The Saint to the Rescue (The Saint Series) Page 7

  “I didn’t try to get a nickel out of you with that story,” said the Saint virtuously, “because that would have been fraudulent. But there’s nothing illegal about using a phony name just for fun.” He drank again from the can, deeply and with relish, and then made another raid on the ice-chest for a square plastic box, from which he extracted a thick and nourishing sandwich. “Pardon me if I have lunch,” he said. “There are plenty more of these, by the way, and to you they are only two thousand dollars each.”

  Mr Diehl could not have explained why this was the precise twitch that snapped the rein of his congenially crude and choleric temper, but it was probably far more a general sense of frustration than any specific affront that made him crowd forward again with his fists bunched and his face purpling.

  “I’m not taking any of this crap,” he growled. “You give me a sandwich and a can of beer, or I’ll help myself!”

  “You’re standing in the shade of my helicopter,” Simon pointed out forbearingly. “For using this very expensive piece of equipment as a parasol I shall have to make a charge of one hundred dollars a minute. If you think that’s too high and you want to get out of the sun, go and sit under a tree.”

  “What tree?” roared Mr Diehl.

  “Oh, there don’t seem to be any right around here, now that you mention it. But you don’t care much about trees anyway, do you? At least, when they’re in the way of a fast cheap cleanup job on a subdivision, you’re the type of clot-headed dollar-clutching slob who—”

  That was the exact moment when Mr Diehl threw his Sunday punch, and perhaps it was just his bad luck that this was only Saturday.

  The Saint did not let go either the can of beer which he held in one hand or the sandwich in the other, but he leaned a little to one side and brought up an elbow with the power and accuracy of a short uppercut, and Mr Diehl suddenly found himself lying on his back with a numb sensation in his jowls, a taste of blood in his mouth, and an astronomically unrecorded nova erupting in the red haze that had temporarily clouded his vision.

  With even more care not to spill a drop or lose a crumb. Simon used one foot to roll the realtor out into a rather muddy expanse of sunlight.

  “Just for that gratuitous display of bad temper,” he said, “the fee for flying you out has now gone up to fifty grand.”

  Mr Diehl sat on a damp log in the sun, making it damper with his own sweat, after the Saint had finished eating and drinking and had stretched himself out for a siesta under the shadow of the helicopter. Glowering at him from a safe distance, Mr Diehl had inevitably toyed with the idea of a murderous sneak attack, but when he was recovered enough to make the first tentative move in that direction, he was instantly greeted by the opening of a cool catlike eye which without any other explanation at all convinced him that such a maneuver would not have the automatic success that it might have conveniently enjoyed in a story.

  In any case, even if he could have overpowered the Saint, he didn’t know how he could have forced him to fly the helicopter. A man might be beaten or even tortured into promising to fly, but once in the air, the passenger was at the mercy of the pilot. And if the preliminary struggle actually incapacitated or even killed the Saint, Mr Diehl would still be stuck there until a rescue party found him, and it would be a long time before any such search was organized. He recalled now, with awful clarity, how the Saint had told the airport crew that they expected to spend at least three days in the Everglades and might even go on to explore some of the inaccessible islands of the Bay of Florida before turning back—to all of which misdirection Mr Diehl had contributed his loud support.

  Far out beyond the last stems of maiden cane, something dark and gnarled came slowly awash in the glazed surface of the water. Mr Diehl identified it after a while as the front end of an alligator, which stared at him with inscrutable agate eyes. Mr Diehl stared back, somewhat less enigmatically, and remembered to wish that he had brought a gun.

  There had to be some weak point in the set-up, if he could only find it.

  The Saint came languidly back to life, yawned and stretched, smoked a cigarette, bathed his face with a cloth ostentatiously dipped in ice-water from the cooler, hauled out a sheaf of magazines, and sat down again in the shade to read.

  “You’re crazy,” Mr Diehl shouted.

  “It just isn’t the time of day to catch bass,” argued the Saint reasonably. “As a native of these parts, you ought to know that. So I’m improving my mind instead of tiring out my arm. Would you care to join me? I’m renting magazines at only a hundred dollars a minute for the reading kind, or two hundred for the ones with girlie photos.”

  Mr Diehl clenched his teeth to the point of almost cracking some expensive bridgework, but managed to suppress an answer that would have been impractical and unprofitable.

  He was sharply susceptible to hunger, like any man accustomed to self-indulgence and a high-calorie diet, but he also had a cushion of accumulated blubber that could absorb temporary deprivations without acute distress. Mr Diehl felt miserably empty in the stomach, but in no danger of fainting from it. The thirst was much harder to bear. His propensity for profuse sweating was always a strain on his fluid resources, and the thought of cold cans of beer nestling in arctic beds of ice cubes or dripping clean refreshing wetness as they were lifted out was a refined anguish that became more acute with the passing of each unslaked minute. It got so bad that even while his pores were acting like faucets he could hardly find enough internal moisture for a good spit.

  When the sun began to cooperate by dousing itself prematurely behind a high bank of clouds in the west, the Saint finished another can of beer and began fishing again. After a while he tied on to a fish that erupted from the water like a stung dervish as it felt the hook, and fought through several more minutes of explosive leaps and straining runs before the light tackle could subdue it. Mr Diehl watched morosely while the Saint beached it and unhooked it and held it up with a skillful thumb under its jaw.

  “Would you like it for supper, Ed? Only two thousand dollars!”

  “You go to hell,” Mr Diehl said hoarsely.

  “Just as you like, Ed,” said the Saint agreeably.

  He put the bass gently back in the water and released it. Then he slapped at himself a couple of times, and picked his way back to the shallow mound where the helicopter stood.

  The word “picked” is not just an idle choice. At one point he froze abruptly on one foot, and remained thus grotesquely poised for several seconds, while a water moccasin slowly unwound its thick black coils from around the tuft of grass that he had been about to step on and slithered off into the muck. Mr Diehl saw it, and wondered if the Saint was also equipped with antivenin, and how much a shot would cost anyone else.

  “The mosquitoes are starting to get hungry,” Simon observed imperturbably, slapping himself again.

  Mr Diehl had already noticed that. He squirmed and fanned himself savagely while the Saint leaned into the cabin and brought out a bottle of insect repellent.

  “I don’t want to rush you, Ed,” Simon remarked, rubbing himself liberally with the lotion, “but we don’t seem to be getting anywhere, and pretty soon I’m going to weaken for the idea of a nice cold shower, some clean clothes, a tall tinkling Pimm’s Cup in an air-conditioned bar, a prime steak dinner, and a comfortable bed. If you haven’t given in before I do, I guess I’ll just have to leave you here and hope I can find you tomorrow.” He replaced the cap on the bottle. “Would you like some of this gunk? You can have it for only five grand, and before morning you’ll think it was cheap at the price.”

  Mr Diehl’s small eyes grew bigger with horror. The last straw that breaks the camel’s back is a time-worn cliché, but something like it happened to whatever stubbornness he had left. The unappetizing brown swamp water was certainly drinkable if a man got thirsty enough, and nobody died of simple starvation in a few days. But the prospect of a night of utter loneliness in the teeming dark, surrounded by snakes and alligators,
with myriads of small swift invisible stinging and biting things to add real torment to imagination, was already a living nightmare before which the edges of his pampered brain curled in clammy panic.

  “You wouldn’t do that,” he croaked. “A man could be killed or go nuts in one night, left here like that.”

  “A Seminole wouldn’t mind it a bit,” contradicted the Saint. “But if it doesn’t appeal to you, you don’t have to stay.”

  Mr Diehl knew it. And in that moment of truth, he also saw the elementary answer that had eluded him for so many wretched hours, and could scarcely believe that he had been so stupid as to miss it in the first five minutes.

  “You’re right, I don’t,” he said. “Give me that repellent. And the check-book. And while I’m writing the check, get me a can of beer.”

  “You could probably use a sandwich, too, to hold you till you get home,” said the Saint. “Let’s call it fifty-five thousand for the whole works, since you’re paying it all at once.”

  Mr Diehl scribbled the check, and would not have cared much what the exact figures were. But the Saint examined it carefully before he folded it and put it away in his wallet.

  “You may wonder why I should take all this trouble, when it might have been easier just to forge your signature,” he said. “But for some years now I’ve been trying to go straight, as the phrase has it, and I don’t want to be accused of doing anything criminal to get your money.”

  Mr Diehl drained the can of beer in three long gulps, and scratched himself almost joyously. He was beginning to think that this highly publicized Saint character might literally have a weak place in his head, which it had taken a smart and nerveless man like Ed Diehl to discover.

  “I just hope you get a sympathetic jury when you have to justify your prices,” he felt bold enough to say.

  “Everyone is entitled to his day in court,” said the Saint equably. “And to save a lot of time-wasting argument there, I think we ought to mark this historic spot.”

  He turned the check-book over and wrote quickly on the back of the last check: “This is the place that I paid $55,000 to be flown out of.”

  “Sign it,” he said, “and I’ll witness it.”

  This was done, and the note was sealed inside the plastic sandwich box, which was buried under the cypress log on which Mr Diehl had spent a good part of his unhappiest day. But he was far from unhappy as the whirling blades overhead brought the reassuring geometric patterns of highway and building in sight again, and in an absurdly few minutes the runways of the Lantana airfield were rising towards them out of the dusk.

  He opened the door on his side and jumped out the moment the helicopter touched down, and was slightly ecstatically amazed that the Saint made no attempt to grab him. He did not fall on his knees and kiss the firm concrete under him, not being that kind of emotional jerk, but nothing could have stopped him taking a stand directly he had backed off beyond probable recapture or reprisal, and shouting his ultimate triumph and defiance.

  “You sonofabitch!” he bawled. “Don’t waste time trying to cash that check after the cops get through working you over, because I’ll be at the bank when it opens on Monday to stop payment!”

  Simon cut the engine and leaned out so as not to have to compete in vulgar volume.

  “Okay, Ed,” he said gently. “You play it the way you see it. But long before that, I’ll have flown in a load of witnesses to pick up our X-marks-the-spot, and they’ll all be qualified surveyors who can testify that we buried it right where your plan calls for the City Hall of a dream town called Heavenleigh Hills. It should make fabulous publicity for everything else you’re contributing to the Future of Florida. Anyhow, you’ve got all tomorrow to think it over.”

  Mr Diehl’s petulant baby face, grubby and scorched and sweat-streaked, puckered slowly but exactly like the face of a spoiled child about to burst into tears. It was an expression that the Saint had seen before. He hoped he would see it many times again.

  THE PERCENTAGE PLAYER

  There is a story, which may be apocryphal, about a certain bookmaker (of the horsey, not the literary, variety) who was making a long trip by car when towards nightfall he happened upon a hostelry which displayed an ordinary sign bearing a most unusual name, “The Even Steven.”

  To a man in his business, this quaint appellation was of course doubly intriguing, and since it was in the middle of a particularly bleak and desolate stretch of country, and he had no idea how much farther he might have to drive to find a meal and a bed, he quickly decided to stop there for the night and satisfy his curiosity at the same time. The proprietor soon explained the peculiar designation of the place.

  “It’s very simple, really. You see, my name actually is Steven Even. So I just decided to turn it around and call this ‘The Even Steven.’ I thought it might get a few folks puzzled enough to stop and ask questions, and sometimes it does. Like yourself.”

  “That’s a pretty smart way to use the luck of a name,” said the bookie appreciatively. “I bet it brings you a lot of business.”

  Mr Even, a dour and dejected type of individual, seemed glad to have someone to talk to.

  “It hasn’t brought me so much luck,” he said. “The folks who stop don’t stay long. There’s not much gaiety around here, as you could see. In fact, there’s not another soul lives closer than thirty miles away, whichever way you go. Makes it pretty lonely for me, a widower. And worse still for my daughters. Three of the loveliest girls you ever set eyes on, should have their pick of boyfriends. But the nearest lads would have to drive thirty miles to pick ’em up, thirty more to take ’em to a movie, thirty miles to bring ’em home, and thirty back themselves. That’s more’n they got time to do even for beauties like these. The girls are getting so frustrated they’re about ready to do anything for a man.”

  The bookie made sympathetic noises, and listened to more in the same vein until hunger obliged him to change the subject to that of food. An excellent home-cooked dinner was served to him by a gorgeous blonde who introduced herself as Blanche Even, and when he was surfeited she still kept pressing him to ask for anything else he wanted.

  “A toothpick, perhaps?” he suggested.

  She brought it, and said, “Would you like me to sit and talk to you for a while?”

  “Thank you,” he said politely, “but I’ve had a long day and I feel like closing the book.”

  He went to his room, and had just started to undress when there was a knock at the door and an absolutely breath-taking brunette came in.

  “I’m Carmen Even,” she said. “I just wanted to see if you’d got everything you want.”

  “I think so, thank you,” he said pleasantly. “I do a lot of traveling, so I pack very systematically.”

  When he had finally convinced her and got rid of her, he climbed in between the sheets and was preparing to read himself to sleep over the Racing Form when the door opened again to admit an utterly stupefying redhead in a négligée to end all négligées.

  “I’m Ginger Even,” she announced. “I wanted to be sure your bed was comfortable.”

  “It is,” he assured her.

  “I hope you’re not just being tactful,” she insisted. “May I try it myself?”

  “If you must,” said the bookie primly. “I will get out while you do it.”

  When she had gone, he settled down with a sigh of relief and was about to put out the light at last when the door burst open once more and the proprietor himself stomped in, glowing with indignation.

  “What’s the matter with you?” he roared. “I got to listen all night to my daughters moaning an’ wailing, the most lusciousest gals in this county, because they all try to show you hospitality an’ you won’t give one of ’em a tumble. Ain’t us Evens good enough for you?”

  “I’m sorry,” said the transient. “But I told you when I registered, I’m a professional bookmaker. I only lay Odds.”

  Mr Theocritus Way, this chronicler must now hasten
to establish, was not the bookie immortalized in the foregoing anecdote. He was however, a man who had concentrated on the subject of Odds with an almost comparably classic single-mindedness.

  Indeed, one of his oldest but perennially profitable discoveries in the field was directly tied to the same numerical quibble between Odds and Evens. At any bar where he might be chumming for potential suckers, when the inevitable dispute eventually arose as to who should buy another drink, he would promptly suggest that they match for it. The mark could hardly refuse this, and would take from his pocket the conventional single coin. Mr Way would then say, with a skillfully intangible sneer, “The hell with that penny-matching stuff. That’s how some guys got rich making doubled-headed coins. Let’s play Monte Carlo Match.”

  He always had some high-sounding name, suggestive of authenticity and tradition, for the games that he invented.

  “What’s that?” the innocent would ask.

  Mr Way would haul out a handful of small change, which he jingled noisily in his closed fist to leave no doubt that it was a fair quantity.

  “I got a mess of chickenfeed here,” he would explain, with labored patience for such ignorance. “You grab a stack from your own pocket. We slap it all on the bar—two stacks. Suppose your stack turns out to be an odd number, and the total of our two stacks is also an odd number, you win. Suppose you got an odd number, and the total of us two is even, you lose. Or vice versa. That’s one bet you can’t fix, because neither of us knows how many coins the other’s going to have.”

  The mark might win or lose the first time, on this fair fifty-fifty basis. Mr Way rather liked him to win, because that made it somewhat easier to insist on another match for money instead of drinks. And one game easily led to another, and another, for increasing stakes. If the dupe insisted on them taking turns as matcher, Mr Way would take his honest fifty-fifty chance. But after the first time, the victim never had a chance to match the total of their combined hands in oddness or evenness.