"Thanks. I can still push my own buttons," said the Saint brusquely, and headed away in the direction indicated, leaving the assistant manager with only one more truncated sentence in his script.
He had very little time to spare, if any. It could be only a matter of seconds before the accredited constabulary would arrive on the scene, and he wanted to verify what he could before they were in his hair.
He went up and found 812, where the house detective could be seen through the open door, surveying the scene with his hands in his pockets and a dead piece of chewing cigar in the corner of his mouth.
Simon shouldered in with exactly the same authoritative technique and motion of a hand towards the flap of his buttonhole.
"What's the bad news?" he demanded breezily.
The house detective kept his hands in his pockets and made a speech with his shoulders and the protruding cud of his cigar that said as eloquently as anything: "You got eyes, ain'tcha?"
Simon fished out a pack of cigarettes and let his own eyes do the work.
It didn't take more than one wandering glance to rub in the certainty that he was still running behind schedule. Although not exactly a shambles, the room showed all the signs of a sound working over. The bed was torn apart, and the mattress had been slit open in several places, as had the upholstery of the single armchair. The closet door stood wide, and the few garments inside had been ripped to pieces and tossed on the floor. Every drawer of the dresser had been pulled out, and its contents dumped and pawed aver on the carpet. The spectacle was reminiscent of the Saint's own room at the Alamo House — with trimmings. He wouldn't have wasted a second on any «searching of his own. The search had already been made, by experts.
So someone already had Vaschetti's diary; or else no one was likely to come across it there.
The Saint scraped a match with his thumbnail and let the picture shroud itself in a blue haze.