Free Call for the Saint by Leslie Charteris Page B

bird
Whose nest is in a watershoot,
My heart is like an apple tree
Whose boughs are bent with thick-set fruit—”
    Stephen Elliott was taking Mrs. Wingate’s place beside a tall thin man to whom she had been talking when she was called. As Simon edged up behind them, he recognized the tall thin shape as Lieutenant Alvin Kearney.
    “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 earsplitting 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 lips 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 Condor 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.”
    What the detective thought would have been inaudible even in the volume of voice which his congested face portended, for at that moment Mrs. Wingate’s vocal analysis of her heart attained a screeching fortissimo that almost scraped the paint off the walls.
    “My heart is gladder than all these,
Because-my lo-o-ove-has come to me!”
    As silence finally settled upon tortured eardrums, there was some perfunctory applause. It was rather nicely adjusted to show grateful appreciation without encouraging an encore. Since apparently the coffee and doughnuts would not be served until after the entertainment, the audience could not walk out, but it did not have to be hysterical.
    Mrs. Wingate panted and bowed twitteringly to the very last handclap, which naturally came from Stephen Elliott.
    “Thank you, thank you, my dear friends… . And now I see that our special guest of the evening has arrived, and I’m going to ask him to come up here and say a few words to you. It is a great privilege to be able to introduce-Mr. Simon Templar.”
    Simon stepped up on the platform to the resigned acclamation of the coffee-and-doughnuts claque. He raised Mrs. Wingate’s pudgy hand to his lips, and ushered her off in giggling confusion. Then he made a sign of dismissal to the piano player.
    “I’m not going to sing,” he said.
    While the accompanist withdrew, he waved cheerfully to the gaping Lieutenant Kearney, and ran friendly blue eyes over the faces of the