The Saint ate a little more, and scarcely noticed what he was doing. The creepy sensation in his backbone had spread out over his whole body, so that every bone in him felt faintly tingling and detached, and his brain was sitting up in a corner of the ceiling moving them with strings.
It was at that moment, for the first time, that a whole chain of the crazy pieces in his jigsaw fell together and began to make a section of a recognisable picture which did curious things to his breathing.
But all that was within himself again, and his face was a study in untroubled bronze.
"I wouldn't worry about its going any further," he said carelessly; and the other nodded, but went on looking at him with a lightly interrogative frown.
"Naturally. But I can't help wondering what made you ask."
"It just came into my head," said the Saint. "On the other hand, I'm wondering why you were thinking about Ourley."
"This isn't easy to say," Uttershaw replied hesitantly. "But I do know from my business dealings with him — and you may have gathered the same impression yourself — that Milton is a bit 'too grasping to care for mere delight'. And it seems to me that any man would need some very good reason for taking Titania to his bosom and keeping her there… I know that some of Milton's financial manipulations have been — well, what you might call complicated. At least, complicated enough for him to keep most of his holdings in his wife's name."
"You're sure of that?"
"Quite sure. As a matter of fact, there are those who would believe that Tiny herself has had a lot to do with the planning and staging of some of those manipulations. There are skeptics who maintain that Tiny's giddiness is more or less of a pose. Although if that's true, the stakes must be very high for a woman to make such an awful caricature of herself."
"If Tiny is Milton's partner behind the scenes, and the duenna of the do-re-mi," Simon remarked thoughtfully, "it must make his home life even more interesting."
"Dire was the noise of conflict." Uttershaw laughed shortly. "You know, I'm still embarrassed about going on with this."
Simon moved his plate a little away from him with an unconscious gesture of finality, and reached for his Pall Malls. He extended the pack towards his guest, and said: "Let me try to help you. How far do you think Milton would go to create a new business life of his own?"
Uttershaw blinked before he bent to accept the Saint's proffered light. He straightened up and exhaled his first puff of smoke a little gustily.
"I hadn't even thought that far," he said, and suddenly he looked shocked and strained. "Do you really mean what I think you're getting at?"
"I was just asking."
"But that's unbelievable. No man could build up anything like this black market alone. He'd have to have at least some associates. And I mean plain criminal associates. A man like Ourley just wouldn't have any connections like that."
"Men like Ourley have had them before. It isn't such a hell of a long time ago that speakeasy proprietors and bootleggers were quite social characters. You get to know a lot of queer people. Big business sometimes deals with queer people, when there are labor troubles or the competition gets rough. The impresarios who put on stag shows at escapist clubs for downtrodden business men move in and out of a world of queer people. Any man can make any connections he wants, if he wants them seriously enough."
Uttershaw made a helpless sort of movement with his hands.
"It seems so fantastic — to think of Milton Ourley as a criminal master mind. Why, he's — he's—"
"He's what?" Simon prompted quietly.
"He's such a dull, irascible, unimaginative, uninventive sort of windbag!" Uttershaw protested. "All he thinks about is how much money he's got, or how much he might make if it wasn't for Roosevelt; and what Tiny is doing with her latest gigolo or how he could be kept late at the office and go out on the town with the boys."
"A master mind," said the Saint didactically, "doesn't always go around with an illuminated forehead. That's the first thing to remember in this detective racket — if you read any stories. Besides which, he can really be just as stupid and boring as anyone else outside of his own field of brilliance. Why shouldn't he be? The greatest bacteriologist in the world could look like a half-wit in a gathering of structural engineers. And he could even be a pain in the neck at a soiree of other bacteriologists. He could be addicted to thunderous belching, or insisting on describing every stroke of his last golf game, without—"
He broke off abruptly, and put a quick hand on the other's arm. The warning shift of his eyes was quite a pamphlet of explanation.
Uttershaw looked where the Saint's glance led him. And then his groan was so polite that it was almost inaudible.
He said, without moving his lips: "Talk of the devil."
Simon nodded, keeping a smile of recognition on his face. He had seen her come in while he was talking, and with the grim certainty of impending doom he had watched her methodically sifting the room with her eyes like a veterinarian working over a shaggy dog with a steel comb.
Now, like a pirate galleon under full sail sweeping down upon a freshly sighted victim, Titania Ourley came cleaving through the tables, her plump and expensively painted face set in the overpowering smile of a woman who remains steadfastly convinced in spite of all discouragements that her charm and beauty will carry her serenely past all the reefs and snags in the sea of life.
"Milton, thou shouldst be with us at this hour," Simon paraphrased under his breath, with a certain resignation.
"Templar hath need of thee," Uttershaw continued for him sympathetically.
"She is a wen'," said the Saint, concluding the slaughter, and stood up to bow over the nearer of the two hands which she extended towards them with a prodigality that would have done credit to Mrs Siddons at her Westphalian best.
Perched on the forward top of her head she wore a confection of fur, feathers, and what appeared to be a bunch of slightly mildewed prunes. It nearly fell into the Saint's coffee as she sat down, but she caught it in time and restored it to its point of balance with what looked like the insouciance of much practice.
"I felt I just had to see you and explain, Simon dear," she said. "Milton's behavior was so downright disgraceful last night — wasn't it, Allen?"
Uttershaw tried to achieve some sort of pleasant and neutral vagueness; but the effort was hardly necessary, for Mrs Ourley had only paused for a swift breath.
"I'd thought that perhaps later we might get in a rumba or two with the Capehart — I've got simply stacks and stacks of records — but as it was you couldn't even stay for dinner. And after I'd told Frankfurter — he's our butler, and a perfect jewel of a butler if I ever saw one, and of course I've seen so many. But the way Milton acted. Well, really, it was a complete surprise to me. And after you'd taken the time and trouble to come all the way out to Oyster Bay and use up your gas and tires and everything to try and help him out of that terrible iridium mess. We had a dreadful spat about it last night, and I told him he was either too rude to live or as good as a traitor; and he said — well, you heard how he talks when he's angry, and I can't bring myself to repeat it. But I was so hoping I'd find you here so that I could tell you it wasn't my fault."
"I never thought it was," said the Saint reassuringly, and was fortunately rescued from further contortions by the intrusion of a bellboy in search of Uttershaw for a telephone call.
"Excuse me," Uttershaw said, with a tinge of humorous malice, and went gracefully away.
Mrs Ourley watched him go with a kind of middle-aged lasciviousness, dislocated her hat again as she turned back to the table, balanced it once more with the same nonchalant agility, and said: "Isn't he the most charming man?"
"A nice character," said the Saint.
"And he's a divine dancer. And always so wonderfully tactful. I don't know what I'd have done if he hadn't been there last night. Milton is simply impossible when he gets into one of his moods. It's a good thing they never last more than a few weeks. But really, Simon — I hope you don't mind me calling you Simon, but I'm beginning to feel as if I'd known you for years — really, you must come out to dinner with us one night. I've got a simply wonderful cook — she makes pics that literally melt in your mouth, I mean literally melt."
"Simple Simon met a pieman, going to the fair," murmured the Saint, and immediately decided that this quotation mechanism was something that had to be taken firmly in hand.
"What?… Oh, you silly boy! Of course I didn't mean anything like that. But my cook really is a treasure."
"You look like a living tribute to her genius," said the Saint with a straight face; and Mrs Ourley beamed.
"You say the sweetest things. But I was telling you about Milton. I know I shouldn't talk about my own husband, but he's ridiculously jealous. He…"
Simon listened with the utmost interest to her description of some of the unreasonableness of Mr Milton Ourley, and while he listened he was studying the face of the woman across the table.
He had to admit that the ideas which Uttershaw had planted were astonishingly fertile. There was a rapacious ruthlessness below the surface of gabbling imbecility which Titania Ourley displayed to the public which could make a lot of surprising pictures of her plausible. Without knowing anything else about her, he knew that she would make a dangerous enemy; and he knew that the effusive gush which enveloped her like her appalling perfume could provide a lot of study for a post-graduate student of camouflage.
The tale of Milton Ourley's derelictions went on and on while the Saint thought about it. He nodded regularly, and made encouraging noises in the right places, and managed to look quite disappointed when the recital was interrupted by the return of Allen Uttershaw.
"Do sit down," said Mrs Ourley hospitably. "I was just telling Simon — I mean Mr Templar — I mean Simon—"
"I'm sorry," Uttershaw said suavely. "I'm still a working man, you know. That call was from my office, and I'm afraid some other working men are getting impatient."
"You're a meanie!"
Mrs Ourley made a moue. This was undoubtedly something she had read about in a magazine. In her interpretation, it looked a little as if she had just detected the presence of a dead rat in the room.
"Forgive me," Uttershaw said. "It isn't because I want to 'scorn delights and live laborious days'." He turned to Simon, and held out his hand with a smile that contained a hint of wicked amusement which had nothing to do with the ordinary urbanities. "I'm glad to leave you in such good company." He glanced at Mrs Ourley again. "By the way, where is Milton?"
"He's down the street at the Harvard Club, having lunch with some dreary man from Washington — at least, that's what he said he was doing," she added darkly. "Lately, I've had my suspicions as to what Milton is doing when he tells me he's doing something else, if you know what I mean. Why?"
"I might want to get in touch with him this afternoon," Uttershaw said casually, but his eyes returned rather conspiratorially to the Saint as he was finishing the sentence. "Well — I enjoyed our talk. Let's meet again soon."
"Very soon," Simon promised.
He sat down again as Uttershaw sauntered out, and saw that Mrs Ourley was following this departure with a tinge of speculation that had not been in her oestrous gaze before.
"Now, why do you suppose he might want to find Milton?" she asked.
She was talking more to herself than to him, but the eyes that she swung back towards him were no longer vacant.
"And he was having lunch with you… Is it something about the iridium?" she asked sharply.
Anyone could have noticed the change in her tone, the steel showing through the whipped cream, the spikes under the feathers.
Simon reached for his coffee and took a sip.
"That's rather obvious, isn't it?" he said calmly. "You know that I'm gunning for the black market. You know that Alien Uttershaw was about the biggest dealer in iridium before the shortage. So I guess the subject may have been just accidentally mentioned."
Her pale and slightly protruding eyes became almost metallic. The thickly rouged lips thinned out, and the puffy features had congealed under the lacquered skin.
"What did he tell you?" she demanded.
The Saint didn't answer. He merely slanted his eyebrows into line of bland and blunt inquiry that was exactly as eloquent as speech. Without articulating a syllable, it wanted to know just what the hell business of Titania Ourley's it was what Allen Uttershaw had told him; and she caught the precise meaning of it like a fighter walking into a straight left. You could almost see the impact of it connecting with one of the receding tiers of chins that sagged from beneath that suddenly hard mouth.
She recovered with a celerity that earned his reluctant admiration. When he gave her that cynical challenge of the eyebrows she had been within a hair's breadth of menace and domineering; now, in a moment, she was leaning back again and delving into an enormous handbag to excavate a cigarette holder that looked like a jeweled pipe from a cathedral organ, and she was just as vapid as she had ever been.
"I'm afraid I'm much too inquisitive," she prattled. "I keep forgetting that you're the Saint, and anything people tell you is sacred. After all, I did make you my own father confessor, didn't I?… But I admit I am curious." She bent forward again so that a comber of hothouse odors practically splashed into the Saint's nostrils. "Not that I ever gossip about anybody — Heaven knows that my worst enemies can't say that about me! But to tell you the truth, I've often wondered about Mr Uttershaw."