The Saint and the Happy Highwayman by Leslie Charteris Read Free Book Online

Lieutenant Corrio’s smugness might have been shaken if he had known about this episode of unpremeditated eavesdropping, but this unpleasant knowledge was hidden from him. His elastic self-esteem had taken no time at all to recover from the effects of Fernack’s reprimand; and when Fernack happened to meet him on a certain Friday afternoon he looked as offensively sleek and self-satisfied as he had, always been. It was beyond Fernack’s limits of self-denial to let the occasion go by without making the/use of it to which he felt he was entitled.
    “I believe Oppenheim has still got his emeralds,” he remarked with a certain feline joviality.
    Lieutenant Corrio’s glossy surface was unscratched.
    “Don’t be surprised if he doesn’t keep them much longer,” he said. “And don’t blame me if the Saint gets away with it. I gave you the tip once and you wouldn’t listen.”
    “Yeah, you gave me the tip,” Fernack agreed benevolently. “When are you goin’ out to Hollywood to play Sherlock Holmes?”
    “Maybe it won’t be so long now,” Corrio said darkly. “Paragon Pictures are pretty interested in me —apparently one of their executives happened to see me playing the lead in our last show at the Merrick Playhouse, and they want me to take a screen test.”
    Fernack grinned evilly.
    “You’re too late,” he said. “They’ve already made a picture of Little Women.”
    He had reason to regret some of his jibes the next morning, when news came in that every single one of Mr Oppenheim’s emeralds had been removed from their hiding place and taken out of the house, quietly and without any fuss, in the pockets of a detective* of whom the Ingerbeck Agency had never heard. They had, they said, been instructed by telephone that afternoon to discontinue the service, and the required written confirmation had arrived a few hours later, written on Mr Oppenheim’s own flowery letterhead and signed with what they firmly believed to be his signature; and nobody had been more surprised and indignant than they were when Mr Oppenheim, on the verge of an apoplectic fit, had rung up Mr Ingerbeck himself and demanded to know how many more crooks they had on their payroll and what the blank blank they proposed to do about it. The impostor had arrived at the house at the usual hour in the evening, explained that the regular man had been taken ill and presented the necessary papers to accredit himself; and he had been left all night in the study, and let out at breakfast time according to the usual custom. When he went out he was worth a million and a half dollars as he stood up. He was, according to the butler’s rather hazy description, a tallish man with horn-rimmed glasses and a thick crop of red hair.
    “That red hair and glasses is all baloney,” said Corrio, who was in Fernack’s office when the news came in. “Just an ordinary wig and a pair of frames from any optician’s. It was the Saint all right—you can see his style right through it. What did I tell you?”
    “What th’ hell d’ya think you can tell me?” Fernack roared back at him. Then he subdued himself. “Anyway, you’re crazy. The Saint’s out of business.”
    Corrio shrugged.
    “Would you like me to take the case, sir?”
    “What, you?” Fernack paused to take careful aim at the cuspidor. “I’ll take the case myself.” He glowered at Corrio thoughtfully for a moment. “Well, if you know so much about it, you can come along with me. And we’ll see how smart you are.”
    Ten minutes later they were in a taxi on their way to Oppenheim’s house.
    It was a silent journey, for Fernack was too full of a vague sort of wrath to speak, and Corrio seemed quite content to sit in a corner and finger his silky moustache with an infuriatingly tranquil air of being quite well satisfied with the forthcoming opportunity of demonstrating his own brilliance.
    In the house they found a scene of magnificent confusion. There was the butler, who seemed to