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."
9
Simon Templar replenished his cup with the last dribble from his rationed coffee-pot, and reflected that life could certainly open up a wondrous variety of perspectives when sundry citizens began to look sideways at one another. It was a sizable item in the mental overhead which he would have preferred to leave out of his budget; but he compromised by showing no visible reaction at all and letting his mind remain passive and receptive.
Titania Ourley, who was apparently waiting for shocked amazement to spread over his features, seemed moderately disappointed when his face remained unmoved but expectant. Nevertheless, she surged closer over the table, buffeting him with another tidal wave of exotic stenches which he decided must have been concocted in a cocktail shaker.
"I wouldn't be at all surprised," she said portentously, "if somebody investigated Allen Uttershaw one of these days and found out a lot of funny things. Oh, I know he's a marvelous dancer, and he's always so perfectly perfect, if you know what I mean, but haven't you noticed that there's something secret about him? I hate to say it when he isn't here to defend himself, but do you know, sometimes I think he isn't quite normal!"
"Really?" drawled the Saint. "You mean he—"