The pencil beam of his flashlight told him that the man who decorated this restful room knew the value of the pause that relaxes. "This is your home," the room said. "Welcome. You like this chair? It was made for you. The prints? Nice, aren't they? Nothing like the country. And isn't that soft green of the walls pleasant to the eye? Lean back and relax. The doctor will see you presently, as a friend. What else, in these surroundings?"
The Saint tipped his mental hat and looked around for more informative detail. This wasn't much. The receptionist's desk gave up nothing but some paper and pencils, a half pack of cigarettes, a lipstick, and a copy of Trembling Romances. Three names were written on an appointment pad on the desk top.
He went into the consultation room, which was severely furnished with plain furniture. A couch lay against one wall, the large desk was backed against an opaque window, and the walls were free of pictorial distractions.
Yet this, too, was a restful room. The green of the reception room walls had been continued here, and despite the almost monastic simplicity of the décor, this room invited you to relax. Simon had no doubt that a patient lying on the couch, with Dr. Zellermann discreetly in the background gloom, would drag from the censored files of memory much early minutiae, the stuff of which human beings are made.
But where were the files? The office safe?
Surely it was necessary to keep records, and surely the records of ordinary daily business need not be hidden. The secretary must need a card file of patients, notations, statements of accounts, and what not.
Once more the pencil beam slid around the office, and snapped out. Then the Saint moved silently — compared to him, a shadow would have seemed to be wearing clogs — back into the reception room. His flash made an earnest scrutiny of the receptionist's corner and froze on a small protuberance. Simon's fingers were on it in a second. He pulled, then lifted — and a section of wall slid upward to reveal a filing cabinet, a small safe, and a typewriter.
The Saint sighed as he saw the aperture revealed no liquid goods. Tension always made him thirsty, and breaking and entering always raised his tension a notch.
As he reached for the top drawer of the file to see what he could see, the telephone on the reception desk gave out a shrill demand. The Saint's reflexes sent a hand toward it, which hovered over the instrument while he considered the situation. More than likely, somebody had called a wrong number. It was about that time in the evening when party goers reach the point where it seems a good idea to call somebody, and the somebody is often determined by spinning the dial at random.
If it happens to be your telephone that rings, and you struggle out of pleasant dreams to curse any dizzy friend who would call you at that hour, and you say "Hello" in churlish tones, some oafish voice is likely as not to give you a song and a dance about being a telephone tester, and would you please stand three feet away from the phone and say "Methodist Episcopalian" or some such phrase, for which you get the horse laugh when you pick up the phone again.