The Saint on the Spanish Main Read Online Free PDF

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