Last Seen Hitchhiking

Chapter 15

She was a small, olive-skinned girl with her hair in bangs, too plump, wearing glasses. She had skipped a buttonhole when buttoning her shirt. The strap of one sandal was flapping.

“Scotch,” she said again, vaguely. “I don’t understand it.”

“And this is Mike Shayne’s automobile,” Rourke said, “the back seat of which, I’ll repeat, is a funny place for a body to turn up in.”

“It’s something to do with that damn mask!” Joanne said accusingly.

“Probably,” Shayne said.

She pushed her fingers through her bangs. “This is the first dead person I’ve ever — Can we sit down somewhere? I’d like a glass of water.”

“We have to stay here until the cops can take over,” Shayne said.

He put ice in a tall glass and filled it with soda. Rourke turned her so she could sit in the front seat, her feet on the sidewalk. She took her head in both hands, pressing hard. Then she accepted the glass from Shayne and drank thirstily.

“I still don’t have the faintest idea. Did Meri — has Meri been—”

“Meri’s been found.” Shayne said gently. “Whoever did that is still out and around. We’re going to have to waste some time after the cops get here. That can’t be helped. But we have a few minutes now for some fast questions and answers. Can you put these two deaths to one side and react to them later? Are you listening, Joanne?”

“I don’t know what you want.”

“How much have you seen of Meri lately?”

She looked at the sidewalk, then at Shayne, at Rourke, and then back at the sidewalk. Only then did she answer. “Not very much. I didn’t care for her professor.”

“Did she break up with Scotch before he went to Mexico with Holloway?”

“No, after they got back. He was miserable down there. He wrote her almost every day. Digging? That wasn’t Scotch’s usual kind of thing. Then they had an argument, arguments, and she shifted to Holloway — not much of an improvement, in at least one person’s opinion.”

She made a helpless sound suddenly and tears ran from her eyes. “There was nothing improper between Meri and myself! If that’s what you’re implying. We liked the same things. We really leveled with each other. She had such wonderful dreams for the future. Scotch!” she said with scorn, gesturing toward the body in the back seat. “He only cared about one single thing, himself, and I don’t see how she stood spending evenings with him, let alone nights. He’s been back lately, sniffing around. He was there in the house one night when I stopped by to take her to the movies. Holloway was away somewhere — Chicago, Indiana. Scotch gave me an extremely sour look and left. The world’s biggest ego combined with the world’s worst disposition.”

“What’s he been doing this last year?”

“Living in Fort Myers with his mother. Smoking, no doubt. Perfectly well satisfied with himself.”

“What did Meri say to you about the mask?”

“We talked about it a lot. I never saw it, but I understand it’s really something. She wasn’t too happy about the idea of selling it to some American museum. She had a thing about museums, but if it had to be in a museum at all, she thought it ought to be in a Mexican one. But that’s not the way the world is organized, according to her crooked employer.”

“Crooked?”

“The phoniest phony who ever pulled on a pair of pants, Mr. Shayne. If he was the one who was dead, I’d be sitting here drinking black velvets.”

“We haven’t heard from him lately,” Shayne said dryly. “Everybody’s been waving guns around, and we may end up with a casualty list longer than two.”

With sirens and lights, the police arrived.

Rourke kept moving with his microphone, letting his audience overhear the asides, grunts, and obscenities of night-shift policemen handling a corpse with a gunshot wound in the head. From time to time Rourke asked a question or dropped in a clarifying remark. After being photographed and dusted, the dead youth was pulled out on the sidewalk. His hair was receding, and this had probably bothered him, for it was layer-cut and sprayed. His slacks were almost too tight. As the cops put him down, one arm flopped out, and Shayne saw an irregularly shaped purple splotch, like an ink-blot, on the back of his hand.

Rourke was watching. “Something to say about that, Mike? Our listeners have been very patient, if we’re still plugged in after all this moving around.”

“One minute,” Shayne told him, and asked the girl, “Koch. What kind of accent did he have?”

“New York. But he was a great impersonator, in his own view. Sidney Greenstreet, James Cagney. French, Russian, Spanish, always performing, always a pain in the ass.”

“O.K.,” Shayne said. “Here’s one circuit I can finally close. Scotch, García, two others. They raided Maxine’s house this morning and Holloway’s tonight. They wore ski masks. Scotch had work-gloves on this morning, to hide that birthmark. At Holloway’s he stayed outside as lookout and he didn’t think he needed them. You notice the bruise on the side of his jaw. I put that there. I’ll give you details when we’re inside.”

Sandy St. John had been trying new names. Her old one was Hungarian. It didn’t fit her personality and was a drag to pronounce. Sandy St. John sounded a little fake, as though a press agent had thought it up, but wanting to sound like a girl with a press agent, she tried it, and so far it was holding up well.

She had fallen asleep as though hit in the face with a shovel. She had been doing that lately, going off in an instant like a doused light. Usually she stayed off, but tonight the switch flicked back on and she sat up abruptly.

There were two men and another girl in bed with her. One of the men opened his eyes when the bed shifted.

“Some more?”

She shook her head slowly. “I can’t remember who I am.”

He accepted that with a nod. “Kid, you and me both.”

She left the bed. The TV was running without sound. Horses galloped soundlessly. The guns were equipped with silencers.

She killed the picture and went to the bathroom, where she looked at the array in the medicine cabinet without being able to decide what she needed. She ran a glass of water. It tasted like ashes. The electric clock said she couldn’t have slept more than fifteen minutes, which was sort of a blow.

At this point, she found that she was confused not only about who, but about where. Motel rooms all looked alike with the blinds shut. It wasn’t her own place, she knew that. Her own place, which as a matter of fact probably didn’t exist, was comfortably furnished, rent-free, and none of the electrical appliances ever failed to perform. She glanced again at the sleepers on the bed. She knew who they were, to the extent that she knew the names on their driver’s licenses. She knew what they liked, sexually. But she wasn’t sure if any of them believed in God, or if they bothered to vote. Even what parts of the country they came from. Were their parents alive?

She began to remember the start of the evening. That was encouraging. Her forgetfulness was selective; she forgot those things she didn’t choose to remember. They had been to the dog races. To her astonishment, for she was usually the unluckiest person alive, she won a great deal of money. The winning dog had been named Bruno’s Pride, and one of the things she couldn’t remember was why she had liked the name. She looked for her purse, found it in the john with the money inside. So that part was real.

The feeling of the bills gave her a sort of early sexual excitement. She hadn’t known she cared that much about money. The thoughts that were roaring through her head were anything but disturbing. Perhaps, after all, she could get on a plane and go somewhere and make sense of her life. But what did she want? Everything! The whole schmear. That was the trouble.

She turned on the TV again, coming in on a cluster of commercials. A beautifully groomed woman held out a can of toilet-bowl cleanser, silently mouthing its praises. A man and a girl, both gorgeous, in bathing suits — toothpaste, she guessed, and toothpaste it was. Her stomach gave an indignant growl and she sent the beautiful intruders back to their hiding place in the tube.

The red eye of the radio was looking at her accusingly. It was on, the volume way down. She glanced at her sleeping friends. If it disturbed them, screw it. She needed voices.

She turned the control and heard Biscayne Fats, whose husky voice had whispered to her through many a wakeful night. But it wasn’t the usual Biscayne Fats. He was standing outside the studio, looking in on his show, except that it didn’t seem to be his own show. It was a strange effect that frightened her slightly. Nobody likes to hallucinate at the end of a party.

A police lieutenant was talking. It was a telephone voice, but that was all right, because Fats habitually took phone calls. But the lieutenant wasn’t talking to Fats. Fats was somewhere else, occasionally inserting a word or two to remind his listeners of his presence.

His man, the lieutenant was saying, had returned to the Boca Raton phone booth, as Shayne had suggested, and looked in the book. And sure enough, one of the yellow pages had been torn out.

Sandy, listening intently, was now about ninety-eight percent certain that she was inside a dream of some kind. A yellow page had been torn out. What could it mean?

In the studio — it was Tim Rourke’s studio, she realized, which was queer; were they conglomerating? — another Boca Raton phone book was found and comparisons were made. One of these voices she liked. It was deep and throaty, weary but patient, warm. She knew it came from a large, powerfully built man. She wished she had him face down on the bed beside her, so she could rub the tension out of his back and shoulders.

“Yeah,” he said slowly. “Here it is. Photographers. Pharmacies. Physicians and Surgeons. Pianos. Let’s rule out the pianos. The others are possible.”

“Not pharmacies,” the lieutenant said. “All the places Anastasia has been slowing down in front of are in the middle of the block. Drug stores are usually on a corner. One of my guys here has been keeping a list of addresses. Let me check.”

Sandy poured herself a glass of wine and settled down in front of the radio. She was going to make sense out of this if it took all night. Pharmacies? Pianos?

The lieutenant came back. “You realize this is approximate, Mike. I mean, we don’t have the number, just the street, something like ‘south side, apartment house.’ Seven places in Boca Raton. We could knock out photographers right away. It’s doctors, Mike. They’re all of them doctors, all seven. Can you explain it? When you need a doctor, you phone him and the answering service tells you to take an aspirin and call in the morning. Or you go to his house and bang on the door. That’s not what Anastasia’s doing. He just goes up and down, looks at the house, and drives on.”

Rourke’s voice: “Maybe there’s something distinctive about the house he’s looking for. Or there’s supposed to be somebody who’s still awake, with a light on.”

The lieutenant again: “Now this is funny. Not only doctors. They’re all obstetricians, gynecologists. Is that how you pronounce it?”

Sandy, finishing that glass of wine and starting another, was finding the conversation more and more bizarre. She was beginning to think the whole thing was a late-night, hoax, like the time Fats had three guests who had just come back from a ride on a flying saucer.

Mike: “Which is it? A gynecologist who collects Mexican art? Or a gynecologist who collects girl hitchhikers?”

“And rapes them,” Rourke put in. “And how the hell do you account for that? Considering his line of work. There he is, eight hours a day, bent over that examining table with his speculum and his rubber glove. Wouldn’t you get tired of that particular view, and want to go bowling or something?”

And suddenly Sandy had such a powerful intuition that she spilled wine on her leg. A gynecologist’s examining table — hitchhikers—

She went into a rapid time-warp, and when she returned to the present, Mike was taking a phone call from Fort Myers, on the other side of the peninsula. A dead youth from Fort Myers, Sid Koch by name, had turned up in the back seat of somebody’s car. Sandy puzzled about it, but it seemed to have no connection with gynecologists, or with anything else. Give it time, she said to herself. Sooner or later the kaleidoscope would stop spinning and patterns would emerge.

The caller, a Mrs. Goodman, was an acquaintance of Koch’s mother.

“Did you know Sidney was jailed on drug charges and he stayed there for a week until he could raise bail? God’s truth. The case was dismissed later, but you know the old saw. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. And there was smoke here. Marijuana smoke.” She gave a croak of laughter.

“Mrs. Goodman—”

“And that boy was always a trial and a disappointment to his mother, who is the sweetest individual on earth. There’s no father in the family. Never has been. She scrimped and she slaved to send him to college, and the thanks she got, he turned artistic on her. Not much of a living in that. All he was willing to do after he got the degree was sit around the house with his hair over his eyes playing the drums so loud it drove everybody on that street purely wild.”

The studio voice tried to interject something. Again she rode him down.

“Naturally, you know, his mother came to the end of her patience and cut off his funds, to get him up off his hiney and out in the world to find a job. For all the effect that had, he just went on in his usual ways. He always had money in his pocket, like in one of those fairy stories. You don’t need to be any mind-reader to know where he got it. From peddling marijuana among his age group, and the narcotics police got wind of it after a time. His mother thought they heard it from me, which is far from correct, but there’s been a certain amount of chilliness in that quarter since. I couldn’t care less.”

“Do you have anything more to tell us about Scotch?”

“You call him that too, do you? Plenty! He kept running off to Miami on his motorbike. I have my spies, don’t you know, and whenever he came back was when he was able to make those little purchases — long-playing record albums and the like. Parts for his motorcycle. A pair of boots costing well over forty dollars.”

“You’re saying there’s no legitimate way for him to afford an expensive pair of boots?”

“That’s precisely what I’m saying. His mother doesn’t allot him one penny. The only answer I’ve been able to come up with is marijuana.”

“What kind of friends did he have?”

“Scruffy. Guitar players, so on and so forth. Marijuana smokers all of them, not a doubt in the world.”

“Girls?”

“One in particular, and she happens to be my daughter, and that’s why I take such a special interest in what sort of a boyfriend she’s getting herself mixed up in. She’ll be heartbroken when she hears about it, a lot more so than me — not that I’m gloating. I personally thought he was more likely to go in one of those motorcycle skids. I still don’t think much of that suicide theory. Suicide? He was too egotistic. The reason I’m calling to strike in a claim for a piece of that money, and I know you’re going to be fair about that, Mr. Shayne, is that he’s been telling a lot of stories about how money was not a problem. He suggested to my daughter that they do some traveling together in Europe and so on. That was some time ago now, a matter of let’s say a couple of weeks. Lately he’s been very short-tempered. Disappearing and showing up and disappearing. My personal opinion, I think he was deep in the drug traffic, and that time he went down to Mexico was to line up a source of supply, which would naturally enter this country through the Port of Miami. It’s been giving me a bad case of insomnia, which is why I’m listening to the radio this late. My advice to you, Mr. Shayne, is to stop chasing around the countryside after pieces of masks. That’s not it. In my considered opinion, it’s marijuana. Marijuana,” she insisted.

The next call surprised everybody. A man’s voice: “Mike, are you by any chance a concealed homosexual?”

Shayne laughed. “I doubt it.”

“Because if you are,” the voice continued, “I hope you’ll come out of the closet and join us. You have the image we need. You could be highly effective in our struggle for recognition.”