The Saint in Miami by Leslie Charteris Page B

asleep.
    3
    He was breakfasting heartily on fried chicken and waffles served under the shade of a gaudily striped umbrella when Peter Quentin and Patricia joined him on the patio.
    “You must have been tired.” Patricia slipped her bath robe back from her brown shoulders, and draped slender tanned legs and sandalled feet along the length of a cane chair. “Peter and I have been swimming for two hours. We thought you were going to sleep all day.
    “If we hadn’t heard you snoring,” said Peter, “we could have hoped you were dead.”
    The Saint’s white teeth denuded a chicken bone.
    “Early rising is the burden of the proletariat and the affectation of millionaires,” he said. “Being neither, I try to achieve a very happy mean.” Holding the bone in one hand, he used it as a pointer to indicate the retreating form of a billowy Negress who was waddling away into the background with a tray. “Where did the Black Narcissus come from? She wasn’t here yesterday. She says her name’s Desdemona, and I find it hard to believe.”
    “Don’t talk with your mouth full,” Patricia told him. “She showed up this morning with a coloured chauffeur named Even. It was their day off yesterday.”
    “That’s interesting.” Simon stirred his coffee. “And the Fillipino houseboy was downtown on some errand. So nobody actually saw how Gilbeck and Justine left.”
    “They phoned,” she said; and he nodded.
    “I’ve helped people to make phone calls myself, in my day.”
    Peter Quentin hoisted his powerful trunk-clad form on to a sunwarmed coping, and swung his sandy feet.
    “If the Gilbecks don’t show up today, skipper, so we just stick around?”
    Simon leaned back and glanced around contentedly at the semi-tropical scene. The house sprawled out around him, cool and spacious under the roof of Cuban tile. A riot of poinsettias, hibiscus, and azaleas bordered the inner wall of the estate and overflowed into the patio. On the other side of the house, a palm-lined driveway swept in a horseshoe towards Collins Avenue. The heightened colours drawn in flashing sunwashed lines made a picture-book setting for the ocean’s incredible blue.
    “I like the place,” said the Saint “Gilbeck or no Gilbeck, I think I’ll stay. Even without the succulent Justine. Desdemona cooks with the thistledown touch of a fairy queen. It’s true that she sometimes looks at me with what a more sensitive man might think was black disapproval, but I feel I can win her. I’m sure that shell learn to love me before we part.”
    “It’ll be one of your biggest and blackest failures if she doesn’t,” said Patricia.
    Simon ignored her scathingly, and lighted a cigarette.
    “Here in the midst of this epicurean if somewhat decadent Paradise,” he said, “we can exist in sumptuous and sybaritic splendour at Comrade Gilbeck’s expense, even though we may have to deny ourselves such British luxuries as bubble-and-squeak and toad-in-the-hole. It’s a beautiful place to live. Also it’s full of fascinating people.”
    “You haven’t tried the restaurant where I had dinner last night, when I was out sleuthing for you,” said Peter Quentin. “They served me a very fat pork chop fried in peanut oil, and coffee with canned milk which turned it a disappointed grey. There was also a plate of grass and other vegetable matter, garnished with a mayonnaise compounded of machine oil and soap flakes.”
    “The fascinating people are the principal attraction,” Patricia explained. “Particularly the one with red hair.”
    The Saint half closed his eyes.
    “Darling, I’m afraid our one and only Hoppy must have been embroidering the story. I told you last night exactly what happened. The whole thing was most casual. Somehow she has fallen under the baleful spell of March’s Gastric Ambrosia, but naturally my superior beauty impressed her. I judged her to be a demure little thing, unversed in the ways of the world and unskilled in