“Gloves?”
“Yes, gloves! The gloves that killed Torpedo Smith! Doc Spangler told me what happened. Why’d you take ’em?”
“My hands were cold,” Simon said blandly.
An imaginative audience might have fancied that it could hear the perspiration sizzling on Inspector Fernack’s face as its rosy glow deepened to purple. He thrust the stogie back into his mouth with a violence that almost choked him and bit into it savagely.
“You be careful, Templar!” he bellowed. “If I felt like it, I could pull you in for assault, trespass, malicious mischief, and petty larceny!”
Simon shook his head sadly.
“You disappoint me, Inspector. A hunter of your calibre talking about sparrows when there are tigers in them thar hills.”
“You don’t say!” Fernack’s cigar angled upward like a naval rifle. “Meaning what?”
The Saint shrugged.
“Well, almost anything is more interesting than”—amusement flickered in the lazy-lidded, hawksharp blueness of his eyes as he enumerated on his angers — “assault, trespass, malicious mischief, and petty larceny.”