thing was, nobody on the March Hare had called me. They were just wonderin' whether they ought to when I got there.'
'It all sounds most mysterious,' Simon agreed sympathetically.
Haskins stood up and mopped his brow.
'It shuah does. Heah's all hell apoppin' just a few hours after you land in town. You're known from heah to Shanghai as a .trouble maker, although I ain't sayin' you deserve it. But if you're as clever as they say you are you naturally wouldn't have any convictions-yet. But you can't blame me for wonderin' about you.'
'Brother,' said the Saint, with the silkiest possible undertone of warning, 'you're beginning to sound just a little too much like Chief Inspector Teal. You remember what I told you? Just because a few queer things happen here, and I'm in Miami at the time, you come charging after me-'
'When I charge you, son, I'll have something.' Haskins scuffed along the floor of the patio with a phlegmatic toe. 'You look at: what's been bustin' loose. A tanker blows up, for no reason. I get a mysterious phone call that nobody can account for, about a body. An' then it seems Gilbeck an his daughter ain't heah, but you are, an' nobody knows where they've gone.'
'So,' said the Saint, 'I must be mixed up with sinking ships and kidnapping millionaires as well.'
Haskins' eyes were flinty mist.
'Son,' he said, 'I don't know what you're mixed up with.'
His right hand snaked suddenly out of his pocket and flattened out in front of Simon Templar. The Saint gazed down at the oblong slip of paper held in its palm. Written on it in plain capitals were the words: LAWRENCE GILBECK: YOU CAN'T GET AWAY WITH IT ALL THE TIME. I'M COMING TO PUT AN END TO YOUR TROUBLES.
The thin linear figure drawn as a signature at the lower right-hand corner wore a halo slighdy askew.
Simon stared at it for just three seconds.
And then, progressively, he began to laugh.
It started as a tentative chuckle, grew up into a louder richness that became tinged with the overtones of hysteria, and ended in a culmination of wild hilarity that mere words could scarcely choke their way through. The whole rounded gorgeousness of the business was almost too shattering to endure.
The full magnificence of it had to work itself into his system by degrees. The March Combine had taken the hurdle of the planted body neatly enough-he had realised that. But in their impromptu comeback they had unsuspectingly sown the seeds of a supernal fizzle of which history might never see the like again.
'Of course,' sobbed the Saint weakly. 'Of course. I wrote ft. What about it?'
The Sheriff scratched his long stringy neck.
'That sort of note only means one sort of thing to me.'
'But you don't know the background.' The Saint wiped his streaming eyes. 'Justine Gilbeck wrote us weeks ago that Papa was behaving like a moulting rooster: he seemed to be in trouble of some sort, but he wouldn't tell her about it. She was worried stiff. She asked us to come here and try to find out what it was and help him. I can show you her letter. Let me get it for you.'
III How Simon Templar Made a Pleasure of Necessity, and Patricia Holm Was Not Impressed
Sheriff Haskins' equine face seemed to grow longer and gloomier as he completed a patient reading of the letter. Then he referred again to the note signed with the Saint's emblem.
''You can't get away with it all the time'' he read off it 'What would that mean?'
'Oh, I was always kidding him that you can't make millions honestly,' Simon replied easily. 'I always told him that one day his sins would catch up with him and he'd go to jail. It was a standing rib. So of course when Justine said he was worried I had to make a crack like that.'
Haskins shifted his cud.
''I'm coming to put an end to your troubles' That would be sort of double meanin', hunh?'
'Yes.'
'On account of what well call this fictitious reputation o' yours.'
'Naturally.' The Saint was still a little shaky with laughter. 'Now wouldn't it be fair to tell me where you got that note from?'
'I dunno yet.' Haskins gazed at it abstractedly for a moment longer, and put it back in his pocket He returned his attention to Justine Gilbeck's letter. He said, as if he were making a comment on the weather: 'I guess there's plenty of this letterhead in the house.'
'And we're all master forgers,' Simon assured him blandly. 'Signatures are just baby stuff to us. We think nothing of four whole pages of handwriting.'
Haskins put the letter back in its envelope and studied the postmark. He tapped it on his front teeth.
'Mind if I keep this a while?'
'Not a bit,' said the Saint. 'There must be a bank in town that knows her writing, and they've probably got other friends here as well. Check up on it all you like. And then come back and apologise to me.'
Haskins put on his hat and turned his head in the manner of a buzzard seeking sustenance. Finding a spot which suited his fancy, he scored a nicotine bullseye at the roots of an unoffending lily, and said: 'Maybe you better not leave town just yet, in case I might want to do that.'
A suitable remise was shaping itself on the Saint's tongue when it was abruptly cut off by the arrival of another car. It was a very different proposition from the Sheriff's well-worn but serviceable jalopy. This was an enormous cream-coloured custom-built Packard, which whirled into the driveway and whipped around the front of the house with an effortless speed that made Simon tip an imaginary hat to the skill of the driver. Above the side of the roadster he had time to catch a glimpse of a jacket of Lincoln green and a mane of tawny hair tossed in the wind, and abruptly changed his mind about making a barbed retort.
He made a starting movement towards the house.
'All right,' he said amiably. 'I'll be expecting you.'
Haskins held his ground, absorbing the scenery with his seamed poker face.
'I don't get much pleasure out of life, son,' he explained, 'and while I'm right respectably married, redheads have always been a weakness of mine. When I get a chance like this, I sorta hesitate to hurry off.'
'Then by all means don't hurry,' said the Saint hospitably; but his brain tightened into preparedness, tinged with a certain malevolence of which Haskins was the sole beneficiary.
It might well have suited the devious purposes of March and his captain to say nothing about his unconventional visit to the March Hare, but the girl's attitude was much less predictable. By trying to get rid of her during their exchange of backchat the night before, March had suggested that she wasn't entirely in his confidence; but Simon was not yet ready to attribute her prompt response to his invitation to nothing but the fascination which his beauty and charm had been able to exert on her during an interview in which his attention had been mostly elsewhere. She was a very uncertain quantity still, and the Saint wasn't anxious for Haskins to find out about that visit to the March Hare too soon. It was a situation that demanded active management . . .
Stimulated by the arrival of a lady, Haskins sought a nearby flowerbed and in more or less gentlemanly fashion disposed of his chew. Simon took advantage of the disgorgement to cross the patio alone and greet the girl as she came out.
By night she had been beautiful; but so were many girls whose glamour vanished with the dawn. She was not one of them. Under the sunlight she took on a flaming vividness that matched the heady colours in the courtyard. The setting took her into its composition and framed her with perfect lightness, as if its exotic blooms took life from her and she from them . . . What the Saint had to do was an attractive task.
'Karen darling!'
His voice was warm and eager. And before she could speak, he had wrapped her in his arms, holding her tightly against him and covering her lips with his own.
'The scarecrow in black's the Sheriff,' he said in an urgent sotto-voce, and went on aloud: 'This is wonderful! Why haven't I seen you for so many years?'
The first rigidity of her supple body gave him a bad moment. But he had to give her a clue, and this seemed to be the only way. If she still didn't want to play, it was the will of Allah . . . He kept her in an embrace of iron, and kissed her again for luck.
Her strength was pent up against him; and then suddenly it wasn't. He loosed her, and she smiled, and he felt a breathlessness which could not be wholly put down to the suspense.
