'Then you certainly ought to. That fine manly figure of yours must be preserved. Now I really must get busy, because you've got plenty on your hands as it is, and I don't want you to have another murder to worry about.'
'You let me worry about my own worrying,' Fernack said grimly. 'All I want to know is what else you know now.'
'You didn't get the significance of the lock?'
'What lock?'
'Never mind,' said the Saint. 'It will dawn on you one of these days. Now I really must be going.'
'But where?' wailed the detective.
The Saint smiled, and blew a slender smoke-ring through a teasing pause.
'I'll leave a note for you at the desk here. You climb on to your little bicycle and come and pick it up.'
'Why not give it to me now?'
'Because I want to be there first. Because I want a little time to set the stage. And because cops rush in where Saints are smart enough to wait. Be patient, Henry. Everything will be under control ... I hope. I'm just trying to make it easy for you. And please, when you get there, do me the favor of listening for a minute before you thunder in. I don't want to be interrupted in the middle of a tender passage. . . . Goodbye now.'
He hung up in time to disconnect a jolt of verbal heat and explosion that might have threatened the New York Telephone Company with a general fusing of wires between the Murray Hill and Spring exchanges, scribbled rapidly on a sheet of paper, and sealed it into an envelope and wrote Fernack's name on it while he waited for the service elevator.
'Get this to the desk, will you?' he said to the operator as they rode down. 'To be called for.'
The timekeeper let him out, and he emerged from the side door on to Fortyfourth Street, walking east. In a few strides he turned into the Seymour Hotel, and walked quickly up the corridor towards the lobby. There he stopped for a minute, waiting to see if anyone entered after him. It was always possible that Kestry might have brooded enough to wait for him, or even that the ungodly themselves might have another representative lurking around. But no one followed him in within a reasonable time; and that part of the chase was won. For the Seymour ran cleat through the block, and he went out on to Fortyfifth Street and stepped into a passing taxi with reasonable assurance that he was alone.
The clock in his head ran with sidereal detachment and precision, and on that spidery tightrope of timing his brain balanced as lightly as a shadow.
He had had to put everything together very quickly and coldly; and yet it seemed to him now that he had always known just where each person who mattered would be, from instant to instant, as though they had been linked to him by threads of extrasensory perception. But he had to be right. He had to be right now, or else he had thrown away all the completeness of what he had tried to do.
And with that sharp sting of awareness in his mind he walked into the lobby of the hotel where he had left Barbara Sinclair.
He nodded to the desk clerk who had signed them in, and rode up in the elevator to her floor. He knocked on the door, and waited a little while. He said: 'Saks Fifth Avenue, ma'am. A COD package for Mrs Tombs.'
12 He waited a little longer, and then the door opened two or three inches, and he saw a narrow panel of her face--hair like a raven's wing, a dark eye, and carmine lips.
He went in.
'I wondered what had happened to you,' she said.
'I had lunch. I met some friends.'
His eyes strayed over the room with the most natural unconcern, but they missed nothing. Actually it was in an ashtray that he saw the proof that at least half of his timing had been right, but his glance picked up the detail without pausing.
Barbara Sinclair moved to a deep low chair by the window and sat down, curling one shapely leg under her. Her other foot swung in a short off-beat rhythm, so that every interrupted movement of it gave him a measure of the effort of will-power that was maintaining her outward composure.
'Has anything else happened?' she asked.
'Just a few things.'
'Have you found out anything?'
'A little. . . . You know, this isn't such a bad place, is it? I must remember it next time some visiting fireman is asking me where to stay with his concubine.'
He was strolling about the room as if he were estimating the general comfort of it and incidentally taking his time over choosing a place to sit down.
'It's not one of the tourist taverns, so he'd be pretty safe from the risk of an awkward meeting with one of the home-town gossips. And it's very discreet and respectable, which ought to put the lady in the right mood. There must be nothing like a dingy bedroom and a leering bellhop to damp the fires of precarious passion.'
He arrived in front of a bookcase on which stood a tall vase of chrysanthemums filled out with a mass of autumn oak leaves. He stood with his back to the room, approving them.
'Chrysanthemums,' he murmured. 'Football. Raccoon coats. The long crawl to New Haven. The cheers. The groans. The drinks.' He shook his head sadly. 'Those dear dead days,' he said. 'The chrysanthemums are here, but the gridiron scholars are boning up on the signals for squads right. And as for driving to New Haven without any bootleg gas coupons . . . But they are pretty.'
'The management sent them up,' she said. 'I'm afraid I didn't think I was spotted as a concubine. I wondered if they thought we were honeymooners.'
He laughed sympathetically, and took the automatic out of his breast pocket and nested it in amongst the leaves, still covering the vase with his back, while he was pretending to make improvements in the arrangement of the bouquet.
Then he turned again to look at her, and said: 'It's too bad, isn't it? We never had that honeymoon.'
'We would have had it, you know, if you hadn't been quite so clever about getting rid of me.'
'I have a feeling of irreparable loss.'
Her lovely face seemed to grow dark and warm from within as her long lashes dipped for a moment. Then she raised them again in a slow stare that could have had many sources.
'You really hate me, don't you?'
He shook his head judicially, his brow wrinkled by a frown that was very vague and distant.
'Not so much.'
'You don't like me.'
He smiled easily, and started to open a fresh pack of cigarettes.
'Like you? Darling, I always thought you were terrific. I would have loved our honeymoon. But unfortunately I haven't any of the instincts of the male scorpion. I never could see consummation and immolation as interchangeable words. And I wasn't nearly so anxious to get rid of you as you were to get rid of me-- permanently.'
'I didn't----'
'Know?' Simon suggested. 'Perhaps not. Perhaps. But your boy friend did. And you must admit that he's clever. Within his own class, anyway. Clever enough, for instance, to set you up in that fancy tenement because it might always be useful to have a pretty girl on call to entertain the tired business man--or decoy the simple sucker. That is, when he didn't want her himself. A very happy way of combining business with pleasure, if you ask me. . . . Or is it rude of me to insist on this masculine viewpoint? Should I have thought of a girl friend instead--some nice motherly creature who . . .'
He raised a hand as she started out of the chair with dark eyes blazing.
'Take it easy,' he drawled. 'Maybe I was just kidding. It's obvious that the bag I found in your apartment was a man's. But so were the pajamas that were hanging in the closet where I heaved Humpty and Dumpty.'
Her hand went to her mouth, and her exquisite features suddenly sagged into a kind of blank smear. It was absurd and pitiful, he thought, how a few words could transform a lovely and vital creature into a haggard woman with neck cords that streaked her throat and eyes that were hollow and lusterless with fear.
'I don't know what you mean,' she said.
'I've heard more original remarks than that,' he said. 'But if it's any help to you, I don't know what you mean
