Last Seen Hitchhiking

Chapter 17

“Do you really have a kitten?” Frieda asked.

Bruno moved distractedly about the room, sometimes where she could see him, but more often not. Her question embarrassed him.

“It was there on the back steps, meowing. I don’t even know if it’s male or female.”

He stopped in front of the radio. “I can’t listen to any more of this.”

His hand stopped short of the volume knob. Shayne was taking another report from Harmon, the police lieutenant in West Palm Beach. Andy Anastasia, in his noisy VW, had moved on to another town, where, again, he stopped at a phone booth, ripped a page out of the book, and resumed his search.

Bruno muttered, “What’s the bastard looking for?”

“Let’s talk about it,” Frieda said. “Maybe we can figure it out.”

He stopped at the foot of the table, his face sullen. “He’s looking for gynecologists. That means he’s looking for me. The police are following him, and he’ll lead them here. That’s what you want, isn’t it? Rescue. A kiss on the lips. Death to the mad rapist.”

“If you haven’t killed anybody—”

“I killed Meri Gillespie!” He clutched his head. “Now I have to kill you. You can see that.”

“I wonder. How many girls have you done this with?”

He walked away and came back. She said softly, “Tell me.”

“You’re the fourth!” he burst out. “The one we just listened to was first. She said her name was Becky. She’s even crazier than I am! At the end she wanted to make love with me strapped to the table, which wouldn’t make much sense scientifically, would it? I wonder if it’s true that her uncle raped her. I wanted to keep her longer, to find out, but I had to get back. I had a pathology exam.”

“What happened to the second?”

“She was going to Alabama. I fed her the acid and drove her all the way to Birmingham, even though I couldn’t really afford the time. I left her asleep in a bus depot.”

He exclaimed suddenly, “I know what Anastasia is looking for! Don’t go away, will you?”

He went out of sight. A door opened and closed. After a moment he came back, carrying a pink stucco flamingo. He was grinning.

“Not just any gynecologist, a gynecologist with his office in his house and a flamingo in the front yard. You don’t see many of these anymore. Houses look the same in Fort Lauderdale and Opa-Locka, but not many of them have pink flamingoes.”

“Which one is us, Lauderdale or Opa-Locka?”

“I’m not telling,” he said, his good humor partially restored.

“How did Anastasia know about the flamingo? Meri told him, of course. Where did you take her, Bruno?”

“She left under her own steam. Look — will you call me Bud? Nobody else will. I can’t even get my own father and mother to.”

His eyelid flickered. He ran his fingers back from the corner of that eye into his hair. “This whole side of my head is about to come off.”

“If you’ll unfasten one of my hands I’ll rub it away for you. I’m good at it.”

“I’ll live with it, thanks. I tried that with Meri, and look at what happened.”

“What did happen, Bud?”

“I didn’t even rape her once! I lost control of her. We hit each other with everything we could get our hands on. I’ve never hurt a girl before in my life. I recommend it to everybody. It’s an astonishing feeling! I was much thinner, and six feet two. You notice this Band-Aid. There are teeth-marks underneath. I made her bleed. I still don’t know how she got all the way loose — some kind of contortionist, that girl. Well, I’m sorry. I didn’t intend it to happen that way. I knew this was dangerous. That’s one of the things all the shrinks told me: I’m too cautious; I’d never get anywhere unless I was willing to take a chance. So goddamn it, that’s what I did! I took a chance! I took a chance and it paid off! If I hadn’t tried to work in that dumb variation and left one of the cuffs too loose. She had a heavy lab bottle. She looked like a cornered wolf. It went through my head in a flash. ‘You can’t let her walk out of here.’ I hit her with something; I don’t know what. I think the stool. She couldn’t see. Now was the time for me to grab her and get the straps back on, but then this damn vertigo. Everything whirled. Around and around and around. When I reached for her, she wasn’t even in the room.”

“I don’t suppose you want to tell me how far we are from where she was found.”

“Far enough. She found one of those phones where you can get a tone without using a coin. She made a collect call to Seminole Beach, to Mrs. What’s-her-name, and the guy was listening in on an extension, and she babbled about the mask, the flamingo. She wandered along the edge of the road and somebody picked her up. When he found out what shape she was in, he made her get out. She stumbled out on a golf course and died there.”

“You don’t know all that, Bruno.”

“Bud,” he said angrily. “No, I don’t, but who are they after? They know my name and the way I operate. They have a list of people I’ve supposedly killed.” He tried to smile, but it wasn’t much of a success. “The only thing they don’t know is where they can find me.”

In the WKMW station, Shayne decided to start tying the threads together. Using a battery of phones, he called Holloway in Coral Gables, Tree at the St. Albans in Miami Beach, Maxine Holloway in Seminole Beach, Harmon in West Palm. Rourke helped, one phone at each ear.

“Everybody leave the lines open,” Shayne said. “Any time you want to interrupt, we’ll switch you in. Start with Maxine. Are you sober enough to understand what I’m saying?”

A voice said faintly, “Barely.”

“Some of this has to be guesswork,” Shayne said. “Your friend Anastasia—”

“Friend?”

“Ex-friend. That fight I walked in on tonight, what was that about?”

“Do you need a special reason? I’m sick of the guy, sick of him—”

“The two main themes seemed to be money and women. Let’s get the money out of the way first. You’re overdrawn. Andy’s been living with you on the cuff. When he came back for his clothes tonight, the radio was on. A cash reward is being offered for a little piece of a stolen mask. He immediately jumped in his car and went looking for gynecologists. My question for you is, how would he know Meri was kept prisoner in a gynecologist’s office unless he talked to her before she died?”

“I don’t know what he knew or didn’t know.”

“Harmon,” Shayne said, picking up another phone.

“Yeah, Mike.”

“Arrange with Seminole Beach to have this woman brought in and booked for extortion.”

“Extortion!” Maxine cried. “What have I done that could possibly be considered—”

“Let’s go through this slowly,” Shayne said. “Bruno Lorenz. According to Natalie, who spent a couple of days with him, he picks up girls, scares them with some theatrical effects, rapes them, gives them a goodbye shot of LSD, and dumps them in a motel room, where they wake up hallucinating. Let’s assume he did that with Meri. LSD hits different people different ways. When she woke up she didn’t wait to get retracked. She remembered she’d started for Seminole Beach. She called you, and you went to get her.”

“A little farfetched, don’t you think?”

“So is Bruno. So are you and Eliot Tree and your ex-husband. You were surprised that she hadn’t brought you the mask. She hadn’t even succeeded in stealing the whole thing, just a fragment, and that fragment was missing. Probably you were disagreeable to her, you and Andy. She’d let you down badly. She’d cost you your chance at the big money, but wasn’t there time to squeeze a little something? Sure, if you worked it right. You wrote Holloway asking for thirty-eight thousand in return for the missing piece, which you didn’t actually have, and signed the letter Meri.”

He waited. Only silence came down the line from Seminole Beach.

“You used the right language and picked the right figure, and Holloway fell for it. He’s as greedy as you are, and he was shooting for bigger stakes. There’s a chance you may be able to sneak out of this, Maxine. I mean you, personally. When we bring Andy in I think we’ll find he’s carrying the full thirty-eight thousand. That’s why I was so sure he’d come back after I left, to pick up his half. But the temptation was too great. Why leave anything for you after all the names you’ve been calling him?”

“He’s a skunk. He’s capable of anything.”

Frieda said, “Everybody else in this is interested in money. Are you, Bud?”

Bruno gripped a cold glass of whiskey. He drank from it, sloppily, and rubbed his hand across his mouth. “What?”

“Two hundred thousand. That’s an attractive figure. There are ways you could collect it.”

He glanced at the bright eye on the bookcase. “If it hadn’t been for that damn thing, I wouldn’t be in so much trouble.”

“When Mike says no questions asked, he means it. He’s been go-between in some very big deals, and people know they can trust him. You’ll need a good lawyer, Bud. They cost money.”

“I’ve got to think. I’ve got to make some plan.”

“The reward is for two things. The mask and me. I can handle it for you.”

“What are you trying to get me to do? Think about it! I have to kill you, it’s the one chance I have. You have four hundred dollars and a gun. I have about five hundred and a car. I’m going to be moving from now on. Moving.”

“Tell me why, Bud,” Frieda said quietly.

“I killed her! Will you get that through your head? Accidental homicide, manslaughter. But do you think anybody’s going to let me bargain about what I plead guilty to? What about that girl up near Jacksonville, with her head cut off? I’m carrying newspaper clippings. I’ve told everybody I did it. That’s what I do! Murder girls! Maybe in real life I didn’t murder anybody but Meri, but the Mad Doctor can’t turn normal in the last reel, for God’s sake. I don’t even claim to be normal!”

He was in motion, swinging the drink. “We’ve all heard of the sexual revolution. Oh, yes. In ninety-nine cars out of every hundred at a drive-in, sexual intercourse is happening. And who’s in the hundredth car? Bruno! If I have a woman with me, we’re talking about the nuances and subtlety of the screenplay. It’s obvious that I’m out of my mind.” He swung around. “Isn’t it? Isn’t it obvious?”

“I think so, Bud. What isn’t so obvious to me yet is that you killed Meri.”

“You don’t know what you’re saying,” he said irritably. “The sound when I hit her. The way she looked at me. I killed her, all right. The victim doesn’t have to die on the premises.”

“According to Mike, she was alive when she got to Maxine’s.”

“She didn’t have to get that far. She called them up and died in the phone booth, and they came and got her and dumped her. If they were going to hit Holloway for money, they couldn’t just call the police and say here’s a dead body, come get it. Frieda, let me alone for a minute.”

“I can’t, Bud. You have me strapped to a table. All I can do is talk. Will you call the radio station and let me ask Mike one quick question?”