“I’m very sorry,” he said. “This is entirely my fault.”
“What are we to understand by that, Mr Templar? — he told us your real name.”
“I knew he was blackmailing you, but I was curious to know how. The easiest way to find out seemed to be to follow him here and eavesdrop a little. But when I started the routine that I figured would make him come here, I didn’t know that I’d have the answer even before he arrived. I picked his pocket just before I left him a few minutes ago, and here’s what I found when I had a chance to look.”
He produced Mr Powls’s wallet and unfolded a newspaper clipping from it, which he had read under a shielded flashlight while he waited in the alley. It could only be the same clipping which Kathleen Holland had described Mr Powls exhibiting in Ye Needle Nooke. It was from The Kansas City Star, under a 1930 dateline, and described a raid on one of the most elegant local brothels. There was also a picture of some of the principal culprits being arraigned in night court. The accused madam was plainly identified as Florence Warshed, and the likeness was unmistakable even after more than a quarter-century. Among the other girls, less easily recognizable, were two others modestly named as Violet Smith and Ida Jones.
Simon handed the clipping to Aunt Flo, who barely glanced at it and let Ida take it and pass it to Violet.
“I thought you’d like to burn it yourselves,” said the Saint.
Aunt Flo had not let go the poker, but her grip was perceptibly less rigid.
“I’ve heard that you’re a man who might understand some things that ordinary people wouldn’t,” she said steadily. “I always ran a good house, if you know what I mean. But after Repeal I could see the handwriting on the wall. I could afford to retire. Violet and Ida were getting a bit too old for the best clients, and yet it wasn’t a good time for them to take over a house on their own. They’d been with me longest of all my girls — in fact, they might just as well have been my own nieces. When the time came, we found that none of us wanted to split up and go it alone. After all, we didn’t have any place to go — we were the only real family any of us had left. So we decided to stick together. We got in my car and headed west, and soon after we found this town we knew it was for us. We could settle down and nobody would ever dream we’d ever been any different from all we wanted to be from there on.”
“You only made one slip that might have started me wondering before I tried you on the Chesterfield Club,” Simon remarked with incurably professional acuity. “The slant you all have about people being good spenders. But not many people would notice it — and you were right, this is one of the last places in the country where you’d be likely to run into an old client. Even that mightn’t’ve been fatal — most pillars of this community would be too worried about whether you’d keep your mouth shut to open their own. But it had to be this Alton Powls.”
“He was always a cheap grifter and I’d be ashamed to class him with my good clients,” said Aunt Flo. “But after he had the luck to spot us, and even went back and dug up that newspaper article to make sure he could rub it in, he’s been taking us for a hundred dollars a week.”
Simon nodded.
“Kathleen guessed he was giving you trouble, but she was only worried about you. She thinks you’re wonderful, and so do I. So I took it upon myself to give him my best warning, to lay off you and chisel his chips somewhere else. I was betting that this would send him hustling right over here to put the last big bite on you, but I was planning to be in the wings myself.”
He bent and examined what was left of Mr Powls more conscientiously, for pulse and heartbeat, of which he verified that there were neither.
“He phoned and said he had to see us at once,” Aunt Flo related. “Then when he got here he told us something about you calling on him. He wanted to see our bank books — he said we’d have to draw out every cent we could raise and give it to him before he left in the morning. And then we could get a mortgage on this place, which would take longer, and send him some more when he wrote to us.”
“That’s what I expected.”
“The girls were trying to talk him out of it, but I knew he’d never lay off as long as he lived, so I picked up the poker and fixed that,” said Aunt Flo defiantly, but her voice broke for the first time.
The Saint took the poker from her without resistance, wiped it carefully on Mr Powls’s neat gray jacket, and put it back in the fireplace.
“I’d probably have done the same thing myself, if I’d got here in time,” he said. “Or something like it. There are only three ways to stop a blackmailer, but only fools go on paying him, and it would be asking too much for you to dare him to tell the worst... I noticed an interesting hole in your lawn as I was sneaking up on you, Did you have any plans for it?”
“We were getting ready to plant a Chinese elm,” said Aunt Flo wistfully. “Quite a large and expensive one, but we need more shade for the fuchsias.”
“I’m afraid you’ll just have to make it another flower bed now,” said the Saint sympathetically. He searched for Mr Powls’s keys and thoughtfully took possession of them before he picked up the body, “I won’t try to cover him very deeply tonight, because I’ll have to run back to his apartment and pack up all his personal things to bury with him, so that it’ll look as if he simply blew town for mysterious reasons of his own. Also the people I’m staying with are expecting me back, and I can’t stretch a story about a flat tire too far. But I’ll be here first thing in the morning with some plants from a nursery, and make a slap-up job of it. Why don’t you all go to bed and get a good sleep?”
The account he gave Kathleen Holland the next day of his final interview with Mr Alton Powls was not fundamentally fictitious, but it took advantage of certain major omissions.
“I don’t think we should pry too hard into Aunt Flo’s awful secret,” he said. “It probably isn’t anything that’d scare anybody but her, anyhow. All I know is that I put the fear of God into your creepy friend, and if you drop by his apartment this afternoon I bet you’ll find he’s already done a flit.”
Having left Mr Powls’s car parked near the railroad station, he was prepared to let any other perfunctory inquirers take the trail from there.
“I almost feel let down,” Kathleen said disappointedly. “I was half hoping you’d do something brilliant and discover that he was Violet and Ida’s black-sheep father.”
“If I had, I wouldn’t even tell you,” said the Saint darkly. “And don’t even hint to Aunt Flo that I’ve talked to you at all. It would only worry her. But between you and me, I stopped at her house this morning and told her who I was and that I was sure she wouldn’t have any more trouble.”
“You looked so hot when you got here,” Kathleen said, “I thought you’d been doing something much more violent than that.”
“Believe it or not,” said the Saint complacently, “before I was through she had me with a spade in my hands working like a bloody grave-digger. I tell you, I get into the damnedest things.”
The element of doubt
“The Law is a wonderful thing, I suppose,” Simon Templar said in one of his oracular moods. “I’ve done a lot of complaining about it in my time, but if it had never existed I wouldn’t have had all the fun of breaking it. And it’s probably a very fine idea that all the wretched little people who can’t take care of themselves should be able to get a fair shake. The trouble is that the same machinery that prevents injustice can also prevent justice.”