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 either. I didn't say the pajamas had any name embroidered on them — or did I?"
She sank back on to the edge of the chair, her hands clasped in her lap, not comfortably or relaxed, but as if she had only paused there in the expectation of having to move again.
He slid a cigarette forward in his pack and offered it to her. In the same solicitous way, he lighted it for her and then lighted one for himself. He drew slowly at it, not savoring the smoke, and looking at her, and wondering why in a world so sadly in need of beauty he should have to be talking to her in this way and know that this was the only way to talk, and that was how it was and there was nothing else to do.
He said, with a slight but sincere shrug: "This isn't a fight. It might have been a beautiful honeymoon. But maybe it just wasn't in the cards. Anyway, it'll have to wait now."
She said: "I suppose so."
He said: "It's no use stalling much more. You were supposed to have made up your mind about telling me something. Have you made up your mind?"
She winced and looked down at the tangling and untangling fingers in her lap. She looked up at him, and then down again at her hands. Her mouth barely moved.
She said: "Yes."
"Well?"
"I'll tell you."
He waited.
"I'll tell you," she said, "sometime this afternoon."
"Why not now?"
"Because…"
The Saint took a great interest in the tip of his cigarette.
"Barbara," he said, "it may not occur to you that I'm giving you a lot more breaks than the rules provide. I never was a nut on technicalities, but the fact remains that you're a technical accessory. You know the man I want to talk to, the man who holds the key to most of this dirty business. You know that everything you keep back is helping him to get away with — literally — murder. And you spend the hours you've been here alone struggling with your conscience to arrive at the tremendous decision that you'll tell me all about it — at your own convenience."
"No," she said.
"I don't want you to think I'm getting tough with you, but I've known police matrons who developed bulging muscles just from persuading wayward girls that they ought to unburden their hearts in the interests of right and justice. And I'm sure that wouldn't appeal to you at all."
She made a thin line of her mouth and gazed back at him defiantly.
"You sound as if you'd said all this before."
"Maybe I have," he admitted equably. "But it doesn't make it any less true. Believe it or not, I've only got to pick up that phone and call a certain gent by the name of Inspector John Henry Fernack to have you taken into what is so charmingly referred to as 'custody'. Custody is a place out of the earshot of any unofficial person who might be too inquisitive; and it isn't a very pleasant place. In Custody, almost anything can happen, and often does." He blew a thoughtful streak of smoke at the ceiling. "You can still make your own choice, but I wish you'd make the right one."
The moment's flare had died out of her as if it had never happened.
She said, as if she were repeating a lesson that she had worked out for herself until it became an obsession: "I've got to tell — this person — first. I've got to tell him that I'm going to tell you. I've got to give him a chance. He — he's been the kindest person I ever met. I was nothing — I was practically starving — I'd have done anything — when I met him. He… he's been very good to me. Always. I want to do what's right, but I couldn't just give him to you — like that. I couldn't be a Judas. At least they give foxes a start, don't they?"
Simon considered the question gravely, as though he had all the time in the world. He felt as if he had. He felt as if she was important, in a way that was important only to him; and there-was always a little time for important things.
"They do," he said. "But that's only because they want the fox to run longer and give the valiant sportsmen a better chase. If they were just being noble and humane, they'd simply shoot him as quickly and accurately as possible, thereby saving him all the agonies of fear, flight, hope, and final despair. Of course that wouldn't be quite so sporting as letting him run his heart out against a pack of hounds, but the eventual result would be the same."
"Sometimes the fox gets away," she said.
"The fox never gets away in the end," he said kindly. "He ma get away a dozen times, but there'll always be a thirteenth time when he makes one little mistake, and then he's just a trophy for somebody to take home. It's almost dull, but that's how it is."
"They've never caught you."
"Yet."
He went to the window and peered out. The sky was already darkening with the limpid clarity of sunset, the hour when it seems to grow thinner and deeper so that you almost begin to see through it into the darkness of outer space.
Without turning, he said: "I gather that you've already told the fox."
He heard her stir in the chair behind him.
"Yes."
He said, without anger, without disappointment, without anything: "I rather thought you would. I expected that when I left you. Because you really have too much heart for too little sense. I don't blame you for the heart, but now I want you to try and develop some sense."
"I'm sorry," she said, and she could have been. "But I can't do anything about it."
He turned.
"For Christ's sake," he said, "don't you get anything into your head? I told you I was expecting you to tip off the fox. Do you think I'd have expected that, and left you alone to do it, if I hadn't figured that you'd be doing something for me? I wanted you to make the fox break cover. I wanted him rushed into doing something that would give us a view of him. I wanted to force him into making the mistakes that are going to qualify him for his seat on the griddle. He's already made one of them, and any minute now he's going to make another. You've done that much to help him, and now you're doing your damn best to help yourself right into the soup with him. If that isn't devotion, I don't know what is."