“Yes.”
“So he suggested that the two of you sneak off and see if you could catch me at it?” She nodded.
“Then,” said the Saint, “you peeked in through the window and saw me with the exhibits on the dressing-table, and he said ‘What did I tell you?’…And then he said something like, ‘Let’s really get the goods on him now. You take this gun and walk in on him and keep him talking. If he thinks you’re alone he’ll probably say enough to hang himself. I’ll be listening, and I’ll be a witness to everything he says.’ Something like that?”
“Something like that,” she said huskily.
“And then the stage was all set. He only had to wait a minute or two, and shoot you. I was supposed to have suspected you already. I’d found a lot of incriminating evidence in your room. And then you’d walked in on me with a gun…While of course his story would have been that he was suspicious when you sneaked off, that he followed you home, and found you holding me up, and you were just about to give me the works when he popped his pistol and saved my life. Everyone would have said that ‘of course’ you must have been Smoke Johnny’s moll at some time, and nobody would ever have been likely to find the record of that marriage in Yuma unless they were looking for it—and why should they look for it? So you were out of the way, and he was in the clear, and I’d personally be his best, solid, hundred-per-cent witness that it was justifiable homicide. It would have made one of the neatest jobs that I ever heard of—if it had worked. Only it didn’t work. Because just as I knew you had a good alibi all the time, I knew that all this junk in your drawer had been planted there, and so I knew that I still had something else to look for—the real motive for all these things that were going on. Maybe I was lucky to find it so quickly. But even so, from the moment when you walked in, something exciting was waiting to happen…Well, it all worked out all right—or don’t you think so, Freddie?”
“You’ve got to get me a doctor,” Freddie said hoarsely.
“Do I have all the right answers?” Simon asked relentlessly.
Freddie Pellman moaned and clutched his arm tighter and raised a wild haggard face.
“You’ve got to get me a doctor,” he pleaded in a rising shout. “Get me a doctor!”
‘Tell us first,” insisted the Saint soothingly. “Do we know all the answers?”
Pellman tossed his head, and suddenly everything seemed to disintegrate inside him.
“Yes!” he almost screamed. “Yes, damn you! I was going to fix that little bitch. I’ll do it again if I ever have the chance. And you, too!…Now get me a doctor. Get me a doctor, d’you hear? D’you want me to bleed to death?”
The Saint drew a long deep breath, and put out the stub of his cigarette. He took a pack from his pocket and lighted another. And with that symbolic action he had put one more episode behind him, and the life of adventure went on.
“I don’t really know,” he said carelessly. “I don’t think there’d be any great injustice done if we let you die. Or we might keep you alive and continue with the shakedown. It’s really up to Lissa.”
He glanced at the girl again curiously.
She was staring at Freddie in a way that Simon hoped no woman would ever look at him, and she seemed to have to make an effort to bring herself back to the immediate present. And even then she seemed to be a little behind.
She said, “I just don’t get one thing. How did you know all that stuff had been planted in my drawer? And why were you so sure that my flimsy alibi was good?”
He smiled.
“That was the easiest thing of all. Aren’t you the detective-story fan? You might have gotten good ideas from some of your mysteries, but you could hardly have picked up such bad ones. At least you’d know better than to keep a lot of unnecessary incriminating evidence tucked away where anyone with a little spare time could find it. And you’d never have had the nerve to pull an alibi like that first attack on yourself if it was a phony, because you’d have known that anyone else who’d ever read a mystery too would have spotted it for a phony all the time. About the only thing wrong with Freddie is that he had bright ideas, but he didn’t read the right books.”
“For Christ’s sake,” Freddie implored shrilly, “aren’t you going to get me a doctor?”
“What would they do in a Saint story?” Lissa asked.
Simon Templar sighed.
“I imagine they’d let him call his own doctor, and tell the old story about how he was cleaning a gun and he didn’t know it was loaded. And I suppose we’d go back to the Coral Room and look for Ginny and Esther, because they must be getting hungry, and I know I still am. And I expect Freddie would still pay off in the end, if we all helped him to build up a good story…”
Lissa tucked her arm under his.
“But what are the rest of us going to do tonight?”
“The Hays Office angle on that bothers the hell out of me,” said the Saint.
HOLLYWOOD
INTRODUCTION
It is not remarkable that a writer of such catholic scope as myself should have finally succumbed to the temptation of offering his own fictional slant on Hollywood, but it is almost phenomenal that he should have waited so long to do it.
Such records as I have indicate that this story was written some time in 1941, or at least eight years after I first displayed my open mouth in a booth at a Brown Derby.
It would be nice to say that this unprecedented pause for station identification was solely due to an impregnable integrity which would not permit me to go off on any subject at half cock.
Unfortunately, that same impregnable integrity forbids me to make any such claim. The plain truth of the matter is that for eight years I resisted the temptation, clinging fanatically to some ethereal hope that I might go to my grave with that one esoteric epitaph: “At least he never wrote a line about Hollywood.” Having failed to die during that unconscionable time, this harmless fancy seemed to become more tired with every passing year. It finally reversed itself so that it seemed almost mandatory for me to write something about Hollywood, however half-baked, before I appeared actually eccentric.
This then is my superficial version of Hollywood, a town about which I think I know much less today than I thought I knew in 1933.
—Leslie Charteris (1946)
1
It was not to be expected that Simon Templar could have stayed in Hollywood in an ordinary way. Nothing that ever happened to him was really ordinary—it was as if from the beginning he had had some kind of fourth-dimensional magnetism that attracted adventure and strange happenings, or else it may have been because nothing to him was entirely commonplace or unworthy of expectant curiosity, that he had a gift of uncovering adventure where duller people would have passed it by without ever knowing that it had been within reach. But as the saga of perilous, light-hearted buccaneering lengthened behind him past inevitable milestones of newspaper headlines, it became even more inescapable that adventure would never let him alone, for unordinary people went out of their way to drag him into their unordinary affairs. In the most platitudinous and yet exciting and fateful way, one thing simply led to another, and he was riding a tide that only slackened enough to let him catch his breath before it was off on another irresistible lunge.
It was like that in Hollywood, where he was eating his first breakfast of that visit when the telephone rang in his apartment at the Château Marmont, which he had chosen precisely because he thought that he might attract less attention there than he would have at one of the large fashionable hotels with a publicity agent hungrily scrutinising every guest for possible copy.
“Mr Simon Templar?” said a girl’s voice.
It was a businesslike and efficient voice, but it had a nice quality of sound, a freshness and a natural feeling of friendliness that made him feel interested in talking to it some more. So he admitted hopefully that he was Simon Templar.
“Just a moment,” she said. “Mr Ufferlitz is calling.”
/> Simon was not quite sure whether he caught the name right, but it didn’t sound like any name among his acquaintances. In any case, he had arrived late the night before, and hadn’t yet told anyone he knew that he was in town. Of course, it was possible that some shining light of the local Police Department was already leaping on to his trail, afire with notions of importance and glory—that was an almost monotonous habit of shining lights of local Police Departments, even in much more out-of-the-way places, whenever Simon Templar paused in his travels, although none of them had ever achieved the importance and glory to which their zeal would have entitled them in a world less hidebound by the old-fashioned rules of evidence. But Simon also felt sure that no Police Department employed telephone girls with such friendly voices. It would have disrupted the whole system…
“Hullo, Mr Templar,” said the telephone. “This is Byron Ufferlitz.”
“Baron who?” Simon queried.
“Byron,” said the new voice. “Byron Ufferlitz.”
This voice was not fresh and provocative, although it was apparently trying to be friendly. It sounded as if it was rather overweight and wore a diamond ring and had a cigar in its mouth. It also appeared to think that its name should be recognised immediately and inspire awe in the hearer.
“Have we ever met?” Simon asked.
“Not yet,” said the voice jovially. “But I want to put that right. Will you have lunch with me?”
There were times when Simon’s directness left the Emily Post School of Social Niceties out of the cosmos.
“What for?” he inquired, with the utmost detachment.
“I’m going to give you a job.”
‘Thank you. What is it?”
“I’ll tell you all about it at lunch.”
“Did anyone tell you I was looking for a job?”
“Oh, I know all about you,” said Mr Ufferlitz confidently. “Been watching you for a long time. That was a great thing you did in Arizona. And that funny business in Palm Springs—I read all about it. So I know what you cost. You asked Pellman for a thousand dollars a day, didn’t you? Well, I’ll pay you the same. Only I don’t want a bodyguard.”
“How do you know I can do what you want?”
“Look,” said Mr Ufferlitz, “you’re Simon Templar, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“You’re the fellow they call the Saint.”
Something like the faintest whisper of distant music seemed to touch the Saint’s eardrums with no more substance than the slipstream of a passing butterfly.
“Well,” he admitted cautiously, “I’ve heard the name.”
“You’re what they call the Robin Hood of modern crime. You’re the greatest crook that ever lived, and you’ve put more crooks away than all the detectives who keep trying to hang something on you. You’re always on the side of the guy who’s up against it, and you’re always busting up some graft or dirty work, and all the gals are nuts about you, and you can jump through windows like Doug Fairbanks used to and knock guys cold like Joe Louis and shoot like Annie Oakley and figure things out like Sherlock Holmes and…and—”
“Catch airplanes in my teeth like Superman?” Simon suggested.
“No kidding,” said Mr Ufferlitz. “You’re the greatest proposition that ever hit this town. I’ve got all the angles worked out. Tell you all about it at lunch. Let’s say the Vine Street Derby at one o’clock. Okay?”
“Okay,” said the Saint tolerantly.
It was exactly why and because he was Simon Templar, the Saint, that things always happened to him. The last few sentences of Mr Ufferlitz had given him a sudden and fairly clear idea of what sort of proposition Mr Ufferlitz would consider “great,” and what kind of angles Mr Ufferlitz would have worked out—even before he turned to the telephone directory and found an entry under Ufferlitz Productions, Inc. Anyway, he had nothing else to do and no other plans for lunch, and Mr Ufferlitz could always provide comic relief.
He was right about that, but he also had no inkling whatever of a number of quite unfunny things that were destined to cross his path as a direct result of his amused acceptance of that invitation.
During the morning he called a friend of his, an agent, and after they had exchanged a suitable amount of nonsense he inquired further about Mr Ufferlitz.
“Byron Ufferlitz?” repeated Dick Halliday. “He’s quite an up-and-coming producer these days. A sort of cross between Sammy Click and Al Capone. I don’t suppose you’d know about it, but he bobbed up only a little over a year ago with some wildcat Studio Employees Union that he’d invented, and somehow he got so many studio employees to join it and made such a nuisance of himself with a few well-timed strikes that finally they had to buy him off.”
“By suddenly discovering that he was a production genius?”
“Something like that. The Government tried to get him for extortion, but the witnesses called it off, and he was supposed to be wanted in New Orleans on some old charge of sticking up a bank, but nothing came of that either. Now he’s quite the white-haired boy. He brought in a picture for about fifty thousand dollars, and surprisingly enough it wasn’t bad. What does he want you to do—sell him your life story or bump somebody off?”
“I’m going to find out,” said the Saint, and went to his appointment with even a shade more optimism.
The Brown Derby on Vine Street—smarter offspring of the once famous hat-shaped edifice on Wilshire Boulevard—was unchanged since he had last been there. Even the customers looked exactly the same—the same identifiable people, even with different names and faces, labeled as plainly as if they had worn badges. The actors and actresses, important and unimportant. The bunch of executives. The writers and directors. The agent with the two sides of a possible deal. The radio clan. The film colony surgeon and the film colony attorney. The humdrum business men and the visiting firemen. The unmistakable tourists, working off this item of their itinerary, trying hard to look like unimpressionable natives but betraying themselves by the greedy wandering of their eyes.
In this clear-cut patchwork of types the Saint acquired a puzzling neutrality. He stood scanning the room with interest, but he was quite positively not a tourist. Yet the tourists and the non-tourists stared at him alike, as if he were someone they should have known and were trying to place. With the casual elegance of his clothes and his dark handsome face he could have been some kind of romantic actor, only that his good looks didn’t seem to have any of the weaknesses of a romantic actor—they had a sinewy recklessness of fundamental structure that belonged more to the character that a romantic actor would try to play than to the character of the impersonator. But he was quite unactorishly unaware of attracting that sort of interest at all, and was satisfied when he caught the eye of a man who was waving frantically at him from a booth half-way down the room, who could only have been Mr Byron Ufferlitz.
For Mr Ufferlitz looked just like his voice. He was rather overweight, and he wore a diamond ring, and he had a cigar in his mouth. The rest of him fitted those features in with the picture that Simon had constructed from Dick Halliday’s comments. He had thick shoulders and thick black hair, and his face had a quality of actual physical toughness that was totally different from the thin-lipped affectation of a tough guy behind a mahogany desk.
“Have a drink,” said Mr Ufferlitz, who had already been passing the time with a highball.
“Cleopatra,” said the Saint.
“What’s that?” asked Ufferlitz, as the waiter repeated it and moved away.
“One of the best dry sherries.”
It was as if Ufferlitz opened a filing cabinet in his mind, punched a card, and put it away. But he did it without the flicker of a muscle in his face, and sat back to make a cold-blooded inventory of the Saint’s features.
“You’re all right,” he announced. “You’re swell. I recognised you as soon as you came in. From your pictures, of course. But I couldn’t tell from them whether they’d just caught you at a good angle.”
“This is a great relief to me,” Simon remarked mildly.
A flash bulb popped at close quarters. Simon looked up, blinking, and saw the photographer retreating with an ingratiating grin.
“That’s just a beginning,” explained Mr Ufferlitz complacently. “We’ll get plenty more pictures later, of course. But there’s no harm grabbing anything that comes along.”
“Would you mind,” asked the Saint, “telling me just what this is all about?”
“Your build-up. Of course I know you’re a celebrity already, but a little extra publicity never hurt anyone. I’ve got the best press-agent in town working on you already. Want you to meet him this afternoon…We got you all fixed up for tonight, by the way.”
“You have?” Simon said respectfully.
“Yep. It was in Louella Parsons this morning. I shot it in last night, soon as I knew you’d arrived. Didn’t you see it?”
“I’m afraid I was too busy reading the subsidiary part of the paper. You know—the part where there’s a war going on.”
Mr Ufferlitz thumbed through a bulging wallet and extracted a clipping. It had a sentence ringed in red pencil.
The Saint Goes West (The Saint Series) Page 16
