Saint Goes West (5 page)

“Aren’t you going to save it for the police?” asked Lissa.

“Not till I’ve finished with it,” said the Saint. “I can make all the tests they’d use, and maybe I know one or two that they haven’t heard of yet. I’ll show you now, if you like.”

Angelo made his impassive appearance with two glasses of orange juice for Lissa and Esther, and a third effervescent glass for Freddie. He stood stoically by while Freddie drained it with a shudder.

“Anything else, Mr. Pellman?”

“Yes,” Freddie said firmly. “Bring me a brandy and ginger ale. And some waffles.”

“Yes, sir,” said the Filipino; and paused, in the most natural and expressionless way, to gather up three or four plates, a couple of empty glasses, and, rather apologetiнcally, as if he had no idea how it could have arrived there, the kitchen knife that lay in front of the Saint with everyone staring at it.

5

AND THAT, Simon reflected, was as smooth and timely a bit of business as he had ever seen. He sat loose-limbed on his horse and went on enjoying it even when the impact was more than two hours old.

It had a superb simplicity of perfection which appealed to his sardonic sense of humor. It was magnificent because it was so completely incalculable. You couldn’t argue with it or estimate it. There was absolutely no percentage in claimнing, as Freddie Pellman had done, in a loud voice and at great length, that Angelo had done it on purpose. There wasn’t a thing that could be proved one way or the other. Nobody had told Angelo anything. Nobody had asked Angelo to leave the knife alone, or spoken to him, about fingerprints. So he had simply seen it on the table, and figured that it had arrived there through some crude mistake, and he had discreetly picked it up to take it away. The fact that by the time it had been rescued from him, with all the attendant panic and excitement, any fingerprints that might have been on the handle would have been completely obscured or withнout significance, was purely a sad coincidence. And that was the literal and ineluctable truth. Angelo could have been as guilty as hell or as innocent as a newborn babe: the posнsibilities were exactly that, and if Sherlock Holmes had been resurrected- to take part in the argument his guess would have been worth no more than anyone else’s.

So the Saint hooked one knee over the saddle horn and adнmired the pluperfect uselessness of the whole thing, while he lighted a cigarette and let his horse pick its own serpentine trail up the rocky slope towards Andreas Canyon.

The ride had been Freddie’s idea. After two more brandies and ginger ale, an aspirin, and a waffle, Freddie Pellman had proclaimed that he wasn’t going to be scared into a cellar by any goddam gangster’s friends. He had hired the best godнdam bodyguard in the world, and so he ought to be able to do just what he wanted. And he wanted to ride. So they were going to ride.

“Not me,” Lissa had said. “I’d rather have a gangster than a horse, any day. I’d rather lie out by the pool and read.”

“All right,” Freddie said sourly. “You lie by the pool and read. That makes four of us, and that’s just right. We’ll take lunch and make a day of it. You can stay home and read.”

So there were four of them riding up towards the cleft where the gray-green tops of tall palm trees painted the desert sign of water. Simon was in the lead, because he had known the trail years before and it came back to him as if he had only ridden it yesterday. Freddie was close behind him. Suddenly they broke over the top of the ridge, and easing out on to the dirt road that had been constructed since the Saint was last there to make the canyon more accessible to pioneers in gasoline-powered armchairs. But bordering the creek beyond the road stood the same tall palms, skirted with the dry drooped fronds of many years, but with their heads still rising proudly green and the same stream racing and gurgling around their roots. To the Saint they were still ageless beauty, unchanged, a visual awakening that flashed him back with none of the clumsy encumbrances of time machines to other more leisured days and other people who had ridden the same trail with him; and he reined his horse and thought about them, and in particular about one straight slim girl whom he had taken there for one stolen hour, and they had never said a word that was not casual and unimportant, and they had never met again, and yet they had given all their minds into each other’s hands, and he was utterly sure that if she ever came there again she would remember exactly as he was remembering … So that it was like the shock of a cold plunge when Freddie Pellman spurred up beside him on the road and said noisily: “Well, how’s the mystery coming along?”

The Saint sighed inaudibly and tightened up, and said: “What mystery?”

“Oh, go on,” Freddie insisted boisterously. “You know what I’m talking about. The mystery.”

“So I gathered,” said the Saint. “But I’m not so psychic after a night like last night. And if you want to know, I’m just where I was last night. I just wish you were more careнful about hiring servants.”

“They had good references.”

“So had everybody else who ever took that way in. But what else do you know about them?”

“What else do I know about them?” Freddie echoed, for the sake of greater clarity. “Nothing much. Except that Angelo is the best houseboy and valet I ever had. The other Filipino-Al, he calls himself-is a pal of his. Angelo brought him.”

“You didn’t ask if they’d ever worked for Smoke Johnny?”

“No.” Freddie was surprised. “Why should I?”

“He could have been nice to them,” said the Saint. “And Filipinos can be fanatically loyal. Still, that threatening letter seems a little bit literate for Angelo, I don’t know. Another way of looking at it is that Johnny’s friends could have hired them for the job … And then, did you know that your chef was an Italian?”

“I never thought about It. He’s an Italian, is he? Louis? That’s interesting.” Freddie looked anything but interested. “But what’s that got to do with it?”

“So was Implicato,” said the Saint. “He might have had some Italian friends. Some Italians do.”

“Oh,” said Freddie.

They turned over the bridge across the stream, and there was a flurry of hoofs behind them as Ginny caught up at a galнlop. She rode well, and she knew it, and she wanted everyнone else to know. She reined her pony up to a rearing sliding stop, and patted its damp neck.

“What are you two being so exclusive about?” she deнmanded.

“Just talking,” said the Saint. “How are you doing?”

“Fine.” She was fretting her pony with hands and heels, making it step nervously, showing off. “Esther isn’t so happy, though. Her horse is a bit frisky for her.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Esther said, coming up. “I’m doнing all right. I’m awful hot, though.”

“Fancy that,” said Ginny.

“Never mind,” said the Saint tactfully. “We’ll call a halt soon and have lunch.”

They were walking down towards a grove of great palms that rose like columns in the nave of a natural cathedral, their rich tufted heads arching over to meet above a cloister of deep whispering shade. They were the same palms that Simon had paused under once before, years ago; only now there were picnic tables at their feet, and at some of them a few hardy families who had driven out there in their automoнbiles were already grouped in strident fecundity, enjoying the unspoiled beauties of Nature from the midst of an enthusiнastic litter of baskets, boxes, tin cans, and paper bags.

“Is this where you meant we could have lunch?” Freddie asked rather limply.

“No. I thought we’d ride on over to Murray Canyon-if they haven’t built a road in there since I saw it last, there’s a place there that I think we still might have to ourselves.”

He led them down through the trees, and out on a narrow trail that clung for a while to the edge of a steep shoulder of hill. Then they were out on an open rise at the edge of the desert, and the Saint set his horse to an easy canter, threading his way unerringly along a trail that was nothing but a faint crinkling in the hard earth where other horses had folнlowed it before.

It seemed strange to be out riding like that, so casually and inconsequentially, when only a few hours before there had been very tangible evidence that a threat of death to one of them had not been made idly. Yet perhaps they were safer out there than they would have been anywhere else. The Saint’s eyes had never stopped wandering over the changing panoramas, behind as well as ahead; and although he knew how deceptive the apparently open desert could be, and how even a man on horseback, standing well above the tallest clump of scrub, could vanish altogether in a hundred yards, he was sure that no prospective sniper had come within sharp-shooting range of them. Yet…

He stopped his horse abruptly, after a time, as the broad flat that they had been riding over ended suddenly at the brink of a sharp cliff. At the foot of the bluff, another long column of tall silent palms bordered a rustling stream. He lighted a cigarette, and wondered cynically how many of the spoiled playboys and playgirls who used Palm Springs for their wilder weekends, and saw nothing but the smooth hotels and the Racquet Club, ever realised that the name was not just a name, and that there really were Palm Springs, sparнkling and crystal clear, racing down out of the overshadowing mountains to make hidden nests of beauty before they washed out into the extinction of the barren plain…

Freddie Pellman reined in beside him, looked the landscape over, and said, tolerantly, as if it were a production that had been offered for his approval: “This is pretty good. Is this where we eat?”

“If everybody can take it,” said the Saint, “there’s a pool further up that I’d like to look at again.”

“I can take it,” said Freddie, comprehensively settling the matter.

Simon put his horse down the steep zigzag, and stopped at the bottom to let it drink from the stream. Freddie drew up beside him again-he rode well enough, having probably been raised to it in the normal course of a millionaire’s son’s upнbringing-and said, still laboring with the same subject: “Do you really think one of the girls could be in on it?”

“Of course,” said the Saint calmly. “Gangsters have girl friends. Girl friends do things like that.”

“But I’ve known all of them for some time at least.”

“That may be part of the act. A smart girl wouldn’t want to make it too obvious-meet you one day, and bump you off the next. Besides, she may have a nice streak of ham in her. Most women have. Maybe she thinks it would be cute to keep you in suspense for a while. Maybe she wants to make an anniversary of it, and pay off for Johnny this Christmas.”

Freddie swallowed.

“That’s going to make some things-a bit difficult.”

“That’s your problem,” Simon said cheerfully.

Freddie sat his saddle unhappily and watched Ginny and Esther coming down the grade. Ginny came down it in a spectacular avalanche, like a mountain cavalry display, and swept off her Stetson to ruffle her hair back with a bored air while her pony dipped its nose thirstily in the water a few yards downstream. Esther, steering her horse down quietly, joined her a little later.

“But this is Wunnderful!” Ginny called out, looking at the Saint. “How do you find all these marvelous places?” Without waiting for an answer, she turned to Esther and said in a solicitous undertone which was perfectly pitched to carry just far enough: “How are you feeling, darling? I hope you aren’t getting too miserable.”

Simon was naturally glancing towards them; He wasn’t looking for anything in particular, and as far as he was concerned Esther was only one of the gang, but in those transient circumstances, he felt sorry for her. So for that one moment he had the privilege of seeing one woman open her soul in utter stark sincerity to another woman. And what one woman said to another, clearly, carefully, deliberately, quietly, with serious premeditation and the intensest earnestнness, was “You bitch.”

“Let’s keep a-goin’,” said the Saint hastily, in a flippant drawl, and lifted his reins to set his horse at the shallow bank on the other side of the stream.

He led them west towards the mountains with a quicker sureness now, as the sense of the trail came back to him. In a little while it was a track that only an Indian could have seen at all, but it seemed as if he could have found it at the dead of night. There was even a place where weeds and spindly clawed scrub had grown so tall and dense since he had last been there that anyone else would have sworn that there was no trail at all; but he set his horse boldly at the living wall and smashed easily through into a channel that could hardly have been trodden since he last opened it… so that presently they found the creek again at a sharp bend, and he led them over two deep fords through swift-running water, and they came out at last in a wide hollow ringed with palms where hundreds of spring floods had built a broad open sandbank gouged out a deep sheltered pool beside it.

“This is lunch,” said the Saint, and swung out of the saddle to moor his bridle to a fallen palm log where his horse could rest in the shade.

They spread out the contents of their saddlebags on the sandbank and ate cold chicken, celery, radishes, and hard-boiled eggs. There had been some difficulty when they set out over convincing Freddie Pellman that it would have been imнpractical as well as strictly illegal to take bottles of chamнpagne on to the reservation, but the water in the brook was sweet and ice-cold.

Esther drank it from her cupped hands, and sat back on her heels and gazed meditatively at the pool.

“It’s awful hot,” she said, suggestively.

“Go on,” Ginny said to Simon. “Dare her to take her clothes off and get in. That’s what she’s waiting for.”

“I’ll go in if you will,” Esther said sullenly.

“Nuts,” said Ginny. “I can have a good time without that.”

She was leaning against the Saint’s shoulder for a backrest, and she gave a little snuggling wriggle as she spoke which made her meaning completely clear.

Freddie Pellman locked his arms around his knees and scowled. It had been rather obvious for some time that all the current competition was being aimed at the Saint, even though Simon had done nothing to try and encourage it; and Freddie was not feeling so generous about it as he had when he first invited the girls to take Simon into the family.