“I work regular hours, Miss Roger, and I don’t want to be kept up all night. I may as well tell you that I talked to Lady Offchurch before you met her this evening. I arranged for her to give one of my men a signal if you had been suspiciously anxious to handle the necklace at any time while you were together. She gave that signal when she said good night to you. That gives me grounds to believe that while you were handling the necklace you exchanged it for a substitute. I think the original is in this apartment now, and if it is, we’ll find it. Now if one of you hands it over and saves me a lot of trouble, I mightn’t feel quite so tough as if I had to work for it.”
“Meaning,” said the Saint, “that we mightn’t have to spend quite so much of our youth on the rock pile?”
“Maybe.”
The Saint took his time over lighting a cigarette.
“All my life,” he said, “I’ve been allergic to hard labor. And it’s especially bad” — he glanced at the girl — “for what the radio calls those soft, white, romantic hands. In fact, I can’t think of any pearls that would be worth it — particularly when you don’t even get to keep the pearls... So — I’m afraid there ain’t going to be no poils.”
“You’re nuts!” Wendel exploded. “Don’t you know when you’re licked?”
“Not till you show me,” said the Saint peaceably. “Let’s examine the facts. Miss Roger handled the necklace. Tomorrow a jeweler may say that the string that Lady Offchurch still has is a phony. Well, Lady Offchurch can’t possibly swear that nobody else ever touched that rope of oyster fruit. Well, the substitution might have been made anywhere, anytime, by anyone — even by a chiseling maharajah. What’s the only proof you could use against Jeannine? Nothing short of finding a string of genuine pink pearls in her possession. And that’s something you can never do.”
“No?” Wendel barked. “Well, if I have to put this whole building through a sieve, and the two of you with it—”
“You’ll never find a pearl,” Simon stated.
He made the statement with such relaxed confidence that a clammy hand began to caress the detective’s spine, neutralizing logic with its weird massage, and poking skeletal fingers into hypersensitive nerves.