“Otis, old marshmallow,” said the Saint reassuringly. “It’s only me — Templar.”
There was no answer.
The bathroom door was ajar. Simon looked inside. Mr Fennick was not there. Nor was he in the closet, or under the bed — Simon ultimately forced himself to verify both places, foolish though it made him feel. But in about half the detective stories that the Saint had read, one of those locations could have been practically counted on to reveal Mr Fennick’s freshly perforated corpse. None of them did. It was almost disappointing.
Simon went to the dresser for the pack of cigarettes which he had left where he put down Mr Fennick’s business card. Now he found the card tucked half into the opening of the package, in such a way that he couldn’t have extracted a cigarette without having his attention focused on it. On the back had been written, in a cramped but meticulous script:
I simply can’t let you bother with my problems. I’ll just have to pay up and make the best of it. Please forget the whole thing.
Simon sat down on the bed and picked up the telephone.
“Mr Fennick, please,” he said.
“One moment, sir.” It was the oleaginous voice of the night clerk, who was evidently entrusted with several chores by a thrifty management. Then, “I’m sorry, sir, but Mr Fennick’s line still has a Do Not Disturb on it.”
“Since when?”
“He asked me to put it on when he came in, sir, at one-thirty.”
“I see... Would you give me his room number?”
The pause this time was almost imperceptible.
“I’m afraid I couldn’t take the responsibility for that, sir. He might be very annoyed if you disturbed him by knocking on his door.”
“What makes you think I’d do that?”
“I’m sure you wouldn’t want to, sir. So you won’t mind asking the manager for the information, will you? He comes on at eight o’clock. Thank you, sir.”
“Invite me to your funeral,” said the Saint sweetly, but he said it after a click in the receiver had announced that the clerk had already terminated the discussion.
For a few minutes, in a simmer of sheer exasperation, he contemplated some quite extravagant forms of retaliation against everyone who had contributed to wasting his time for the past hour. But at the end of a cigarette he laughed, and fell asleep thinking it was lucky he hadn’t gone any farther on a wild-goose chase with such a protégé.
If Mr Otis Q Fennick was such an eviscerated marvel that he insisted on submitting to the crudest kind of contrived shakedown, without even a struggle, after having been offered the best advice and assistance, then he deserved to stew in his own syrup.
The Saint slumbered on his relaxing justification for precisely three hours and seventeen minutes, at which time a crew of civic servants arrived under his window with some raspingly geared conveyance and began to decant into it the garbage cans which had previously been only silent ornaments of the alley, clanging and crashing them back and forth as a tympanic accompaniment to their mutual shouts of encouragement and impromptu snatches of vocalizing.
By the time they had moved on he was wide awake and knew that he had no hope of feeling drowsy again that morning. But as he lay still stretched out with his eyes closed the entire Fennick episode unrolled again in his memory, and the earlier mood of exasperation crept back. Only instead of being a petulant flash of anger, it was now a considered and solid resentment that could not be dismissed.
He tried to dismiss it while he got up and showered and shaved and went down to the coffee shop for breakfast, but it refused to go away.
“You’ve got every excuse to duck this,” he had to tell himself finally, “except one that’ll let you forget it.”
If Mr Fennick consented to pay blackmail, it could well be maintained that this was Mr Fennick’s own private business, and the hell with him. But if a blackmailer got away with blackmail, that had always been the Saint’s self-appointed business, as had any kind of unpunished evil. And it was doubly so when the circumstances ruled out any possibility of legal retribution.
Simon finished his second cup of coffee and went back through the lobby, where a totally different staff had taken over. This time he had no difficulty in getting Mr Fennick’s room number, which was 607, but the switchboard operator told him that the Do Not Disturb was still on the phone. For a moment he contemplated going up and banging on the door, but then he reflected that Mr Fennick, in the shattered condition in which the sweetmeat sachem must have regained his room, had probably taken a sleeping pill and would not exactly scintillate if he were prematurely aroused.
Meanwhile, the Saint had in his pocket the card which the uncooperative bartender had given him. It might not be much, but it was something. And at least it might help to pass the time constructively.
Scoden Street was a narrow turning off one of the drabber stretches of Geary, given over to a few small dispirited neighborhood shops jumbled among other nondescript buildings of which some had been converted into the dingier type of offices and some still offered lodgings of dubious desirability. Number 685 seemed to combine the two latter types, for a window on the street level was lettered with the words “VERE BALTON STUDIOS” on the glass, behind which an assortment of arty enlargements were attached to a velvet backdrop, while on the entrance door was tacked a large printed card with the legend “APARTMENT FOR RENT.”
The door was open, though only a couple of inches.
Simon pushed it with his toe and went in.
He found himself in a small dark hallway, at the rear of which a flight of worn wooden stairs started upwards, doubtless to the vacant apartment. Immediately on his right was a door, also ajar, with a shingle projecting from the lintel on which the “VERE BALTON STUDIOS” sign was repeated. He went through into a sort of reception room formed by the space between the shoulder-height back drop of the front window and a set of full-length drapes which shut off the rest of the premises. It contained a shabby desk and three equally shabby chairs, but none of them was occupied.
“Hi,” said the Saint, raising his voice. “Anybody home?”
There was no reply, or even any sound of movement. But the long drapes were not fully drawn, and through the aperture he could see a yellowness of artificial light.
He went to the opening and looked into a small studio equipped with a dais, a tripod camera, and the usual clutter of lamps, screens, and props to sit on or lean against. But nobody was utilizing the props, and the only lamp alight was a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling.
Simon stepped on through the curtains. The near corner inside had been partitioned off with Beaverboard into a cubicle which from the sinks and shelves of bottles that could be seen through its wide open door was obviously used as a darkroom, but no one was using it. At the opposite end of the studio was another door, half open.
“Anybody home?” Simon repeated.
Nobody acknowledged it.
He crossed the studio quietly, cutting a zigzag course between the paraphernalia, and his second tack put him at an angle from which he could see the body that lay on the floor of the back room.
It belonged to a fat man of medium height with dirty gray hair and a rather porcine face to which death had not added any dignity. There were three bullet holes in the front of his patchily reddened white shirt, loosely grouped around the “VB” monogram placed like a target over his heart, and two of them were ringed with the powder burn and stain of almost contact range.
Simon bent and touched the back of his hand to one of the flabby cheeks — not to verify the fact of death, which was unnecessary, but to determine if it was very recent. The skin was cold.