, come back here!” she cried. “You can’t go in there!”
Like other women who had tried to tell the Saint what he couldn’t do, she thought of her objections a little late. The Saint was already in.
Michael Grady was sitting tilted back in his swivel chair, his feet resting on the edge of his huge desk, his broad, snub-nosed face turned upward at the ceiling as he cuddled a telephone in the crook of his jaw and shoulder. His gaze swung downward as he heard the door close, and his eyes, which matched the Saint’s for blueness, bulged with embryonic eruption.
The Saint waved a debonair greeting and sank into a worn leather club chair facing him.
The promoter grunted a couple of times into the telephone, his eyes fixed on Simon Templar’s, and hung up, his feet returning to the floor with a crash.
“And who the hell might you be?” he blasted.
A rich brogue was still ingrained in his gravelly tenor, although as the Saint well knew it had been thirty years since he had left his native Ireland. The ups and downs of Mike Grady’s turbulent career to his present eminence as promoter of the Manhattan Arena was a familiar story to the city’s sporting gentry; it was a career which on the whole, Simon knew, had won Grady more friends than enemies — and those enemies the kind an honest but headstrong man easily makes on his way to the top.
“The name,” Simon announced, “is Simon Templar.”
Grady stared at him, digesting the name, seeking a familiar niche for it, his brows drawn in a guarded frown. He opened his mouth as if to speak, then closed it again as recognition dawned in his eyes and wiped away the frown. He leaned forward on his desk.
“The Saint?” he asked unbelievingly, and sprang to his feet without waiting for a reply. “Of course! I should’ve known!” He came from behind the desk, extending an eager hand. “Glad to meet you, Saint!”
Simon rose to his feet and allowed his arm to be used like a pump-handle.
“And it’s a shame you’ve not visited me before,” Grady enthused. “Why, only yesterday one of the boys brings up your name as a possibility for master of ceremonies for the Summer Ice Follies we’re puttin’ on soon. The Saint and Sonja Henie! Can’t you just see that billin’! It’d be sensational! You’d pack ’em in! We’d have it all in the papers — on billboards — on the radio—”
“And in skywriting,” said the Saint. “Well, I suppose the world will always beat a path to the door of the man who builds a better claptrap, but I didn’t come as a performer in that line. I... er... already have a... sort of profession, you know.”
“A profession? You?” Grady smiled jestingly. “And what would that be?”
“I’m what you might call a haunter,” said the Saint.
Grady’s brows knitted.
“A haunter?”
“Of guilty consciences.”
“That,” said Mr Grady after a pause, “I don’t get.”
Simon helped himself to a cigarette from the dispenser on the desk.
“Well,” he said engagingly, “take your conscience, for example.”
Grady grinned at him.
“And why would you be hauntin’ my conscience? It’s crystal clear.”
Simon struck a match.
“Is it?”
“Indeed it is.”
“Even about your secret partnership with Doc Spangler?”
Grady’s grin faded. He turned abruptly, went back behind his desk, and sat down. His fingertips tapped a nervous tattoo on the top of his desk for a moment.
“Even if that were true,” he said finally, “would it be a crime?”
The Saint also sat down again, lowering himself through a leisured breath of smoke.
“I always heard you were an honest man, Mike,” he said quietly. “Spangler’s a crook, and you know it.”
Grady flushed.
“I don’t know anything of the sort!” he snapped. “So he served time once. What of it? A man can make a mistake.”
“I know,” Simon nodded. “And you put him back on his feet; gave him a job at the Queensbury Gym.”
“The best damn masseur I ever had!”
“Very likely. He was an MD before they took away his licence for peddling dope.” Simon consulted his cigarette ash. “Mike, you even advanced him money to go into business as a fight manager, didn’t you?”
Grady stirred impatiently.
“Well, what of it?” he demanded. “When I got this job here at the Arena I gave up the gym. Doc didn’t want to work there without me, so I loaned him a couple of grand.”
“For which he gave you a share in Barrelhouse Bilinski as collateral.”
“Well—” Grady chuckled, but his humour was laciniated with unease. “It didn’t seem like much collateral at the time. He wasn’t the Masked Angel then, you know.”
“I know.”
“Well, then,” Grady said, spreading his square freckled hands expressively, “you know how good Spangler is. A great fighter he’s made out of a broken-down stumble bum.”