Saint on Guard Read Free Page A

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