Mr and Mrs Matthew Joyson had never heard of Paolo and Francesca, but in certain ways they could have given serious competition to those classic lovers. It would be unkind of the chronicler to suggest that this resemblance may even have extended to the technical morality of their bedded bliss, although when questioned Mrs Joyson tended to be somewhat hazy about the details of the ceremony by which she acquired the name. We prefer instead to refer to the intensity of Mr Joyson’s jealous devotion, a feature which he frequently had occasion to emphasize, and which paid him much better dividends than ever stuck to the wad of the late Paolo Malatesta.
Matt Joyson was a man of about fifty with the solidly impressive bearing that one would associate with a banker or an attorney, which had been a certain asset to him in the days when he had played parts of that type in second and third road companies. Unfortunately his thespian talents were somewhat less distinguished than his appearance, and the rigors of cheap rooming houses between jobs and even worse accommodations on the road were uncongenial to a temperament conditioned by the stage-sets in which he usually appeared, so that when he met a kindred soul in the very nubile shape of the fair Luella, an ambitious ingénue who tried to pawn a watch which he unguardedly left in his dressing room, it seemed like a good time to branch out into a more comfortable career.
They adopted into their design for living a third party, one Tod Kermein, a photographer who had fallen upon evil days on account of certain exposures to which the United States Post Office adopted a rather puritanical attitude, and Matt Joyson proceeded to develop for the troupe a cameo drama which played to extremely limited houses, but with more profit to the performers than any production in which they had previously appeared. It was still necessary to travel from time to time, but the runs in any given town were usually longer than the engagements to which they had been accustomed, and by mutual co-operation and keeping a watchful eye on each other’s sleight of hand in the division of the spoils they had achieved a very pleasant and profitable way of life by the time they reached Los Angeles and the purview of Simon Templar.
The Saint (as he was known to his friends, most of whom were still alive, and just as well to his enemies, many of whom were not so lucky) was not looking for trouble at the time. He was, as a matter of fact, looking for something a lot harder to find.
“I’m sorry, Mr Templar,” said the assistant manager at the Hollywood Plaza, “but we daren’t make any exceptions. Your five days are up tomorrow, and we must have your room.”
“Who are you going to give it to?” Simon protested.
“Probably to somebody who’s just being thrown out of the Roosevelt,” answered the manager philosophically, and added hastily, “but I don’t think it would help you to rush over there. They’ve certainly got somebody waiting who’s just being thrown out of the Ambassador.”
Patricia Holm, with her shining golden head at the Saint’s shoulder, brought her blue eyes into play.
“Isn’t there anything you could do,” she pleaded, “to let a couple of nice people into this private game of musical chambers?”
The man swooned but was helpless.
“If I could solve that one,” he said, “I wouldn’t have to work here.”
The Saint took her arm.
“Leave us drink some lunch,” he said, “and brood about life in this nation of nomads.”
The adjoining restaurant was cool and surprisingly quiet. They sat in a booth and ordered drinks. The Saint lighted cigarettes for them both.
“Well, old darling,” he said, “I suppose we could always get several reservations on the night train to San Francisco, and a lot more reservations on the train back. We could spend every second day there and every other day here, and live in a compartment. After a month, it’d be the same as spending two weeks in each place.”
“We could plant a potato in a pot,” said the girl wistfully, “and in six months we’d have vines trained over the window.”
The Saint sighed.
It was, he thought, an unjustly humiliating complication in the life of any self-respecting buccaneer. There had been other times when it had been difficult for him to stay in sundry towns, but those repulses had always been sponsored either by the police, who disapproved of him on principle, or by certain citizens who preferred to have only the police to contend with. Here he had done no harm and planned none — so far... He gazed moodily about the room, and it was at that moment, although neither of them thought anything of it at the time, that he made his first contact with the life of Luella Joyson.
She happened to be sitting at an adjoining table with an Air Force top sergeant, whose voice carried clearly to Simons ears.
“These real-estate prices have lost their altimeters,” the sergeant was saying. “But what’s a guy gonna do? This climate agrees with my kid, and my wife’s nuts about it. I’ve gotta give ’em a roof if it takes all my mustering-out and accrued pay.”
His companion smiled, and the Saint’s eyes focused on her. Her smile was one of Luella’s most valuable assets. It was fashioned with wide, fun lips exquisitely accented in a shade of shocking pink which matched the hue of her Adrian suit. The smile crinkled bewitchingly in the corners of long dark eyes. Between the red lips gleamed small even teeth, and a man instinctively wondered how it would feel to be bitten by them — lightly and without passion. This pleasing prospect was framed in shining black hair rippling to sleek square shoulders, and topped by an attractive but unnecessary scrap of hat.
When she spoke, the lazy promise in her voice brought the Saint to full attention.
“I know the spot you’re in, Sergeant — er, Bill — I can call you Bill, can’t I? The price is too high. I didn’t set it; I can’t do anything about that. But I’ll tell you what I can do. For you, Bill. I’ll knock my commission off the price.”
She laid a small white hand over the sergeant’s muscular brown paw for one brief instant, in a gesture compounded charmingly of propitiation and appeal.
A frown dwelt momentarily on the sergeant’s rugged young features. Then his gray eyes softened, and a corner of his straight-across mouth twisted upward.
“That’s pretty damned sweet of you, Miss, uh, Luella—”
“Just plain Luella, Bill.”
“Okay, Luella. It’s swell of you, but I can’t let you do it. You’ve got to make a living.”
“Let me worry about that, Bill. I’ll just add it on to my next sale, to somebody who made his pile while you were out there on a Fortress.”
“If you put it like that — you’re sweet to do it, though.”
“It’s a pleasure — Bill.” Abruptly she became businesslike. “Finished? Then let’s go on up to my place and get the forms made out and signed.”
The Saint watched them go, not failing to note that Luella’s legs tapered to slim ankles which would have wrung a whistle from a real timber wolf.
“That’s quite a gal,” he observed, in a fatherly way.
“I noticed you taking in her personality,” retorted his lady. “Beautiful, weren’t they?”
Simon tossed her a sad sweet smile.
“It’s the artist in me. I see pretty women simply as interesting masses of light, shadow, and line.”
“Curved lines, of course.”
“Of course. Did you notice, darling Pat, that there was a certain note in that conversation, on which we so shamelessly eavesdropped, which didn’t quite belong?”
Patricia frowned.
“Well... I... she was flirting with the sergeant — a little. But who wouldn’t? He’s nice-looking, in a craggy sort of way. His kind of crisp curly hair always gives women itchy fingers.”
“I always wondered what did it,” murmured the Saint. “Ah, the patter of little fingers through one’s locks...!” He dropped his bantering tone for one laced with puzzlement. “But there was something off key. Her ‘place’? That usually means an apartment. Why her apartment? She’s a female real-estate agent — why not an office? Oh well...” He shrugged. “The sergeant is a lucky character, Pat. He has — or will shortly have — a place to lay his head, and those of his family. Which he most certainly deserves, but which doesn’t help us. However, it does give me an idea.”
“Don’t let it run away with you,” said Patricia tartly. “You haven’t seen his wife yet.”
The Saint ran a hand over his dark head.
“Darling, my thoughts would get a special award from the Hays office. It only occurred to me that there may be a solution to this hotel business. Why do we have to go through this routine with the hotels? Why don’t we just take an apartment, and when we’re tired of the place we’ll just rent it and move on.”
This was an interesting idea while it lasted, which was for some three hours after lunch. In that time they had an intensive refresher course in the topography of Hollywood and Beverly Hills, made the acquaintance of a couple of dozen real-estate agents and twice that many apartment managers, and came painfully to the conclusion that several thousand other people had had the same idea first.
“You’d better do something about those train reservations,” Patricia said finally. “I’m going to sink myself in a bubble bath and think about the life of a traveling salesman.”
“Make yourself beautiful, and we’ll go dancing somewhere,” Simon told her. “I’ll go over to the Brown Derby and drown a sorrow, and catch up with you.”
There was just one vacant place at the bar, and as the Saint slid into it and ordered a Peter Dawson he recognized the soldier on the next stool, and felt the first premonitory flutter of psychic moth wings as the pattern of coincidence began to build. For his neighbor was the sergeant to whom his attention had been indirectly drawn at lunch time.
Only it was a very different-looking sergeant with the same face. His eyes stared a light-year into space, his straight lips were frozen into a white line, and his fingertips also were white from the force with which they pressed on the bar. He looked less like a man with a beautiful piece of real estate and a beautiful realtress thrown in than anything the Saint could imagine.
Simon Templar’s reflexes of observation and curiosity were automatic. The form of his response was just as spontaneous even when it seemed most theatrical, for his sense of drama had a fundamental impishness that was as natural to him as breathing. He managed to corner the sergeant’s blank stare for an instant, and said, “Did you lose out on the house or the babe — or both?”
The soldier’s eyes came stiffly into focus.
“What’s that?”
“You don’t,” said the Saint with a smile, “look like a man who’s found a place to live ought to look, in this day and age.”
He was expecting a reaction, but nothing like what he got.
The head which Pat had admired a few hours earlier swung towards him with an expression that only seemed to belong with a gunsight. One of the hands on the bar balled into a white-knuckled fist, and the shoulder muscles tensed under the olive drab.
“Who’re you?” the young mouth snarled. “Whadda you know about it?”
“Take it easy,” drawled the Saint softly. “I’m just the innocent bystander and I’d like to avoid his traditional fate. I just happened to be sitting at the next table to you at lunch — remember? — And I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation with the lovely Luella.”
“That —!” The sergeant used a one-syllable expletive and inventoried the dregs of his vocabulary for kindred honorifics reflecting variously on her character, morals, charms, and ancestry — which was, one inferred, dubious.
The bartender brought a drink. The Saint tasted it, and felt the moth wings of anticipation grow firmer. Like fingers on his spine.
“Then you didn’t buy a house?” he asked mildly.
The soldier reached into one of his blouse pockets, his face still frozen, but the deadliness gone from his eyes. He produced a film holder of the type and size used in a Speed Graphic camera. He tossed it onto the bar.
“There’s my house,” he said viciously. “How do you like the color scheme? Isn’t it swell, with all the pepper trees around it? And the closed back yard for the kid to play in, just like the doctor said. But what I like best is the view — Baldy, Mount Wilson, and Catalina on a clear day. That’s my house, whoever you are, fourteen hundred bucks’ worth, by God!”
The Saint’s chiseled features developed set lines of their own. He picked up the film holder, turned it over in his hands.
“There’s a negative in this, of course?”
“Sure. A picture of Luella. A keepsake!”
“In — er — underthings?”
“Underthings, hell. In practically nothing.”
“And you?”
The boy blushed, the rich red visibly flooding up his neck and ears in the low-lit bar, and the Saint saw that he really was quite young.
“The badger game,” Simon remarked.
“I guess so.” The sergeant wrung the miserable words from deep inside him. “I knew it, the minute these two guys broke in. One of ’em was a ‘private detective’—they said — with a camera. Sure — I was a dope. But she’s a sexy, good-looking babe, and I’m human.” He laughed briefly and bitterly. “So I was a sucker, and I figured she saw a big healthy guy and a chance to make beautiful music. A chance to make beautiful money, I would say. Well, she did.”
He drained the rest of his drink and beckoned the bartender.
“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 infinitesimal 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 London. 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 explain—”
“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 bedroom 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 coincidence 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 bru-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—”
“What had to be, had to be,” said Mr Joyson sagely, and edged hastily towards the door. “Don’t you bother your pret — er, don’t bother about a thing. Just leave all the details to me. I’ll see my lawyer in the morning, and we’ll discuss what steps to take, and you can get in touch with me at my home at — er—” He dug in his pockets. “I seem to have lost my card-case. The address is 7522 South Hooper — East Los Angeles. No phone. Now you just contact me, say, tomorrow afternoon. I’ll do anything I can to help. Come, Kermein.”
He completed his exit with almost indecent haste, but was able to refrain from mopping his brow till he was outside. Tod Kermein fell in step with him on the street, and their steps turned automatically in the direction of the nearest bar.
Kermein, who knew his place, preserved a discreet but sympathetic silence until they had been served, when he permitted himself to say, “Jeez, what a lousy break.”
“What a goddam stinking break!” Joyson exploded. “This pigeon was the vice-president of a bank, no less, and carrying a roll you could paper a house with, according to Luella. Whoever’d think his wife’d beat us to it?”
“I guess after all it must happen that way sometimes,” Kermein said, awed with a great discovery. “You know, I never thought of that.”
Matt Joyson scarcely heard him. The bracing draughts of Kentucky Nectar which he had absorbed were quieting his jangled nerves without impairing his mental processes. And something, something on the instinctive levels of his mind, now that the first blackout curtain of panic began to lift, was irking his consciousness with jagged little edges. He began to wish he had made a less precipitate withdrawal.
“It was too neat,” he muttered foggily. “Too pat.”
His eyes were murky with unformed suspicion.
Tod Kermein tried to console him.
“You’re always seeing somebody under the bed, Matt.”
“Once, there was,” Joyson reminded him. “Remember that go with the college president in Dallas?”
Kermein grimaced.
From the juke box at one end of the room seeped the voice of a scat singer who longed for some Shoo Fly Pie. At one of the low tables a pretty girl, like the melody, did some mild rhythmic writhing. The bartender, a jovial gent in a toupee, set a fresh drink in front of an aging debutante at the far end of the bar.
“I can’t nail it down,” Joyson said. “Something smells, and I don’t know what it is.”
“Because the guy’s wife gets there the same time we do? You heard her. She’s been followin’ the old jerk a long time, she nabs him. at exactly the right minute, which is just our time, too. Bad luck, that’s all. One chance in a million.”
“One thing’s sure.” Joyson struck the bar a light blow with a clenched fist. “Somewhere in town right now there’s a negative with Luella on it. It’s gonna be used by that dame in her divorce action. If one of our old suckers sees it, and we try to go back to him for more—”
He left the sentence unfinished.
“If that blonde really is after a divorce,” he enunciated softly. “If she’s his wife...” He swung off the bar stool. “We’re going back to the apartment. I want to talk to Lu about this guy.”
They walked along the echoing sidewalk toward the apartment house. Fifty yards from it, Kermein grabbed his companion’s arm. With his free hand he pointed.
In the lee of a potted shrub beside the entrance, a man lurked. A camera case was slung over his shoulder, and even in the dark the two men could recognize the photographer who had accompanied Patricia. He was not looking in their direction at the moment, but an elephant could not have lurked more obviously.
Like a sister act, Joyson and Kermein pivoted and walked briskly back to the bar they had just left. There was no more uncertainty in Joyson’s mind as they stepped inside.
“But — but what the hell’s he doin’ there?” mumbled Kermein. “The job was finished when he got his picture. You think the old goat’s got another dame in the place?”
“Shut up!” Joyson’s tone silenced him. “I don’t know and I don’t care. It smells. Gimme a nickel.”
He went to the phone booth. When Luella’s throaty voice answered, he wasted no words.
“Did you get rid of everyone?”
“Yes, Matt. I did the best I could. But I want to know—”
“So do I. But I don’t want to wait to find out. Something’s screwy. That photographer the dame had with her is still hanging around the front of the building.”
“What’s the matter? Did—”
“Talk later. All I know is there’s going to be some kind of beef. So we’re blowing. Put the pictures and the cash in a bag and come down the fire escape. The car’s in the alley. We’ll meet you there.”
“I’ve got clothes to pack.”
“I’m not taking any raps for your wardrobe. I’ve got a hunch about this. You can get more clothes in San Francisco, but you can’t in Tehachapi. We’ll give you ten minutes.”
Luella Joyson heard the click as he hung up, and wasted some good expletives on an unresponsive microphone.
Then, with a shrug of her comely shoulders, she went to a closet in the bedroom and dragged out a large suitcase and opened it. It contained several bulky envelopes of uniform size, but even after the addition of a dozen thick stacks of medium-denomination currency which she retrieved from various hiding places in the apartment, there was still room for a small armful of her most expensive clothes.
She put on a fur coat, snapped the bag shut, picked it up, and paused for a last regretful look around the inviting room. Then she stepped through the open window onto the fire escape.
She dropped lightly from the bottom of the last ladder to the alley pavement, almost beside a shiny low-slung sedan. Opening the door, she shoved the bag in and looked up and down the gloomy canyon between tall apartment buildings like the one she had left.
Two figures debouched into the alley from the street and came toward her, silhouetted against the opening, and she recognized Joyson and Kermein. She started to climb into the car — and stopped, as the sound of voices reached her.
At the end of the alley, where two shapes had been visible a second ago, there were now four. And then she heard a voice she recognized.
“I want you boys to meet a friend of mine,” said the grim tones of Sergeant Bill Harvey, followed on the instant by the sound of knuckles and jaws in violent collision. The group of shadows leaped into frenetic motion and gave off scrambled sound effects of flesh smacking flesh, scuffling feet, smothered grunts, and gasps of pain.
Luella snatched off a high-heeled shoe and hobbled swiftly toward the commotion, but as she ran, it resolved itself into two recumbent shapes, with two more moving swiftly toward the street. They were gone by the time Luella reached the scene.
She had a sickening suspicion of the identity of the fallen two even before she bent over them, but as she stooped, a fresh horrifying sound jerked her bolt upright again. The sound was the starting of a car’s engine.
Uttering a small scream, Luella sprang towards the long black sedan.
The taillight seemed to wink mockingly at her as it dwindled toward the far end of the alley and vanished into the street.
The photographer called Smith, whose obviously new civilian clothes would normally have branded him at once to a less rattled Matthew Joyson, leered at the 4x5 print and chuckled.
“Sarge, do you look silly,” he remarked.
“Go to hell, Corporal,” said Sergeant Harvey genially. He tore the picture and the negative into small pieces and scattered them out of the car window.
“I didn’t think they’d ever part with a negative,” said the Saint. “You’d have felt fine in a few months when Brother Joyson dropped in and told you how sorry he was he hadn’t been able to get any more evidence with your dough, and he was going to have to cite you as correspondent after all — unless, of course, you wanted to finance some more detectives.”
“All the pictures have names and address on them,” confirmed Patricia, who was going through the suitcase in the back of the car while they drove.
“So a lot of people will have a pleasant surprise when they get ’em back. That’s why it had to be played my way, so the gang’d be sure to pack everything up and drop it in our laps. Sometimes I think a great psychologist was lost in me.”
Simon Templar eased the sedan around a corner and parked it behind his own convertible.
“A very satisfactory evening,” he remarked. “What else have you got in that suitcase besides clothes, Pat?”
She handed him one of the bundles of greenbacks, and the Saint grinned.
“Fourteen hundred bucks, wasn’t it, Bill?” He flipped off the bills. “And the rest I suppose we’ll have to divvy up and send back to the original donors — less, of course, our fee for collection.”
Bill Harvey said, “I can’t tell you how swell you’ve been, sir. If it hadn’t been for you—”
“Forget it,” said the Saint. “I can’t tell you how much fun it was.”
Patricia Holm harked back to that, broodingly, some minutes later when they were driving away in their own car.
“I suppose you did have fun,” she said thoughtfully. “Maybe it’s a good thing you knew I was waiting to break into that bedroom.”
Simon chuckled.
“Darling, I’m sure everything would have continued on a high spiritual plane.”
“Which reminds me somehow,” she said, “did you reserve that Pullman?”
“We aren’t going to need it. You don’t think for a moment that Luella and Co are going to stop traveling now, do you? We are probably the only people in Los Angeles who know where there’s an apartment vacant tonight — and I’ve still got Luella’s keys from their car,” said the Saint.