What Really Happened

by Brett Halliday

  “Maybe a lot of things,” Shayne told him evenly. “Sit down and listen and you’ll find out. Are your wife and daughter still visiting her fiancé in Nashville?” he added pleasantly.

  Gurley doubled both fists and his square jaw jutted belligerently. “You keep my wife and daughter out of this. They’ve got nothing, by God, to do with—”

  Chief Gentry was out of his chair and standing in front of Gurley. He gave The Lantern a shove, and growled, “Sit down and shut up.”

  There was a buzz of static from the radio and the unintelligible words and bits of music as Flannagan turned the dial to center it on the right station. Then he stopped when Crosby’s crooning voice filled the room with “A White Christmas.”

  “That must be it,” he said. “It’s right on the setting you gave me.”

  “Thanks. We should get a station identification in about sixty seconds.”

  Harold Prentiss, who had entered the room quietly on sandaled feet, touched Shayne’s arm. The redhead wheeled about and said, “You got here just in time. Meet our host, Ralph Flannagan. Harold Prentiss. You two have a lot in common, including the fact that you were the last people who are known to have seen Helen Taylor shortly before she died last night.”

  The two men nodded briefly and guardedly, and Flannagan turned back to the radio and tuned the volume higher as the crooner’s song ended and an announcer came on with a commercial.

  Shayne stepped back to the archway and leaned negligently against the frame where he had an unobstructed view of each person in the room. They were all sitting or standing, tense and listening, with various degrees of puzzlement and worry and curiosity depicted on their faces.

  The commercial ended and a voice said, “This is your friendly voice for Mutual in Nashville, WMAK, with studios in the historic Maxwell House. Stay tuned to thirteen hundred on your dial for the tops in local and network shows.”

  Then there was a clash of cymbals and another voice declaimed dramatically, “What … really … happened? How often have you asked yourself that question after reading a news account of some dramatic occurrence in your daily paper? How often have you put the paper aside and said to yourself, ‘That’s all very well so far as it goes—but I wonder what really happened?’

  “Tonight we bring you another story behind the news. What … really … happened brings you each week a person who made the morning headlines—to tell you in his or her own words what really did happen.

  “On our nationwide première last week you will recall that we brought to our microphone a man who had been acquitted of murder less than twenty-four hours previously by a jury of his peers. Sitting comfortably in your homes, you heard him relate for the first time: What … really … happened. You heard the startling confession of guilt from the lips of a man whom the law had adjudged innocent—a man who is protected by our laws from being prosecuted again for his crime; yet he confessed his guilt openly and without remorse to a million listeners.

  “Tonight, we bring you a no less startling revelation. The story of what … really … happened in Miami, Florida last night. Standing beside me in this studio is the one woman in the world who knows the true story—and who, in a moment, is going to tell you what … really … happened.

  “Did you read it? Was it headlined in your newspaper? It happened in Miami, Florida. Wanda Weatherby was shot to death last night under mysterious and baffling circumstances. The police were without clues, you read, lacking any semblance of a motive for the cold-blooded crime, and with no suspects.

  “You were told only that Wanda Weatherby died in her living-room with a rifle bullet in her head that had been fired by an unknown assassin lurking in the darkness of the night outside her open window. How many of you read the story and wondered: What … really … happened?

  “Tonight you will hear exactly that—the true story behind this morning’s headline—the most startling and dramatic revelation that has yet been made on the air.

  “This is not a transcription. No portion of this program is recorded. The voice you are about to hear is that of a real person who is now waiting at the microphone to speak.

  “Tonight: What … really … happened, brings you not the perpetrator of a murder confessing his crime, not a fugitive from justice, but a fugitive from death. Tonight we bring you Wanda Weatherby herself to tell you in her own words what really happened in Miami last night. After a few words on behalf of our sponsor, Camel cigarettes, you will hear Wanda Weatherby’s own voice.”

  “No! My God, no!” Ralph Flannagan jerked the words out wildly, staring at the radio with bulging eyes, his features twisted in a mask of desperation and fear and insanity.

  “It was Wanda,” he raved in a strangled declaration. “I saw her through the window. I know it was Wanda!” He whirled around, white-faced and trembling, froth forming on his lips. “Shut it off!” he screamed hysterically. “It’s not Wanda! It couldn’t be! There’s—some—mistake—” He collapsed slowly to the floor, gibbering incoherently and sobbing, while a deep-toned voice extolled the virtues of Camel cigarettes over his radio.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Shayne stepped over Flannagan and turned off the radio, turned to Gentry and said, “There you are, Will. With several witnesses to his confession.”

  “But you’re crazy, Mike,” Rourke protested angrily. “You know Ralph has an alibi. I don’t care what you say, I have to give him one myself.”

  “Why did you shut that program off?” Gentry demanded. “My God, I want to hear it whether you do or not. If they’ve got Wanda Weatherby in that studio, who the hell was murdered?” The police chief was standing, his agate eyes cold, and jabbing a soggy cigar at the detective.

  “Wanda Weatherby is dead,” Shayne told him flatly. He nudged Flannagan’s groveling body with his toe and said gruffly, “Get up and tell us why you killed Wanda and Helen Taylor.”

  “Hold it, Mike,” Gentry rumbled angrily. “If the Weatherby woman is dead, why does a Nashville radio station announce she’s coming on to tell a story?”

  “Yeh,” said Rourke, “and sponsored by a legitimate outfit like Camel. Turn it on and let’s hear—”

  Confusion grew in the room, with everyone muttering opinions and making demands upon the rangy redhead for explanations.

  Shayne leaned close to Gentry and muttered, “Order some quiet, Will, so I can give you the lowdown and prove I’m right.” He turned to Rourke and said, “Give me a hand getting your pal off the floor and into a chair.”

  Gentry roared, “Quiet—and sit down,” while the detective and the reporter dragged Ralph Flannagan from his prone position and dumped him on the couch. Gentry resumed his seat and chewed on the soggy butt of his cigar.

  Shayne stood before them and said, “The Camel advertisement actually did the trick. You see, a radio sponsor is so sacrosanct to Ralph Flannagan that he couldn’t conceive of any trickery behind their commercial. That, coupled with the fact that it was his own radio, tuned in by himself and with no wires connected from the outside—it had to be an actual broadcast.

  “That’s why I tried it here in his apartment—so he would know it was a regular broadcast.” He paused and turned to Harold Prentiss, grinned approvingly, and added, “You put on a damned good show. I began wondering whether it was real myself.”

  “I—I—” the assistant director began, but his Adam’s apple seemed to catch in his throat, and before he could find his voice Ralph Flannagan dragged himself up from his slumped position on the couch and muttered:

  “Don’t know what got into me. Just went to pieces. I didn’t mean—”

  “You meant it, all right,” Shayne broke in harshly. “Sure, you went to pieces when they said Wanda was there ready to start talking. Because you knew damned well she wasn’t. But you thought maybe someone else was there that had seen you and knew the whole story. Like you confessed, you saw her through that window last night when you shot her.”

  “I didn’t say that!” Flannagan
raged. “I tell you I was all mixed up.”

  “You said it and meant it.” Shayne turned to Rourke and went on in a tone of deep disgust, “Hell, Tim, you and I were both suckers to fall for his alibi. He planned it that way—to use both of us to alibi him.”

  “I don’t get it. I was right here.”

  “Look—here’s how he worked it. I got a frantic telephone call at ten o’clock from a woman saying she was Wanda Weatherby and begging me to come over in a hurry. She hung up fast—before I could ask her any questions. Ralph Flannagan made that call while you were right here in this room reading the carbon of the letter Wanda mailed to me. Remember what you told me last night?”

  “About what?”

  “That Flannagan was just getting dressed after a bath when you got here, and went back to finish after giving you the letter to read.

  “That’s when he made the call. From his bedroom. He had just shot Wanda Weatherby and hurried back here to meet you on schedule—and to telephone me to establish his perfect alibi.”

  “He phoned you, Mike? Impersonating a woman—and you didn’t catch on?”

  “He placed the call, all right,” Shayne explained soberly, “but a woman spoke Wanda’s lines. After receiving her letter saying she hadn’t been able to reach me by telephone, Flannagan knew that I had never heard her voice. He knew, too, that I had never heard Helen Taylor’s voice, and he hoped to fix things so I never would. He sent her away from here with a slug of strychnine in her stomach that he expected would kill her before she learned about Wanda’s death and began to add up the score.”

  “You say it was the Taylor girl who phoned you at ten o’clock?” Gentry interjected. “Prentiss, here, claims he was telling her good night at her hotel at ten.”

  “That’s correct. You see, the voice I heard over the telephone was a recording Helen made right here in this apartment, before she imbibed a couple of cocktails loaded with poison. I should have caught on as soon as I saw the recorder in Flannagan’s office—standing close to the telephone—and when he told me he used it to record auditions. But I didn’t know so much about the gadgets as I do now. I didn’t realize you could record a scene like that on wire or tape, stand there with your hand on the switch ready for it to start talking into the telephone the instant someone on the other end answers the phone, and let it keep talking straight through, then break off and hang up.”

  “Wait a minute, Mike,” Rourke protested. “You told me about the call and you said you interrupted once and she answered you. That couldn’t have been anticipated in advance and recorded. Even Flannagan couldn’t have figured out what you would ask and make her answer fit perfectly.”

  “Flannagan is a radio producer,” Shayne reminded him. “That was a smart quirk, and it had me stymied for a long time. I know now that he had her pause to catch her breath, and that’s when I asked, ‘What are you afraid of?’ And she came in fast, saying, ‘Please don’t interrupt me.’ Hell, that would have been the perfect answer to anything I might have said. Yet, it gave the definite implication that I was carrying on an actual conversation instead of listening to a recording.

  “There were a dozen clues pointing to the truth,” he went on impatiently, “if we had only recognized them. Helen Taylor came here at eight for an audition, after Flannagan gave her a song and dance about a new radio program starring Michael Shayne, and swore her to secrecy. He prepared a script in which she called herself Wanda Weatherby and talked excitedly to Shayne over the telephone. They rehearsed it, made a recording, and he told her she was just right for the lead in the new series. Then they celebrated her success with cocktails, and she went away happy in the belief that she had landed a longtime job.

  “Afterward, she had dinner with Prentiss while she was still happy about her good luck, and partially spilled the truth, so she believed, to him. Then she began to feel sick. He took her home, and she must have turned on her radio and heard the news flash of Wanda’s death at eleven-thirty. She realized at once that she had been duped, and kept trying to tell her roommate, but was too far gone to do more than mutter my name and Wanda Weatherby’s. Even with all that,” he ended wearily, “I didn’t begin to get the picture until this morning when Prentiss demonstrated how a tape recorder works.”

  All eyes had been upon the detective as he spoke. When he stopped, they turned to observe Ralph Flannagan. He was slumped on the couch, his face buried in his palms, and his stocky body limp and shaking.

  Rourke asked, “How the devil did you induce a radio station in Nashville to co-operate—to broadcast a complete hoax like that tonight? I know you called them long-distance this afternoon, but—”

  “I called to ask them for the exact wording they used in making a station identification,” Shayne explained. “I didn’t know but that someone in the room would be familiar with that station and spot the whole setup as a hoax.”

  “You’re still talking in riddles,” Rourke protested.

  “I told you this afternoon that a wire recorder would do almost anything except mix drinks. One of the things it does is to turn itself into a miniature broadcasting station and actually broadcast over the airwaves anything that happens to be recorded on it. It can be picked up on any radio within a radius of a couple of hundred feet if it is tuned in to the wave-length over which that particular recorder is set to broadcast.

  “Lucy has a friend in this building, so we plugged the recorder into an outlet in her apartment. Prentiss simply watched the time and started the wire running at a few minutes before eight, and then came down to see what kind of reception we were getting. We recorded everything you heard, including the last lines of a Bing Crosby song, out at Prentiss’s studio this afternoon.”

  Shayne reached in his pocket and took out two sheets of folded notepaper and handed them to Chief Gentry. “Those came in another envelope from Wanda Weatherby in a later mail. Maybe she neglected to enclose them in the envelope you saw, or maybe they were an after-thought when she realized that both Flannagan and Henderson also had a motive for killing her, as well as Gurley.”

  “I’m holding Gurley,” Gentry rumbled. “That hood of his should be able to talk tomorrow.”

  “That’s up to you and the federal boys, Will. Attacking a federal employee is out of my jurisdiction. But getting back to my case,” he hurried on, “Tim can tell you what Flannagan’s motive was. You’ll have to figure out Henderson’s reason for yourself. He thinks it’s a plot of the Communists to discredit him in his fight against public housing, but I have a crazy hunch that this picture might have something to do with it.” He took a folded 8×10 print from his pocket and handed it over to the chief.

  He had completely blacked out Sheila Martin’s face from Jed Purly’s flash photograph so that it was impossible to recognize her. Watching the chief’s face as he studied the picture, he said, “If the Commies figured that one out, we’ll have to give them credit for being smart operators. You can see they used Wanda Weatherby’s bedroom for their stage-setting.”

  Carefully avoiding Sheila Martin’s eyes, he said lightly, “And now Lucy has probably chewed her fingernails to the quick upstairs wondering how things went off, so I’ll trot along.”

  He went out the door fast, while Gentry was still looking sourly at the picture and the notes, and before he could ask embarrassing questions.

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Mike Shayne Mysteries

  CHAPTER I

  Michael Shayne’s swivel chair was slued sideways behind his office desk to accommodate the stretch of his long legs and generally slumped position. His right arm lay along the desk top, his hand conveniently near a drink of cognac. After each sip he carefully centered the glass on the plastic coaster which Lucy Hamilton had placed there to preserve the shining surface from rings. The afternoon was hot and humid; not a breath of air stirred. With his shirt sleeves rolled up and collar open he stared moodily at two rectangles of sunlight coming through the open west windows, and perspired profusely.
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  Upon renting the office on Flagler Street he made a pact with Lucy to keep regular office hours when he was not actively engaged in a case. Closing-time was near, and he had decided some time ago that sipping cognac the last few minutes was more pleasant than facing his efficient secretary’s accusation of not attending to business. He could hear the faint tapping of her typewriter through the closed door, and he grinned lazily, wondering what the devil she was finding to do.

  The typing stopped abruptly. Shayne lit a cigarette, swallowed the last of his drink, and squinted at the door through a cloud of smoke, expecting to see Lucy appear with fresh make-up and purse in hand ready to go. He looked at his watch. The time was five minutes to five.

  He had both sleeves rolled down and the cuffs buttoned when the door opened quietly, then closed again. “Quitting-time?” he muttered.

  “It’s three minutes of five,” Lucy informed him crisply, “and we have a client.”

  “Send him away,” said Shayne promptly. “Tell him it’s too late and too damned hot.”

  “Button your collar and straighten your tie—and brush the ashes off your front, Michael.” Her tone was low, yet peremptory, and her brown eyes flickered over him and over the desk critically. “You’d better put on your coat. And for goodness’ sake hide that bottle before I bring her in.”

  Shayne yanked the knot of his tie straight and said flatly, “I wouldn’t put on a coat in this heat for the Duchess of Windsor.”

  “If you weren’t so stubborn—Really, Michael.” She stepped aside to a fan mounted on a tall pedestal and flipped the switch. “You don’t have to look like a limp dishrag.”

  “All that thing does is stir up the heat,” he complained, squaring the swivel chair around and reaching out a long arm to stash the cognac bottle in a lower drawer of the steel filing-cabinet.

  Lucy took his Palm Beach jacket from the hanger and held it for him. “Hurry up. The lady is waiting.”