Charteris, Leslie - 25, page 2
It seemed to the Saint, quite abstractly, that he might have enjoyed hearing that; but he was just tactful enough not to say so.
He said: "What you've told me isn't exactly enough to convict him. And for that matter, it doesn't lay the black market in my lap either. But I'd like to have a talk with your husband."
"Oh, if you only would, Mr Templar! You're sooo clever, I'm sure you could persuade him to tell you."
"I could try," he said noncommittally. "Where do you live?"
"We've got a little place out at Oyster Bay. Milton will be home by half past six. If you could manage to get out there—you could say you just happened to be passing and you dropped in for a drink——"
"Tell him we met in Havana," said the Saint, "and put him in the right frame of mind."
He got her out of the door with some remarkably firm and adroit maneuvering, and came back to pour himself a healthy dose of Peter Dawson and restore his nerves.
The fortunes of buccaneering had brought many women out of the wide world and thrown them into Simon Templar's life, and it is a happy fact that most of them had been what any man would agree that a woman out of the wide world ought to be, which was young and decorative and quite undomesticated. But he had to realise that sooner or later such good luck had to end; and he had no idea of ignoring Titania Ourley, in spite of her unprepossessing appearance and even more dreadful charm.
It was like that in the strange country of adventure where he had worn so many trails. When yo.u had no idea where your quarry was, there was nothing to bring it within range like the right bait. When you had no idea what your quarry was like, you had to find the right bait, and sometimes that wasn't at all easy, but when you had the right bait you were bound to get a nibble. And when you had a nibble, the rest depended on how good you were. Mrs Milton Ourley was definitely a nibble.
He reached Oyster Bay soon after six-thirty, and after the inevitable series of encounters with village idiots, characters with cleft palates, and strangers to the district, he was able to get himself directed to Mr Ourley's little place.
This little place was no larger than a fairly flourishing hotel, occupying the center of a small park. Simon watched the enormous iron-studded portal open as he approached it with the reasonable expectation of seeing the hallway flanked with a double line of periwigged footmen; but instead of that it was Mrs Ourley herself who stood fabulously revealed on the threshold, gowned and corseted in a strapless evening dress that made her-upper section look slightly like an overfilled ice cream cone.
"Simon! You darling boy! How wonderful of you to remember!"
She insisted on taking both his hands as she drew him in, and still holding on to them when he was inside—doubtless under the impression that this gave her some of the winsome appeal of Mary Martin in her last picture.
He found himself in an immense pseudo-baronial hall cluttered with ponderous drapes and gilt furniture, and atmospherically clogged with a concentration of perfume on which it might have' been possible to float paper boats. As Mrs Ourley dragged him closer to her bosom, it became stiflingly plain that she herself was the wellspring of this olfactory soup.
"I was just driving by," Simon began as arranged, "and——”
"And of course you had to stop! I just knew you couldn't forget——”
"What the dabbity dab is going on here?" boomed a sudden wrathful voice from the background.
Mrs Ourley jumped away with a guilty squeal; and Simon turned to inspect Mr Ourley with as much composure as Mrs Ourley's over-zealous interpretation of her part could leave him.
"Good evening," he said politely.
He saw a very short man with enormous shoulders and an even more enormous stomach swelling below a stiff white shirtfront. He carried a raggedly chewed cigar in thick hirsute fingers, and his black beetling brows arched up and down in apoplectic exasperation.
"Tiny!" he roared at his wife, thereby causing even the Saint to blink. "I've told you before that I'll make no effort to control your comings and goings outside of this house, but I will not have you bringing your gigolos into my home!"
Mrs Ourley bridled automatically.
"But he's not a ... I asked him to drop in."
"So," said Milton Ourley thunderously. "You admit it. Well, | this is just about the last——"
"But Milton," she protested coldly, "this is Mr Templar. Simon Templar. You know—the Saint."
"Jumping Jehosaphat!" roared Mr Ourley. "The what?"
Simon turned back from the Beauvais tapestry which he had been surveying while he allowed the first ecstatic symptoms of marital bliss to level off.
"The Saint," he said pleasantly. "How do you do?"
"Dabbity dab dab dab," said Mr Ourley. A new flood of adrenalin in his blood stream caused him to inflate inwardly until he looked more than ever like a bellicose bullfrog. "Tiny, have you gone out of your mind? Asking this crook, this—this busybody——"
"Milton," said Mrs Ourley glacially, "I heard you and Mr Linnet talking about iridium last night. And since Simon is trying to break up that racket, I thought it would be a good idea to bring you two together."
Milton Ourley stared at the Saint, and his broad chest seemed to shrink one or two sizes. That might have been only an impression, for he stood as solid as a sawed-off colossus on his short stocky legs. Certainly he did not stagger and collapse. His glare lost none of its fundamental bellicosity. It was only quieter, and perhaps more calculating.
"Oh, did you?" he said.
The Saint fingertipped a cigarette out of the pack in his breast pocket. For his part, the approach was all ploughed up anyhow. He had given Titania Ourley little enough script to work with, and now that she had gone defensively back into simple facts it was no use worrying about what other lines might have been developed. Simon resigned himself to some hopeful adlibbing, and smiled at Mr Ourley without the slightest indication of uncer-tainty in his genial nonchalance.
"You see?" he murmured. "Tiny has brains as well as beauty."
Ourley's red face deepened into purple again.
"You leave my wife out of this!" he bellowed. "And as for you, you can get out of here this minute, Mister Templar. When you've got any authority to come barging into other people's affairs——"
"You heard the name," Simon replied softly. "Did you ever hear of the Saint asking for any authority?"
" 'And seem a saint when most I play the devil'," said another voice, a deep cultured voice from somewhere else in the hall.
Simon looked around for it.
He saw, in one of the doorways, a tall spare man whose dinner clothes seemed to have been poured over his figure, smiling and twirling a Martini glass in one manicured hand. Gray at the temples, his face was hard and almost unlined, cut in the aquiline fleshless pattern of a traditional Indian chief.
"I don't want to break anything up," he said, "but all the excitement seemed to be out here." Ignoring Ourley, he sauntered towards the Saint with his free hand outstretched. "I've heard a lot about you, Mr Templar. My name's Allen Uttershaw. I'm supposed to run that Uttershaw Mining Company. I heard somebody talking about iridium. Are you going to get that stolen shipment back for us?"
"I don't know," said the Saint. "I'm afraid I only heard about you a few days ago."
" 'Full many a flower is born to blush unseen'," Uttershaw said tolerantly, his smile widening.
Ourley made a gesture of frightful frustration with his cigar.
"What is all this?" he barked. "Who said that?"
"John Kieran," said Uttershaw gravely; and Simon looked at him with new interest. It began to seem as if Mr Allen Uttershaw might be quite a fellow.
Mr Ourley didn't have the same pure intellectual detachment. He repeated his outraged gesture with italics in smoke.
"Dabbity dab dab dab!" he roared. "Has everybody gone nuts? First I find my wife has brought this meddler into my home to spy on me, and then you keep on quoting poetry. Or maybe it's me that's crazy."
"Milton!" said Mrs Ourley sternly.
Uttershaw took Simon by the arm and started to lead him easily into the living room from which he had emerged.
"Milton, I'm ashamed of you," he said. "What will Mr Templar think of your hospitality?"
"I don't give a dab dab what he thinks," fumed Ourley, pattering helplessly after them. "My hospitality doesn't include welcoming crooks and spies with open arms."
"Now, after all—surely Mr Templar is at least entitled to the chance of saying something for himself." Uttershaw turned to a tray on which a shaker and a row of glasses were set out. "How about a drink, Mr Templar?"
"Thanks," said the Saint, with equal urbanity.
He took the glass that Uttershaw handed him, gazed into it for a moment, and then swept his cool blue eyes again over the faces of the other two men.
"I didn't exactly come here to spy," he said frankly. "I didn't actually come here with any plans at all. But after what Mrs Ourley told me, I was certainly anxious to talk to"—he inclined his head—"Mr Ourley. I thought I might possibly get you to talk to me. You know that I'm interested in the iridium situation, and it seems that you've had some dealings with the black market. You might like to tell me about it."
"My wife is an irresponsible imbecile," Ourley said balefully. "I'm just a business man with a contract to fill, and I'm filling it."
"Anyone who buys in a black market, of course, is technically compounding some sort of misdemeanor," Simon went on im-perturbably. "But in this case it goes a little further. Iridium isn't so common that a black market can just scratch it up out of a junk pile. And Mr Uttershaw will certainly remember a recent robbery in which two men were killed. It seems rather obvious to me that at least some of this black market iridium is coming from that stolen shipment which started the shortage in the first place. In that case, anyone who buys it is not only receiving stolen goods, but in a sort of way he's an accessory to murder."
"Fiddlesticks!" exploded Ourley. "What do you propose to do when you get some information—turn it over to the Junior G-Men or cash in on it yourself?"
"Milton!" repeated Mrs Ourley, aghast from her quivering bust to the crimson-tipped toes that protruded through the front of her evening sandals.
"Considering my reputation, the question is not out of order," Simon said equably. "And the answer is that I shall deal with any facts I can get hold of in whatever way I think they would do the most good."
"Well," rasped Ourley, "in that case I'd be seventyseven kinds of a dab dabbed idiot if I told you anything—if I knew anything, that is," he added hastily.
Simon's gaze was dispassionately unwavering.
"Would you say the same thing to the police or the FBI?"
"You're dabbity dab well right I would. My business is still my own business until these dabbity dab New Dealers take what's left of it away from me."
Uttershaw stepped up with a gold lighter for the cigarette which the Saint was still holding unlighted between his fingers.
"Do you know anything about this iridium black market, Milton?" he inquired curiously.
Ourley's mouth opened, and then closed again like a trap before it parted a second time to let out words.
"I have no information to give anyone," he said; "especially to interfering dab dabs like this. And that's final."
"I only wondered," Uttershaw said suavely, "because naturally I'm interested myself. Of course that iridium shipment of mine was insured, but I couldn't insure my legitimate profit, which would have been quite reasonable. And after all, we all have to make some kind of living. Besides, I can't help hating to think that some crooks are making a fantastic profit where I'm really entitled to a fair one. Personally, I wish Mr Templar a lot of luck. And I'm sure the Government would be behind him."
"Don't talk to me about the Government!" Ourley blared, his face ripening again. "What I still want to know is what right a meddling son of a dab blab like this Templar has to go around sticking his nose into my business and making passes at my wife and crashing into my house to cross-examine me. And I want him the hell out of here!"
" 'The eagle suffers little birds to sing'," Uttershaw remembered soothingly; and Ourley's eyes bulged with his blood pressure.
"I wish everybody would stop throwing quotations at me," he howled. "Who said that?"
"Clifton Fadiman—or was it F P A?" said Uttershaw good-humoredly.
Simon Templar emptied his shallow glass and set it down. It seemed rather sadly clear that he was not going to make any substantial progress there and then, and his nibble still left him a secondary line that might be more profitable to play on. He had that in his mind as he bent over Mrs Ourley's diamond-sprinkled hand with somewhat exaggerated formality.
"It's been nice to see you again—Tiny," he said, and added with a malice that saved him from shuddering: "Perhaps we shall dance that immortal rumba one of these days." He bowed to the spluttering Mr Ourley. "I still hope you'll think this over, Milton. I do really. Prison life is so slimming," he said; and shook hands with Uttershaw. "If you hear anything in professional circles, I'm at the Algonquin. We might have lunch one day."
"I'd love to," Uttershaw said cordially. "I'd still like to know why you should take so much trouble."
Simon turned at the door. There were certain little touches and lovely curtains that he could never resist.
" 'I sing because I must'," he said softly, and was gone.
They heard his car starting up and crunching away down the drive, and there was a longish silence in the room.
Then Milton Ourley found his voice again.
"Now what the dabbity dab goes on?" he yelped. "He sounded as if he was quoting poetry too. You've got everybody doing it. What did he mean?"
Allen Uttershaw held up his glass and turned it meditatively.
" 'I sing because I must'," he repeated. For a moment his handsome bony brow was furrowed with thought. Then, just for another moment, it cleared. He went on: " 'And pipe but as the linnet sings . . .' "
His voice died away, and left only his clear gray eyes drifting over Ourley's congested face.
3 Mr Gabriel Linnet, according to the Manhattan directory, had a residential address just off Madison Avenue in the Sixties. It proved to be a three-storey whitestone house with an air of solid prosperity which was quite different in style from that of the Ourley palazzo, but which obviously indicated a similar familiarity with spending coupons.
No lights showed from the windows as Simon stopped his car outside, but it was impossible to tell at a glance whether that might only be the effect of blackout curtains. There was another kind of light, though, that the Saint saw as he stepped out—a spark like a durable firefly hovering over a vague grayish shape in the darkness of the entrance porch. As he came to the steps, the shape developed into an ermine wrap encasing a girl who was perched on the stone balustrade beside the front door, and the firefly was a cigarette in her hand. The faintest subtlest fragrance, a thing not to be mentioned in the same breath as the stupefying reek of Mrs Ourley, crept into his nostrils as he came closer and touched his mind with a quite fanciful excitement.
He took a pencil flashlight from his pocket with a pretense of searching for the doorbell, but he was careful to turn it clumsily enough so that the beam passed over her face.
At least, it was meant to pass over; but when he saw her clearly his hand stopped, and he could no more have kept it moving for a moment than a conscientious bee could have kept flying past a freshly opened flower.
She had long-bobbed blue-black hair that shone like burnished metal, and long-lashed eyes that looked the same color. Her face was a perfect oval of softly-modeled olive, ripening into moist lips that were in themselves a justification for at least half the poems that have been written on such subjects. She was the kind of thing that a castaway on a desert island would dream about just before the seagulls started talking back to him.
The Saint should have had his mind on nothing but the job in hand; but he was still a long way from such dizzy depths of asceticism. She was so much more what a woman out of the wide world should have been, so completely everything that Titania Ourley was not, that he didn't even realize how long he looked at her before she gave him a hint of it.
"Are you quite through?" she said icily; and yet even then her voice matched the picture of her so much better than the mood that the rebuke was warmer than most other women's welcomes.
The Saint turned his light downwards so that it wasn't directly in her eyes, and she could see him equally by the reflected glow; but he didn't turn away himself.
He said, in a low reckless breath:
"Barbara the Beautiful
Had praise of lute and pen;
Her hair was like a summer night,
Dark, and desired of men . . ."
She sat utterly still for a few seconds.
Then she said: "How did you know my name was Barbara?"
"I didn't," he said. "I just came from a Quiz Kids reunion, and I've got a bad attack of the quotes. I'm sorry. Is your name Barbara?"
"Barbara Sinclair."
"It's a nice name."
"Now that that's settled," she said, "why don't you run along? Can't you see I'm busy?"
"So am I," said the Saint. "Don't go away now. I shan't be long."
He turned his light back on the front door, searching for the bell again.
"You're wasting your time," she said. "There's nobody in."
He took his fingers from the bell without touching it, and sat on the stone railing beside her.
"For some reason," he murmured, "that begins to seem strikingly unimportant."
