“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 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 tantalising 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 matinée, and verified it from the newspaper. He walked to the Martin Beck Theatre and went in the stage door.