Mike Shayne turned to face the woman in the starched white nurse’s uniform who stood in the doorway. Long years in the business of private detective, a business in which the unusual and the shocking became routine, enabled him to~ keep a total poker face. It wasn’t easy though.
‘Nurse Hadley’ had the uniform and the air and even a clinical thermometer in her dress pocket and a starched white cap. But she was no more a nurse than Shayne was premier of Bulgaria.
VI
Mike Shayne could not be mistaken. There were the same handsome features, so oddly at varience with the cold grey eyes, the sensuous lips and the high breasted, wide hipped figure exactly as he remembered them from years back. So was the way of standing with her left side a bit advanced and the left hand set squarely against the hip. He knew her all right.
Nurse Hadley was Millie Love, just as all Miami after dark had known her twenty years before. Then she had owned, or at least fronted, one of the lavish and expensive gambling dens and houses of assignation that had studded the Florida Gold Coast in the wild and brazen postwar days.
There had been a scandal and a dead man on the floor, a man of such political and financial prominence that a public trial would have embarrassed or destroyed half of Miami. Instead of a trial there had been an elaborate cover up. In the end the man was buried quietly and Millie vanished from the scene. Mike Shayne had never really known the whole of that story.
Now here she was again in the office of this third rate hostel for the aged and the infirm. She wore her years well, but there was no mistaking her.
She knew him too. He had no doubt of that, and braced himself for what might occur when His Mr. Kelly was unmasked.
The woman looked him right in the face with masked and bitter eyes.
“Why of course, Dr. Amor,” she said in a voice that Shayne remembered well. It was the same voice she had used when she took over as dealer at one of her house’s gambling tables. “I’ll be glad to show Mr. Kelly through. If you’ll just follow me, sir.”
Shayne followed her out into the hall. He didn’t dare turn to face Paul Amor on the way for fear his eyes might give him away. When the office door had closed he looked at her again.
To his very great surprise she still gave no sign of recognition, but met his glance apparently openly and unconcerned. Her still beautiful mouth curved in the smile of a business woman eager to make a good impression on a possible client.
“I suppose you’ll want to see some of the guest rooms as well as the clinic and recreation rooms?” she said. “We’ll do those first, then anything else you’d like to see, Mr. Kelly. We want the relatives of our guests to be perfectly satisfied as to their comfort here with us.”
Shayne wanted to say: “Oh come off it, Millie. I know you and you know me and we both know it. I didn’t come here looking for you either so relax. I never was your enemy.”
He didn’t though. Her air was so natural and her composure so perfect that he was almost ready to doubt his own senses.
So all he said was: “Yes. After that I’d like to take a look at the kitchens and the staff area. That sort of thing is important in the care a man gets here.”
Shayne made no attempt to disguise his voice or natural intonations. In fact he emphasized both. If there had been any possible chance that Millie hadn’t recognized him, he wanted to dispel it.
She gave no sign of recognition.
Instead she gave him the complete tour, even looking in on two or three of the guests in their rooms. These last deemed comfortable and at ease. They greeted Nurse Hadley cheerfully.
She even took him up on the flat roof of the east wing of the building. There was wooden flooring here and deck chairs, even a ping-pong table. The improvised sundeck had several large plants set over by the parapet in heavy earthenware pots.
They were alone up there and no one could have overheard anything they said, but the woman still kept her mask unbroken. Mike Shayne let it go at that. He was sure that he couldn’t have been mistaken about her identity, but if she wanted to play games that was quite okay.
When they got down to the kitchens the help, nurses, orderlies and kitchen workers were eating their lunch. Most of them seemed to be either blacks or Cubans. None had any look of a German.
Shayne risked a question. “Do you have a man named Hans something or other working here? Big fellow. A German or a Dane I think?”
“No. Nobody by that name or anything like it. Why do you ask?”
“I’m sorry,” Shayne said. “From something someone said I had thought you did.”
He had watched her very carefully as he spoke and he could have sworn that she showed no sign of recognition or of any special emotion at the name, but then she hadn’t shown any sign of recognizing Mike Shayne either.
Millie Love had always been famous for her iron hard gambler’s mask. By now Shayne was ready to award her an all-time grand master’s gold medal for achievement at the art.
She took him back to the office and left him with Dr. Amor. Certainly Shayne could see no sign of any signal passing between them.
Shayne broke away as soon as he could. He let Paul Amor give him a brochure and a blank application form for registry at the Friendly Rest.
He liked what he’d seen, he said, but of course his wife had to be consulted. She’d probably want to come herself, and bring her uncle for a look around. They wouldn’t want to put the old man anywhere against his own will. The redhead hoped he’d understand.
Paul Amor said that he understood perfectly. Naturally they wouldn’t want to leap into anything as important as the decision they were, he hoped, about to make.
He offered Shayne a drink, which the big man refused, and they shook hands very amicably.
There was no sign of Millie Love either in the courtyard or the entryway as Mike Shayne left the building. He hadn’t really expected that there would be.
Outside on the street he turned East towards the Bay and swung to the right around the corner to walk to where his car was parked.
There was a wild yell of: “Look out!” and a hurtling figure slammed into Shayne and drove him out off the sidewalk into the street.
At the same instant one of the big potted plants from the roof garden of the Friendly Rest crashed onto the sidewalk where Shayne had been seconds before.
VII
If he hadn’t been pushed out of the way of the falling missile, Mike Shayne would have been dead or seriously injured. He looked at the person who had saved his life, and wasn’t particularly surprised to find that it was Tom Rumbo. He’d recognized that eldritch yell.
“I know,” the little man said, looking up at him. “You said to wait in your office. But I’m a detective. You said I could help you with this case. I can’t help by sitting there with my feet up, so I followed you.”
“How did you get out past Lucy?”
“She was busy mopping up the vase of flowers that fell off her desk and smashed on the floor.”
Rumbo said that with a perfectly straight face, and Shayne refrained from asking how the vase had come to fall off the desk. He and Rumbo were beginning to understand one another, and he couldn’t help liking the little old man.
“Aren’t you going to call the cops or go back in there yourself?” Rumbo asked. “Somebody in there tried to kill you.”
“They’d only swear it was an accident.”
“But I saw that thing lifted onto the parapet and then shoved over. I could swear that—”
“You could swear till you were blue in the face and it’d be your word against theirs. It was an accident. You didn’t happen to see who did it?” the big detective asked.