Saint Steps In by Leslie Charteris Read Free Book Online

answer. But it had the tinge of being a pat answer, too. As if it had been
rehearsed carefully to reply to embarrassing questions.
    Or maybe he still
had a hangover of his own first skepticism.
    He made a
decision with characteristic abruptness.
    “Suppose,” he suggested, “you go to your room. Lock and night-lock the door and don’t open it
to anyone, except me.”
    He
went to the desk, scrawled a word on a slip of paper, folded it and handed it to her. She looked at it and
nodded. He took the paper back and touched a match to it.
As the ashes crumbled, they took into
nothingness the word he had written, the
word he was to say when he called her.
    He was taking no
chances that Mr. Sylvester Angert’s cousin might
be looking for his room in the hall outside, complete with a little tube that heard through doors.
    “Will you be long?” she asked.
    “I
hope not. I’ll take you to your room, if you don’t mind.”
    “I’d appreciate it.”
    He escorted her to the elevators, rode up five floors, and s aw her safely to her door. He waited
until the night latch clicked and then returned to the elevators. He rode to the main lobby and spent a few minutes looking
into the dining room. It was virtually deserted—for Washington—and the man he was looking for wasn’t there.
    Simon left the hotel and bought a taxi driver for the second time that night.
    He leaned back on the cracked-leather upholstery and reached for a cigarette.
    “Take me to a street that enters into Scott Circle,” he directed. “One that hits the
circle near the low numbers.”
    “You got any
special number in mind, Chief?”
    “Yeah,
bud. I got me a number in mind, but just do like I told you, see?”
    “Okay, okay.
I just wanted to know.”
    He lit his
cigarette, wondering if his tough-guy talk would convince a radio casting director, in a pinch. He decided that it wouldn’t. He hadn’t used it for quite a while,
and he was out of practice. He made a
mental note to polish up on it.
    The
cab drifted to a street corner on the rim of the circle, and the hackman turned.
    “How’s this, Cap?” he asked.
    “This is swell.”
    He paid off the driver, waited until the cab drove away, and waited a few minutes more to make
certain that the cabbie was
not too curious. He surveyed the dimned-out houses on the circle and picked out the mansion which he had
already visited once this evening.
    There
was a light in the downstairs hallway and lights in a second-floor room that must be a bedroom. As he
watched, Simon saw a bulky shadow pass the drawn shade.
The shadow was of proportions that hardly
could have belonged to anyone else but Frank Imberline.
    The
downstairs light went out. The Saint moved along the sidewalk enough to see a tiny window in the back of
the house go on. That meant that the colored butler must be going to bed.
    Walking in the deep shadows, Simon Templar made his way to the front door of the house that
surely must have been built as an ambassadorial dwelling. He worked on the lock for about a minute with an instrument from his
pocket, and it ceased to be an obstruction.
    “Now,” he told himself, “if there’s no burglar alarm,
and if there’s no bolt, we
might get to see Comrade Imberline in person.”
    There
was neither alarm nor bolt. Simon let himself noise lessly into the front hall and closed the door gently
behind him. A circular staircase
wound its way up toward the second floor, and there was no creak of a loose
joist as the Saint made his way aloft. A
crack of light under a door told him that Frank Imberline was still awake.
    Simon pushed open the door and calmly walked into the great man’s bedroom.
    Imberline was seated at a desk, scanning a sheaf of papers. He was clad in maroon and gold pajamas
that made the Saint blink for
a moment. As Simon stepped into the room, the rub ber tycoon swung his heavy head in his direction and
popped his eyes, the unhealthy
ruddiness slowly ebbing from his face.
    “Who are
you?”