by Noel Hynd
The spirit soared. It would kill only one of them. They were so much in love, this actress and this policeman! What would be more painful than if one lived and one died?
Oh, what terror he, Henry, would soon bring to every living soul on Nantucket! What misery! What exquisite pain!
Tim Brooks’ eyes flashed open and he bolted upright in bed.
Sweat poured from his brow.
What a horrible feeling!
The first thing he did was look at the woman sleeping next to him. Yes, she was breathing. Evenly and beautifully. He sighed in relief.
He placed a protective arm on her. In response, she snuggled closer to him.
The second thing Brooks did was move his eye around the room.
But there was nothing he could see.
As quickly as Brooks’ eyes had opened, the phantom had vanished.
Chapter Fifty-three
“How much is it worth to you,” Andrea asked with a smile. “I mean, if I told you who Henry Flaherty was, what would you do for me?”
Detective Brooks looked up from his desk. Andrea stood in the doorway to his office. She was wearing a short summer dress that was far too young for her and, to Tim Brooks’ fatigued eyes, she looked terrific in it. Andrea also knew how to read a man’s gaze.
“What?” he asked, leaning back in his chair.
“First things first,” Andrea Ward said. “May I come in?”
“Sure.” He motioned to one at the side of his desk.
She sauntered in and sat down, positioning herself across from him as provocatively as possible. Vintage Andrea: incessant banter, flirting around the point, coupled with body language that was as subtle as a punch in the nose.
It had already been a memorable Thursday morning for the Nantucket Police Department, not to mention the county prosecutor. Influenced by the fact that the attendant details of the Hughes murder had resembled that of the DiMarco murder, Eddie Lloyd’s bail had been reduced by eighty percent. His family had quickly posted a bond, secured by the equity in their home. Eddie had been released.
What troubled Tim Brooks much more, however, was the laboratory report on the ice pick that had been planted in the center of Emmet Hughes’ forehead. The only fingerprints found were Hughes’ own, leading to any of three dead ends, none of them terribly plausible.
Hughes had stabbed himself in the brain while in the process of wringing his own neck. Or second, the pick had flown through the air of its own accord and then had slammed into the front of his skull. Or third, a human killer, equipped with surgical gloves and whom no one had seen come or go, had done the deed.
Brooks knew better. But now, shortly after ten A.M., it was Andrea’s turn to contribute to his morning.
“I already told you,” Timothy said, taking up her inquiry. “I’d give you the full scoop on the story. What have you got for me?”
“Come on, Timmy,” she teased. “There must be something better than that. How important is this Henry Flaherty to you?”
“Enough to throttle you if you don’t tell me what you have.”
“Just throttle?” she asked.
“Just throttle.”
“That answers my other question. I guess you and Annette Carlson are still an item.”
He sighed. Two of the national tabloids had picked up the scent of a story on Nantucket. One had run a picture of 17 Cort Street and pronounced it the site of an “occult murder.” The other had run a similar story, but also included the “scoop” that “film-sexpot Annette Carlson” was “hiding from the police” and “bedding down with a local fireman.”
Meanwhile, both papers had reporters on the island. Brooks held Andrea in a long, cold, impatient gaze. That was her cue.
“I have a Henry Flaherty for you, Timmy,” she said. “I don’t know if it’s your man. Been dead for…” She hunched her shoulders. “Well, that’s part of the mystery. No one knows how long he’s been dead. I assume he’s dead. Born in 1907, which would make him one year older than Lyndon Johnson and no one has seen much of him lately. A hundred and three years old. Well, most people that age are dead, Timmy, even if you can’t prove it.”
He leaned forward.
“So who is he? Or who was he?”
She smiled, crossed her legs dramatically, and explained. By spending a day cruising through old newspaper clippings, telephone directories, tax listings, birth and death certificates, and police records, Andrea had found him a handful of males named Henry Flaherty. Four, in fact. One was six-years-old and currently enrolled in the Hyannis public school system. Another had operated a Chevrolet dealership in Hyannis for thirty years and was living in comfortable retirement in Florida. Andrea had even called and chatted with the man.
Another Henry Flaherty had been a librarian on Martha’s Vineyard since 1987. “Very quiet, very pleasant man,” Andrea said. He was still employed at the public library in Edgartown, if Brooks wished to talk to him. “But somehow,” Andrea said, “I don’t think he fits the profile of what you’re looking for.”
“Probably not,” Brooks conceded. “So who’s the fourth?”
“He was a New York theatrical producer in the nineteen thirties and forties,” Andrea said. “Had some very successful shows. Not the top ones of the day, but close to it. Made a lot of money in his time and left quite a fortune, more than a million dollars, when he was declared dead in nineteen fifty-three.”
Brooks knew enough to hang on Andrea’s tantalizing phraseology.
“‘Declared dead’?” he asked.
“After being missing for seven years. The legal limit.”
Part of Brooks’ mind was taking in the new information as Andrea presented it. The other part was trying to put in order what had already been received.
“Okay. Here are the odd spins,” Andrea said. “This Henry was last seen on Nantucket Island in nineteen forty-five. Disappeared here. Rumor had it that he met with some sort of foul play. There were several accounts that he was murdered. But he may have committed suicide.” She paused. “Big search for him at the time since he was an important theater man. But, as I said, no one ever found him.” She pursed her lips. “Tragic.”
“Was it?”
She sighed. “Had all the elements of a good trashy novel,” said Andrea, who’d never been able to sell her own mediocre trashy novel. “See, Henry was married to this pretty young girl named Mabel Mack. Great name, huh? Double M’s. I’ve always liked double M’s. Marilyn Monroe. Mickey Mantle. There are others.
“Yeah. Mickey Mouse, for example,” Brooks said. Tell me about Mabel Mack.”
“Mabel was his wife and one of his stars. But she drowned on this island.”
“When?”
“Nineteen forty-five.”
“Is that established? Her body was found?”
“Go over to town hall and check Nantucket’s own death records. Or take my word for it because I was already there. She went down in the tide off Surfside Beach,” Andrea said.
“Same as…”
“Bruce Markley.”
Brooks froze for a moment.
“That’s right,” she said. “Interesting geometry, isn’t it?” Andrea, as a reporter, had a religion similar to Brooks’ as a detective: when investigating a case, neither believed in the existence of coincidence.
“Put the story in chronological order, Andrea,” Brooks asked, now possessed with a newly found sense of indulgence. “Tell me what you know from the start.”
Among many other things, Andrea was a quick study. She had a sheaf of notes and never consulted them. But she poured forth the official version of long-dead events. Much of it was rumor and another chunk of it was innuendo, reported in the local press at the time. Andrea had ferreted this much out of the libraries and police records, but had also obtained a few more tidbits by fax from the theater library at New York’s Lincoln Center. Henry, after all, having been a producer, and Mabel Mack, his wife, having been an actress, both had entries. Flaherty had been a Hora
tio Alger story of the ragtime and World War I era, but somewhere along the line his tale had taken a dark turn and spun out of control.
He was an immigrant from Ireland who had traveled to New York from Cork in 1925 and set up shop as a professional stage comedian. He worked as the straight half of a “Double Irish” vaudeville act called Kearns & Flaherty. But a few days after a violent argument in 1929, Flaherty became a solo act and the popular Ed Kearns was dead.
There was a trial. Ed Kearns was an old-timer in New York and the Broadway scuttlebutt had it that Flaherty had murdered him in the latter’s Greenwich Village home. There was a high profile trial but a jury failed to convict. Amid scandal, Flaherty continued his career and morphed into a producer.
This career, according to the lengthy write-ups he received when he turned up missing in 1945, was surprisingly successful. The fact that he had ducked a murder conviction gave him something of a novelty as an act. This didn’t help in New York where the many friends of the late Ed Kearns refused to book him. But on tour across the rest of the United States, his appearance fee tripled.
On top of this, Flaherty was apparently quite a good performer for several years. He saved his money. And his success on the legitimate boards had bankrolled him for the move into stage production. There again, he succeeded.
Flaherty took traveling shows to the Catskills, Philadelphia and Boston, before returning them to New York. He met with still more success. He also met a nineteen-year-old girl named Mabel Mack in September 1941, when she auditioned for one of his productions.
Flaherty knew how to go after what he wanted. He wanted young Mabel. They were married in January of the following year.
Thereafter, details in the press were both sketchy and contradictory. Mabel enjoyed success in one of Flaherty’s shows, a revival of a Twenties show with music of the Jazz Age. But the producer himself was seen around New York with far too many other beautiful young things to suggest monogamy by both parties to the marriage.
Obviously trouble, serious trouble, brewed. Andrea smiled like the Cheshire cat. “Is this getting close to your mark at all?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
In the middle of all of this, something dawned on Tim Brooks, something buried in his subconscious which made him listen all the more intently.
He remembered Annette’s account of her first encounter with a ghost. He remembered that she said she had been dreaming about a woman on a stage… dancing to a syncopated ragtime beat… lost somewhere between the present and the 1940s.…
“Then I’ll nudge things a little closer,” Andrea said. “I’ve been digging through your own police department’s records. Ever cruise through the year nineteen forty-five, Tim?”
He shook his head.
“Try it sometime. It’ll make for interesting reading if you like characters named Henry Flaherty.”
“Come on, Andrea,” he said. “Get to it.”
She winked.
Back in 1945, she revealed, the producer Henry Flaherty had come to Nantucket with a small acting company. He put on some summer productions in Siasconset, the town at the other end of the island. His wife Mabel Mack headlined.
But one evening in July, out at Surfside, Mabel marched into the surf fully clad in her stage clothes. Or at least that was what witnesses said. It was also what the coroner agreed.
“They called it a suicide. Death by drowning. But her friends told reporters that she was depressed. Disconsolate. About what?” Andrea asked, immediately answering her own question with a shrug. “No one at the time ever revealed what the problem was. Not in anything I could find. And I doubt if there’s anyone alive anymore who’d know.”
In his mind, Brooks felt the pieces of the puzzle busily moving around, trying to take shape one second, failing to fit the next.
“The thing was, Tim,” Andrea Ward continued, “Mabel was a pretty popular girl. I don’t mean promiscuous. I mean popular. Lots of friends. On Broadway. On the theater circuits. And apparently here. On this island. So who made her so depressed? Who made her so miserable with life that she would march into the sea?”
“We both know,” Brooks deduced. “But you tell me.”
“Cherchez l’homme,” she said. “It’s always a man, isn’t it? Most of the other actors held Henry responsible. As did everyone who loved Mabel. Well, here’s where the story ends, Tim, because two days later, he disappeared. Henry Flaherty. The police at the time thought he had fled the island. But there was no record of him having left.
Needless to say, an investigation followed here on Nantucket. He was never found. Nor was his body. Seven years later, in nineteen fifty-three, he was declared legally dead.” She paused. “And that was the last time Henry Flaherty figured directly into anything theatrical or otherwise.”
Andrea smiled.
“So? What do you think?” she asked. “Like it? I do. Does it help?”
“I like it,” he admitted. “You did well.” He paused. “What about this ‘Mabel Mack’? Was that a stage name? ‘Mack’ sounds like it might have been truncated from something else. Did you happen to notice a real name?”
Andrea hadn’t noticed and the question propelled her back into her clippings. She couldn’t find an answer.
“Why do you ask?” Andrea inquired, looking up. “Got an angle?”
“Maybe.”
“Good,” she said. “Then maybe you can tie it into the final footnote to the story.”
“What’s that?”
Across Brooks’ desk she handed a copy of a clipping that had been sent to her from the theater library in New York. This item was datelined 1972 and, while it dealt with an unsubstantiated tale, lent a possible explanation to Henry Flaherty’s demise.
His demise and more. A terminally ill actor named Kenny Carkner, dying in a film industry nursing home in southern California, spun forth a strange tale two days before his death at age eighty-one. It was the type of conscience-clearing tale frequently spun on deathbeds. Mr. Carkner recalled working the straw hat theater circuits in the summer in the East during the Eisenhower era.
He remembered filling in for a two-week stand with some other actors whom he didn’t know very well at an island theater in Massachusetts. He had heard a story that had always stayed with him. There had been this young actress married to an older producer, the account went.
“A mean old Harp from County Cork,” recalled the actor, an Irishman himself. The producer’s physical and mental abuse of his wife—he both beat her and flagrantly cheated on her—had driven her deeply to depression. But only when she had fallen in love with another man, sought a divorce, and had been denied it by her outraged husband, had she totally despaired.
It was then, according to the tale the old man had told, that young Mabel Mack, walked into the surf and committed suicide. Brooks followed the deathbed tale into its final paragraphs. A bunch of the other actors got good and drunk following Mabel’s death, Carkner had said, and were set to exact their revenge upon the producer, whose name the dying actor didn’t recall three decades after the fact. They dragged him out to a field at gunpoint, the story went, intent on beating him.
A struggle followed. The gun was fired. The producer was dead and no one was really sorry about it.
But thereupon, the story took a final ghoulish turn, something that separated it from the normal amateurish homicide. It was a touch that seemed to have meant little to anyone other than lovers of the macabre across the years until now.
Panicked by what they had done, the actors made an effort to conceal their crime. They disposed of the producer’s corpse somewhere on the island. But just in case it were ever found, they wanted to make it impossible to identify.
“One of the actors had worked as a butcher as a young man,” the dying thespian said. “So it was a simple matter, I was told. They decapitated the corpse before getting rid of it. They buried the head under a local house.”
Brooks stared at this, the monstrosity of
it all sinking in as he finished reading. Apparently there had been some token investigation of the old man’s tale in 1972, when it was first told. But no one had found anything and, with all the principals long dead, no one had shown much enthusiasm for investigating further. Nor were there any specifics or, for that matter, any proof that the tale was anything more than a good creepy yarn.
But Tim Brooks raised his eyes. He knew differently. Mabel Mack and Henry Flaherty. A suicidal actress and a decapitated corpse. The perfect companion pieces for a tall, angry, malevolent, headless vision.
For several seconds there was silence in the room. Brooks stared at Andrea. She smiled.
“Well?” she asked eventually. “How did I do?”
“Great. Up until the end.”
“What did I miss?”
“That was almost the last time Henry figured into anything,” Brooks said, recalling her closing remark. “It was the last time until a month ago. That’s when Beth DiMarco died in the field past the cemetery. And that’s when Henry Flaherty came back to this island.”
Andrea looked at him blankly for several seconds.
“Didn’t get you,” she finally said. She looked down again at her notes. “Remember? I said he’d be a hundred and three years old. And that’s if they didn’t chop off his noggin.”
“Got your pad and pencil?”
She did.
“You can’t print it yet,” he said. “But in case I don’t live to the end of this case, here’s the story.”
And then he told her.
Two hours later, Brooks fit into place another piece of the puzzle.
He telephoned New York and found a young researcher at the theater library at Lincoln Center. The researcher was kind enough to go to her files and look at the earliest entries for the long-deceased Broadway ingénue who performed under the name of Mabel Mack.
As Brooks suspected, “Mack” was a stage name. The actress had been born with the less memorable and less stage-worthy moniker of Irma May Myers.
