“Body?” Shayne blinked his eyelids down and peered at Gentry through narrow slits. “Whatcha mean — body?”
“Just what I said.” Gentry pounded the words at him in an effort to penetrate the alcoholic stupor of the detective’s brain. “We just had an anonymous tip that a murder was being committed in this apartment.”
Shayne laughed thickly. He shifted his narrow gaze to Rourke, then let it wander around the empty office. “I don’ shee a body. You shee a body?” He fixed his wavering eyes on Rourke again.
Chief Gentry stood on widespread legs in front of Shayne and shook his head at Rourke. “Damned if I would have believed this if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. Thank God, Phyllis isn’t here to see him.”
“She must have cramped his style more than any of us guessed,” Rourke commented sagely. “Looks like he sent her out of town just so he could go on a binge.”
Shayne reached for the cognac bottle and missed it. Rourke handed it to him with a disgusted snort. “Go ahead and pass yourself out.” He turned to Gentry. “Looks like that phone call was phony, chief.”
Both men spoke without regard for Shayne, as though he had ceased to count as an animate human being.
Shayne showed no objection to being openly discussed. He sat slumped in the swivel chair behind the desk with his eyes closed, holding the bottle rigidly with both hands.
“There must have been some basis for that phone call we received,” Gentry contended. “Maybe he had a fight with his wife before she left. Someone might have heard them battling in here and thought it was murder.”
“Sounds reasonable. God knows, he couldn’t have got this way in the short time since the train left. He must’ve been working up to this for several hours.”