The big redhead took the instrument from her and grunted a surprised: “Hello.”
“Mike,” it was Chief Will Gentry’s voice. “I won’t ask you straight out if you went by to see Adele Miller last night.”
“Does that mean you don’t think I’d give you an honest answer?”
“It means I don’t think I’d want to hear the answer if you did give it.”
“Trouble?” Shayne asked.
“We got a call from the manager of that apartment house about thirty minutes ago. The people across the hall woke him up. The Miller woman’s door was open and they thought they’d heard a ruckus. When our boys got there they found the whole apartment tom apart.”
“And Adele?”
“The Miller woman was flat on her face on the kitchen floor in a pool of blood. She’d been shot three times.”
Shayne said, “Is she dead?”
“That’s a good question,” Will Gentry told him. “We got her to Jackson Hospital still alive and the last I heard two docs were working to keep her that way. She was so near dead though it was hard to tell the difference. She may even be dead by now.”
“Did she talk?”
“Mike, people shot as bad as that girl are lucky to breathe, let alone talk. Unconscious all the time. If she did talk, what do you think she’d have said?”
“I wish I knew, Will. It would help if I could even guess. When was she shot?”
“The docs say they think she’d been on the floor a long time. Near as anybody can tell she might have been shot as early as midnight. That’s a guess though.”
“I’m coming over the Bay,” Mike Shayne told his friend. “If she comes to enough to talk, I want to be there to listen.”
“Her room is guarded,” Will Gentry said.
Shayne said, “You can get in, and you can take me with you. It’s important.”
He hung up the phone. Then he went to tell Tim Rourke what had happened.
Dora watched him go with a puzzled expression, but made no attempt to question the big man. She just went on getting ready to fix breakfast for the household.
The rising sun was at Mike Shayne’s back as he drove over the causeway from Miami Beach. Ahead of him its rays struck sparkles and blinding flashes of light from the windows of the wall of highrise buildings that had grown up to line the mainland shore of Biscayne Bay.
Mike Shayne could remember when the only buildings that stuck up that high were the Dade County Courthouse and the old News tower. Those had been simpler days.
Jackson Memorial Hospital, named for Miami’s first permanent doctor, had also changed and grown from a single ancient building to a towering complex of wards and wings and special facilities. Even this early in the morning the detective had trouble finding a parking space anywhere near the ward he wanted to visit.
Will Gentry was waiting at the nurse’s station on the floor where police assigned patients were kept. There was a uniformed patrolman in a chair by the door of one of the rooms down the hall.
Gentry gestured at that door.
“They brought her back from the operating room,” he told Shayne. “They were trying to get out the one bullet that lodged near her spine without killing her. There’s a doctor and a nurse in with her now.”
The police guard at the room door passed them both through without any question. It was a different matter with the nurse inside the room. She started by giving them a hostile stare, and then actually tried to push Will Gentry back out into the hall.
“Get out,” she said. “You’d be in the way. Haven’t you any respect for the dying? We’ve work to do in here.”
“So do we,” Gentry said. “I’m sorry, nurse, but that’s the way it’s got to be.”
The doctor who was working over the woman in the bed looked up.
“Let him be, Jean,” he told the nurse. “He really does have business here. Besides I don’t see that it’s going to make any difference.”
He turned to Shayne and Gentry. “I’m sorry Chief, but I don’t think she’s going to be able to tell you a thing. It’s only a matter of minutes now. I don’t think she’ll regain consciousness at all.”
Adele Miller was white and drained of blood. She looked as if she were already dead except for a faint, rasping breath under the oxygen mask that covered her mouth and nose. They were giving her a blood transfusion but the elixer of life barely dripped into her collapsed veins.
“We’re doing all we can,” the doctor said, “but she was hurt too badly and lost too much blood.”
Even as he spoke the body convulsed slightly and then was still. Doctor and nurse bent over her. When the doctor looked up he said only: “That was it. I’m sorry. She’s gone.”
“Better take the body to the autopsy room,” Chief Gentry said. “The coroner will want to supervise this one himself.”
“Not yet, Will,” Mike Shayne said. “Don’t move the body at all right now.”
IX
Chief Will Gentry looked at his friend across the dead body of the woman in the hospital bed. “What are you talking about, Mike? I suppose you’ve got something up your sleeve, but I’ve got a right to know what it is.”
“Sure you do,” Shayne said. “I want the body left here for a little while and you three stay with it like you were still working over her. I’m going out to the phone at the nurse’s desk and make arrangements for Adele to be transferred to a private hospital at Ellen Barker’s expense. I hope plenty of the staff here overhear me do it so they can remember if anybody questions them later on. I’m also going to talk about calling in specialists from Baltimore and Boston for another operation.”
“You want the killer to think she’s still alive,” Gentry said. “I can see that. But how the hell long do you think you can keep it up?”
“It won’t have to be long,” Shayne said. “When the ambulance from the private hospital arrives downstairs the four of us will put the body on a stretcher and start taking it down. We’ll have an oxygen mask over the face and the nurse here holding up a plasma bottle plugged into the arm. We’ll take a whole elevator for ourselves.
“When the elevator hits the ground floor there’ll be a lot of confusion. The mask will be off Adele’s face. The story is she regained consciousness in the elevator, spoke a few words that only I could hear and then died. You all take the body on to the morgue.”
“All you’re doing is making a target out of yourself,” Will Gentry said. “It’s an old trick but it might work.”
“You have no right to use this body that way,” the nurse said. “Hasn’t she suffered enough? It’s immoral.”
“The woman is dead,” Shayne reminded her. “All we plan to do is conceal that fact for a little more time. Besides, it may be the only way we can find the one who really made her suffer, the person who shot her down and left her to die. Think about that.”
“He’s right,” the doctor said. “It may bring a killer to justice, and I don’t really see what harm it can do.”
A half hour later the charade Mike Shayne planned had been acted out to the full in front of an audience of hospital personnel and visitors.
Shayne and Will Gentry were standing on the steps in front of the main entrance of Jackson Hospital waiting for Gentry’s assistant Lieutenant Maine to bring the Chief’s car around.
“It isn’t the first time you’ve made yourself a target,” Will Gentry was saying, “and I don’t suppose it’ll be the last. I wish you’d let me assign a couple of my boys to tail you, just in case.”
“I’ve got to go back to the Beach,” Shayne said. “That’s out of your jurisdiction. Besides you know if somebody does come after me and spots your boys, it would blow the whole thing higher than the One Biscayne Tower. I know what I’m doing, Will.”