Saint Steps In by Leslie Charteris

that she still looked blank and helpless.
    “I couldn’t possibly say. He’s so hopelessly untidy when he isn’t
being fanatically neat.”
    Simon
stared at the desk. He didn’t know Calvin Gray’s habits, or anything about his work and interests. He
knew that it was perfectly possible to search files and papers without leaving a room looking as if a
cyclone had gone through it.
    Anyway, what
would anyone have been searching for? No body
would have been expected to keep a precious secret formula in an open filing cabinet, or sandwiched
between tax demands and seed catalogs
on top of a desk … And still he had
that exasperating feeling of underlying discord, of some factor that didn’t
explain itself or didn’t connect, as if he was trying to force everything into one or two wrong theories, when there was still a right theory that would
have accom modated everything, only he had been too blind to see it yet.
    “Let’s see everything,” he said shortly.
    They
went upstairs and saw bedrooms. Madeline Gray’s room. Calvin Gray’s room. A couple of guest rooms.
Bath rooms. Everything looked ordinary and orderly.
It was a nice well-kept house.
    “So he isn’t here,” said the Saint. “There’s no blood
and no smashed windows and no
dead bodies in any of the closets. He went out and left the lights on. Why shouldn’t he go out
and leave the lights
on?”
    He didn’t know whether he was trying to console her or whether he wag arguing with himself. He knew damn well that
it was perfectly simple to kidnap a man without wrecking his house. You just walked in on him and stuck a gun in
his ribs and said “Come for a
walk, pal,” and nine times out of ten that was all the commotion there was going to be.
    “There’s
still the laboratory,” she said in a small voice; and he caught at that for the moment’s
reprieve.
    “Why didn’t
you show me that before?”
    She
took him out of the house, and they walked by a wind ing path through tall slender trees whose delicate
upper branches lost themselves
in the darkness beyond the glow of his pencil flashlight.
    The laboratory had been invisible from the house and the driveway, and they came on it suddenly
in a shadowy clear ing—a long white modernistic
building with a faint glow from inside
outlining the Venetian windows. She led him to the door, and they went into a tiny hall. A door that
stood ajar on one side disclosed
tiled walls and a washbasin and shower.
    Beyond
the little hall, the laboratory was a long sanitary barn with a single lamp burning overhead and striking
bright gleams from glass tubes
and retorts and long shelves of neatly labeled bottles and porcelain-topped benches and
stranger pieces of less describable
apparatus. But nothing was broken, and everything seemed reasonably in order. Only there was no one there.
    “Does this look all right too?” he asked.
    “Yes.”
    He surveyed the details as meaninglessly as any other lay man would have surveyed a chemical
laboratory. If you were going to produce any brilliant observation in a setting like that, you had to be a master chemist too. And he wasn’t. He
wondered if any detective really ever knew everything, so that he could
immediately start finding incongruities in any kind of technical setup, like super sleuths always could in stories.
    “You could make rubber here?” he said.
    “Of course.”
    There must have been more doubt in his face than he meant to have there, or else he just looked
blank because he was thinking along other lines, or else she also wanted to keep her mind busy along other lines.
    “I could show you now,” she said.
    It didn’t seem important, but it was another escape.
    “Show me,” he said.
    She went and fetched bottles from the shelves. Some of them were unlabeled. She measured things
in beakers and test tubes. She carried mixtures to a table where an elaborate train of processing gear was already set up. She poured a quantity
of sawdust from an old coffee can into