Gentry squinted at it with puffy eyes, then handed it to Shayne. “Can you make out the mark, Mike?” he asked.
Shayne peered at the bullet intently, angling it around in his fingertips. “Right now I’d say it was the capital letter N,” he said. He returned the bullet to Gentry.
The Police Chief wrapped it in his handkerchief. As he thrust the bundle into the pants pocket of his ample rear a second detective rushed up with: “No record of any Burton Adams at Marine Headquarters, sir, and everybody present or accounted for.”
A very strong aroma of Bourbon suddenly assailed Shayne’s nostrils over his shoulder. He didn’t have to turn around to suspect it came from Timothy Rourke, fabled crime reporter of Miami’s Daily News. But turn he did, grabbing the skeleton of a man by the collar and yanking him aside.
“Listen, Tim,” he whispered into the reporter’s ear, “I’ve never given you a bum steer, have I?”
“On stories, no,” conceded Rourke, grinning. “On dames, yes.”
Shayne sighed. “If you want to shoot for a second Pulitzer Prize, play it my way. Have your New York man check with the magic editor of the Billboard and the Daily News morgue, but fast! Get me all the dope you can get on this guy Voltane. But keep your trap shut!”
Rourke’s slaty eyes grew slightly animated. “Sure, Mike, if you’ve really latched on to something big.”
IV
The Biscayne arena’s emergency lights cast eerie shadows in the dead magician’s off-stage dressing room. It was close to midnight, and no sign of life remained in the building other than the handful of uniformed policemen left on guard by Gentry — and Michael Shayne.
A solitary gaunt shadow himself, he had a distinctly unpleasant feeling of unreality as his narrowed eyes pierced the gloom. Through the vast silence he could hear the cooing of doves, nothing more. A human hand lay on top of a small trunk, gruesomely convincing even at close view. Other phantoms of the magician’s art loomed ghostly and mocking, and from a leather picture-frame beside a crystal ball, Kara’s oblique black eyes were fixed on him hypnotically.
Shayne stared back. A faint stir of air lightly caressed the back of his neck, and the Gypsy’s eyes seemed to be telling him to search further.
He turned toward a huge battered wardrobe trunk. It was open wide, and the right half held Voltane’s shirts and street clothes in neat array. The left half consisted of a bureau-like series of drawers. He pulled out the top drawer. It was filled with evening ties, collars, handkerchiefs and unopened packs of playing cards. He was about to close it again when his eye caught something odd.
Perhaps it was only an illusion due to the way the shadows struck it, but to Shayne it seemed that the face and sides were a good three inches or more deeper than the inside.
His hand darted within. He rapped sharply, his strong, firm fingers eliciting a hollow sound. He snatched a nail file from the makeup shelf. As he was about to pry open the false bottom he was blinded by a sudden flash of light, accompanied by a sharp pain at the back of his skull.
He fell forward into a darkly swirling sea of nothingness...
It was nearly ten the next morning when he awoke in Lucy Hamilton’s bed. A throbbing, nauseating pain was shooting from the back of his head down his body to the tips of his toes.
Police Chief Gentry was seated by his side, and Lucy was staring at him with bitter reproach. There was concern in her eyes too, but her anger made her speak sharply. “You almost had a concussion! Will phoned me the minute he got the report from the Arena, and I brought you back here from the hospital in a cab. I slept on the couch.” She handed him a cup of steaming black coffee. “Drink this.”
Shayne put his hand gingerly to his head, felt the bulky gauze dressing and winced. “Put a shot in it, Angel,” he groaned.
“I already did,” she said. “Two. But if you had any sense you wouldn’t need spiked coffee.”
Gentry helped him up to a sitting position. “They found a monkey wrench in Voltane’s dressing room after you got conked,” he rumbled. “It had bloodstains on it, but unfortunately the handle was wrapped in a towel. So — no finger prints.”
Shayne sipped the coffee royal gratefully, slowly coming out of the fog. “What else did they find?” he asked.
“That you had pried open the false bottom of a drawer in Voltane’s trunk,” replied Gentry pleasantly. “The boys figured you swiped something. So they frisked you and found the nub of a thirty-caliber bullet wrapped up in your handkerchief.”
“It didn’t come from the trunk. It came from Voltane’s mouth. I found it there just a few seconds after he got shot. Go on.”
Gentry scowled at the dead cigar butt in his slightly unsteady fingers. “I don’t like saying this, Mike, but I’m giving you fair warning. If you’re holding anything back, if this bullet should turn out to be an important bit of evidence in what might — I say ‘might’ — just happen to be a case of murder, you’re in hot water. And this time don’t count on friendship!”
Shayne downed the last of the coffee royal. He felt his strength returning, poked his long legs out from under the bedcovers, thumped his bare feet on the floor, and sat upright. Lucy stuck a cigarette in his mouth, held a lighted match to it.
“Angel,” he said, “bring in your notes from last night.”
He turned to Gentry. “You’ll find a detailed, eyewitness account of everything that happened from the beginning of Voltane’s pitch up to the moment Lucy and I hit the stage. You’re not going to get very far, Will — unless you find out exactly how that trick would have been pulled off if nothing had gone wrong with it.”
Gentry dropped the wet cigar butt into a dainty pink-and-white porcelain ashtray on Lucy’s bed-side table. “I’ll know a lot more,” he growled, “when I lay my hands on that phony marine! And I’ll get him — even if I have to call out the marines themselves!”
Shayne was on his feet, his lean, muscular body enveloped in a sheet, when Lucy returned with five neatly-typed pages. He checked them briefly. “Good girl,” he said, and handed them to Gentry. The latter folded them carefully, slipped them into his inside coat pocket, arose, put on his cap and looked very official.
After he departed Shayne, still wobbly, took a quick shower in Lucy’s bathroom, wearing her green rubber cap to protect the wound on his head. Over her protests he staggered into his clothes, downed two fast shots of brandy, and kissed the tip of her nose.
He called out as he left, “Thanks, nurse! I’ll check with you later at the office. Watch for an important call from Tim Rourke.”
“Michael, darling! Take care!”
The combined residence and private sanitarium of Dr. Herman Vogle loomed hugely as Shayne drove through the main gate, swirled along a winding graveled road flanked by neatly landscaped palm trees, and parked alongside the building.
Vogle was leaning over a massive mahogany desk, scribbling on a pad, when the detective was ushered into his book-walled private office by a thin-lipped, slightly annoyed nurse. He did not look up, even when Shayne seated himself in a comfortable leather chair, crossed his legs, lit a cigarette and blew clouds of smoke across the desk. Shayne’s head was killing him.
Finally Vogle raised his eyes. “I’m very busy, Shayne. What do you want?”
The redhead took his time. “I’d like to talk to Kara.”