Leslie Charteris - The Saint to the Rescue

She was almost exasperatedly incredulous.

“And now they’ll take care of themselves. There must be more to it than that!”

“Well, there may be a little more,” he smiled. “Let’s go and get a real drink somewhere, and on the way you could show me where Brother Powls lives.”

But when they parted later he had still managed to evade being pinned down to anything more positive than a promise to pick her up for lunch the next day.

He was obligated to dine with his friends at their home, but afterwards — having made conversation about everything except the problem with which Kathleen Holland had presented him — he made the excuse of having to take an important letter to the post office to make sure it would go out by the earliest possible mail. He had no such letter and did not even go near the post office, but drove instead to the small new building that Kathleen had shown him, which was pleasantly situated a block from Cabrillo Boulevard within sight of the ocean and the pier and yacht harbor. There was a light in the upper corner that she had pointed out, and he went up the outside stairway and knocked on the door.

Mr Powls opened it, and his jaw dropped.

“What... Yes, Mr Templar. I was hardly expecting—”

“May I come in?” said the Saint, and went in irresistibly.

“What can I do for you, sir?”

“For a start,” said the Saint, “you can give me any folding money you’ve got on you.”

He kept one hand deep in his jacket pocket, not being so crude as to stretch it out of shape by making anything point through it, but the suggestion was just as effective to Mr Powls’s flickering eyes.

“What is this — a stick-up?”

“Call it what you like, Alton, but sprout the lettuce.”

“I think it’d be better if I called the police. You wouldn’t shoot me for the few dollars I’ve got on me.”

“Do you remember me making you admire my Bingo card this afternoon, chum?” Simon said. “I did that to get your fingerprints on it. You may not believe it, but I have all sorts of useful connections — even here. Those prints are already on their way to Washington,” he elaborated mendaciously, “only I haven’t told anyone yet where they came from. If you feel like calling the police, I won’t stop you. By the time we all get to the station there should be a make from the FBI, and we can go on from there.”

Mr Powls took a crumpled fold of currency from his trouser pocket and passed it over.

“Nobody ever told me the Saint went in for this kind of thing,” he sneered.

“These are rugged days, Alton. What with inflated prices and a confiscatory income tax, it isn’t so easy to live like a millionaire any more without a little side money.”

“But why pick on me?”

Simon had been scrutinizing each piece of paper money in the roll he had taken and separating it into two slim packs clipped between different fingers. Now he fanned out one sheaf like a poker hand.

“I marked all these bills with two little tears close together near one corner, just before I gave them to Aunt Flo this afternoon as a charity donation. How did you get them?”

“She gave them to me. I was lucky, too.”

“You certainly were. But that goes back to when you first hit Santa Barbara and ran into a meal ticket when you were just window-shopping. What were you in stir for, comrade?”

“You’ll find out soon enough. It was about some uranium stock I sold. There shouldn’t have been any squawk at all, but I wrote something in a letter and they used it to hang a federal rap on me.”

“And now you’re out, you’ve switched from the bunco racket to blackmail. That sums it up, doesn’t it?”

“You’re talking to yourself.”

“And even taking it out of charity donations.”

“She gave it to me,” Powls repeated. “I don’t know where it came from. If she snitched it where she shouldn’t, what does that make her?”

“A scared old lady,” said the Saint. “What have you got on her?”

Mr Powls’s cartilaginous lips curled. He was regaining confidence quickly.

“I should tell you — so that you can take over. You dig that up for yourself, if you’re so wise. You can’t beat it out of me here, without one of the neighbors’ll call the cops, and you don’t want that any more than I do. Leave me alone to handle it, and I might even give you a little cut.”

The Saint’s smile was terribly benevolent.

“I’m only humanly inquisitive about Aunt Flo,” he said. “But I’m just as humanly certain that whatever her guilty secret is she’s done a great job of living it down for twenty years. And you should have heard that blackmail is one of the crimes I rate among the wickedest in the world and among the least adequately punished by the law.”

He held Mr Alton Powls by the coat lapel and shook him back and forth quite gently, while the forefinger of his other hand tapped him on the chest for emphasis, and his eyes were sword-points of sapphire in the angelic kindliness of his face.

“I shall give you twelve hours to get out of Santa Barbara, and a few more to be out of the state of California,” he said. “And if I run into you after that, the only cut I shall take will be in your throat.”

He went out without a backward glance.

He got into his car and drove purposefully away, knowing full well that he was watched from the window above, but after four blocks he circled around and came quietly down an alley to coast to a stop with his lights out in its blackest patch of shadow from which he could watch the building he had just left.

When Mr Powls came out a few minutes later, and drove off in a small car from an open garage under one end of the building, Simon did not even have to be cautious about following him. Unburdened with luggage of any kind, Mr Powls was certainly not rushing to beat the liberal deadline he had been given. There was only one place where he could have been headed, other than the one which could have been generically described as Out of There, and Simon set his own course for it by another route.

If the Saint had not been quite so confident about it, it is barely possible that Mr Alton Powls might be alive today. Simon knew the address of the Warshed ménage, which was available to anyone who could read a telephone directory, and having ascertained that, he had not bothered to ask Kathleen Holland to show it to him. He thought he knew his way around the Montecito district fairly well, and he had driven a score of times over the road on which the house stood. The one thing he had overlooked was that he had only driven over it and not in search of a specific destination on it, and he had temporarily forgotten the penchant of denizens of even less traditionally aloof areas than this for secreting their street numbers in minuscule figures in the obscurest possible location, whether to discourage process servers or poor relations. Thus he made two abortive passes at his target, each time made slower by the fact that he did not want to arrive with a triumphant roar, before he positively identified the right entrance. And then he had to drift two hundred yards past it, and find a wider place in the road to park, before he could walk back and enter the rustic gates on foot. By which time, perhaps, Mr Alton Powls had already been gathered to his fathers, if an overworked recording angel could put the finger on them.

At any rate, he looked dead enough, as the Saint saw him after threading a catlike way to the house which stood completely secluded from the road within its ramparts of tall clipped hedges — after circumnavigating Mr Powls’s small car which by this time was cooling in the driveway, and high-stepping delicately over odorous flower beds, and almost falling into a treacherous excavation in the middle of a small patch of lawn, and finally reaching the draped living-room window from which the light came, and selecting the one marginal crack in the curtains through which he could steal the widest wedge-shaped view of the interior.