“Don’t go away, Otis,” he said from the door. “Just in case your pals haven’t run out of cute tricks, or in case we might have to pull some quaint switch of our own, it might be clever not to give anyone a chance to prove you’ve been in your room lately. Who knows — we might even dare them to prove that that picture wasn’t taken years before you got married, or even that it’s your picture at all. Anyhow, wait till I bring you the first bulletin.”
He was gone before he could be delayed by any further argument.
The elevator was piloted by the same jockey who had taken him up only a little while ago, an elderly individual with drooping shoulders and an air of comatose resignation to the infinite monotony of endlessly identical vertical voyages. He revealed no curiosity or interest whatsoever in why the Saint should want to ride down again at such an hour: one felt that he had long since been anesthetized against anything that could happen in a hotel during a convention, and perhaps at any other time.
“Tell me,” said the Saint, with elaborately casual candor. “If I wanted to play a joke on one of the fellows — a friend of mine — could you let me into his room?”
The man did not even turn his head. In fact, for a number of seconds he appeared to have been afflicted with deafness, until at the ultimate limit of plausible cogitation he wrung from himself a single word of decision:
“Depends.”
“On what?”
The instant the words were out of his mouth, Simon knew he had been too fast. The man pointedly made him wait even longer for the next reply, as a form of corrective discipline.
“Plenty.”
The lift shuddered to a stop at the ground floor, and the gate rumbled open. The pilot held it, waiting for the Saint to disembark, with such a total lack of eagerness to pursue the conversation that except for his minimal movements it would have been easy to believe that he was stuffed.
Simon got out, and followed the direction of a neon arrow which proclaimed that it pointed to The Rowdy Room. This proved to be a depressing, under-lighted cavern decorated in blood red and funeral black, with a dance floor large enough for a minuet by four midgets and an orchestra alcove furnished with an upright piano and stands for two other instrumentalists, all of whom had obviously racked up all the overtime they wanted and called it a day. The only rowdiness left was being provided by a quartet of die-hards in one corner, two of whom were foggily listening to some obscure argument being loudly elaborated by the third, while the fourth was frankly falling asleep. The bartender, listlessly polishing glasses, accepted the Saint’s arrival with a disinterested stare which barely suggested that if Simon wanted anything he could ask for it.
Simon ordered a Peter Dawson on the rocks, and after he had tasted it, he said, “Where’s the gal who takes the pictures?”
“Norma? She ain’t here.”
“That settles one thing,” said the Saint mildly. “I was wondering if she’d become invisible.”
The barman squinted at him suspiciously, and said, “She went home early. Had a headache or sump’n.”
“Would you know where I can get in touch with her?”
“She’ll be here tomorrow.”
“That’s the trouble — I may be leaving in the afternoon, much earlier than she’d come to work. I wanted to see her about some pictures that were taken the other night.”
“Well, whyncha say so?” demanded the bartender aggrievedly.
He fumbled through some litter beside the cash register, and turned back with a card. The ornate printing on it could be reduced to “VERE BALTON, Photography,” and an address, “685 Scoden Street.”
“I thought you called her Norma,” Simon said.
“I did. Balton is the guy who has the concession. She works for him.”
“Where is Scoden Street?”
“About five-six blocks from here, on the left off of Geary.”
“And what’s her name?”
“I tolja, Norma,” said the other, with obviously increasing impatience with so much stupidity.
“Nothing else?”
“You tell ’em Norma took the pitchers here,” said the bartender. “They’ll take care of ya.”
“Thank you,” said the Saint.
He finished his drink, put down the exact price and a minimum tip, and sauntered back to the lobby.
If the shapely Norma was not averse to providing certain extracurricular services of the type indicated by Mr Fennick’s story, it was highly implausible that the bartender would know nothing about it. Indeed, it was most probable that he would sometimes help to procure them. Therefore the Saint couldn’t insist on getting in touch with her too urgently, or pressing the questioning too hard, without the risk of telegraphing a warning to the quarry he had yet to identify.
Behind the reception desk, the night clerk, a weedy young man with long hair and acne, was totting up stacks of vouchers on an adding machine. He kept Simon waiting while he ducked his way stubbornly through to the end of a pile, and then looked up with an unctuous affectation of attentiveness.
“Yes, sir?”
“I’m afraid I left my key upstairs,” said the Saint “Can you let me have a spare? Room 409.”
“What is the name, sir?”
“Templar.”
The clerk ducked aside behind a screen that blocked one end of the counter, but he could be heard flipping the pages of an index. After some further groping in a drawer he bobbed back, holding a key.
“Could you show me anything with your name on it, sir?”
Simon impassively produced a driver’s license, and the clerk handed over the key.
“Do you put everyone through this when they lock themselves out?” Simon inquired mildly.
“Yes, sir, if I don’t know them. You can’t be too careful, at this hour of the night, I always say. Especially during a convention.”
“Why especially during a convention?”
“When they get too full of the spirit of the thing, sir, delegates often think of practical jokes to play on each other — all in good fun, of course, but not always appreciated by the victim. You yourself, sir, mightn’t be amused if you found a live seal in your bathtub, and found out that my negligence had enabled your friends to plant it there.”
“I guess you have a point.”
The pimply one bared his yellow teeth ingratiatingly.
“I knew you’d see it, sir. Thank you. Goodnight, sir,” he said, and picked up another sheaf of checks and resumed the busy tapping of his calculator keys without another upward glance.
Simon stepped into the elevator, and the lugubrious liftman let go a carpet sweeper which he was pushing lethargically about the foyer and started the ascent in stoic silence.
Finally the Saint asked, “Plenty of what?”
After another floor had gone by, it transpired that the driver had not lost the thread of his lucubrations.
“Things,” he opined darkly.
They were at the fourth floor again. He held the gate open, without looking at the Saint, but with a rugged air of self-satisfaction with his achievements in both navigation and diplomacy. Simon got out, and headed back to his room.
His excursion had yielded nothing sensational, but at least he had half a name, an address which might be the start of a trail, and some observations which might interest Mr Fennick.
The trouble was that Otis Q Fennick was not there to hear about them.
The room was not big enough to hide even such a slight man as Mr Fennick anywhere except in the closet or under the bed. But if he had been even more jittery than he had shamelessly confessed, it was remotely possible that he could be terrified of anyone who might enter.