What Really Happened

by Brett Halliday

  Shayne climbed the winding old stairway and knocked on the door with a typed sign that read: Prentiss. Private.

  A voice said, “Come,” and Shayne entered what had obviously been a master bedroom, but now converted into the most untidy office he had ever seen. A state of confusion, it began to appear, was the natural habitat of television workers. Three desks were stacked with a litter of papers and scripts, there were two typewriter stands without typists, three filing cases with most of the drawers partially open, wadded sheets of discarded paper ankle-deep on the floor, and in the midst of it stood a bony and harassed-appearing young man talking excitedly over the phone.

  He wore faded-blue dungarees, was barefooted, and his toenails were purple with polish. The blouse that hung outside his trousers was a violent pink with green elephants and giraffes chasing each other across his chest. He was prematurely bald, had a very high forehead, and obtrusively large ears. His eyes were deep-set and brown and melancholy, and his jaw was long and bony.

  He fixed his eyes on Shayne with complete disinterest and continued to talk excitedly over the phone.

  “I don’t give a green gumdrop what you think about it, darling. I’m telling you that scene stunk up the place and we had to call in fumigators. And it’s out.” He waved a thin hand in the air while he listened for a moment, then said, “And nuts to you, sweetheart.” He hung up, and in the same breath asked, “Who are you?”

  “Mike Shayne. Are you Prentiss?”

  “Certainly I’m Prentiss.” Obviously, Shayne’s name meant nothing to him. He turned and shuffled on bare feet through a litter of wadded paper and sat down at one of the desks with his back toward the detective. He rested his elbows on the desk and buried his face in his hands.

  Shayne took a cigarette from the pack in his breast pocket, and the scratching of a match sounded loud in the quiet room. The assistant director continued to sit with his back turned, his face buried in his thin palms, and did not move or speak.

  Shayne shuffled forward in the litter and eased one hip onto a corner of a desk a couple of feet from Prentiss, and said, “The name is Michael Shayne. I want—”

  “Shut up, for the love of God!” Prentiss jerked his head up and stared at the redhead. “Can’t you see I’m concentrating? What was that—Michael Shayne, did you say? That’s a detective, isn’t it? Like Nero Wolfe?”

  “Only different,” Shayne agreed. He took a long drag on his cigarette and asked, “Where did you hear I was starting a radio program?”

  “That’s it!” He snapped his bony fingers, then pressed a palm hard against his elongated forehead. “You’re real, aren’t you? Sure. Mike Shayne! Hard-fisted, cognac-drinking private eye here in Miami. Why shouldn’t you have a radio program if you want it? God knows one more on the air won’t make any difference.”

  “Where did you hear about it?” Shayne repeated patiently.

  Harold Prentiss stared at him for a moment, then leaned back and lifted one bare foot to rest it on the edge of the desk. He wriggled his purple-tipped toes and said in disgust, “Isn’t that a hell of a shade? I ordered magenta, damn it.”

  Shayne leaned forward and slapped him. The force of his open palm slewed Prentiss sideways and his foot slid from the desk. He recovered his balance, stood up, and said seriously, “Why did you do that?”

  “Cut the posing,” Shayne growled, “and answer my question.”

  “What did you ask me?” He seemed honestly puzzled.

  “Where you got your information about a Michael Shayne radio program?”

  “Oh—that.” Prentiss waved both hands vaguely. “Someone must have told me.” He cocked his head on one side and narrowed his sad brown eyes. “You’ll play yourself, of course. It’s a terrific idea. Stupendous. On TV you’ll slay them.”

  Shayne grated, “Sit down and shut up.”

  Prentiss sat down and shut up.

  “You can answer my question,” Shayne told him, “or you can tell the police.”

  “I don’t—think—I—understand,” the assistant director said, frowning.

  “I’m investigating a murder. Two murders. And it may be pertinent.”

  “Why come to me?” Prentiss dropped his exaggerated façade of preoccupation and became composed and businesslike.

  “Because you telephoned an actress named Muriel Davidson this morning and advised her to apply for a part in such a show. I want to know where the rumor started.”

  “Who knows where any rumor starts? You can’t keep a thing like that a secret. Not in this business.”

  “There has to be some foundation, and there isn’t any to this.”

  “There isn’t?” Prentiss frowned thoughtfully.

  “None whatever. So, someone started it. Who?”

  “God, I don’t know where I did hear it. One of those things you pick up—”

  “That’s a lie,” Shayne interrupted in a mild voice. “You wouldn’t have been so insistent that Muriel promise not to reveal her source of information if it was just something you had picked out of the air. I want to know where you got it.”

  “I see.” Prentiss sighed and compressed his thin lips. He drummed his finger tips on the desk, and asked with downcast eyes, “You say it may be important in a murder investigation?”

  “Yes.”

  “I was afraid of that,” he acknowledged. He sighed again, and said bitterly, “I was a fool to tell Muriel. But I’ve been trying to make her for three weeks without getting to first base, and I thought she might be properly grateful for the tip. The crazy things a man will do when his chromosomes get impatient.”

  Shayne said, “I’m waiting.”

  “It was a girl named Helen Taylor. When I heard on the radio this morning that she had died last night and the police wanted to know where she had been between eight-thirty and midnight, I knew I’d be a fool to involve myself. So I didn’t. I kept my mouth shut.”

  “Keep it open now,” Shayne advised him.

  “Yeh.” Harold Prentiss lifted his thin shoulders in a gesture of futility. “I took Helen to dinner. That’s all. I took her home afterward and kissed her good night in a brotherly fashion in that horrible lobby of her hotel because she wasn’t feeling well and didn’t want me to come up. That’s absodamnlutely all.”

  “Where did you have dinner?”

  “At the Palm Villa. She met me there a little after eight-thirty, and I sent her upstairs to bed about ten o’clock.”

  “But she felt ill after dinner?”

  Prentiss nodded emphatically. “She’d had a drink or two before I met her and was a little high. Then she got a tummyache. She thought it was the liquor on an empty stomach and then the heavy meal. Maybe it was.”

  “Do you know where she had her drinks?”

  “No. I didn’t ask. She was celebrating, you see, because she had just landed a new job.”

  “What sort of job?” Shayne demanded.

  “In a radio show. She wouldn’t tell me anything about it. Said it was a big secret, so I didn’t press her. Then, while we were eating dinner she began asking me if I’d ever heard of Michael Shayne. I said I had, and what about you? Then she got confused and tried to cover up, pretending it was just idle curiosity, but when I kept after her she asked me what I thought about a radio program featuring you in person and your exploits.

  “So, I said it sounded wonderful and that she’d be damned lucky if she could land the lead in a show like that. She denied that was what she had been talking about, but I thought I could read between the lines and was pretty sure it was, and she had been told not to talk about it. When I heard she was dead this morning. I thought what the hell, it was a chance for Muriel to get an inside track, and I called her.”

  “Let me get this straight,” said Shayne. “First, Helen told you she was celebrating because she had landed a new job and refused to tell you what it was. Later, she began talking about me, and when you pressed her to give a reason for her interest, she finally admitted she had heard
someone was going to do a program featuring me. Is that the sequence?”

  “Yes. As nearly as I recall.”

  Shayne cleared a few facts in his own mind during the brief, ensuing silence. Helen Taylor had just come from Flannagan who admitted he had received Wanda’s letter at seven. True, the radio director denied having discussed the letter with anyone, but there was always the possibility that he might have left it lying around where a curious visitor might pick it up.

  “Then it’s possible,” he said slowly, “that Helen Taylor might have been interested in me and asked questions about me for some entirely different reason? Something she didn’t want to tell you, when you pressed her for a reason, it’s possible that she just made up the story about a radio show on the spur of the moment to explain her interest in me.”

  “It’s possible, I guess,” said Prentiss dubiously. “It’s the sort of explanation that might spring into her mind, and one she knew I’d accept.”

  “She didn’t actually tell you, then, that her new job was playing the lead in a mystery program?”

  “N-No. I put two and two together and came up with that. Are you serious about saying there’s nothing to this radio-program idea?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “But that’s fantastic, you know. It’s a terrific idea,” said Prentiss excitedly, waving his bony hands in the air. “It’s a natural for television. My God! You’d be colossal playing yourself. Michael Shayne in person. You’ve got the looks and the voice for it. It’s worth millions. Come here, man!” He leaped to his bare feet and trotted to another desk where he pushed papers aside to disclose a tape recording machine.

  While Shayne watched in amusement, he turned dials and started wheels turning, then picked up a small microphone and thrust it toward the detective. “Say something—anything. I’ll play it back and show you how good you are. I’ll produce the shows on film. It’ll be the biggest thing in television.”

  Shayne grinned and said, “Come back to earth. I’m a detective, not an actor. You’ll have to go to the police and make a complete statement about meeting Helen Taylor last night.”

  “That’s it!” Prentiss exulted. “That’s exactly it. You’ve got marvelous timbre and resonance.” He touched a control on the recorder and the tape whirled rapidly backward.

  Before Shayne could protest further, Prentiss turned another knob and the tape rolled forward and the detective’s voice came from the machine with startling clarity.

  “… back to earth. I’m a detective, not an actor. You’ll have to go to the police and make a complete statement about meeting Helen Taylor last night.”

  “See how well you come over,” the assistant director exclaimed. “We’re in, I tell you.”

  Shayne stepped forward and looked down at the machine. “So that’s how they work. I always thought you had to process the tape—or something. Had to have another machine to play it back on.”

  “No. That’s all there is to it. I’ll tell you what. I’ll work up a short script right away and we’ll make a real audition for you.”

  Shayne shook his head and said grimly, “Right now, you’re going down to police headquarters with me and talk to Will Gentry. Do I take you barefooted, or have you got some shoes around?”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Harold Prentiss did possess a pair of sandals. At Shayne’s insistence he reluctantly produced them from behind a door, protesting that he was needed at the studio and that it was outrageous to force a man in his position to go to police headquarters with no more relevant information than he had.

  Shayne was adamant, and escorted him firmly down the stairs, waited impatiently while Prentiss shouted to someone in the studio that he would be back shortly, then took him out to his car.

  Prentiss sat beside him in glum silence throughout the ride, and Shayne didn’t attempt to question him further. There would be plenty of questions thrown at him as soon as he admitted having taken Helen Taylor to dinner the previous evening; plenty of unpleasant suspicion focused on him for having failed to report that fact to the police.

  Shayne parked in front of the police station just across from the F.E.C. tracks. They got out together and the detective led the way in through a side door and down a hall to Will Gentry’s private office at the end. The door stood ajar and he pushed it open without knocking.

  Chief Gentry sat behind his desk chewing on the soggy butt of a cigar and frowning at a typed notation before him. He rolled his rumpled eyelids up when Shayne said, “I brought you a little present, Will. If I’d had time I would have wrapped him up in tissue paper and tied a red ribbon around his neck.”

  Gentry shifted his cigar, looked Prentiss over from his bald head to the purple toenails peeking through the sandals. “On him,” he agreed, “tissue paper and a red ribbon would look good.”

  Prentiss cleared his throat and started to speak, but Shayne intervened. “He wants to tell you about taking Helen Taylor to dinner last night. Don’t be too tough on him for not coming in sooner, because the morning paper just had a brief item about her death and didn’t mention poison. I’ve got to beat it, Will,” he went on swiftly, “and I’ve already heard his story. You turned up anything important yet?”

  “Not much.” Gentry motioned for the assistant director to sit down. “I just had this report from Detroit, but it’s not much. Just enough to show you were on the right track.” He looked down at the paper he had been studying. “Nineteen thirty-three is the only record the police have on Wanda Weatherby. Prohibition was on the way out and the rackets were busting up. In a city-wide roundup of one of the Capone mobs, a gal named Wanda Weatherby got caught in the net. No particular charge against her, and she was later released when the police doctor discovered she was going to have a baby. They have no further record of her.”

  “Was she married?” Shayne asked.

  “No record of a marriage,” rumbled the chief.

  Shayne was silently thoughtful for a moment, tugging at his left earlobe. Then he reminded the chief, “Jack Gurley first came to Miami with Capone. Was he picked up with her in Detroit?”

  “No. I checked that particularly. There’s no mention of The Lantern.”

  “Have you picked up Gurley yet?”

  “We’ve got him,” Gentry growled, “but he isn’t talking. He’s sitting right on top of his constitutional rights and demanding that we charge him with something so he can have a mouthpiece.”

  Shayne shrugged and said, “How does he explain Wanda’s letter accusing him of attempted murder?”

  “He doesn’t. He’s not talking.”

  Shayne said, “Remember I mentioned a possible connection between Wanda and pornographic movies. I understand that business has been taken over by television methods, and Prentiss may be able to give you something on that. He’s an assistant TV director.” Shayne was on his way out when he dropped that casual bit of information, and he closed the door before Gentry could ask any questions.

  In his car, Shayne backed around and headed for the News building.

  Timothy Rourke was waiting in a corner of the City Room when Shayne walked in. The reporter had a thick cardboard folder spread out on his desk and was working through a mass of newspaper clippings and jotting notations and dates on a sheet of copy paper.

  He looked up when the detective pulled a chair up beside him, and said, “I don’t know what you’re looking for on Gurley, Mike,” irritably. “This file goes back to 1936 when he first showed up in Miami on Al Capone’s payroll.”

  “I’m not sure what I want, either, Tim. But first, what about Henderson?”

  “That bastard seems to be in the clear, damn it. Tom Merkle covered the meeting last night and took shorthand notes. They show that Henderson was definitely in there pitching from about nine-thirty until close to eleven. He presided, and had to recognize the speakers and all that.”

  Shayne said, “I thought it would be that way.” He bent forward to look at the file on Gurley, and saw that Rour
ke had worked through the clips to 1942. “What have you found on The Lantern up to this point?”

  “Nothing much.” Rourke glanced at his notes. “He was first picked up in ’36 on a concealed-weapon charge. In ’38, he applied for a license to run a bar and was turned down on account of his past association with Capone. But in ’40 he was getting respectable. He went in partnership with one George Stuart in buying a gin mill on the Trail, and since there was real money involved, there were no questions asked about past associations.

  “He kept on getting respectable, and was married in ’41 to a local girl by the name of Isabelle Lancaster. They had a big wedding and went on a honeymoon cruise to South America.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Shayne sharply. “That was 1941? Just eleven years ago. Did Gurley marry a widow?”

  “I don’t think so.” Rourke leafed back through the clippings and studied an item from the society page. “No.” He read: “‘The bride is the only daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Lancaster of Coral Gables. A recent graduate of Bryn Mawr, she has been one of the prominent members of Miami’s younger set,’ blah blah blah. Doesn’t sound like a widow.”

  “Does it say Gurley is a widower?” Shayne probed. “Or have you run across any mention of him having a child?”

  “No.” Rourke leafed forward through the clippings idly, then said abruptly, “That’s right. He has got a grown daughter now, hasn’t he?”

  “She’s engaged to be married, so she must be at least eighteen,” Shayne told him.

  “Here’s something,” said Rourke, lifting another item from the society page and showing Shayne a picture of a youthful woman and a young girl of ten or twelve.

  “Mrs. J. Pierson Gurley of Coconut Grove,” he read aloud, “and stepdaughter, Janet, who has recently returned from boarding-school to make her home with her parents.”

  Shayne said quietly, “I think we’ve got what we want, Tim. You check the license bureau here and see if Gurley admitted to a previous marriage when he took out his license. And get Will Gentry on the phone.”