Saint Errant (The Saint Series) Page 15

  “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 fas
t 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 cardcase. 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 moti
on 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.