Only a muscle twitching in his left cheek gave an indication of Shayne’s intense interest. This was it. This was what had been nagging at him.
“My man?” he asked quietly. “I thought all of you knew I work alone.”
“Dick didn’t give me too much on the phone,” the clerk said apologetically, “but that’s what he said. You did have an assistant a couple of months ago. Remember? You brought him in and introduced him around and said he was to use your room any time he wanted.”
Shayne’s eyes were very bright, but he said, “Yeh, Nash,” casually. “For a couple of weeks in January. He was around last week asking about Ralph Carrol?”
“Dick didn’t say it was him. Just said he was your man. ’Course we all know you always worked by yourself, but I recollect you did have this man that one time, and—”
“I remember,” Shayne cut in impatiently. “What’s Dick’s home number?”
“Oh, you can’t get him there now, Mr. Shayne. He was taken to the hospital for an operation at noon. He just wanted me to tell you he hadn’t spilled it and wouldn’t unless you said to.”
Shayne took out his wallet and laid a ten-dollar bill on the desk. He said, “Thanks. Send Dick some flowers.” He hurried out and headed for Nora Carrol’s hotel.
He stopped at the desk in the Commodore and asked for Mrs. Carrol’s room number. The clerk gave him the information and indicated the house phones on a counter a few feet away. “If you wish to speak to her,” he suggested delicately, “perhaps you’ll wait. I believe she has a caller now.”
Shayne trotted to the row of phones, lifted one, and said, “Room three-sixty,” and Nora Carrol answered immediately.
He said, “Mike Shayne downstairs. I’ll be right up.” He hung up before she could protest or acquiesce, and stalked to the row of elevators, found one waiting that put him on the third floor within a minute of his call. Thirty seconds later he stopped in front of three-sixty and rapped.
Through the closed door he heard movement inside the room and the blurred murmur of voices. He rapped again, hard and insistent.
A shrill cry of panic responded. “No, Ted! My God! No!” Nora Carrol’s voice echoed in Shayne’s ears followed by a blast of gunfire.
Shayne tried the knob fast. He drew back across the corridor, ready to lunge at the door with his left shoulder, when the door flew open.
Nora Carrol stood just inside, her hair disheveled and her face contorted with fear and horror. Tears streamed down her cheeks. The acrid smell of gunsmoke drifted up from the muzzle of a.45 automatic on the floor, and just beyond the gun a man’s body lay crumpled on its side.
“I tried to stop him! I tried to!” She sobbed the words over and over. “But he went crazy all at once.”
Shayne was beside her with an arm around her. He looked somberly down at the body of the man who had tried to kill him, in the front seat of his car, some nine hours earlier. Blood was gushing from a hole at the base of his throat, just beneath his chin.
Heeling the door shut, he half carried and half dragged the distraught widow to the bed. He let her down gently. “Cry it out while I call the police. But first tell me one thing. Is it Ted Granger?”
“Yes. He— he—” Her voice choked and she turned on her side, covered her face with both hands, and sobbed wildly.
Shayne picked up the telephone on the bedside table, asked for an outside line, and gave Will Gentry’s private number at police headquarters.
When the chief answered, he said, “Shayne, Will. I’m with Mrs. Carrol in three-sixty at the Commodore, and Ted Granger is lying here on the floor — dead.”
He listened a moment, then said impatiently, “It looks that way. I’ll try to calm Mrs. Carrol down and have her ready to answer questions when you get here. Better bring Bates along if he’s still around.”
He hung up and stood with his back to the corpse and the hysterical widow on the bed. His wound throbbed like a dull, steady rhythm on a drum, but he scarcely felt it as he turned slowly to make a careful survey of the room.
The dead man was in his shirt sleeves. His hat and jacket lay on a chair near the door. Everything was neat and tidy, and there was no indication of a struggle of any sort.
Shayne lit a cigarette, walked around to the other side of the bed from where Nora lay, and sat down. He studied her moodily, listening to her choking sobs. He took long drags on his cigarette, remembering the first time he had seen her, completely nude, and outlined in the faint light from the open door of his apartment, as she moved toward it to close it on the night latch before getting into his bed.
Suddenly he caught her shaking shoulder in a firm grasp and said curtly, “That’s about enough histrionics. So the guy is dead, and that makes two of your men rubbed out in twelve hours. But there’s still Margrave left.”
Her sobbing subsided slowly, and, for a moment, she lay still. Then she lifted herself on one elbow, glared at him, and said in an outraged voice, “What do you mean by that crack?”
“Don’t forget that Margrave has the invention now,” he said cynically. “That’s why you switched from him to Ralph in the first place, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I think you do.”
Nora Carrol was suddenly stricken again, and tears flowed down her cheeks. “How can you say things like that,” she sobbed, “when Ted is — when he’s l-lying there on the f-floor?”
Shayne said pleasantly, “Skip it if you like. It really doesn’t matter now, I guess.”
At the sound of footsteps hurrying down the hall, he got up and went to the door to admit Will Gentry and Attorney Bates. Officers from the homicide squad, a worried hotel manager, and curious guests pressed in behind him.
“Come in with your notebook, Jervis,” Gentry said to a young officer. “You, too, Bates. Rest of you stay out until I call you.”
He closed the door, looked at Granger’s body, then at Shayne, with lifted brows; and finally at the bed where Bates sat beside Mrs. Carrol, holding both of her hands in his.
Officer Jervis was seated at a table across the room with notebook and pencil ready. “Take this down,” the chief ordered. “Statement from Michael Shayne.” He turned to the redhead and waited.
“I came here straight from your office. Called Mrs. Carrol from the desk and said I was on my way up. I knocked on her door and heard voices, and some sort of movement. Then Mrs. Carrol screamed, ‘No, Ted. My God! No.’” Shayne’s utter lack of inflection on the words gave them a dramatic impact that no emphasis could possibly have done.
“This was instantly followed by one shot inside the room. I was all ready to hit the door with my shoulder, but Mrs. Carrol jerked it open from inside. She was sobbing and hysterical, and this is what I saw.” He gestured toward the dead man and the gun. “A dead man with a gun lying beside him. She told me it was Ted Granger and that she had tried to stop him, but he had suddenly gone crazy. I phoned you and haven’t touched anything except the telephone.”
He paused, then added calmly, “That’s about the size of it, Will. I haven’t tried to question her. There’s one thing more you should know right now. Granger is the man who called me on the telephone a little before four o’clock and offered me ten grand to keep quiet about Mrs. Carrol. He is the man who shot me, as I parked my car on the bayfront, and left me for dead. It’s a fair guess that the gun on the floor is the same one he used on me.”
Will Gentry nodded gravely. “The hole in the roof of your car came from a forty-five slug. We found an ejected cartridge on the floor.” He turned to Nora and said, “Your turn now, Mrs. Carrol. Start at the beginning and tell us everything you know about this.”