Call for the Saint (9 page)

He proved this by applied pressure, with one hand gagging Frankie, though the audience could not see that.

It took three more holds, each a little more agonizing than the last, with Frankie trying desperately to escape, while none of his putative allies dared lift a finger to help him because Kearney was watching.

“So we’ve got her. Let go!”

“Where?”

“Second floor. Room by the stairs-uh!”

“Front or back?”

“Back”

“Thank you, Frankie,” Simon said, and his hands moved swiftly.

He jumped up. Frankie did not.

“He’s fainted,” the Saint gasped in well-simulated alarm. “It may be his heart. … Get a doctor!”

He leaped down from the platform and hurried toward the nearest exit; but Kearney caught him before he had gone more than a few steps.

“Just a minute,” Kearney snarled. “What did you do to that guy?

“I just gave him a mild chiropractic treatment,” said the Saint wintrily. “I know it wasn’t as good as you could have done at headquarters, but I thought a rubber hose might have been rather conspicuous. He’ll wake up in about ten minutes and be as good as new.”

The detective kept hold of his arm.

“What’s the idea, anyway? And where do you think you’re going?”

“I think I’m going to search this hotel, without bothering about a warrant,” Simon answered in a flat voice. “Because my idea is that Monica Varing is being kept a prisoner here.”

“The actress? Are you crazy?”

“I don’t think so. In fact, just before Frankie passed out he told me she was upstairs.”

Those of the audience who had moved were crowding towards the stage to obstruct the efforts of the first eager beavers who had moved to offer Frankie Weiss first aid. The others cast glances at the Saint but did not try to get near him, being probably kept at a distance by the presence of Kearney as much as anything else; so that the two of them might almost have been alone in the crowded room. At least until Mrs. Wingate bore down upon them, with Stephen Elliott bobbing like a towed dinghy in her wake.

“Whatever is the matter?” she squeaked frantically. “This is terrible—”

“You tell them, Alvin,” Simon suggested; and with a side step as swift and light as a ballet dancer he made way for Mrs. Wingate to plow into a berth between them, and vanished through the door he had originally been heading for before the detective had the remotest chance of circumnavigating Mrs. Wingate’s bulk to intercept him.

Simon raced up the stairs to the ground floor and from there to the second without interference. There were four doors back of the stairs, and he flung each of them open in turn. None of them was locked. Two of the rooms were six-bed dormitories, empty, but smelling rancidly of habitation. In the third room a very old man with a pock-marked face looked up with an idiotic grin from a game of solitaire.

The fourth room was empty-not only empty but so cleaned out that it had the same prison barrenness that he had found in the room he himself had occupied the night before. There were rumples in the bed that didn’t follow the same contours as careless bedmaking; and he knew this must have been the room, even before he saw that the opaque window glass contained the same fused-in netting as his own window had had, even before his nostrils detected in the mustiness of the air a clear fragrance that could only be Monica… .

Kearney caught up with him there a moment later and stuck a gun into his ribs.

“All right, Mr. Saint,” he grated. “Don’t try anything else, or I’ll blast you.”

“You blathering nitwit,” said the Saint, with icy calm. “Why couldn’t you stay downstairs and make sure they wouldn’t smuggle her out?”

“From where?” Kearney jeered.

“From here. Frankie told me the truth. She was in this room. Don’t you smell anything?”

The detective sniffed.

“It smells lousy to me.”

Simon’s eye caught a gleam on the floor. He ignored Kearney’s revolver entirely to step forward and pick it up.

“Look.”

“A tooth out of a comb,” Kearney said scornfully. “So what?”

“A spring tooth,” Simon said, “from the kind of comb women wear in their hair. And dark red-brown-the color she’d use.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Mrs. Wingate and Stephen Elliott caught both of them up at that point. The philanthropist was quivering with a kind of pale-lipped restraint.

“This is the most outrageous suggestion I’ve ever heard, Mr. Templar,” he said. “Lieutenant Kearney tells me—”

“Oh, I do hope you’re mistaken!” babbled Laura Wingate. “She’s such a sweet person, I’d die if anything happened to her.”

“If anything happened to her, it would not be here,” Elliott stated frostily. “Lieutenant, I think you’d better take Mr. Templar and his accusations to the proper authority.”

Kearney nodded.

“It’ll be a pleasure, Mr. Elliott.”

“In spite of the comb?” Simon persisted.

“We have quite a number of lady guests,” Elliott said stiffly. “If that is any grounds for this kind of behavior—”

“It isn’t,” Kearney said. “And I’m going to enjoy booking the Saint on charges of disturbing the peace, just to keep him quiet for a while.” He prodded Simon again with his gun. “Come along, you.”

“I loved your show,” Mrs. Wingate trilled, apparently feeling that some expression was due from her. “You must do it for us again one day.”

Simon and Kearney went downstairs, passing a barrage of eyes that had seeped up from the basement.

“By the way,” Simon said, “Frankie is wearing a gun.”

“He has a permit,” said Kearney. “I know the judge who issued it. Keep going.”

They went out to the sidewalk, and there was a brief but awkward pause while the total cablessness of the street established itself.

“Why don’t we take my car?” suggested the Saint accommodatingly. “It’s right here.”

“Okay,” Kearney said belligerently. “I’ll let you drive it- and just don’t try anything.”

He opened the door, and followed Simon in. While the Saint was still fitting the key in the lock, he reached over and snapped one loop of a pair of handcuffs over Simon’s left wrist. The other cuff he secured to the steering wheel.

“All right,” he said grimly. “Let’s go.”

Simon started the engine and nursed the car north for a few blocks. Kearney held the revolver in his lap and glowered with rather strenuously sustained triumph.

“How about your big case against me?” Simon asked after a while. “Aside from my breaches of the peace, I mean. Is that coming along?”

Kearney flexed his jaw muscles.

“We got a letter this afternoon. It was addressed to the Chief, and it was signed by Cleve Friend. It said he was mixed up in some deal with you and he was trying to get out of it because he’d got cold feet. And he was afraid you wouldn’t let him get out. You’d threatened to kill him unless he played along. The letter said he was leaving it with a friend, to be mailed if he-died.”

The Saint kept his eyes straight ahead.

“Did you check the signature?”

“It was Friend’s signature, all right. A little shaky, but it compared.”

“Shaky?” Simon pondered. “And I’ll bet the letter itself was typewritten.”

“It was.”

“It would be. Either Friend signed under the influence of scopolamin-which is a hypnotic-or else he was tortured into signing it,”

“You can explain anything, can’t you?” Kearney gibed. “Somebody’s trying to frame you, of course.”

“Of course,” Simon agreed coolly. “That- should be obvious, even to a policeman.”

“Yeah? And how did they make this Varing dame disappear?”

“Probably through a secret passage …”

His voice trailed away as the thought hit him like a splash of cold water between the eyes.

“My God,” he said softly. “Secret passage. Of course. What a feeble-minded flop I am!”

“Hey!” Kearney squawked suddenly. “Where d’you think you’re going? This ain’t the way to Headquarters.”

“It’s the way I’m taking,” said the Saint. “Come in, Hoppy.”

Mr. Uniatz rose from behind the front seat and applied the muzzle of his Betsy to the nape of Kearney’s neck.

“Okay, copper,” he said. “Take it easy.”

The detective’s face went white, then red.

“You can’t get away with this,” he said desperately.

“We can try,” said the Saint. “I’ve just had an inspiration, and I’m going to be much too busy to horse around with any footling rap about disturbing the peace.”

He sped the car west on Roosevelt, and presently turned up Central Avenue to Columbus Park, where he stopped.

“Okay, Hoppy,” he said.

“De woiks, boss?”

“Just let him take a nap,” Simon said hastily.

Mr. Uniatz raised his gun and brought it down with professional precision; and the detective napped… .

Simon found Kearney’s keys, unlocked the handcuffs, and transferred them to the detective’s wrists. He took Kearney’s badge and identification, figuring that a handcuffed man without credentials would be more than ordinarily delayed in starting a hue and cry. Then they took Kearney out of the car and laid him under a tree with his hat over his face, and drove quickly away.

The Saint’s brain flogged itself pitilessly under the impassive mask of his face.

“Secret passages,” he repeated, as he opened up the headlights on the road to Wheaton. “Hoppy, I ought to have my head examined.”

“What for, boss?”

“Maggots. What the hell’s the first thing you’d expect to find in a hide-out that used to belong to Al Capone? And don’t you remember Sammy said he had a safe place to hide Junior?”

“Sure.”

“Well, it was safe. So safe that Kearney couldn’t find it. But we’ll find it this time, if we have to blast for it. And then we’ll know whether Sammy and his friend Fingers double-crossed us, or if the King caught up with them.”

He reconnoitered the house carefully, but there were no signs of a police guard, and a ground-floor window succumbed in short order to the Saint’s expert manipulation. It was after that that the problems began to multiply, and it took two hours of methodical labor to work them out.

They finally found the “safe place” by tortuously tracing a ventilating pipe that seemed to have an outlet but no inlet. Even then the field was merely narrowed down to the cellar, and it took an inch-by-inch investigation to settle on the probable entrance. Hoppy’s reminiscences of bootlegging days were helpful and diverting, if sometimes gruesome; but in the end they had to use crowbars to break down the brick wall. There was a steel plate beneath that; but once its locking mechanism was revealed it surrendered to a piece of baling wire.

It let them into a small, comfortably furnished room with a ventilating plate in the ceiling, where Sammy the Leg, trussed like an unsinged chicken, lay philosophically on a cot, and looked at them.

“Chees, pal,” Hoppy said, as he worked on Sammy’s ropes with a jackknife. “We t’ought ya’d been bumped or sump’n.”

“Not me,” Sammy grunted. He tested his limbs experimentally. “Thanks, Saint. I figured I was gonna cash in for sure. Those lousy bastards just meant me to lie here and starve.”

“Didn’t you hear us?” Simon asked. “You could have saved us some time if you’d yelled.”

“It wouldn’t have done no good. This room’s soundproofed. I heard you just now, sure, but you couldn’t of heard me. Besides, how did I know who it was? I could tell somebody was busting in, so I let ‘em bust. Not that I could of stopped you.” Sammy walked stiffly back and forth like a shaggy bear, pausing at the door. “Had to break in, didn’t you? It’ll cost dough to fix that.” He grimaced. “Hell. C’mon upstairs. I’m starving.”

But the first thing Sammy the Leg did was to extract a beer bottle from his refrigerator, uncap it, and guzzle the contents. He wiped his mouth with a hairy hand, sighed, and eyed the Saint malevolently.

“Lousy double-crosser,” he said. “Nope, not you. I mean Fingers. Go on, sit down. Have a beer. Wait a sec.”

He went back to the refrigerator and brought out a plate of pig’s knuckles.

“How did it happen?” Simon asked.

“Fingers Schultz,” Sammy said, gnawing a knuckle. “Just goes to show. Never trust nobody. That little bastard’s been with me for three years. Thought I could depend on him. Sure I could-till he started figuring I was a has-been and somebody else could pay off better, and protect him.”

“Like the King of the Beggars?” Simon prompted.

“I wouldn’t know about that. Fingers brought Frankie Weiss here. They stuck me up. Fingers knew about that room downstairs and how to get into it. They took that guy you left here away with them, and left me like you found me. Funny-he didn’t seem so happy about them finding him, like you’d expect.”

“Junior’s hunches were working fine,” Simon told him coldbloodedly. “They asked him all the questions they had to, and then rubbed him out.”

Sammy reflectively chewed a knucklebone, his small eyes studying the Saint. Finally he sighed.

“That’s too bad. I guess he had it coming, but that don’t do you no good.” A pig’s knuckle cracked disconcertingly in Sammy’s huge grip. He got up, found another bottle, and lifted it to his mouth. “Who’s gonna pay for messing up my cellar?” he demanded abruptly. “All it takes to open it is to stick a wire in the right place between the bricks. You didn’t have to wreck it like that.”

“How much will the repairs cost?” Simon asked.

“Say two hundred.”

The Saint smiled.

“That’s a coincidence. My charge for rescuing people who are tied up and left to die is exactly two hundred fish. Shall we call it square?”

Sammy said without rancor: “I didn’t figure it would work on you, but there was no harm trying. Fingers is the guy who ought to pay for it. But when I catch up with Fingers, he won’t be in no shape to sign checks.”

Simon lighted a cigarette.

“You’re right about Junior’s rubbing-out doing me no good,” he said. “As a matter of fact, they’re working pretty hard at trying to frame me for it. You’ll be interested to know that part of the frame was a deed of gift on this house from you to me. Now we know more about it, it wasn’t such a bad setup at all. You’d never show up to contest the title; and if anyone ever did find your body, it’d have been in my house and looked just as if I’d bumped you and forged the deed… . The King is quite a sweet little schemer, it turns out.”