He handed the phone over to Fernack and strolled with his cigarette to the window, floating evanescent blue wreaths against the pane and contemplating the dubious rewards of unswerving but unsophisticated righteousness.
4
He didn't know what story Jetterick would be telling, and he didn't pay much attention. He imagined it would be pretty complete as Jetterick knew it. The one lead that Jetterick didn't have, aside from the later developments of the day before, was the one that ran to Andrea Quennel and through her to Hobart Quennel and Walter Devan — Simon felt sure that Walter Devan himself was the actual killer in this case. He couldn't see the introduction of any more outside talent, and he couldn't see Hobart Quennel personally engaged in mayhem either. If Morgen had been traced to Devan, Jetterick would have had a pointer in that direction from another angle; but even that hadn't happened. And the Saint had practically discounted Morgen altogether by then, except as an accessory: the man's Nazi affiliations might be another story, but they were not this one.
Simon Templar had met property dragons before, often enough to feel almost sentimental about the smell of paint and papier-mâché that came with them; but now he had a pellucid and vertiginous certainty that his quarry was darker and deadlier than any of those hackneyed horrors.
He couldn't have explained very succinctly why he kept the whole trail of Quenco to himself. He knew that that wasn't in line with the most earnest pleas of the Department of Justice — but Simon Templar had always had an indecorous disdain for such appeals. It might have been an incorrigible reversion to his old lawless habits, overriding the new rôle into which the fortunes of another war had conscripted him. It still wasn't because of Andrea's long rounded legs. It might have been because he knew in cold logic how flimsy his own evidence was, even flimsier than the gauze he had just made out of Fernack's case against him; because he knew that there were no statutory weapons to pierce that statutory armor of a man in Hobart Quennel's position, because in spite of his challenge to Andrea he knew how Fernack and even Jetterick would have laughed at him, because he was afraid of the morass of red tape that could tie him up until his own phantom sword was blunt… He didn't know, and he didn't think about it much.
He waited until Fernack's mostly monosyllabic conversation was finished. It took an unconscionable time, and he wondered whether it would be included in the bill charged to the late Frank Imberline's estate. He couldn't see much to worry about in that, when he reviewed it; and his brow was serene and unfurrowed when he turned to look at the detective again.
Fernack's brow was a little damp, obviously from overwork, and he was starting to puzzle over the pages he had scrawled over in his notebook. But his manner was reluctantly different under its brittle shell.
He cleared his throat.
"There's just one thing nobody knows yet," he said. "Why did you come to New York today?"
"To get some dope on certain characters," said the Saint honestly. "The girl was one of those things — she drifted in later."
Fernack didn't even respond to that. It gave the Saint's rudimentary conscience a nice clean feeling.
"Why did you want to see Imberline?"
"I didn't know, when I checked in here. It depended on what I found out about him. When his record looked clear — as you'll find out when you get it — I thought I'd just beard him in his den and see if I could make sense with him. I couldn't make much at the time, but it seems he was at least impressed enough to verify me. Which may have been just too bad for him. Like me, he wasn't smart enough. He wasn't smart enough to keep his mouth shut."
"And you don't know who would have shut his mouth for him?"
"I don't know anything I'd want to have quoted now," said the Saint, as frankly as he could.
Fernack closed his book and put it away. Simon felt sorry for him.
"Well," said the detective dourly, "I expect you were going somewhere. Go there."
"It's getting late for my breakfast. What about some lunch?"
"I'm going to have to say something to those goddamn reporters."
"Next time, then."
"I hope that won't be for another fifty years."
"It's too bad, Henry," said the Saint with almost genuine sympathy. "This is going to be a hell of a case for you — what with the complications of the FBI and another link in the next state. But that's what the Proper Authorities have badges for."
He went back to his own room.
He finished dressing with his tie and coat, picked up the remains of his ruminative bottle of Peter Dawson, and started back towards the elevators. Inevitably, a loitering cub, detailed to guard the flank, intercepted him before he got there.
"Mr. Templar, may I ask you a question?"
"Ask me anything you like," said the Saint liberally. "I'm just a perambulating ouija board."
"Are you helping the police in this case, or are they trying to pin something on you?"
Simon deposited the bottle carefully in his hands.
"The whole solution of the mystery," he said, "is probably contained in this sample of the saliva of a dromedary which was found eating the stuffing out of Imberline's mattress. And if you want the truth," he added hollowly, "Naval Intelligence has a theory that Fernack himself poisoned both of them."
The assistant manager twittering still more anxiously, created enough diversion for the Saint to catch a descending car and make a solitary exit.
Simon regulated his bill at the desk with sublime sangfroid, since it was a most ethical hermitage, and he might want to use it again, and it was no fault of the management if careless guests asked to be slaughtered in its upper regions, and left its portals without a smudge on his credit rating or any visible objection to the cloud of sleuths who might have been following him like a smokescreen of bees on the scent of the last wilting clover blossom of the season.
He went to Grand Central, enjoyed a shave at the Terminal Barber Shop, and was driven from there by the pangs of purely prosaic hunger to the Oyster Bar, where he took his time over the massacre of several inoffensive molluscs. It was after lunch that he became highly inconsiderate of the convenience of possible shadows. His method, which need not be followed in detail, involved some tricky work around subway turnstiles, some fast zigzagging in the Commodore Hotel, and a short excursion through a corner drug store; and when he re-entered Grand Central through the Biltmore tunnel he was quite sure that he would have shaken off anyone who wasn't attached to him with a rope. He found a train leaving for Stamford in five minutes, stopped to buy a newspaper, and settled in with it.
The paper called itself an Extra, but the only thing extra about it was the size of the headlines. They said RUBBER DIRECTOR MURDERED, and that was approximately what the story consisted of. The city editor had done his best to give it a big lead with a lot of "Mystery surrounds" and "It is suspecteds," but his reporter had been able to put very few bones into it at that point. A prefabricated sketch of Frank Imberline's life and career ran alongside under a double-column head and tried to make the story look good.