“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.”