Free Call for the Saint by Leslie Charteris

talking to you. Not yet. I will later. I don’t care if you know the Commissioner or the Mayor or the President of the United States! Just don’t leave town, understand?”
    “Yes,” Simon said. “I get it. All right, Alvin. I’ll string along. In fact—” He hesitated. “I’ll even tell you why I was seeing Cleve Friend.”
    Kearney said suspiciously: “Yeah? Another gag?”
    “No. You might as well know, I suppose. I can’t’ keep it quiet forever.”
    “Okay,” Kearney snapped. “Spill it.” He could not quite keep the eagerness out of his voice.
    The Saint said mildly: “We were plotting his murder. Good-by, Alvin.”
    He hung up, leaving the detective gibbering inarticulately, and poured himself another cup of coffee.
    “This is what is known as a cumulative frame,” he remarked to Hoppy, who was starting his morning target practice. “I wonder how thorough it’s going to be.”
    Mr. Uniatz bounded a BB accurately off the coffeepot.
    “I don’t get it, boss,” he said automatically.
    “It works backwards,” Simon explained. “First an unidentified body is found, and the only connection between it and me was a deed of gift. Now some people have recognized the body and say that I’ve been seen foregathering with Junior, hereinafter referred to as the unlamented Mr. Cleve Friend, a grifter from Frisco. It’s significant that some of these witnesses are beggars. Later, perhaps, a witness to the murder will pop up: By sheer accident, he happened to be passing when I bumped off Friend.”
    “But ya didn’t bump him off,” Hoppy said. “Did ya?”
    “No, Hoppy, I didn’t.”
    “Den it’s okay, ain’t it?”
    The Saint lighted a cigarette and leaned back.
    “I wish I could be sure of that.” He blew a procession of three reflective smoke rings towards the ceiling. “Do you happen to know anything about scopolamin?”
    “I never hoid of him. Is he in de same mob wit’ dat Gordian?”
    “It’s a drug, Hoppy. It makes people tell the truth. And it seems that somebody gave it to Friend before he was bumped off. They wanted to know how much he’d spilled, and he must have told them. We can also be sure that they asked him all he knew about us. … So we can take it that the blind-beggar act is dead and has been for some time.”
    A scowl of dutiful concentration formed like a sluggish cloud below Mr. Uniatz’s hairline as he worked this out and tried to reconcile its components. His mental travail appeared to deepen through successive minutes to a painful degree, and at last he brought forth the root of it.
    “Den why,” he asked, “don’t dey give ya de woiks last night?”
    “That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” said the Saint slowly. “Unless they’re taking their time to cook up a much bigger and better frame… . Big Hazel has a whisky bottle with my fingerprints on it now, and there wasn’t a thing I could do to stop her getting away with it. She really had me off balance-I was so busy turning down a drink that I was sure would be a knockout that the other angle just went by under my nose.”
    He blew another smoke ring very deliberately, devoting everything to the perfection of its rich full roundness, while he tried to make his inward thoughts match the calm of his outward movement.
    “Also,” he said, and he was really talking to himself, “it seemed to me that there was just the slightest sinister emphasis -just the merest trace of it-in the way Big Hazel talked about having women in the hotel. I wonder …”
    He picked up the telephone and called Monica Varing’s hotel, but her room didn’t answer.
    They had parted on a tentative agreement to lunch again, and it was not likely that anyone so punctual as she was would be careless about an engagement. Probably, he told himself, she had gone shopping.
    He called again every half hour until one-thirty, and stayed in his own room for fear of missing her if she called him.
    It was not an afternoon to remember