He kissed her, and broke it off quickly when he felt the warmth of her lips.
“Goodnight, darling,” he said.
She got out, and he drove away while he still could.
When he entered his apartment at the Château Marmont there was a note in a plain envelope under the door. He opened it and frowned over the heavy sprawling hand. It seemed to have been composed very much impromptu, for it was written on a sizable blank space under the date line of The Hollywood Reporter — obviously torn out of one of those strange advertisements which say, in infinitely modest type, “Joe Doakes directed WOMEN IN ARMS,” and buy a whole page to set it off.
WHATEVER TIME you get home tonight, I want you to come right out and see me. Don’t tell ANYONE I sent for you. This is VERY IMPORTANT. The door will be open. Don’t ring! BYRON UFFERLITZ (603 Claymore Drive)
The Saint sighed, and put the note in his pocket. A few minutes later he was retracing his tracks out Sunset Boulevard.
Claymore Drive was only a couple of blocks from April Quest’s house, and as he passed her street Simon smiled again over the easy way she had taken his mind from its habitual restless search for plot. She had been right, of course: so much of his life had been woven with conspiracy and dark purposes that he had long since ceased to be as interested in the solution of past mysteries as he was in anticipating mysteries that had not yet shaped themselves, and that inquiring watchfulness had become so automatic that he was apt to find himself stalking the shadow of his own imagination.
Or was he?... A long time had gone by since one of those hunches had last let him down. What had Ufferlitz said? “There are plenty of people who’d hate to see me make a hit with this idea. One or two of ’em would go a long ways to wreck it... I guess you can take care of yourself...” He had almost accepted Ufferlitz’s note as just one of those regal impetuosities that Hollywood producers traditionally indulge in; the thought that it might after all be more than that gave him a sudden feeling of inward stillness as if the blood momentarily ceased to move in his veins.
He shrugged it off as he slowed down at Mr Ufferlitz’s number, and yet enough of it remained to paralyse his right foot from the reflex shift from accelerator to brake. He crawled round the next corner, and in the next few yards found several cars parked outside a house where all the lights were on. He eased in among them, and walked back to 603 Claymore Drive. He grinned derisively at himself for doing it; yet it was one of those Saintly precautions that cost nothing even if they were to prove unnecessary. So was the handkerchief with which he covered his fingers when he opened the front door.
The hall itself was unlighted, but a shaft of illumination spilled from an open doorway to his left.