Call for the Saint (18 page)

The girl at the switchboard near Grady’s office door, who doubled as receptionist, surveyed the Saint in the same way as he approached her. But even her dead-pan appraisal softened responsively to the intimate flattery of his smile, the irrepressible proposition of his blue eyes, and the devil-may-care lines of chin and mouth… . He was opening the door of Grady’s private office before she suddenly remembered her duties as sentry of the sanctum.

“Hey, come back here!” she cried. “You can’t go in there!”

Like other women who had tried to tell the Saint what he couldn’t do, she thought of her objections a little late. The Saint was already in.

Michael Grady was sitting tilted back in his swivel chair, his feet resting on the edge of his huge desk, his broad snub-nosed face turned upward at the ceiling as he cuddled a telephone in the crook of his jaw and shoulder. His gaze swung downward as he heard the door close, and his eyes, which matched the Saint’s for blueness, bulged with embryonic eruption.

The Saint waved a debonair greeting and sank into a worn leather club chair facing him.

The promoter grunted a couple of times into the telephone, his eyes fixed on Simon Templar’s, and hung up, his feet returning to the floor with a crash.

“And who the hell might you be?” he blasted.

A rich brogue was still ingrained in his gravelly tenor, although as the Saint well knew it had been thirty years since he had left his native Ireland. The ups and downs of Mike Grady’s turbulent career to his present eminence as promoter of the Manhattan Arena was a familiar story to the city’s sporting gentry; it was a career which on the whole, Simon knew, had won Grady more friends than enemies-and those enemies the kind an honest but headstrong man easily makes on his way to the top.

“The name,” Simon announced, “is Simon Templar.”

Grady stared at him, digesting the name, seeking a familiar niche for it, his brows drawn in a guarded frown. He opened his mouth as if to speak, then closed it again as recognition dawned in his eyes and wiped away the frown. He leaned forward on his desk.

“The Saint?” he asked unbelievingly, and sprang to his feet without waiting for a reply. “Of course! I should’ve known!” He came from behind the desk, extending an eager hand. “Glad to meet you, Saint!”

Simon rose to his feet and allowed his arm to be used like a pump handle.

“And it’s a shame you’ve not visited me before,” Grady enthused. “Why, only yesterday one of the boys brings up your name as a possibility for master of ceremonies for the Summer Ice Follies we’re puttin’ on soon. The Saint and Sonja Henie! Can’t you just see that billin’! It’d be sensational! You’d pack ‘em in! We’d have it in all the papers-on billboards-on the radio—”

“And in skywriting,” said the Saint. “Well, I suppose the world will always beat a path to the door of the man who builds a better claptrap, but I didn’t come as a performer in that line. I-er-already have a-sort of profession, you know.”

“A profession? You?” Grady smiled jestingly. “And what would that be?”

“I’m what you might call a haunter,” said the Saint.

Grady’s brows knitted.

“A haunter?”

“Of guilty consciences.”

“That,” said Mr. Grady after a pause, “I don’t get.”

Simon helped himself to a cigarette from the dispenser on the desk.

“Well,” he said engagingly, “take your conscience, for example.”

Grady grinned at him.

“And why would you be hauntin’ my conscience? It’s crystal clear.”

Simon struck a match.

“Is it?”

“Indeed it is.”

“Even about your secret partnership with Doc Spangler?”

Grady’s grin faded. He turned abruptly, went back behind his desk, and sat down. His fingertips tapped a nervous tattoo on the top of his desk for a moment.

“Even if that were true,” he said finally, “would it be a crime?”

The Saint also sat down again, lowering himself through a leisured breath of smoke.

“I always heard you were an honest man, Mike,” he said quietly. “Spangler’s a crook, and you know it.”

Grady flushed.

“I don’t know anything of the sort!” he snapped. “So he served time once. What of it? A man can make a mistake.”

“I know,” Simon nodded. “And you put him back on his feet; gave him a job at the Queensberry Gym.”

“The best damn’ masseur I ever had!”

“Very likely. He was an MD before they took away his license for peddling dope.” Simon consulted his cigarette ash. “Mike, you even advanced him money to go into business as a fight manager, didn’t you?”

Grady stirred impatiently.

“Well, what of it?” he demanded. “When I got this job here at the Arena I gave up the gym. Doc didn’t want to work there without me, so I loaned him a couple of grand.”

“For which he gave you a share in Barrelhouse Bilinski as collateral.”

“Well —” Grady chuckled, but his humor was laciniated with unease. “It didn’t seem like much collateral at the time. He wasn’t the Masked Angel then, you know.”

“I know.”

“Well, then,” Grady said, spreading his square freckled hands expressively, “you know how good Spangler is. A great fighter he’s made out of a broken-down stumble bum.”

The Saint shook his head sadly.

“Mike,” he protested, “anyone, a child-even Connie, your own daughter-might be skeptical of that. In fact, if she knew about your partnership with Spangler, she might even be afraid that you’re mixed up in something not quite—”

Grady stiffened, his face reddening.

“And what the hell has my daughter to do with this?”

The Saint’s disclaimer was as bland as cold cream.

“Why, nothing at all, Mike. I merely mentioned her as a possibility.”

“Well, you just leave her out of this!” Grady glared at him and then looked away restlessly. “Maybe it isn’t according to Hoyle for me to have a financial interest in Bilinski,” he grumbled, “but it doesn’t matter a damn to me if he wins or loses, just so I get my two grand back.”

“By the way,” said the Saint, “how does Spangler get away with Bilinski wearing that old sock over his head?”

“He has special permission from the Boxing Commission,” Grady replied curtly.“It’s a legitimate publicity stunt.”

“If there is such a thing,” Simon admitted. “But it certainly improves his appearance.”

“He’ll have to take it off for the Championship fight,” Grady informed him sourly, “when he gives Steve Nelson the beatin’ he deserves!”

The Saint’s probing eyes drooped with offensive restraint.

“You seem to lack a certain enthusiasm for your future son-in-law,” he observed.

“Not my son-in-law!” roared the promoter. “No common knuckle-head box fighter is going to marry the daughter of Mike Grady, I can tell you. I don’t know what tales you been hearing, but she’s not marrying that punk, you can depend on it!”

“What are you going to do-forbid the banns?”

“I’ll not see her tied to a lowser with no more future than a cake of ice,” Grady said belligerently. “I’ve seen what happens to the most of ‘em after their fightin’ days are done, with their brains addled and the eyes knocked out of ‘em, no money saved and their wives drudges!”

The Saint built an “O” with a smoke ring.

“So that’s why you quarreled.”

“I wouldn’t call it a quarrel.” The promoter’s eyes glittered. “I told him just what I’ve told you, and I told him to let Connie alone.”

“But if Steve is retiring after his fight with the Angel, as he says—”

“Sure! That’s what he says,” Grady snorted. “How many times have I heard that one before! So he’s retiring. On what?”

Simon shrugged.

“On the purse, I suppose. Unless, of course, he gets killed before he can collect it. The way Smith was.”

Mike Grady put his elbows on the desk and cupped his forehead in his hands, staring down at his desk.

“That was a terrible thing to happen,” he said somberly. “But it was an accident.” He looked up defiantly. “It wouldn’t happen once in a million fights.”

The Saint gazed at him thoughtfully. A pattern seemed to be unfolding. So Grady wanted no part of Connie’s fiance. He was in semi-partnership with Doc Spangler. But did he disapprove of Nelson enough to arrange his death? Was he of the same stripe as Spangler ? … Somehow the Saint couldn’t quite accept that. Grady was not wanting in the essential elements of humanity. A hotheaded obstinate old blowhard, perhaps-but not a wicked man. Shrewd, conniving, scheming maybe-but not a crook. Somewhere the thorn of conscience prickled. Somewhere beneath the flinty carapace was a naively sentimental heart. An expert in such things, the Saint felt certain of his diagnosis. And yet …

“Perhaps,” said the Saint. “But I collect those one-in-a-million chances.” He slipped the snub-barreled revolver out of his pocket and laid it almost casually on Grady’s desk. “No doubt it was also one chance in a million that I found this in my apartment last night.”

Grady stared at the gun in openmouthed amazement.

“Where the hell did you get that?” he demanded stupidly.

“It’s yours, of course?”

“Sure it’s mine. My initials are on it! Where’d you get it?”

“I told you. In my apartment last night. After my little interview with Spangler last night, some character broke into our ivory tower with the apparent idea of air-conditioning us with your heater. Unfortunately we had just booby-trapped the door in preparation for a visit from the tax collector. This other character didn’t have a sense of humor, so he went away in a sort of huff.”

Grady thrust himself from his chair and walked to the window. He stared out blindly, his hands folded across his chest, his face a thundercloud.

“I don’t understand,” he muttered. “Unless he sold it, or —” He turned to Simon abruptly. “That gun was stolen from me,” he said flatly, “by Steve Nelson!”

The Saint tapped the ash from his cigarette dispassionately.

“Stolen?” he murmured.

“Yes, stolen!” Grady returned to his chair. “Last week. Right in this office. He took the gun and I’ve never seen it since- that is, until .this moment.”

“How do you know he took it?” the Saint asked.

“How do I know he took it!” Grady bawled. “The bastard nearly broke my arm!”

“Oh,” Simon deduced, innocently. “This, I take it, was during the quarrel you didn’t have.”

Grady glowered at the gun on the desk.

“If it wasn’t a matter of business and money out of my pocket, I’d have had him thrown in jail for so long—”

“That Connie wouldn’t even know him when he did come out?”

“Skip it.”

“You pulled that gun on him, didn’t you? And he took it away from you. Was that it?”

Grady’s high-blood pressure became painfully evident.

“I said skip it!” he shouted. “I was defending myself-not that I couldn’t handle the lowser with me bare hands if I had to!”

Simon rose to his feet and retrieved the gun.

“You won’t mind if I borrow this until I trace the character who tried to use it on me last night?”

“Help yourself,” Grady grunted darkly. “Did you have any idea who it was?”

“Do you think Steve Nelson could answer that question?”

Grady scowled and shook his head,
“It doesn’t sound like him-sneakin’ into a man’s house … No, it couldn’t have been! The lowser must have sold it or-lost it. Whoever got it from Nelson is the man you’ll be wantin’.”

The Saint stood up.

“That’s who I’m going to find,” he said. “I’ll see you again, Mike.”

Before the promoter realized that the interview was over, he had opened the door and sauntered out.

There was a sudden dampening of volume in the conversation about him as he emerged from Grady’s office. Whereas he had attracted little attention on entering the reception room, his effrontery in crashing Grady’s office ahead of everyone else now made him a marked man, the target of a concentrated battery of indignant eyes. But the Saint seemed wholly unaware of the hushed hostility as he paused by the girl at the switchboard and watched her plug in a connection.

“Yes, Mr. Grady,” she said. And after a moment: “Dr. who? … Yes, sir, I’ll get him for you right away.”

She reached for the telephone directory on a shelf beside her.

“Crescent 3-1465,” the Saint prompted helpfully.

She looked up like a startled gopher; and Simon Templar gave her the same friendly smile with which he had short-circuited her before.

“It was Dr. Kurt Spangler you wanted, wasn’t it?” he said, and strolled on out before she could find her voice.

Hoppy Uniatz had the engine of the convertible racing as Simon opened the door, and he scarcely gave the Saint time to sit down before he banged in the clutch and sent the car roaring up the street and lurching around the first corner against the lights.

“What are you trying to do?” Simon asked. “Pick up a ticket?”

“Don’t worry, boss,” Hoppy said. “De getaway is a cinch. I drove lotsa dese jobs before. Dijja blast him good?”

Simon considered him.

“What on earth are you talking about?”

”Dat bum, Grady! Ya just give him de business, don’tcha?”

The Saint shook his head patiently.

“No, Hoppy, no. I never said that our visitor last night was Mike Grady. Let’s head for Riverside Drive-I want to talk to Steve Nelson in person.”

CHAPTER EIGHT
The blue convertible swept up Riverside Drive through the sixties, past the seventies, with the sundrenched wind whispering through Simon Templar’s crisp dark hair; it was a clean brisk wind cooled by the majestic mile-wide ribbon of the Hudson which ran parallel on their left, its shining waters stippled by the wind in a million breaking facets that caught the bright sunlight in broad mosaics of burnished gold. All in all, the Saint thought, it was much too gay and lovely a day for exploring spiritual sewers, or delving into the fetid labyrinths of murder.

They were in the eighties before the Saint signaled Hoppy to slow down.

“It’s that house at the end of the block,” he said.

The big car swooped to the curb and drew to a halt before one of the three-storied brownstone buildings which stand along Riverside Drive like autumnal spinsters, their old-fashioned elegance reminiscent of a more sedate and happier era.