“I’m sure I don’t know what it’s about,” the detective was saying, in a voice that had no need to drop its level to avoid interfering with the ear-splitting stridencies that were welling from Mrs Wingate’s throat. “For all I know, it may be just another of his funny gags. But I’d look plenty silly if anything happened and I wasn’t here.”
Elliott took out a handkerchief and patted his temples, while Mrs Wingate continued to liken her heart to various other improbable objects.
“I don’t know anything about it,” he said mildly. “But if he’s working on a case—”
“Oh, is he?” Kearney snapped that up with the avidity of a starving shark. “What case?”
Elliott hesitated.
“I really can’t say,” he replied at last. “Why don’t you ask him?”
“Yes, why not?” Simon agreed, and they both turned.
Kearney’s lip thinned over his teeth as he met the Saint’s affable smile. There was no thoroughly defensible reason for his reaction, yet it was a basic reflex which in its time had produced fundamentally identical effects upon such widely separated personalities as Chief Inspector Teal of Scotland Yard, Inspector Fernack of New York City, Lieutenant Ed Connor of Los Angeles, Sheriff Newt Haskins of Miami, and many others who will be remembered by the unremitting followers of this saga. It was perhaps something that sprang from the primal schism of law and disorder, an aboriginal cleavage between policeman and outlaw whose roots were lost in the dank dawns of sociology.
Lieutenant Alvin Kearney of Chicago liked the Saint, admired him, respected him, envied him, and hated him with an inordinate bitterness that loaded stygian tints into his scowl as he rasped, “All right, wise guy, you tell me. What was the idea phoning me to meet you here tonight because there might be a riot?”
“I guess it was a form of stage fright,” said the Saint, with an aplomb which made Kearney feel as if he had two days’ growth of beard and a dirty neck. “I’m not very used to these personal appearances, and I felt nervous. You can’t tell what an audience like this might do, so I thought I should have some protection.”