The Saint to the Rescue

The element of doubt

“The Law is a wonderful thing, I suppose,” Simon Templar said in one of his oracular moods. “I’ve done a lot of complaining about it in my time, but if it had never existed I wouldn’t have had all the fun of breaking it. And it’s probably a very fine idea that all the wretched little people who can’t take care of themselves should be able to get a fair shake. The trouble is that the same machinery that prevents injustice can also prevent justice.”

He could be more specific about this if anybody wanted to listen:

“If you want to guarantee a man the benefit of any reasonable doubt, you also get a system with built-in loopholes that a sufficiently cunning lawyer can drive a bus through. And then you’ll have a certain number of lawyers who specialize in doing just that — who don’t give a damn how guilty they know their clients are as long as they can pay the bill. In fact, who’d rather defend a man who’s guilty as hell, because the fee can be so much fatter. There’s a lot of boils on the cosmos alive and free today who’d be behind bars or under a slab if it weren’t for that kind of shyster. Sometimes I think those professional cheaters of the Law should be hanged even higher than their customers.”

The Saint did not have to mention what he had done himself to remedy some of the failures of formal jurisprudence, for by that time quite as much as was safe for him was already known about his freewheeling interpretation of justice.

In those days, Mr Carlton Rood was an outstanding example of the type of attorney whose neck might have been in frequent jeopardy if the Saint’s heterodox theories of legal responsibility had prevailed in the statute books.

From the foundation of his first two spectacular acquittals had been built up a reputation for court-room invincibility that had become a legend of his generation. It was a legend that enjoyed some of the advantages of a chain reaction, for every successful defense could be counted on to draw new crops of desperate defendants to his office, and by this date it had reached a point where any cause sufficiently célèbre it was almost mandatory to retain Carlton Rood. Among his grateful clients could be listed some of the biggest names that ever adorned a theatre marquee or a police dossier, and there is no doubt that they all received value for their money.

If there were any tricks of delay, confusion, objection, and obfuscation which Mr Rood did not know, nobody else had ever thought of them either. On the principle that no case was lost until the last appeal had failed, he approached every assignment with a dazzling variety of technical devices primarily designed to postpone any irrevocable result to the remotest possible future, before which prosecutors could lose their steam, judges could grow numb with boredom, and inconvenient witnesses could be overtaken by clouding of the memory or simply die of old age — if not otherwise helped off the scene by interested parties. But when in spite of all shenanigans he was brought to a showdown, he had no peer in the forensic techniques and pyrotechnics of leading, misleading, tripping, trapping, twisting, bamboozling, pleading, bullying, hand-wringing, gamut-running, and plain ham acting that can be employed to obscure an issue or distort a fact.

He was a heavy-set heavy-featured man with a luxurious growth of silver hair which he cultivated to the proportions of a mane. The combination gave him a leonine and statesmanlike aspect of which he was fully aware and which he exploited, to the utmost, enhancing them with the gold-rimmed pince-nez dangling on a wide black ribbon, the string ties, and the dark clothes of slightly old-fashioned cut which are part of the stock cartoon of a Southern senator. On him they looked right and extraordinarily impressive, so that the most hostile jury usually ended up listening to him with respect, in spite of the skeptical attitude which his own publicity had inspired in large cynical sections of the population, which inclined to the view that anyone who went to the expense of hiring Carlton Rood should be presumed guilty until irrefutably proved otherwise.

The verdict in Mr Rood’s latest headline trial was being awaited hourly on a certain day when Simon stopped in Biloxi on the Gulf Coast for gas. While he was waiting for his tank to be oiled, he saw a newspaper van pull up at a tiny shop next door while the driver delivered a bundle of papers. Simon walked over and went in as the van drove away, and found a stout middle-aged woman fumbling with the string that held the package together.

“Can I help you?” he said gallantly.

He deftly loosened the knot, and turned over the top paper. The black type leaped to his eye like a blow: “SHOLTO ACQUITTED.”

It was a result that the Saint would have bet considerable odds against, but for once his gift of prophecy must have succumbed to wishful thinking. Carlton Rood had done it again. But the achievement was so startling that Simon was conscious of suppressing a gasp, and may not have completely succeeded.

“Did he get off?” asked the woman.

She was looking right across the newspaper when she spoke, and Simon suddenly understood why she wore dark glasses in spite of the gloom inside the shop.

“I’m afraid so,” he said gently. “Would you like to know all the grisly details?”

“Thank you, but my niece’ll read it to me when she gets here from school. It doesn’t really matter how he did it, if he got off. I thought this might be one time when he wouldn’t, but I suppose that was too much to hope. I have been hoping it, though — ever since he blinded me.”

She said this in such a matter-of-fact tone that he wondered momentarily if one or the other of them had slipped a cog.

“How was that?” he prompted cautiously.

“Oh, it was nearly twelve years ago, when he was still doing some of his own dirty work. They might have got him for murder then, if it hadn’t been for what happened to me. You probably read about it at the time. My name’s Agnes Yarrow.”

Although there was little criminal news that he had missed since he began to make a notable amount of it himself, and his memory was prodigious, he would have had to admit that he would not always recall everything that had ever happened in the annals of gangsterism from a single reference. But the blind woman quickly relieved him of the need to ply her with questions.

“My husband and I had a small dry cleaning business in Mobile. Sholto was organizing a Laundry and Cleaning Association, as he called it. It was just a racket for him to get ten per cent of everybody’s business, but he let you know that if you didn’t sign up with the Association you wouldn’t have any business. We were the first to refuse to join. One day Sholto came in and started spraying acid out of a flit gun over all the clothes that were waiting to be picked up. I tried to stop him, and I got a squirt of acid in my face. I fell down screaming, and my husband came out of the back room and grabbed him. He took the flit gun away from him and he could have held him, he was a big strong man, but Sholto pulled out a gun and shot him dead and ran away.”

“But he was arrested later, and — Yes, I remember now. Carlton Rood defended him. It was one of his first important successes. But now it comes back, it seems to me that Sholto wasn’t even tried for murder, only for the attack on you.”

“That’s right. I still don’t understand it all, but the District Attorney seemed to get an idea that if he could convict him of the attack first, it’d be much easier to convict him of murder afterwards. But if they couldn’t, they’d save the expense of a much bigger trial.”

“A fascinating idea,” said the Saint. “I wonder if Carlton Rood helped to give it to him.”

“I don’t know. But Sholto got off. He had some sort of alibi, and they couldn’t find anyone who’d seen him leaving the shop. I was the only one who could have identified him — and I’d lost my sight. Of course, I’d heard his voice, too, but that’s much harder. His attorney made a complete fool of me in court when it came to picking out his voice from a lot of others.”

Simon nodded.

“That seems to ring a bell. He had private detectives with tape recorders all over the country, scouting for people with voices like Sholto’s. He even hired professional mimics. It was one of the tricks that made him famous.”

“It worked, anyhow,” Mrs Yarrow said with a kind of weary resignation. “It was months afterwards, and you don’t remember a voice the same as you do a face, at least not when you’re more used to relying on your eyes.”

“But you’re absolutely sure, in your own mind, that it was Sholto?”

“I was absolutely certain, the first time the police let me hear him talk. It was only afterwards that the lawyers confused me. And it must have been him, mustn’t it? Look at everything he’s done since.”

The Saint could not bring himself to point out that this argument was the direct antithesis of some of the fundamental tenets of civilized legal doctrine, for it was an attitude which he had often taken himself.

Instead, he said, “Isn’t there any chance of doing anything for your eyes?”

“Nothing. They told me before I left the hospital that I’d never see again.”

“But that was a long time ago,” he persisted. “Haven’t you tried again since?”

She shook her head.

“I don’t see any use trying to keep giving myself false hopes. They were much too definite. And I’ve learned to live with it. But I still can’t stop wishing Sholto would get what he deserves.”

Simon paid for the paper and went back to the car which he seemed to have left in another chapter of his existence, so much had changed since he walked into the little sundries store.

It was not really such a wild coincidence that he had thus met Mrs Yarrow and heard her story, for at the time he had not been personally preoccupied with either Rood or Sholto. Although he could visualize them as theoretically intriguing subjects for future attention, his interest at the moment had been only the lively but abstract interest of any wide-awake citizen, which would also have encompassed the latest Hollywood marriage or the latest South American revolution. It would have been no more important a coincidence, mathematically, if the news vendor had turned out to have once manicured the film star or nursed the deposed President or had any distant connection with anyone else in the news. The difference was that in any other such situation the Saint would have murmured some polite clichés and quickly forgotten the whole thing. Agnes Yarrow fell into another category only because this was the kind of encounter which so often brought the Saint’s catholic but diffused concern for the Ungodly into sharp focus on one or two particular specimens.

Mr Carlton Rood, as a result of such an accidental conversation, was suddenly promoted into this inauspicious spotlight.

Simon Templar traveled no farther that day than one of the motels facing the Gulf west of town, where he read the complete newspaper story and then spent two or three hours in intense meditation. The stratagems by which Mr Rood had won another acquittal for his client need not be retold here in laborious detail: it is sufficient for this story, as it was for the Saint’s motivation, that they were typically ingenious, immoral, and successful. Nothing else was needed to qualify Mr. Rood for immediate retribution, in the Saint’s judgment, but the manner of providing for it required inventiveness and planning.

After dinner that night he made a long-distance phone call, and the next morning he drove back to Biloxi and Mrs Yarrow’s little shop.

“I took what you may think was rather a liberty last night,” he told her. “I talked about your case to a friend of mine in Santa Barbara, California, who’s one of the best ophthalmologists in the country. I must tell you bluntly that he wasn’t very optimistic. But he would like to see you.”

“It’s very kind of you,” she said. “But I just can’t afford a trip like that.”

“I’d like to pay for it — please don’t be offended. If that sounds too much like charity, I promise that if he is able to restore your sight I’ll let you pay me back every penny. I know you’d think that was worth the money. But if he can’t do anything for you it won’t cost you a cent. Let me take the gamble, and I give you my word it won’t hurt my bank account a bit if I lose.”

“But I told you I didn’t want to torment myself with false hopes.”

“You want something done about Sholto, don’t you? If you had your sight back, you could identify him again — and he could still be tried for the murder of your husband. That would mean something to you, wouldn’t it?”

As she wavered, he took her hand and put an envelope into it.

“This is a plane ticket I bought this morning, in your name, from New Orleans to Santa Barbara,” he said. “The reservation is for Sunday — that gives you three days to make your personal arrangements, and it should be a good day for you to get someone to drive you to the airport. You have to change planes in Los Angeles, but the airline will look after you there. And I’ll have my doctor friend send someone to meet you at Santa Barbara airport. His name and address are written on the envelope, if you want to tell your friends where you’re going.”

“But what about your name?” she protested weakly. “And why do you want to do this for me? I don’t know anything about you except that you’ve got a nice voice!”

“That’s all I intend you to know right now,” said the Saint. “But if you must think of me by some label, you may call me Santa Claus.”

He drove to New Orleans himself the same morning and took the next plane to New York, where Mr Rood had long since transferred his headquarters from his more pastoral beginnings in the South.

One of the Saint’s intangible assets, and one of incalculable value in his peculiar activities, was the vast and variegated collection of acquaintances that he had accumulated and cultivated over the years, a roster of trades and professions that was a unique classified directory in itself.

Besides a friend who was a distinguished ophthalmologist he could have produced with equal facility an ophicleidist, an oil rigger, or, probably, an orangutan. Another man whose talents he needed lived in New York when not working elsewhere, and Simon was fortunate to find him at liberty.

In the course of the following week, Mr Rood received certain visitors at his office whose roles in his destiny he did not perceive.

The first was a new client who sought his advice about making a will which would distribute his fortune fairly among his wife and daughters, protect them from fortune-hunters, ensure a substantial inheritance for his still unborn grandchildren, and yet not leave his heirs under a state of absolute tutelage. Mr Rood discoursed for some time on the theoretical problems involved, until he learned that about ninety-nine per cent of the million-dollar estate which the man was so worried about was contingent on his successful marketing of the idea of making automobiles impervious to minor collisions by building the bodies entirely out of soft rubber. Whereupon Mr Rood briskly recommended him to consult first with a patent attorney, and never thought about him again.

The second caller presented himself as a free-lance journalist who specialized in writing autobiographies, speeches, or any other kind of material for celebrities who were, if not otherwise unqualified, too busy for the dull toil of capturing their scintillating thoughts in page after page of readable prose. If he could not name any names whom he had served in this capacity, he could claim this reticence as proof of his inviolable discretion: part of his service was to avert even the slight stigma of the “as told to” type of by-line, and those who wanted to claim his articles as their own original work could do so without fear that any other person would ever hear who really wrote them. Reassuringly, he was asking nothing more than permission to approach certain editors with the idea of a series of the great lawyer’s reminiscences of his famous cases, if the work was commissioned, Mr Rood would simply supply him with court records and spend a few hours talking them over, and of course the finished stories would be completely subject to Mr Rood’s editing and approval. It was an unexceptionably straightforward-sounding proposition, and Mr Rood was quite interested in discussing it. The Saint could be disarmingly flattering and persuasive when he tried, even when wearing a rumpled suit and a studious-looking pair of horn-rimmed glasses and using the undistinguished name of Tom Simons.

After their talk had reached an encouraging stage of warmth and relaxation, the Saint was able to say in the most spontaneous conversational manner:

“One thing I’ve often wondered about, Mr Rood. Aren’t you ever afraid that some of your ex-clients might start worrying about you as a sort of security risk?”

“Good heavens, no!” responded the advocate, in genuine astonishment. “They were all innocent men, wrongfully accused, and so proven by due process of law, as the records show.”

“Naturally. But many of them were at least generally rumored, shall we say, to have been involved in some rather dubious activities aside from the crimes they were actually charged with. In preparing their defense, you may easily have had access to a lot of incidental information about other associations or misbehaviors which could be very embarrassing for them if you talked too much.”

“That might be true. But an ethical lawyer’s confidence is as sacred as the confessional.”

“The underworld doesn’t put much faith in lofty principles,” said the Saint. “I must be a little more frank. Because of my job, I have some rather peculiar contacts. The other day I happened to mention you and the idea we’ve been discussing to a man whom of course I can’t name, who has some rather special connections of his own. He told me he’d heard that some big fellows were wondering if you weren’t getting to know too much for your own good, and that you mightn’t be around so much longer.”

Mr Rood rubbed his chin.

“That’s an extraordinary notion. I can think of no reason why anyone would doubt me.”

“But of course you’ve taken precautions, just in case some trigger-happy mobster got ideas.”

“What sort of precautions?” asked the attorney guardedly.

“Like making a list of the men most likely to worry about you, with some notes on the reasons why, and leaving it in safe hands with instructions to deliver it to the police if you should die of anything but the most in-contestably natural causes, and dropping a tactful word in the right places about what you’ve done.”

“Oh, that, obviously,” said Mr Rood, in a tone which betrayed to Simon’s hypersensitive ear that the thought had just begun to commend itself.

The Saint had achieved his object, and there was no point in prolonging the interview.

“Then I won’t worry about being able to finish this job, once we get it started,” he said cheerfully, and stood up. “I hope I’ll have some news for you in a week or two. And thanks for sparing me so much of your valuable time.”

“You have a very interesting proposition, Mr Simons,” said Carlton Rood heartily, shaking his hand with a large and adhesive paw. “I’ll look forward to hearing more from you.”

Yet another visitor came late that night, bypassing the janitor and climbing ten flights of emergency stairs to unlock the office through a neat hole cut in the glass upper panel of the entrance door. This visitor broke into several filing cabinets and strewed their contents over the floor, but did not try to tackle the massive safe in which all really important papers were kept. He took nothing except about two hundred dollars which he found in the petty cash box — the Saint could be munificently generous when he chose, but could never resist the smallest tax-free contribution towards his non-deductible expenses when it could be taken from the right coffers.

Mr Rood was not unduly perturbed by this minor larceny and vandalism, but nevertheless it aggravated an irksome hangnail of dubiety which had been scuffed up by the affable “Tom Simons.” And he was enough of a believer in symbols to take it as a direct providential nudge to procrastinate no longer over the simple practical suggestion that had been made to him. He canceled a dinner engagement the next night, and spent the evening at work on a highly inflammable document intended only for posthumous publication.

Long before that, Simon Templar had telephoned Santa Barbara again.

“She seems to be doing all right,” said his friend. “But it will still be three or four days before we know if we have any luck. Don’t count on it too much. I told you that the chance was very small.”

“But not hopeless.”

“No, not hopeless, or I would not have operated. You must try to be patient.”

“You know that isn’t my long suit, Mickey. However — did everything else go according to plan?”

“Yes, just as we talked about it. I was able to move her from the hospital yesterday, in Georgia’s car, so they don’t know where she went, and in the private nursing home she has another name, under which I opened a separate file in my office records, so there is no trace of the connection.”

“Thanks, pal,” said the Saint. “Take care to keep it that way. For the time being, her life may depend on it.”

By the time Mr Rood embarked on his secret literary endeavor, the Saint had flown back to New Orleans, reclaimed his car at the airport, and taken the road to Atlanta, where the beneficiary of Mr Rood’s latest legal triumph made his home. Simon was not only temperamentally short on patience, but he had even less inclination to let an act of justice that he had decided upon teeter on the outcome of a medical long shot of which the surgeon himself was less than optimistic about the result.

Joseph Sholto, enjoying the expansive euphoria induced by a narrow escape of which even he had been far from confident, would at this moment have guffawed hysterically at any suggestion that he would ever doubt the maxim which had been one of the guiding principles of his adult career, that a bad boy’s best friend is his lawyer.

Joe Sholto (to the initiated he was more generally known as “Dibs”) had come a long way since he was doing his own strong-arm and squirt-gun work to try to put over a protection racket on Mobile’s laundries and dry cleaners. When he had achieved enough limited success to be noticed, he received the standard accolade from the Syndicate: come in or get out. Prudently, Dibs decided to sell, but kept his own independence, when he came in, he wanted it to be as an equal, not as one of a host of minor hangers-on. He had his ups and downs, but thanks to a ruthless devotion to his own welfare and his faith in the best legal chicanery he managed to avoid any disastrous collisions with constitutional justice, so that he became one of those semi-mythological names which are vaguely known to the public and baldly referred to by the press as “gangsters” without ever having suffered a major conviction.

He hit the jackpot when he saw the possibilities of the trading stamp business. At this time the craze for these miniature coupons was booming from coast to coast, and probably half the families in America were daily pasting up “stamps” of various colors and designs, given to them by local merchants at the rate of ten for every dollar they spent, in booklets which when filled and accumulated in sufficient numbers could be exchanged for almost anything from a razor to a refrigerator. These stamps were offered to the stores as a merchandising gimmick by a number of reputable firms which also undertook to redeem them, and the competition between them was simply to offer the most attractive premiums at the best price.

One day it dawned upon Dibs Sholto that he too could have a part of this business. The investment in printing the stamps and the booklets to stick them in was relatively trivial, and the goods they would eventually be exchanged for could be bought out of the money the storekeepers would pay for the stamps. It seemed like such a magnificently automatic way of multiplying mazuma that he was slightly disgusted with himself for not having thought of it ten years before. The only trouble now was that the best potential customers, if they were interested at all, had already been signed up by the old-established stamp firms, or in the case of some chains had even set up their own stamp systems.

Again he was too wise to begin by tussling with giants, but there were plenty of pygmies who could be taken for an impressive total poundage. The beauty of the stamp scheme was that it was not limited to any type of sale or service: theoretically, every single shop in every town and village could use them to attract new customers or keep old ones. Yet it was still true that in spite of the wide spread of the craze a majority of smaller enterprises had not succumbed to it, feeling that their modest business did not need or could not afford such promotion. It was in these small tradesmen that Sholto saw his market, and the smaller they were the more likely they were to succumb to the kind of salesmanship in which he specialized, which offered the cogent inducements of freedom from broken windows, slashed tires, stink bombs, and even personal injury.

Thus with the encouragement of some property damage and a few salutary beatings, Dibs Sholto’s gaudily colored Double Dividend Stamps throve and spread over the southeast corner of the country until they were as familiar as any other brand to the housewives of five states, most of whom had no notion whatever of how some of the merchants they dealt with had been persuaded to feature them. Being, unlike a barefaced protection racket, an ostensibly legitimate enterprise, the Double Dividend organization managed to escape the monopolistic attention of the criminal hierarchy, and was able to handle local complaints at the county level: there were surprisingly few of these, for Sholto’s small sales force of goons were trained to select the prospects most likely to be terrorized. It was Double Dividend’s own successful expansion which had brought the first serious trouble on itself. A Congressional Committee nosing into the trading stamp business in general had heard some evidence, an Attorney General had been prodded to take action, and Sholto had found himself on trial in Washington on the federal charges from which it had taken all Carlton Rood’s genius to extricate him.

But now that that briefly disconcerting obstacle had been disposed of, Dibs Sholto could see nothing to stop him enlarging his stamp system into a nation-wide network from which the dividends to himself would be not double but tenfold.

“Next time, the big boys won’t tell me — they’ll ask me,” he said to himself. “And they’ll make the deal I want. I’m on top of something that’s all mine, and nobody in the world has a thing on me.”

In this mood of resurgent arrogance after a fright which had shaken him more than he would ever admit now to anyone, he was discussing plans for the future with two of his chief lieutenants in the stately Colonial mansion north of the city of Atlanta which he had made his residence, when the white-haired Negro butler who was part of the expensive scenery announced an uninvited visitor.

“Who the hell is Sam Temple?” Sholto wanted to know.

Since no one could tell him, he sent one of his aides to find out. In a few minutes the man came back with an answer.

“He’s a two-bit private eye, but he says he ain’t here to ask questions — he’s got something to sell.”

Simon Templar never needed such crude accessories as a false beard to create a character, when he thought there was little danger of being recognized by his features. Merely by plastering his hair down with odorous oil, leaving his shoes unshined, and putting on the same soiled shirt that he had worn all the previous day, with the addition of a garish tie, a pair of loud and clashing socks, and a large diamond ring, all bought at the same dime store, and a little grime under his fingernails, he struck exactly the right note of seedy flashiness, and his manner as he entered Sholto’s presence was a convincing blend of obsequiousness and bluster.

“You won’t be sorry you saw me, Dibs. What I’ve got to sell is worth plenty, but I’m not going to make this a stick-up. I’d rather have you feeling you still owed me something than drive a hard bargain. Some other time I might want to ask you for a favor, if you know what I mean.”

“What’re you selling?” Sholto growled. He was a rather short rotund man with a snub-nosed face which he consciously tried to make less porcine by carrying his chin stuck out at an angle of permanent challenge, and the same crude aggressiveness was duplicated by his habitual voice. But his small shoe-button eyes were coldly calculating and as unemotional as marbles.

“It’s like this,” said the Saint. “A couple of nights ago I broke into a lawyer’s office in New York. I can tell you that because I know it won’t go any farther, after we get through talking. A client had hired me to find out if a certain thing was in his files, and you can’t be too fussy how you go about a job like that, if you know what I mean.”

“Who was this lawyer?”

“Mr Carlton Rood, Dibs — your own mouthpiece, according to what I read in the papers. That’s why I’m here now. But what I was looking for didn’t have anything to do with you. Only while I was looking, I found a recording machine in his desk which he can turn on if he wants to record a conversation. So I sat down and played the tape that was in it, in case it had anything on it about my client, or anything else that might be useful, if you know what I mean.”

“I know what you mean,” Sholto snarled. “So what did you hear?”

“There was this piece about you, Dibs. And I knew you’d be interested. So I found a spare spool of tape and made a copy of it — that was easy, machines like that being part of my business, if you know what I mean, and it didn’t tip him off like it would if I’d taken the original tape. But you know his voice, and I thought you’d like to hear it.”

Simon opened the small attaché case he had brought in with him, whose purpose now became apparent: with the lid off, it proved to be a portable tape recorder and playback. At a nod from Sholto, one of the lieutenants helped him to plug in the cord. There was no longer any problem of piquing the interest of the audience.

The Saint twiddled a couple of knobs, and suddenly the opulent accents of Carlton Rood boomed with startling realism from the instrument:

“You say that Mrs Yarrow has already been operated on?”

Then another voice, commonplace but incisive: “Almost a week ago. The operation was completely successful. In a few weeks she’ll have normal vision, and could be called to identify the man who squirted acid at her in Mobile.”

Rood’s florid tones again: “But that case was thrown out twelve years ago.”

“Sholto was never tried for shooting the husband. And there’s no statute of limitations on murder.”

“But what extraordinary lengths to go to — to revive an ancient case like that—”

“The Senator’s determined to get Sholto. And several other big scalps. He figures he needs them for his next election campaign. He’s paying for all this out of his own pocket, and he can afford to.”

“Indeed. But why are you telling me this, Mr Simons?”

“The Senator is a practical man. In politics, if you can’t lick ’em, you join ’em — within limits, of course. The Senator would rather have you on his side than have to fight you. You know how ambitious he is, and he wants this very badly. Here’s what I’m authorized to offer. Three hundred thousand dollars cash for all the information and lead you can supply, which of course will never be attributed to you — and it can be handled so as to make it tax free. And a Federal judgeship, which will give you a distinguished peak to retire from in a few years and a perfect out from having to turn down defending your old clients.”

The Saint gave a quick twist of one finger and thumb, and the sound stopped abruptly.

Sholto glared at him.

“What did you do that for?”

“I think that’s plenty for a sample,” Simon answered, “I know you want to know what Mr Rood said, but I’ve got to leave myself something to sell, if you know what I mean.”

One of the lieutenants moved menacingly closer, and Simon looked him in the eye and ostentatiously took his hand off the machine.

“Don’t be hasty,” he said. “You’ve heard all I brought with me. The rest is on another tape, in a safe place.”

Sholto’s teeth clamped down on his cigar.

“How much?”

“It should be worth ten grand, easily.”

“To hear Rood tell this jerk to tell the Senator to go take a running jump at himself?” Sholto scoffed. “What kind of sucker d’you take me for?”

“I’m not telling you what he says. That’s the part you have to pay for.”

“And if all you’re selling is a false alarm, you know how sorry you’d be?”

“You won’t get it out of me that way, Dibs,” said the Saint with a thin smile. “But I’m taking the risk that you won’t think you were gypped when you’ve heard it.” He paused. “Besides, if we do business, I’m hoping to sell you something else.”

“What’s that?”

“I expect you’ll want to know where this Mrs Yarrow is. Confidential investigations are my business. I could help you find her — for a little extra, that is. But you won’t be disappointed. I guarantee I could locate her in less than four days, because of something you haven’t heard yet, if you know what I mean.”

The racketeer’s eyes stayed on him unblinking, expressionless beads of jet, for a long count of seconds, while his stubby fingers beat a mechanical tattoo on his knee. But behind that impenetrable stare Simon knew that an exceptionally shrewd brain was working, for even in the brutal jungles of Dibs Sholto’s world a man does not rise to eminence who is slow to grasp and react.

There was obviously no doubt in Sholto’s mind about the genuineness of the tape record. And Simon had not for a moment anticipated that there would be, for the friend in New York who had made it for him — after half an hour’s first-hand study of Mr Rood’s vocal mannerisms during an abortive discussion on a problem in willing a million-dollar estate — had in the heyday of radio been one of the most sought-after multi-voiced actors, and was now a professional mimic who made a fairly steady living in the secondary night-club circuit with an act in which he impersonated sundry celebrities. It was a poetic touch that the Saint could never have resisted, to hook Joe Sholto with a similar trick to one of those that Carlton Rood had used twelve years ago to get him off. And from that point Simon felt he could almost hear the turning of cog-wheels behind Sholto’s inscrutable scowl.

“I’ll have to think it over,” Sholto said at last. As Simon shrugged and stood up, he went on: “No, you can stick around. It’ll take a while, but not that long.” He jerked his cigar at his second lieutenant. “Take him in the dining room, Earl. Buy him a drink.”

Earl opened the door, and Simon followed him docilely across the hall into a room on the other side. There was an assortment of bottles on the sideboard, among which Simon noticed the label of Peter Dawson.

“Help yourself,” Earl said hospitably.

He raked together a pack of cards that were scattered over one end of the table, and riffled them thoughtfully.

“You play gin rummy?”

“Not very well,” said the Saint modestly.

Joe Sholto was already dialing Long Distance to give the number of one of his special representatives who worked out of Biloxi, and had the good luck to catch him at his office, which was a local pool room.

“Look for a Mrs Agnes Yarrow, who’s been living down there,” Sholto said. “Find out if she’s in town or where she’s gone — anything else you can pick up. Call me back right away.”

The next number he asked for was in New York, and presently it brought the sonorous tones of Carlton Rood over the wire.

“Good afternoon, Joseph.”

“Hiya, Carl.” Sholto’s voice had all the bluff bonhomie his abrasive disposition could put into it. “I hear you had burglars... Yeah, one of my boys saw it in the paper. Hope you didn’t lose anything important... Well, that’s too bad, but it could’ve been worse. Two hundred bucks you can put on the next sucker’s bill — but it better not be mine!”

So Rood’s office had indeed been broken, into — that much of the story checked. They talked for a while about diverse loose ends and lesser upshots of the recent trial, and the conversation had about run its natural course when Sholto casually tossed in his booby trap.

“By the way, Carl, you ever meet a guy named Simons?”

Mr Rood was startled enough not to answer instantly. He recalled his recent interviewer’s emphasis on anonymity, and the advantage it offered to his own vanity which he had not overlooked in thinking about the proposition since, and decided that some professional reserve was justified.

“Why on earth do you ask that, Joseph?” he inquired cautiously.

“He’s an attorney who’s been bothering a friend of mine about some broad he may have knocked up,” Sholto said. “I just thought you might know him.”

“Oh, no,” said Mr Rood, relieved that he was not to be faced with a problem. “I don’t believe I know anyone of that name.”

They signed off with the conventional cordialities, and Sholto slammed down the receiver and hurled his cigar stump savagely into the fireplace.

“The dirty, stinking, lying, double-crossing son of a bitch!”

His first lieutenant was already looking at him in full comprehension, but Sholto’s indignation had to have the first outlet of words.

“If he hadn’t told me before, that was his chance to say something. That’s when he had to say it, if he was ever going to be on the level. But no. ‘I don’t believe I know anyone of that name,’ he says. The bastard! I need to hear the rest of that tape like a hole in the head. I know what he must’ve said to Simons.”

He pulled the spool of tape off the recorder and glowered at it for a moment as if he were wondering what insensate violence to inflict on it. Then he took out another cigar, bit off the end, lighted it, and went back to his armchair. He sat in hard-mouthed grim-jawed silence which his lieutenant was too wise to interrupt, turning the spool over and over monotonously in one hand, and there was something even more terrifying in his impassive concentration than in his rage.

It was an hour and a half before the telephone rang again, and he heard the voice of his henchman in Biloxi.

“I think I got all you wanted, Dibs.”

“What is it?”

“The dame has a newsstand-shop here in town. Had it five years. She lives with a married sister. But right now she’s away. She went to California to have her eyes operated on, account of she’s blind. Seems someone met her in the shop and offered to pick up the tab, but nobody knows who he was. Nobody else saw him, and she couldn’t tell anything about him, account of being blind. A mystery man.”

“Do they know where she went in California?”

“Santa Barbara. I got the name of the doctor. I’ll spell it out for you—”

Sholto wrote it down, grunted his thanks, and hung up. He took out another cigar, and this time he carefully cut off the end.

“That’s all we need,” he said, and repeated what his correspondent had told him.

“Didn’t he get the address where she is?” asked the lieutenant.

“What’s that matter?” Sholto snarled. “If the doc clams up, we ask all the hospitals. There can’t be so many in Santa Barbara.” He was not to know that the Saint had already foreseen and forestalled this. “Get that crummy pee eye back here.”

Simon Templar entered with the air of thinly disguised nervous expectancy proper to his part, and Sholto wasted no time crushing him.

“I thought your proposition over, bub, and it’s no sale.”

“You mean you don’t want to know what Mr Rood said?”

“I know what he said. You ain’t dumb enough to think you could get away with a record of him turning this guy Simons down, so I guess he says okay. I don’t pay ten grand to hear that.”

“But you’d like to find Mrs Yarrow, wouldn’t you?”

“I’ll find her if I want to, and cheaper than you can do it.”

“But after all, Dibs,” whined the Saint aggrievedly, “if I hadn’t—”

“Yeah, I know,” Sholto said. “I do owe you something for the tip-off. And nobody ever said I welshed on nothing reasonable. I don’t have no obligation, but I’ll pay you what I think the tape I hear is worth.”

He dug into his pocket and pulled out a thick wad of green paper bound with a gold clip. He detached two bills from the top and held them out, and the Saint looked down and saw that the denominations were a thousand dollars each.

“Take it,” Sholto rasped, “before I change my mind.”

Simon swallowed and took it.

Then he turned to the second lieutenant, who had followed him back in, and produced a sheet from a score pad.

“And you owe me eighty-five dollars and ten cents, Earl,” he said.

“Pay him,” Sholto said. “And throw him out.”

He stood at the window and watched the Saint’s car going down the drive, and then turned briskly as the second lieutenant returned.

“Call the airport, Earl,” he ordered. “Get us on the next plane to New York. We’ll all go.”

“What about the dame in California?” asked the first lieutenant.

“We’ll have plenty of time for her. She’s bound to be in the hospital for some time yet. But Rood won’t wait. I could pass the word to the big boys, but I think we’ll take care of him ourselves.” Sholto took out the spool of tape and weighed it meditatively in his hand again. “I wouldn’t be surprised to see ’em coming to us with their hats in their hands when they hear what I’ve done for ’em.”

With no inkling of the role that had been chosen for him in Dibs Sholto’s pursuit of his ambitions, Mr Carlton Rood returned to his apartment in the East Sixties that night after an excellent dinner, feeling very comfortably contented with the perspective of his life. His literary endeavor had been completed and safely deposited, and that very afternoon he had dropped the first strategically aimed word about it, in a quarter from which he knew the grapevine would rapidly circulate it to all interested ears. He felt a mild glow of gratitude to Mr Simons for the suggestion, and benevolently hoped that something good would come of the business they had discussed.

As he reached the doorway, two men got out of a car parked nearby and came quickly towards him. Mr Rood saw them out of the corner of his eye, and suddenly realized that what he had glimpsed of one of them was familiar. He turned, and recognized a valued client.

“Why, Joseph!” he exclaimed. “This is a surprise—”

“I bet it is, you lousy squealer,” Sholto said, and personally fired the first shot of a fusillade.

“You see,” said the Saint tranquilly, “the law of the land says that if there’s any reasonable doubt about a man’s guilt, he must be acquitted. The law of the underworld is just the opposite. Or, the other side of the fence, if there’s any serious doubt about a man’s reliability, they make sure he can’t possibly worry them any more. I thought that since Carlton Rood had worked so hard to protect the tribe that lives by that philosophy, he might like to have it tried on himself.”

“I’m sure he loved it,” said his friend the ophthalmologist. “But what about this sequel?”

He indicated the newspaper they had been looking at, which reported the finding of a body identified as that of Joseph (“Dibs”) Sholto, fatally laden with lead, in a garbage dump somewhere in Jersey.

“When the notes that Rood left reached the Department of Justice and various district attorneys, and the heat started, sizzling all over, the big boys naturally blamed Sholto for starting the whole thing. And out of his own bailiwick, too. So they had to teach him a permanent lesson. The ordinary dull due process of Law might have taken care of him anyway, with the help of Rood’s contribution, but they saved it the trouble. I can’t say I was so sure of that, but I was hoping for it. Let’s call it a bonus.”

“I’d be sorry for Machiavelli,” said the doctor, “if the poor naive man had ever come up against you.”

Simon Templar grinned gently, and his friend glanced at his watch and stood up.

“If you can come to the nursing home now,” he said, “Mrs Yarrow was most anxious that if we have succeeded, the first person she sees would be you...”