Saint on Guard (18 page)

Thus it happened that after a couple of grilled sandwiches in the hotel coffee shop he set out to stroll back down into the business district with the air of a tourist who had nowhere to go and all right to get there.

And thus his stroll brought him to the Ascot Hotel just a few blocks from the waterfront. The Ascot was strictly a business man’s bunkhouse, the kind of place where only the much-maligned couriers of commerce roost briefly on their missions of peculiar promotion.

Simon entered the small lobby and approached the desk. The plaque above the desk said, without cracking a smile: “Clerk on duty: MR wimblethorpe.” Simon Templar, not to be outdone in facial restraint, said without smiling either: “Mr Wimblethorpe, I’m looking for a Mr Matson of St Louis.”

“Yes, sir,” said the clerk. “Mr Matson was staying here, but–-“

“My name,” said the Saint, “is Sebastian Tombs. I’m a mining engineer from west Texas, and I have just located the richest deposit of bubble gum in the state. I wanted to tell Mr Matson about it.”

“I was trying to tell you,” said the clerk, “that Mr Matson has checked out.”

“Oh,” said the Saint, a bit blankly. “Well, could you give me his forwarding address?”

The clerk shuffled through his card file.

“Mr Matson didn’t leave an address. A friend of his came in at five o’clock and paid his bill and took his luggage away for him.”

Simon stared at him with an odd sort of frown that didn’t even see the man in front of him. For the Saint happened to know that Mr Matson was waiting for a passport from Washington, in order to take ship to foreign parts, and that the passport had not yet come through. Wherefore it seemed strange for Mr Matson to have left no forwarding address—unless he had suddenly changed his mind about the attractions of foreign travel.

“Who was this friend?” Simon inquired.

“I don’t know, Mr Tombs. If you could stop by or call up in the morning you might be able to find out from Mr Baker, the day clerk.”

“Could you tell me where Mr Baker lives? I might catch him at home tonight.”

Mr Wimblethorpe was a little hesitant, but he wrote his fellow employee’s address on a slip of paper. While he was doing it, the Saint leaned on the desk and half turned to give the lobby a lazy but comprehensive reconnaissance. As he had more or less expected, he discovered a large man in baggy clothes taking inadequate cover behind a potted palm.

“Thank you, Mr Wimblethorpe,” he said as he took the slip. “And now there’s just one other thing. In another minute, a Mr Yard of the police department will be yelling at you to tell him what I was talking to you about. Don’t hesitate to confide in him. And if he seems worried about losing me, tell him he’ll find me at Mr Baker’s.”

He turned and sauntered leisurely away, leaving the bewildered man gaping after him.

He picked up a taxi at the next corner and gave the day clerk’s address, and settled back with a cigarette without even bothering to look back and see how the pursuit was doing. There were too many more important things annoying him. A curious presentiment was trying to take shape behind his mind, and he wasn’t going to like any part of it.

Mr Baker happened to be at home, and recalled the incident without difficulty.

“He said that Mr Matson had decided to move in w,ith him, but he’d had a few too many, so his fritnd came to fetch his things for him.”

“Didn’t you think that was a bit funny?”

“Well, yes; but people are always doing funny things. We had a snuff manufacturer once who insisted on filling his room with parrots because he said the old buccaneers always had parrots, and Lafitte used to headquarter here. Then there was the music teacher from Idaho who–-“

“About Mr Matson,” Simon interrupted—“what was his friend’s name?”

“I’m not sure. I think it was something like Black. But I didn’t pay much attention. I knew it was all right, because I’d seen him with Mr Matson before.”

“Can you describe him?”

“Yes. Tall and thin, with sort of gray-blond hair cut very short–-“

“And a military bearing and a saber scar on the left cheek?”

“I didn’t notice that,” Baker said seriously. “Mr Matson made a lot of friends while he was at the hotel. He was always out for a good time, wanting to find girls and drinking a lot. … I hope there isn’t any trouble, is there?”

“I hope not. But this guy Black didn’t say where Matson was going to move in with him?”

“No. He said Mr Matson would probably stop in and leave his next address when he sobered up.” Baker looked at him anxiously. “Do you have some business connection with Mr Matson, Mr— ah–-“

“Titwillow,” said the Saint. “Sullivan Titwillow. Yes, Mr Matson and I are partners in an illicit diamond buying syndicate in Rhodesia. I hope I haven’t kept you up… . Oh, and by the way. Don’t jump into bed as soon as I go, because you’ll have at least one other caller tonight. His name is Yard, and he is the Law in Galveston. Please be nice to him, because I think his feet hurt.”

He left the baffled day clerk on the front stoop, and returned to the cab which he had kept waiting.

He was whistling a little tune to himself as he got in, but his gaiety was only in the performance. The presentiment in his mind was growing more solid in spite of anything he could do. And he knew that he was only trying to stave it off. He knew that what-ever happened, Fate had taken the play away from him.

“My name, if anybody should ask you,” he said to his driver, ‘is Sugarman Treacle. I am a Canadian in the lumber business. I have sold myself on the job of investigating public vehicles with a view to equipping them with soft pine blocks and coil springs as a substitute for rubber during the present tire shortage. Please feel quite free to discuss my project with any rival researchers who want to talk it over with you.”

“Okay, Colonel,” said the cabby affably. “Where to now?” And then the Saint’s presentiment was much too firmly ma-terialised to be brushed off. It was something too outrageously coincidental to have ever been intelligently calculated, and at the same time so absurdly obvious that its only concealment had been that it had been too close to see.

The Saint said: “Do you know a joint called the Blue Goose?” “Yeah,” said the other briefly. “You wanna go there?” “I think so.”

“I can get you in. But after that you’re on your own.” Simon raised one eyebrow a millimeter, but he made no comment. He said: “Do you think you could shake off anybody who might be following us before we get there? My wife has been kind of inquisitive lately, and I’m not asking for trouble.”

“I getcha, pal,” said the driver sympathetically, and swung his wheel.

The Blue Goose had a sign outside and several cars parked in front; but the door was locked, and the chauffeur had to hammer on it to produce a scrap of face at a barred judas “window. There was a line of muttered introduction, and then the door opened. It was all very reminiscent of Prohibition, and in fact it was much the same thing, for the state of Texas was still working on the package store system and hadn’t legalised any open bars.

“There y’ are, doc,” said the cabby. “An’ take it easy.”

Simon paid his fare and added a generous tip, and went in.

It was apparent as soon as he was inside that at least the adjective in the name was justified. The decorator who had dreamed up the trimmings must have been hipped on Gershwin. Everything was done in a bluish motif—walls and tablecloths and glass and chairs. There was the inevitable from hunger orchestra, with too much brass and a blue tempo, and the inevitable tray-sized dance floor where the inevitable mixture of sailors, soldiers, salesmen, and stews were putting their work in with the inevitable assortment of wild kids who had drunk too much and wise women who hadn’t drunk enough. Even the lighting scheme was dim and blue.

The only thing that wasn’t clear from the entrance was whether the customer got goosed, or was merely a goose to be there.

Simon crossed to the bar and ordered a Scotch and water, saving himself the trouble of ordering Peter Dawson, which would have been no different anyway in spite of the label on the bottle. He got It with plenty of water in a shimmed glass, and saved his breath on that subject also.

He said to the bartender: “Throgmorton–-“

“Call me Joe,” said the bartender automatically.

He was a big blond man with big shoulders and a slight paunch, with a square face that smiled quickly and never looked as if the smile went very far inside.

“Joe,” said the Saint, “do you know a gal here by the name of Olga Ivanovitch?”

The man paused only infmitesimally in his mopping.

At the Saint’s side, a voice with strange intonations in it said: My name is Olga Ivanovitch.”

Simon turned and looked at her.

She sat alone, as certain other women did there, with a pile drink in front of her. He hadn’t paid any attention to her when he chose his stool, but he did now. Because she had a real beauty that was the last thing he had expected there—in spite of the tradi-tional requirements of a well-cast mystery.

Beauty of a stately kind that had no connection with the common charms of the other temptations there. A face as pale and aristocratic as that of a grand duchess, but with the more earthy touches of broad forehead and wide cheekbones that betrayed the Slav. Blonde hair as lustrous as frozen honey, braided severely around her head in a coiffure that would have been murder to any less classic bone structure. Green eyes that matched her deep-cut green gown. By her birth certificate she might have been any age; but by the calendars of a different chronology she had been old long ago—or ageless.

“Why were you looking for me?” she asked in that voice of unfamiliar harmonies.

The bartender had moved down the counter and was busy with other ministrations.

“I wanted to know,” said the Saint steadily, “what you can tell me about a character called Henry Stephen Matson—possibly known to you as Henry Stephens.”

3 He had to admire the way she handled the mask of her face, even with the underlying configuration to help her.

“But why should you ask me?” she protested, with seductive bewilderment.

The Saint put one elbow on the bar and pillowed his chin on the hand attached to it.

“Darling,” he said, with every kind of friendliness and good humor and amiable sophistication, “you are an exceedingly beauti-ful creature. You’ve probably been told that at least once before if not ten times an evening. You are now hearing it again—but this time from a connoisseur. Nevertheless, ready as I am to swoon before you, the few fragments of sense that I have left will not let me go along with the gag of treating you as an ingenue.”

She laughed; and it was something that he registered in her favor, if only because she was probably the only woman in the place who could have unraveled his phraseology enough to know whether to laugh or not.

She said: “Then I won’t do?”

“You’ll do perfectly,” he assured her, “if you’ll just take my word for it that I’m strictly in favor of women who are old enough to have had a little experience—and young enough to be interested in a little more. But they also have to be old enough to look at an old tired monument like me and know when I don’t want to sit up all night arguing about storks.”

It was a delight to watch the play of her shoulders and neck line.

“You’re priceless… . Would you buy me a drink?”

“I’d love to. I expect to buy the whole joint, a small hunk at a time. If I have a drink too, it should be worth two tables and a dozen chairs.”

He signaled the square-faced bartender.

“And a cigarette?” she said.

He shook one out of his pack.

“You’ve got quite a sense of humor, Mr–-“

“Simon Templar,” he said quietly, while the bartender was turning away to select a bottle.

Her perfectly penciled eyebrows rose in perfectly controlled surprise.

“Simon Templar?” she repeated accurately. “Then you must be–-Here, let me show you.”

She reached away to remove a newspaper from under the nose of a recuperating Rotarian on the other side of her. After a moment’s search, she re-folded it at an inside page and spread it in front of the Saint.

Simon saw at a glance that it was the early morning edition of the Times-Tribune, and read the item with professional appraisal.

It was not by any means the kind of publicity that he was ac-customed to, having been condensed into four paragraphs of a middle column that was overshadowed on one side by the latest pronunciamento of the latest union megaphone, and on the other by a woman in Des Moines who had given birth to triplets in a freight elevator. But it did state quite barrenly that an unidentified burned body had been found on the shore road east of Virginia Point by “Simon Temple, a traveling salesman from Chicago”. The police, as usual, had several clues, and were expected to solve the mystery shortly.

That was all; and the Saint wondered why there was no mention of the name that the dying man had given him, or his gasped reference to the Blue Goose, and why Lieutenant Kinglake had been so loth to give out with any leads on the night life of Galveston. Perhaps Kinglake hadn’t taken the Saint’s question seriously at all… .

Simon turned his blue steel eyes back to Olga Ivanovitch again, and gave her a light for her cigarette. Once more he was aware of her statuesque perfection—and perfect untrustworthiness.

He lifted his newly delivered dilution of anonymous alcohol.

“Yes,” he acknowledged modestly, “I am the traveling salesman. But you aren’t the farmer’s daughter.”

“No,” she answered without smiling. “My name is Ivanovitch.”

“Which means, in Russian, exactly what ‘Johnson’ would mean here.”

“But it’s my name.”

“And so is ‘Templar’ mine. But it says ‘Temple’ in the paper, and yet you placed me at once.”

“For that matter,” she said, “why did you ask me about— Henry?”

“Because, my sweet, if you’d like the item for your memoirs, your name was on dear Henry’s lips just before he passed away.”

She shuddered, and closed her eyes for a moment.

“It must have been a gruesome experience for you.”