Leslie Charteris - Call for the Saint

“Where?”

“Second floor. Room by the stairs — uh !”

“Front or back?”

“Back—”

“Thank you, Frankie,” Simon said, and his hands moved swiftly.

He jumped up. Frankie did not.

“He’s fainted,” the Saint gasped in well-simulated alarm. “It may be his heart... Get a doctor!”

He leaped down from the platform and hurried towards the nearest exit, but Kearney caught him before he had gone more than a few steps.

“Just a minute,” Kearney snarled. “What did you do to that guy?”

“I gave him a mild chiropractic treatment,” said the Saint wintrily. “I know it wasn’t as good as you could have done at headquarters, but I thought a rubber hose might have been rather conspicuous. He’ll wake up in about ten minutes and be as good as new.”

The detective kept hold of his arm.

“What’s the idea, anyway? And where do you think you’re going?”

“I think I’m going to search this hotel, without bothering about a warrant,” Simon answered in a flat voice. “Because my idea is that Monica Varing is being kept a prisoner here.”

“The actress? Are you crazy?”

“I don’t think so. In fact, just before Frankie passed out he told me she was upstairs.”

Those of the audience who had moved were crowding towards the stage to obstruct the efforts of the first eager beavers who had moved to offer Frankie Weiss first aid. The others cast glances at the Saint but did not try to get near him, being probably kept at a distance by the presence of Kearney as much as anything else, so that the two of them might almost have been alone in the crowded room. At least until Mrs Wingate bore down upon them, with Stephen Elliott bobbing like a towed dinghy in her wake.

“Whatever is the matter?” she squeaked frantically. “This is terrible—”

“You tell them, Alvin,” Simon suggested; and with a side-step as swift and light as a ballet dancer he made way for Mrs Wingate to plough into a berth between them, and vanished through the door he had originally been heading for before the detective had the remotest chance of circumnavigating Mrs Wingate’s bulk to intercept him.

Simon raced up the stairs to the ground floor and from there to the second without interference. There were four doors back of the stairs, and he flung each of them open in turn. None of them was locked. Two of the rooms were six-bed dormitories, empty, but smelling rancidly of habitation. In the third room a very old man with a pock-marked face looked up with an idiotic grin from a game of solitaire.

The fourth room was empty — not only empty, but so cleaned out that it had the same prison bareness that he had found in the room he himself had occupied the night before. There were rumples in the bed that didn’t follow the same contours as careless bed making, and he saw that the opaque window glass contained the same fused-in-netting as his own window had had, even before his nostrils detected the mustiness of the air, a clear fragrance that could only be Monica...

Kearney caught up with him there a moment later and stuck a gun into his ribs.

“All right, Mr Saint,” he grated. “Don’t try anything else, or I’ll blast you.”

“You blathering nitwit,” said the Saint, with icy calm. “Why couldn’t you stay downstairs and make sure they wouldn’t smuggle her out?”

“From where?” Kearney jeered.

“From here. Frankie told me the truth. She was in this room. Don’t you smell anything?”

The detective sniffed.

“It smells lousy to me.”

Simon’s eye caught a gleam on the floor. He ignored Kearney’s revolver entirely to step forward and pick it up.

“Look.”

“A tooth out of a comb,” Kearney said scornfully. “So what?”

“A spring tooth,” Simon said, “from the kind of comb women wear in their hair. And dark red-brown — the colour she’d use.”

Mrs Wingate and Stephen Elliott caught both of them up at that point. The philanthropist was quivering with a kind of pale-lipped restraint.

“This is the most outrageous suggestion I’ve ever heard, Mr Templar,” he said. “Lieutenant Kearney tells me—”

“Oh. I do hope you’re mistaken!” babbled Laura Wingate. “She’s such a sweet person. I’d die if anything happened to her.”

“If anything happened to her, it would not be here,” Elliott stated frostily. “Lieutenant, I think you’d better take Mr Templar and his accusations to the proper authority.”

Kearney nodded.

“It’ll be a pleasure, Mr Elliott.”

“In spite of the comb?” Simon persisted.

“We have quite a number of lady guests,” Elliott said stiffly. “If that is any grounds for this kind of behaviour—”

“It isn’t,” Kearney said. “And I’m going to enjoy booking the Saint on charges of disturbing the peace, just to keep him quiet for a while.” He prodded Simon again with his gun. “Come along, you.”

“I loved your show,” Mrs Wingate trilled, apparently feeling that some expression was due from her. “You must do it for us again one day.”

Simon and Kearney went downstairs, passing a barrage of eyes that had seeped up from the basement.

“By the way,” Simon said, “Frankie is wearing a gun.”

“He has a permit,” Kearney said. “I know the judge who issued it. Keep going.”

They went out to the sidewalk, and there was a brief but awkward pause while the total cablessness of the street established itself.

“Why don’t we take my car?” suggested the Saint accommodatingly. “It’s right here.”

“Okay,” Kearney said belligerently. “I’ll let you drive it — and just don’t try anything.”

He opened the door and followed Simon in. While the Saint was still fitting the key in the lock he reached over and snapped one loop of a pair of handcuffs over Simon’s left wrist. The other cuff he secured to the steering wheel.

“All right,” he said grimly. “Let’s go.”

Simon started the engine and nursed the car north for a few blocks. Kearney held the revolver in his lap and glowered with rather strenuously sustained triumph.

“How about your big case against me?” Simon asked after a while. “Aside from my breaches of the peace, I mean. Is that coming along?”

Kearney flexed his jaw muscles.

“We got a letter this afternoon. It was addressed to the Chief, and it was signed by Cleve Friend. It said he was mixed up in some deal with you and he was trying to get out of it because he’d got cold feet. And he was afraid you wouldn’t let him get out. You’d threatened to kill him unless he played along. The letter said he was leaving it with a friend, to be mailed if he — died.”

The Saint kept his eyes straight ahead.

“Did you check the signature?”

“It was Friend’s signature all right. A little shaky, but it compared.”

“Shaky?” Simon pondered. “And I bet the letter itself was typewritten.”

“It was.”

“It would be. Either Friend signed under the influence of scopolamine — which is a hypnotic — or else he was tortured into signing it.”

“You can explain anything, can’t you?” Kearney gibed. “Somebody’s trying to frame you, of course.”

“Of course,” Simon agreed coolly. “That should be obvious, even to a policeman.”

“Yeah? And how did they make this Varing dame disappear?”

“Probably through a secret passage...”

His voice trailed away as the thought hit him like a splash of cold water between the eyes.

“My God,” he said softly. “Secret passages. Of course. What a feeble-minded flop I am!”

“Hey!” Kearney squawked suddenly. “Where do you think you’re going? This ain’t the way to Headquarters.”