Saint Errant (17 page)

He drained the rest of his drink and beckoned the bar tender.

“So after she got your name, and address, and your wife’s first name-” prompted the Saint.

“Well, then it was time to draw up a bill of sale. And she said ‘Excuse me, Bill, I have something to do in the bedroom for a minute.’ Well, you heard her voice. You know what she can promise you, just talking about the weather.”

The Saint felt a familiar anger growing within him. He saw the picture clearly-a not very complicated picture: The soldier, his pockets crammed with accumulated pay, home to his wife and son from the wars. Probably the wife had come to the Coast to wait for him, moved in with Aunt Mabel pending his return. Probably she was named something like Lola May.

“What’s your wife’s name?” the Saint asked irrelevantly.

“Lola May. Why-“

“Nothing at all.”

And so, “ruptured duck” conspicuous on his blouse, his six stripes heralding relative solvency, his candid gray eyes clean of suspicion, he was the ideal candidate for one of crook-dom’s oldest and dirtiest rackets-with a new and up-to-date come-on.

“So then,” said the Saint, “she came out of the bedroom in something that was next to nothing and in less time than it takes to tell it you were in a, shall we chastely say,’ compromising position.”

The sergeant glared.

“It wasn’t quite that way,” he amended. “She launched herself at me like a runaway steam roller.”

“I see. In any event, when the door opened-“

“They came in through the window. Off the fire escape.”

“Um. Authentic touch, that. When the window opened to admit her-‘husband’ and the ‘detective’ with his little camera, the exploding flash bulb illumined a scene in which one and one added up to a very damning two.”

“You ain’t just whistling ‘Dixie’.”

“And now, the Outraged Husband has the floor. For a long time, and I quote, he has suspected that this Abandoned Woman is up to just this sort of thing. Here, at long last, is pictorial evidence to convince the most skeptical judge. The fact that it involves you, Bill, is unfortunate, but-“

“That’s just what he said.” The sergeant’s bitter voice took it up. ” ‘I hate to mix you up in something like this, soldier, but it’s already cost me more than I can. afford to get the goods on her.’ “

“Luella has withdrawn to the bedroom, weeping,” supplied the Saint.

“She did a runout, all right. Well, by that time I knew I’d been had. It’s been three years since I saw my wife and the little guy; I couldn’t start off with something like this, could I? So the next move was up to me. I asked him how much it would take to keep the detectives going till he got some other evidence.”

“Which amount,” Simon observed, “by a strange coincidence, was exactly the sum Luella had been prepared to accept as a down payment on a house.”

“It was a smooth act,” agreed the veteran miserably.

“So you paid him the money, the ‘detective’ handed you an exposed negative, and-exit one sergeant.”

“You seem to know an awful lot about these things,” observed the soldier, a thin edge of his earlier truculence creeping back into his voice. “Just who the hell are you?”

“My name,” said the Saint, “is Simon Templar.”

“Templar!” The sergeant took a long look. “But you’re not -you mean …”

Simon nodded.

“The Saint! The-the Robin Hood of Modern Crime!”

“As the headline writers say,” Simon confessed wryly.

“Well-uh, glad to meet you.” They shook hands, the sergeant rather bemused, it seemed. He gulped at his drink. “Where do you fit into this?” he blurted.

“That is what I’m wondering,” said Simon Templar; and the banter was gone from his voice, the blue eyes tempered to damascene hardness. “But I know I belong somewhere.” He emptied his glass thoughtfully and signaled for a refill. “I think you and I had better get serious about Operation Luella, Sergeant. Brief me on where she hangs out and how the pickup works.”

The prime tactical problem was hardly a problem at all to a pirate of Simon Templar’s experience. Nor was the role which he selected for the immediate performance. With one or two subtle changes to his appearance that could hardly be called make-up, and one or two props that were scarcely props at all, and a change of voice and bearing that was a matter of in finitesimal modulations, he could put on another personality as a man might put on a coat; and only an audience that knew he was acting would even appreciate the masterpieces that he created.

“This one shows the two boys in front of my summer place at Carmel,” the Saint was saying late the next afternoon. “Oldest one’s twelve. Little devil, but smart as a whip.” He beamed with fatherly pride.

“The young one looks like you, Mr Taggart,” said the lady known as Luella.

“Well, thanks, Miss, uh-“

“My friends call me Luella. And I’m sure you’re a friend.”

Without moving a muscle, the Saint conveyed the impression of bashfully digging a toe into the bar carpet.

“That’s mighty nice of you, ma’am-Luella. It’s a right pretty name. Sort of bell-like-or something.”

Luella touched the snapshot with a long red-tipped finger.

“Your summer place looks wonderful.”

“Cost twenty thousand,” the Saint said modestly, “but worth every cent. Wife’s up there with the boys. And I’m here in Hollywood. Tendin’ to some business, o’ course, but-” His glance was a work of genius. It reminded you of a timid bather sticking a dainty toe in a pool of water before wading-not plunging-in. It reminded you of a nice boy playing hooky for the first time. It reminded you of a professor of Sanskrit about to consign a single quarter to a gaudy slot machine. “- but havin’ a little fun, too, if we tell the truth.”

Seated on a stool at the Beverly Wilshire bar, the Saint looked the part of a conservative businessman who could stick twenty grand into a summer place. His blue serge suit was of excellent cloth, but by a tailor who must have hated Lon don. His high collar and tightly knotted dark tie placed him as a man who served on civic committees. And his hair, sleekly parted in the middle, added the final touch of authenticity to his characterization of Mr Samuel Taggart, Vice-President of the Stockmen’s National Bank of Visalia, California.

And that was what his business card, freshly printed earlier that same day, said. The name Taggart appeared on the back of the snapshot, bought earlier from a photographer’s shop.

“And are you having fun, Mr-uh-“

“Call me Sam, Luella,” the Saint simpered. “Wife calls me Samuel most of the time, but I like Sam. Sorta friendly, I think.”

“Are you having fun, Sam?”

“Well, I got a feelin’ I’m about to, Luella. Say, could I buy you somethin’ to drink? I been tellin’ you all about myself, seems the least I could do. Say, bartender! Uh, give the young lady what she wants. Me, I’ll have a lemonade.” He cupped one hand alongside his mouth, whispered to the bartender, who was eyeing him stonily: “Put some gin in it,” To Luella he said apologetically: “I like gin in ‘em.”

“Aren’t you a one, though, Sam.”

“Shucks,” the Saint said, “man’s got a right to have a little fun. Kind of hard for me, though, not knowin’ these places people’re always talkin’ about in Hollywood. Don’t know my way around very well yet.”

He put a hundred-dollar bill on the bar, replaced the roll in his pants pocket, and looked moodily into his lemonade with gin.

Luella’s manner became more animated. She clinked glasses. “Here’s to an evening of fun, Sam. I’ll tell you what, Sam. I have an engagement for the evening, but I can break it. I’ll be your pilot.”

“Well, say, that’s mighty fine of you, Luella. But I don’t like to bust up anything. Course a nice-lookin’ lady like you must keep awful busy, and an old duffer like me couldn’t expect you to-“

“Poo!” Luella said lightly. She laid a hand on the Saint’s sleeve. “Excuse me while I make a phone call.”

She went away to a phone booth, and though her conversation was unheard by the Saint, he felt that he could have written the dialogue.

From that point forward, events moved smoothly and orderly along their predestined path, and the gentleman known as Sam found himself in due course in the apartment of the lady known as Luella-“for a nightcap, Sam, dear.”

The nightcap was forthcoming, and Luella was forthright. She sat beside the Saint on a divan, and there was no quibbling about maintaining a space between them in the interests of morality. They touched, shoulder and thigh, and she gave him a long slow glance from long dark eyes.

“It’s been such fun, Sam.” She put a hand on his and squeezed, ever so lightly.

Somehow the Saint managed a blush.

“It was sure swell of you, Luella. Gosh, do you know this town!”

Luella stood up, after squeezing his hand again.

“Why don’t you be comfortable, Sam? Take off that hot old coat.” She helped him out of his coat and vest, carried them toward her bedroom. “Excuse me while I get into something cool, Sam.”

The Saint leaned back, a little smile flickering on his mouth. He adjusted the black sleeve bands on his pin-striped shirt, loosened his tie, sipped at his drink, and awaited the inevitable.

It came at that moment. Luella’s muffled voice called: “Sam, dear, could you help me? My darned zipper is stuck.”

The Saint got to his feet, raised Saintly eyes to Heaven, and entered the bedroom.

Luella stood with her dress up over her shoulders, revealing a body of such classic lines that he caught his breath. The body was clad in the scantiest of diaphanous scraps, and the Saint loosened his tie a little more before stepping forward to assist her in getting her head out of the dress. It was in this position, with the dress breaking free from her dark hair, the Saint holding it, obviously having taken it off, that the cameraman caught them.

The blinding flash bulb popped, the shutter clicked from the bedroom doorway, and the Saint whirled, looking as guilty as a little boy caught with his hand in the cooky jar.

Patricia Holm stood there.

“That’ll do it, Smith,” she said to a young man who carried a Speed Graphic.

She surveyed Simon with magnificent scorn
The Saint was the picture of a man trying to disclaim any connection with the dress. He held it at arm’s length, between thumb and forefinger, and regarded it with astonishment, as if to say: “Now where in the world did that come from?”

Luella was frozen to a tinted statue. She stared at Pat and the photographer with boiled and unbelieving eyes. This sort of thing, her expression said, couldn’t happen. It was fully ten seconds before she thought to use her hands in the traditional manner of women caught without clothes.

“Now, dear,” Simon began in conciliatory tones, “I can ex plain-“

“Explain!” Patricia spat the word. “You can explain to the judge, Samuel Taggart. I’ve been a long time catching you with the goods-you, you-” Patricia choked, and her voice was awash in a bucketful of tears. “Oh, how could you, Sam? The boys, and-” She turned, covered her face with her hands, and her shoulders began to shake.

The Saint surveyed the grouping of the dramatis personae, through Mr Samuel Taggart’s eyeglasses, with an impresario’s appreciation, noting that to anyone in the living room only he and the lightly clad Luella would be visible through the open door.

A second flash bulb’s blinding glare knifed through his reflections.

“At last!” thundered Matthew Joyson, with the glibness of many past performances. “My lawyer will know how to use-“

Then his voice trailed away, and he stared at the other members of the tableau with the expression of a gaffed fish. Tod Kermein, with the camera, gulped audibly and offered a rather similar impersonation, concentrating most of it on Patricia’s lens-bearing companion, and reminding the Saint of a goldfish which had just discovered itself in a mirror.

“And then there were six,” Simon murmured. “Busiest bed room scene I ever saw.”

“What the hell-“

Mr Joyson tried again, and again stopped on a note almost of panic.

Luella did her best.

“Honest to God, Matt,” she began. “I swear there’s nothing-“

Matthew Joyson may have lacked many sterling qualities, but presence of mind was not one of them. As a matter of fact, he had a professional pride in his ability to ad-lib, which had stood him in good stead during his days on the road, when at certain matinees an overindulgence on the night before had dulled his recollection of the script. He realized now that something drastic had gone wrong, that by some incredible co incidence his big scene had been blown up by a rival team who were actually playing it straight, and that the one safe course was to drop the curtain as fast as possible and consider the other angles later.

He turned to Patricia.

“Madam,” he said in his most magisterial style, “am I to understand that we are here on the same errand?”

“The brute!” Patricia choked. “The bur-hu-hute! And after all I’ve done for him. The best years of my life-“

Mr Joyson took command of the situation, so regally that only a captious critic would have noted the undertones of desperation in his behavior.

“Stand back, Kermein,” he commanded. “We don’t need any more detective work here.” He snatched the dress from Simon’s unresisting fingers. “By your leave, sir!” He strode over to the still petrified Luella. “May I trouble you to cover yourself?” he grated. “To think that my wife, my own wife …” His voice broke for a moment, but he recovered it bravely. He turned to Patricia again, adjusting his mien to something between an undertaker and a floorwalker, if anything can be imagined that would fit into such a narrow gap. “Madam, accept my heartfelt sympathy. I know too well what your feelings must be. I only wish you could have been spared the same betrayal. What a dingy ending to it all!”

“Cedar Rapids Repertory Theatre, 1911,” commented the Saint; but he said it to himself, and outwardly maintained a properly hangdog visage.

Patricia regarded Mr Joyson with brimming blue eyes.

“You’re so kind… . But to think that we should have to
meet like this!” She dabbed a handkerchief at her tear-stained face. “If only I could have spared you any connection with my tragedy-“