Leslie Charteris - The Saint Sees it Through

The pencil beam of his flashlight told him that the man who decorated this restful room knew the value of the pause that relaxes. "This is your home," the room said. "Welcome. You like this chair? It was made for you. The prints? Nice, aren't they? Nothing like the country. And isn't that soft green of the walls pleasant to the eye? Lean back and relax. The doctor will see you presently, as a friend. What else, in these surroundings?"

The Saint tipped his mental hat and looked around for more informative detail. This wasn't much. The receptionist's desk gave up nothing but some paper and pencils, a half pack of cigarettes, a lipstick, and a copy of Trembling Romances. Three names were written on an appointment pad on the desk top.

He went into the consultation room, which was severely furnished with plain furniture. A couch lay against one wall, the large desk was backed against an opaque window, and the walls were free of pictorial distractions.

Yet this, too, was a restful room. The green of the reception room walls had been continued here, and despite the almost monastic simplicity of the décor, this room invited you to relax. Simon had no doubt that a patient lying on the couch, with Dr. Zellermann discreetly in the background gloom, would drag from the censored files of memory much early minutiae, the stuff of which human beings are made.

But where were the files? The office safe?

Surely it was necessary to keep records, and surely the records of ordinary daily business need not be hidden. The secretary must need a card file of patients, notations, statements of accounts, and what not.

Once more the pencil beam slid around the office, and snapped out. Then the Saint moved silently — compared to him, a shadow would have seemed to be wearing clogs — back into the reception room. His flash made an earnest scrutiny of the receptionist's corner and froze on a small protuberance. Simon's fingers were on it in a second. He pulled, then lifted — and a section of wall slid upward to reveal a filing cabinet, a small safe, and a typewriter.

The Saint sighed as he saw the aperture revealed no liquid goods. Tension always made him thirsty, and breaking and entering always raised his tension a notch.

As he reached for the top drawer of the file to see what he could see, the telephone on the reception desk gave out a shrill demand. The Saint's reflexes sent a hand toward it, which hovered over the instrument while he considered the situation. More than likely, somebody had called a wrong number. It was about that time in the evening when party goers reach the point where it seems a good idea to call somebody, and the somebody is often determined by spinning the dial at random.

If it happens to be your telephone that rings, and you struggle out of pleasant dreams to curse any dizzy friend who would call you at that hour, and you say "Hello" in churlish tones, some oafish voice is likely as not to give you a song and a dance about being a telephone tester, and would you please stand three feet away from the phone and say "Methodist Episcopalian" or some such phrase, for which you get the horse laugh when you pick up the phone again.

This is considered top-hole wit in some circles.

If this were the case, Simon reflected, no harm could be done by answering. But what harm in any case? he asked himself, and lifted the receiver.

"Hullo."

"Ernst?" asked a sharp and vaguely familiar voice. "I'm glad you came early. I'll be there immediately. Something has arisen in connection with Gamaliel Foley."

Click. The caller hung up. That click was echoed by the Saint's memory, and he directed his flashlight at the appointment pad to confirm it. There it was, sandwiched between the names of Mrs. Gerald Meldon and James Prather, Gamaliel Foley.

The Saint was torn between two desires. One was to remain and eavesdrop on the approaching meeting of Dr. Z and his caller with the vaguely familiar voice; the other was to find Gamaliel Foley and learn what he could learn. The latter procedure seemed more practical, since the office offered singularly few conveniences for eavesdropping; but Simon was saddened by the knowledge that he would never know what happened when the conferees learned that it was not Dr. Zellermann who had answered the call.

He replaced the wall panel and went away. On the twelfth floor he summoned the elevator, and he wasn't certain whether or not he hoped he wouldn't encounter Park Avenue's psyche soother. It might have been an interesting passage at charms, for the doctor could give persiflage with the best. But no such contretemps occurred on the way out; and Simon walked the block to Lexington Avenue and repaired to a drugstore stocked with greater New York's multiple set of telephone directories.

He found his man, noted the Brooklyn address, and hailed a taxicab.

For a short while Simon Templar gave himself over to trying to remember a face belonging to the voice that had spoken with such urgency on the telephone. The owner of the voice was excited, which would distort the voice to some extent; and there was the further possibility that Simon had never heard the voice over the telephone before, which would add further distortion to remembered cadences and tonal qualities.

His worst enemies could not call Simon Templar methodical. His method was to stab — but to stab unerringly — in the dark. This characteristic, possessed to such an incredible degree by the Saint, had wrought confusion among those same worst enemies on more occasions than can be recorded here — and the list wouldn't sound plausible, anyway.

So, after a few unsatisfactory sallies into the realm of Things To Be Remembered, he gave up and leaned back to enjoy the ride through the streets of Brooklyn. He filed away the incident under unfinished business and completely relaxed. He gave no thought to his coming encounter with Gamaliel Foley, of which name there was only one in all New York's directories, for he had no referent. Foley, so far as he was concerned, might as well be Adam, or Zoroaster — he had met neither.

When the cab driver stopped at the address the Saint had given, Simon got out and walked back two blocks to the address he wanted. This was an apartment house of fairly respectable mien, a blocky building rising angularly into some hundred feet of midnight air. Its face was pocked with windows lighted at intervals, and its whole demeanor was one of middle-class stolidity.

He searched the name plates beside the door, found Foley on the eighth floor. The Saint sighed again. This was his night for climbing stairs. He rang a bell at random on the eleventh floor, and when the door buzzed, slipped inside. He went up the carpeted stairway, ticking off what the residents had had for dinner as he went. First floor, lamb, fish, and something that might have been beef stew; second floor, cabbage; third floor, ham flavored with odors of second floor's cabbage; and so on.

He noted a strip of light at the bottom of Foley's door. He wouldn't be getting the man out of bed, then. Just what he would say, Simon had no idea. He always left such considerations to the inspiration of the moment. He put knuckles to the door.

There was no sound of a man getting out of a chair to grump to the door in answer to a late summons. There was no sound at all. The Saint knocked again. Still no sound. He tried the door. It opened on to a living room modestly furnished with medium-priced overstuffed pieces.

"Hullo," Simon called softly. "Foley?"

He stepped inside, closed the door. No one was in the living room. On the far side was a door leading into a kitchen, the other no doubt led into the bedroom. He turned the kitchen light on, looked about, switched off the light and knocked on the bedroom door. He opened it, flicked the light switch.