Free The Saint in Miami by Leslie Charteris

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