Leslie Charteris - Saint Errant

“What’s the matter? Did—”

“Talk later. All I know is there’s going to be some kind of beef. So we’re blowing. Put the pictures and the cash in a bag and come down the fire escape. The car’s in the alley. We’ll meet you there.”

“I’ve got clothes to pack.”

“I’m not taking any raps for your wardrobe. I’ve got a hunch about this. You can get more clothes in San Francisco, but you can’t in Tehachapi. We’ll give you ten minutes.”

Luella Joyson heard the click as he hung up, and wasted some good expletives on an unresponsive microphone.

Then, with a shrug of her comely shoulders, she went to a closet in the bedroom and dragged out a large suitcase and opened it. It contained several bulky envelopes of uniform size, but even after the addition of a dozen thick stacks of medium-denomination currency which she retrieved from various hiding places in the apartment, there was still room for a small armful of her most expensive clothes.

She put on a fur coat, snapped the bag shut, picked it up, and paused for a last regretful look around the inviting room. Then she stepped through the open window onto the fire escape.

She dropped lightly from the bottom of the last ladder to the alley pavement, almost beside a shiny low-slung sedan. Opening the door, she shoved the bag in and looked up and down the gloomy canyon between tall apartment buildings like the one she had left.

Two figures debouched into the alley from the street and came toward her, silhouetted against the opening, and she recognized Joyson and Kermein. She started to climb into the car — and stopped, as the sound of voices reached her.

At the end of the alley, where two shapes had been visible a second ago, there were now four. And then she heard a voice she recognized.

“I want you boys to meet a friend of mine,” said the grim tones of Sergeant Bill Harvey, followed on the instant by the sound of knuckles and jaws in violent collision. The group of shadows leaped into frenetic motion and gave off scrambled sound effects of flesh smacking flesh, scuffling feet, smothered grunts, and gasps of pain.

Luella snatched off a high-heeled shoe and hobbled swiftly toward the commotion, but as she ran, it resolved itself into two recumbent shapes, with two more moving swiftly toward the street. They were gone by the time Luella reached the scene.

She had a sickening suspicion of the identity of the fallen two even before she bent over them, but as she stooped, a fresh horrifying sound jerked her bolt upright again. The sound was the starting of a car’s engine.

Uttering a small scream, Luella sprang towards the long black sedan.

The taillight seemed to wink mockingly at her as it dwindled toward the far end of the alley and vanished into the street.

The photographer called Smith, whose obviously new civilian clothes would normally have branded him at once to a less rattled Matthew Joyson, leered at the 4x5 print and chuckled.

“Sarge, do you look silly,” he remarked.

“Go to hell, Corporal,” said Sergeant Harvey genially. He tore the picture and the negative into small pieces and scattered them out of the car window.

“I didn’t think they’d ever part with a negative,” said the Saint. “You’d have felt fine in a few months when Brother Joyson dropped in and told you how sorry he was he hadn’t been able to get any more evidence with your dough, and he was going to have to cite you as correspondent after all — unless, of course, you wanted to finance some more detectives.”

“All the pictures have names and address on them,” confirmed Patricia, who was going through the suitcase in the back of the car while they drove.

“So a lot of people will have a pleasant surprise when they get ’em back. That’s why it had to be played my way, so the gang’d be sure to pack everything up and drop it in our laps. Sometimes I think a great psychologist was lost in me.”

Simon Templar eased the sedan around a corner and parked it behind his own convertible.

“A very satisfactory evening,” he remarked. “What else have you got in that suitcase besides clothes, Pat?”

She handed him one of the bundles of greenbacks, and the Saint grinned.

“Fourteen hundred bucks, wasn’t it, Bill?” He flipped off the bills. “And the rest I suppose we’ll have to divvy up and send back to the original donors — less, of course, our fee for collection.”

Bill Harvey said, “I can’t tell you how swell you’ve been, sir. If it hadn’t been for you—”

“Forget it,” said the Saint. “I can’t tell you how much fun it was.”

Patricia Holm harked back to that, broodingly, some minutes later when they were driving away in their own car.

“I suppose you did have fun,” she said thoughtfully. “Maybe it’s a good thing you knew I was waiting to break into that bedroom.”

Simon chuckled.

“Darling, I’m sure everything would have continued on a high spiritual plane.”

“Which reminds me somehow,” she said, “did you reserve that Pullman?”

“We aren’t going to need it. You don’t think for a moment that Luella and Co are going to stop traveling now, do you? We are probably the only people in Los Angeles who know where there’s an apartment vacant tonight — and I’ve still got Luella’s keys from their car,” said the Saint.

Simon Templar propped one well-shod foot on the tarnished brass rail of the Bonanza City Hotel bar, and idly speculated on the assortment of footgear which had probably graced this brazen cylinder in its time — prospectors’ alkali-caked boots, miners’ hobnails, scouts’ buckskins, cowhands’ high heels... and now his own dully gleaming cordovan, resting there for a long cool one to break the baking monotony of the miles of steaming asphalt which had San Francisco as their goal.

But it was quite certain that none of the boots which in diverse decades had parked themselves on that time-mellowed prop had ever carried a more picturesque outlaw, even though there was no skull and crossbones on his softly battered hat, and no pearl-handled six-shooters clung to his thighs. For Simon Templar had made a new business out of buccaneering, and hardly one of the lawbreakers and law-enforcers who knew him better under his sobriquet of the Saint could have given a valid reason why the source of so much trouble should ever have acquired such a name. The Saint himself would have found that just as hard to answer: in his own estimation he was almost as good as his name, and he would have maintained at the stake that most of the things that happened to him were not of his inviting. The one remarkable thing was how regular they conspired to invite him.

Which was what started to happen again at that precise moment, although as it began he was still far from realizing where it might go.

He was examining the mirrored reflections of sundry characters draped along the mahogany rim (which still boasted the autograph of a Prince of Wales under a screwed-down glass plate) and wondering if any of them inhabited the paintless houses outside, when he felt a touch on his arm.

“Would it be worth a drink t’see the Marvel of the Age, stranger?”

An anticipatory hush seemed to settle gradually on the small dark room. Simon could see in the mirror that each of the characters who decorated the perimeter of the horseshoe stiffened a little as the reedy voice broke the quiet. Brown hands tensed a little around their glasses, and a covert wink was exchanged between the unmistakable cognoscenti.

The Saint turned to look down into a saddle-tanned seamed face studded with mild blue eyes and topped by this gray hair. The blue jeans were faded, so was the khaki shirt, and the red necktie ran through a carven bone clasp. The look in the blue eyes said that their owner expected an order to get the hell from underfoot — or at best the polite brush-off which was already on Simon Templar’s lips.