Call for the Saint

By no perceptible sign, the Saint sensed a sudden change in her, an inner freezing, her eyes coming into focus on the gun, her whole being gripped by that thanatoid stillness that stands on the threshold of panic.

'Where,' she said, in a small tight voice, 'did you get--that?'

'It was left here last night as a sort of-calling card.'

Patricia was staring at him.

'Last night?'

'Some hopped-up heister crashes de jernt,' Hoppy snorted. 'He gets away before we can even see who it is. But we give him such a scare he forgets de rod.'

'You didn't tell me!' Pat accused. 'You finished that brawl at the Arena over here, didn't you?' She searched Simon's face narrowly, and sensed the truth with the swift certainty of an intuition ground to psychic fineness by the countless abra­sions of past experience. 'Someone followed you here and tried to kill you!'

The Saint bowed.

'Darling, you know our kind of friends too well.'

Connie Grady stood up. She gathered up her purse and gloves with unsteady hands. Her face was pale, the magnolia skin drawn and haggard. She tried to ignore the revolver on the table, but her eyes kept flitting back to it, under the spell of some kind of frightening fascination.

'I'm sorry I bothered you like this,' she said with nervous breathlessness. 'It was silly, really. I-' She broke off, walking quickly to the door. 'Good-by.'

'No, wait!'

'Please.'

She almost ran out of the apartment, and the front door slammed behind her.

Patricia and Hoppy returned their blank stares to the Saint- Patricia's tinged with irony.

'Too bad,' she said. 'And you were just starting to make such an impression.'

'Chees,' Hoppy said between mouthfuls, resuming his as­sault on the food, 'de Torpedo gettin' killed last night kinda made her blow her top, huh, boss ?'

'It was that gun,' Pat stated, 'that upset her. Why?'

Simon picked up the revolver and turned it idly in his hands.

'My crystal ball doesn't work like yours,' he said, and he smiled at her. 'Rather an attractive little thing, isn't she?'

'Oh, rather,' Pat agreed, her smile sweetly corrosive; 'if you like them on the slightly hysterical side.'

Simon laughed,' his fingernail tracing the small intertwined letters engraved on the metal just above the stocks of the gun.

'Poor Melusina,' he sighed whimsically. 'I'm afraid her dear old daddy is making her cry.'

'Melusina? What are you talking about? I thought her name was Connie.'

'So it is. The term was merely analogous. Melusina was a fairy. A French fairy.' Simon grinned provocatively. 'If you ever delved into such matters in your youth, dear, you'll re­member the story.'

'I never was as good at fairy tales as you,' Pat said de­murely.

'Melusina,' Simon continued imperturbably, 'was no end attractive and quite easy to take-even if she was on the slight­ly hysterical side. However, she happened to suffer an injury from her father, for which, if memory serves, she had him imprisoned inside a mountain. She, in turn, was punished by being turned into a snake from the waist down every Saturday night.'

'She ought to have been able to wriggle out of that one,' Patricia said dryly. 'But what has it got to do with Miss Grady, if anything?'

'Boss, don't she t'ink Smith got killed by accident?' Hoppy demanded.

'Inasmuch as you raise the question,' Simon said, 'I'll give you an answer. No.'

'Obviously,' said Patricia. 'But what do you think?'

'She's quite right. It wasn't an accident.'

Mr. Uniatz absorbed half a cup of coffee at a gulp, scowling interestedly.

'Ya mean de Torpedo ain't knocked off fair and square?'

The Saint nodded thoughtfully.

'Indubitably not-if instinct serves, and I think it does. At any rate, we're going to look into the matter.'

'What are you going to do, Simon?'

The Saint smiled at her, and then at the gun lying on the palm of his hand.

'We're going to call on the man who owns this,' he said. 'Wish we could take you along, but unfortunately ...'

'But you said you didn't even see who it was who left that gun here!' she exclaimed. 'How do you know who--'

'I know who owns these initials,' said the Saint patiently, lifting the gun for her inspection. He showed her the mono­gram in fancy script on the metal. 'They're rather difficult to untangle, but I think you can make them out.'

Hoppy leaned over.

'Initials?' he queried, peering at the gun. 'Where?' 'M . . . G,' Pat read. 'M-G? But who is M G?'

'Offhand, I'd say it was Connie's father, Michael Grady, wouldn't you?' Simon kissed her, and stood up. 'Let's get started, Hoppy. We may be able to dig her old man out of the mountain.'

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Saint entered by one of the side en­trances of the Manhattan Arena and found himself, as he ex­pected, in the office wing of the building. The corridors and reception rooms were alive with voices and sporting gentry of varied interests and importance; for this was a crossroads of the indoor sporting world, and through these catacombs parad­ed its foremost and hindmost representatives.

Simon moved silently and inconspicuously along the shad­owed wall of the main hall and stepped into the main recep­tion room.

It was a bare and unkempt antechamber, its hard chairs and bare benches occupied by a garrulous covey of promoters, man­agers, sportswriters, ticket speculators, and professional ath­letes of varied talents and notoriety, all obviously waiting to see the great Mike Grady. A fog of tobacco smoke hung over the room like stale incense burnt to strange and violent gods; the voices of the votaries droned a ragged litany punctuated by coarse yaks of laughter. There was something about them that marked them as a distinct species of metropolitan life; each was subtly akin to the other, no matter how different their outer hides might be. It lay, perhaps, in the mutual boldness of their eyes, the uninhibited expression of primitive emotion, the corner-of-the-mouth asides and the sudden loudly profane rodomontades in lower-bracket dialects. Their eyes appraised him pitilessly as he threaded his way through them, like circus animals taking the measure of a new trainer; but in the same moment their inquisitorial glances flipped away again, as if even under his easy elegance they recognized instinctively a fellow member of their own predatory species.

The girl at the switchboard near Grady's office door, who doubled as receptionist, surveyed the Saint in the same way as he approached her. But even her dead-pan appraisal softened responsively to the intimate flattery of his smile, the irrepressi­ble proposition of his blue eyes, and the devil-may-care lines of chin and mouth. . . . He was opening the door of Grady's private office before she suddenly remembered her duties as sentry of the sanctum.

'Hey, come back here!' she cried. 'You can't go in there!'

Like other women who had tried to tell the Saint what he couldn't do, she thought of her objections a little late. The Saint was already in.

Michael Grady was sitting tilted back in his swivel chair, his feet resting on the edge of his huge desk, his broad snub-nosed face turned upward at the ceiling as he cuddled a telephone in the crook of his jaw and shoulder. His gaze swung downward as he heard the door close, and his eyes, which matched the Saint's for blueness, bulged with embryonic eruption.

The Saint waved a debonair greeting and sank into a worn leather club chair facing him.

The promoter grunted a couple of times into the telephone, his eyes fixed on Simon Templar's, and hung up, his feet re­turning to the floor with a crash.

'And who the hell might you be?' he blasted.