Leslie Charteris - The Saint to the Rescue

After their talk had reached an encouraging stage of warmth and relaxation, the Saint was able to say in the most spontaneous conversational manner:

“One thing I’ve often wondered about, Mr Rood. Aren’t you ever afraid that some of your ex-clients might start worrying about you as a sort of security risk?”

“Good heavens, no!” responded the advocate, in genuine astonishment. “They were all innocent men, wrongfully accused, and so proven by due process of law, as the records show.”

“Naturally. But many of them were at least generally rumored, shall we say, to have been involved in some rather dubious activities aside from the crimes they were actually charged with. In preparing their defense, you may easily have had access to a lot of incidental information about other associations or misbehaviors which could be very embarrassing for them if you talked too much.”

“That might be true. But an ethical lawyer’s confidence is as sacred as the confessional.”

“The underworld doesn’t put much faith in lofty principles,” said the Saint. “I must be a little more frank. Because of my job, I have some rather peculiar contacts. The other day I happened to mention you and the idea we’ve been discussing to a man whom of course I can’t name, who has some rather special connections of his own. He told me he’d heard that some big fellows were wondering if you weren’t getting to know too much for your own good, and that you mightn’t be around so much longer.”

Mr Rood rubbed his chin.

“That’s an extraordinary notion. I can think of no reason why anyone would doubt me.”

“But of course you’ve taken precautions, just in case some trigger-happy mobster got ideas.”

“What sort of precautions?” asked the attorney guardedly.

“Like making a list of the men most likely to worry about you, with some notes on the reasons why, and leaving it in safe hands with instructions to deliver it to the police if you should die of anything but the most in-contestably natural causes, and dropping a tactful word in the right places about what you’ve done.”

“Oh, that, obviously,” said Mr Rood, in a tone which betrayed to Simon’s hypersensitive ear that the thought had just begun to commend itself.

The Saint had achieved his object, and there was no point in prolonging the interview.

“Then I won’t worry about being able to finish this job, once we get it started,” he said cheerfully, and stood up. “I hope I’ll have some news for you in a week or two. And thanks for sparing me so much of your valuable time.”

“You have a very interesting proposition, Mr Simons,” said Carlton Rood heartily, shaking his hand with a large and adhesive paw. “I’ll look forward to hearing more from you.”

Yet another visitor came late that night, bypassing the janitor and climbing ten flights of emergency stairs to unlock the office through a neat hole cut in the glass upper panel of the entrance door. This visitor broke into several filing cabinets and strewed their contents over the floor, but did not try to tackle the massive safe in which all really important papers were kept. He took nothing except about two hundred dollars which he found in the petty cash box — the Saint could be munificently generous when he chose, but could never resist the smallest tax-free contribution towards his non-deductible expenses when it could be taken from the right coffers.

Mr Rood was not unduly perturbed by this minor larceny and vandalism, but nevertheless it aggravated an irksome hangnail of dubiety which had been scuffed up by the affable “Tom Simons.” And he was enough of a believer in symbols to take it as a direct providential nudge to procrastinate no longer over the simple practical suggestion that had been made to him. He canceled a dinner engagement the next night, and spent the evening at work on a highly inflammable document intended only for posthumous publication.

Long before that, Simon Templar had telephoned Santa Barbara again.

“She seems to be doing all right,” said his friend. “But it will still be three or four days before we know if we have any luck. Don’t count on it too much. I told you that the chance was very small.”

“But not hopeless.”

“No, not hopeless, or I would not have operated. You must try to be patient.”

“You know that isn’t my long suit, Mickey. However — did everything else go according to plan?”

“Yes, just as we talked about it. I was able to move her from the hospital yesterday, in Georgia’s car, so they don’t know where she went, and in the private nursing home she has another name, under which I opened a separate file in my office records, so there is no trace of the connection.”

“Thanks, pal,” said the Saint. “Take care to keep it that way. For the time being, her life may depend on it.”

By the time Mr Rood embarked on his secret literary endeavor, the Saint had flown back to New Orleans, reclaimed his car at the airport, and taken the road to Atlanta, where the beneficiary of Mr Rood’s latest legal triumph made his home. Simon was not only temperamentally short on patience, but he had even less inclination to let an act of justice that he had decided upon teeter on the outcome of a medical long shot of which the surgeon himself was less than optimistic about the result.

Joseph Sholto, enjoying the expansive euphoria induced by a narrow escape of which even he had been far from confident, would at this moment have guffawed hysterically at any suggestion that he would ever doubt the maxim which had been one of the guiding principles of his adult career, that a bad boy’s best friend is his lawyer.

Joe Sholto (to the initiated he was more generally known as “Dibs”) had come a long way since he was doing his own strong-arm and squirt-gun work to try to put over a protection racket on Mobile’s laundries and dry cleaners. When he had achieved enough limited success to be noticed, he received the standard accolade from the Syndicate: come in or get out. Prudently, Dibs decided to sell, but kept his own independence, when he came in, he wanted it to be as an equal, not as one of a host of minor hangers-on. He had his ups and downs, but thanks to a ruthless devotion to his own welfare and his faith in the best legal chicanery he managed to avoid any disastrous collisions with constitutional justice, so that he became one of those semi-mythological names which are vaguely known to the public and baldly referred to by the press as “gangsters” without ever having suffered a major conviction.

He hit the jackpot when he saw the possibilities of the trading stamp business. At this time the craze for these miniature coupons was booming from coast to coast, and probably half the families in America were daily pasting up “stamps” of various colors and designs, given to them by local merchants at the rate of ten for every dollar they spent, in booklets which when filled and accumulated in sufficient numbers could be exchanged for almost anything from a razor to a refrigerator. These stamps were offered to the stores as a merchandising gimmick by a number of reputable firms which also undertook to redeem them, and the competition between them was simply to offer the most attractive premiums at the best price.

One day it dawned upon Dibs Sholto that he too could have a part of this business. The investment in printing the stamps and the booklets to stick them in was relatively trivial, and the goods they would eventually be exchanged for could be bought out of the money the storekeepers would pay for the stamps. It seemed like such a magnificently automatic way of multiplying mazuma that he was slightly disgusted with himself for not having thought of it ten years before. The only trouble now was that the best potential customers, if they were interested at all, had already been signed up by the old-established stamp firms, or in the case of some chains had even set up their own stamp systems.