The Brown Derby on Vine Street — smarter offspring of the once famous hat-shaped edifice on Wilshire Boulevard — was unchanged since he had last been there. Even the customers looked exactly the same — the same identifiable people, even with different names and faces, labeled as plainly as if they had worn badges. The actors and actresses, important and unimportant. The bunch of executives. The writers and directors. The agent with the two sides of a possible deal. The radio clan. The film colony surgeon and the film colony attorney. The humdrum business men and the visiting firemen. The unmistakable tourists, working off this item of their itinerary, trying hard to look like unimpressionable natives but betraying themselves by the greedy wandering of their eyes.
In this clear-cut patchwork of types the Saint acquired a puzzling neutrality. He stood scanning the room with interest, but he was quite positively not a tourist. Yet the tourists and the non-tourists stared at him alike, as if he were someone they should have known and were trying to place. With the casual elegance of his clothes and his dark handsome face he could have been some kind of romantic actor, only that his good looks didn’t seem to have any of the weaknesses of a romantic actor — they had a sinewy recklessness of fundamental structure that belonged more to the character that a romantic actor would try to play than to the character of the impersonator. But he was quite unactorishly unaware of attracting that sort of interest at all, and was satisfied when he caught the eye of a man who was waving frantically at him from a booth half-way down the room, who could only have been Mr Byron Ufferlitz.
For Mr Ufferlitz looked just like his voice. He was rather overweight, and he wore a diamond ring, and he had a cigar in his mouth. The rest of him fitted those features in with the picture that Simon had constructed from Dick Halliday’s comments. He had thick shoulders and thick black hair, and his face had a quality of actual physical toughness that was totally different from the thin-lipped affectation of a tough guy behind a mahogany desk.
“Have a drink,” said Mr Ufferlitz, who had already been passing the time with a highball.
“Cleopatra,” said the Saint.
“What’s that?” asked Ufferlitz, as the waiter repeated it and moved away.
“One of the best dry sherries.”
It was as if Ufferlitz opened a filing cabinet in his mind, punched a card, and put it away. But he did it without the flicker of a muscle in his face, and sat back to make a cold-blooded inventory of the Saint’s features.
“You’re all right,” he announced. “You’re swell. I recognised you as soon as you came in. From your pictures, of course. But I couldn’t tell from them whether they’d just caught you at a good angle.”
“This is a great relief to me,” Simon remarked mildly.