The Saint Sees It Through

friend who would call you at that hour, and you say 'Hello' in churlish tones, some oafish voice is likely as not to give you a song and a dance about being a telephone tester, and would you please stand three feet away from the phone and say 'Methodist Episcopalian' or some such phrase, for which you get the horse laugh when you pick up the phone again.

This is considered top-hole wit in some circles.

If this were the case, Simon reflected, no harm could be done by answering. But what harm in any case? he asked himself, and lifted the receiver.

'Hullo.'

'Ernst?' asked a sharp and vaguely familiar voice. 'I'm glad you came early. I'll be there immediately. Something has arisen in connection with Gamaliel Foley.'

Click. The caller hung up. That click was echoed by the Saint's memory, and he directed his flashlight at the appoint­ment pad to confirm it. There it was, sandwiched between the names of Mrs. Gerald Meldon and James Prather, Gamaliel Foley.

The Saint was torn between two desires. One was to remain and eavesdrop on the approaching meeting of Dr. Z and his caller with the vaguely familiar voice; the other was to find Gamaliel Foley and learn what he could learn. The latter pro­cedure seemed more practical, since the office offered singularly few conveniences for eavesdropping; but Simon was saddened by the knowledge that he would never know what happened when the conferees learned that it was not Dr. Zellermann who had answered the call.

He replaced the wall panel and went away. On the twelfth floor he summoned the elevator, and he wasn't certain whether or not he hoped he wouldn't encounter Park Avenue's psyche soother. It might have been an interesting passage at charms, for the doctor could give persiflage with the best. But no such contretemps occurred on the way out; and Simon walked the block to Lexington Avenue and repaired to a drugstore stocked with greater New York's multiple set of telephone directories.

He found his man, noted the Brooklyn address, and hailed a taxicab.

For a short while Simon Templar gave himself over to trying to remember a face belonging to the voice that had spoken with such urgency on the telephone. The owner of the voice was excited, which would distort the voice to some extent; and there was the further possibility that Simon had never heard the voice over the telephone before, which would add further distortion to remembered cadences and tonal qualities.

His worst enemies could not call Simon Templar methodical. His method was to stab—but to stab unerringly—in the dark. This characteristic, possessed to such an incredible degree by the Saint, had wrought confusion among those same worst enemies on more occasions than can be recorded here—and the list wouldn't sound plausible, anyway.

So, after a few unsatisfactory sallies into the realm of Things To Be Remembered, he gave up and leaned back to enjoy the ride through the streets of Brooklyn. He filed away the incident under unfinished business and completely relaxed. He gave no thought to his coming encounter with Gamaliel Foley, of which name there was only one in all New York's directories, for he had no referent. Foley, so far as he was concerned, might as well be Adam, or Zoroaster—he had met neither.

When the cab driver stopped at the address the Saint had given, Simon got out and walked back two blocks to the address he wanted. This was an apartment house of fairly respectable mien, a blocky building rising angularly into some hundred feet of midnight air. Its face was pocked with windows lighted at intervals, and its whole demeanor was one of middle-class stolidity.

He searched the name plates beside the door, found Foley on the eighth floor. The Saint sighed again. This was his night for climbing stairs. He rang a bell at random on the eleventh floor, and when the door buzzed, slipped inside. He went up the carpeted stairway, ticking off what the residents had had for dinner as he went. First floor, lamb, fish, and something that might have been beef stew; second floor, cabbage; third floor, ham flavored with odors of second floor's cabbage; and so on.

He noted a strip of light at the bottom of Foley's door. He wouldn't be getting the man out of bed, then. Just what he would say, Simon had no idea. He always left such considera­tions to the inspiration of the moment. He put knuckles to the door.

There was no sound of a man getting out of a chair to grump to the door in answer to a late summons. There was no sound at all. The Saint knocked again. Still no sound. He tried the door. It opened on to a living room modestly furnished with medium-priced overstuffed pieces.

'Hullo,' Simon called softly. 'Foley?'

He stepped inside, closed the door. No one was in the living room. On the far side was a door leading into a kitchen, the other no doubt led into the bedroom. He turned the kitchen light on, looked about, switched off the light and knocked on the bedroom door. He opened it, flicked the light switch.

There was someone here, all right—or had been. What was here now was not a person, it was a corpse. It sprawled on the rug, face down, and blood had seeped from the back to the dark green carpet. It was—had been—a man.

Without disturbing the body any more than necessary, Simon gathered certain data. He had been young, somewhere in his thirties; he was a white-collar worker, neat, clean; he bore identification cards which named him Gamaliel Bradford Foley, member of the Seamen's Union.

The body bore no information which would link this man with Dr. Ernst Zellermann. Nor did the apartment, for that matter. The Saint searched it expertly, so that it seemed as if nothing had been disturbed, yet every possible hiding place had been thoroughly explored. Foley, it seemed, was about to become engaged to a Miss Martha Lane, Simon gathered from a letter which he shamelessly read. The comely face which smiled from a picture on Foley's dresser was probably her likeness.

Since no other information was to be gathered here, the Saint left. He walked a half dozen blocks to a crowded all-night drugstore and went into an empty phone booth, where he dialled Brooklyn police.

He told the desk sergeant that at such and such an address 'you will find one Gamaliel Foley, F-o-l-e-y, deceased. You'll recognise him by the knife he's wearing—in his back.'

3

At the crack of ten-thirty the next morning, Avalon Dexter's call brought him groggily from sleep.

'It's horribly early,' she said, 'but I couldn't wait any longer to find but if you're all right.'

'Am I?' the Saint asked.

'I think you're wonderful. When do you want to see me?'

'As soon as possible. Yesterday, for example. Did you have a good time last night?'

'Miserable. And you?'

'Well, I wouldn't call it exciting. I thought about you at odd moments.'

'Yes, I know,' she said. 'Whenever you did, I turned warm all over, and wriggled.'

'Must have been disconcerting to your escort.'

She laughed, bells at twilight.

'It cost me a job, I think. He'd peer at me every time it hap­pened. I think he concluded it was St. Vitus. The job was in Cleveland, anyway.'

'Some of the best people live in Cleveland,' Simon said.

'But you don't, so I didn't go.'

'Ordinarily, I'd have a nice fast comeback for such a leading remark, but I seem to have trouble finding any words at all.'

'You could say 'I love you.' '

'I love you,' Simon said.

'Me, too, kid.'

'This being Friday,' Simon said, 'what do you say we go calling on people after we have brunched together, and then let the rest of the day take care of itself?'

'That scrambling sound,' she said, 'is eggs in my kitchen. So hurry.'

'Thirty minutes,' said the Saint, and hung up.

He had never needed thirty minutes to shave, shower, and dress, but he needed to make a call.

Hamilton said: 'What kind of a jam are you in this time?'

'If you can get anything on one Gamaliel Bradford Foley,' the Saint said, 'it might be useful. I'd do it myself, but you. can do it faster, and I expect to be sort of busy on other things.'