The Saint to the Rescue Read Free Page B

though it made him feel. But in about half the detective stories
that the Saint had read, one of those locations could have been practically
counted on to reveal Mr. Fennick’s freshly perforated corpse. None of them did. It was almost disappointing.
    Simon went to the dresser for the pack of
cigarettes which he had left where he put down Mr. Fennick’s business card. Now he
found the card tucked half into the opening of the package, in such a
way that he couldn’t have extracted a cigarette without having his attention
focused on it. On the back had been written, in a cramped but
meticulous script:
    I simply can’t let you bother with my
problems. I’ll just have to pay up and make the best of it.
Please forget the whole thing.
    Simon sat down on the bed and picked up the
telephone.
    “Mr. Fennick, please,” he said.
    “One moment, sir.” It was the
oleaginous voice of the night clerk, who was evidently entrusted with
several chores by a thrifty management. Then: “I’m sorry, sir, but Mr.
Fennick’s line still has a Do Not Disturb on it.”
    “Since when?”
    “He asked me to put it on when he came
in, sir, at one- thirty.”
    “I see… . Would you give me his room
number?”
    The pause this time was almost imperceptible.
    “I’m afraid I couldn’t take the
responsibility for that, sir. He might be very annoyed if you disturbed him
by knocking on his door.”
    “What makes you think I’d do that?”
    “I’m sure you wouldn’t want to, sir. So
you won’t mind asking the manager for the information, will you? He
comes on at eight o’clock. Thank you, sir.”
    “Invite me to your funeral,” said
the Saint sweetly, but he said it after a click in the receiver had announced
that the clerk had already terminated the discussion.
    For a few minutes, in a simmer of sheer
exasperation, he contemplated some quite extravagant forms of retaliation against
everyone who had contributed to wasting his time for the past hour. But
at the end of a cigarette he laughed, and fell asleep thinking it was lucky
he hadn’t gone any farther on a wild-goose chase with such a protege.
    If Mr. Otis Q. Fennick was such an
eviscerated marvel that he insisted on submitting to the crudest kind of contrived shakedown, without even a struggle, after having been of fered the
best advice and assistance, then he deserved to stew in his own syrup.
    The Saint slumbered on this relaxing
justification for pre cisely three hours and seventeen minutes, at
which time a crew of civic servants arrived under his window with some raspingly
geared conveyance and began to decant into it the garbage cans
which had previously been only silent orna ments of the alley,
clanging and crashing them back and forth as a tympanic accompaniment to their
mutual shouts of encouragement and impromptu snatches of vocalizing.
    By the time they had moved on he was wide
awake and knew that he had no hope of feeling drowsy again that morn ing. But as
he lay still stretched out with his eyes closed the entire Fennick
episode unrolled again in his memory, and the earlier mood of exasperation
crept back. Only in stead of being a petulant flash of anger, it was now a
con sidered and solid resentment that could not be dismissed.
    He tried to dismiss it while he got up and
showered and shaved and went down to the coffee shop for breakfast, but it refused to go away.
    “You’ve got every excuse to duck
this,” he had to tell him self finally, “except one that’ll let
you forget it.”
    If Mr. Fennick consented to pay blackmail, it
could well be maintained that that was Mr. Fennick’s own private
business, and the hell with him. But if a blackmailer got away with
blackmail, that had always been the Saint’s self-appointed business,
as had any kind of unpunished evil. And it was doubly so when the circumstances
ruled out any possibility of legal retribution.
    Simon finished his second cup of coffee and
went back through the lobby, where a totally different staff