Brett Halliday - Nice Fillies Finish Last

“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.

Shayne looked at the tray. There were two stale pieces of buttered toast on it, sliced into triangles. A plastic yellow soup bowl was half-filled with a dark clear soup, probably bouillon. There was an empty cup and a metal teapot. As far as Shayne knew, Rourke had never drunk tea in his life. That left the bouillon.

Shayne stepped in front of the tray as Mrs. Domaine started for it.

“Call Dr. Greenberg,” he said to Miss Mallinson. “And who’s the head of the hospital? Get him in here fast.”

There was a partially filled aspirin bottle on a side table. He poured out the tablets, rinsed the bottle with stale water from the carafe on Rourke’s bedside table, and carefully filled it with soup from the plastic bowl. Miss Mallinson watched incredulously.

“You mean she put something in the food?”

“We’re going to analyze it and find out.”

Mrs. Domaine gave a kind of shudder, her shoulders rigid. She said in a small voice, without looking at Shayne, “Can I talk to you?”

“You not only can,” the detective said, putting the bottle in his shirt pocket, “you have to. You also have to start telling the truth. You’re in a jam, Mrs. Domaine, and it’s not the kind of jam you can get out of by spending some of your husband’s money.”

“Everything I told you was the truth.”

Shayne snorted. “It was like hell. What did you give him? If it was anything serious, you’d better not waste any time.”

“It wasn’t lethal, for heaven’s sake!” There was a note of irritation in her voice. “I used a few sleeping pills. It was a barbiturate, but mild, and he didn’t drink much. He may have a headachy feeling when he wakes up, but that’s all.”

Miss Mallinson cried, “You don’t think you’re going to get away with this, do you?”

“There’s only one way she can get away with it,” Shayne said. “That’s by changing her clothes and coming out with me and explaining various things.”

“I won’t be through for another hour,” Mrs. Domaine said.

“You’re through now. In fact, you’re through at the hospital. You’ll have to find another way to spend your afternoons. Miss Mallinson will see to that. Meet me in the parking lot in five minutes. Five, not five and a half.”

She gave him a frightened look. When she was gone, Miss Mallinson said urgently, “How do we know she wasn’t lying? What if she really gave him something stronger?”

Rourke was smiling in his sleep, as though he was dreaming about something pleasant.

“She couldn’t risk lying,” Shayne said. “It would be different if she’d been able to wash the bowl. This way we have her and she knows it.”