"Now, what would give any burglar the idea of cracking an undertaker's shop?" Simon apostrophized the counter girl in the coffee shop where he was eating breakfast.
"Those guys 've got more money than anybody," she said darkly. "Inflation, depression, recession, whatever, people keep dying just the same. There's one business can always be sure of customers."
"And the worse a depression gets, the more it might boom, with more people committing suicide," Simon admitted, following her cheerful trend of thought. "But no matter how fast the bodies roll in, an undertaker doesn't normally ring up cash sales like a supermarket. He presents a nice consolidated bill for his assorted services, which is pretty certain to be big enough to be paid by check. So why would anyone expect to find any more in his desk than small change?"
"Could be they were looking for gold teeth in the stiffs."
Simon found himself liking her more every minute, but he had to point out: "It says here, there was no other damage except the window they broke to get in."
"I bet he's got plenty of it socked away, anyhow," she said, reverting to her original thesis. "You only got to walk around Lake Worth and see 'em tottering about the shuffleboard courts or sitting in those everlasting auction rooms. It should make an undertaker feel like Moses with a claim staked in the Promised Land. Everyone ninety years old, and just waiting to keel over till maybe they're driving a car and can take someone else with them."
"Honestly, I'm disgustingly healthy. And I can still lick all my grandchildren."
"Oh, I can see that. I just wish I saw more fellows around here like you."
She was a comely wench, and she had that look in her eye, but he already had a fairly promising social calendar for that visit, and he decided not to complicate it with this additional prospect, at least for the present.
The established playgrounds of the spoiled sophisticates, socially registered or columnist-created, are forced to struggle with one perennial blight: a dearth of eligible playboys. This may be because the widows and divorcees are too durable, or the influx of their would-be successors too torrential; or because the men who have yet to earn their own wherewithal are still tied to their jobs and projects in less glamorous but more lucrative centers, or those who inherited it have been decimated by a preference for mixed drinks and/or mixed genders; there is a whole rubric of hypotheses which this chronicler may examine at some other time. The fact remains that in such places any unattached male with reasonable manners, charm, alcoholic tolerance, stamina, and affinity for empty chatter, can be assured of enough invitations to guarantee him his choice of gastritis or cirrhosis, or both; and what is so descriptively called the Florida Gold Coast is no exception.
Simon Templar had never made any systematic effort to crash this exclusively dubious society, but there were times when it amused him to be a fringe free-loader, and he had not fled from the northern blizzards to the subtropical sunshine to enjoy himself like a hermit. He shared any intelligent man's disdain for cocktail parties, in principle; but he knew no easier way for a comparative stranger in town to make a lot of assorted acquaintances quickly.
"This is my house guest, Betty Winchester," said his hostess.
"How do you do," murmured the Saint, like anyone else.
"You're going to take her to dinner," his hostess informed him regally; then she saw some more guests arriving. "Oh, excuse me — you tell him about it, Betty."
The girl was actually blushing — an olde-worlde phenomenon which Simon found quite exotic.
"You don't really have to, of course," she assured him. "She's worried because she has to leave me tonight — an emergency meeting of some charity committee she's on — and she thinks it's dreadful to have to abandon me to myself. Please don't think any more about it."
She had black hair and very large hazel eyes in a face that was pert and appealing now, and within the next seven years would decide whether to be stodgy or sensual or sulky, just as her nubile figure might become voluptuous or gross. But at that moment Simon was not shopping for futures. He estimated her age at a barely possible 22.
"But I'd like to think about it," he said. "I didn't have any better ideas. Unless you did?"
"No. I haven't been going out much. I came down here to stay with my uncle, who'd been very sick, and when he died these nice people insisted that I move in with them till after the funeral."
"Had you known them before?" he asked. The usual small talk.
"I went to high school with their daughter, and we still see each other sometimes."
"Where do you live, then?"
"In New York. And she's married and living in Philadelphia. Do you live here?"
"No. I'm just another tourist, too… When was this funeral?"
"Yesterday."
"I'm sorry. But I take it you're not in total mourning."
"Oh, no. Although my cousin and I were his only last relatives. But we weren't really so close to him, all the same. And I don't think it would do him any good now if I went around being tragic for months, would it?"
"With all due respect to Uncle, I agree," Simon said. "So about this dinner — is there anything special you feel an appetite for?"
She thought.
"Only one thing I haven't been able to get, at least not the way I remember them: stone crabs! We used to go to a place, Joe's, right at the south end of Miami Beach—"
"That's a lot longer haul than it used to be, since this coast got practically built up all the way. But I discovered another place last season, a bit closer, on the Seventy-ninth Street Causeway, where the claws are just as luscious and sometimes even bigger." He consulted his watch. "I could get you there in not much more than an hour on the Parkway, and if you had one more good drink before we took off you'd hardly know you'd missed anything. That is, unless there's something about this brawl that we mustn't miss?"
The answer was that they dined sumptuously at Nick & Arthur's, stifling for temporary logistic reasons the nostalgic loyalty to Joe's, and sentimentally comparing the size and succulence of the specimens served by both establishments.
"Anyway," Simon concluded, "they are Florida's unique and wonderful contribution to the hungry tummy. And what more could Lucullus ask?"
She didn't try to answer that, most probably having never heard of Lucullus, but she happily finished everything that could be put on her plate, and had some coconut cream pie after it while he finished the bottle of Deinhard Steinwein '59 with which they had launched those supreme crustaceans. After which it ultimately and inevitably came to a question of what they should do next.
Since the Saint's adventures nearly always seem to get dated by something or other, it may as well be stated right away that this happened during the epoch when a so-called dance called the Twist had spread like an epidemic from a place called the Peppermint Lounge in New York where it first broke out, across the United States and even beyond the seas; and on countless nightclub floors devotees who had hitherto seemed at least superficially rational were disjointing vertebrae and spraining knees in frenzied attempts to imitate the writhings of an inexpert Fijian fire-walker trying to help himself across the coals by holding on to a live wire.
As they came out of the restaurant, Simon noticed that they were next door to a new manifestation which had moved in since the last time he had been there: an establishment which proclaimed itself, in splendid neon, to be "New York's Peppermint Lounge". Discounting any fantastic possibility that the original New York incubator of the current mania had physically uprooted itself and followed its vacationing, habitués to Miami Beach, it seemed as if this must at least be an authorized and authentic branch of the mother lodge; and he was reminded of a shocking deficiency in his spectrum of experience.