Simon skipped the question for a moment. “Did you buy any black-market meat during the war?”
“Maybe you really want a job in the floor show,” Lansing said. “I’ll buy the gag. So I had to stay in business. So what?”
“Did you get anything through Vincent Maxted?”
Lansing’s eyelids flickered. “What about him?”
“Only this,” said the Saint. “The first job of blackmail that we met over referred to something which only you or someone very close to you should have known. Maybe the same can be said about this new job. I’ve got an idea it can. And if that’s true, we may be getting somewhere. We don’t want to miss something that might be right under our nose.”
Lansing’s eyes were flat and hard like jet. “I can only think of one guy who might be liable to know as much as I know myself, including about what happened to Jake,” he said. “But don’t ask me how he’d know. I just say I could believe it because I know the kind of guy he is. This guy always seems to know too much about everything that goes on.”
“And who’s that?”
“Some people call him the Saint.” Simon smiled.
“You give me too much credit, Rick. As a matter of fact, I never suspected anything about Jake Hardy until you practically told me yourself. I’d never even given it a thought. From what I hear, he was no great loss to the community, so why should I worry about how he was moved on? I couldn’t have cared less if it had been the other way around, and when somebody does get you one of these days, as they probably will, it still won’t bother me.”
“Then what are you wasting your time here for?”