Mrs Wingate and Stephen Elliott caught both of them up at that point. The philanthropist was quivering with a kind of pale-lipped restraint.
“This is the most outrageous suggestion I’ve ever heard, Mr Templar,” he said. “Lieutenant Kearney tells me—”
“Oh. I do hope you’re mistaken!” babbled Laura Wingate. “She’s such a sweet person. I’d die if anything happened to her.”
“If anything happened to her, it would not be here,” Elliott stated frostily. “Lieutenant, I think you’d better take Mr Templar and his accusations to the proper authority.”
Kearney nodded.
“It’ll be a pleasure, Mr Elliott.”
“In spite of the comb?” Simon persisted.
“We have quite a number of lady guests,” Elliott said stiffly. “If that is any grounds for this kind of behaviour—”
“It isn’t,” Kearney said. “And I’m going to enjoy booking the Saint on charges of disturbing the peace, just to keep him quiet for a while.” He prodded Simon again with his gun. “Come along, you.”
“I loved your show,” Mrs Wingate trilled, apparently feeling that some expression was due from her. “You must do it for us again one day.”
Simon and Kearney went downstairs, passing a barrage of eyes that had seeped up from the basement.
“By the way,” Simon said, “Frankie is wearing a gun.”
“He has a permit,” Kearney said. “I know the judge who issued it. Keep going.”
They went out to the sidewalk, and there was a brief but awkward pause while the total cablessness of the street established itself.
“Why don’t we take my car?” suggested the Saint accommodatingly. “It’s right here.”
“Okay,” Kearney said belligerently. “I’ll let you drive it — and just don’t try anything.”
He opened the door and followed Simon in. While the Saint was still fitting the key in the lock he reached over and snapped one loop of a pair of handcuffs over Simon’s left wrist. The other cuff he secured to the steering wheel.
“All right,” he said grimly. “Let’s go.”
Simon started the engine and nursed the car north for a few blocks. Kearney held the revolver in his lap and glowered with rather strenuously sustained triumph.
“How about your big case against me?” Simon asked after a while. “Aside from my breaches of the peace, I mean. Is that coming along?”
Kearney flexed his jaw muscles.
“We got a letter this afternoon. It was addressed to the Chief, and it was signed by Cleve Friend. It said he was mixed up in some deal with you and he was trying to get out of it because he’d got cold feet. And he was afraid you wouldn’t let him get out. You’d threatened to kill him unless he played along. The letter said he was leaving it with a friend, to be mailed if he — died.”
The Saint kept his eyes straight ahead.
“Did you check the signature?”
“It was Friend’s signature all right. A little shaky, but it compared.”
“Shaky?” Simon pondered. “And I bet the letter itself was typewritten.”
“It was.”
“It would be. Either Friend signed under the influence of scopolamine — which is a hypnotic — or else he was tortured into signing it.”
“You can explain anything, can’t you?” Kearney gibed. “Somebody’s trying to frame you, of course.”
“Of course,” Simon agreed coolly. “That should be obvious, even to a policeman.”
“Yeah? And how did they make this Varing dame disappear?”
“Probably through a secret passage...”
His voice trailed away as the thought hit him like a splash of cold water between the eyes.
“My God,” he said softly. “Secret passages. Of course. What a feeble-minded flop I am!”
“Hey!” Kearney squawked suddenly. “Where do you think you’re going? This ain’t the way to Headquarters.”
“It’s the way I’m taking,” said the Saint. “Come in, Hoppy.”
Mr Uniatz rose from behind the front seat and applied the muzzle of his Betsy to the nape of Kearney’s neck. “Okay, copper,” he said. “Take it easy.”
The detective’s face went white, then red.
“You can’t get away with this,” he said desperately.
“We can try,” said the Saint. “I’ve just had an inspiration, and I’m going to be much too busy to horse around with any footling rap about disturbing the peace.”
He sped the car west on Roosevelt, and presently turned up Central Avenue to Columbus Park, where he stopped.
“Okay, Hoppy,” he said.
“De woiks, boss?”
“Just let him take a nap,” Simon said hastily.
Mr Uniatz raised his gun and brought it down with professional precision, and the detective napped...
Simon found Kearney’s keys, unlocked the handcuffs, and transferred them to the detective’s wrists. He took Kearney’s badge and identification, figuring that a handcuffed man without credentials would be more than ordinarily delayed in starting a hue and cry. Then they took Kearney out of the car and laid him under a tree with his hat over his face, and drove quickly away.
The Saint’s brain flogged itself pitilessly under the impassive mask of his face.
“Secret passages,” he repeated, as he opened up the headlights on the road to Wheaton. “Hoppy, I ought to have my head examined.”
“What for, boss?”
“Maggots. What the hell’s the first thing you’d expect to find in a hide-out that used to belong to Al Capone? And don’t you remember Sammy said he had a safe place to hide Junior?”
“Sure.”
“Well, it was safe. So safe that Kearney couldn’t find it. But we’ll find it this time, if we have to blast for it. And then we’ll know whether Sammy and his friend Fingers double-crossed us, or if the King caught up with them.”
He reconnoitered the house carefully, but there were no signs of a police guard, and a ground-floor window succumbed in short order to the Saint’s expert manipulation. It was after that that the problems began to multiply, and it took two hours of methodical labour to work them out.
They finally found the “safe place” by tortuously tracing a ventilating pipe that seemed to have an outlet but no inlet. Even then the field was merely narrowed down to the cellar, and it took an inch-by-inch investigation to settle on the probable entrance. Hoppy’s reminiscences of bootlegging days were helpful and diverting, sometimes gruesome, but in the end they had to use crowbars to break down the brick wall. There was a steel plate beneath that, but once its locking mechanism was revealed it surrendered to a piece of bailing wire. It let them into a small, comfortably furnished room with a ventilating plate in the ceiling, where Sammy the Leg, trussed like an unsinged chicken, lay philosophically on a cot, and looked at them.
“Chees, pal,” Hoppy said, as he worked on Sammy’s ropes with a jack-knife. “We t’ought ya’d been bumped or sump’n.”
“Not me,” Sammy grunted. He tested his limbs experimentally. “Thanks, Saint. I figured I was gonna cash in for sure. Those lousy swine just meant me to lie here and starve.”
“Didn’t you hear us?” Simon asked. “You could have saved us some time if you’d yelled.”
“It wouldn’t have done no good. This room’s soundproofed. I heard you just now, sure, but you couldn’t of heard me. Besides, how did I know who it was? I could tell somebody was busting in, so I let ’em bust. Not that I could have stopped you.” Sammy walked stiffly back and forth like a shaggy bear, pausing at the door. “Had to break in, didn’t you? It’ll cost dough to fix that.” He grimaced. “Hell. C’mon upstairs. I’m starving.”
But the first thing Sammy the Leg did was to extract a beer bottle from his refrigerator, uncap it, and guzzle the contents. He wiped his mouth with a hairy hand, sighed, and eyed the Saint malevolently.
“Lousy double-crosser,” he said. “Nope, not you. I mean Fingers. Go on, sit down. Have a beer. Wait a sec.”
He went back to the refrigerator and brought out a plate of pig’s knuckles.
“How did it happen?” Simon asked.
“Fingers Schultz,” Sammy said, gnawing a knuckle. “Just goes to show. Never trust nobody. That little snake’s been with me for three years. Thought I could depend on him. Sure I could — till he started figuring I was a has-been and somebody else could pay off better, and protect him.”
“Like the King of the Beggars?” Simon prompted.
“I wouldn’t know about that. Fingers brought Frankie Weiss here. They stuck me up. Fingers knew about that room downstairs and how to get into it. They took that guy you left here away with them, and left me like you found me. Funny — he didn’t seem so happy about them finding him, like you’d expect.”
“Junior’s hunches were working fine,” Simon told him cold-bloodedly. “They asked him all the questions they had to, and then rubbed him out.”
Sammy reflectively chewed a knucklebone, his small eyes studying the Saint. Finally he sighed.
“That’s too bad. I guess he had it coming, but that don’t do you no good.” A pig’s knuckle cracked disconcertingly in Sammy’s huge grip. He got up, found another bottle, and lifted it to his mouth. “Who’s gonna pay for messing up my cellar?” he demanded abruptly. “All it takes to open it is to stick a wire in the right place between the bricks. You didn’t have to wreck it like that.”
“How much will the repairs cost?” Simon asked.
“Say two hundred.”
The Saint smiled.
“That’s a coincidence. My charge for rescuing people who are tied up and left to die is exactly two hundred fish. Shall we call it square?”
Sammy said without rancour, “I didn’t figure it would work on you, but there was no harm trying. Fingers is the guy who ought to pay for it. But when I catch up with Fingers he won’t be in no shape to sign cheques.”
Simon lighted a cigarette. “You’re right about Junior’s rubbing-out doing me no good,” he said. “As a matter of fact, they’re working pretty hard at trying to frame me for it. You’ll be interested to know that part of the frame was a deed of gift on this house from you to me. Now we know more about it, it wasn’t such a bad set-up at all. You’d never show up to contest the title; and if anyone ever did find your body, it’d have been in my house and looked just as if I’d bumped you and forged the deed... The King is quite a sweet little schemer, it turns out.”
Sammy the Leg was staring at him with a mixture of grief and consternation that made him look as if he was going to cry.
“You mean... they gave you my house?”
His eyes actually grew moist as they stole lingeringly around the appalling interior.
“Don’t worry — I’ll give it back to you,” said the Saint generously. “All I want from you is just as much as you can tell me. For instance: when Frankie and Fingers were talking, did they let anything drop that would give you any idea where the King of the Beggars has his main hideaway? Or where they might have kept Junior if they’d wanted to keep him?”
Sammy chewed thoughtfully for a while, and made a decision.
“I ain’t no squealer,” he said, “but after what those two rats done to me... They didn’t say much, either. But Fingers said, ‘Why not work him over here?’ and Frankie said, ‘They’re waiting for us at Elliott’s, and we got a better trick there.’ ”
Mr Uniatz came out of a prolonged silence during which he had been refreshing himself from a pint bottle of bourbon which he had discovered among Sammy’s supplies. His return to the conversation might have been due to the stirring of a thought, or to the fact that the bottle was now empty.
“De Elliott Hotel?” he said. “But we just come from dere—”
“And we didn’t search it,” Simon said. “That was only the place where I started thinking about secret passages. So naturally I was too dumb to start there... Wait a minute!” He came to his feet suddenly, and his eyes were alight. “Sammy — did he say ‘Elliott’s’ or ‘the Elliott Hotel’?”
Sammy stared at him.
“He said ‘Elliott’s,’ ” he stated positively. “I never heard of an Elliott Hotel.”
“Of course, he did,” said the Saint, with a lilt in his quiet voice like muted trumpets. “Of course he did. Anyone who meant the Elliott Hotel would say so, or call it ‘the Hotel’ or ‘the Elliott.’ They wouldn’t call it ‘Elliott’s.’... Hoppy, we’re on our way!”
Hoppy struggled obediently but foggily to his feet.
“Okay, boss.”
“That’ll be five bucks for the bourbon,” Sammy said. He closed his hairy fist on the bill that Simon placed in it, and added, “Just one thing. Try to leave Fingers for me, will you? I sort of feel I ought to get him myself, for the looks of things.”
“We’ll try,” Simon promised.
He drove back into Chicago with the speedometer needle exactly on the legal limit, for this was one time when he did not want to be stopped. His first destination was his own hotel: he was gambling that that might well be the last place where Kearney would expect him to show up again, but in any case he was riding a hunch that justified the chance.
And the piece fell into place as if it had been machined to fit, with the uncanny smoothness that so often seemed to lubricate the gears of Simon Templar’s destiny.
There was a letter in his box at the desk, a product of the last delivery. It was addressed to Hoppy, but Simon opened it as soon as he saw the name of the firm of realtors it came from.
“Dear Mr Uniatz, We have finally been able to trace the ownership of the Property in which you are interested at 7204 Kelly Drive. The owner is a Mr Stephen Elliott, and we understand he would consider an offer—”
Simon read no more. He stuffed the letter into his pocket, and sapphires danced in his eyes. “Let’s go, Hoppy,” he said, “and arrange an abdication.”