Brett Halliday - What Really Happened

“Y-Yessir.”

“I’m the chief of police,” fumed Gentry. “I’ll be responsible.”

“But I’m Michael Shayne,” said the redhead to the confused postman. “If those letters are addressed to me, you’d better hand them over.”

“Yessir.” The man thrust the sheaf of letters into his hand and fled.

“Now, by God, Mike—” Gentry began, but Shayne cut him off coldly.

“Stop making an ass of yourself. You’ll see Wanda Weatherby’s letter if it’s here. But you’re not going to paw through the rest of my mail at the same time.”

Shayne passed the packet of mail to Lucy. “Go through them and see it you find a letter from Wanda Weatherby. Give it to me if you do.”

Timothy Rourke stood behind the two men, an interested spectator. Lucy laid the letters on her desk and began glancing through them. She studied the fourth envelope briefly and said, “Here it is,” and handed her employer the square white envelope he had mailed to himself early that morning.

Shayne studied it gravely, holding it out for Gentry to see. “Here it is. No hocus-pocus. No sleight-of-hand. No nothing. It just happens I don’t like to have a cop pawing through my mail.”

He slid his forefinger under the flap and tore it open, took out the two sheets of folded notepaper before Gentry’s eyes, and extracted the check. He glanced at the check and waved it in the air, saying cheerfully, “This explains the stub you found in Wanda’s checkbook.” He handed it to Lucy. “Better put that in the safe,” he advised, “before Will tries to grab it.”

“Keep the check,” Gentry said angrily. “I want to read her letter.”

“You shall,” Shayne soothed him, “just as soon as I finish it.” He unfolded the first sheet and glanced through it rapidly, raising his ragged red brows and grinning widely as he reached the postscript. He passed it on to Gentry, but warned, “Better get your blood pressure under control before you read the postscript.”

He unfolded the second sheet while Gentry read the first one. His expression was grim when he handed it to the chief, remarking, “Now we know how Gurley knew what was in the letter and why it was so important to keep it from reaching me. I think you’ve got a charge you can book him on, all right.”

Timothy Rourke had withdrawn, standing aside with a look of worried puzzlement on his long, thin face. Shayne grinned briefly, for the moment forgetting that the reporter knew nothing of the replacement of Wanda’s letter by this forgery, and that he believed the letter Gentry was reading was the original copy of the one she had written accusing Ralph Flannagan of planning her death.

Rourke glared and muttered sotto voce, “I thought, damn it, you were going to do something — not just hand it over to Will like that.”

Shayne shrugged and went past the reporter into his office, calling over his shoulder, “Let Tim see the letter when you’ve read it, Will.”

He went to the filing-cabinet and pulled out the second drawer, took out three paper cups, a bottle of rye, and one of cognac. He poured two cups of rye and set them on the desk, filled his own cup with cognac, and closed the cabinet as Will Gentry came in, rubbing his heavy jaw reflectively and exuding clouds of noxious smoke from a fresh cigar.

Shayne gestured to the cups and said soberly, “Let’s have a drink together and forget all this, Will. We’ve been at each other’s throats ever since last night, and I don’t like it. You’ve got to admit that I didn’t hold out on you.”

Gentry hesitated, then picked up the whisky. “I give you credit for a smart play in having Black follow the post man. That pulled Gurley into the open, and now, by God, we’ve got him.” He tossed the whisky off, sputtered, and crumpled the paper cup in his palm. “That bastard has been thumbing his nose at us for years. I never thought he’d be dumb enough to walk into a murder rap. What the hell do you suppose the Weatherby woman had on him that forced him to bump her?”

Before Shayne could answer, Rourke strode into the office beaming happily and holding the two letters in his hand. “I don’t know what kind of frame-up this is, but it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.”

“Frame-up?” asked Gentry.

“What Tim means, I think,” Shayne said casually, “is that this has all the earmarks of a phony. We know that Gurley received a copy of that letter earlier in the evening, so it would look as though he’s the one man in Miami who wouldn’t have harmed Wanda last night.”

Gentry’s agate eyes narrowed suspiciously. He sat down heavily in the cushioned chair across from the detective. “Wait a minute, now. Sure he knew about the letter. And that drove him to it. If she’d been alive this morning she meant to come to you with whatever she had on Gurley. He had to kill her before she saw you. Probably had a man planted outside her house last night and heard her telephone you to come over in a hurry. So, that was curtains for Wanda.”

Shayne wrinkled his brows thoughtfully. “I don’t know, Will.”

“Why else would he have risked hijacking the United States mail?” Gentry argued.

“Even if he didn’t kill her himself,” Shayne objected, “he knew this letter put him on one hell of a spot when he found out someone else did the job last night. That gave him practically the same motive for grabbing the mail as if he were guilty.” He swiveled back in his chair and tugged at his earlobe for a moment, then added, “I think that’s what Tim meant when he mentioned a frame-up.”

The reporter drew a chair up to the side of the desk, sank into it, and laid the letters on the table.

Chief Gentry’s cigar was dead. He leaned forward to lay it in an ash tray, then asked Shayne, “You mean to say you don’t think Wanda Weatherby wrote the letter? That someone planned to kill her and used this method of throwing suspicion on Gurley?”

Shayne said slowly, “If that check is good, Wanda must have written the covering letter. But she took the precaution of sending a carbon copy to Gurley as insurance against his harming her. It should have worked that way, but we know it didn’t.”

“Sure. But when he killed her last night,” Gentry argued, “he had his plans all made for seeing that the letter never reached you. If you hadn’t figured that move and had Black on the job,” he interposed grudgingly, “he might have succeeded. I still say it was his best bet under the circumstances. We’ll know more about that when we find out exactly why Wanda Weatherby was afraid of him.”

There was a brief silence, then Shayne said abruptly. “Tell me something. Do you know whether private stag parties at the Sportsman’s Club are sometimes enlivened with pornographic movies?”

“I wouldn’t know about that,” Gentry told him.

“I would,” Timothy Rourke said. “The answer is yes. I never attended one myself, but I know fellows who have.”

“Yeh,” Gentry said with deep disgust. “Fellows who’d swear you were a liar if we put them on a witness stand.”

“While you’re checking Wanda’s background,” Shayne broke in hastily, “see if you can find anything to indicate she’s been mixed up in that sort of thing. You might check with Detroit — all the way back to the mid-thirties on that angle. And also look for her husband in Detroit, though somehow I don’t think you’ll find one.”

“Where,” Gentry demanded, “did you get the Detroit lead if you still insist you know nothing about the woman?”

“I made that statement at eleven o’clock last night,” Shayne reminded him. “It was true at the time. I am a detective, Will, and the word means one who detects. I made it my business to learn some things about her.”