Call for the Saint by Leslie Charteris

conversation came from the other end of die line, until the clerk muttered: “Okay, I’ll do my best.”
    Simon started to move away.
    “Er-Mr. Templar—”
    He turned.
    “Yes?”
    The clerk was sweating. His face had a slightly glazed surface from the strain of trying to look natural.
    “The manager just called, Mr. Templar, and wanted to speak to you about-about an overcharge on your bill.”
    “I’ll be glad to speak to him in the morning,” said the Saint co-operatively. “We should have lots to talk about-everything on my bill looks like an overcharge to me.”
    “He’s on his way here now, sir,” said the clerk from his tonsils. “If you could wait a few minutes—”
    The Saintly smile would have glowed ethereally in a stained-glass window.
    “I’m afraid I haven’t time,” he said. “But when Lieutenant Kearney gets here, do congratulate him for me on his new job. Oh, and give him this letter, will you?”
    He laid the communication from the real-estate agents on the desk, and hurried Hoppy out of the lobby before the clerk could reassemble his wits for another attempt to delay him.
    Again his car snaked through the traffic at the maximum speed that would still leave it immune from legal interference.
    The Saint’s hands were light and steady on the wheel, his keen tanned profile implacably calm against the passing street lights. And while he drove like a precision machine he thought about Monica. Monica drugged, her velvet voice incoherent, her enigmatic eyes blank, her proud body listless and helpless … He thought of worse things than that; and a black coldness lanced through him with an aching intensity that froze his eyes as they stared ahead.
    “I’m the dope, Hoppy,” he said, in a dead toneless level. “I should have known better than to think I could push her off the stage… . She put on that beggar woman’s outfit again, of course. She went back to the Elliott Hotel. But on account of what Junior had spilled, she didn’t last a minute. They were probably taking care of her last night while I was lying there wondering why they didn’t do anything about me.” His voice had a bitterness beyond emotion. “By this time they’ve given her a treatment and they know all the rest about me. Except where I am now. This is the showdown.”
    “Who’d t’ought it,” Hoppy said amazedly. “Elliott-de old goat!”
    Simon said nothing.
    The house on Kelly Drive was as dark as the last time they had seen it, an unimaginative two-story pile of brick with drawn blinds that made the windows look like sightless eyes.
    Simon went to the back door, with Hoppy at his heels. Having picked the lock once before, he took a mere few seconds to open it again.
    They stepped into darkness and silence broken only by the monotonous slow pulse of a dripping tap. This was the kitchen. On the other side of the room was the door at the head of the stairs that led down to the basement where initiations into the brotherhood of beggars were performed. As Simon touched it, it gave way a fraction: it was not quite closed, but the darkness was blacker still beyond the slight opening. He stopped and listened again, and heard nothing. The darkness of the house had not seemed to indicate that there was a guard, but he was jumping to no rash conclusions.
    He balanced the gun in his hand and pushed the door wider.
    Then he heard it-a faint but clear rustle of movement that threw a momentary uncontrollable syncopation into his heartbeats and sent a flying column of eskimo beetles skirmishing up into his scalp. And with the rustle, a low sleepy inarticulate moan.
    “What’s dat?” breathed Mr. Uniatz hoarsely.
    The Saint hardly bothered to whisper. After the first instant’s shock, he understood the rustle and the moan so vividly that the needlessness of further stealth seemed to be established.
    “That’s Monica,” he said, and went down the steps.
    His pencil flashlight broke the darkness as he reached the bottom;