Free The Saint Sees It Through by Leslie Charteris Page B

previous attempts to locate the object of
his search had uncovered one or more nests of illegality.
    One had led him to a sort of warehouse, a huge
structure where
vast numbers of bottles of bona fide liquors were made less intoxicating by the simple addition of faintly colored dis tilled water. All very healthful, no doubt, and
tending to reduce the incidence of drunkenness among habitues of clip clubs
like Cookie’s—where, incidentally,
one of the delivery trucks had led
him. This wholesale watering of drinks had another humanitarian aspect: it
saved work for the bartenders. Still, when he remembered the quality of Cookie’s drinks, the Saint concluded that she and/or her bartenders had initiative along
that same line. The Saint felt that there was room for reasonable doubt that the reduction of the alcoholic potency of the
drinks stemmed from compassionate
motives, cynical though that con clusion
might be.
    Another trail had dragged across it a
herring that had turned out to be the numbers racket. During his brief
examination of exponents
of mathematical larceny, he had been led again, by one of the collectors, to Cookie’s.
    He had run down a couple of false leads that
led nowhere except to the decision that this was a Mecca for the
chiseller, and that some of almost everybody’s best friends are
petty crooks at
bottom.
    The Saint was looking for bigger game.
Perhaps the rising elevator would bring some.
    It regurgitated two young men who were
beyond doubt fresh in from the sea. They wore shore clothes, but the sea was
in their tanned
faces, their hard hands, and the set of their legs, braced automatically for the roll of a deck. The Saint couldn’t see their eyes in the hall’s gloom, but he knew
they would have the characteristic look of those who gaze habitually on
circular horizons.
    They walked without speaking to James
Prather’s door, thumbed the button, were admitted. The Saint moved
catlike to the door, but listening brought nothing. The door was heavy, the walls
designed to give privacy to the occupant. Simon sighed, summoned
the elevator, and joined Avalon, who was sitting in one of those chairs that
clutter the lobbies of apartment houses and gazing at the uninspiring wallpaper
with a forlorn expres sion.
    “I beg your pardon, Miss,” he said,
“but I was attracted by your beauty, and can’t help asking you a
question. I am a rep resentative of Grimes Graphite, Inc—‘Grimes’ gets the grime,’ you
know—and felt certain that you must use it. Is that what makes your skin glow
so?”
    “My mother before me, and her mother
before her, rubbed their faces each night with Grimes’s graphite. But I
don’t use it myself. I loathe it.”
    “That is hardly the point at issue, is
it? We can use that line about your maternal progenitors, run a photo of yourself—do you ski?—no matter, we can fix that. And we might
even be persuaded to raise the
ante.”
    “You twisted my bankbook,” Avalon
said. “I’m your gal.”
    “Really?”
    She smiled. “Really.”
    They looked at each other for a long moment,
until several persons came through the front door in a group, of which
the male members stared at Avalon with very obvious admiration. The Saint
took her outside.
    “An idea has slugged me,” he said,
“and I don’t want you to be seen talking to me until we’re ready. I just
hope our sailor boys give me a couple of minutes to tell you.”
    “What are you talking about?” she
demanded as he hailed a passing taxi.
    He helped her in.
    “Wait,” he told the driver, and
closed the glass panel separat ing the production end of the cab from the
payload.
    “I have a faint hunch,” he told Avalon in a low voice.
“Two young men will presently issue
from that door. Possibly you saw them come in. Tanned, one in a
freshly-pressed gray suit, the other in
blue? Did they notice you?”
    “Looked right through me.”
    “Don’t be bitter, darling. They had big things on their
minds. On their way