He went to the door, and held it open.
The Saint considered, and after due and deliberate consideration rose and helped Avalon to her feet.
"I'd like to come back," he told Prather at the door.
Prather nodded nervously, watched the Saint and Avalon walk toward the elevator for a few feet, then almost slammed the door. Simon pushed the elevator button, and just before the door opened, planted a swift kiss on her startled but quickly responsive mouth.
"Wait for me in the lobby, darling," he whispered, and handed her inside the car.
He took up a post of observation further down the hall, so that the elevator door was halfway between him and Prather's door. He suspected he would not have long to wait before something happened. What that something might be, he was unable to predict.
He thought of the false trails he had run down before he began to sniff around Cookie's Cellar. He wondered if this would turn out to be another. Each of his previous attempts to locate the object of his search had uncovered one or more nests of illegality.
One had led him to a sort of warehouse, a huge structure where vast numbers of bottles of bona fide liquors were made less intoxicating by the simple addition of faintly colored distilled water. All very healthful, no doubt, and tending to reduce the incidence of drunkenness among habitues of clip clubs like Cookie's — where, incidentally, one of the delivery trucks had led him. This wholesale watering of drinks had another humanitarian aspect: it saved work for the bartenders. Still, when he remembered the quality of Cookie's drinks, the Saint concluded that she and/or her bartenders had initiative along that same line. The Saint felt that there was room for reasonable doubt that the reduction of the alcoholic potency of the drinks stemmed from compassionate motives, cynical though that conclusion might be.
Another trail had dragged across it a herring that had turned out to be the numbers racket. During his brief examination of exponents of mathematical larceny, he had been led again, by one of the collectors, to Cookie's.
He had run down a couple of false leads that led nowhere except to the decision that this was a Mecca for the chiseller, and that some of almost everybody's best friends are petty crooks at bottom.