“Thank you,” said Kleinhaus. “Meanwhile, Mr. Tombs, we went on keeping an eye on you, to sec where you’d lead us. I still didn’t know how deeply you were involved in the affair, and I was as puzzled as you seem to have been by the things Ravenna was carrying and by the motive for the robbery. Most of that has now been cleared up. One of my men followed you here, and I followed Signora Ravenna myself after I talked to her at the police station a little while ago. Her answers seemed as suspicious to me as they apparently did to you.”
“How long have you been listening?” Simon asked.
“I’ve been in the hall all the time. Monsieur Galen’s servant was too agitated by the way Signora Ravenna reacted when he told her that her husband was already here to remember to shut the front door. It was very illuminating.” The detective’s bright blue eyes shifted again. “Now, Signora Ravenna, I still want to hear what you were going to say.”
Her face was a white mask.
“I have nothing to say! You can’t be serious about such an accusation — and from such a person! Can you believe I would have my own husband murdered?”
“Such things have happened,” Kleinhaus said sadly. “However, we can check in another way. The two men have already been caught. Mr. Tombs will be able to identify them. Then you can confront them, and we’ll see what they say when we — prompt them a little...”
The false indignation drained out of her delicately-molded face, and the features turned ugly and formless with terror. She moistened her full lips, and her throat moved, but no sound came.
And then, as if she understood that in that silence she had already betrayed her own guilt for all to see, she gave a choked little cry and ran past Galen, shoving him out of the way with a hysterical violence that sent him staggering, and ran out through the French windows, out onto the sunlit terrace that went to the edge of the cliff where the house perched, and kept on running...
Inspector Kleinhaus, presently, was the first to turn from looking down over the edge. With a conclusive gesture he replaced his absurdly juvenile hat.
“Perhaps that saves a lot of unpleasantness,” he remarked. “Well, I must still ask you to identify the two men, Mr. Tombs — your name really is Tombs, is it?”
“It sounds sort of ominous, doesn’t it?” said the Saint easily.
He still had eight diamonds, six emeralds, and ten valuable stamps in his pockets and no one was left to ask embarrassing questions about them. At such a time it would have been very foolish to draw any more attention to himself.
Payoff
by Frank Kane
Tony’s men had been trying to stop the killer for five days — and all Liddell had was five minutes.
Tony Melish was scared. It showed in the little twitch under his left eye, the thin film of perspiration that glistened on his upper lip.
“They’re bluffing,” he said. “Only they picked the wrong guy to bluff.” He hit himself on the chest with the side of his hand. “They think they can muscle Tony Melish into a shake?”
The blonde looked up from her long, carefully-shellacked fingernails, smiled lazily. “From the way you’ve been acting the last four days, you sure could fool me.” She was tall. Thick, wavy blonde hair cascaded down over her shoulders in shimmering metallic waves. Her body was ripe, lush. Swelling breasts showed over the top of her low cut dress; a small waist hinted at full hips, long shapely legs concealed by the fullness of her skirt. She turned the full force of slanted, green eyes on Johnny Liddell. “He hasn’t been out of this place in four days. He says they’re not bluffing him. Look at him shaking apart.”
“Shut up, you,” the night club owner said.
Liddell looked over to where Melish stood in front of the fireplace, clenching and unclenching his hands. The years had made a lot of changes in Tony, Liddell realized. The lean wolfishness of his face was blurred by a soft overlay of fat. Flat, lustreless eyes still peered from under heavily-veined, thickened eyelids, but the soft, discolored pouches under them took away the old menace.
“How come you waited until the last minute to call me in, Tony?” Liddell asked.
The night club man shrugged. “I thought my boys could handle it. I thought they could smoke out the guys behind it.” He spat angrily into the fireplace. “They got no place. I don’t know any more now than I did five days ago.”
Liddell nodded, glanced down at the typewritten sheet he held in his lap. “They want fifty grand or you get it tonight at eleven. No mention of any snatch or anything else — the dough or the works.” He consulted the watch on his wrist, grinned humorlessly. “That leaves exactly five minutes. I can’t do much for you in five minutes if your boys couldn’t even get to first base in five days.”
“All I want from you is to stand by for a couple of hours.” The night club owner wiped the perspiration off his upper lip with the back of his hand. “It ain’t that I don’t trust my own boys, but I just like the idea of having a gun handy I can be sure of.” He stole a nervous look at the clock on the desk, compared it with his wrist watch. “They’re bluffing. They got to be.”
The blonde snorted, walked over to the big picture window, pushed back the blinds, stared down at the street ten stories below. Tony started to yell at her, checked himself. With a shrug, he walked over behind her, hands going around her, lips to her neck.
“No need of you hanging around, baby,” he told her. “Go on back to your place. I’ll talk to you in the morning.”
The blonde coolly removed his hands from the front of her strapless gown. “By ouija board?” Her eyes flicked past him, ignored the rush of angry color in his face. “So long, Liddell. I hope you enjoy holding his hand.”
As she walked across the room, her round hips worked softly and smoothly against the tightly drawn fabric of her skirt. She stopped at the door, hand on knob. “Mind letting me out of this vault, Tony?”
The night club man walked to his desk, jabbed at a concealed button. The door opened, and a thin man in a heavily-padded tuxedo materialized in the opening. His hand was jammed deep in his bulging jacket pocket; his small eyes hop-scotched around the room. Finally, they came to rest hungrily on the blonde.
The fullness of her lips straightened out into an angry line. “When you get to the lower rib, it’s really a birthmark,” she said coldly.
The guard’s eyes narrowed. He looked at Tony. “What the hell’s she talking about?”
“I didn’t know you weren’t through undressing me,” the girl said. She turned to look at Tony. “You were going to do something about this jerk looking at me that way.”
“No,” Tony said. “I’m going to do something about you when they stop looking at you that way, baby.” He nodded at Mickey. “See that someone puts her in a cab.”
The blonde stamped through the doorway. The door swung shut behind her.
“That dame’s going to drive me screwy. I ain’t got enough on my mind, she’s got to get particular how a guy looks at her,” Tony said. He wiped his forehead with the flat of his hand, stared at his damp palm. “You figure like me, don’t you, Liddell? It’s a bluff?”
“Maybe.”
“What do you mean, maybe? You think they’re crazy enough to think I’ll kick in that kind of dough just because they talk tough?”
Liddell shrugged. “Maybe they don’t expect you to kick in. Maybe they figure on hitting you and using this—” he held up the typewritten sheet — “as a cover.”
The night club man’s eyes receded behind their discolored pouches. “Go on.”
“If you did get it and the cops found this note, they’d be looking for a shakedown mob.” Liddell brought a cigarette from his jacket pocket, hung it in the corner of his mouth, where it waggled when he talked. “From this, they’d never figure to look closer to home — an old partner, some of your own boys, for instance.”