“It means that if the Admiral was paying Esteban for the car-park concession, Esteban could hardly have been using him as part of a blackmail racket. Otherwise the pay-off would have gone the other way. And certainly it would if the Admiral had been doing Esteban’s dirty work when he killed Lida Verity.”
“The Admiral!” Patricia exclaimed.
Simon nodded.
“Of course. Our corny nautical character. He never missed anything that went on here — including Mrs Verity’s rather foolish affair with a superior gigolo and shill named Maurice Kerr. Only she didn’t sit still for blackmail. I guess she told the Admiral she was going to have me take care of him, and she may even have tried to scare him with the gun she’d borrowed. He got mad or lost his head and grabbed the gun and shot her.” The Saint dipped in his pocket again. “Here are the white gloves he always wore. You’ll notice that there’s a tear in one of them. I’m betting that the thread you found in that trigger guard can be proved to have pulled out of that glove.”
Haskins turned the gloves over in his bony hands, and brought his eyes slowly back to the Saint.
“Reckon you done another good job, Saint,” he conceded peacefully. “We’ll soon know... An’ this heah Esteban, he ought to stake you with blue chips all night for lettin’ him out.”
“Letting me out!” Esteban echoed indignantly. The enormity of the injustice done to him grew visibly in his mind, finding voice in a crescendo of righteous resentment. “I tell the world I am let out! That Admiral, he makes agreement with me to pay me half of everything he makes from the concession. And he never tells me — the peeg! — he never tells me anything about this blackmail at all!”
Jeannine
Introduction
Before you have ploughed very far into this episode, it is bound to become manifest even to the most obtuse of you that you are reading a sort of sequel to the one before. So I am going to take the edge off it and admit it before you start. But this was not anything I planned. There was a lapse of many years between the writing of the stories. The fact that the same girl turned out to be involved was almost a surprise even to me. But the story called for a character that the Saint had matched wits with before, and while I suppose it wouldn’t have been too difficult to invent one, it seemed a lot simpler to dig one out of the Saint’s recorded past, where the previous encounter was fully documented. This is one of the sordid advantages of writing such an unconscionable number of stories. You don’t have to keep on creating new characters indefinitely. The time comes when you only have to reach back into the half-forgotten past, pick up some personality that once flashed across your screen, and figure what might have happened to him or her (and how tediously grammatical I must be getting) since the earlier encounter. If any aspirant authors among you want to exploit this simplified system of story-concocting, I bequeath it to you gladly with my blessing. All you have to do is to put in fifteen or more creative years, and from then on everything is on the house. — Leslie Charteris