Simon opened the door and swung out a long leg.
“A noble duty, Horatio,” he murmured, “but we belong here — remember? The sheriff wouldn’t like it if he thought we’d jumped ship.”
The Admiral stood firmly planted in his path. His face was no longer ruddily friendly, and his eyes were half shuttered.
“I’m sorry, sir. I don’t know how you were able to disembark, but my orders—”
That was as far as he got, for at that moment the precise section of his anatomy known to box-fighting addicts as the button came into unexpected violent contact with an iron fist which happened at that moment, by some strange coincidence, to be traveling upwards at rocket speed. For one brief instant the Admiral enjoyed an entirely private fireworks display of astonishing brilliance, and thereupon lost interest in all mundane phenomena.
The Saint caught him as he crumpled and eased his descent to the gravel. There was no other movement in the parking lot, and the slow drumming of the distant surf blended with a faint filtration of music from inside the club to overlay the scene with the beguiling placidity of a nocturne. Simon took another grip and heaved the Admiral quite gently into the deeper shadows of some shrubbery, where he began to bind and gag him deftly with the Admiral’s own handkerchief, necktie, and suspenders.
“You, too, can be a fine figure of a man, bursting with vibrant health and super strength,” recited Patricia. “Send for our free booklet, They Laughed When I Talked Back to the Truck Driver.”
“If Mary Livingstone ever loses her voice, you can get a job with Jack Benny,” said the Saint. “Now while I finish this up, will you be a good girl and go in and engage Esteban in dulcet converse — with his back to the door. I’ll be with you in two seconds.”
To be drearily accurate, it was actually sixty-eight seconds later when the Saint entered the gaming room again. He found Esteban facing a vivacious Pat, and it was clear from his back that it would take something rather important to drag him away from her.
The Saint was able to provide this. It manifested itself as a pressure in the center of Esteban’s spine.
“This isn’t my pipe, Esteban,” he breathed in the entrepreneur’s ear. “Shall we adjourn to your private office, or would you like bits of your sacroiliac all over the joint?”
Esteban said nothing. He led the way, with the Saint walking apparently arm in arm with him, and Pat still chattering on the other side.
“—and I am going to write to my mother, Mr Esteban, and tell her what a romantic place you—”
“Now we can wash this up,” the Saint said.
He closed the door behind them. Esteban stood very still.
“What do you expect this to get you, Mr Templar?”
“A peek in your safe,” said the Saint softly.
“The safe is locked.”
“This is still the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Sacroiliacs,” Simon reminded him. “The safe can be unlocked.”
“You wouldn’t dare to shoot!”
“Not until I count to three, I wouldn’t. It’s a superstition with me. One... two...”
“Very well,” Esteban said.
Little beads of sweat stood on his olive brow as he went to the wall safe and twirled the dial.
Simon handed his gun to Pat.
“Cover him. If he tries anything, shoot him in his posterity.” He added to Esteban, “She will, too.”
Esteban stood to one side as the Saint emptied the safe of bundles of currency, account books, and sheaves of business-like papers. He was pleased to find that Esteban was a neat and methodical man. It made the search so much quicker and easier. He had known before he started what kind of thing he was looking for, and there were not too many places to look for it. He was intent and efficient, implacable as an auditor, with none of the lazy flippancy that normally glossed his purposes.
Another voice spoke from the doorway behind him.
“So we’re havin’ a party. Put that gun down, Miss Holm. What would this all be about, son?”
“Come on in, daddy,” Simon said. “I was just deciding who you were going to arrest.”
Esteban’s sudden laugh was sharp with relief. “I think, my friend, the sheriff knows that already. Mr Haskins, I shall be glad to help you with my evidence. They stick me up in my own club, bring me in here, and force me to open the safe. Fortunately you catch them red-handed.”
“That’s the hell of a way to talk about a guy who’s just going to save your worthless neck,” said the Saint.
Newt Haskins pushed his black hat onto the back of his head.
“This had shuah better make a good story, son,” he observed. “But I’m listenin’.”
“It wasn’t too hard to work out,” Simon said seriously. “Lida Verity was being blackmailed, of course. That’s why she told us she was in trouble, instead of calling on you. Blackmail has been a side line in this joint for some time — and a good hunting ground this must be for it, too. This town is always full of wives vacationing from their husbands, and vice versa, and the climate is liable to make them careless. Somebody stooging around this joint could build up interesting dossiers on a lot of people. In fact, somebody did.”
He took a small notebook from his pocket.
“Here it is. Names, dates, details. Items that could be plenty embarrassing if they were used in the wrong way. I’m going to rely on your professional discretion to see that it’s destroyed when you’re through with it.”
“He’s trying to pull the fast one!” Esteban burst out. “He never found such a book in my safe—”
“I didn’t say I did,” Simon responded calmly. “I found it on somebody else. But since you were the most obvious person to be behind the operation, I wanted to nose around in your safe to see if there was anything in it that would confirm or deny. I’m afraid the results let you out. There doesn’t seem to be anything that even remotely connects you. On the other hand, I found this.”
He handed Haskins a slip of paper, and the sheriff squinted at it with his shrewd gray eyes.
“Seems to be a check made out to Esteban,” Haskins said. “It says on the voucher ‘January installment on car-park concession.’ What do you figger that means, son?”
“It means that if the Admiral was paying Esteban for the car-park concession, Esteban could hardly have been using him as part of a blackmail racket. Otherwise the pay-off would have gone the other way. And certainly it would if the Admiral had been doing Esteban’s dirty work when he killed Lida Verity.”
“The Admiral!” Patricia exclaimed.
Simon nodded.
“Of course. Our corny nautical character. He never missed anything that went on here — including Mrs Verity’s rather foolish affair with a superior gigolo and shill named Maurice Kerr. Only she didn’t sit still for blackmail. I guess she told the Admiral she was going to have me take care of him, and she may even have tried to scare him with the gun she’d borrowed. He got mad or lost his head and grabbed the gun and shot her.” The Saint dipped in his pocket again. “Here are the white gloves he always wore. You’ll notice that there’s a tear in one of them. I’m betting that the thread you found in that trigger guard can be proved to have pulled out of that glove.”
Haskins turned the gloves over in his bony hands, and brought his eyes slowly back to the Saint.
“Reckon you done another good job, Saint,” he conceded peacefully. “We’ll soon know... An’ this heah Esteban, he ought to stake you with blue chips all night for lettin’ him out.”
“Letting me out!” Esteban echoed indignantly. The enormity of the injustice done to him grew visibly in his mind, finding voice in a crescendo of righteous resentment. “I tell the world I am let out! That Admiral, he makes agreement with me to pay me half of everything he makes from the concession. And he never tells me — the peeg! — he never tells me anything about this blackmail at all!”