Leslie Charteris - The Saint in Miami

"He comes here," said Gallipolis. "But he's been coming on and off for two years."

"Know anythin' about him?"

"No more than anybody else who comes here. I know what he looks like and how much he spends."

The Greek's limpid-eyed sincerity was as transparent as it had been when he told Simon quite a different story.

Haskins ambled over to a comer and ejected his chew with off-hand accuracy into a convenient cuspidor.

"This business is gettin' so danged tangled up," he announced as he came back, "it's like watchin' a snake eatin' its own tail. If it keeps on long enough there won't be nuth'n left at all."

"Perhaps," Simon advanced mildly, "you'd save yourself a lot of headaches if you took Lafe back to your office and saw what you could get out of him there."

The Sheriff was troubled. He searched beyond the Saint's serious tone for some justification of his feeling of being taken for a ride. It was difficult to define the glint in the Saint's scapegrace blue eyes as one of open mockery; and yet…

"An' where will you be," he asked, "while that's goin' on?"

"I might see if I can get a line on this Rogers bird," said the Saint. "But you know where to get in touch with me if you need me again."

"Look, son." Haskins' long nose moved closer, backed by a narrowing stare. "Whether or not you know it, you've done me a right smart good turn today. Lafe's meaner 'n gar broth, an' wanted bad. I'll be plenty happy to see him tucked away. But I don't want no more trouble on account o' you. Suppose now we all go back to town peaceable like, an' you leave the findin' of this Rogers to me."

Simon took out a pack of cigarettes and meditatively selected one.

He felt even more uncannily as if he were a puppet that was being taken through some conspicuous but meaningless part of a complex choreography, while the real motif was still running in incomprehensible counterpoint Too many people seemed to be too completely genuine to too little purpose.

There was, of course, the girl Karen, who might be classed as an unknown quantity. But it was impossible to visualise the pickle-pussed Lafe Jennet, no matter what his status as a marksman might be, as an embryo Machiavelli. Gallipolis had displayed several paradoxical characteristics, but the Saint felt ridiculously and unreasonably certain that among all of them there was a perplexity which contradicted the part of a conspirator. And there could be no doubt at all about the Sheriff. Newt Haskins might speak with a drawl and chew tobacco and move slothfully under the southern sun, but his slothfulness was that of a lizard which could wake into lightning swiftness. He had quite unmistakably the rare gem-like clarity of character of a man whom no fear or fortune could ever swerve from his arid conception of duty. And yet his arrival that afternoon had a timeliness which seemed to be an integral part of an elusive pattern.

No abstract extrapolation could ever make order out of it, Simon concluded. And so the only thing still was to find out — to let his own natural impulses take their course, and see where they led him.

"I just hate being shot at," he said amicably, "especially by proxy. And I don't think I'd be violating any law by looking for a guy named Rogers if I wanted to. Or would I?"

Haskins stared at him for the briefest part of a minute. His lean weatherbeaten face was as unemotional as a piece of old leather.

"No. son," he said at last. "Just lookin' for a guy named Rogers won't be violatin' no laws…" He turned abruptly, grasped Jennet by the collar, and propelled him towards the door. "Git goin', Lafe." He glanced back at the Saint once more, from the doorway. "I'll be around," he said, and went out.

Simon lounged languidly against the bar, and tried to put a smoke-ring over the neck of a bottle.

Gallipolis used the peephole to assure himself that Haskins and Jennet had really gone. He turned his face back from the aperture with a discouraged air.

"The hell with it." He waggled his curly head from side to side, and looked at the Saint "Are you going too, or have you got any more trouble?"

"You've still got my gun," Simon reminded him.

The Greek seemed to brood about it. Then he slid back the bar and picked out the Luger from his cache. He handed it to Simon butt foremost.

"Okay," he said. "Now what?"

Simon holstered the gun.

"Why didn't you tell the Sheriff what you told me about Rogers?"

"Hell," said Gallipolis, "I should help him? I hope you find Rogers. He might have made trouble for me here."

"What else do you know?"

"Not a thing, friend." Gallipolis replaced the bar, with a movement of gentle finality. "I guess I better see what's left of Frank. You wouldn't want to take a job dealing stud for me?" Before Simon could think of any fitting way of declining the compliment, he answered his own question with a mournful "No," and disappeared down the hall.

The Saint straightened himself with an infinitesimally preoccupied shrug.

"I guess we might as well blow, too, Hoppy," he said. "But it all looks too damned easy."

"Dat's what I t'ought," agreed Mr Uniatz complacently.

For once it was Simon Templar who did the delayed take. He had reached the foot of the gangplank, busy with other thoughts, when it dawned abashingly on him that his low esteem for Hoppy's mental alertness might after all have been unjust He half stopped.

"How did you work it out?"

Mr Uniatz removed the bottle neck from his lips with a noise like a dying drain.

"It's easy, boss." Mr Uniatz expanded with pleasure at being accepted, if only temporarily, into the usually closed councils of the Saint's gigantic brain. "All we gotta do is find de Pool."

A faint frown began to mar the Saint's heartening attention.

"What pool?"

"De Pool you talk to March about on de boat," Hoppy explained darkly. "I got it all figgered out. De Greek says it comes from a spring, but dat's a stall. It comes from dis Foreign Pool we're lookin' for. Dat's de racket I got it all figgered out," said Mr Uniatz, clinching his point with rhetorical simplicity.

Simon Templar had enjoyed a long drink which did not peel the last remaining membranes from his throat; he had told his inconclusive story to Peter and Patricia; he had showered refreshingly; and he had changed at leisure into dress trousers, soft shirt, and cummerbund. He was perfecting the set of a maroon bow tie when Desdemona knocked on his door and proclaimed disapprovingly: "Dey's a lady to see you."

"Who is it?" he asked, from habit, but his circulation changed tempo like a schoolboy's.

"Same one who was here dis mawnin'."

He heard the Negress flat-footing disdainfully away as he slipped into a fresh white mess jacket.

Karen Leith was in the patio, and her loveliness almost stopped him. She was wearing some unelaborately costly trifle of white, gathered close about breast and waist and billowing into extravagant fullness below. The tinted patio lights touched the folds with some of the sunset colours of her hair. Otherwise it was all white, except for a thin green chiffon handkerchief tucked into a narrow gold belt at her waist.

"So you made it," said the Saint

"You asked me."

Her lips were so fresh and cool, smiling at him, that it was an effort not to repeat his performance of the morning, even though there could be no excuse for it now.

"I couldn't believe I was so irresistible," he said.

"I thought it over all day, and decided to come… Besides, it made Randy so mad."

"Doesn't that matter?"

"He hasn't bought me — yet."

"But you told him."

"Why not? I'm free, white, and — twentyfive. I had to tell him, anyway. I asked Haskins not to tell, but I realised I couldn't trust him. Suppose he'd gone ambling off in his quiet crafty way and told Randy, just to see what he could stir up. It'd 've looked quite bad if I hadn't said it first."