Leslie Charteris - The Saint in Miami

"If you see me being taken off in the wagon," he said, "don't bother to wait lunch."

A couple of moments after they had gone, the official presence of Sheriff Newton Haskins cast its long shadow into the cheery courtyard.

Seen in the bright light of day, the officer who had hailed them from the police boat appeared even thinner and more lugubrious than he had the night before. He was dressed in funereal black, defying the thermometer. His broadcloth coat was pushed open behind pocketed hands, disclosing a strip of spotless white shirt topped by a narrow and unfashionable black bow tie. He might very easily have been mistaken for an undertaker paying a business call on the bereaved — except for the width or the cartridge belt at his waist, which sagged to the right under the weight of a holstered gun.

His approach was leisurely. Hands in pockets, he watched Patricia's and Peter's retreat to the beach, studied the flowers, and cast an appraising glance up at the cloudless sky. Only after he had apparently satisfied himself that the heavens were still in place did he condescend to notice the Saint.

Extended backwards in his chair, with his ankles crossed on the table, Simon greeted him with a smile of carefree cordiality.

"Well, well, well, — if it isn't our old friend Sheriff Haskins! Sit down, laddie. All my life I've heard of this southern hospitality, but I didn't think a busy officer like you" would have time to come and welcome a mere tourist like me."

Hands still in his pockets, Newt Haskins seated himself slowly in a metal garden chair with an exhibition of perfect muscular control. He began a survey at the Saint's bare feet, enumerated his legs, reviewed his blue gabardine shorts and the rainbow pattern of his beach robe, and ended up gazing dispassionately into the Saint's mocking eyes.

"You'd be surprised, son, how many crooks I've welcome to Miami in the past ten years."

"Crooks, Sheriff?" Simon's brows lifted in faint inquiry. "Do I misunderstand you, or is that meant to refer to me?"

Haskins' left hand crawled out of its pocket like a turtle, bearing with it a plug of black tobacco. His deep-set sharp grey eyes sank farther into his Indian brown face as he bit off a chew. Holding the remainder of the plug, his hand crawled back into its hole again. Watching the methodical working of the muscles along his lean jaws, Simon had an irresistible nostalgic memory of another officer of the Law with whose habits he was much more familiar — the gum-chewing Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal of Scotland Yard.

"You, son? Now, there shuah ain't no use leapin' to conclusions thataway." Haskins' speech, when he was not shouting through a megaphone, lagged naturally into the native Floridian s drawl. "Actually, I come on a jaunt out heah to have a few words with Mr Gilbeck. Seein' he warn't around, I thought I might make myself sociable-like an' pass the time o' day."

"A very noble impulse," said the Saint reservedly. "But you have an ambiguous line of conversational gambits."

The Sheriffs otter-trap lips pursed themselves, and for one tense moment Simon feared that a stream of tobacco juice was destined to desecrate the virgin whiteness of the stucco wall. The crisis passed when Haskins swallowed, moving his larynx pensively up and down.

'Listen, son," he said. "Every tout, grifter, dip, gambler, yegg, land shark, and mobster, from Al Capone down to any lush-rolling prostitute, hits this city sooner or later, and we find 'em sunnin' their bottoms along our shore."

The Saint fluttered his eyelids and said: "But how poetical you are, daddy. Please tell sonny more."

Haskins' face remained glum, except for a passing glint in the depths of his lethargic grey eyes which might equally well have come either from anger or amusement

"Big and little, man and woman, killers an' punks," he said, "I've met 'em all. They don't none of 'em scare me."

"That takes a great load off my mind," said the Saint, with the same dulcet challenge.

"I thought it might do you good to know."

"Well," drawled the Saint, with dangerous camaraderie. "Neighbour, that shuah is white of you. Ah ain't met sech a speerit o' kindheartedness sense mah ole gramppaw had his whiskers et plumb off by General Beauregard's horse in the Civil Wah."

Haskins rounded out a cavernous cheek with his cud of tobacco.

"Simon Templar," he said, without heat, "you may think that's a southern accent, but it stinks of Oxford to me." He leaned back in his chair and stared skyward. "Modern police methods are makin' it awful tough for the boys, son. I sent a cable to Scotland Yard last night, an' I got an answer just before I come out heah."

"Give me one guess and I'll tell you who answered you." A joyful smile began to dawn on the Saint's face. "Is it possible — No, this is too good!… But is it possible that it could have been signed with the name of Teal?"

The Sheriff crossed his legs and fanned the air with a number eleven toe.

"I wonder if you'll be so infernally happy when you know what he had to say."

"But I know what he had to say. That's what makes me so happy. If you'd only come to me in the first place, I could have saved you the cost of your wire. Let's see — it would have been something like this… He told you that I'd run the gamut of crime from burglarly to murder — he thinks. That I dine on blackmail and arson seasoned with assault and battery — he suspects. That every time a body is found under the Chief Commissioner's breakfast table, or somebody puts a home-made shilling into a cigarette machine, the whole CID spews itself into prowl cars and dashes off to arrest me — they hope. Was that it?"

"It didn't have all those fancy touches," Haskins allowed, "but that's about how it read."

Simon trickled blue smoke through insolent and delighted lips.

"There's only one thing wrong with your reading," he murmured. "You must have got so excited over the first part that you didn't stop to read through to the end."

"An" what might that have done for me?"

"You might have found out that all the first part was really nothing but the foam on poor old Teal's fevered brain. You might have discovered that none of those things have ever been proved, that I've never been convicted of any of them or even brought to trial, that there isn't the single ghost of a charge he could bring against me today, and that I'm known to be getting pretty damn tired of having every dumb cop in creation ringing my doorbell and making me listen to a lot of addlepated blather that he can't prove."

Haskins' left hand sought daylight again without the plug of tobacco, and its blunt thumbnail made a test for stubble around the deep cleft of his chin.

"Son," he said, "I've been compared to everything from the disappearin' view of a racehorse at Tropical Park, to havin' my maw never find out what my paw's last name was. It ain't never got a rise out of me. I don't aim to change my tactics now. You and your friends are guests in a prominent citizen's home, an' I'm treatin' you as such. But as Sheriff of this county I've got a few questions to ask you, and I expect you to answer 'em."

It was a rare event for Simon Templar to feel admiration for any professional enforcer of the Law. But admiration for any cool unflustered opponent who could meet him in his own field and exchange parry and riposte without vindictiveness but with a blade sharp enough to match his own, was a tribute which none of his instincts could refuse. He drew at his cigarette again, and over his fingers his eyes twinkled calculatingly blue but with all malice wiped out of them.

"I suppose that anything I say can be used as evidence against me," he remarked cheerfully.

"If you're fool enough to tell me anything incriminatm'," said Haskins, "that's true. Don't blame me for it."