The Saint Goes West (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  It was a slight shock, as if the picture had suddenly come to life. She was so exactly like it. The only thing different was her dress, and this was something formal and white and very simple. But the neck was cut down to her waist, and the material was so sheer that you would have known exactly what she wore underneath it if she had worn anything. She looked like a wayward Madonna decked out in a suitable disguise to find out what really went on in night clubs.

  She said, “Sorry I wasn’t ready, but I had the goddamnedest time getting dressed. Every lousy rag I put on looked like hell.”

  “Well,” he said, “I’m glad you were able to save something out of the junk pile.”

  “Pretty frightening, isn’t it?” she said, looking down at herself. “Brings out all the floozie in me. And everything else. Well, nobody can ever say I didn’t give my All.”

  She had a glass in her hand, practically empty. She emptied it, and sat down beside him and tinkled a small hand-bell.

  “Shall we have some more serum before we go to the rat race?”

  He drained his own glass and nodded, but the acceptance was hardly necessary. The butler appeared like a watchful genie with a shaker in his hand, and proceeded to pour without any instructions.

  Simon gazed at her speculatively over his cigarette.

  “It’s a hell of a way to get acquainted, isn’t it?” he remarked. “But it’s nice of you to cooperate, as Byron calls it.”

  “If a girl never had to cooperate any worse than this,” she said, “this goddamn racket would be a breeze.”

  “Just how much cooperation is supposed to he ordered here?” Simon asked. “Byron left it a little vague.”

  She looked at him.

  “It doesn’t sound like Byron, to leave anything to your imagination.”

  “Maybe my imagination is a little slow.”

  “Are you kidding me, or where have you been all your life?”

  “I haven’t been getting an Ufferlitz-Hollywood build-up all my life.”

  Her eyes were curious.

  “We’re going to Ciro’s together; in this town, that automatically means a budding romance. If we leer at each other and hold hands a bit, they’ll just about have us in bed together. We don’t actually have to go to bed before witnesses, because you can’t print that anyway. Disappointed?”

  “Not a bit,” said the Saint. “It’s much more fun without witnesses.”

  “For Christ’s sake,” she said pleasantly. “You didn’t have to be here long to learn the routines, though.”

  His clear blue eyes rested on her again, and this time their lazy mockery had a different twinkle. A slow grin etched itself around his mouth.

  “Thank God,” he drawled, and held out his hand. She couldn’t help shaking it, and smiling back at him, and suddenly they were laughing together. “Now we can have fun,” he said.

  So they were friends.

  Simon Templar had to admit that inefficiency at least was not one of Mr Ufferlitz’s failings, or at any rate of his assistants. The head waiter at Giro’s, whom Simon had never seen before in his life, said “Good evening, Miss Quest,” and then, “Good evening, Mr Templar!” with an air of glad surprise, as though he were greeting an old and valued customer who had been away for a long time, and ushered them to a ringside table from which he removed the RESERVED card with a flourish. He said enticingly, “A cocktail to start with?”

  “Dry Martinis,” said the Saint, and he bowed and beamed himself away.

  “The works,” said April Quest.

  “So I see,” murmured the Saint. “Let’s pretend we’re used to it.”

  “You’re going to be an experience,” she said. “Did you ever do any acting?”

  “Not for the camera.”

  “Were you on the stage?”

  He shook his head.

  “Not that either. Just what you might call privately. You see, when you lead a wicked life like mine, you can’t always be yourself,” he explained. “According to the job in hand, you may want to pretend to be anything, from a dyspeptic poet with Communist tendencies to a retired sea-captain with white whiskers and a perpetual thirst.”

  She was studying him with candid interest now.

  “Then some of that stuff about you must be on the level.”

  “Some of it,” he admitted mildly.

  “Most of it, I guess.” She said it herself. “I ought to have known—it isn’t the sort of thing that press-agents think up. But Jesus, you meet so many phonies in this business you get out of the habit of believing anything. I’m one myself, so I know.”

  “You?”

  “What do you think you know about me?”

  “Let’s see. Your name’s April Quest,” he began cautiously. “Or is it?”

  “That’s about as far as you’ll get, and nobody would believe that. What’s a name! Even that isn’t a hundred per cent, either. It was Quist on my birth certificate, but they thought Quest sounded better.”

  “I remember reading something about you,” he recalled. “Last year, wasn’t it, when you were the new sensational discovery? You were raised in the logging country up north. Your parents died when you were a kid, but you kept the old forest going. You’d never been in a city or bought a ready-made dress or worn a pair of shoes, but tough lumberjacks worshipped the ground you walked on and worked like slaves for you. You’d never seen a lipstick or a powder puff. You were the unspoiled glamor girl of the wilderness, the untamed virgin queen of the Big Trees—”

  “Nuts,” she said. “My father was a drunken longshoreman who got his skull cracked in a strikers’ riot. I was dealing them off the arm in a truck-drivers’ hash house outside Seattle when Jack Groom stopped in for a cup of coffee and offered me a trial contract at twenty-five a week. I’d just about settled on another offer to be a B-girl in San Francisco, but this looked better. And that’s more than I’d tell another soul in this village. I guess I must have a feeling about you.”

  “That’s nice,” said the Saint, and meant it.

  Suddenly her hand slid over his fingers, and her smile was really intoxicating.

  “Darling,” she said softly.

  He looked at her in a quite unreasonable stillness.

  A flash bulb popped.

  Simon turned in time to see the photographer backing away. April Quest giggled, and let go his hand.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I only just saw the bastard coming in time.”

  “Try to warn me next time, will you?” said the Saint gently. “My heart’s liable to blow a gasket when you put so much soul into your work.”

  A heavy hand fell on his shoulder, and he looked up and back. April mirrored his movement at the same time. Mr Byron Ufferlitz stood between them, looking heavily genial with a fat cigar in his mouth.

  “That was nice cooperation, kiddies,” he rumbled. “I told him to get another later on, when you’re dancing. How’s everything?”

  “Fine,” April said.

  She smiled dazzlingly, but her voice sounded very faintly mechanical.

  “How ya getting on with the Saint? He’s all right, huh? What a profile! And that figure…You two are gonna make a great team. Maybe you’ll do a lotta pictures together, like Garbo and Gilbert or Colman and Banky in the old days.”

  “I can’t afford it,” said the Saint. “Earning that kind of money is too expensive these days.”

  “We’ll take care of that,” said Mr Ufferlitz jovially, if a trifle ambiguously. “Say, April, about your new hair-do, I was talkin’ to Westmore just now and…”

  Simon looked around the room and caught the raised eyebrows of Dick Halliday, who had just come in with Mary Martin. He grinned, and then he saw Martha Scott and Carl Alsop making faces at him, and they were just the first of other faces that were breaking into expressions of recognition, and he knew that he was certainly going to have to be well paid for the explanations he would have to make to some of his friends in Hollywood for his manner of arriving back among them.
Then, trying to postpone that awkward moment by finding some blank direction to turn to, he looked towards the entrance from the bar and saw Orlando Flane.

  Flane was looking right at them. He had a highball glass in his hand, and his feet were braced apart as if to steady himself. In spite of that he was swaying a little. His too-handsome face was flushed, and his hair and necktie had the uncomfortably rumpled look that can never be confused with any other kind of untidiness. There was no doubt that Orlando Flane was drunk again, or still drunk. The twist of his mouth was vicious.

  “Well, I mustn’t stay any longer,” Mr Ufferlitz was saying. “Don’t want to look like I was promoting this. Have yourselves a time, and don’t worry about the check. It’s all taken care of. ’Bye.”

  He clapped them on the shoulders again and moved away. Simon’s eyes followed him towards the bar with interested expectations, but Orlando Flane had disappeared.

  “There,” said April cold-bloodedly, “goes one of the prize-winning swine of this town.”

  With Flane still on his mind, Simon said, “Who?”

  “Ufferlitz, of course. Dear Byron.”

  Their drinks came belatedly, accompanied by menus, and there was an interruption for the ordering of dinner. From the wine list, Simon added a bottle of Bollinger ’31.

  “On Byron,” he said, as the waiter removed himself. “Everyone tells me something about him. He was a stick-up man in New Orleans, but his pictures make money. He’s a retired union racketeer, but he pays his slaves. Take it away.”

  “How much does he pay them?”

  The Saint’s brows levelled fractionally.

  “He hasn’t shown me the payroll yet,” he admitted. “But two literary gents named Kendricks and Lazaroff told me his checks were okay.”

  “Listen,” she said. “Those two clowns used to be rated one of the best writing teams in Hollywood, even though they nearly drove every producer nuts that they worked for. But last year they went too far. They got in a beef with Goldwyn, and he fired them. So they bluffed their way into his house when he was out and filled all his clothes with itching powder and left ink soap in all the bathrooms. The Producers’ Association banned them and they haven’t worked since—until Byron hired them. How much d’you think he had to pay them when they were in a spot like that, and why wouldn’t they be goddamn glad to get it?”

  This was a new angle.

  “I didn’t know about that,” he said thoughtfully. “The deal he offered me was all right, but of course he hasn’t got anything on me…yet,” he added. “What about you?”

  This was a new angle.

  “He expects to rape me before we start shooting, of course, but he doesn’t need much else. He got me with Jack Groom, because Jack still has my contract.”

  “For twenty-five a week?”

  “No, a bit more than that now. I don’t know what Jack’s deal is, but I know he hates Byron’s guts.”

  “I met Comrade Groom today,” Simon remarked casually. “How do you get on with him?”

  The exquisitely drawn green eyes measured him contemplatively, and then they were bright with laughter.

  “ ‘The Saint Goes On,’ ” she quoted. “I can see it coming. Now stop being a damn detective, will you? This is your night off. We’re supposed to be having fun and romance, and we’ve hardly stopped being serious for a minute. Dance with me.”

  She stood up imperiously, and he had to join her. It wasn’t hard to do. She could change her moods as quickly as light could flicker over the facets of cut crystal, and do it without seeming to leave raw edges or a sense of chill: you were not cut off or left behind, but taken with her.

  They danced. And dined. And danced again. And she made it impossible to be serious any more. With all her callous cynicism and violent language, she could be a fascinating and exciting companion. The Saint found himself having a much more entertaining evening than he had expected. It was as if they instinctively recognised in each other an intense reality which in spite of all other differences made them feel as if they had known each other a hundred times longer than those few hours.

  It was one o’clock when he drove her home, after a brief struggle through the regular nightly crew of autograph hunters outside.

  “Come in and have a drink,” she said.

  Simon thought about it, while another belated car cruised by.

  “Maybe not,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “Cooperation only goes so far.”

  “So what?”

  “So I don’t want you to call me a wolf again. But I’m human.”

  “My God,” she said, “don’t you think I know the difference? Don’t you think I could…I’d like to buy you a drink,” she said.

  He kissed her, and broke it off quickly when he felt the warmth of her lips.

  “Goodnight, darling,” he said.

  She got out, and he drove away while he still could.

  When he entered his apartment at the Château Marmont there was a note in a plain envelope under the door. He opened it and frowned over the heavy sprawling hand. It seemed to have been composed very much impromptu, for it was written on a sizable blank space under the date line of The Hollywood Reporter—obviously torn out of one of those strange advertisements which say, in infinitely modest type, “Joe Doakes directed WOMEN IN ARMS,” and buy a whole page to set it off.

  WHATEVER TIME you get home tonight, I want you to come right out and see me. Don’t tell ANYONE I sent for you. This is VERY IMPORTANT. The door will be open. Don’t ring!

  BYRON UFFERLITZ

  (603 Claymore Drive)

  The Saint sighed, and put the note in his pocket. A few minutes later he was retracing his tracks out Sunset Boulevard.

  Claymore Drive was only a couple of blocks from April Quest’s house, and as he passed her street Simon smiled again over the easy way she had taken his mind from its habitual restless search for plot. She had been right, of course: so much of his life had been woven with conspiracy and dark purposes that he had long since ceased to be as interested in the solution of past mysteries as he was in anticipating mysteries that had not yet shaped themselves, and that inquiring watchfulness had become so automatic that he was apt to find himself stalking the shadow of his own imagination.

  Or was he?…A long time had gone by since one of those hunches had last let him down. What had Ufferlitz said? “There are plenty of people who’d hate to see me make a hit with this idea. One or two of ’em would go a long ways to wreck it…I guess you can take care of yourself…” He had almost accepted Ufferlitz’s note as just one of those regal impetuosities that Hollywood producers traditionally indulge in; the thought that it might after all be more than that gave him a sudden feeling of inward stillness as if the blood momentarily ceased to move in his veins.

  He shrugged it off as he slowed down at Mr Ufferlitz’s number, and yet enough of it remained to paralyse his right foot from the reflex shift from accelerator to brake. He crawled round the next corner, and in the next few yards found several cars parked outside a house where all the lights were on. He eased in among them, and walked back to 603 Claymore Drive. He grinned derisively at himself for doing it; yet it was one of those Saintly precautions that cost nothing even if they were to prove unnecessary. So was the handkerchief with which he covered his fingers when he opened the front door.

  The hall itself was unlighted, but a shaft of illumination spilled from an open doorway to his left.

  “Hullo there,” he said quietly.

  There was no answer as he crossed to the lighted doorway. As soon as he reached it he could see why. The room was Mr Ufferlitz’s study, and Mr Ufferlitz was there, but it was quite obvious that no one would have to cooperate with Mr Ufferlitz anymore.

  4

  Mr Ufferlitz sat at his mahogany desk, which was about the size of a ping-pong table. His head was pillowed on the blotter, which had not proved sufficiently absorptive to take care of all the blood that had run
out of him. Simon walked round the desk and saw that Mr Ufferlitz’s back hair was a little singed around the place where the bullet had gone in, so that the gun must have been held almost touching his head; probably most of the upper part of his face had been blown out, because blood had splashed forward across the desk and there were little blobs of gray stuff and white chips of bone mixed with it.

  The larger splotches of blood were still shiny, and the chewed end of a cigar that lay among them was still visibly damp. So the Saint estimated that the shot couldn’t have been fired more than an hour ago. At the outside.

  He looked at his watch. It showed exactly two o’clock.

  The house was absolutely silent. If there were any servants in, their quarters were far enough away for them to have been undisturbed.

  Simon stood very quietly and looked around the room. It had an air of having been put together according to a studio designer’s idea of what an important man’s study should look like. One wall was lined with bookshelves, but most of the books wore dark impressive bindings with gilt lettering, having undoubtedly been bought in sets and most probably never read. The bright jackets of a few modern novels stood out in a clash of color. There were a couple of heavy oil paintings on the walls. Scattered between them were a number of framed photographs with handwriting on them. They were all girls. One of them was April Quest, and there was another face that seemed faintly familiar, but the inscription only said “Your Trilby.” Obviously these were symbols of Mr Ufferlitz’s new career as a producer. The room itself had the same appearance—Mr Ufferlitz had hardly been in the business long enough to have built the house himself, but he had clearly selected it with an eye to the atmosphere with which he felt he ought to surround himself.