"For instance," said the Saint, just as pleasantly, "what was the great revelation you had in mind?"
"I was wondering if you'd formed any definite conclusions about Ourley."
Simon enjoyed more mouthfuls. He was hungry. But he didn't miss any of the lines of sober anxiety in the other's thinly sculptured face.
"He appears to be a little man with a large wife," he said trivially.
"And though his favorite seat be feeble woman's breast," quoted Uttershaw mournfully. "Milton really does prefer them feeble, and with all that — shall we say? — giddiness of hers, Tiny Titania is as tough as her own stays. And while she likes her own dancing partners, she watches him like a hawk. He isn't even allowed to have a typist under forty in his office."
The Saint had a sudden strange creeping feeling in his spine.
"Does Milton take it and like it," he asked, "or does he still manage to get his fun?"
Uttershaw shook his head deprecatingly.
"I wouldn't know about that," he said. "I told you we were never very close."
"Didn't he ever talk?"
Uttershaw pursed his lips as he brought a hand up to his lean jaw and stroked his face meditatively.
"There was one time…" he said slowly, and stopped.
"Yes?"
"Oh, hell, it doesn't amount to anything. There was a stag affair at some escapist club for downtrodden business men that he belongs to, and he insisted on dragging me along. For some reason or other I couldn't get out of it, or perhaps I didn't think of an excuse quickly enough. Ourley… but it was all so alcoholic that it really doesn't mean a thing."
To the Saint, it felt as if the air about the table was charged with the static electricity of an approaching storm, but he knew that it was only a mystic prescience within himself which was generating that sense of overloaded tension.
"Suppose you give me a chance to decide that for myself," he suggested genially.
"Well, Ourley was pretty tight — most of them were — and he cornered me and babbled a lot of damn foolishness. I guess getting out from under Tiny's iron fist for even that one night had unsettled him, and given him delusions of grandeur. 'In vino veritas', I suppose. Anyway, he was in quite a Casanova mood. Told me he had a key that Tiny didn't know about, and how he was really much too smart for her, and all that sort of thing. I didn't pay much attention, and I got away as soon as I could. Next morning he called me up and explained that he'd had too much to drink, which was obvious, and said he'd been talking a lot of nonsense and would I forget it. I never gave it another thought, and of course I wouldn't…" Uttershaw broke off, and smiled rather sheepishly. "But that's just what I am doing, isn't it?"
8
The Saint ate a little more, and scarcely noticed what he was doing. The creepy sensation in his backbone had spread out over his whole body, so that every bone in him felt faintly tingling and detached, and his brain was sitting up in a corner of the ceiling moving them with strings.
It was at that moment, for the first time, that a whole chain of the crazy pieces in his jigsaw fell together and began to make a section of a recognisable picture which did curious things to his breathing.
But all that was within himself again, and his face was a study in untroubled bronze.
"I wouldn't worry about its going any further," he said carelessly; and the other nodded, but went on looking at him with a lightly interrogative frown.
"Naturally. But I can't help wondering what made you ask."
"It just came into my head," said the Saint. "On the other hand, I'm wondering why you were thinking about Ourley."
"This isn't easy to say," Uttershaw replied hesitantly. "But I do know from my business dealings with him — and you may have gathered the same impression yourself — that Milton is a bit 'too grasping to care for mere delight'. And it seems to me that any man would need some very good reason for taking Titania to his bosom and keeping her there… I know that some of Milton's financial manipulations have been — well, what you might call complicated. At least, complicated enough for him to keep most of his holdings in his wife's name."
"You're sure of that?"
"Quite sure. As a matter of fact, there are those who would believe that Tiny herself has had a lot to do with the planning and staging of some of those manipulations. There are skeptics who maintain that Tiny's giddiness is more or less of a pose. Although if that's true, the stakes must be very high for a woman to make such an awful caricature of herself."
"If Tiny is Milton's partner behind the scenes, and the duenna of the do-re-mi," Simon remarked thoughtfully, "it must make his home life even more interesting."
"Dire was the noise of conflict." Uttershaw laughed shortly. "You know, I'm still embarrassed about going on with this."
Simon moved his plate a little away from him with an unconscious gesture of finality, and reached for his Pall Malls. He extended the pack towards his guest, and said: "Let me try to help you. How far do you think Milton would go to create a new business life of his own?"
Uttershaw blinked before he bent to accept the Saint's proffered light. He straightened up and exhaled his first puff of smoke a little gustily.
"I hadn't even thought that far," he said, and suddenly he looked shocked and strained. "Do you really mean what I think you're getting at?"
"I was just asking."
"But that's unbelievable. No man could build up anything like this black market alone. He'd have to have at least some associates. And I mean plain criminal associates. A man like Ourley just wouldn't have any connections like that."
"Men like Ourley have had them before. It isn't such a hell of a long time ago that speakeasy proprietors and bootleggers were quite social characters. You get to know a lot of queer people. Big business sometimes deals with queer people, when there are labor troubles or the competition gets rough. The impresarios who put on stag shows at escapist clubs for downtrodden business men move in and out of a world of queer people. Any man can make any connections he wants, if he wants them seriously enough."
Uttershaw made a helpless sort of movement with his hands.
"It seems so fantastic — to think of Milton Ourley as a criminal master mind. Why, he's — he's—"
"He's what?" Simon prompted quietly.
"He's such a dull, irascible, unimaginative, uninventive sort of windbag!" Uttershaw protested. "All he thinks about is how much money he's got, or how much he might make if it wasn't for Roosevelt; and what Tiny is doing with her latest gigolo or how he could be kept late at the office and go out on the town with the boys."
"A master mind," said the Saint didactically, "doesn't always go around with an illuminated forehead. That's the first thing to remember in this detective racket — if you read any stories. Besides which, he can really be just as stupid and boring as anyone else outside of his own field of brilliance. Why shouldn't he be? The greatest bacteriologist in the world could look like a half-wit in a gathering of structural engineers. And he could even be a pain in the neck at a soiree of other bacteriologists. He could be addicted to thunderous belching, or insisting on describing every stroke of his last golf game, without—"
He broke off abruptly, and put a quick hand on the other's arm. The warning shift of his eyes was quite a pamphlet of explanation.