"It's a job."
"I suppose so." He ventured another lead, making himself querulous again. "Why did you lock me in? I wanted to go to the bathroom-- "There's a thing under the bed. We lock everybody in. It isn't only men who come here. You have to keep a place like this respectable. Women stop here too."
For no good reason, an electric tingle squirmed up the Saint's spine. There was nothing he could directly trace it to, and yet it was unmistakable, a fleeting draught from the flutter of psychic wings. Without time to analyze it, without knowing why, he deadened every response except that of his mind, exactly as he had controlled his awakening when she walked in, and turned the instinctive quiver into a bitter chuckle.
"You wouldn't expect them to give people like me any trouble, would you?"
"You never can tell." Big Hazel moved closer, her hands dropping into the pockets of her voluminous skirt. Her voice was still brisk and businesslike as she went on: "I'll make out your registration tomorrow, and you can put a cross on it or whatever you do."
"Thank you, ma'am."
"Would you like a drink?"
The Saint stirred a little on the bedside, as if in mild embarrassment, as the same reflex prickle retraced its voyage over his ganglions. But he still kept his face expressionless behind the blank windows of his smoked glasses.
"Thank you, ma'am, but I don't drink anything. Not being able to see, it sort of makes me a bit dizzy."
"You won't mind if I do?"
Without encouraging an answer, she pulled a pint bottle of a cheap blend out of the folds of her skirt and attacked the screw cap. She held the bottle and the cap in pleats of her clothing for a better purchase, but even her massive paws seemed to make no impression on their union.
The Saint paid only incidental attention to her heavy breathing until she said: "The damn thing's stuck. Can you open it?"
He found the bottle in his hands, and unscrewed the cap with a brief effort of steel fingers.
"Thanks, Mr. Smith."
She took a quick gulp from the bottle, and guided his groping hand to replace the cap.
"Well, have a good night," she said.
She went out, and the door closed behind her. And once again he heard the lock click.
Simon lay back on the hard bed, remembering vividly that she had never touched the bottle except through the cloth of her skirt pocket. He rested all night in the same vigilant twilight between sleep and waking, revolving a hundred speculations and surmises; but nothing else disturbed him except his own goading thoughts.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
It was surprisingly easy to get out- almost too easy. In the early morning feet crept past the door again, and the lock clicked stealthily. When he tried the door, after a while, it opened without obstruction. He tapped his way downstairs, and the thin meek man at the desk scarcely looked up as he went by. Big Hazel was nowhere to be seen.
In the role of a blind man it would have been difficult to shake off any possible shadowers, but that seemed an unnecessary precaution. If he was suspected at all, everything would be known about him anyway; if not, he would not be shadowed. But he thought he knew which it was.
He showered and shaved at his own hotel; and he was finishing a man-sized breakfast of bacon and eggs when the telephone rang.
"Listen, Mr. Templar," Lieutenant Kearney said. "You're not figuring on leaving town, are you?"
"My plans are nearly completed," Simon informed him. "At the stroke of midnight a small blimp, camouflaged as a certain well-known Congressman, will drop a flexible steel ladder to the roof of this hotel. I shall mount it like a squirrel and flee southward, while the sun sinks behind beautiful Lake Michigan. It all depends on the sun," he added reflectively. "If I can only induce it to put off sinking until midnight, and do it in the east for a change, the plan will go off without a hitch."
"Listen--" Kearney said, and sighed. "Oh, well. So you know the Commissioner. So I've got to give you a break. Just the same-" His tone changed. "I've been getting some information around Chicago."
"Fine," Simon approved. "If you run across a good floating crap game, by all means tell me. I need a stake before I make my getaway."
Kearney went on doggedly: "This stiff we got in the morgue-we found out who he was. His name's Cleve Friend. He's a grifter from Frisco."
"You ought to make a song out of that," Simon told him.
"Yeah. Well, anyhow, what was the idea saying you didn't know him?"
"Did I say that?" Simon asked blandly.
"You implied it," Kearney snapped. "And that don't check with what I've been hearing."
Simon paused.
"Just what have you been hearing?" he asked.
"Things from people. People around town. Not in your social circle, of course." Kearney's voice was heavy with sarcasm. "Bums, poolroom touts, beggars."
"Beggars?"
"We ran Friend's picture in the paper today," Kearney said. "The photographer retouched it a little-that hole in his head, you know. And some people came in to look at him. They recognized him. He's a grifter, or I mean he was, and quite a few people have seen him around Chicago the last month or so. Some of them saw you, too. Some of them even saw you both together."
"Those chatterboxes knew me by name, of course?"
"Listen," Kearney said, "don't kid yourself. The Saint's picture has been in the papers, too, a lot of times. What was it you were seeing Friend about lately?"
"I can't tell you," Simon said.
"You won't?"
"I can't. I'm too shy."
"God damn it," Kearney roared. "Maybe you can tell me why the autopsy on Friend showed he'd been shot full of scopolamin, then!"
Simon's eyes changed. "Scopolamin? That wasn't what killed him?"
"You know damn well what killed him. You saw the bullet hole. I'm not doing any more talking to you. Not yet. I will later. I don't care if you know the Commissioner or the Mayor or the President of the United States! Just don't leave town, understand?"
"Yes," Simon said. "I get it. All right, Alvin. I'll string along. In fact--" He hesitated. "I'll even tell you why I was seeing Cleve Friend."
Kearney said suspiciously: "Yeah? Another gag?"
"No. You might as well know, I suppose. I can't' keep it quiet forever."
"Okay," Kearney snapped. "Spill it." He could not quite keep the eagerness out of his voice.
The Saint said mildly: "We were plotting his murder. Good-by, Alvin."
He hung up, leaving the detective gibbering inarticulately, and poured himself another cup of coffee.
"This is what is known as a cumulative frame," he remarked to Hoppy, who was starting his morning target practice. "I wonder how thorough it's going to be."
Mr. Uniatz bounded a BB accurately off the coffeepot.
"I don't get it, boss," he said automatically.
"It works backwards," Simon explained. "First an unidentified body is found, and the only connection between it and me was a deed of gift. Now some people have recognized the body and say that I've been seen foregathering with Junior, hereinafter referred to as the unlamented Mr. Cleve Friend, a grifter from Frisco. It's significant that some of these witnesses are beggars. Later, perhaps, a witness to the murder will pop up: By sheer accident, he happened to be passing when I bumped off Friend."
"But ya didn't bump him off," Hoppy said. "Did ya?"
"No, Hoppy, I didn't."
"Den it's okay, ain't it?"
The Saint lighted a cigarette and leaned back.
"I wish I could be sure of that." He blew a procession of three reflective smoke rings towards the ceiling. "Do you happen to know anything about scopolamin?"
"I never hoid of him. Is he in de same mob wit' dat Gordian?"
"It's a drug, Hoppy. It makes people tell the truth. And it seems that somebody gave it to Friend before he was bumped off. They wanted to know how much he'd spilled, and he must have told them. We can also be sure that they asked him all he knew about
us. ... So we can take it that the blind-beggar act is dead and has been for some time."
A scowl of dutiful concentration formed like a sluggish cloud below Mr. Uniatz's hairline as he worked this out and tried to reconcile its components. His mental travail appeared to deepen through successive minutes to a painful degree, and at last he brought forth the root of it.
"Den why," he asked, "don't dey give ya de woiks last night?"
"That's what I'm trying to figure out," said the Saint slowly. "Unless they're taking their time to cook up a much bigger and better frame. . . . Big Hazel has a whisky bottle with my fingerprints on it now, and there wasn't a thing I could do to stop her getting away with it. She really had me off balance-I was so busy turning down a drink that I was sure would be a knockout that the other angle just went by under my nose."
He blew another smoke ring very deliberately, devoting everything to the perfection of its rich full roundness, while he tried to make his inward thoughts match the calm of his outward movement.
"Also," he said, and he was really talking to himself, "it seemed to me that there was just the slightest sinister emphasis -just the merest trace of it-in the way Big Hazel talked about having women in the hotel. I wonder ..."
He picked up the telephone and called Monica Varing's hotel, but her room didn't answer.
They had parted on a tentative agreement to lunch again, and it was not likely that anyone so punctual as she was would be careless about an engagement. Probably, he told himself, she had gone shopping.
He called again every half hour until one-thirty, and stayed in his own room for fear of missing her if she called him.
It was not an afternoon to remember with any pleasure or any pride. He must have walked several miles, pacing the room steadily like a caged lion and taking months of normal wear out of the carpet. He tried to tell himself that his imagination was running away with him, that he was giving himself jitters over nothing. He told himself that he should have kept Monica entirely out of it, that he should never have let her learn anything, that he would only have himself to blame if she tried to steal the play from him. He saw her all the time in his mind's eye, a composite of all her tantalizing facets-sultry, impish, arrogant, venturesome, languorous, defiant, tender. He felt angry and foolish and frightened in turn.
Mr. Uniatz worked on his BB marksmanship with untroubled single-mindedness. He could learn nothing from the Saint's face, and to him the operations of the Saint's mind would always be a mystery. It was enough for him that there was a mind there, and that it worked. All he had to do was carry out its orders when they were issued. It was a panacea for all the problems of life which over the years had never failed to pay off, and which had saved untold wear and tear on the rudimentary convolutions of his brain.
At five o'clock Simon remembered that Monica might have a matinee, and verified it from the newspaper. He walked to the Martin Beck Theatre and went in the stage door.
"Miss Varing ain't on this afternoon," said the doorman. "She's sick."
With lead settling in his heart, Simon sought out the stage manager.
"That's right," said the man, who remembered him. "She called me this morning and said she wouldn't be able to go on. She said if I hadn't heard from her by this time she wouldn't be doing the evening performance either."
"She isn't sick," said the Saint. "She hasn't been in her hotel all day."
The stage manager looked only slightly perturbed. He said nothing about artistic temperament; but his discretion itself implied that he could think of plausibly mundane explanations.
Simon took a taxi to the Ambassador and finally corralled an assistant manager whom he could charm into co-operation. A check through various departments established that room service had delivered breakfast to Monica Varing's apartment at nine, that she had been gone when the maid came in at eleven. But her key had not been left at the desk, and no one had seen her go out.
"No one knows they saw her," Simon corrected, and asked his last questions of the doorman.
Already he knew what the answer would be, and wondered what forlorn hope kept him trying to prove himself wrong.
"An old ragged woman, looked like she might be a beggar?
. . . Yes, sir, I did see her come out. Matter of fact, I wondered how she got in. Must have been while I was calling someone a cab."
"On the contrary," said the Saint, with surprising gentleness, "you opened the door for her yourself."
He left the man gaping, and went back into the hotel to call Lieutenant Kearney.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The boiler room in the basement of the Elliott Hotel was not quite as bleak as the description implies. This was only because the description does not mention several rows of hard wooden benches, the bodies of several dozen apathetic occupants of them, a few paper decorations left over from some previous Christmas, and the platform at one end where Stephen Elliott was filling in with some merry ad-libs as the Saint found his way in.
"And-ah-as the stove said to the kettle, I hope you're having a hot time." Nobody laughed, and Elliott went on: "We want you to enjoy yourselves, friends, and the next item on tonight's program is a song by Mrs. Laura Wingate."
He handed Mrs. Wingate up to the platform, and the connection between his two statements became somewhat obscure as the piano began to tinkle out an uncertain accompaniment and Mrs. Wingate cut loose with an incredibly piercing and off-key soprano.
"My heart is like a singing bird Whose nest is in a watershoot, My heart is like an apple tree Whose boughs are bent with thick-set fruit--"
Stephen Elliott was taking Mrs. Wingate's place beside a tall thin man to whom she had been talking when she was called. As Simon edged up behind them, he recognized the tall thin shape as Lieutenant Alvin Kearney.
"I'm sure I don't know what it's about," the detective was saying, in a voice that had no need to drop its level to avoid interfering with the earsplitting stridencies that were welling from Mrs. Wingate's throat. "For all I know, it may be just another of his funny gags. But I'd look plenty silly if anything happened and I wasn't here."
Elliott took out a handkerchief and patted his temples, while Mrs. Wingate continued to liken her heart to various other improbable objects.
"I don't know anything about it," he said mildly. "But if he's working on a case--"
"Oh, is he?" Kearney snapped that up with the avidity of a starving shark. "What case?"
Elliott hesitated.
"I really can't say," he replied at last. "Why don't you ask him?"
"Yes, why not?" Simon, agreed, and they both turned.
Kearney's lips thinned over his teeth as he met the Saint's affable smile. There was no thoroughly defensible reason for his reaction, yet it was a basic reflex which in its time had produced fundamentally identical effects upon such widely separated personalities as Chief Inspector Teal of Scotland Yard, Inspector Fernack of New York City, Lieutenant Ed Condor of Los Angeles, Sheriff Newt Haskins of Miami, and many others who will be remembered by the unremitting followers of this saga. It was perhaps something that sprang from the primal schism of law and disorder, an aboriginal cleavage between policeman and outlaw whose roots were lost in the dank dawns of sociology.
Lieutenant Alvin Kearney of Chicago liked the Saint, admired him, respected him, envied him, and hated him with an inordinate bitterness that loaded stygian tints into his scowl as he rasped: "All right, wise guy, you tell me. What was the idea phoning me to meet you here tonight because there might be a riot?"
"I guess it was a form of stage fright," said the Saint, with an aplomb which made Kearney feel as if he had two days' growth of beard and a dirty neck. "I'm not very used to these personal appearances, and I felt nervous. You can't tell what an audience like this might do, so I thought I should have some protection."
What the detective thought would have been inaudible even in the volume of voice which his congested face portended, for at that moment Mrs. Wingate's vocal analysi
s of her heart attained a screeching fortissimo that almost scraped the paint off the walls.
"My heart is gladder than all these, Because-my lo-o-ove-has come to me!"
As silence finally settled upon tortured eardrums, there was some perfunctory applause. It was rather nicely adjusted to show grateful appreciation without encouraging an encore. Since apparently the coffee and doughnuts would not be served until after the entertainment, the audience could not walk out, but it did not have to be hysterical.
Mrs. Wingate panted and bowed twitteringly to the very last handclap, which naturally came from Stephen Elliott.
"Thank you, thank you, my dear friends. . . . And now I see that our special guest of the evening has arrived, and I'm going to ask him to come up here and say a few words to you. It is a great privilege to be able to introduce-Mr. Simon Templar."
Simon stepped up on the platform to the resigned acclamation of the coffee-and-doughnuts claque. He raised Mrs. Wingate's pudgy hand to his lips, and ushered her off in giggling confusion. Then he made a sign of dismissal to the piano player.
"I'm not going to sing," he said.
While the accompanist withdrew, he waved cheerfully to the gaping Lieutenant Kearney, and ran friendly blue eyes over the faces of the rest of the audience. A few of them looked like the respectable struggling poor, some were ordinary shiftless down-and-outs; these would be bona fide beggars, helpless victims of the King's racket; and undoubtedly there were others who worked directly for the King. Big Hazel Green was nowhere in evidence, but he saw Frankie Weiss sitting a few rows back from the dais.
"Ladies, gentlemen, and others," Simon began. "Some of you may have heard of me. Some of you may not. I'm sometimes known as the Saint."
He waited till the low resultant buzz died down, and little dancing devils of mischief showed in his eyes.
"I won't make a long speech," he said. "I know you're probably anxious to get at the refreshments. Anyway, I'm no good at speeches. I'd rather show you a few tricks which might come in useful; since it's been brought to my attention that some of you have been victimized by unscrupulous extortionists, which is a polite name for some dirty racketeering rats."
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