Saint Errant (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  Matt Joyson was a man of about fifty with the solidly impressive bearing that one would associate with a banker or an attorney, which had been a certain asset to him in the days when he had played parts of that type in second and third road companies. Unfortunately his thespian talents were somewhat less distinguished than his appearance, and the rigors of cheap rooming houses between jobs and even worse accommodations on the road were uncongenial to a temperament conditioned by the stage-sets in which he usually appeared, so that when he met a kindred soul in the very nubile shape of the fair Luella, an ambitious ingénue who tried to pawn a watch which he unguardedly left in his dressing room, it seemed like a good time to branch out into a more comfortable career.

  They adopted into their design for living a third party, one Tod Kermein, a photographer who had fallen upon evil days on account of certain exposures to which the United States Post Office adopted a rather puritanical attitude, and Matt Joyson proceeded to develop for the troupe a cameo drama which played to extremely limited houses, but with more profit to the performers than any production in which they had previously appeared. It was still necessary to travel from time to time, but the runs in any given town were usually longer than the engagements to which they had been accustomed, and by mutual co-operation and keeping a watchful eye on each other’s sleight of hand in the division of the spoils they had achieved a very pleasant and profitable way of life by the time they reached Los Angeles and the purview of Simon Templar.

  The Saint (as he was known to his friends, most of whom were still alive, and just as well to his enemies, many of whom were not so lucky) was not looking for trouble at the time. He was, as a matter of fact, looking for something a lot harder to find.

  “I’m sorry, Mr Templar,” said the assistant manager at the Hollywood Plaza, “but we daren’t make any exceptions. Your five days are up tomorrow, and we must have your room.”

  “Who are you going to give it to?” Simon protested.

  “Probably to somebody who’s just being thrown out of the Roosevelt,” answered the manager philosophically, and added hastily, “but I don’t think it would help you to rush over there. They’ve certainly got somebody waiting who’s just being thrown out of the Ambassador.”

  Patricia Holm, with her shining golden head at the Saint’s shoulder, brought her blue eyes into play.

  “Isn’t there anything you could do,” she pleaded, “to let a couple of nice people into this private game of musical chambers?”

  The man swooned but was helpless.

  “If I could solve that one,” he said, “I wouldn’t have to work here.”

  The Saint took her arm.

  “Leave us drink some lunch,” he said, “and brood about life in this nation of nomads.”

  The adjoining restaurant was cool and surprisingly quiet. They sat in a booth and ordered drinks. The Saint lighted cigarettes for them both.

  “Well, old darling,” he said, “I suppose we could always get several reservations on the night train to San Francisco, and a lot more reservations on the train back. We could spend every second day there and every other day here, and live in a compartment. After a month, it’d be the same as spending two weeks in each place.”

  “We could plant a potato in a pot,” said the girl wistfully, “and in six months we’d have vines trained over the window.”

  The Saint sighed.

  It was, he thought, an unjustly humiliating complication in the life of any self-respecting buccaneer. There had been other times when it had been difficult for him to stay in sundry towns, but those repulses had always been sponsored either by the police, who disapproved of him on principle, or by certain citizens who preferred to have only the police to contend with. Here he had done no harm and planned none—so far…He gazed moodily about the room, and it was at that moment, although neither of them thought anything of it at the time, that he made his first contact with the life of Luella Joyson.

  She happened to be sitting at an adjoining table with an Air Force top sergeant, whose voice carried clearly to Simons ears.

  “These real-estate prices have lost their altimeters,” the sergeant was saying. “But what’s a guy gonna do? This climate agrees with my kid, and my wife’s nuts about it. I’ve gotta give ’em a roof if it takes all my mustering-out and accrued pay.”

  His companion smiled, and the Saint’s eyes focused on her. Her smile was one of Luella’s most valuable assets. It was fashioned with wide, fun lips exquisitely accented in a shade of shocking pink which matched the hue of her Adrian suit. The smile crinkled bewitchingly in the corners of long dark eyes. Between the red lips gleamed small even teeth, and a man instinctively wondered how it would feel to be bitten by them—lightly and without passion. This pleasing prospect was framed in shining black hair rippling to sleek square shoulders, and topped by an attractive but unnecessary scrap of hat.

  When she spoke, the lazy promise in her voice brought the Saint to full attention.

  “I know the spot you’re in, Sergeant—er, Bill—I can call you Bill, can’t I? The price is too high. I didn’t set it; I can’t do anything about that. But I’ll tell you what I can do. For you, Bill. I’ll knock my commission off the price.”

  She laid a small white hand over the sergeant’s muscular brown paw for one brief instant, in a gesture compounded charmingly of propitiation and appeal.

  A frown dwelt momentarily on the sergeant’s rugged young features. Then his gray eyes softened, and a corner of his straight-across mouth twisted upward.

  “That’s pretty damned sweet of you, Miss, uh, Luella—”

  “Just plain Luella, Bill.”

  “Okay, Luella. It’s swell of you, but I can’t let you do it. You’ve got to make a living.”

  “Let me worry about that, Bill. I’ll just add it on to my next sale, to somebody who made his pile while you were out there on a Fortress.”

  “If you put it like that—you’re sweet to do it, though.”

  “It’s a pleasure—Bill.” Abruptly she became businesslike. “Finished? Then let’s go on up to my place and get the forms made out and signed.”

  The Saint watched them go, not failing to note that Luella’s legs tapered to slim ankles which would have wrung a whistle from a real timber wolf.

  “That’s quite a gal,” he observed, in a fatherly way.

  “I noticed you taking in her personality,” retorted his lady. “Beautiful, weren’t they?”

  Simon tossed her a sad sweet smile.

  “It’s the artist in me. I see pretty women simply as interesting masses of light, shadow, and line.”

  “Curved lines, of course.”

  “Of course. Did you notice, darling Pat, that there was a certain note in that conversation, on which we so shamelessly eavesdropped, which didn’t quite belong?”

  Patricia frowned.

  “Well…I…she was flirting with the sergeant—a little. But who wouldn’t? He’s nice-looking, in a craggy sort of way. His kind of crisp curly hair always gives women itchy fingers.”

  “I always wondered what did it,” murmured the Saint. “Ah, the patter of little fingers through one’s locks…!” He dropped his bantering tone for one laced with puzzlement. “But there was something off key. Her ‘place’? That usually means an apartment. Why her apartment? She’s a female real-estate agent—why not an office? Oh well…” He shrugged. “The sergeant is a lucky character, Pat. He has—or will shortly have—a place to lay his head, and those of his family. Which he most certainly deserves, but which doesn’t help us. However, it does give me an idea.”

  “Don’t let it run away with you,” said Patricia tartly. “You haven’t seen his wife yet.”

  The Saint ran a hand over his dark head.

  “Darling, my thoughts would get a special award from the Hays office. It only occurred to me that there may be a solution to this hotel business. Why do we have to go through this routine with the hotels? Why don’t we just take an apartment, and when we�
��re tired of the place we’ll just rent it and move on.”

  This was an interesting idea while it lasted, which was for some three hours after lunch. In that time they had an intensive refresher course in the topography of Hollywood and Beverly Hills, made the acquaintance of a couple of dozen real-estate agents and twice that many apartment managers, and came painfully to the conclusion that several thousand other people had had the same idea first.

  “You’d better do something about those train reservations,” Patricia said finally. “I’m going to sink myself in a bubble bath and think about the life of a traveling salesman.”

  “Make yourself beautiful, and we’ll go dancing somewhere,” Simon told her. “I’ll go over to the Brown Derby and drown a sorrow, and catch up with you.”

  There was just one vacant place at the bar, and as the Saint slid into it and ordered a Peter Dawson he recognized the soldier on the next stool, and felt the first premonitory flutter of psychic moth wings as the pattern of coincidence began to build. For his neighbor was the sergeant to whom his attention had been indirectly drawn at lunch time.

  Only it was a very different-looking sergeant with the same face. His eyes stared a light-year into space, his straight lips were frozen into a white line, and his fingertips also were white from the force with which they pressed on the bar. He looked less like a man with a beautiful piece of real estate and a beautiful realtress thrown in than anything the Saint could imagine.

  Simon Templar’s reflexes of observation and curiosity were automatic. The form of his response was just as spontaneous even when it seemed most theatrical, for his sense of drama had a fundamental impishness that was as natural to him as breathing. He managed to corner the sergeant’s blank stare for an instant, and said, “Did you lose out on the house or the babe—or both?”

  The soldier’s eyes came stiffly into focus. “What’s that?”

  “You don’t,” said the Saint with a smile, “look like a man who’s found a place to live ought to look, in this day and age.”

  He was expecting a reaction, but nothing like what he got.

  The head which Pat had admired a few hours earlier swung towards him with an expression that only seemed to belong with a gunsight. One of the hands on the bar balled into a white-knuckled fist, and the shoulder muscles tensed under the olive drab.

  “Who’re you?” the young mouth snarled. “Whadda you know about it?”

  “Take it easy,” drawled the Saint softly. “I’m just the innocent bystander and I’d like to avoid his traditional fate. I just happened to be sitting at the next table to you at lunch—remember?—And I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation with the lovely Luella.”

  “That —— !” The sergeant used a one-syllable expletive and inventoried the dregs of his vocabulary for kindred honorifics reflecting variously on her character, morals, charms, and ancestry—which was, one inferred, dubious.

  The bartender brought a drink. The Saint tasted it, and felt the moth wings of anticipation grow firmer. Like fingers on his spine.

  “Then you didn’t buy a house?” he asked mildly.

  The soldier reached into one of his blouse pockets, his face still frozen, but the deadliness gone from his eyes. He produced a film holder of the type and size used in a Speed Graphic camera. He tossed it onto the bar.

  “There’s my house,” he said viciously. “How do you like the color scheme? Isn’t it swell, with all the pepper trees around it? And the closed back yard for the kid to play in, just like the doctor said. But what I like best is the view—Baldy, Mount Wilson, and Catalina on a clear day. That’s my house, whoever you are, fourteen hundred bucks’ worth, by God!”

  The Saint’s chiseled features developed set lines of their own. He picked up the film holder, turned it over in his hands.

  “There’s a negative in this, of course?”

  “Sure. A picture of Luella. A keepsake!”

  “In—er—underthings?”

  “Underthings, hell. In practically nothing.”

  “And you?”

  The boy blushed, the rich red visibly flooding up his neck and ears in the low-lit bar, and the Saint saw that he really was quite young.

  “The badger game,” Simon remarked.

  “I guess so.” The sergeant wrung the miserable words from deep inside him. “I knew it, the minute these two guys broke in. One of ’em was a ‘private detective’—they said—with a camera. Sure—I was a dope. But she’s a sexy, good-looking babe, and I’m human.” He laughed briefly and bitterly. “So I was a sucker, and I figured she saw a big healthy guy and a chance to make beautiful music. A chance to make beautiful money, I would say. Well, she did.”

  He drained the rest of his drink and beckoned the bartender.

  “So after she got your name, and address, and your wife’s first name—” prompted the Saint.

  “Well, then it was time to draw up a bill of sale. And she said, ‘Excuse me, Bill, I have something to do in the bedroom for a minute.’ Well, you heard her voice. You know what she can promise you, just talking about the weather.”

  The Saint felt a familiar anger growing within him. He saw the picture clearly—a not very complicated picture: the soldier, his pockets crammed with accumulated pay, home to his wife and son from the wars. Probably the wife had come to the Coast to wait for him, moved in with Aunt Mabel pending his return. Probably she was named something like Lola May.

  “What’s your wife’s name?” the Saint asked irrelevantly.

  “Lola May. Why—”

  “Nothing at all.”

  And so, “ruptured duck” conspicuous on his blouse, his six stripes heralding relative solvency, his candid gray eyes clean of suspicion, he was the ideal candidate for one of crook-dom’s oldest and dirtiest rackets—with a new and up-to-date come-on.

  “So then,” said the Saint, “she came out of the bedroom in something that was next to nothing and in less time than it takes to tell it you were in a, shall we chastely say, compromising position.”

  The sergeant glared.

  “It wasn’t quite that way,” he amended. “She launched herself at me like a runaway steam roller.”

  “I see. In any event, when the door opened—”

  “They came in through the window. Off the fire escape.”

  “Um. Authentic touch, that. When the window opened to admit her—‘husband’ and the ‘detective’ with his little camera, the exploding flash bulb illumined a scene in which one and one added up to a very damning two.”

  “You ain’t just whistling ‘Dixie.’ ”

  “And now, the Outraged Husband has the floor. For a long time, and I quote, he has suspected that this Abandoned Woman is up to just this sort of thing. Here, at long last, is pictorial evidence to convince the most skeptical judge. The fact that it involves you, Bill, is unfortunate, but—”

  “That’s just what he said.” The sergeant’s bitter voice took it up. “ ‘I hate to mix you up in something like this, soldier, but it’s already cost me more than I can afford to get the goods on her.’ ”

  “Luella has withdrawn to the bedroom, weeping,” supplied the Saint.

  “She did a runout, all right. Well, by that time I knew I’d been had. It’s been three years since I saw my wife and the little guy; I couldn’t start off with something like this, could I? So the next move was up to me. I asked him how much it would take to keep the detectives going till he got some other evidence.”

  “Which amount,” Simon observed, “by a strange coincidence, was exactly the sum Luella had been prepared to accept as a down payment on a house.”

  “It was a smooth act,” agreed the veteran miserably.

  “So you paid him the money, the ‘detective’ handed you an exposed negative, and—exit one sergeant.”

  “You seem to know an awful lot about these things,” observed the soldier, a thin edge of his earlier truculence creeping back into his voice. “Just who the hell are you?”

&
nbsp; “My name,” said the Saint, “is Simon Templar.”

  “Templar!” The sergeant took a long look. “But you’re not—you mean…”

  Simon nodded.

  “The Saint! The…the Robin Hood of Modern Crime!”

  “As the headline writers say,” Simon confessed wryly.

  “Well—uh, glad to meet you.” They shook hands, the sergeant rather bemused, it seemed. He gulped at his drink. “Where do you fit into this?” he blurted.

  “That is what I’m wondering,” said Simon Templar, and the banter was gone from his voice, the blue eyes tempered to damascene hardness. “But I know I belong somewhere.” He emptied his glass thoughtfully and signaled for a refill. “I think you and I had better get serious about Operation Luella, Sergeant. Brief me on where she hangs out and how the pickup works.”

  The prime tactical problem was hardly a problem at all to a pirate of Simon Templar’s experience. Nor was the role which he selected for the immediate performance. With one or two subtle changes to his appearance that could hardly be called make-up, and one or two props that were scarcely props at all, and a change of voice and bearing that was a matter of infinitesimal modulations, he could put on another personality as a man might put on a coat, and only an audience that knew he was acting would even appreciate the masterpieces that he created.

  “This one shows the two boys in front of my summer place at Carmel,” the Saint was saying late the next afternoon. “Oldest one’s twelve. Little devil, but smart as a whip.” He beamed with fatherly pride.

  “The young one looks like you, Mr Taggart,” said the lady known as Luella.

  “Well, thanks, Miss, uh—”