Call for the Saint

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.