"It's a pity you can't take some dough with you and buy a share in this garage business," he said; and knew before he started to elaborate the suggestion into an offer that it would be refused.
Later on in the evening he had an even better idea, and he talked for half an hour before he was able to induce Marty to accept it. What argument it was that finally turned the scale he would have found it hard to remember. But once the Saint was on the trail of an inspiration he had a gift of persuasiveness that would have sold a line of rubber boots to a colony of boa constrictors.
Lucky Joe Luckner, recuperating from the ordeal of his trial in his hotel suite at Briarcliff, was still satisfied with his consistent good luck in spite of the two quiet and inconspicuous men who sat around in the hotel lobby all day and followed him at a discreet distance whenever he went out. He had no intention of jumping his bail. The drastic entry of the Department of Justice into the war with crime had made the role of a fugitive from justice even less attractive than it had been before. Luckner had never been a fugitive — he couldn't imagine himself in the part. Quite confidently, he was waiting for an acquittal in his next trial which would leave him a free man without a single legal stain on his character; and if his attorney did not quite share this sublime confidence, he had to admit that the result of the first trial lent some support to it.
"Betcha they can't box me in twenty years," he declared boastfully, to his personal bodyguard.
The saturnine Mr. Toscelli agreed encouragingly, which was one of his lighter duties, and Lucky Joe rewarded him with a slap on the back and a cigar. Few men are offended by hearing their boasts enthusiastically echoed, and Luckner was known to be rather more than ordinarily vulnerable.
He was a short, thickset man who looked rather more like a truck driver than a beer baron, with small close-set eyes and a big coarse laugh. His extravagances were of a type that ran to loud check suits, yellow spats, strangely hued hats and large diamonds; and he imagined that these outward evidences of good taste and prosperity were part of the secret of his hypnotic power over women. This hypnotic power was one of his more whimsical fantasies, but his associates had found it healthier to accept it with tactful solemnity. He boasted that he had never failed to conquer any woman whom he had desired to possess, and he had a convenient faculty for forgetting the many exceptions which tended to disprove the rule. But apart from this one playful weakness he was as sentimental as a scorpion; and the Saint estimated the probabilities with some care before he approached Lucky Joe in person.
If he had been cautious he would never have gone at all, but Simon Templar was a confirmed believer in direct action, and he knew exactly the strength of his hand.
He drove out to Briarcliff on a pleasant sunny day and sauntered up the steps under the critical eyes of a dozen disapproving residents who were sunning themselves on the terrace. The Saint could see no good reason why they should be disapproving, for he felt very contented with himself that morning and considered that he was more than ordinarily beautiful and definitely an ornament to the scenery; but he realized that the knowledge that Lucky Joe Luckner was a fellow guest must have cast a certain amount of cloud over the tranquillity of the other inmates of that highly respectable hostelry, and made his own excuses for their lack of visible appreciation. Perhaps they had some good reason to fear that a man with that loose and rather buccaneering stride and that rather reckless cut of face was only another manifestation of the underworld invasion which had disturbed the peace of their rural retreat, and in a way they were right; but the Saint didn't care. With his hands in his pockets and his spotless white Panama tilted jauntily over one eye, he wandered on into the lounge and identified two blue-chinned individuals, who lifted flat fishlike eyes from their newspapers at his advent, as being more deserving of the reception committee's disapproving stares than himself. There were also two large men with heavy shoulders and big feet sitting in another corner of the lounge, who inspected him with a similar air of inquiry; but neither party knew him, and he went up the stairs unquestioned.
The door of Luckner's suite opened at his knock to exhibit another blue chin and flat fishlike stare similar to those which had greeted him downstairs. It stayed open just far enough for that, and the stare absorbed him with the expressionlessness of a dead cod.
"Hullo, body," murmured the Saint easily. "When did they dig you up?"