Free Saint Steps In by Leslie Charteris Page B

me. What goes with this pulling of
punches— this bush league milquetoast
skullduggery?”
    He
went on nagging his mind with that proposition while the taxi turned up the Merritt Parkway and presently branched off again to the right up a meandering lane that
brought them to a stone gateway and
through that up a short trim drive to the
front of a comfortably spacious New England frame house. He had a glimpse of white shingled walls and green
shingled roofs and gables as the taxi’s headlights swept over them, and he saw that there were lights behind some of the
curtains. For a moment her hand was
on his arm, and he put his own hand over
it, but neither of them said anything.
    She opened the front door while he was paying off the driver, and he carried their bags up the path
of light to the hall and joined her there.
    She called: “Daddy!”
    They could hear the taxi’s wheels crunching out off the gravel, and the hum of its engine
fading down the lane, leaving them alone
together in the stillness.
    “Daddy,” she called.
    She went through
an open door into the living-room, and he put
the bags down and followed her. The room was empty, with one standard lamp burning beside the piano.
    She went out again quickly.
    He stayed there, lighting a cigarette and taking in the scene. It was a
livable kind of room, with built-in bookshelves and plenty of ashtrays and not too fancy chintz covers
on the chairs, a pleasant compromise between
interior decorating and mas culine comfort.
There were no signs of violence or disorder, but there were rumples in various cushions where they had been sat on since the room was last done over.
There was a pipe in one of the
ashtrays by the fireplace: he went over and felt the bowl, and it was quite
cold. He wondered how long a pipe bowl would stay warm after it was put down.
    A telephone stood on the same table. He picked it up, and heard the familiar tone of a clear
line. Just to make sure, he dialed a number at random, and heard the ringing at the other end, and then the click of the connection, and a
gruffly sleepy male voice that said
“Yes?”
    “This
is Joe,” said the Saint momentously. “You’d better start thinking fast. Your wife has
discovered everything.”
    He hung up, and
turned to Madeline Gray as she came back into the room.
    “The
phone is working,” he said casually. “There’s noth ing wrong with the line.”
    “Come with me,” she said.
    He took her arm and crossed the hall with her. They looked into the dining room, sedate and barren
like any dining room between meals. They went on into the kitchen. It was clean and spotless, inhabited only by a
ticking clock on a shelf.
    “I’ve been here,” she said.
    “Would he have had dinner?”
    “I
couldn’t tell.”
    “What about
servants?”
    “We haven’t
had anyone living in for a couple of weeks, and we weren’t going to do anything about it until I got back from Washington. Daddy couldn’t have been bothered with interviewing
them and breaking them in. I got him a girl who used to work for us, who got
married and lives quite close by. She could
have got him his dinner and cleaned up and gone home.”
    After that there
was a study lined with ponderous and well- worn
books, and featuring a couple of filing cabinets and a big desk littered with papers as the principal
movable furni ture. It was fairly
messy, in a healthy haphazard way.
    Simon went to one
of the filing cabinets, and pulled open a drawer
at random. The folders looked regular enough, to any one who hadn’t
lived with the system.
    He turned from there to glance over the desk. He only saw a disarray of letters, circulars, cryptic memoranda,
abstruse pamphlets, and assorted manuscript.
    “How does it look to you?” he asked.
    “About the same as usual.”
    “You
must have lived with some of this stuff. Does any of it look wrong?”
    She skimmed through the filing drawer that he had opened, and turned over some of the papers on
the desk. After