The Saint Goes West (The Saint Series) Page 9

  “I want you to see it coming, you rat,” said that only half familiar voice.

  The Saint looked at him steadily.

  “It’s good to see you, Hank,” he said in a very even tone. “I’m glad you were able to get Max and Nails for yourself. I was afraid—”

  “Save your breath Templar,” said the Texan coldly. “Jean’s told me about you already. Now stand up and take it.”

  Simon Templar’s lips curled in a faint smile that was almost cynical. He gazed at ironic death with clear blue eyes and found it a little funny.

  It was the perfect moment for Don Morland to rush in and clutch Reefe’s right arm and gasp frantically: “No, no! They made him do it to save Jean from being beaten. I heard them.”

  “I left as soon as we got back to the house,” Reefe explained. “I started off all right when I got here, but Nails couldn’t ’ve been more than a few minutes behind me. I was doin’ fine when there was a knock on the door an’ one of the men went out. When he came back, he just said a couple of words in German to the others, an’ they all jumped on me at once. Knocked me out cold. When I woke up I was tied to a chair in the kitchen. Took me some time to get loose.”

  “Nails fixed me a drink after Hank had gone,” said the girl. “There must have been something in it, because suddenly I felt dizzy and everything started to go black. The next thing I knew, I was here.”

  “So,” said the Saint, “I guess this winds up the interlude.”

  He had already told them his own story and completed the background for them.

  “What do we do now?” asked Reefe.

  “You’d better drive into Lion Rock and phone the FBI in Phoenix,” said the Saint. “You can drop Mr Morland and Jean off at the house on your way. I’ll wait here and look after the prisoners till the flying squad arrives, and give them the whole story. They’ll take a few hours to get here.”

  “Okay,” said Reefe.

  He stood up and hitched his belt. There was a slight softening of amusement in his dour face.

  “I guess I know now why you kept remindin’ me of that feller the Saint,” he said.

  Simon looked him in the eyes.

  “I guess you do,” he admitted.

  They shook hands, and Reefe and Morland started towards their car.

  Jean Morland linked her arm with the Saint’s as he rose and followed. “I’ll wait for you,” she said.

  “Don’t wait too long,” he answered lightly. “It may be some time, and you’re going to need some rest.”

  They took two or three steps more, quite slowly.

  “It’s dreadful to think that Hank might have killed you,” she said, and the Saint chuckled.

  “I’ve had a few happier moments myself. But he was quite right, according to what he knew. He’s a good guy. He’ll always be a good guy…He kind of likes you I think.”

  She said nothing.

  Morland and Hank were already in Morland’s station wagon. Just a few yards from it, Jean Morland stopped, and turned in front of him.

  “Thank you so much,” she said, “—Saint.”

  Her arms slipped around his neck, and for a long moment he felt the pressure of her lips.

  Then she was gone.

  He stood and watched the station wagon drive away.

  After several minutes, he turned and walked over to the bunkhouse. The buttress of cots and furniture was undisturbed, and looked likely to remain that way until somebody from outside moved it. There was very little noise from the store-room where the nine Bundsmen were imprisoned. There was not likely to be much. A shortage of oxygen is highly discouraging to violent effort.

  Simon went back to the ranch house and explored a bit. He found a bottle of Peter Dawson, and a bottle of Benedictine.

  He decided that the occasion deserved the more expensive drink. He poured himself some Benedictine, and went back to the living room. There, after some searching, he gathered together some paper, a pen, and a package of cigarettes.

  He sat down at the dining table, with his drink and a lighted cigarette, and for more than an hour he wrote steadily in his neat individualistic hand. When he had finished, the complete synopsis of the story, with all relevant facts and avenues of inquiry, was there for the forthcoming G-Men to read. He signed it with his name, and below that he carefully sketched a skeleton figure crowned with a correctly elliptical halo.

  He finished his drink while he read it over and put it down again and nailed it to the table with the pen. Then he lighted one more cigarette, put the rest of the pack in his pocket, and went out to his car.

  He got in and drove to the so-called main road, and there without hesitation he turned to the right and drove away westwards—which was not the way to the Circle Y. He had the greatest admiration for the FBI, but they were liable to lead into formalities that he was too busy to be annoyed with.

  He drove quickly, with the softness of Jean Morland’s lips on his mouth, and his heart singing.

  PALM SPRINGS

  INTRODUCTION

  Palm Springs, if anybody doesn’t know it by this time, is an oasis in the desert a little more than a hundred miles east of Los Angeles. When I first went there, the business district was about three blocks long and a block wide; there were about three hotels, much too big for the town, a reasonable number of homes, a few auto courts, and a dude ranch on the outskirts. Today the neon signs of the motels greet you miles out in the desert and escort you in unbroken procession to a main street as long as the whole village used to be when I first knew it, and the houses have spread way out where we used to ride after jackrabbits, and they have flowed all around the dude ranch on the other side, and then for about fifteen miles out on the highway beyond more villages or communities have sprung up in an almost uninterrupted chain to take advantage of the overflow that even this enlarged Palm Springs cannot swallow; I seldom go there anymore, because it is too different from the place I used to love.

  But I spent six consecutive winters there in the good old days which ended at Munich, and it would have been strange if I had never set a story there.

  The actual process of doing it, however, suffered some vicissitudes.

  My first attempt was when RKO was making Saint movies. Thinking how pleasant it would be to work on a picture in my own favorite location, I cleverly suggested that we should make one called The Saint in Palm Springs. They liked the idea very much, and I went to work on the script. It turned out to be an excellent story; so naturally the producers (who always knew that they could have written much better Saint stories than I did, only they never got around to it) didn’t like it much. They hired various wizards to improve it, and did such a thorough job that the final script contained absolutely nothing whatsoever of mine except the title. I have never been able to guess why they flinched from that ultimate alteration, unless it was because they feared they might obscure the genius of the inspired executive who decreed that this epic should be shot at Palmdale, which is only a hundred and fifty miles away from Palm Springs.

  Then in early 1941, Dan Longwell, chairman of the Editorial Board of Life magazine, paid me a visit in California. I had known Dan many years before, when he was one of the editors of my New York publishers, a firm then known as Doubleday, Doran & Co. (Everything in this busy life keeps changing, as we reminiscent ancients are continually being reminded.) Dan, or somebody on his staff, had abruptly recalled that in 1841 Edgar Allen Poe had published The Murders in the Rue Morgue, that therefore in 1941 the world should theoretically be celebrating the centenary of the detective story, and that therefore Life should somehow be represented in the chorus of tribute.

  Dan’s idea was that Life should mark the occasion by publishing the first “mystery” story of the new era, and for reasons which I am far too bashful to speculate about, he wanted me to write it. It was, of course, to be done in a series of photographs with captions, rather like stills from an unmade movie.

  Again I thought of Palm Springs, and wh
at could be better than a trip there, in good company, at the expense of Life?

  But RKO still owned (and for that matter still owns) the original Palm Springs story I had written, since they had paid me handsomely for it—even though to this day they have never used a line of it. (This is why it costs you so much to go to the movies.)

  So I wrote another story, and was especially careful to include three beautiful girls in it. And since Life magazine, at that time anyway, had not discovered that it was as great a creative genius as the current crop of producers at RKO, they stupidly accepted it as I wrote it. We went to Palm Springs with three models and a photographer—and they not only left me to direct the shots but, God help me, made me play the part of the Saint as well.

  This was my first and only appearance as a film star, even on static film, and I am not going to pretend I didn’t enjoy it. A hell of a time was had by all.

  The resultant million-dollar comic strip was duly published in eight pages of Life magazine in May 1941. And there again an immortal Palm Springs story might have been decently interred.

  But I am a very persistent, or at least economical, writer. I still wanted a Palm Springs story, and even after a lapse of years I thought this was a good one. I went to work elaborating it. And the story you are about to read is what came out.

  —Leslie Charteris (1951)

  1

  “Look,” said Freddie Pellman belligerently. “Your name is Simon Templar, isn’t it?”

  “I think so,” Simon told him.

  “You are the feller they call the Saint?”

  “So I’m told.”

  “The Robin Hood of modern crime?”

  Simon was tolerant.

  “That’s a rather fancy way of putting it.”

  “Okay then,” Pellman lurched slightly on his bar stool, and took hold of his highball glass more firmly for support.

  “You’re the man I want. I’ve got a job for you.”

  The Saint sighed.

  “Thanks. But I wasn’t looking for a job. I came to Palm Springs to have fun.”

  “You’ll have plenty of fun. But you’ve got to take this job.”

  “I don’t want a job,” said the Saint. “What is it?”

  “I need a bodyguard,” said Pellman.

  He had a loud harsh voice that made Simon think of a rusty frog. Undoubtedly it derived some of this attractive quality from his consumption of alcohol, which was considerable. Simon didn’t need to have seen him drinking to know this. The blemishes of long indulgence had worked deeply into the mottled puffiness of his complexion, the pinkish smeariness of his eyes, and the sagging lines under them. It was even more noticeable because he was not much over thirty, and could once have been quite good-looking in a very conventional way. But things like that frequently happen to spoiled young men whose only material accomplishment in life has been the by no means negligible one of arranging to be born into a family with more millions than most people hope to see thousands.

  Simon Templar knew about him, of course—as did practically every member of the newspaper-reading public of the United States, not to mention a number of other countries. In a very different way, Freddie Pellman was just as notorious a public figure as the Saint. He had probably financed the swallowing of more champagne than any other individual in the twentieth century. He had certainly been thrown out of more night clubs, and paid more bills for damage to more hotels than any other exponent of the art of uproar. And the number of complaisant show girls and models who were indebted to him for such souvenirs of a lovely friendship as mink coats, diamond bracelets, Packards, and other similar trinkets would have made the late King Solomon feel relatively sex-starved.

  He travelled with a permanent entourage of three incredibly beautiful young ladies—one blonde, one brunette, and one redhead. That is, the assortment of colorings was permanent. The personnel itself changed at various intervals, as one faithful collaborator after another would retire to a well-earned rest, to be replaced by another of even more dazzling perfections, but the vacancy was always filled by another candidate of similar complexion, so that the harmonious balance of varieties was retained, and any type of pulchritude could always be found at a glance. Freddie blandly referred to them as his secretaries, and there is no doubt that they had left a memorable trail of scandal in every playground and every capital city in Europe and the Americas.

  This was the man who said he wanted a bodyguard, and the Saint looked at him with cynical speculation.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked coolly. “Is somebody’s husband gunning for you?”

  “No, I never mess about with married women—they’re too much grief.” Pellman was delightfully insensitive and uninhibited. “This is serious. Look.”

  He dragged a crumpled sheet of paper out of his pocket and unfolded it clumsily. Simon took it and looked it over.

  It was a piece of plain paper on which a cutting had been pasted. The cutting was from Life, and from the heading it appeared to have formed part of a layout reviewing the curtain calls in the careers of certain famous public enemies. This particular picture showed a crumpled figure stretched out on a sidewalk with two policemen standing over it in attitudes faintly reminiscent of big-game hunters posing with their kill, surrounded by the usual crowd of gaping blank-faced spectators. The caption said,

  A village policemans gun wrote finis to the career of “Smoke Johnny” Implicato, three times kidnaper and killer, after Freddie Pellman, millionaire playboy, recognised him in a Palm Springs restaurant last Christmas Day and held him in conversation until police arrived.

  Underneath it was pencilled in crude capitals,

  DID YOU EVER WONDER HOW JOHNNY FELT?

  WELL YOU’LL SOON FIND OUT. YOU GOT IT COMING MISTER.

  A FRIEND OF JOHNNY.

  Simon felt the paper, turned it over, and handed it back.

  “A bit corny,” he observed, “but it must be a thrill for you. How did you get it?”

  “It was pushed under the front door during the night. I’ve rented a house here, and that’s where it was. Under the front door. The Filipino boy found it in the morning. The door was locked, of course, but the note had been pushed under.”

  When Freddie Pellman thought that anything he had to say was important, which was often, he was never satisfied to say it once. He said it several times over, trying it out in different phrasings, apparently in the belief that his audience was either deaf or imbecile but might accidentally grasp the point of it were presented often enough from a sufficient variety of angles.

  “Have you talked to the police about it?” Simon asked.

  “What, in a town like this? I’d just as soon tell the Boy Scouts. In a town like this, the police wouldn’t know what to do with a murderer if he walked into the station and gave them a signed confession.”

  “They got Johnny,” Simon pointed out.

  “Listen, do you know who got Johnny? I got Johnny. Who recognised him? I did. I’d been reading one of those true detective magazines in a barber shop, and there was a story about him in it. In one of those true detective magazines. I recognised him from the picture. Did you read what it said in that clipping?”

  “Yes,” said the Saint, but Freddie was not so easily headed off.

  He took the paper out of his pocket again.

  “You see what it says? ‘A village policeman’s gun wrote finis to the career…’”

  He read the entire caption aloud, following the lines with his forefinger, with the most careful enunciation and dramatic emphasis, to make sure that the Saint had not been baffled by any of the longer words.

  “All right,” said the Saint patiently. “So you spotted him and put the finger on him. And now one of his pals is sore about it.”

  “And that’s why I need a bodyguard.”

  “I can tell you a good agency in Los Angeles. You can call them up, and they’ll have a first-class, guaranteed, bonded bodyguard here in three hours, armed to the teeth.
”

  “But I don’t want an ordinary agency bodyguard. I want the very best man there is. I want the Saint.”

  “Thanks,” said the Saint. “But I don’t want to guard a body.”

  “Look,” said Pellman aggressively, “will you name your own salary? Anything you like. Just name it.”

  Simon looked around the bar. It was starting to fill up for the cocktail session with the strange assortment of types and costumes which give Palm Springs crowds an unearthly variety that no other resort in America can approach. Everything was represented—cowboys, dudes, tourists, trippers, travelling salesmen, local business men, winter residents, Hollywood; men and women of all shapes and sizes and ages, in Levis, shorts, business suits, slack suits, sun suits, play suits, Magnin models, riding breeches, tennis outfits, swim suits, and practically nothing. This was vacation and flippancy and fun and irresponsibility for a while, and it was what the Saint had promised himself.

  “If I took a job like that,” he said, “it’d cost you a thousand dollars a day.”

  Freddie Pellman blinked at him for a moment with the intense concentration of the alcoholic.

  Then he pulled a thick roll of green paper out of his pocket. He fumbled through it, and selected a piece, and pushed it into the Saint’s hand. The Saint’s blue eyes rested on it with a premonition of doom. Included in its decorative art work was a figure “1” followed by three zeros. Simon counted them.

  “That’s for today,” said Freddie. “You’re hired. Let’s have a drink.”

  The Saint sighed.

  “I think I will,” he said.

  2

  One reason why there were no gray hairs on the Saint’s dark head was that he never wasted any energy on vain regrets. He even had a humorous fatalism about his errors. He had stuck his neck out, and the consequences were strictly at his invitation. He felt that way about his new employment. He had been very sweetly nailed with his own smartness, and the only thing to do was to take it with a grin and see if it might be fun. And it might. After all, murder and mayhem had been mentioned, and to Simon Templar any adventure was always worth at least a glance. It might not be so dull…