Thanks to the Saint (The Saint Series) Read online

Mr Eade held the item up to admire it more carefully.

  “A magnificent stone,” he remarked. “Not in the necklace itself—those are real diamonds, quite nicely mounted, but very small and not very good. Notice how the settings make them look about three times their actual size. But the emerald…” He whipped out a loupe from an inner pocket, screwed it into his eye, and peered through it at the pendant. “Yes, undoubtedly genuine. A rather shabby antique setting, but a stone that would be worth at least thirty thousand dollars in today’s wholesale market.”

  He handed Simon the necklace and removed his magnifying monocle with an apologetically awkward laugh.

  “Excuse me being so professional,” he said. “But I’m in the wholesale jewelry business myself, and I never seem to be able to get away from it. Everyone who hears that I’m in it has something they want to ask me about.”

  He produced a card which confirmed, with all the authority of tasteful engraving, that he was indeed a wholesale jeweler, with an address in New York City which not even a native of Manhattan could have stated positively, without going back to look, was an impossible location for premises of that kind.

  “Maybe you’d enjoy meeting the dame who lost this,” Simon said. “I don’t know her from Eve, except that Eve must have been a lot more attractive, or Adam would never have goofed off. But a ruin well plastered with fancy rocks.”

  Mr Eade pursed his lips sympathetically.

  “That type, was she?”

  “Definitely. And fortissimo.”

  “That’s the way it goes,” said Mr Eade, as one philosopher to another. “At the Taj Mahal, where I’m staying, I had the misfortune to run into some good customers of mine who really should go back to the Indians—East or West Indians, whichever would accept them first. They buy jewels psychopathically, like an alcoholic always wants one more drink, or a hillbilly comedian who just made the big time doesn’t only want a Cadillac, he’s got to have three. Of course they’re wonderful clients to have, but sometimes I think—”

  What Mr Eade thought, aside from the necessity of naming a hotel where he could be reached, and skillfully impressing it on his interlocutor with a mnemonic twist which only an outright cretin could have forgotten, was cheated of utterance by the abrupt return of the dowager they had been discussing, who came blundering through the crowd with her eyes on the ground and a haughty disregard for the people she jostled, casting to one side and the other like a bird dog, until she appeared to scent the necklace which Simon was still holding, and plunged towards it with a shrill yip worthier of a coonhound than a pointer.

  “Thank you very much,” she said, snatching it from his hand. “I suppose you were wondering if you’d have more chance of getting a reward if you turned it over to the management or if you tried to find me personally.”

  “Madam,” said the Saint, “I assure you—”

  “And that’s giving you the benefit of the doubt,” she said malignantly. “From the way you were looking at it, you could just as well have been trying to make up your minds whether it was worth keeping and saying nothing about at all. Well, for your information, even though the pendant is only something I took a fancy to in a junk shop, the necklace is real, and it’s insured for eight thousand dollars.”

  Mr Eade gave a slight but perceptible twitch and exchanged glances with the Saint.

  “If you’ll forgive me,” he said with some reluctance, “I’m afraid you’re very ill advised about that pendant.”

  “I wear it because I like it,” she retorted, testing the catch and then refastening the coruscating collar around her neck. “And that’s all that matters to me, even if I only paid twenty dollars for it.”

  “But as a qualified appraiser and professional jeweler,” persisted Mr Eade painfully, “it’s my duty to tell you that—”

  “Oh, so that’s your racket. The things some people will do to drum up business,” she commented, almost as if she was on the verge of accusing him of having caused her to lose the necklace in the first place. “Thanks very much, but when I’ve got any work of that sort I’m not likely to give it to someone I just picked up in a bar.”

  She dug into her purse, came out with a couple of crumpled dollar bills, and tossed them on to the counter.

  “But here’s a drink for you, anyway, so you can’t complain that you didn’t get anything for your trouble,” she sneered, and was gone, plowing like a juggernaut through the patrons who were not quick enough to give her gangway.

  Simon was the first to regain his voice.

  “You see what I meant?” he murmured.

  “Charming.” Mr Eade shook his head numbly and incredulously. “Never once let either of us finish what we were trying to say. And to think she may never find out what that twenty-dollar ornament is really worth.”

  “I suppose you couldn’t have been mistaken?”

  “Positively not. You have to know about emeralds, especially with the synthetics they’re making now, but that’s my job. I examined it with a powerful glass. She may have found it in a junk shop, where the dealer didn’t know what he’d got—you hear stories like that, though I never came this close to one before. But if she wanted to sell it, I’d pay thirty thousand dollars cash for it right now, because I know I could turn right around and sell it to those people I was telling you about for fifty thousand.” He shrugged and smoothed out the crumpled currency on the bar. “What shall we do about this?”

  “Since we had to take the insults anyhow,” said the Saint, “we might as well swallow the last one.”

  Mr Eade signaled the barman to replenish the Saint’s glass and ordered himself a temperate St Raphael. They toasted each other perfunctorily and then lapsed into one of those brooding silences which Mr Eade was so adept at engineering.

  “Why don’t you go after her and try to buy that thing?” Simon asked finally.

  “After the way she behaved, could you force yourself to throw that much money into her lap?”

  “You could make a nice profit.”

  “You mean, by bidding for the necklace and letting her throw in the pendant?” said Mr Eade, just in case Simon had overlooked that angle. “Unfortunately, it would be most unethical for me to do that. As a professional, if I didn’t offer her a fair price, and anything ever came out about it, it would finish me in my business. It wouldn’t be the same as a layman doing it, who couldn’t be accused of taking unfair advantage. He could always claim he was just lucky.” Mr Eade tilted his glass again meditatively. “Well, let’s hope that some day she sells it for ten dollars to another junk dealer and some more deserving person has the good luck to pick it up.”

  Simon lighted a cigarette and puffed at it in a jerky way that was exactly the kind of symptom Mr Eade liked to see.

  “Suppose someone else brought it to you, in the next day or two—I meant someone who might have heard us talking, for instance,” he said clumsily. “Would you think you were obligated by those professional ethics to ask how much he paid for it?”

  “In an ideal world I suppose I might be,” said Mr Eade thoughtfully. “But being human, and not being directly involved, I’m afraid I’d feel that it’s a kind of poetic justice when such an unpleasant person gets taken, and I wouldn’t feel bound to ask any awkward questions.”

  He emptied the rest of his glass slowly, to ensure the pregnancy of the pause, and put it down, and only then permitted his eyes to twinkle.

  “But you’re not likely to run into her again—not if you’re lucky, that is,” he said with an air of completely amiable understanding. With the interlude thus closed, he consulted his watch. “And now, according to my astrological chart, this is the most favorable hour for me to match my fate with a roulette wheel, so if you’ll excuse me…”

  He drifted away, intuitively certain of his histrionic triumph to a degree which would have made a stage actor’s most coveted ovation seem pallid and hollow.

  Simon Templar was no less satisfied with his own performance. He did not bo
ther to go looking for the odious matron, or even worry about whether she would find him again, for he knew that his portrayal of the beatified Simple Simon infected with cupidity and dazzled by the potentialities of his own newly discovered acumen was as polished as it had ever been in the days when he used to exploit it more frequently, and he was confident that an angler like Mr Eade could be relied on not to let such an obviously well-hooked fish escape the gaff.

  He was toasting himself tranquilly by the pool the next morning when the woman came by. She wore a flowered romper-style playsuit that looked like a badly fitting slip cover on her, but she was still jeweled as if for a night at the opera.

  “Are you sitting out in this heat because you like it, or to give you an excuse to exhibit your beautiful physique in the hope that some stupid woman will fall for it?” she inquired.

  He gazed back at her with scarcely veiled dislike in his cold blue eyes—because that would have been expected of him.

  “I like it,” he said, unsmiling. “And I can always hope.”

  “Don’t look at me. I’m not stupid. I know all about men who are too good-looking for their own good.”

  Her painted face was even harder in daylight, and her voice had lost none of its cultivated acidity. She twisted and tugged at the necklace and pendant she was still wearing, in the nervously irritable automatism which had first made him notice it, and suddenly it came loose and fell through her fingers to the ground.

  “You go on like that,” said the Saint, without moving, “and one day you’ll really lose it.”

  She used a short sibilant word which no lady should have in her vocabulary and picked up the string of gems herself. She fiddled with the catch in sharp, angry movements which suggested that she only wished it had been an animate object that she could have hurt.

  “I shouldn’t ever wear it at all. It’s jinxed, that’s what it is. I’ve lost it before, and had it stolen once, and each time it’s cost me money to get it back. Even last night I had to buy you a drink. And while I was away from the table, my number came up twice in a row. I ought to know better. I got it from my last husband, and he was never anything but bad luck. God damn the stinking thing,” she broke out, at the peak of her gradual crescendo of fury. “Now the catch is really busted. And you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to take it right downtown this afternoon and sell it—if I can find an honest jeweler anywhere in this clip town.”

  She glowered at him suspiciously.

  “You got anything to say about that? You think I wouldn’t?”

  “I didn’t say a word,” Simon protested.

  “When I decide anything’s no good for me, I junk it, whether it’s a piece of jewelry or a husband, or anything else. They can all be replaced. How do you like that?”

  “It’s okay with me,” said the Saint. “But if you’re not kidding about selling that necklace, how much would you take for it?”

  “What’s that to you?”

  “I’m a used-car dealer. A trader. I might make you an offer.”

  “I don’t want a used car.”

  “I’m getting married pretty soon, as soon as my divorce comes through. My girl likes jewels, and you might give me a good buy.”

  “I told you last night, it’s insured for eight thousand dollars.”

  “That means you couldn’t get more than four for it at the most, if you had to sell it.”

  She studied him shrewdly between narrowed lids.

  “What did you say your name was? I wouldn’t take less than five.”

  “Sebastian Tombs,” he said equably. “And I’ll split the difference with you. Forty-five hundred. Cash.”

  “Show it to me,” she scoffed. “If you’ve got it.”

  “I’ll have to wire my bank in Tucson. But I can have it this afternoon.”

  She dropped the necklace into her bag and shut it with a snap that matched the saurian clamp-up of her mouth.

  “I’ll look for you in the lobby at four,” she said. “But don’t think I’ll be surprised if I don’t see you.”

  Simon freshened himself with a languid swim in the pool and went back to his room, from which he made a call to the Taj Mahal.

  “Were you serious about what you said last night, about the pendant that gruesome old witch was wearing?” he asked.

  Mr Eade chuckled with unfeigned delight.

  “Don’t tell me you’ve stolen it!”

  “I think I can buy it. Would you still be in the market for it?”

  “Certainly. I never joke about business.”

  “Can I bring it over to your hotel, say about four-thirty?”

  “I have an engagement to play golf this afternoon,” said Mr Eade, glancing hastily over a summary of plane schedules. “And then with the usual drinks at the club, and I’d like to get showered and changed…Could you make it seven o’clock, and consider that an invitation to dinner?”

  The Saint made another phone call, enjoyed a leisured lunch, and then drove downtown. But he was back and waiting in the lobby of the Persepolis punctually at four o’clock and had to cool his heels for ten minutes before he saw the woman sailing towards him like a runaway galleon.

  “All right,” she said aggressively. “Have you got it all, or are you going to give me a song and dance?”

  He handed her an envelope, and she counted forty-five bills and pointedly verified that each individual one was of the correct denomination. Then she opened her purse and brought out the necklace.

  “Okay, here you are.”

  He stared at it in dismay.

  “But the pendant—”

  “I didn’t say that went with it. I bought that myself. And anyway, it’s only junk.”

  “But it looked perfect with the necklace, somehow,” he protested. “That’s what appealed to me. I wouldn’t want the necklace without it.”

  She leered at him with insulting cynicism.

  “And I suppose you’ll tell your girl it’s a real emerald, too.” She let him suffer for an artistic moment and said, “Very well, you can have it. But it wasn’t included in the price. It cost me twenty dollars, and that’s what I want for it.”

  The eagerness with which he fumbled for a twenty-dollar bill imposed a severe strain on her facial self-control, but she kept her mask of misanthropic disdain intact while she exchanged the pendant for the money, although she trusted her voice to remain in character for no more than a grudging “Thank you” before she turned and stalked away as if he had once again ceased to exist for her.

  In their room at the Taj Mahal, a three-minute taxi ride away, Mr Eade, dressed for travel, was smoking a thin cigar and turning the pages of a cheesecake magazine. Their bags, packed and ready to go, stood by the door.

  “Couldn’t have been easier,” she said, in answer to his mildly interrogative eyebrow.

  She opened her bag and counted him out twenty-three hundred-dollar bills, and he scrupulously gave her fifty dollars change.

  “How long have we got, Copplestone?”

  “Our plane leaves at five-forty.” He checked his watch. “I think we should leave for the airport in ten minutes at the most.”

  “Then I’ve got time to take some of this war paint off.”

  She disappeared into the bathroom and was quite surprisingly transformed when she came back. Without the excess jewelry and the flamboyantly clashing scarf which she had worn like a shawl collar, she was acceptably dressed, and with only normal makeup she was neither the harridan of the Persepolis nor the prim executive secretary of the Hollywood studio, but a very ordinary middle-aged woman—a chameleon waiting to be prodded into its next coloration.

  “I don’t know what I’d do without you, my dear,” said Mr Eade sincerely. “We make a perfect team.”

  “As long as there goes on being a sucker born every minute, we’ll do all right,” she said. “A couple more jobs like this and that Yarmouth dame, one after another, and we ought to be able to take a nice long vacation.”

  The
re was a knock on the door, and Mr Eade opened it almost unthinkingly, and certainly without concern.

  “Mr Eade?”

  The man who stood there was unknown to him, but something about his bearing had a chillingly familiar air, which became an icy clutch around Mr Eade’s heart as the man flipped open a wallet to exhibit a gold metal star pinned inside. While Mr Eade sought achingly for breath, the man came on in.

  “And Mrs Eade, I presume?” he remarked politely. He turned back to the door. “Come on in, Mr Tombs.” Simon Templar followed him. “Is this the guy who gave you the pitch about the emerald?”

  “That, Lieutenant,” said the Saint concisely, “is him.”

  “What is this all about?” demanded Mr Eade hollowly.

  The Lieutenant dissected him with distantly unfriendly eyes.

  “You should know all about it, Copplestone,” he said with a cruelly sarcastic inflection. “Unless you’ve been luckier all your life than you deserve. The usual bunco rap. Mr Tombs isn’t so dumb. He figured what you were up to and came to see us this afternoon. I was in the lobby, and I witnessed him giving Mrs Eade the money and her giving him the necklace. We followed her back here and waited outside the door till I’d heard enough to wrap it up double. You want me to recite it, or are you going to say Uncle?”

  “You can enjoy the technicalities on the City’s time,” said the Saint gently. “Having delivered the case into your lap, I’d just like my money back.”

  The Lieutenant reached out for Mrs Eade’s purse and emptied its contents onto a table, but what he presently sorted out made his face crinkle in a comical mixture of astonishment and perplexity.

  “Eleven thousand eight hundred and eighty dollars in cash and traveler’s checks,” he said. “But only twenty-two of those marked hundreds you gave her.”

  “This is rather ridiculous,” Mr Eade argued weakly. “Mr Tombs made a deal, on his own initiative—”

  “For something that was represented as a diamond necklace, alleged to be insured for eight grand.” The Lieutenant produced it from his pocket and flung it down. “This here is a piece of paste that you couldn’t insure for eighty bucks. And that’s fraud, Pappy. Have you got the rest of that dough? If you have, we’ll find it.”