Free Saint Goes West by Leslie Charteris Page B

brain.”
    8
HE WAS alone in the house. Freddie Pellman had taken the girls off to the Coral Room for dinner, and Simon’s stall was that he had to wait for a long-distance phone call. He would join them as soon as the call had come through.
    “You’ll have the place to yourself,” Freddie had said when he suggested the arrangement, still glowing from his recent accolade. “You can search all you want. You’re bound to find something. And then we’ll have her.”
    Simon finished glancing through a copy of Life, and strolled out on the front terrace. Everything on the hillside was very still. He lighted a cigarette, and gazed out over the thin spread of sparkling lights that was Palm Springs at night. Down below, on the road that led east from the foot of the drive, a rapidly dwindling speck of red might have been the tail light of Freddie’s car.
    The Saint went back into the living-room after a little while and poured himself a long lasting drink of Peter Dawson. He carried it with him as he worked methodically through Esther’s and Ginny’s rooms.
    He wasn’t expecting to find anything in either of them, and he didn’t. But it was a gesture that he felt should be made.
    So after that he came to Lissa’s room.
    He worked unhurriedly through the closet and the chest of drawers, finding nothing but the articles of clothing and perнsonal trinkets that he had found in the other rooms. After that he sat down at the dresser. The center drawer conнtained only the laboratory of creams, lotions, powders, paints, and perfumes without which even a modern goddess believes that she has shed her divinity. The top right-hand drawer contained an assortment of handkerchiefs, scarves, ribbons, clips, and pins. It was in the next drawer down that he found what he had been waiting to find.
    It was quite a simple discovery, lying under a soft pink froth of miscellaneous underwear. It consisted of a .32 autoнmatic pistol, a small blue pharmacist’s bottle labeled “Prussic Acid-POISON”, and an old issue of Life. He didn’t really need to open the magazine to know what there would be inside, but he did it. He found the mutilated page, and knew from the other pictures in the layout that the picture which had headed the letter that Freddie had shown him at their first meeting would fit exactly into the space that had been scissored out of the copy in front of him.
    He laid the evidence out on the dresser top and considered it while he kindled another cigarette.
    Probably any other man would have felt that the search ended there; but the Saint was not any other man. And the strange clairvoyant conviction grew in his mind that that was where the search really began.
    He went on with it more quickly, with even more assurance, although he had less idea than before what he was looking for. He only had that intuitive certainty that there should be something-something that would tie the last loose ends of the tangle together and make complete sense of it. And he did find it, after quite a short while.
    It was only a shabby envelope tucked into the back of a folding photo frame that contained a nicely glamorised porнtrait of Freddie. Inside the envelope were a savings bank pass book that showed a total of nearly five thousand dollars, and a folded slip of paper. It was when he unfolded the slip of paper that he knew that the search was actually over and all the questions answered, for he had in his hands a certificate of marriage issued in Yuma ten months before …
    “Are you having fun?” Lissa asked.
    She had been as quiet as a cat, for he hadn’t heard her come in, and she was right behind him. And yet he wasn’t surнprised. His mind was filling with a great calm and quietness as all the conflict of contradictions settled down and he knew that the last act had been reached.
    He turned quite slowly, and even the small shining gun in her hand, aimed squarely at his chest, didn’t surprise or disturb him.
    “How did you know?”