Leslie Charteris - Saint Errant

“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?”

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

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