Thanks to the Saint (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  But when they made what he called a courtesy stop at his office, to see if there had been any vital messages while he was entertaining her, before they went on to lunch, there was an abrupt change in this placid tempo. His secretary met him with a long face.

  “I’m afraid this is going to be a nasty shock for you, Mr Eade,” she said. “I tried to call Mr Traustein about the meeting this afternoon, and it seems he had a heart attack in the shower this morning, and he died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.”

  “Oh no!” said Mr Eade, and collapsed into a chair as if his legs had been cut from under him.

  Mrs Yarmouth felt instinctively obliged to say she was sorry.

  “No, it isn’t that,” said Mr Eade, removing his hands from a face which he hoped looked convincingly haggard. “He was a fine man, I understand, but I hardly knew him at all in a personal way. Our relationship was purely business. Mr Traustein was a very rich man who privately financed movie ventures, which people like myself, on the creative side, seldom have enough capital to do. He had promised to put up the money for the series that I was expecting to start, and the papers were to be signed this afternoon.”

  “And you can’t go ahead without him?” Mrs Yarmouth prompted, quite superfluously.

  “Frankly, no,” said Mr Eade heavily. “Not that I couldn’t get any amount of other financing, of course. That isn’t any problem, with a property and a distribution deal like mine. But to get the right terms, you have to have time to negotiate. You’ve no idea how ruthless the vultures in this town can be. When they know you’ve got to have money in a hurry, and haven’t got time to haggle, they make you pay through the nose. And it’s their business to know everything that’s going on in the Industry—you can’t bluff them. The minute I start talking to them, they’ll know they can put me through the wringer.”

  “What shall I tell the studio, Mr Eade?” asked the secretary, who had been standing patiently by.

  She was a rather homely woman of primly efficient aspect, in the neighborhood of forty, so radically different from the popular conception of a Hollywood producer’s secretary that Mrs Yarmouth had approved of her on sight and had thereby been subtly strengthened in her respect for Mr Eade.

  “Please don’t tell them anything,” he said urgently. “Don’t talk to anybody. Perhaps I can still think of something before the whole town knows I’m over a barrel.”

  “Very well, Mr Eade.”

  “You’d better get some lunch—we’ll have a lot to do this afternoon. But before you go would you bring me that last letter from Herbert and Shapiro?”

  He let Mrs Yarmouth read the missive herself. On a genuine sheet of letterhead pilfered from an advertising agency so famous that jokes about it were good for a laugh even from unsophisticated audiences, it said in part:

  This will confirm that the StarSuds Corporation have authorized us to pay you the agreed price of $30,000 for each episode of your series Don Juan Jones in full upon delivery of each half-hour’s film ready for projection, commencing on May 12 and weekly thereafter.

  However, we feel obliged to remind you that time is of the essence in your contract, and that failure to deliver the first film on or before May 12 will be grounds for cancellation of the entire series, as it would cause us ourselves to forfeit the time commitment which we have from the network.

  “You see,” Mr Eade elucidated, “as far as a sponsor’s concerned, having a good TV show is only half the battle. Getting a good network time to put it on the air is the other half. StarSuds happen to have a perfect time spot booked for this series. But if I don’t deliver, they’ll lose it, and besides canceling my contract they could probably sue me for damages.”

  “I should think it’d be more sensible if they lent you the money to make the pictures,” said Mrs Yarmouth.

  “You don’t understand,” said Mr Eade patiently. “Things just aren’t done that way in this business—StarSuds is packed in boxes, but the soap-makers don’t make the boxes. Their attitude is that they’re in the soap business, not the box business. Or, to take it a step further, the motion-picture business. They expect to buy television pictures, not make them. As it is, they’re as close to subsidizing this series as they’ll ever come. Think of it.” He tapped the letter. “They’ll pay for the first film on May the twelfth. That’s in just over two weeks. And from then on, they pay for each film on delivery. They’ll cost me less than twenty thousand each to make—I can show you the budget. That’s ten thousand dollars a week clear profit. But, between now and the twelfth, I must shoot at least two pictures to keep my schedule here at the studio.”

  “That means an investment of forty thousand,” said Mrs Yarmouth brightly. “And then you get back thirty—”

  “But, of course, right then I have to start another picture, which means an investment of another twenty thousand—”

  “So then you’re only down thirty thousand, and you get all that back the following week—”

  “Precisely,” said Mr Eade, unwilling to be outclassed in arithmetic. “In other words, in two more weeks I’d be even—”

  “And after that you’d actually be working with their money,” Mrs Yarmouth calculated triumphantly.

  Mr Eade gracefully conceded the mathematical honors.

  “But we’re only talking about might-have-beens,” he reminded her lugubriously. “It would have been a very nice deal, but now I’m afraid it’s another story.” He straightened his bowed shoulders with simple dignity and assembled his features into a heart-rendingly brave smile. “But I don’t want to bore you with my troubles, and we certainly mustn’t let them spoil your lunch.”

  He sustained a valorous lightness and charm for about half an hour and then allowed the first slackening of the inevitably forced conversation to develop into a silence in which Mrs Yarmouth’s thoughts could not humanly fail to go back over the details of his predicament.

  “I hope I’m not being too inquisitive,” she said, “but if you only had to borrow forty thousand dollars—”

  “Twenty thousand,” he corrected her quickly. “I’m putting up half the money myself, in any case, and I’m only sorry that’s all the cash I have available.”

  He had already assayed her expertly as being worth a twenty thousand dollar touch at the maximum, but he had discovered the psychological wheeze that a mark was much more easily induced to put up an amount which seemed to be only matching Mr Eade’s own investment than the same sum if it were represented as the entire capitalization of the venture.

  “Well, twenty thousand,” she said. “But how much were you going to have to give Mr Traustein for that?”

  “Thirty per cent of the profits.”

  “That sounds like an awful lot.”

  “I assure you, for television financing, it was very reasonable. Forty per cent is quite normal. Some people have had to pay fifty per cent. And in my situation I’ll be stuck for at least sixty—perhaps even seventy. In fact, if someone offered me twenty thousand dollars for only half the profits, right now, I’d think of them as a fairy godmother. But I don’t think anyone’s likely to.”

  Mrs Yarmouth performed another mental computation which left her goggle-eyed.

  “That’d give them five thousand dollars a week,” she said in an awed tone.

  “For thirteen weeks, anyway,” corroborated Mr Eade matter-of-factly. “Longer, of course, if StarSuds renews the contract.” He smiled again, wanly. “You see how true the saying is that Money can always make money.”

  Mrs Yarmouth went on thinking, visibly and intensely, but Mr Eade appeared to be temporarily mired in his own despondent reflections and did not interrupt her.

  It was another refinement of his technique that he hardly ever propositioned any of his victims, having found that they were much more effectively and firmly hooked if he let them suggest participation themselves and believe that it was their very own idea. He was sure that Mrs Yarmouth would not disappoint him, and she didn’t.

&
nbsp; “Do you suppose,” she said timidly, “that if I put up ten thousand dollars, it would help?”

  Mr Eade was not crude enough to leap up and dance a jig, but after he had satisfied himself that ten thousand dollars was the most cash that she could raise quickly, by selling some Government bonds and emptying her savings account, he permitted himself to develop some controlled enthusiasm.

  “I could always raise about five thousand dollars in loans from personal friends,” he mused. “I should be able to get twenty-five hundred on my Cadillac. And if I cashed in my insurance policy…You know, with your ten thousand I almost think we could swing it!”

  “Would that entitle me to a quarter of the profits?” she asked.

  “You could name your own terms.”

  “You said you’d be glad to give up half the profits for twice that amount, but I don’t want to be greedy.”

  “I can only think of you as a very generous lady,” Mr Eade said huskily.

  “And what would you think about considering my nephew for the leading man?”

  Mr Eade was not shocked—in fact, he had been expecting this even sooner.

  “As a partner—and a very important partner—you’d certainly have a voice in the casting. Of course, we do have an option on quite a big name for the part, as you know, but I haven’t signed his contract yet, and if you insisted…I’m sure Howard Mayne could do the job—I made some inquiries about him after you mentioned his name. But he’ll be away on location for at least another week, you said. That makes it more difficult. But we could shoot around him…Yes, if you want that very badly, I won’t argue with you. It’s settled,” said Mr Eade, settling his argument with himself. He gave her his hand on it, gravely, and then permitted himself to revert with a frown of partial apology to more crassly financial problems. “But do you fully understand that what it said in that letter—‘Time is of the essence’—is literally true? This is Thursday. I must have this money in my bank before they close tomorrow, because most of our costs have to be put up in advance first thing on Monday morning, or else the studio and the guilds and unions won’t let us even start shooting.”

  “I’ll send a wire to my bank in Middlebury this afternoon,” she said, “and tell them to wire me the money, and I ought to get it tomorrow morning.”

  From then on everything was so automatic that it would be tedious to recount it in detail.

  She was back before noon the next day with a cashier’s check and only realized when she laid it on Mr Eade’s desk that she had not consulted a lawyer and indeed did not know one in that city. Mr Eade thought she should not take just any lawyer but should wait until her nephew could recommend one. He produced an impressive document which actually was most conscientiously worded, for he had paid a genuine if somewhat shabby attorney fifty dollars to draw it up.

  “This is the agreement that poor Mr Traustein was going to sign. I’ve simply had my secretary substitute your name for his and alter the amount of the investment and your percentage.” He pointed out the changes. “Suppose I sign it, but you don’t. Then I’m completely committed, but if you want any changes, after you’ve talked to an attorney next week, you can insist on having them made before you sign. In that way you’ll still be in the driver’s seat.”

  Mrs Yarmouth found this thought very comforting over the weekend, until Monday brought her an alarmed telegram from Howard Mayne in answer to the long, excited letter she had written him. Then when she tried to call Mr Eade at the studio, she was told that he had given up his office on Saturday and they had no idea where he had moved.

  “You see?” said the Saint. “If you hadn’t been in such a hurry to cash in on the poor man’s misfortune, on a scale of usury that would make Shylock look like a drunken sailor—”

  “It was a very fair rate, in the circumstances,” she protested huffily. “He told me so himself.”

  “He told you so. But didn’t anything tell you that with a contract with people as big as Herbert & Shapiro and StarSuds, he shouldn’t have to cut anybody in for twenty-five hundred a week in exchange for a month’s loan of ten grand?”

  “Why didn’t you go to the police at once, Aunt Sophie?” Mayne put in.

  “Because I’m not quite as stupid as you think. If I’d done that, it would’ve been sure to get in the papers, especially if Mr Eade were caught, and you don’t think I want everyone in Middlebury laughing at what a fool I’ve made of myself, do you?” she said paradoxically.

  “That’s another thing that helps these bunco artists,” said the Saint. “Half the time the cops don’t even have a chance to do anything, because the sucker is too ashamed to let the whole story come out.”

  “I wish you would stop calling me that,” said Mrs Yarmouth. “All I want to know, since Howard has persuaded me to take you into my confidence, is whether you think you can do anything about it.”

  Simon rubbed his chin.

  “The toughest thing about that is the needle-and-haystack part,” he murmured. “I have a couple of ideas where he might go from here, but I can only promise to keep my eyes peeled. It’s lucky that snapshot you took of him in Palm Springs turned out so well.”

  Mr Eade’s movements were not completely unpredictable, for like many of his ilk he was somewhat a creature of habit. Each year, like many more respectable salesmen, he covered roughly the same circuit, which corresponded with the equally predictable migrations of human pigeons. In summer, during the tourist season, he worked the transatlantic liners and airplanes, with intermittent sojourns in London, Paris, and the Riviera. In the autumn he might shuttle between New York and Bermuda. At the turn of the year his base would be in Miami Beach, perhaps interrupted by excursions around the Caribbean, until about Easter he jumped to Southern California for the pickings of the desert season there. Then sometimes he would kill a little time in San Francisco, or cross over to Nevada, before the round started all over again.

  At the Persepolis in Las Vegas, his wife reported spotting a top-grade mark. To the uninitiated, this might sound far more providential than finding a needle in a haystack, considering the ant-like swarms of variegated citizenry which seethe continuously through such casinos, but in fact, to the fully transistorized veteran of sucker prospecting, it is hardly even an effort to winnow through the densest strata of insolvent chaff and geiger in on any lode of naïve nuggets that may be present.

  “He’s carrying a bale of bills that would choke a horse, but he never gambles more than a few bucks—that’s not what he’s here for,” she said. “He’s waiting for a divorce in about another week, and then he’s going to marry some Hollywood starlet. He’s a used-car dealer from Tucson, and he thinks he’s pretty sharp. I listened to him telling a bartender all about himself.”

  She was the same homely and efficient woman who had played the part of his secretary in the television build-up, but now, in readiness for an entirely different rôle, she was loudly dressed, excessively rouged and powdered, and conspicuously encrusted with jewels, to add up to the instantly recognizable prototype of a graceless and probably obnoxious vulgarian who had somehow succeeded in picking up much bullion and little breeding.

  “Point him out to me, my dear,” said Mr Eade.

  The next time Simon Templar sat at a bar with a vacant stool beside him, she moved onto it, expanding herself arrogantly to crowd him, and demanding the instant attention of the bartender he was talking to without even allowing him to reach the end of a sentence. It would have been impossible for him not to notice her, but she seemed superbly oblivious to the disgusted stare with which he raked her from her hennaed hair down to her pink brocade shoes.

  “Don’t be afraid to give me a full shot,” she said as the bartender was pouring. “I’m paying for it, and the house can afford it.”

  The bartender let the jigger run over till it stood in a little puddle on the counter, moved the glass of ice cubes and the soda water towards her, rang up the ticket and placed it in front of her, and silently went away. />
  “The insolence of these people!” she muttered. “Chisel you out of every drop and every nickel they can get away with, and can’t even be bothered to do it with a smile.”

  Simon said nothing, watching her with cold detachment while she put the ingredients of her highball together and swallowed it greedily, toying nervously between gulps with the glittering necklace ending in a large emerald pendant which she wore around her thick but wrinkled neck.

  She looked at the tab, slapped a dollar bill on it, and said in a penetrating rasp, “Keep the change, boy.”

  Simon studiously averted his eyes, until a sequence of rustlings and clinkings and a finally violent flouncing assured him that she had emptied her glass and left. He suffered no anxiety, for he knew that his reaction was intended to be basically emotional and that the plot would proceed whether he entered it vocally at that stage or not.

  He had time for one peaceful sip of his Peter Dawson before Mr Copplestone Eade moved in.

  Mr Eade introduced himself from somewhere near the level of the floor, by brushing against the Saint’s leg, and Simon glanced down to see him straightening up with something sparkling in his hand which he appeared to have retrieved from under the Saint’s feet.

  “Pardon me,” said Mr Eade, “but I think the lady who was with you dropped this.”

  “She wasn’t with me,” said the Saint, gallantly forbearing to quibble over whether she should be called a lady. He looked more closely at the green bauble dangling at the end of the chain of stones and recognized it at once from the way she had drawn attention to it with her fidgeting. “But I’m pretty sure that’s hers.”