“Oh, that!” Shayne sat down at the desk, glanced at Lucy who looked up from the note pad in her hand with round, questioning eyes. He drew in a deep breath and said, “I may as well give it to you, both of you. I’m going to need all the help I can get from now on.”
“Did I give myself away when you told me to take notes? I’d never heard of any Mitchell case, but I tried to be calm.”
“You were perfect, angel,” he assured her. “That call was actually for Gentry, from some clerk at the airport who’d been checking flights to Wilmington for Will. He had been given this number to call, and mistook me for Gentry when I answered.” He poured himself a short drink of cognac and drank it. “Their records show that Michael Shayne bought a round-trip ticket to Wilmington on the four-twenty plane this morning and returned on a flight arriving here at nine-ten. There is going to be hell to pay when Will finds out about this.”
After a moment of shocked silence, Rourke whirled to face his old friend and said, “Then your story about getting shot was a phony?”
“No, there was nothing phony about that,” Shayne told him grimly. “But we know now that there is some guy, representing himself as Michael Shayne right here in Miami, impersonating me! It’s dollars to doughnuts he flew up to Wilmington for the express purpose of removing the files on Bates’s correspondence with him from Bates’s office.”
“Then he must be the man who threw the blanket over my head in Mrs. Carrol’s hotel room last night,” Lucy said excitedly.
“Probably,” Shayne interrupted her. “We can assume he was there searching for the same letter I hoped you’d find. Picking up the pieces and destroying all the evidence after he learned that Carrol was dead and there would be an investigation that would surely point to him as an impersonator, if nothing else.”
“But you just got through proving to Will Gentry that such a thing was physically impossible,” Rourke protested.
“I only pointed out how improbable it was,” Shayne told him moodily. “But this seems to eliminate the theory that Bates was lying. Wasn’t it Sherlock Holmes who said that after you’ve eliminated the impossible, whatever remains must be the truth, no matter how improbable?”
Rourke shook his head dubiously. “That’s a pretty important item of information to hold out on Gentry.”