Saint Steps In by Leslie Charteris Read Free Book Online Page B

not. There are only so many hours in the day—— ”
    “And so many
days in the week——”
    “Young
man,” said Mr. Imberline magisterially, “I am a public servant. I have the most humble
respect for the trust which has been placed in me, and my daily responsibility is to make sure that not one hour—not one
minute—of my time shall be frittered away on things
from which the Community cannot benefit.”
    “You
couldn’t by any chance have made an appointment with her for tonight and forgotten it?” Simon
asked, unawed by that resounding statement.
    Imberline drew
his chins together.
    “Certainly
not! I never forget an appointment. Punctuality is the politeness of princes—— ”
    “You really ought to have seen her. She’s quite something to look at.”
    There seemed to be a flicker of interest in the close-set eyes. Suddenly, the middle-aged lecher was there for Simon to
see. The big man grinned nauseatingly.
    “A nice dish, eh?”
    “A very nice dish. But to get back to Gray’s invention—you haven’t seen it demonstrated yourself, I take it?”
    Imberline shook his head.
    “No. I’m a busy man. I can’t be running all over the country to
view the brainstorm of every crackpot. I looked at his sample and I told my
staff to investigate it. That’s all I could do. Even you might understand
that.”
    Simon stared at
him thoughtfully through a couple of clouds of smoke. He was beginning to get
an odd feeling about this interview which
fitted with nothing that he had expected. Frank Imberline was as pompous and phony as a bullfrog with a megaphone; his thinking appeared to be done in
resonant clich é s, and he uttered
them all the time as if he were address ing
a large rally in a public square. And yet from the beginning his reaction to
Simon’s presence had been one of righteous indignation and not fear. It was true that the Saint hadn’t waved a knife under his nose or made any
threatening noises. But the Saint had
also calmly admitted a technical act of burglary, which there was no denying
anyhow; and any normal citizen would have regarded such an intruder as
at least a po tentially dangerous screwball.
Well, possibly Imberline was one of those men who are too obtuse to be
subject to ordinary fear. But in that case,
why hadn’t he simply rung or called for help and had the Saint arrested?
    Because he was
more profoundly afraid that the Saint had something
else up his sleeve? Or for some other reason?
    Imberline was returning his scrutiny just as shrewdly. He took the
cigar out of his mouth and bit off the end. “You tell me that Miss—er—Gray is a very
attractive young woman,” he said.
    “She is.”
    “Young man, I’m going to ask you aquestion.”
    “Shoot.”
    “Is there any romantic reason for this interest of yours?”
    The Saint shook his head.
    “None at all.”
    “Have you invested any money in this so-called invention?”
    “No.”
    Imberline struck a match and put it to the cigar.    
    “Well,
then,” he said in a gust of smoke, “what the hell are you here for?”
    “That’s a fair question,” said the Saint. “I have some
quaint reasons of my own for believing that this
invention may have more in it than you
think. If that’s true, I’m as interested as any citizen in wanting to see something done about it. If there’s any fake about it, I’m still
interested—from another angle. And from that angle, I’d be even more
interested if the invention was really good
and there was a powerful and well- organized campaign of skullduggery
going on to prevent any thing being done
about it.”

“Why?”
    “I’ve told you my name. But perhaps you’d know me better if I said—the Saint.”
    Imberline’s cigar jerked in his mouth as his teeth clamped on it, and his eyes squeezed up again. But there was no
change of color in the florid face. No—Frank Imberline, with or with out a guilty conscience, wasn’t panicked by shadows.
He stared back at the Saint,