The Saint on the Spanish Main (5 page)

Gloria Uckrose came in, wearing a green silk
dressing
gown and
apparently nothing else.

4

“I thought,” she said, “I’d
see whether you were kid
ding, about joining you for a drink.”

“Throw on a dress,” said the Saint
agreeably, “and
I’ll be waiting for you in the bar.”

“I’d be more comfortable here.”

“Then I’d have to go get
something.”

“I don’t really need anything. I’ll
settle for just join
ing.” She had come all the way into the
room, walking
confidently across towards the window. Now she stood
with a
cigarette in a short holder in her mouth, her vel
vet eyes resting on
him a little mockingly through the
trickle of smoke. “Why don’t you
shut the door?”

Simon leaned on the handle, fanning the door
a little
wider if anything.

“Your husband mightn’t understand,”
he explained
ingenuously. “He might follow you here, and come
bursting
in, brandishing a revolver. He might even be
acquitted if he shot me.”

She laughed shortly.

“My husband would be too scared of the
bang to pull
the trigger. Anyway, he’s snoring his head off. He had
three double Daiquiris before lunch, and I know exactly
what they
do to him. A hurricane wouldn’t wake him up
before cocktail
time.”

“Which room do you have?”

“The third door along to your left.
Why?”

“Would you think me unduly nervous if I
went and
listened to this snore myself?”

“Not at all. Go ahead.”

“In that case I don’t need to,”
said the Saint cryptically. He started to shut the door, stopped again, and
said:
“What
about Brother Innutio? Suppose he notices something that he thinks Clinton
should hear about?”

“He took dramamine on the boat. He could hardly keep his eyes
open through lunch.”

Simon closed the door.

“It’s nice to meet someone as wide awake
as you,” he
murmured. “You probably even know already exactly
what you’d
say if Clinton happened to catch you coming
back into the room in
that costume.”

“This?” The careless gesture she
made bared a few
more inches of brown thigh in the opening of her robe.
“Of
course. I wanted some ice water, and nobody an
swered the bell, so I went looking for someone.”

“It’s a bore having to think of all
these things, isn’t
it?” he said disarmingly.

“You sound rather like a man who’s had
the badger
game tried on him.”

“I have,” Simon admitted. “It’s
never worked,
though.”

“Don’t even pretend to apologize. I
expected you to
careful—I’d have been disappointed if you weren’t. We
don’t have to play games,
Saint. I know who you are.”

He dipped into a pack of cigarettes on the bedside
table and placed one in his mouth. It was like
driving an
unfamiliar road full of
potholes and blind curves, improvising a serpentine course from instant to
instant be
tween the minor pitfalls,
while never knowing what ma
jor trap
might yawn around the next bend. But his hand
was light and flexible on the steering, his blue eyes relax
ed and receptive for all their vigilance.

“I had a feeling you connected with the name,” he said.
“Even if your gentleman companions didn’t.”

“Those idiots!” she said
contemptuously. “They were
so busy with their own yapping, they wouldn’t have
heard your name if it had been J Edgar
Hoover.”

“Brother Innutio at least acted as if
he should have
recognized that one. Hoover, I mean.”

“I think Vince has just seen too many
gangster mov
ies.”

“Are you trying to tell me that that’s
been his only
contact?”

She shrugged.

“How should I know? He was recommended by a New York
detective agency. Anyway, Clinton en
courages
the act. It makes him feel big, or something.”

Perfectly normal, just a common idiosyncrasy.

“And what’s Clinton’s excuse for needing a body
guard at all?” Simon inquired
conversationally.

She stared at him blankly.

“You mean you don’t know?”

“I haven’t the remotest idea.”

Although he could lie brilliantly when the
occasion called for it, the truth could be told with a pellucid sim
plicity
that it would have been almost impossible to give
to a falsehood. The
incredulous widening of her eyes
were merely automatic: his honesty was so
obvious that
it would have convinced anyone. But for the moment the
fact as he stated it left her speechless.

“So that’s how it is,” she said at
last. “I’ve got to face
it now.”

“Face what?” he asked politely.

She sat down on the arm of the chair nearest
to her,
careless of how the robe fell off her legs.

“What I’ve been dreading for a long
time,” she said.
“He’s losing his mind. I thought he was
a little touched
when he hired Vincent. But he swore that people were
following him and spying on him. He talked about being
kidnaped or murdered
for something he’d known about
before he retired. And when you arrived
here, and it
finally dawned on him who you were, he was sure that
you were
working for these people and you’d only come
here to get him.”

“His captain could have told him that we
met entirely
by
accident, and all I ever knew about your husband
until I got here was what Patsy told me.”

“I know. Captain O’Kevin told him that.
But he
wouldn’t believe it. He’s certain that you knew Captain O’Kevin would
be at the Rod and Reel Club, and you
planned to meet him there to make it
easier for you to
get
close to us when you got here.”

Simon lowered himself on to the bed and
leaned back
against the headboard, hitching one leg up to rest an
arm on his knee.

“And who are the sinister mob that’s
supposed to be
behind
that elaborate piece of delirium?”

“I don’t know. He’s never discussed any
of his business with me. And when I tried to ask him about this
thing in particular, he told me
it was better for me not
to know. But he
almost had me believing in it until a
minute ago.”

“Was I the only real test? You’d never
seen any other
suspicious characters lurking around, with your own
eyes?
Nobody ever had tried to actually do anything to
him?”

“Not that I ever saw.”

The Saint slowly and carefully created a
perfectly formed smoke ring.

“Then it certainly does look as if your
husband is at least mildly squirrelly,” he said. “If it’s any comfort
to
you, I can give you my word that I had no designs on
him whatsoever when I met
Patsy.”

“It doesn’t matter now.” She
stirred with a sudden
restlessness. “I was going to have to
get away from him
anyhow. You can’t go on looking at a man twenty times a
day and wondering how blind you can have been to marry him. I already told him
I’m taking the plane back
to Nassau tomorrow. The only difference now
is that this’ll probably be for keeps. Maybe it’s not very noble
of me, but
I don’t want to be around when his delusions get worse. How do I know when he
might start suspect
ing
me?”

“I can see how that might make you
uncomfortable,”
said the Saint, with an absolutely straight face.

“I’m even more glad I came to see
you.”

“Pardon my curiosity,” he said,
“but if Clinton had
you half believing in his hallucinations,
especially after I
showed up—why
did
you come to see me?”

“You invited me, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“And right there on the dock, you knew
I wanted to
accept.”

“But suppose I’d told you, yes, I
really did have some
thing unpleasant in mind for your husband?
What did
you
figure on doing then?”

“I was going to offer to help you.”

In his position, Simon was cushioned against
falling
down; but he lounged a little more limply, and he was glad that he had
no need to pretend that he was completely unsurprised.

“That was certainly very friendly,”
he remarked, with
prodigious moderation.

She stood up, and again her dark eyes had the
same
veiled amusement that they had held when she first came
in.

“I’m sure it isn’t the first time that a
woman’s wanted
to team up with you.”

“Well, no,” he said.

She picked the remaining third of her
cigarette out of
the holder and held it up for a moment.

“You see? No lipstick. No incriminating
evidence.” She stubbed the butt out in an ashtray and dropped the
holder
into the pocket of her robe. “I could be useful.
I’m very competent. I
think of things.”

“I’d noticed that.”

She came closer to the bed, near enough for
him to
have touched her if he moved a little.

“I suppose I should be coy,” she
said. “But my time’s
so short. I’m sure you know what kind of
husband I’ve
had
all these years. I need a man. Don’t you want to
make love to me?”

It had been coming to that ever since she
knocked on his door, and he had always known it, but it had seldom
been said
to him so forthrightly. He met her unwavering
gaze with a tinge of
utterly immoral admiration, before his eyes were involuntarily drawn down to
the valley
where
the green robe had fallen open to her waist.

“Yes, they’re real,” she said.

She made an almost imperceptible supple
movement,
and the robe slipped off her shoulders and down to her
elbows.
Her breasts were like alabaster where they had
been covered when
she sunbathed, and the startling pink-tipped whiteness of them against the rest
of her
bronzed skin made them look more shamelessly naked
than any
breasts he had ever seen. And perhaps this was
also because they
would rank among the most beautiful.

He would always remember it as one of the
most
fabulous feats of self-control in his life that kept him
looking at her without moving.

“Don’t you at least think you should
lock the door?” he asked steadily.

“Yes. No. Oh, I’m a fool!” She
twitched the robe over
her shoulders again, wrapping it tightly
around her.
“But
you’re so right. And you do things so gracefully.

Of course it’s impossible here. We’ve got to
get away
first, where we won’t have to feel tense. Will you come
to
Nassau?”

“With you, tomorrow?”

“No, that’d be too obvious, wouldn’t it?
Clinton
would be sure to make a scene, and either he wouldn’t
let me go
or he’d suddenly decide to come too.” She ran
a hand through her burnished hair.
“And you mustn’t
stay here after I’ve
gone. You’d have real trouble with
Vince—you
would have already, only I talked them out of it. Oh, I know you can take care
of yourself, but there are so many ways to stab a man in the back, and I won’t
risk that when I’ve only just found you, before
we’ve
even … Wait, I’ve got it!
There must be a charter plane
service
in Miami.”

“There’s one on the MacArthur Causeway
that flies
small planes over here.”

“You could phone over and get one here
in an hour.”

“Probably. And I announce that I’m going
back to
Miami, but
after I’ve taken off I hand the pilot some
more
green stuff and tell him I’ve changed my mind and
I want to be flown to Nassau.”

“And I’ll be there with you tomorrow.
Please, Simon, will you?”