Free Call for the Saint by Leslie Charteris Page A

with any pleasure or any pride. He must have walked several miles, pacing the room steadily like a caged lion and taking months of normal wear out of the carpet. He tried to tell himself that his imagination was running away with him, that he was giving himself jitters over nothing. He told himself that he should have kept Monica entirely out of it, that he should never have let her learn anything, that he would only have himself to blame if she tried to steal the play from him. He saw her all the time in his mind’s eye, a composite of all her tantalizing facets-sultry, impish, arrogant, venturesome, languorous, defiant, tender. He felt angry and foolish and frightened in turn.
    Mr. Uniatz worked on his BB marksmanship with untroubled single-mindedness. He could learn nothing from the Saint’s face, and to him the operations of the Saint’s mind would always be a mystery. It was enough for him that there was a mind there, and that it worked. All he had to do was carry out its orders when they were issued. It was a panacea for all the problems of life which over the years had never failed to pay off, and which had saved untold wear and tear on the rudimentary convolutions of his brain.
    At five o’clock Simon remembered that Monica might have a matinee, and verified it from the newspaper. He walked to the Martin Beck Theatre and went in the stage door.
    “Miss Varing ain’t on this afternoon,” said the doorman. “She’s sick.”
    With lead settling in his heart, Simon sought out the stage manager.
    “That’s right,” said the man, who remembered him. “She called me this morning and said she wouldn’t be able to go on. She said if I hadn’t heard from her by this time she wouldn’t be doing the evening performance either.”
    “She isn’t sick,” said the Saint. “She hasn’t been in her hotel all day.”
    The stage manager looked only slightly perturbed. He said nothing about artistic temperament; but his discretion itself implied that he could think of plausibly mundane explanations.
    Simon took a taxi to the Ambassador and finally corralled an assistant manager whom he could charm into co-operation. A check through various departments established that room service had delivered breakfast to Monica Varing’s apartment at nine, that she had been gone when the maid came in at eleven. But her key had not been left at the desk, and no one had seen her go out.
    “No one knows they saw her,” Simon corrected, and asked his last questions of the doorman.
    Already he knew what the answer would be, and wondered what forlorn hope kept him trying to prove himself wrong.
    “An old ragged woman, looked like she might be a beggar?
    … Yes, sir, I did see her come out. Matter of fact, I wondered how she got in. Must have been while I was calling someone a cab.”
    “On the contrary,” said the Saint, with surprising gentleness, “you opened the door for her yourself.”
    He left the man gaping, and went back into the hotel to call Lieutenant Kearney.
    CHAPTER TWELVE
The boiler room in the basement of the Elliott Hotel was not quite as bleak as the description implies. This was only because the description does not mention several rows of hard wooden benches, the bodies of several dozen apathetic occupants of them, a few paper decorations left over from some previous Christmas, and the platform at one end where Stephen Elliott was filling in with some merry ad-libs as the Saint found his way in.
    “And-ah-as the stove said to the kettle, I hope you’re having a hot time.” Nobody laughed, and Elliott went on: “We want you to enjoy yourselves, friends, and the next item on tonight’s program is a song by Mrs. Laura Wingate.”
    He handed Mrs. Wingate up to the platform, and the connection between his two statements became somewhat obscure as the piano began to tinkle out an uncertain accompaniment and Mrs. Wingate cut loose with an incredibly piercing and off-key soprano.
    “My heart is like a singing