“You can’t show him anything!” Hamlin said furiously. “If you do, Kelly could put us out and take everything!”
Hyram Angelworth turned desperately to Simon.
“Listen — you owe me your life. Give me mine in return, and leave Carole out of this!”
“I’m sorry,” said the Saint. “I’ve got my orders. And Carole won’t be hurt unless you force us to.”
Angelworth’s shoulders sagged as he let out a long deep breath.
“You leave me no choice.” He turned wearily. “Come into my study.”
“Wait a minute!” Hamlin barked, waving his gun. “There’s more people involved than just Carole. I can’t let you do it!”
“Can’t let me do it?” Angelworth said in a dangerously quiet voice. “I decide what’s done here. I pulled you out of jail and turned you from a convict into a rich man—”
“And he’ll turn you back into a convict if you don’t behave yourself,” Simon put in. “With your record you’ll make a perfect fall guy if the cops ever start suspecting your boss.”
“I have decided,” Angelworth said to Hamlin, “to combine forces with West Coast Kelly. Now get out of the way and let me settle this business.”
Hamlin hesitated a moment, but placed himself between Angelworth and the study.
“I won’t tolerate insubordination,” Angelworth snapped. “Get out of the way.”
“No!” Hamlin half screamed.
Angelworth shot first and sent Hamlin careening back against the wall, his gun flying from his hand and tumbling across the carpet. As Hamlin sagged to the floor, blood soaking the left side of his body, Simon had time to wonder if the secretary really would have pulled the trigger of his own pistol. He had certainly been destroyed by the hesitant mentality of an employee, while Angelworth had been quickened by the mentality of the leader.
“Nice shot,” said the Saint. “I see how you got to be the Supremo.”
He followed Angelworth past Hamlin, who was unconscious but still bleeding, into the book-lined study. In a moment Angelworth had swung one of the bookshelves away from the wall and was opening the door of a safe which had been hidden behind it.
“All the important records are here,” Angelworth said. “Take what you want and look at it.”
The Saint felt triumphant relief. He took the folders which Angelworth handed him and strolled out into the living-room looking through the papers. Angelworth’s eyes followed him anxiously.
Simon leaned against the wall near a window. Without taking his eyes from his reading, he pulled the curtain aside, waved his arm up and down three times, and let the curtain fall into place again. Angelworth’s body stiffened.
“What was that?”
“Signaling,” Simon said.
“Signaling what?”
“That everything’s okay.” His signal would have been received by a watcher on the roof of the building opposite, and relayed back to the floor below the New Sylvania’s penthouse. He looked up from the folders. “This is interesting stuff. You’re very creative with numbers. For Carole’s sake I wish you’d been a math professor instead of a crook.”
The door from the hallway burst open, and suddenly the room was invaded by three blue uniforms led by a man in a plain suit. Confronted with this police presence, Hyram Angelworth’s instincts told him to bolt for the rear exit, but intelligence told him to try a last desperate sound.
“Thank God you’ve come!” he cried, pointing a shaking finger at the Saint. “This man broke in here and—”
“Spare us,” said the Saint. “The law, for once, is with me.” He spoke to Lieutenant Stacey, who was leading the task force. “This fine-looking gent is the Supremo. He was obliging enough to hand over the evidence from the wall safe, and to plug his assistant there for trying to stop him. Brother Hamlin seems to be alive; he should make a very willing witness.”
“You’re working for the police?” Angelworth grated. “Then where’s Carole? What have you done with Carole?”
“She’s downtown, at Police Headquarters, protected by a charming detective lieutenant. She was picked up on a phoney charge to make certain she wouldn’t be in touch with you after lunch.”
“Did she know?” Angelworth asked almost piteously.
“No, she didn’t,” Simon answered.
With incredible swiftness Angelworth spun round and dashed back into the study. As the policemen raced after him, Simon shouted: “Watch out — he’s got a gun in there!”
But there was no sound of shots. A moment later, after scuffling noises, the police emerged into the living-room again with a handcuffed and crestfallen ex-Supremo in their charge.
“He was trying to kill himself,” one of them said. “We got the gun just when he was putting it to his head.”
“I’ll give him one thing,” Simon said thoughtfully. “He did love one person in the world more than himself.”
The atmosphere at the airport the next noon was clear, kerosene-perfumed, and — to the Saint — supercharged with his own eagerness to get away from Philadelphia. Brad Ryner sat in the police car with the door open, and Lieutenant Stacey stood beside the Saint as a porter carried Simon’s bag into the terminal.
“I want you to know how much we appreciate what you did,” Stacey said earnestly.
Simon shook his head, nodding, and turned to Ryner.
“Look,” Ryner said, “I feel mighty bad about this. When I used those pictures to get you to help out, I didn’t realise what it was gonna cost you. I mean about the girl. I didn’t know what a crummy mess it would put you in, not until she told you off at headquarters last night.”
The Saint’s mind was forced to leap back and relive that scene again. Carole had been released, with explanations, when her father was brought in, and had then had to cope alone with the shock of his arrest and the revelations that went with it, while Simon was indulging the authorities in their mania for paperwork. It had not been necessary for him to see her even after she had helped with summoning lawyers and fending off vulturine reporters. In fact, Stacey, who was well aware of her feelings by that time, had tried to avert the unpleasantries.
Sitting in his office that evening, he had said to Simon, while Brad Ryner listened: “She’s very upset, naturally. She’s not being rational. She’s got to blame somebody, and it’s easier for her to blame you than her father. I’d suggest that you don’t see her. At least not for some time, till she’s cooled down.”
“Yeah,” Ryner had joined in. “Just blow. What good can it do to let her chew you out?”
“If she wants to see me, I at least owe her that,” Simon had said. “Let her in.”
It had been worse than he had anticipated. When Carole entered Stacey’s office she had looked so haggard, her eyes so swollen and reddened with crying, that Simon could scarcely recognise her as the lively happy girl he had known so briefly. It was understandable. Before this she had not been able to imagine to herself that there was even a one per cent clay content in her paternal idol’s feet, and now he turned out to be ninety-nine per cent pure mud. And the man she had loved was the one who had shattered her world, doomed her father to prison, and condemned her at the very least to humiliation and a terrible time of readjustment.
“You pig!” she said, and for as long as he lived he would remember the corrosive bitterness of every syllable. “I can’t think of anything low enough to call you.”
“Now wait a minute,” Ryner had put in. “Don’t blame Simon for what your father did. He was only...”
Simon silenced the detective with a glance, but did not try to reply to Carole himself.
“You could have told me,” she said. “You knew I... I loved you. And all the time you were using me to get at my father!”