“A dialogue writer,” she said.
“Where are you going to be later?”
“Where are you going to be?”
“I don’t know right now. Can I call you?”
“I’ll be at home. Probably washing my last pair of silk stockings. The number’s in the book.”
“I don’t read very well,” said the Saint, “but I’ll try and get someone to look it up for me.”
He walked around to the parking lot and retrieved his car, and drove north towards the hills that look down across the subdivided prairie between Sunset Boulevard and the sea. Lazaroff and Kendricks lived up there, not Orlando Flane, and yet suddenly the pursuit of Orlando Flane was not so important. Flane could be found later, if he wanted to be found at all — if he didn’t, he wouldn’t be sitting at home. But other patterns were taking a shape from which Flane was curiously lacking. It was like stalking a circus horse in the belief that it was real, and finding it capable of separating into two identities with cloths over them...
The house was perched on a sharp buttress of rock high above the Strip — that strange No Man’s Land of county in the middle of a city whose limits traditionally extend to the Jersey side of the Holland Tunnel. There were cars in the open garage, Simon noticed as he parked, and he rang the bell with the peaceful confidence that the wheels were meshing at last and nothing could stop them.
Kendricks himself flung the door open, looking more than ever like one of the earnest ambassadors of the House of Fuller, as if their positions ought to have been reversed and he should have been on the outside trying to get in. The sight of the Saint only took him aback for a moment, and then his face broke into a hospitable grin.
“Surprise, surprise,” he said. “Superman has a nose like a bloodhound, on top of everything else. We were just starting to celebrate. Come in and help us.”