Free The Saint in the Sun by Leslie Charteris

genially.
    “Of course, they had to accept it eventually.” Wilbert inevitably reddened. “They could hardly get around the various people I’d talked to on the phone, which wouldn’t have given me time to get far away from the villa. But it was rather awkward when it came out that Sir Jasper had made me the trustee of his will, and it was so loosely worded that I could do almost anything I liked.”
    “What did he leave his money to?”
    “Most of it to found a motion picture museum, with the provision that one whole section has to be devoted to relics of himself and his productions.”
    “Modest to the last,” murmured the Saint. “Well, you certainly gave him service while he was alive. But what I liked best was the way you cleaned up his boat the last time. If you hadn’t been so conscientious, we wouldn’t have had the cigar-ash clue.”
    “That didn’t make a lot of difference, did it?”
    “It helped, Wilbert. It helped.”
    Dominique Rousse was posing for photographers while her husband stood a little apart, watching with his usual introspective detachment.
    “Good evening, Mr Thomas,” he said ironically, as Simon came towards him. “I suppose you couldn’t wait to see how the picture turned out.”
    “I do feel a sort of personal interest,” Simon confessed.
    “I think you’ll like what I did with Maureen Herald’s part. It is big enough to justify her co-starring, without upsetting the balance of the play.”
    “Or upsetting Dominique, no doubt,” said the Saint. “You don’t need me to tell you you’re a good writer. But you ought to be more careful of your own dialog.”
    “In what way?”
    “You must know that one of the stock routines for a character to trip himself up in a detective story is to talk about a murder before he’s been told that there’s been one. If that police sergeant had understood English and been on the ball when you dropped that clanger, you might have had to finish your script in the pokey.”
    One of the photographers recognized the Saint, grabbed him unceremoniously, and dragged him over to Dominique.
    With her sullen beauty, and a rope of diamonds twined in her red-blonde hair, and her stupendous figure revealed by a skintight green silk sheath cut low enough to prove to everyone that her world-famous bosom owed nothing to artificial enrichment, it took no effort at all to visualize her as a queen who could have had a pagan mob at her feet, even though she had demonstrated the moral instincts of a cat.
    “Pretend to be pointing a gun at her,” urged the photographer. “No, that’s no good. Put a judo hold on her.”
    Simon took her by the wrist and twisted her arm gently behind her in such a way that she was pressed against him face to face.
    “You could have done this long ago,” she said in a whisper that scarcely moved her lips. “I told you I do not break my promise. Why have you not come to claim it?”
    He smiled into her eyes.
    “Some day I may,” he said. “When I can make myself unscrupulous enough.”
    Finally he was able to rejoin Maureen Herald as another group of photographers tired of her.
    “It was nice of you to come all this way to put up with this sort of thing,” she said, taking his arm. “But I felt you ought to be here. After all, if you hadn’t come up with the explanation of the Undine business, any of us might have been in an awkward spot.”
    “Somebody certainly owes me something,” he admitted, “for helping to hide a murder.”
    They were moving into the theater, but she stopped to stare at him.
    “You mean you’ve changed your mind since?”
    “I always did think it was murder.” He got her moving again. “It wasn’t just the cigar-ash business, though that started me thinking. When Wilbert let out that Undine never took the boat out alone, I tried to fit that in. Then I remembered the clothes Undine was wearing, and that was the clincher. Undine’s taste in color schemes was ghastly, but it wasn’t