He nodded to the desk clerk who had signed them in, and rode up in the elevator to her floor. He knocked on the door, and waited a little while. He said: "Saks Fifth Avenue, ma'am. A C.O.D. package for Mrs Tombs."
12
He waited a little longer, and then the door opened two or three inches, and he saw a narrow panel of her face — hair like a raven's wing, a dark eye, and carmine lips.
He went in.
"I wondered what had happened to you," she said.
"I had lunch. I met some friends."
His eyes strayed over the room with the most natural unconcern, but they missed nothing. Actually it was in an ashtray that he saw the proof that at least half of his timing had been right, but his glance picked up the detail without pausing.
Barbara Sinclair moved to a deep low chair by the window and sat down, curling one shapely leg under her. Her other foot swung in a short off-beat rhythm, so that every interrupted movement of it gave him a measure of the effort of will-power that was maintaining her outward composure.
"Has anything else happened?" she asked.
"Just a few things."
"Have you found out anything?"
"A little… You know, this isn't such a bad place, is it? I must remember it next time some visiting fireman is asking me where to stay with his concubine."
He was strolling about the room as if he were estimating the general comfort of it and incidentally taking his time over choosing a place to sit down.
"It's not one of the tourist taverns, so he'd be pretty safe from the risk of an awkward meeting with one of the home-town gossips. And it's very discreet and respectable, which ought to put the lady in the right mood. There must be nothing like a dingy bedroom and a leering bellhop to damp the fires of precarious passion."
He arrived in front of a bookcase on which stood a tall vase of chrysanthemums filled out with a mass of autumn oak leaves. He stood with his back to the room, approving them.
"Chrysanthemums," he murmured. "Football. Raccoon coats. The long crawl to New Haven. The cheers. The groans. The drinks." He shook his head sadly. "Those dear dead days," he said. "The chrysanthemums are here, but the gridiron scholars are boning up on the signals for squads right. And as for driving to New Haven without any bootleg gas coupons… But they are pretty."
"The management sent them up," she said. "I'm afraid I didn't think I was spotted as a concubine. I wondered if they thought we were honeymooners."
He laughed sympathetically, and took the automatic out of his breast pocket and nested it in amongst the leaves, still covering the vase with his back, while he was pretending to make improvements in the arrangement of the bouquet.
Then he turned again to look at her, and said: "It's too bad, isn't it? We never had that honeymoon."
"We would have had it, you know, if you hadn't been quite so clever about getting rid of me."
"I have a feeling of irreparable loss."
Her lovely face seemed to grow dark and warm from within as her long lashes dipped for a moment. Then she raised them again in a slow stare that could have had many sources.
"You really hate me, don't you?"
He shook his head judicially, his brow wrinkled by a frown that was very vague and distant.
"Not so much."
"You don't like me."
He smiled easily, and started to open a fresh pack of cigarettes.
"Like you? Darling, I always thought you were terrific. I would have loved our honeymoon. But unfortunately I haven't any of the instincts of the male scorpion. I never could see consummation and immolation as interchangeable words. And I wasn't nearly so anxious to get rid of you as you were to get rid of me — permanently."
"I didn't—"
"Know?" Simon suggested. "Perhaps not. Perhaps. But your boy friend did. And you must admit that he's clever. Within his own class, anyway. Clever enough, for instance, to set you up in that fancy tenement because it might always be useful to have a pretty girl on call to entertain the tired business man — or decoy the simple sucker. That is, when he didn't want her himself. A very happy way of combining business with pleasure, if you ask me… Or is it rude of me to insist on this masculine viewpoint? Should I have thought of a girl friend instead — some nice motherly creature who…"
He raised a hand as she started out of the chair with dark eyes blazing.
"Take it easy," he drawled. "Maybe I was just kidding. It's obvious that the bag I found in your apartment was a man's. But so were the pajamas that were hanging in the closet where I heaved Humpty and Dumpty."
Her hand went to her mouth, and her exquisite features suddenly sagged into a kind of blank smear. It was absurd and pitiful, he thought, how a few words could transform a lovely and vital creature into a haggard woman with neck cords that streaked her throat and eyes that were hollow and lusterless with fear.
"I don't know what you mean," she said.
"I've heard more original remarks than that," he said. "But if it's any help to you, I don't know what you mean either. I didn't say the pajamas had any name embroidered on them — or did I?"
She sank back on to the edge of the chair, her hands clasped in her lap, not comfortably or relaxed, but as if she had only paused there in the expectation of having to move again.
He slid a cigarette forward in his pack and offered it to her. In the same solicitous way, he lighted it for her and then lighted one for himself. He drew slowly at it, not savoring the smoke, and looking at her, and wondering why in a world so sadly in need of beauty he should have to be talking to her in this way and know that this was the only way to talk, and that was how it was and there was nothing else to do.
He said, with a slight but sincere shrug: "This isn't a fight. It might have been a beautiful honeymoon. But maybe it just wasn't in the cards. Anyway, it'll have to wait now."
She said: "I suppose so."
He said: "It's no use stalling much more. You were supposed to have made up your mind about telling me something. Have you made up your mind?"
She winced and looked down at the tangling and untangling fingers in her lap. She looked up at him, and then down again at her hands. Her mouth barely moved.
She said: "Yes."
"Well?"
"I'll tell you."
He waited.
"I'll tell you," she said, "sometime this afternoon."
"Why not now?"
"Because…"
The Saint took a great interest in the tip of his cigarette.
"Barbara," he said, "it may not occur to you that I'm giving you a lot more breaks than the rules provide. I never was a nut on technicalities, but the fact remains that you're a technical accessory. You know the man I want to talk to, the man who holds the key to most of this dirty business. You know that everything you keep back is helping him to get away with — literally — murder. And you spend the hours you've been here alone struggling with your conscience to arrive at the tremendous decision that you'll tell me all about it — at your own convenience."
"No," she said.
"I don't want you to think I'm getting tough with you, but I've known police matrons who developed bulging muscles just from persuading wayward girls that they ought to unburden their hearts in the interests of right and justice. And I'm sure that wouldn't appeal to you at all."
She made a thin line of her mouth and gazed back at him defiantly.
"You sound as if you'd said all this before."
"Maybe I have," he admitted equably. "But it doesn't make it any less true. Believe it or not, I've only got to pick up that phone and call a certain gent by the name of Inspector John Henry Fernack to have you taken into what is so charmingly referred to as 'custody'. Custody is a place out of the earshot of any unofficial person who might be too inquisitive; and it isn't a very pleasant place. In Custody, almost anything can happen, and often does." He blew a thoughtful streak of smoke at the ceiling. "You can still make your own choice, but I wish you'd make the right one."