It was an alabaster-faced woman with mauve lipstick and stringy hair who said to a fellow colonist, an elderly bearded man with a gold earring, “Of course I heard the shots, dahling. How could I help it, living right underneath her? But I haven’t the faintest idea what time it was, except that it was daylight. I only half woke up, and I thought she was probably slamming doors or hitting a paramour with a frying pan or some ordinary thing like that. I’ve had the most frightful job trying to explain to some yokel detective that I couldn’t leap out of bed and start investigating every time there was an uproar in Norma’s apartment, I’d never have got a good night’s sleep...”
Simon drifted on, melting out of the crowd as self-effacingly as he had joined it.
He walked, down past the limits of the old Barbary Coast of legendary times, now sanitized into something called an “International Settlement,” on into the bustling exotically scented streets of Chinatown which looked much less exotic in the watery sunlight which was struggling to penetrate the dank mistiness of a fine San Francisco morning.
Johnny Kan was already at work in his back office, ploughing into the myriad unepicurean details of restaurant management of which his evening customers would be as unconscious as they would be of the activities of the cleaning crew which was just as busy restoring the dining rooms to the virginal freshness which they would thoroughly debauch before midnight. But he showed no impatience at being interrupted.
“You must have been cheating last night,” he said, “or you couldn’t look so much better than I feel. Can I do anything for you, or did you only come here to gloat?”
“You can do something for me,” said the Saint. “I could do it myself if I had to, but I’m feeling lazy. I’m sure you’ve got all the connections. Just find out today’s schedule for these caramel-cookers that we lost so much beauty sleep dodging last night.”
“I must be an all-day sucker,” Johnny Kan said, reaching for the phone. “But you had me convinced that it was just a coincidence that you hit San Francisco in the middle of their convention, and you didn’t want any part of them.”
“I wasn’t trying to kid you. The important coincidences have all happened since we said goodnight.”
The schedule was forthcoming in a few minutes.
“Ten o’clock, Paramount Theater, a movie: New Methods of Merchandising, followed by a lecture on Taxation Aspects of the Bottling Industry. Twelve o’clock, St Francis Hotel, lunch: guest speaker, the President of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce. Three o’clock, forum: Soda Fountains and Juvenile Delinquency. Five o’clock—”
“Whoa,” said the Saint. “That’s plenty. I only want to know where to look for a guy, and I should be able to find him long before five.”
“Would it be very indiscreet to ask which of the caramel-cookers had incurred this unprecedented interest?”
“No. I don’t think so. The name is Otis Q Fennick.”
“Oh. Of the Fennick Candy Company?”
“Why — do you know him?”
“No. But I know their West Coast representative. A Mr Smith. He eats here sometimes. They have a sales office here, you know.”
“I didn’t.”
“When you want to know anything in a foreign city, you should always consult the natives. Let me look up the address for you. Right now, I should think that’s where you’d be most likely to find him. They don’t make any soft drinks, so he’d hardly be interested in the tax problems of bottling — if I may presume to offer my amateurish deduction.” Kan turned the pages of a city phone book. “Ah, here it is. On Suiter Street — it should be only a block or two from Union Square.”
He jotted down the address, and Simon took it gratefully.
“You’re right, I’m glad I asked you.”
“Doesn’t that entitle me to know what this is about?”
“Perhaps, before I leave town, Johnny. But not just yet. There’s still too much I haven’t figured out myself.”
Simon continued his walk, down to Union Square and west on Sutter. The number that Kan had given him was a modern office building, and the directory board in the lobby showed that the Fennick Candy Company was on the second floor. He went up.
From the sequence of doors on the corridor, the West Coast office appeared to take up only two rooms, but they were doubtless sufficient for their purpose. The outer room which he entered contained, besides the standard furniture, a large glass-case display of samples, and a middle-aged woman with an efficient but forbidding air who was typing rapidly at the dictation of some tinny disembodied voice that came through an earphone clamped to her head. Electrically recorded sounds entered her ears and emerged through her fingertips as transformed impulses to be electrically recorded in legible form: she was the only human link in this miracle of technology, and she seemed to bear a deep-rooted grudge against this incurable frailty of hers and to have dedicated herself to suppressing every trace of it that she could.
“Mr Fennick is busy,” she said, with a kind of malevolent satisfaction. “Can I help you?”
“I’m afraid not.” Simon glanced at the communicating door. “Is he with somebody?”
“Mr Fennick is working on a speech he has to make to the convention tomorrow. He gave the strictest orders that he was not to be disturbed for any reason whatever.”
“This is very, very important.”
“For any reason whatever,” the woman repeated smugly.
She was a type that Mrs Fennick would have approved of thoroughly, according to Mr Fennick’s thumbnail sketch of his ever-loving spouse. It was as certain as anything humanly could be that she had not sat on anybody’s lap since she was knee-high. The paradox that didn’t fit at all was that the Liane Fennick whom Simon had met was so utterly unlike his mental picture of a tyrannically jealous wife. But in any puzzle, when all the paradoxes were straightened out, the solution was often absurdly easy.
He inquired patiently, “How long will Mr Fennick be incommunicado?”
“Until five minutes to twelve, when he has to leave for a luncheon.”
“Is he always so hard to see?”
“Mr Fennick isn’t here very often. And this is a very busy time.”
“Is Mr Smith just as busy?”
“Not as a rule. But at present he’s covering a meeting for Mr Fennick, since Mr Fennick has to work on his speech. If you’ll leave your name and tell me your business, I’ll try to arrange an appointment for you.”
“Thanks, gorgeous,” said the Saint, with beatified earnestness. “I may take you up on that. But later.”
He sauntered out.
The next door along the corridor, which displayed only the word “PRIVATE” under its number, could only be the private entrance to the inner office so zealously guarded by the misanthropic matron with the headset. Even so has many a citadel with intimidating moat and drawbridge had an unguarded postern gate.
Simon leaned an ear against the upper panel. He heard no resonance of rounded phrases in rehearsal, or even the mutter of tentative phrases being fed into a dictating device. Of course, the door might have been exceptionally soundproof, or Mr Fennick might have been a purely cerebral worker. But Simon did not intend to be put off from seeing him, if he was there. It would be easy for the Saint to apologize for having come to the wrong door, which must have been inadvertently left unlocked.
He took from his wallet a wafer-slim implement which he kept there as routinely as another man might have kept a nail file. At this period he seldom needed it as often as twice a year, but he would not have been surprised to have used it twice already that day. And yet on this third possible occasion it finally proved that the Boy Scouts were right and preparedness would always pay off sometime. It slid back the spring lock with less fuss than its own key, and Simon walked in with all the disarming insouciance of the excuse that he had prepared.