Free Saint on Guard by Leslie Charteris Page B

am doing, isn’t it?”
    8 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 care-lessly; 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