He quirked an eyebrow at her and his eyes brightened with an interestingly irrelevant tangent to that idea, but Monica was not to be diverted.
“Keep that wicked look out of your eyes,” she said, “and stick to the subject. What did you find out from Junior?”
“Not very much, I’m afraid.”
He told her just what he had learned; holding back nothing but Sammy the Leg’s address. There was nothing much else to withhold.
“I think Junior came clean — as clean as he could,” he concluded. “The King wouldn’t last long if any little jerk like Junior could put the finger on him. The only thing Junior may have weaselled on is how much he really had to do with the Irvine killing. We might burn that out of him, but it wouldn’t stand up in court. So maybe we’ll have to kill him anyway, just to make sure.”
His tone was casually serious enough to make her shiver.
“Then we might get further if I went out and played beggar again,” she said, but the Saint shook his head.
“I hate to criticise your performance, but I think the part is going to have to be played another way. And that’s a way I wouldn’t let you risk.”
It took three days. For Frankie Weiss did not appear at his rendezvous with Junior on Wednesday night, and, after the Saint had waited for an hour, he began to feel a familiar tingling sensation at the roots of his hair. The move had been taken away from him. The best he could hope was that Junior’s disappearance from his usual haunts had been reported without making Frankie suspect anything more than that Junior had skipped town — with some of the take.
But there had to be other agents than Junior, and they would still be operating, and that was what Simon’s plan was based on.