“It was too neat,” he muttered foggily. “Too pat.”
His eyes were murky with unformed suspicion.
Tod Kermein tried to console him.
“You’re always seeing somebody under the bed, Matt.”
“Once, there was,” Joyson reminded him. “Remember that go with the college president in Dallas?”
Kermein grimaced.
From the juke box at one end of the room seeped the voice of a scat singer who longed for some Shoo Fly Pie. At one of the low tables a pretty girl, like the melody, did some mild rhythmic writhing. The bartender, a jovial gent in a toupee, set a fresh drink in front of an aging debutante at the far end of the bar.
“I can’t nail it down,” Joyson said. “Something smells, and I don’t know what it is.”
“Because the guy’s wife gets there the same time we do? You heard her. She’s been followin’ the old jerk a long time, she nabs him. at exactly the right minute, which is just our time, too. Bad luck, that’s all. One chance in a million.”
“One thing’s sure.” Joyson struck the bar a light blow with a clenched fist. “Somewhere in town right now there’s a negative with Luella on it. It’s gonna be used by that dame in her divorce action. If one of our old suckers sees it, and we try to go back to him for more—”
He left the sentence unfinished.
“If that blonde really is after a divorce,” he enunciated softly. “If she’s his wife...” He swung off the bar stool. “We’re going back to the apartment. I want to talk to Lu about this guy.”
They walked along the echoing sidewalk toward the apartment house. Fifty yards from it, Kermein grabbed his companion’s arm. With his free hand he pointed.
In the lee of a potted shrub beside the entrance, a man lurked. A camera case was slung over his shoulder, and even in the dark the two men could recognize the photographer who had accompanied Patricia. He was not looking in their direction at the moment, but an elephant could not have lurked more obviously.
Like a sister act, Joyson and Kermein pivoted and walked briskly back to the bar they had just left. There was no more uncertainty in Joyson’s mind as they stepped inside.
“But — but what the hell’s he doin’ there?” mumbled Kermein. “The job was finished when he got his picture. You think the old goat’s got another dame in the place?”
“Shut up!” Joyson’s tone silenced him. “I don’t know and I don’t care. It smells. Gimme a nickel.”
He went to the phone booth. When Luella’s throaty voice answered, he wasted no words.
“Did you get rid of everyone?”
“Yes, Matt. I did the best I could. But I want to know—”
“So do I. But I don’t want to wait to find out. Something’s screwy. That photographer the dame had with her is still hanging around the front of the building.”
“What’s the matter? Did—”
“Talk later. All I know is there’s going to be some kind of beef. So we’re blowing. Put the pictures and the cash in a bag and come down the fire escape. The car’s in the alley. We’ll meet you there.”
“I’ve got clothes to pack.”
“I’m not taking any raps for your wardrobe. I’ve got a hunch about this. You can get more clothes in San Francisco, but you can’t in Tehachapi. We’ll give you ten minutes.”
Luella Joyson heard the click as he hung up, and wasted some good expletives on an unresponsive microphone.
Then, with a shrug of her comely shoulders, she went to a closet in the bedroom and dragged out a large suitcase and opened it. It contained several bulky envelopes of uniform size, but even after the addition of a dozen thick stacks of medium-denomination currency which she retrieved from various hiding places in the apartment, there was still room for a small armful of her most expensive clothes.
She put on a fur coat, snapped the bag shut, picked it up, and paused for a last regretful look around the inviting room. Then she stepped through the open window onto the fire escape.
She dropped lightly from the bottom of the last ladder to the alley pavement, almost beside a shiny low-slung sedan. Opening the door, she shoved the bag in and looked up and down the gloomy canyon between tall apartment buildings like the one she had left.
Two figures debouched into the alley from the street and came toward her, silhouetted against the opening, and she recognized Joyson and Kermein. She started to climb into the car — and stopped, as the sound of voices reached her.
At the end of the alley, where two shapes had been visible a second ago, there were now four. And then she heard a voice she recognized.
“I want you boys to meet a friend of mine,” said the grim tones of Sergeant Bill Harvey, followed on the instant by the sound of knuckles and jaws in violent collision. The group of shadows leaped into frenetic motion and gave off scrambled sound effects of flesh smacking flesh, scuffling feet, smothered grunts, and gasps of pain.
Luella snatched off a high-heeled shoe and hobbled swiftly toward the commotion, but as she ran, it resolved itself into two recumbent shapes, with two more moving swiftly toward the street. They were gone by the time Luella reached the scene.
She had a sickening suspicion of the identity of the fallen two even before she bent over them, but as she stooped, a fresh horrifying sound jerked her bolt upright again. The sound was the starting of a car’s engine.
Uttering a small scream, Luella sprang towards the long black sedan.
The taillight seemed to wink mockingly at her as it dwindled toward the far end of the alley and vanished into the street.
The photographer called Smith, whose obviously new civilian clothes would normally have branded him at once to a less rattled Matthew Joyson, leered at the 4x5 print and chuckled.
“Sarge, do you look silly,” he remarked.
“Go to hell, Corporal,” said Sergeant Harvey genially. He tore the picture and the negative into small pieces and scattered them out of the car window.
“I didn’t think they’d ever part with a negative,” said the Saint. “You’d have felt fine in a few months when Brother Joyson dropped in and told you how sorry he was he hadn’t been able to get any more evidence with your dough, and he was going to have to cite you as correspondent after all — unless, of course, you wanted to finance some more detectives.”
“All the pictures have names and address on them,” confirmed Patricia, who was going through the suitcase in the back of the car while they drove.
“So a lot of people will have a pleasant surprise when they get ’em back. That’s why it had to be played my way, so the gang’d be sure to pack everything up and drop it in our laps. Sometimes I think a great psychologist was lost in me.”
Simon Templar eased the sedan around a corner and parked it behind his own convertible.
“A very satisfactory evening,” he remarked. “What else have you got in that suitcase besides clothes, Pat?”
She handed him one of the bundles of greenbacks, and the Saint grinned.
“Fourteen hundred bucks, wasn’t it, Bill?” He flipped off the bills. “And the rest I suppose we’ll have to divvy up and send back to the original donors — less, of course, our fee for collection.”
Bill Harvey said, “I can’t tell you how swell you’ve been, sir. If it hadn’t been for you—”
“Forget it,” said the Saint. “I can’t tell you how much fun it was.”
Patricia Holm harked back to that, broodingly, some minutes later when they were driving away in their own car.
“I suppose you did have fun,” she said thoughtfully. “Maybe it’s a good thing you knew I was waiting to break into that bedroom.”
Simon chuckled.
“Darling, I’m sure everything would have continued on a high spiritual plane.”