Last Seen Hitchhiking

Chapter 12

Shayne picked up his Buick where he had left it, near Holloway’s Moorish gatehouse in Coral Gables. He hit the interstate and went north at what was turning out to be his usual speed tonight, close to a hundred miles an hour. After juggling the times Rourke had given him, he had decided that he had a chance of arriving before the body was taken away. He kept his mind deliberately blank, concentrating on the road, the cars he was passing, the speedometer needle. If it was Frieda, there was nothing he could do except make the identification, and clear his calendar so he could concentrate on tracking down her killer.

He left the interstate at the West Palm interchange. He had never played on the municipal course here, but he knew how to reach it. The clubhouse was ablaze with light but cars were beginning to move out. Seeing an ambulance approaching, Shayne set his blinkers, flicked his headlights from high to low and back to high, and turned abruptly into its path.

A horn blatted. The heavy vehicle ran out on the shoulder and came to a stop with one blinking light less than a yard from Shayne’s fender. The driver came out yelling. Shayne dismounted without hurrying and stepped into the headlights.

“Are you carrying a body?”

“Yes, indeed, I’m carrying a body! And you nearly made a few more with that dumb move.”

“I want to look at her before you disappear.”

Other cars jammed up behind the ambulance, and a crowd gathered quickly. The top-ranking cop on the scene was a homicide lieutenant named Harmon. Shayne explained: he was trying to find a missing woman, and it was possible that she might be the one being taken away, though he hoped not. Noting from the way Shayne held himself that he didn’t intend to move his Buick until they did as he asked, the lieutenant signed to one of the attendants.

“Take a minute.”

With the air of a man being seriously inconvenienced, the attendant opened the double doors. Shayne climbed in. Harmon watched from outside as he turned back the sheet. Shayne’s face tightened.

“Do you know her?” Harmon asked.

After a moment Shayne said, “I’ve seen photographs. Her name’s Meri Gillespie. Spelled M-e-r-i. A University of Miami grad student. She was hitchhiking.”

“Hitchhiking,” Harmon repeated.

Shayne scraped his thumbnail across his chin, looking down at the dead girl. “But there are some fancy angles.”

“Like what, Shayne?”

Another moment passed. Answering was an effort. Shayne had begun to think that he had two separate problems, that Meri was still alive and had staged her own disappearance for her own reasons.

“Her employer got a letter from her tonight. He knows her well, and the letter seemed plausible. If she didn’t write it, whoever did, knew how she expressed herself and what she was up to. In other words, not a stranger.”

He folded the sheet all the way down. The overhead bulb was too dim. He asked for something stronger, and somebody handed in a battery lantern. He moved the light slowly from one contusion and discoloration to the next. The body had been badly battered. A mark several inches wide, with regular edges, ran across her chest.

“Seat-belt?”

“That’s what it looks like,” Harmon said. “There’s another like it on her left wrist, as though she had her hand looped in the belt. There’s a scalp laceration, and that may be what killed her. We’ll know in the morning. If we’d pulled her out of a wrecked car, cause of death would be obvious. Here on a golf course, in this rain cape—”

The cape, a square of red plastic with an attached hood, had been folded into a compact parcel and placed beside the body. Shayne shook it open.

“Any bloodstains?”

“We think so. The lab will tell us. My guess is that she’s been dead — oh, about five hours. She was about twenty feet in from the fence.”

After completing one sweep of the body, Shayne brought the light back and examined more closely several dried smears on the insides of the thighs. He looked a question at the lieutenant.

“Semen?” Harmon said. “Probably. The placement of bruises certainly says rape, but the M. E. is going to have to confirm it. You said something about what she was up to. Do you want to expand on that?”

Shayne pulled the sheet up over the body. “There’s no point in bringing you up to where I am, because that’s nowhere. I’ve had nothing but knuckleballs thrown at me the last couple of hours. She was carrying something various people wanted. That doesn’t mean one of them killed her.”

“I’d better get a statement on that, Shayne. Do you want to follow me in?”

“No. At least you have a name to put on the tag, which is more than you had before I got here.”

“You can get it out of the way in twenty minutes. I’d be happier.”

Shayne repeated his refusal. “I think things are about to start happening. I’ll call you in the morning.”

The others were looking at the ground, waiting for orders. Harmon made no attempt to block Shayne when he jumped down and walked toward his own car.

Raising his voice, Harmon called, “Don’t phone, Shayne. Come in. Nine o’clock sharp.”

“I’ll be there.”

He returned to the interstate, driving fast again, with the window flap reversed to send a stream of air into the face. Signs for the Seminole Beach exit rose ahead. His foot lifted, came down, then moved to the brake. He had told Holloway and Tree he had a plan, but it was really an absence of plan, like throwing a handful of confetti into the wind and hoping he could learn something from the way the scraps came down. Before he committed himself, there was one final thing he could try. His usual method, when he knew as little as he did now, was to keep moving and give the appearance of having a destination, to show up where he was least expected with an air of knowing everybody’s secret thoughts. If he had a piece of bad news to spring on somebody, he sprang it and checked reactions. Maxine, Holloway’s ex-wife, might be startled to learn her successor had been found dead — startled enough to tell Shayne a few of the things she had kept to herself that morning.

Some minutes later, he pulled up in front of Maxine Holloway’s deteriorating house on the nonfunctional canal. Artificial lightning flickered in the interior of the dimly lit garage. Maxine’s friend, the found-object sculptor, was working, in spite of the late hour. As Shayne approached, he heard Maxine’s voice.

“Oh, no. Not this time. You aren’t going to fall back on the old bit of the creative artist who can’t be bothered. You’re going to be bothered whether you like it or not. You’re going to be introduced to some harsh reality.”

Metal clanged. “Leave me alone, Max, let me work this off, or goddamn it—”

“Or goddamn it what? You’ll walk out? I’ll give you money for a tankful of gas, Andy. Andy. I want you to look at me when I’m talking to you.”

Shayne stopped on the porch and lit a cigarette. The quarrel was taking place in the workshop, but it had moved there from a different part of the house, and it still had to go through several stages before resolving itself in reconciliation or violence. Andy tried to ignore the strident voice. The welding arc flashed. Some metallic object was thrown, probably a small hand tool. He was a hypocrite, she cried. He was so full of the proletarian-artist crap that he was hateful to her. He believed himself to be irresistible to women. She was glad to tell him that this was a misconception. He had a compulsion about touching female flesh, swaggering and sweating in front of them in those tight pants and that faky belt that he cinched up so hard she wondered why it didn’t give him a hernia. Age and looks didn’t matter, the great Casanova was ready to dip into anybody. Although it was largely pretense, this supersexiness, he talked a great game. But when it came to execution he was definitely second rate, well below even Sam Holloway — though she hadn’t appreciated it at the time.

Such a phony. He pretended not to care about filthy money, and here he was, as corrupt and materialistic as all those people he reviled. Totally without talent. Expected to be fed and licked and petted. She couldn’t stand his smell or his slobby ways—

At that point he began to reply, stammering as he tried to put together the right arrangement of words that would really destroy her. They were stamping about. Much of what they were saying, or gasping, must have been unintelligible even to each other. Deciding that he was learning nothing from this, Shayne opened the garage door and stepped in.

Andy was wearing blue jeans, work boots, and a welder’s helmet, with the face-mask tilted back. He had Maxine by the arms and was bending her back over the bench. He had a weightlifter’s shoulders, and if she had been less angry she would have been overmatched. But he was having trouble holding her. She kicked. She spat. Her hair was flying, and with her color up she was a much better-looking woman than when Shayne had seen her that morning. The unattended torch sputtered, burning a gouge in the bench.

Shayne took Andy’s sweaty middle in both hands and squeezed hard. In a moment he felt a change in the electrical flow, as the sculptor realized that it was no longer a two-person fight. Shayne pulled, and Andy came away from the woman. She struck at his face. The metal mask tipped forward and reverberated when her knuckles rapped against it. Shayne continued to move, pivoting. Letting go, he sent the small angry man tumbling into the embrace of one of his intricate constructions of copper tubing.

He came around swearing. Recognizing Shayne, he went back on his heels and shook the sweat out of his eyes.

“This is no way to live. That tongue of yours, bitch,” he shouted. “It’s all over. There’s no chance anymore.”

“Finally,” she shouted back. “I’m delighted. Get the hell out. Animal. That fur on your body. My next man is going to be perfectly hairless. Let me know when you want to pick up your so-called art works, so I can arrange not to be home. Make it soon, before I put everything out on the sidewalk with the rest of the garbage.”

“One question,” Shayne said reasonably. “How many sales have you had in the last year?”

Maxine answered for him. “Zero! Showing that the art-buying public has a certain amount of taste.”

In an instant they were screaming again. One of the epithets she hurled at him hit home, and he snatched up the torch and darted it at her face. Shayne kicked upward. The flame swung around. He wrenched a length of tubing off the ungainly sculpture, feinted high, struck once at the nozzle and a second time at Andy’s wrists. The torch dropped.

“The fight’s over,” Shayne announced, snuffing out the flame. “It’s the lady’s house, and apparently she wants you to leave.”

“I’m leaving. Emotionally I’ve already left.” He picked up her purse from the bench and rummaged through it, removing a handful of bills. “Severance pay. With that great greeting-card business you’ve got, you can spare it.”

He picked up a blue work-shirt and threw it over one shoulder. He went out. A moment later a car could be heard moving off.

“At least he took his own car,” she observed.

She poked at her hair, taking deep breaths. Her face was flushed in streaks. She looked appraisingly at the sculpture Shayne had mutilated.

“I like it better that way. Three years! Finished. I’m going to get soused. That’s an old-fashioned word, but it’s an old-fashioned thing. Come join me. That couldn’t have been very high-style entertainment for you. I hate to get that mad. Everything’s been so upsetting and tense. I wish the damn girl would show up.”

Shayne said, “She showed up tonight on a golf course in West Palm Beach. Dead.”

Maxine’s hand went to her stomach, as though Shayne had hit her there. She rocked back. It was the reaction he’d been looking for.

“Tell me. Tell me, please.”

“She was wearing a red rain cape. Nothing else. No sign of her knapsack. They think she died from a blow on the head. That looked about a day old, but there were recent scratches. She may have got them climbing over the fence to get into the golf course. We’ll know more about it after the autopsy.”

Item by item, Maxine was putting herself back together. Saying nothing, she took Shayne into the kitchen, where she poured whiskey and drank it.

She breathed out in a shudder. “I’ve been hoping it might turn out to be all right for her. I suppose I knew it wouldn’t.”

She waved at the bottles and ice-bucket. “Fix yourself something. It’s so funny. Look at all the things involved in this — that huge amount of money, the reputations, the struggle of the great museums, one of the biggest art discoveries and art sales in years — and a psychotic killer wrecks it all by picking up a hitchhiker. Are you still interested in what my plans were for that mask? Probably less so now. I don’t mind telling you, if you want to sit still for it. Everything seems so — dirtied. Utterly, without any redeeming social value.”

Shayne made a drink and sat down. Having finished her first strong bourbon, Maxine poured herself another, with nothing to dilute it but the melting ice, and she clearly had no intention of letting it stay in the glass long enough to be seriously weakened.

She plunged ahead. “We were O.K. here, Andy and I. I think really O.K., as good as it gets. When the work’s going well, he’s nice and easy, and money has just never been a problem. We had enough to get by on. He worked in the store four hours a day. The sociability was good for him. Who makes money as a sculptor? About three people in the country. So you don’t expect it, and it doesn’t bother you. Then this. Six hundred thousand. I put Sam onto that site, incidentally. He’s saying he heard about it from chicle gatherers — not true. I figured it out from the field notes of a Boston expedition seventy years ago. Sam went down with foundation money, and sure enough, there it was. I wasn’t bitter about it. Such things happen all the time in real life.”

“And then Meri got in touch with you.”

“I was fibbing about that. I got in touch with her. This sale to Terre Haute was just too much. I worked her up. A nice girl, idealism running out of her ears. I persuaded her to pinch the mask, to bring it here and then we’d really set off a few fireworks. Blow that son of a bitch Holloway out of the water. Send the mask back to its proper owners, the descendants of the people who made it. That was the scenario I’d worked out, and she bought it, like a nice little liberal arts major.”

“But that wasn’t your real scenario.”

“Definitely not. The moment she walked in the door, the debriefing was going to begin. There are arguments on both sides, you know. What’s ethical, what stinks. I was going to have Ellie Tree talk to her, and when he gets going he can charm a bird off a bough. And if worst came to worst, and she still wanted to ship it back to Old Mexico—”

She stopped to drink. Shayne supplied, “You were going to mug her.”

“You know it. With some help from Andy. Did you notice his biceps and triceps? At that point the mask would be fair game. Sam stole it from Mexico, she stole it from Sam, we stole it from her. I had a big argument with Andy about how much of a percentage we should give her. I was surprised he was so greedy. He didn’t want to give her a dime. He hasn’t been sleeping more than a couple of hours a night lately. When you pass a half million, money takes on a certain glamour, you know?”

“Was Meri planning to steal the whole thing, not just one piece?”

“That was the idea, but I guess Sam felt something coming. Where is it now, what would the guy do with it after he killed her? He’d throw it away, bury it. Two hundred years from now, somebody’ll dig it up and wonder how the Toltecs got so far north.”

She drank again, and burst out, “I’m sorry about Meri, damn it! I didn’t stop to think about her, I was so busy thinking of ways I could take Sam. I don’t know if I told you he stole my thesis? Whole passages, word for word. It’s been eating away at me, I guess. What the hell! Get drunk. Take off your shoes. Because what can somebody do about this besides nothing?”

There was a clock radio on the spice cabinet beside the stove, already turned to FM. Shayne switched it on and found Tim Rourke’s station. Voices were arguing about whether or not the passive male homosexual experienced lubrication during the arousal phase.

“Stay tuned,” Shayne said. “We’re going to be talking about you in a few minutes.”

“About me!”

“If you hear anything you don’t agree with, call in.”

She looked up, her eyes partly closed, as though she was trying to make him out through thickening mist. “You don’t feel like staying?”

“Not tonight.”

“Because I think Andy’s going to come back, with blood in his eye. And if he lays a finger on me, I’ll shoot him. I know you don’t care enough about it to prevent a murder.”

“Be sure to hit him with your first shot.”

Shayne finished his drink and returned to the Buick, where he asked his operator to locate a police lieutenant named Harmon in Palm Beach. Shayne had broken out on the interstate by the time she completed the connection. Harmon was still wrapping the discovery of Meri’s body in the necessary red tape. Shayne described Andy Anastasia and suggested that Harmon send some men to watch Maxine’s house.

“Preventive maintenance. At this time of night, nobody’s going to want to volunteer. But these people are connected to the body you found, and there’s a big score in it for some lucky guy. I don’t have time to explain. Listen to WKMW in Miami. As soon as I get down there I’m going to start something a little weird. It may not work, but it ought to be interesting.”