He paused and cleared his throat, looking around the room as if trying to pick out someone. At one of the up-front tables Skinny Simon stirred restlessly and drank from his water glass.
“I’m going to tell you something now that I’ve never told anyone before in my life. Something that is unknown to the television audience, although I hardly expect it will remain a secret after I reveal it here tonight. I’m going to tell you about two boys, or young men, if you will, alone in the world of some twenty-two years ago. You remember that time—it was soon after the war. A lot of people were mixed up. I was among them. We were both among them.
“It was my friend who got me interested in mystery reading, really. He was a great fan of Graham Greene, and this, if you will remember, was the period just after the publication of Greene’s most noteworthy entertainments. He got me reading these books and his tales of suspense and intrigue and crime were the gateway for me to the world of mystery.
“I want to tell you about my friend—about me—and about what we did one summer day back in 1947…”
And then it happened, before Barney’s startled eyes.
He had reached over to retrieve the Raven, which he’d set among the other awards not yet claimed. He was clutching it, half-turning back toward Ross Craigthorn, when the roar of a gunshot filled the room. He saw the flame leap. He saw it come, it seemed, from the microphone itself, saw it tear into Ross Craigthorn’s face and hurl him backward on the raised dais.
Craigthorn staggered, blood already coming from his face and mouth—began, to twist, falling against the table. Then he went down, hitting the floor hard. Women were screaming. Men were running toward the platform. The room was in chaos.
Barney Hamet bent over, trying to do something, anything. Betty was at his side; trembling.
“Betty, call an ambulance!” he shouted. “Call someone! Quickly!”
“What happened? What happened?”
“Call someone!”
Then he realised that Susan Veldt was also there, pushing through the others, getting to him. “Is he alive?”
For answer, Ross Craigthorn lifted his hand, tried to speak, but only blood came from his mouth where the bullet had entered. His eyes glazed, and in one last desperate lunging effort, he tore at the Raven statuette in Barney Hamet’s hand—tore it free and shattered it on the floor of the podium.
Barney tried to speak to him. “Ross! Who did it? What …?”
But there was only more blood, and the life that had remained dribbled fearfully away. The eyes continued to glaze and suddenly were staring at the ceiling. His body lurched, then was still.
Ross Craigthorn had lived for less than one minute after the bullet tore into his mouth. Now he was dead.
Somewhere in the room, before three hundred mystery writers and editors, a murderer had struck unseen.
The police came—a brusque detective named George, along with photographers and fingerprint experts and all the others. They came and examined the body and listened to the witness and took down names and photographed angles and got approximately nowhere.
It was Barney who remembered the microphone and, examining it, noticed what he had seen without noticing earlier—the slim metal tube that was wired to the side of the mike. It was a tube about six inches long, with an empty cartridge inside, and from its back ran two thin copper wires that disappeared into the podium itself. Barney followed the wires down and found a small transistorised unit of some sort inside. He didn’t know exactly what it was, but one of the detectives identified it at once.
“Part of one of these two-way citizens’ radios. It’s a receiving unit actually, set to receive a radio signal.”
“A radio signal?” Barney repeated.
By now they were examining the tube and the cartridge. Detective George grunted. “Order the entire thing removed to the back room for further study before being taken to headquarters.”
“What do you make of it?” Barney asked.
“Never saw anything like it in my life,” the detective told him. He was a big man, with wild hair and a rumpled business suit He didn’t look like a detective, but then he didn’t really look like anything else, either.
“This part is just a tube, like they use in zip guns. Basically, the thing is an electrified, radio-controlled zip gun. The cartridge … I’d guess it to be a .38—was placed down at the end of this little tube. Some wires were run, and tiny holes drilled right through the cartridge to connect the wires directly with the powder charge. A gap was left between them, enough gap for a spark. When the radio receiving unit was activated, the spark jumped across these terminals, set off the powder charge and propelled the bullet up the tube and out Very inaccurate, of course. It wouldn’t be good at more than five or ten feet, but that’s all the distance needed to kill a man here. Naturally he had his face toward the microphone. In this instance he had his mouth right in front of it while he was talking.”
“But … what does it mean? Who set the thing off?” Barney asked.
The detective sighed. “Someone with a unit like this in his possession. It could be hidden in a woman’s purse, in a suitcoat pocket, carried almost in the palm of a hand. It would be set to transmit a single signal. When a button was pressed, or a knob turned, it sent its signal and fired the bullet. A very ingenious device, and fairly simple to build.”
Barney could still not quite comprehend. “How close would the man have to be to do this?”
“I would guess a few hundred yards. Certainly anyone in this ballroom could have done it.”
“Can you search them?”
But already that seemed hopeless. The guests were scattered. There were some women in the ladies room, sobbing and hysterical. There was plenty of opportunity for the killer to dispose of his incriminating electronic gear before the police arrived.
“I want the names of everyone here,” Detective George said.
“Easy.” Barney handed him a list. “There they are. Exactly 303 of them. All you’ll need after that are the waiters. I don’t know if there was a hotel banquet manager here or not. We had a photographer, too. You’d better get his name.”
“Right.”
Barney wandered off as if in a daze. Max Winters came running up to him. “This is terrible! Terrible, Barney!”
“You’re telling me! I can imagine the headlines tomorrow.” He fumbled for a cigarette. “By the way, Max, you would have been the big winner tonight. Congratulations of a sort, I guess.”
Max gave a sardonic laugh. “Thanks. I’ll pick up my Edgar.”
Susan Veldt was there too, and Barney saw rather than comprehended the notebook full of quickly-jotted shorthand that she’d been taking down.
“Barney … What are you going to do?”
“What do you mean?”
“Do they know who did it? Do they know anything at all?”
“They know nothing—except that it was a cleverly-planned crime. A bullet inside a tube, set off by a radio signal from somewhere in this room. All the killer had to do was walk in here this afternoon and tape it to the microphone, and probably nobody noticed him. Or if they did, they didn’t pay any attention to him. He just put the receiving unit inside the rostrum, attached the wires, and left. The whole thing would take maybe two minutes at the most—probably less. Sure, the wires were visible. The tube was visible. But who was to notice? The only person that would probably have thought it was suspicious would have been an engineer or a loudspeaker expert. Even Craigthorn wouldn’t have noticed—they use boom mikes on television. I looked at the thing myself, probably saw it, and never paid any attention to it. You see a couple of extra wires—even a tube attached to the microphone—and you don’t think anything of it. Some sort of crazy new electronic gear.”
“It’s awful, Barney!”
“Murder always is.”
“Let’s go somewhere for coffee.”
“I’ve got to see the directors. All hell’s going to break out around MWA headquarters. Th
anks much, but I’ll take a raincheque.”
“All right,” she said.
“I’ll call you tomorrow.”
He latched onto Max Winters and then hurried on in search of the others. He knew it was going to be a long night. “Betty, who else is here among the directors? See who you can round up.”
“Right. I’ll do the best I can.”
Dick McMullen, the agent, came up to him then. “Barney, is there anything I can do?”
“No. Just stand by. That’s what I’m telling everybody. It’s a hell of a night. I’ve got to get the directors together and decide what we’re going to do.”
8 Susan Veldt
THOUGH THE NEXT MORNING was Saturday, Susan Veldt was at the offices of Manhattan before nine o’clock. She was not surprised to find Arthur Rowe already there, working over proofs for next week’s issue. With a weekly magazine that had to make a news-stand appearance every Wednesday and reach the printers on Sunday, a great deal of last-minute work was done on Saturday. She knew that Arthur Rowe worked every Saturday, often far into the night, correcting proofs, juggling articles, to fit, and generally giving each issue the slick appearance that made it all look so easy.
“How are you?” she asked, pausing at the door of his office.
“Sue! My God, Sue! Come in here and tell me all about it! What happened? What happened there? Where were you? How close were you to it? Did you see him get shot? Tell me all about it!”
She picked out her favourite chair, a comfortable leather-covered one, with brass-studded nails she could run her fingers over. Often the sessions in Arthur Rowe’s office lasted for hours, and it gave her something to do. This morning, though, she was eager to talk. The night before had been an experience, not just because it was the first time she’d ever seen anyone murdered, but because, happening where it did in the midst of all those celebrities, it had taken on the aspects of a thunderbolt. It was as if she had seen an act of God. A bullet fired without any hand on a trigger.
She ran quickly over the night’s events, recounting them in detail, as Rowe made occasional notes on his pad. He chomped so tightly on the pipe that she thought he might bite it through. Finally he took it from his mouth and placed it in the overflowing ashtray.
“Sue, we’ve got something here I We’ve got something damn big! And I’m not going to let it get away from us. There are murders every day in Manhattan, but this murder is going to make our magazine.”
“What do you mean, Chief?”
“This is what I mean! We have Ross Craigthorn, one of the most popular, best-known television personalities in the country, murdered in sight of three hundred people. And those people were not just anybody. Those people were mystery writers, mystery editors, agents. It’s their job to tantalise the public with the solving of crimes—to create detectives, and murderers, and all the rest. Don’t you see? What will happen now? Will the Mystery Writers of America band together to solve this murder in their midst? And if they do, or if they don’t, we’ve got a story either way. Just think of it … MWA helpless before murder at awards dinner. Or MWA sets out to capture killer on its own. Either they find him, or they don’t. And either way, we’ve got the story of the year! You can write it as satire, or black comedy, or any way you want—but we’ve got a great story!”
Susan Veldt looked dubious. “Are you turning Manhattan into a true-crime magazine, Chief?”
“I’m turning it into whatever this town of ours is, Sue. Some weeks it’s tragedy—other weeks it’s humour. This week we’ve got a murder, and I think it’s going to last us for a good many weeks. From what you’ve told me about this deadly little device, our killer was an amateur. In fact, he sounds like a mystery writer himself, to dream up an infernal machine like that.”
“All right,” she said. “I’m convinced. What do you want me to do?”
“What’s that guy’s name? The guy you were with last night?”
“Barney Hamet.”
“Tell me something about him.”
“It’s in my first article, resting in your In box, if you ever get around to looking at your In box.”
He shuffled through some papers until he found it “It’s too long to read now. Tell me about it anyway.”
“He’s a sometime writer. For a while he was a private detective. Now he’s executive vice-president of MWA.”
“What about his personal life? Married?”
“Single, now. I think he was divorced.”
“Good looking guy? Go for a girl like you?”
She ran a casual hand over her nylons. “I guess.”
“Fine. Stick to him. He’s going to be your meal ticket. I want to know everything that MWA does on this case. I want to know if they’re going to leave it in the police hands, if they’re going to try to find the killer themselves, if they’re going to just try and shovel it under the rug. Whatever they do, you go with them and find out, and keep that typewriter hot. We’re going to have the story of the year! This is the kind of thing Manhattan was made for!”
“Do you really think it’s fair to be satirical about a man’s murder? Don’t you think the public might object to us making fun of one more bit of violence?”
“We’re not making fun of the violence. We’re not making fun of Ross Craigthorn. We only might have a little fun at the expense of MWA. That is, if they decide to play detective and make a botch of it.”
“All right,” she sighed. “I guess you know best.”
“That’s why I’m the editor.”
“What about the rest of the series? We’ve got the Pulitzer awards coming up the first week in May.”
He thought for a moment, then snapped back, “Put someone else on it! You stay on this mystery writers’ thing!”
“Right, Chief.”
9 Barney Hamet
MWA HEADQUARTERS WAS A scene of saddened energy at three o’clock Saturday afternoon. It was the hour for the regular directors’ meeting, and though there had been some talk of cancelling or postponing it, Barney had finally decided that it must be held. There were just so many things to be gone over—statements to the press, letters to members, an article to be written for next month’s Third Degree, the MWA house organ.
“All right,” Barney said. “So we’ve got ourselves a murder. A front-page murder at that. You people have seen the Times and the News. The Post this afternoon plays it up big too. We’re on the spot. A famous person has been killed at our awards dinner and you know where that leaves us? Right behind the eight-ball! The whole thing makes us look foolish. It wasn’t as if he had just been shot or stabbed. He had to be killed with some crazy device that looks like it was dreamed up by a mystery writer.” He looked down the table to where Betty Rafferty sat making quick shorthand notes. “Betty, you were as close to him as I was. Did you see anything?”
“Not a thing, Barney … except how he took that Raven out of your hand and smashed it. We’ll have to get you a new one.”
“I’m not worried about that right now. I’m mainly worried about why he did it.”
“A dying message …” Max Winters said, giving words to the obvious.
“Sure. A dying message.” Barney sighed and looked down, scratching his head. “Don’t think I haven’t given it a lot of concentration. I even called Fred Dannay up in Larchmont this morning.” (Dannay was one half of the Ellery Queen writing combination, and a number of his plots, especially in the short-short length, had concerned dying messages.) “I called Fred and talked to him for half an hour. We discussed the thing up and down. He agrees it was a dying message of some sort, but he’s as puzzled by it as the rest of us. Raven—bird—maybe some other bird. Maybe the killer’s name has a bird in it. There was no other bird around except for the Raven’s statue, so he grabbed for the closest thing handy. There are a dozen explanations and we’ve got nothing to go on.”
Betty Rafferty spoke up from the end of the table. “I’ve gone through the entire guest list. There’s not a bird among them.”<
br />
Harry Fox was not formally part of the board of directors, but he often dropped in on meetings, and he sat near the makeshift bar now, voicing occasional comments. “I’m a Fox. That’s an animal. Does that help any?”
“Afraid not,” Barney said.
“What do we do?” Someone else asked. “Let’s cut the chatter and get down to business.”
What they did for the next half hour was listen to opinions—from Jim Reach and Chris Steinbrunner, Gloria Amoury and Aaron Marc Stein. The sum of it was that nobody knew exactly what to do. They all agreed that MWA had to come out of it looking good. There was too much at stake in the organisation’s prestige.
“The thing to do is check all the names on that seating list,” Harry Fox said. “Every one of them. Find out how much they knew about Craigthorn. Maybe we’ll turn up a bitter enemy first time out.”
Barney nodded in agreement. “I’m going to ask you all to work on this with me. I’m going to give you a few names each and start you digging.”
“One thing,” Max said. “Barney, you’re a detective. You were a licensed private eye for a good many years, and you’re known as such. I think MWA should hire you formally, or informally, to investigate Craigthorn’s murder.”
“I haven’t been a detective for years, Max. You know that.”
“But you can get back into the swing of things. Look, Barney, you’re the logical one. A lot of mystery writers running off half-cocked aren’t going to get anywhere. You know the sort of things that we need to find. If you don’t find them, okay, but nobody can criticise us if we have you looking for them.”
“What about that girl?” Betty Rafferty asked. “Is she going to make trouble? The writer from Manhattan magazine?”
Barney had forgotten Susan Veldt for the moment. “I don’t know. What do you want me to do with her? Take her to bed with me?”
The Shattered Raven Page 5
