“May I ask why you thought he wouldn’t mind your waking him up, if he was trying to sleep late?”
“I happened to have dug up a hot lead on something he was telling me he was very concerned about financially. I thought he ought to know it at once, so I took a chance.”
On the pretext of looking for a safe place to get rid of the match, he contrived to work himself around to a sufficient glimpse of the bathroom to confirm that Mr Fennick was not hiding out there, or stashed there as a corpse. He was aware that he might begin to seem obsessed with such possibilities, but he could certainly have offered a doozy of an excuse.
“Well,” she said, “that seems to leave us both in the same boat. He’s probably lost for the day now. They have meetings and lunches and speeches and more meetings, from the first hangover till it’s time to start the next one, don’t they, on these conventions?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Simon grinned. “I’ve never been part of one.”
“Ah, yes. I said that you didn’t look like the type.”
“Neither do you, Mrs Fennick.”
She had been studying him with unmistakably increasing interest for the last few minutes, and her appraising eyes did not waver by a fraction of a degree at the intangible hint of audacity in his tone.
She said, “Did you get chummy enough, as you put it, to call my husband Otis?”
“I guess I did.”
“Then you needn’t be so formal with me. If he didn’t tell you, the name is Liane. Do you have a name, too? Or a number?”
“Simon Templar.”
“The Saint, of course. All right, I can enjoy a joke. But eventually you’ll have to explain why it’s funny. And what type don’t I look like?”
“The wife of a marzipan magnate,” said the Saint, unabashed. “You look more like a glamour model.”
“I was, not so many centuries ago. Lots of magnates pick up that type. Didn’t you know? It adds prestige, like a Cadillac. Why don’t we spend the day together, waiting for Otis, and I’ll explain it all.”
He would have had to be very much younger, very much older, or very much more naïve, to misunderstand the whole of her implication, and he let her know that he was weighing all of it in the long cool glance that he rested on her before he answered.
“It might be fun,” he said, and he did not have to pretend to mean it. “But—”
“Don’t tell me that Otis became your best friend overnight. And you don’t look like a man who’d have any other objection to taking pity on a lady’s boredom.”
“He didn’t, and I haven’t. But I’d hate to help spoil a good thing for you.”
“Did Otis give you the idea, in his cups, that we held hands every night while we made plans for our silver wedding honeymoon?”
“No. In fact, he gave me the impression that you were the rolling-pin type, just waiting for him to come home with a smudge of lipstick under his ear. If you’ve got him as housebroken as that, it could be moderately catastrophic if he picked up the ammunition to shoot back at you.”
“My good man, since we’ve suddenly become so very businesslike, let me remind you that the Fennicks are legal residents of the sovereign State of New York, which is also the legal domicile of the Fennick Candy Company. Have you ever heard any betting on a rich man’s chances in a New York divorce court?”
“You sound as if you’d talked to some good lawyers.”
She came so close, deliberately, that the first time they both inhaled simultaneously would have caused a most stimulating collision.
“Then why don’t you let me worry about my own problems?”
He bent and carefully kissed her motionlessly upturned mouth. Then he stepped back and glanced at his watch.
He was not aware until afterwards of how cold-blooded he must have seemed. He didn’t intend it as a rebuff. It was a long time since he had abjured any profound amazement at the strange impulses of women. Perhaps he had been exposed to too many of them. But in an oddly unegotistical way, for him, he was inclined to respect the privacy of their motives, and to enjoy the pleasant surprise without criticizing the donor. He had no moralistic resistance to Liane Fennick as an unexpected diversion, but there was a one-track quirk in his psychology that would not let him enjoy the best of it while he was still wound up with something else.
“There’s another problem I’ve got to take care of,” he said. “Let’s make it a date for lunch.”
She was palpably baffled by his restraint, but he couldn’t help that. If he could have seen only a few hours into the future, he might have played it differently. But she took it well.
“Twelve-thirty?”
“I’ll pick you up here.”
“This time you’d better use the phone first,” she said. “If it doesn’t answer, or if Otis happens to come back, I’ll meet you at the Drake.”
“But now,” said the Saint regretfully, “I have got to duck.”
He brushed her lips once more, with impudent promise, and went out.
An ingrained pattern of cautiousness that had become second nature made him walk down two flights of stairs before taking the elevator. It was not a question of exaggerated apprehensiveness, but a simple automatism of eliminating unnecessary risks. Whatever the intrusion of Liane Fennick might lead to, he could lose nothing by impressing the elevator boy with the fact that he rode down from his own floor, which should suffice to supplant any recollection of the floor he had gone up to.
The same habit made him ask the bell captain in the lobby for a street map of the city, instead of asking the whereabouts of De Boer Lane. There was no point in gratuitously enlarging the number of witnesses who might recall that he had inquired about that address.
And having located that short blind alley on one of the southern slopes of Telegraph Hill, he also picked out a convenient intersection three blocks away, and directed a taxi there, for the same good reason. From the intersection, after the taxi was out of sight, he walked. There was nothing prescient about it, except a logic which assumed that something had to be rotten in the state of Fennick. He didn’t exhaust himself with trying to guess what it was. But after a very short stroll, he knew that his instincts had been impeccable at least on the score of procedure.
His taxi couldn’t have reached De Boer Lane if he had begged it to. The street that it opened from was almost solid with police cars at that point, and an ambulance backed into the narrow turning blocked it completely. The lane was only about forty yards long, and was lined with small unmatched houses jammed shoulder to shoulder, none of them more than two stories high, the kind of cottages that lend themselves to cramped but quaint conversions and are therefore highly esteemed by would-be Bohemian types. It was the ideal backwater for a girl of Norma Uplitz’s unconventional mores, where odd goings-on at odd hours would be so normal as to attract no attention. All except one aberration about which even the most sophisticated neighborhoods are seldom blasé...
The inevitable crowd of passers-by who had flowed in from the street was giving the native colony plenty of competition for the best view of the shrouded shape which at that moment was being carried out on a stretcher from a house halfway up the cul-de-sac.
The Saint did not need any parapsychic gifts to anticipate what the number of the building would be before he located it. And as he edged inconspicuously closer, he did not really need his exceptional visual acuity to decipher the name of Norma Uplitz on one of the mailboxes at the entrance. As for the infinitely ultimate possibility that the body on the stretcher would have come from the other of the two apartments, he had only to keep his ears open as he filtered through the morbid mob with the nearest approximation he could make to invisibility.