The Saint Goes West s-23

by Leslie Charteris

  The Saint Goes West

  ( Saint - 23 )

  Leslie Charteris

  An anthology of two novellas by Leslie Charteris; Palm Springs and Hollywood.

  The Saint Goes West

  Leslie Charteris

  Contents I. PALM SPRINGS II. HOLLYWOOD

  THE SAINT GOES WEST

  I: PALM SPRINGS

  1

  "LOOK," SAID FREDDIE PELLMAN belligerently. "Your name is Simon Templar, isn't it?"

  "I think so," Simon told him.

  "You are the feller they call the Saint?"

  "So I'm told."

  "The Robin Hood of modern crime?"

  Simon was tolerant.

  "That's a rather fancy way of putting it."

  "Okay then," Pellman lurched slightly on his bar stool, and took hold of his highball glass more firmly for support.

  "You're the man I want. I've got a job for you."

  The Saint sighed.

  "Thanks. But I wasn't looking for a job. I came to Palm Springs to have fun."

  "You'll have plenty of fun. But you've got to take this job."

  "I don't want a job," said the Saint. "What is it?"

  "I need a bodyguard," said Pellman.

  He had a loud harsh voice that made Simon think of a rusty frog. Undoubtedly it derived some of this attractive quality from his consumption of alcohol, which was considerable. Simon didn't need to have seen him drinking to know this. The blemishes of long indulgence had worked deeply into the mottled puffiness of his complexion, the pinkish smeariнness of his eyes, and the sagging lines under them. It was even more noticeable because he was not much over thirty, and could once have been quite good-looking in a very conventional way. But things like that frequently happen to spoiled young men whose only material accomplishment in life has been the by no means negligible one of arranging to be born into a family with more millions than most people hope to see thousands.

  Simon Templar knew about him, of course-as did pracнtically every member of the newspaper-reading public of the United States, not to mention a number of other countries. In a very different way, Freddie Pellman was just as notorious a public figure as the Saint. He had probably financed the swalнlowing of more champagne than any other individual in the twentieth century. He had certainly been thrown out of more night clubs, and paid more bills for damage to more hotels than any other exponent of the art of uproar. And the number of complaisant show girls and models who were indebted to him for such souvenirs of a lovely friendship as mink coats, diamond bracelets, Packards, and other similar trinkets would have made the late King Solomon feel relatively sex-starved.

  He travelled with a permanent entourage of three incredibly beautiful young ladies-one blonde, one brunette, and one redнhead. That is, the assortment of colorings was permanent. The personnel itself changed at various intervals, as one faithful collaborator after another would retire to a well-earned rest, to be replaced by another of even more dazzling perfections; but the vacancy was always filled by another candidate of similar complexion, so that the harmonious balance of varieties was retained, and any type of pulchritude could always be found at a glance. Freddie blandly referred to them as his secretaries; and there is no doubt that they had left a memorable trail of scandal in every playground and every capital city in Europe and the Americas.

  This was the man who said he wanted a bodyguard; and the Saint looked at him with cynical speculation.

  "What's the matter?" he asked coolly. "Is somebody's husнband gunning for you?"

  "No, I never mess about with married women-they're too much grief." Pellman was delightfully insensitive and uninнhibited. "This is serious. Look."

  He dragged a crumpled sheet of paper out of his pocket and unfolded it clumsily. Simon took it and looked it over.

  It was a piece of plain paper on which a cutting had been pasted. The cutting was from Life, and from the heading it appeared to have formed part of a layout reviewing the curtain calls in the careers of certain famous public enemies. This particular picture showed a crumpled figure stretched out on a sidewalk with two policemen standing over it in attitudes faintly reminiscent of big-game hunters posing with their kill, surrounded by the usual crowd of gaping blank-faced spectators. The caption said: A village policeman's gun wrote finis to the career of "Smoke Johnny" Implicato, three times kidnaper and killer, after Freddie Pellman, millionaire playboy, recogнnised him in a Palm Springs restaurant last Christmas Day and held him in conversation until police arrived.

  Underneath it was pencilled in crude capitals: DID YOU EVER WONDER HOW JOHNNY FELT? WELL YOU'LL SOON FIND OUT. YOU GOT IT COMING MISTER.

  A FRIEND OF JOHNNY.

  Simon felt the paper, turned it over, and handed it back.

  "A bit corny," he observed, "but it must be a thrill for you. How did you get it?"

  "It was pushed under the front door during the night. I've rented a house here, and that's where it was. Under the front door. The Filipino boy found it in the morning. The door was locked, of course, but the note had been pushed under."

  When Freddie Pellman thought that anything he had to say was important, which was often, he was never satisfied to say it once. He said it several times over, trying it out in different phrasings, apparently in the belief that his audience was either deaf or imbecile but might accidentally grasp the point of it were presented often enough from a sufficient variety of angles.

  "Have you talked to the police about it?" Simon asked.

  "What, in a town like this? I'd just as soon tell the Boy Scouts. In a town like this, the police wouldn't know what to do with a murderer if he walked into the station and gave them a signed confession."

  "They got Johnny," Simon pointed out.

  "Listen, do you know who got Johnny? I got Johnny. Who recognised him? I did. I'd been reading one of those true deнtective magazines in a barber shop, and there was a story about him in it. In one of those true detective magazines. I recognised him from the picture. Did you read what it said in that clipping?"

  "Yes," said the Saint; but Freddie was not so easily headed off.

  He took the paper out of his pocket again.

  "You see what it says? 'A village policeman's gun wrote finis to the career. . . .'"

  He read the entire caption aloud, following the lines with his forefinger, with the most careful enunciation and draнmatic emphasis, to make sure that the Saint had not been baffled by any of the longer words.

  "All right," said the Saint patiently. "So you spotted him and put the finger on him. And now one of his pals is sore about it."

  "And that's why I need a bodyguard."

  "I can tell you a good agency in Los Angeles. You can call them up, and they'll have a first-class, guaranteed, bonded bodyguard here in three hours, armed to the teeth."

  "But I don't want an ordinary agency bodyguard. I want the very best man there is. I want the Saint."

  "Thanks," said the Saint. "But I don't want to guard a body."

  "Look," said Pellman aggressively, "will you name your own salary? Anything you like. Just name it."

  Simon looked around the bar. It was starting to fill up for the cocktail session with the strange assortment of types and costumes which give Palm Springs crowds an unearthly variety that no other resort in America can approach. Everything was represented-cowboys, dudes, tourists, tripнpers, travelling salesmen, local business men, winter resiнdents, Hollywood; men and women of all shapes and sizes and ages, in levis, shorts, business suits, slack suits, sun suits, play suits, Magnin models, riding breeches, tennis outfits, swim suits, and practically nothing. This was vacation and flippancy and fun and irresponsiblity for a while; and it was what the Saint had prom
ised himself.

  "If I took a job like that," he said, "it'd cost you a thousand dollars a day."

  Freddie Pellman blinked at him for a moment with the inнtense concentration of the alcoholic.

  Then he pulled a thick roll of green paper out of his pocket. He fumbled through it, and selected a piece, and pushed it into the Saint's hand. The Saint's blue eyes rested on it with a premonition of doom. Included in its decorative art work was a figure "1" followed by three zeros. Simon counted them.

  "That's for today," said Freddie. "You're hired. Let's have a drink."

  The Saint sighed.

  "I think I will," he said.

  2

  ONE REASON why there were no gray hairs on the Saint's dark head was that he never wasted any energy on vain regrets. He even had a humorous fatalism about his errors. He had stuck his neck out, and the consequences were strictly at his invitation. He felt that way about his new employment. He had been very sweetly nailed with his own smartness, and the only thing to do was to take it with a grin and see if it might be fun. And it might. After all, murder and mayhem had been mentioned; and to Simon Templar any adventure was always worth at least a glance. It might not be so dull. . . .

  "You'll have to move into the house, of course," Pellman said, and they drove to the Mirador Hotel to redeem the Saint's modest luggage, which had already run up a bill of some twenty dollars for the few hours it had occupied a room.

  Pellman's house was a new edifice perched on the sheer hills that form the western wall of the town. Palm Springs itself lies on the flat floor of the valley that eases impercepнtibly down to the sub-sea level of the Salton Sea; but on the western side it nestles tightly against the sharp surges of broken granite that soar up with precipitous swiftness to the eternal snows of San Jacinto. The private road to it curled precariously up the rugged edges of brown leaping cliffs, and from the jealously stolen lawn in front of the building you could look down and see Palm Springs spread out beneath you like a map, and beyond it the floor of the desert mottled gray-green with greasewood and weeds and cactus and smoke tree, spreading through infinite clear distances across to the last spurs of the San Bernardino mountains and widening southwards towards the broad baking spreads that had once been the bed of a forgotten sea whose tide levels were still graven on the parched rocks that bordered the plain.

  The house itself looked more like an artist's conception of an oasis hideaway than any artist would have believed. It was a sprawling bungalow in the California Spanish style that meнandered lazily among pools and patios as a man might have dreamed it in an idle hour-a thing of white stucco walls and bright red tile roofs, of deep cool verandahs and inconsequential arches, of sheltering palm trees and crazy flagstones, of gay beds of petunias and ramparts of oleanders and white columns dripping with the richness of bougainvillea. It was a place where an illusion had been so skilfully created that with hardly any imagination at all you could feel the gracious tempo of a century that would never come again; where you might see courtly hacendados bowing over slim white hands with the suppleness of velvet and steel, and hear the tinkle of fountains and the shuffle of soft-footed servants, and smell the flowers in the raven hair of laughing seёoritas; where at the turn of any corner you might even find a nymph-- Yes, you might always find a nymph, Simon agreed, as they turned a corner by the swimming pool and there was a sudden squeal and he had a lightning glimpse of long golden limbs uncurling and leaping up, and rounded breasts vanishing alнmost instantaneously through the door of the bath house, so swiftly and fleetingly that he could easily have been convinced that he had dreamed it.

  "That's Esther," Freddie explained casually. "She likes taking her clothes off."

  Simon remembered the much-publicised peculiarities of the Pellman mщnage, and took an even more philosophical attiнtude towards his new job.

  "One of your secretaries?" he murmured.

  "That's right," Freddie said blandly. "Come in and meet the others."

  The others were in the living-room, if such a baronial chamber could be correctly designated by such an ordinary name. From the inside, it looked like a Hollywood studio deнsigner's idea of something between a Cordoban mosque and the main hall of a medieval castle. It had a tiled floor and a domed gold mosaic ceiling, with leopard and tiger skin rugs, Monterey furniture, and fake suits of armor in between.

  "This is Miss Starr," Freddie introduced. "Call her Ginny. Mr. Templar."

  Ginny had red hair like hot dark gold, and a creamy skin with freckles. You could study all of it except about two square feet which were accidentally concealed by a green lastex swim-suit that clung to her soft ripe figure-where it wasn't artistically cut away for better exposures-like emerald paint. She sat at a table by herself, playing solitaire. She looked up and gave the Saint a long disturbing smile, and said: "Hi."

  "And this is Lissa O'Neill," Freddie said.

  Lissa was the blonde. Her hair was the color of young Inнdiana corn, and her eyes were as blue as the sky, and there were dew-dipped roses in her cheeks that might easily have grown beside the Shannon. She lay stretched out on a couch with a book propped up on her flat stomach, and she wore an expensively simple white play suit against which her slim legs looked warmly gilded.

  Simon glanced at the book. It had the lurid jacket of a Crime Club mystery. "How is it?" he asked.

  "Not bad," she said. "I thought I had it solved in the third chapter, but now I think I'm wrong. What did he say your name was?"

  "She's always reading mysteries," Ginny put in. "She's our tame crime expert-Madam Hawkshaw. Every time anyone gets murdered in the papers she knows all about it."

  "And why not?" Lissa insisted. "They're usually so stupid, anyone but a detective could see it."

  "You must have been reading the right books," said the Saint.

  "Did he say 'Templar'?" Lissa asked.

  The door opened then, and Esther came in. Simon recogнnised her by her face, a perfect oval set with warm brown eyes and broken by a red mouth that always seemed to be whispering "If we were alone. ..." A softly waved mane the color of smoked chestnuts framed the face in a dark dreamy cloud. The rest of her was not quite so easily identiнfiable, for she had wrapped it in a loose blue robe that left a little scope for speculation. Not too much, for the lapels only managed to meet at her waist, and just a little below that the folds shrank away from the impudent obtrusion of a shapely thigh.

  "A fine thing," she said. "Walking in on me when I didn't have a stitch on."

  "I bet you loved it," Ginny said, cheating a black ten out of the bottom of the pack and slipping it on to a red jack.

  "Do we get introduced?" said Esther.

  "Meet Miss Swinburne," said Freddie. "Mr. Templar. Now you know everybody. I want you to feel at home. My name's Freddie. We're going to call you Simon. All right?"

  "All right," said the Saint.

  "Then we're all at home," said Freddie, making his point. "We don't have to have any formality. If any of the girls go for you, that's all right too. We're all pals together."

  "Me first," said Ginny.

  "Why you?" objected Esther. "After all, if you'd been there to give him the first preview--"

  The Saint took out his cigarette-case with as much poise as any man could have called on in the circumstances.

  "The line forms on the right," he remarked. "Or you can see my agent. But don't let's be confused about this. I only work here. You ought to tell them, Freddie."

  The Filipino boy wheeled in the portable bar, and Pellman threaded his way over to it and began to work.

  "The girls know all about that threatening letter. I showed it to them this morning. Didn't I, Lissa? You remember that note I showed you?" Reassured by confirmation, Freddie picked up the cocktail shaker again and said: "Well, Simon Templar is going to take care of us. You know who he is, don't you? The Saint. That's who he is," said Freddie, leaving no room for misunderstanding.

  "I thought so," said Lissa, with her cornfl
ower eyes clinging to the Saint's face. "I've seen pictures of you." She put her book down and moved her long legs invitingly to make some room on the couch. "What do you think about that note?"

  Simon accepted the invitation. He didn't think she was any less potentially dangerous than the other two, but she was a little more quiet and subtle about it. Besides, she at least had something else to talk about.

  "Tell me what you think," he said. "You might have a good point of view."

  "I thought it sounded rather like something out of a cheap magazine."

  "There you are!" exclaimed Freddie triumphantly, from the middle distance. "Isn't that amazing? Eh, Simon? Listen to this, Ginny. That's what she reads detective stories for. You'll like this. D'you know what Simon said when I showed him that note? What did you say, Simon?"

  "I said it sounded a bit corny."

  "There!" said Freddie, personally vindicated. "That's the very word he used. He said it was corny. That's what he said as soon as he read it."

  "That's what I thought too," said Esther, "only I didn't like to say so. Probably it's just some crackpot trying to be funny."

  "On the other hand," Simon mentioned, "a lot of crackpots have killed people, and plenty of real murders have been pretty corny. And whether you're killed by a crackpot or the most rational person in the world, and whether the performance is corny or not, you end up just as dead."

  "Don't a lot of criminals read detective stories?" Lissa asked.

  The Saint nodded.

  "Most of them. And they get good ideas from them, too. Most writers are pretty clever, in spite of the funny way they look, and when they go in for crime they put in a lot of reнsearch and invention that a practising thug doesn't have the time or the ability to do for himself. But he could pick up a lot of hints from reading the right authors."

  "He could learn a lot of mistakes not to make, too."

  "Maybe there's something in that," said the Saint. "Perнhaps the stupid criminals you were talking about are only the ones who don't read books. Maybe the others get to be so clever that they never get caught, and so you never hear about them at all."