Nice Fillies Finish Last

CHAPTER 11

In Fort Lauderdale, Shayne dropped Domaine and Mrs. Moon at a cab stand, then found the hospital and parked.

A bosomy woman in a large hat presided at a desk in the reception room. By keeping her hat on, she showed that this wasn’t what she did for a living, in fact that she didn’t have to work at all unless she felt like it. She had a small card file, which she fingered when Shayne told her he had come to see Timothy Rourke. She said brightly, “No visitors, I’m sorry.”

“He’s seeing visitors,” Shayne said. “I talked to him on the phone a half hour ago, and he said to come over. Will you call the floor and find out?”

She gave him a quick scrutiny. Clearly he couldn’t be made to go away by pretending he wasn’t there.

“I hate to,” she said. “The nurses just about take your head off, which is funny considering that we’re only trying to help.” She picked up the phone and asked for the nurses’ station on the third floor. “Reception,” she said firmly. “An inquiry about the patient in 325, Timothy Rourke. He’s listed on my card as a No-Visitors, but someone here insists that’s a mistake.”

She listened, said, “I see,” and hung up. She reported to Shayne: “The patient’s asleep at the moment. If you’d care to take a seat, and if he wakes up before visiting hours are over-”

“Who’s his doctor?”

She glanced at the card. “Dr. Greenberg, but doctors are even harder to get hold of than nurses. You can try at the desk.”

The switchboard girl tried to locate Dr. Greenberg for him, and told him presently, “He’s not in the hospital at the moment, but if you’d take a seat-”

Shayne’s face was grim. He went back outside and around a corner to the emergency entrance, large double doors opening onto a low dock. They were marked NO ADMITTANCE. He pushed them open and walked in. Finding the fire stairs, he went up to the third floor. In 325, a private room, a heavily bandaged patient was sound asleep, propped up on two pillows and snoring peacefully. Shayne recognized his friend by his long nose, almost the only feature not covered with bandages. His hands were concealed inside great gauze mittens.

“Come on, boy, wake up,” Shayne said. “Tim!”

He shook the reporter’s shoulder. Rourke’s long snore turned into a half-growl and a whistle. He exhaled violently, making a sound like a honking goose, then the snoring resumed.

“Goddamn it!” Shayne said, shaking him hard. “Wake up!”

“Just what do you think you’re up to?” an icy voice demanded from the door.

Shayne turned. A trim, green-eyed nurse was regarding him furiously. Shayne snapped his fingers, trying to remember the name Rourke had mentioned on the phone.

“Miss Mallinson.”

“Yes, and what do you mean by barging in here and manhandling my patient?”

“I’m just trying to wake him up. What kind of shot did you give him, anyway?”

Advancing, she drove him away from the bed. After adjusting the sheet over Rourke’s chest, she listened approvingly to his snores, as though admiring their musical quality.

“He needs that sleep badly,” she said. “We didn’t have to give him anything. He fell asleep by himself.”

“I want to talk to him for a minute. He can go back to sleep afterward. He won’t object.”

He tried to get around her.

“Keep this up,” she said pleasantly, “and you’re going to hear a scream that’ll raise the hair on your head.”

“Fine. That might wake him up.”

“We have five male nurses on this floor. Together they might be able to handle you. You’re Mr. Shayne, aren’t you? Well, seriously. This kind of sudden deep sleep is the usual reaction after an accident like his. I know he was rattling away like a machine gun when you talked to him, but he was exhausted. He lost pints and pints of blood, and anybody as skinny as that doesn’t have it to spare. We persuaded him to eat something, which neutralized the alcohol, and he went off like that.” She snapped her fingers. “I was just as glad, to tell you the truth. He’d been keeping me on my toes. He’s impossible, isn’t he?”

“Didn’t the bandages slow him down?”

“Not as much as you’d think. I tried to keep out of reach, but he’s sneaky.”

She blushed slightly, and Shayne tried a different approach. “If he calls you after the bandages are off and asks you to have dinner with him, will you go?”

She evaded his eyes. “Oh, people act a certain way in the hospital, but when they get out it’s different. I don’t think he’ll call me. I’d go, certainly. I wanted to be mad at him but I couldn’t, he was so funny. And I liked the way he behaved when the doctor was sewing him up.”

Shayne absentmindedly poked a cigarette into his mouth, taking it out again when she looked at him severely. He leaned on the foot of the bed and looked at his sleeping friend.

“Tim and I have known each other a long time, Miss Mallinson. He was on a story when he got hurt. It may turn out to be a big one. He wouldn’t fall asleep in the middle of it, regardless of how much blood he’d lost, or how many stitches he’d had taken. Reporting isn’t just a business with him. It’s the way he exists.”

Suddenly, trying to explain why the Tim Rourke he knew so well couldn’t have fallen asleep at a time like this unless he had been drugged, Shayne realized what the reporter had meant when he said Dolan couldn’t have drunk wood alcohol. It wasn’t in character. Shayne’s cigarette came out again. He put it between his lips without lighting it.

“It’s more than a newspaper story,” he went on. “A friend of his has been killed. This is tied in with some harness races tonight, and if we can’t find out who did it before the races are over, I don’t think anybody ever will. When Tim talked to me on the phone, he said he had something to tell me. He knew I was on my way. He wouldn’t go to sleep when he was expecting me any minute. I mean it.”

“To my certain knowledge,” she said firmly, “he took four aspirins and nothing else. Dr. Greenberg doesn’t believe in anything but local anesthesia for minor surgery unless a patient insists, and Tim’s insisting was all in the opposite direction.”

“If that’s so, there won’t be any harm in waking him up. He talked to a man before he was hurt. I need to know what he found out. He wanted me to get him out of the hospital, but I’ll discourage that. I can see he’s in no shape to be turned loose.”

She hesitated, and Shayne went on, “And if you do yell for those male nurses, I can guarantee that Tim will be disgusted with you when he hears about it.”

“The rules say specifically-”

“Tim Rourke doesn’t believe in that kind of rules and I doubt if you really do either.”

“Well, if somebody’s been killed,” she said miserably, “I suppose that would make it an emergency. I just hope this isn’t a trick.” She turned toward the bed, adding, “Anyway, those male nurses are never around when you need them.”

She tapped the side of Rourke’s nose smartly with two fingers. “Tim. Tim Rourke. Wake up.”

His next snore broke into three snorts. His eyes stayed closed. She took his shoulders in both hands and gave him a hard shake. He groaned, and at the end of the breath it turned into another snore. She looked across the bed at Shayne.

“I know he wasn’t given anything but aspirin.”

“Your security isn’t that good. The woods around here are full of people who want him to sleep through till tomorrow.”

“You don’t seriously mean that somebody could walk in off the street-”

“I walked in off the street,” Shayne reminded her. “Nobody stopped me.”

She shook the reporter again, with her full strength. His head bounced off the pillows, but he didn’t wake up.

“I’m afraid you’re right,” she said slowly. “I think I can tell you what he wanted to talk to you about. I got him a list of nurses’ aides from the hospital auxiliary. I had to turn the pages for him because of the bandages. And he gave a loud grunt halfway through. I put the list back but I can get it again.”

“What about waking him up?”

She bit her lip, looking down at the slumbering reporter. “First we’ll have to find out what he was given. It’s going-to be hard to make Dr. Greenberg stand still long enough to listen. The conservative treatment would be to let him try to come out of it by himself, and Greenberg is the most conservative doctor on the staff. You’ll have to get a policeman to tell him it’s a murder case.”

“The cops don’t know anybody’s been murdered,” Shayne said. “If you think doctors are hard to convince, you ought to try cops sometime. First, I need some more facts.”

There was a sound at the door.

“Sorry,” a woman’s voice said. “I just wanted the tray.”

Shayne swung around, recognizing the voice. Claire Domaine, in a blue nurse’s aide uniform, was in the doorway. Her hand went to her throat when she saw Shayne. Her eyes jumped from his face to the tray on the table beside the bed. They jumped back to Shayne at once and past him, but that quick involuntary movement had already told him why his friend Rourke was so determined not to wake up.