“That’s pretty damned sweet of you, Miss, uh, Luella—”
“Just plain Luella, Bill.”
“Okay, Luella. It’s swell of you, but I can’t let you do it. You’ve got to make a living.”
“Let me worry about that, Bill. I’ll just add it on to my next sale, to somebody who made his pile while you were out there on a Fortress.”
“If you put it like that — you’re sweet to do it, though.”
“It’s a pleasure — Bill.” Abruptly she became businesslike. “Finished? Then let’s go on up to my place and get the forms made out and signed.”
The Saint watched them go, not failing to note that Luella’s legs tapered to slim ankles which would have wrung a whistle from a real timber wolf.
“That’s quite a gal,” he observed, in a fatherly way.
“I noticed you taking in her personality,” retorted his lady. “Beautiful, weren’t they?”
Simon tossed her a sad sweet smile.
“It’s the artist in me. I see pretty women simply as interesting masses of light, shadow, and line.”
“Curved lines, of course.”
“Of course. Did you notice, darling Pat, that there was a certain note in that conversation, on which we so shamelessly eavesdropped, which didn’t quite belong?”
Patricia frowned.
“Well... I... she was flirting with the sergeant — a little. But who wouldn’t? He’s nice-looking, in a craggy sort of way. His kind of crisp curly hair always gives women itchy fingers.”
“I always wondered what did it,” murmured the Saint. “Ah, the patter of little fingers through one’s locks...!” He dropped his bantering tone for one laced with puzzlement. “But there was something off key. Her ‘place’? That usually means an apartment. Why her apartment? She’s a female real-estate agent — why not an office? Oh well...” He shrugged. “The sergeant is a lucky character, Pat. He has — or will shortly have — a place to lay his head, and those of his family. Which he most certainly deserves, but which doesn’t help us. However, it does give me an idea.”
“Don’t let it run away with you,” said Patricia tartly. “You haven’t seen his wife yet.”
The Saint ran a hand over his dark head.
“Darling, my thoughts would get a special award from the Hays office. It only occurred to me that there may be a solution to this hotel business. Why do we have to go through this routine with the hotels? Why don’t we just take an apartment, and when we’re tired of the place we’ll just rent it and move on.”
This was an interesting idea while it lasted, which was for some three hours after lunch. In that time they had an intensive refresher course in the topography of Hollywood and Beverly Hills, made the acquaintance of a couple of dozen real-estate agents and twice that many apartment managers, and came painfully to the conclusion that several thousand other people had had the same idea first.
“You’d better do something about those train reservations,” Patricia said finally. “I’m going to sink myself in a bubble bath and think about the life of a traveling salesman.”
“Make yourself beautiful, and we’ll go dancing somewhere,” Simon told her. “I’ll go over to the Brown Derby and drown a sorrow, and catch up with you.”
There was just one vacant place at the bar, and as the Saint slid into it and ordered a Peter Dawson he recognized the soldier on the next stool, and felt the first premonitory flutter of psychic moth wings as the pattern of coincidence began to build. For his neighbor was the sergeant to whom his attention had been indirectly drawn at lunch time.
Only it was a very different-looking sergeant with the same face. His eyes stared a light-year into space, his straight lips were frozen into a white line, and his fingertips also were white from the force with which they pressed on the bar. He looked less like a man with a beautiful piece of real estate and a beautiful realtress thrown in than anything the Saint could imagine.
Simon Templar’s reflexes of observation and curiosity were automatic. The form of his response was just as spontaneous even when it seemed most theatrical, for his sense of drama had a fundamental impishness that was as natural to him as breathing. He managed to corner the sergeant’s blank stare for an instant, and said, “Did you lose out on the house or the babe — or both?”
The soldier’s eyes came stiffly into focus.
“What’s that?”
“You don’t,” said the Saint with a smile, “look like a man who’s found a place to live ought to look, in this day and age.”
He was expecting a reaction, but nothing like what he got.
The head which Pat had admired a few hours earlier swung towards him with an expression that only seemed to belong with a gunsight. One of the hands on the bar balled into a white-knuckled fist, and the shoulder muscles tensed under the olive drab.
“Who’re you?” the young mouth snarled. “Whadda you know about it?”
“Take it easy,” drawled the Saint softly. “I’m just the innocent bystander and I’d like to avoid his traditional fate. I just happened to be sitting at the next table to you at lunch — remember? — And I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation with the lovely Luella.”
“That —!” The sergeant used a one-syllable expletive and inventoried the dregs of his vocabulary for kindred honorifics reflecting variously on her character, morals, charms, and ancestry — which was, one inferred, dubious.
The bartender brought a drink. The Saint tasted it, and felt the moth wings of anticipation grow firmer. Like fingers on his spine.
“Then you didn’t buy a house?” he asked mildly.
The soldier reached into one of his blouse pockets, his face still frozen, but the deadliness gone from his eyes. He produced a film holder of the type and size used in a Speed Graphic camera. He tossed it onto the bar.
“There’s my house,” he said viciously. “How do you like the color scheme? Isn’t it swell, with all the pepper trees around it? And the closed back yard for the kid to play in, just like the doctor said. But what I like best is the view — Baldy, Mount Wilson, and Catalina on a clear day. That’s my house, whoever you are, fourteen hundred bucks’ worth, by God!”
The Saint’s chiseled features developed set lines of their own. He picked up the film holder, turned it over in his hands.
“There’s a negative in this, of course?”
“Sure. A picture of Luella. A keepsake!”
“In — er — underthings?”
“Underthings, hell. In practically nothing.”
“And you?”
The boy blushed, the rich red visibly flooding up his neck and ears in the low-lit bar, and the Saint saw that he really was quite young.
“The badger game,” Simon remarked.
“I guess so.” The sergeant wrung the miserable words from deep inside him. “I knew it, the minute these two guys broke in. One of ’em was a ‘private detective’—they said — with a camera. Sure — I was a dope. But she’s a sexy, good-looking babe, and I’m human.” He laughed briefly and bitterly. “So I was a sucker, and I figured she saw a big healthy guy and a chance to make beautiful music. A chance to make beautiful money, I would say. Well, she did.”
He drained the rest of his drink and beckoned the bartender.
“So after she got your name, and address, and your wife’s first name—” prompted the Saint.
“Well, then it was time to draw up a bill of sale. And she said, ‘Excuse me, Bill, I have something to do in the bedroom for a minute.’ Well, you heard her voice. You know what she can promise you, just talking about the weather.”
The Saint felt a familiar anger growing within him. He saw the picture clearly — a not very complicated picture: the soldier, his pockets crammed with accumulated pay, home to his wife and son from the wars. Probably the wife had come to the Coast to wait for him, moved in with Aunt Mabel pending his return. Probably she was named something like Lola May.