Leslie Charteris - Thanks to the Saint

“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.”

There 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.”

Mr Eade sadly extracted the other twenty-three bills from a distended wallet. Simon picked up the total and added one more green leaf from the pile on the table.

“That’s the extra twenty she squeezed out of me for the pendant,” he explained. “Some of that other lettuce will be part of the ten grand they got from Mrs Yarmouth, and no doubt Copplestone has the rest of it. I guess they kept everything split fifty-fifty — more or less. You’d better impound it, anyway. I’ll call Mrs Yarmouth right away and tell her it’s safe and have her go to the police in Los Angeles and get the extradition machinery started.”

Mr Copplestone Eade, after a long reproachful gaze at his spouse, turned with a sigh and conjured further wads of negotiable paper from various pockets. He was above all things a practical man and knew when to abandon a line that would obviously get him nowhere.

“Here is five thousand dollars,” he said. “My wife, I’m sure, will be glad to contribute the other five. As you surmised, we split fifty-fifty — more or less. Shall we be realistic? Extradition proceedings can be tiresome. And trials can be lengthy, and embarrassing to all parties. And during all that time the money would be tied up by the Court. Don’t you think that if she got it all back at once, like you’ve got back yours, she could be persuaded to drop the charges?”

Simon Templar only gave an impression of pondering this.