Simon Templar entered with the air of thinly disguised nervous expectancy proper to his part, and Sholto wasted no time crushing him.
“I thought your proposition over, bub, and it’s no sale.”
“You mean you don’t want to know what Mr Rood said?”
“I know what he said. You ain’t dumb enough to think you could get away with a record of him turning this guy Simons down, so I guess he says okay. I don’t pay ten grand to hear that.”
“But you’d like to find Mrs Yarrow, wouldn’t you?”
“I’ll find her if I want to, and cheaper than you can do it.”
“But after all, Dibs,” whined the Saint aggrievedly, “if I hadn’t—”
“Yeah, I know,” Sholto said. “I do owe you something for the tip-off. And nobody ever said I welshed on nothing reasonable. I don’t have no obligation, but I’ll pay you what I think the tape I hear is worth.”
He dug into his pocket and pulled out a thick wad of green paper bound with a gold clip. He detached two bills from the top and held them out, and the Saint looked down and saw that the denominations were a thousand dollars each.
“Take it,” Sholto rasped, “before I change my mind.”
Simon swallowed and took it.
Then he turned to the second lieutenant, who had followed him back in, and produced a sheet from a score pad.
“And you owe me eighty-five dollars and ten cents, Earl,” he said.
“Pay him,” Sholto said. “And throw him out.”
He stood at the window and watched the Saint’s car going down the drive, and then turned briskly as the second lieutenant returned.
“Call the airport, Earl,” he ordered. “Get us on the next plane to New York. We’ll all go.”
“What about the dame in California?” asked the first lieutenant.
“We’ll have plenty of time for her. She’s bound to be in the hospital for some time yet. But Rood won’t wait. I could pass the word to the big boys, but I think we’ll take care of him ourselves.” Sholto took out the spool of tape and weighed it meditatively in his hand again. “I wouldn’t be surprised to see ’em coming to us with their hats in their hands when they hear what I’ve done for ’em.”
With no inkling of the role that had been chosen for him in Dibs Sholto’s pursuit of his ambitions, Mr Carlton Rood returned to his apartment in the East Sixties that night after an excellent dinner, feeling very comfortably contented with the perspective of his life. His literary endeavor had been completed and safely deposited, and that very afternoon he had dropped the first strategically aimed word about it, in a quarter from which he knew the grapevine would rapidly circulate it to all interested ears. He felt a mild glow of gratitude to Mr Simons for the suggestion, and benevolently hoped that something good would come of the business they had discussed.
As he reached the doorway, two men got out of a car parked nearby and came quickly towards him. Mr Rood saw them out of the corner of his eye, and suddenly realized that what he had glimpsed of one of them was familiar. He turned, and recognized a valued client.
“Why, Joseph!” he exclaimed. “This is a surprise—”
“I bet it is, you lousy squealer,” Sholto said, and personally fired the first shot of a fusillade.
“You see,” said the Saint tranquilly, “the law of the land says that if there’s any reasonable doubt about a man’s guilt, he must be acquitted. The law of the underworld is just the opposite. Or, the other side of the fence, if there’s any serious doubt about a man’s reliability, they make sure he can’t possibly worry them any more. I thought that since Carlton Rood had worked so hard to protect the tribe that lives by that philosophy, he might like to have it tried on himself.”
“I’m sure he loved it,” said his friend the ophthalmologist. “But what about this sequel?”
He indicated the newspaper they had been looking at, which reported the finding of a body identified as that of Joseph (“Dibs”) Sholto, fatally laden with lead, in a garbage dump somewhere in Jersey.
“When the notes that Rood left reached the Department of Justice and various district attorneys, and the heat started, sizzling all over, the big boys naturally blamed Sholto for starting the whole thing. And out of his own bailiwick, too. So they had to teach him a permanent lesson. The ordinary dull due process of Law might have taken care of him anyway, with the help of Rood’s contribution, but they saved it the trouble. I can’t say I was so sure of that, but I was hoping for it. Let’s call it a bonus.”
“I’d be sorry for Machiavelli,” said the doctor, “if the poor naive man had ever come up against you.”
Simon Templar grinned gently, and his friend glanced at his watch and stood up.
“If you can come to the nursing home now,” he said, “Mrs Yarrow was most anxious that if we have succeeded, the first person she sees would be you...”