The Saint to the Rescue by Leslie Charteris Read Free Book Online Page A

between him and his
secretary.
    “I’ll go with him,” he said.
“You’d better get ready to cope with the reporters. They’ll be calling
up and flocking around like vultures in no time. But I know you can
handle them.”
    Without actually touching her, he moved her
firmly back to the outer office again by the force of increasing
proximity alone, and in default of any supporting intervention by
her employer she was helpless. The Saint returned her last venomous
glare with a winning smile and closed the door on her.
    Then he turned back to Fennick and lighted
another cigarette.
    “I guess I underrated you,” he
murmured. “You didn’t for get about Liane. I suppose she phoned you to
gloat over what she thought she’d got and asked if you were ready to talk
business again, and you said you’d be right over. The Mercurio is only
about three blocks from here, I think, and you could count on
that dragon you keep outside to prevent anyone upsetting your
alibi. If you had to tap Liane on the head with a wrench to make her easy to
push out, the mark wouldn’t be noticed after she’d hit the ground, any more than you’d
be noticed scooting back down the stairs in your plumber’s outfit.
You’d reduced all the risks to a minimum, which is the best
anyone can do. It was just plain bad luck about me.”
    The manufacturer moved stiffly around the
desk, white- faced but with a certain dignity.
    “I’ll give myself up,” he said.
“You needn’t come to see that I don’t run away.”
    Simon shook his head reproachfully.
    “You’re wrong about me again, Otis, old
jujube. I think capital punishment is a fine cure for blackmailers. Vere
Balton and Norma Uplitz aren’t any loss to the community. And that makes
your late wife even guiltier than they were. If you can get away with
it, good luck to you. The cops won’t get any hints from me. I’m only coming
along to check out of that crummy hotel and be on my way.”
     
     

    41
     
    E VEN a
champion leads with his chin sometimes, and this was one time when the
Saint did it with a flourish and fan fares. He hadn’t even been feinted out
of position.
    “Is there anything I can do for you down
in the playgrounds of the Gilded Shmoe?” he asked.
    Coming from anyone else, it would have been
only a con ventional and harmless way of saying thanks for the long weekend of
bass fishing that he had enjoyed on the St. Johns River between
Welaka and Lake George, on his way South to the more sophisticated and in
many ways less charming resorts of Florida’s Gold Coast. And Jim Harris,
the lean and leathery owner of the lodge where Simon Templar always
stopped, would have taken it the same way.

“Just don’t try to send us everyone you
meet,” he said good-humoredly. “We’ve had some good sportsmen and
fish ermen from down there, but there’s some kind that expect more than
we’re set up to give ‘em.”
    “I know what you mean,” Simon said.
“A strike on every cast, air-conditioned skiffs, and a gaudy
night club to come home to.”
    They were sitting out on the high bluff
overlooking the river, under the magnificent oaks that shaded it in the
day time, after the last dinner of that visit, watching the lights of a tug
with a train of barges plodding up the channel and swapping the lazy
post-mortems and promises that friends and fishermen swap at
such times. At that latitude and inland, the first cold front of fall had
spoiled the appetites of the mosquitoes, although it was still only a
temporary dis pensation that made it enjoyable to stay out after dark.
    “On a night like this,” Simon
murmured idly, “here and now, it’s hard to remember what it must have
been like for the pioneers who hacked their way through the swamps and jungles of
this entomologist’s paradise, and made it fit for the non-insect pests
to move in.”
    “I don’t think the Spaniards made much
out of it,” Harris said. “But some of the later
carpetbaggers did all right.”
    “You