“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 any thing 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.”