“He was a classmate of mine in college. Worked his own way through — the real hard-driving kind. I watched him start with one truck that he drove himself, and build up that Transamerican Transport system, while I was in business in Portland. He’s been coming here for the last five years, ever since I retired and bought this place.”
An oddly empty sensation lodged in Simon Templar’s stomach like a bullet and expanded hollowly. He lighted a cigarette, moving rather slowly and stiffly, while a clammy chill stroked his skin into goose-pimples.
“Thanks, Ben,” he said at length. “You just saved me from pulling the most fabulous boner of all my life. Some day I may tell you both how gorgeously ghastly it could have been, but right now I don’t feel strong enough. However, I just changed my mind again, and I’m going to stay out the week in the cottage.”
“Whatever you say,” answered the other agreeably, if in some pardonable fog.
Simon drove back to his cabin, unloaded his gear again, and took from his suitcase the checkbook of a Swiss bank in which, for many obvious reasons, he had for some time found it convenient to carry an account in the name of Sebastian Tombs. He wrote a check for ten thousand dollars and made another pilgrimage to the cottage at the other end of the camp.
“Your bank should be able to get this cleared by airmail and cable within three days,” he said. “Meanwhile we’ll get some professional to draw up whatever you ought to sign, and as soon as you can give me a valid receipt, I’ll take everything to Portland myself and get Jardane started. The sooner he gets going, the sooner you start collecting. For the time being, here’s the three thousand option money he was talking about.”
The little man peered at the crumpled cash mistily through his bifocals.
“But according to our verbal agreement, half of this is yours.”
“You know how you feel about your ex-wife?” said the Saint lightly. “That’s how I feel about tax collectors. I’m going to do this for free. Call it my contribution to the cause of the downtrodden male, which wouldn’t normally be a deductible item. Or a sop to my own conscience. Just do me a favor and stop dropping your wallet and telling the story of your life to anyone who picks it up. You might make some innocent con man feel like a perfect sucker.”
“I don’t understand this at all,” said Mr Quigg.
The careful terrorist
The explosion that killed Lester Boyd blew out a couple of windows in his West Side apartment and narrowly missed some passers on the sidewalk below with a shower of falling glass, but otherwise its force was so accurately calculated that it endangered nobody but its intended victim. The apartments across the landing and directly overhead felt only a dull concussion, and a little plaster fell from a ceiling underneath; that was all. But all that was left of Lester Boyd was a gory pulp and the memory of a crusading journalist who had taken one dare too many.
Two days after it happened Chief Inspector Fernack came striding out of The New York Herald Tribune by the back way on Fortieth Street, swung to his left, and collided with Simon Templar with a force that would have sent most men spinning. But the momentum of Fernack’s rugged beef and bone was absorbed almost casually by a deceptively lean frame of spring steel and leather, and the Saint smiled and said, “Why, John Henry, haven’t you heard that it isn’t supposed to be good for men of your age to gallop around like Boy Scouts on a treasure hunt?”
Fernack recognized him with delayed surprise, bit off the churlish execration which like any healthy New Yorker he was instinctively prepared to launch at any stranger who obstructed his own fevered shuttlings, and said almost lamely, “Oh, it’s you.” Then, with renewed irascibility, “When did you get back in town? And what are you up to now?”
The Saint suppressed a sigh — just enough for it to be still irritatingly perceptible.
“Yesterday,” he replied methodically. “And nothing. But I don’t need to ask you silly questions, John Henry. I’m just an amateur detective — not a pampered civil servant. I observe that you’re slightly overwrought. I see where you’ve come from.” He glanced up at the grimy building beside them. “I read newspapers. I know that Lester Boyd worked here. I deduce that you’re working on his murder and that you’re still trying to tag a Clue.”
“Have you got one?” Fernack growled.
“I’ve got the price of a drink,” Simon said. “You look as if you could use one — and why should we stand being jostled on a hot pavement outside Bleeck’s when it’s cooler and quieter inside?”
The detective offered only token resistance to being steered through the unpretentious door of the famous tavern. Simon found a sufficiently secluded space for them at one end of the age-mellowed bar, for they were still more than half an hour ahead of the vanguard of artists and writers and big and little wheels of the newspaper world who had given the place its name as their informal club and who by lunch time would have jam-packed it to the first of its two daily peaks of convivial frenzy. He ordered Dry Sack for himself and Peter Dawson on the rocks for Fernack, and under the soothing influence of the smooth Scotch nectar Fernack almost apologized, in a grudging and indirect way.
“This isn’t just a routine case to me,” he said. “I knew the guy. Some of the stuff he printed was what I told him. He was doing a good job.”
Originally assigned to do a short series on the rackets that still flourished in a United States that had become progressively less conscious of them as they became more deeply embedded in the political and economic system, Lester Boyd had pursued his researches with such zeal and proficiency, and had written about them with such trenchant clarity and wit, that the initial articles had stretched out into a syndicated column which had been running for more than six months with no diminution of reader interest when an expertly measured quantity of dynamite brought it to an abrupt conclusion.
The subjects of Boyd’s investigations were not the illicit distillers and unlicensed gamblers and peddlers of forbidden pleasures, the violators of fairly simple laws which could be enforced by any moderately efficient police force with the ambition to do it. He pointed out that the victims of that group of malefactors were mostly eager customers by their own choice, or at best had been susceptible to relatively little coaxing to step off the straight and narrow path. The targets that he had made his specialty were the crooked union bosses and masterminds of devious extortion who defrauded and disfranchised the “working man” at the same time as they professed to be championing his cause, and who simultaneously used the threat of strikes and riots to saddle legitimate business with a hidden tax which, he argued, was eventually paid by almost every citizen in the form of the extra pennies which as a result had to be added to the majority of things that people buy.
This is such an ingeniously subtle and diffused form of blackmail, embezzlement, and larceny that most public prosecutors — to say nothing of the rank-and-file union members and the realistic business men on the other side of the table — had long since given up hope of any practical solution except to continue the payment of tribute and charge it off to modern overhead. But Lester Boyd’s pertinacious studies had contrived to detail and document so many case histories and specific shakedowns that they had started a rumble of rising indignation across the land which the sensitive ears of its politicians could not ignore. And as a corollary, the parasites who saw their immunity and fat living menaced stopped sneering and began to snarl.
“He was warned to lay off,” Fernack said. “He got messages stuffed in his mailbox, phone calls in the middle of the night. Then a coupla goons were waiting outside his apartment building once when he came home, but the cop on the beat happened to come around the corner just as they started slugging him. After that I tried to make him call Headquarters whenever he was going any place where there wasn’t bright lights and plenty of people, and we’d have a radio car cruise by and watch for him. Sometimes he’d do it and sometimes he wouldn’t bother, but I made him have it put in the paper anyway and I figured it’d make those bastards think twice about trying to beat him up again. But he wouldn’t lay off, of course. So they laid him off.”