“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’a t’ought it,” Hoppy said amazedly. “Elliott — de old goat!”
Simon said nothing.