“And now you’re going to claim you sat in your car while he took pot shots at you?” growled Gentry.
“Just about,” Shayne conceded morosely. He settled back and related exactly what had happened. “It was nine o’clock when I woke up. I took time to clean the dried blood off my face with bay water and examine the car for a bullet hole, then headed toward town. I stopped on the boulevard for breakfast, and saw the Herald extra. That was the first I knew about Lucy. I called my lawyer from the roadside restaurant, then came on to my office and found two goons waiting at the door with a search warrant.”
“Honest to Christ, Mike, do you expect me to believe that story?” Gentry asked in a wondering voice.
“Take a look at the evidence, the bullet hole in my car. Get a doctor to look at my head, and tell you what else beside a bullet could have done it. Analyze the blood on the cushion where I lay passed out for five hours. You don’t think I held a gun to my own head and pulled the trigger, do you?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Gentry told him, somberly considering his cigar butt before discarding it. “This fellow you claim you met at Seventy-Ninth, he wouldn’t be the one who jumped Lucy at the Commodore, I suppose.”
“That’s out,” Shayne stated flatly. “He couldn’t be. I started as soon as I finished talking to Lucy. By the time she got dressed and to the Commodore, I must have been halfway out there. He was waiting at the filling-station, after having parked his car by the bay, and he had walked back to meet me.”
“So that makes two little men who no one can prove were there,” Gentry growled. “Plus another one in Wilmington who broke into a lawyer’s office to remove incriminating letters you claim weren’t there. How can you expect me to believe any of this, Mike?”
Shayne said soberly, “I don’t. But you can try.”
“I am trying.”
“Keep on working on it,” Shayne urged. “It’ll come easier after a while. Once you make up your mind that I’m telling the truth, you’ll be on the right track.”