Patricia was staring at him.
“Last night?”
“Some hopped-up heister crashes de joint,” Hoppy snorted. “He gets away before we can even see who it is. But we give him such a scare he forgets de rod.”
“You didn’t tell me!” Pat accused. “You finished that brawl at the Arena over here, didn’t you?” She searched Simon’s face narrowly, and sensed the truth with the swift certainty of an intuition ground to psychic fineness by the countless abrasions of past experience. “Someone followed you here and tried to kill you!”
The Saint bowed.
“Darling, you know our kind of friends too well.”
Connie Grady stood up. She gathered up her purse and gloves with unsteady hands. Her face was pale, the magnolia skin drawn and haggard. She tried to ignore the revolver on the table, but her eyes kept flitting back to it, under the spell of some kind of frightening fascination.
“I’m sorry I bothered you like this,” she said with nervous breathlessness. “It was silly, really. I—” She broke off, walking quickly to the door. “Good-bye.”
“No, wait!”
“Please.”