Last Seen Hitchhiking

Chapter 18

“Your turn, Holloway,” Shayne said, picking up another phone. “Say something so I can be sure I pressed the right button.”

“Fantastic.”

“Anything else?”

“You’ve stirred up a wasps’ nest here, Shayne, no question about that. I’ve been waiting for this opportunity. If anybody has that fragment and can bring it to me, I’ll pay two hundred and fifty. Again, no questions asked, and inasmuch as I’m not tying it to the return of any missing women, you can count on being asked fewer questions. Did you cut me off, Shayne, or let it go out on the air?”

“I’m not censoring anything,” Shayne said. “You have six hundred thousand to play with, and I thought you might try to top our offer. So I reserved another piece when I was repacking the box in the St. Albans. I have it here somewhere. Yeah, here it is. Blue with red lines.”

“Talk about swindlers,” Holloway said through his teeth.

“Why did you shoot that Indian last year, Holloway?”

“You’re reaching. You’re reaching. That matter is closed.”

“Murder cases are never closed. And murder’s an extraditable offense. So worry about it a little. You killed him to call attention to your expedition.”

“Stick to something you know,” Holloway said pityingly.

“I’ve had it explained to me. You needed two stories. One was official, but nobody believed that. To make sure everybody heard about the Yucatan expedition, all the museum people and other potential buyers, you shot an Indian and planted a knife on him. At first I thought that must be what Scotch was blackmailing you with. Blackmail’s the only thing that fits his financial picture, small sums coming in after regular trips to Miami, a larger sum expected when you dealt off the mask to Terre Haute. Let’s kick this around for a minute. We have time.”

“I don’t see what you’re getting at,” Bruno said worriedly. “One quick question to Shayne. I know they wouldn’t have time to trace the call. What do you hope to accomplish? Seriously. You’ve had more experience than I’ve had. Explain it.”

“Assault is a better kind of trouble than murder. Natalie won’t bring charges against you. You’ve been seeing psychiatrists. That won’t help much, but it’s something.”

“If you think I’m going to sit there while people argue about whether or not I’m sane—”

“Bud, stand still and look at me. It’s hard to do any orderly thinking, tied down like this. Whenever I think I have it, I go out of gear and everything starts racing. You’ve been pretty convincing. If you think you killed Meri, you’ll think you have to kill me.”

“It isn’t what I think, it’s what they think.”

“Meri passed through two sets of hands, yours and Andy’s and Maxine’s. I know how Mike works. He’s been getting the facts together. Now he’s about to start pounding. Wait and see what they say.”

“I don’t have a chance!”

“You don’t have a chance if everybody just hangs up and calls in the lawyers. But Mike’s got them hooked. They want to know what’s going to happen to that two hundred thousand dollars. He’s going to turn them against each other and surprise them into saying damaging and imprudent things. Things that may clear you, Bud. And we can help.”

“I don’t get it,” he said stubbornly. “You’re trying to take advantage of this damn migraine—”

“He’s giving Maxine a breathing spell, but she’s the one he’s after, I think. If Mike’s right, Andy stole nineteen thousand dollars from her tonight, half the money they conned Holloway into giving them. Andy can be picked up at any time. Mike will work on them separately, and try to get one of them to cave in. Let me talk to him, please. I can’t tell him where I am, because I don’t know. Keep your finger on the switch. If I say anything you don’t like, cut me off.”

A light flashed in front of Shayne. He put Holloway on hold, and switched lines.

It was Harmon again.

“Anastasia may be getting discouraged, Mike. He’s been through seven phone books by my count, and now he’s having a drink in a bar. It looks as though he’s settling down. He paid for the drink with a fifty-dollar bill, if that means anything.”

“Holloway’s money, probably,” Shayne said, “out of the thirty-eight thousand. Unless he sold a piece of sculpture, which would surprise the hell out of me. Let him finish the drink, and then bring him in. Holloway?” he said, punching a button to put Holloway back on the air.

“I’m still here, naturally, although if I had any sense I’d go to bed and hope that tomorrow this will turn out to have been an LSD dream.”

“We were talking about Sid Koch. What kind of student was he?”

“Mediocre. I have some grant money for cataloguing and research, and I employed him briefly. I only kept him a few weeks. When I was putting the Yucatan team together, I couldn’t get some of my first choices. He filled in.”

“People have asked why. Heat, insects, diarrhea.”

“I confess I wondered myself.”

“Now I’m guessing again. I think he had a pretty good idea what you were going to find.”

“We had high expectations. We knew the site was there somewhere.”

“How did you date this mask, Holloway?”

“You’ve heard about radio-carbon. You can’t be that ignorant. And the cultural factors—”

“So the terracotta, at least, would have to be from the period.”

The remark dropped like a stone. Holloway let it alone for a moment, before saying with care, “Do I catch an implication? The mosaic chips are bonded to the terracotta. Onyx, chrysolite — I don’t need to say that each of those bits is undoubtedly millions of years old.”

“I’m told that what gives this mask its enormous value is that nothing’s missing. What if you had two partial masks and put them together? Would that still be forgery?”

“Of course. But you’re joking. I don’t know why I’m arguing this with you. You know nothing about the subject.”

“I don’t claim to,” Shayne said. “I’m working backwards, trying to find some logical explanation for the way you people have been behaving. Scotch was probably cynical about you to start with. If he saw something in your shop that made him suspect you were working out some kind of stunt, it would give him a good reason for going to Yucatan. He and Meri were still friends. He wrote her daily letters, which she may have kept. Finding the mask was a big thing, and he must have mentioned it to her. When she decided to block the sale, she could use the letter as evidence that your Bogatá papers were fakes. But if Scotch was collecting from you regularly, naturally he wouldn’t want her to do that.”

Rourke, across the table, told Shayne, “Eliot Tree’s trying to say something.”

Shayne took that phone and put Tree on the air. “Mike. Mike.”

“Yeah.”

“Are you serious about any of this. Did I put up two hundred thousand dollars for a fake?”

“Do you think Holloway’s technically capable of it?”

“Oh, he’s an excellent technician. He’s the expert. The authenticator. And good God, man, do you realize that just by raising that question publicly you’ve destroyed much of the mask’s value?”

“If that’s true, it’s the result of years of fraudulent practice. What do you think of my idea that the Indian was killed to get everybody’s attention up here, including yours?”

“I can accept that. Certainly it worked.”

“But it happened a day early, Tree, before the mask was found. I’m going to put Holloway back on now, to see if he disagrees with any of this. Holloway?”

“I disagree with everything. I want to know what your purpose is here.”

“My usual one,” Shayne said. “I’m trying to explain a particular act of violence, Scotch’s murder.”

“Or suicide.”

“Or suicide. But people don’t think he was the suicidal type. Much less than you are, for example. I think he saw you plant the mask and dig it up. If this whole value structure is so delicate that an unsupported assertion can knock a price down from six hundred thousand to nothing, his eyewitness testimony ought to be worth real money. You put him on temporary retainer, with the big payment to come after you cashed the Terre Haute check. I think a hundred thousand would be about right. And then Meri interfered. I don’t think Scotch knew she hadn’t taken the whole mask, merely a piece. If he could get his hands on it, he could sell it to Tree for up to two hundred, double the amount he could get from you. He and García and two goons have been looking for it all day. When they were working on you, I thought I ought to break it up, but I had to take them one at a time. Scotch was first. I went off with the others when they left. You came out on the porch, and there was the blackmailer, unconscious, who hadn’t been satisfied with one-sixth but wanted it all.”

“You aren’t saying I killed him,” Holloway said.

“Didn’t you? The one man who knew how that mask got to Yucatan. Of course you killed him, Holloway. Now the problem of what to do with the body. To dispose of it in your own car would take time you couldn’t account for later. You’d only heard one car leave. Mine had to be somewhere nearby.”

“This staggers the imagination! That out of all the cars on the streets of Coral Gables, I would pick Michael Shayne’s.”

“Why not? When I picked it up later I was still in a hurry, racing to Palm Beach to look at a body. I didn’t look in the back seat. It didn’t matter after that — you took off the ski mask before you killed him, and why would I connect him with the masked man, in the dark, on Professor Holloway’s front steps?”

“You don’t expect any jury to believe—”

“You never know about juries. But by the time it gets to that point, you won’t be a respectable professor in a big university. If your profession is like others I know, there are people all over the country who’ll be delighted to jump on you. Maxine is saying you based your textbook on a stolen thesis. After all this, more people will believe her. You may not find it quite so easy to get graduate students. But I think your real trouble is going to be in Mexico. Think about it. I get the impression they’re just about fed up with North Americans who steal their art and murder their citizens. Yeah. One way or another, you’re going to see the inside of a Mexican jail. Prison conditions down there are gruesome.”

He was still talking casually, conversationally, but his hand was tight on the phone. Rourke signaled that he had a call. Shayne shook his head. Several station officials, as well as Will Gentry, Miami Chief of Police, had joined the engineer in his glassed-in cubicle. The outer office was filled. The others caught Shayne’s tension. On the switchboard, Art, the middle-aged homosexual, stood up so he could see in.

The Holloway phone was the only one cut into the transmitter. There was the sound of heavy breathing. That was all for the moment.

Then Holloway said lightly, “Do you know something, I think you may be right.”

There was a thump, the sound of movement, a shot.

A girl’s voice cried an instant later, “Damn you people! Damn you!”

Shayne recognized the voice; it was Diane, the graduate student who had accompanied Holloway to the St. Albans. “What happened, Diane?”

“You know what happened! You tricked him. You knew he’d been drinking. He’s such a wonderful man, kind, intelligent. You were trying to get him to shoot himself.”

“He left one gun in my car with Scotch. I wasn’t sure he had another.”

“Well, it’s lucky I was here — it’s just in his shoulder. Will a doctor come quickly, please?”

A woman’s voice: “Mike Shayne? Is that really you I’m talking to, Mike?”

“Yeah, go ahead. Who’s this?”

“Nobody special, you don’t know me. But this is the one and only chance I’ll ever get to call you by your first name and I intend to take full advantage of it. All the time you-all were talking about gynecologists, Mike, I could feel something tugging and grabbing in the back of my mind. All of a sudden it went off like a bomb!”

Silence.

“Just taking a drink of my warm milk. I have that kind of doctor right across the street from me, Dr. Bertram Ainsworth, and he’s on vacation right now, a honeymoon as a matter of fact, been gone about three weeks. I go to him myself for the menopause. He left his lights burning to discourage thieves.”

“Where are you?” Shayne said quickly.

“I gave them the address when they asked what I was calling about. I’m right here in Lake Worth, and I can’t ever get to sleep before three in the morning. I raised the shade and looked out, and somebody’s using the house, Mike! Sure as you’re born. Because ten or fifteen minutes ago this fattish young man came out in a pair of pants and he took the flamingo in off the lawn. And I thought I’d call you and tell you. I had a terrible time getting through.”

Suddenly Art, on the switchboard, rose straight up, both hands flying. He rapped on the glass and signaled to Shayne, his small hoop-earring shaking.

“Three!” he shouted, holding up three fingers. “Three!”

Shayne cut his caller off abruptly and punched a button.

“Shayne.”

A quiet voice said, “Mike, this is Frieda.”

Like Art, Shayne came to his feet. The room was still.

“Go on.”

“I’m all right,” she said, “and I want everybody to remember that not much is known about rape or how rapists get that way, and I hope all those cops who are closing in on us will use their heads for once instead of their service revolvers.”

“Will Gentry’s here in the studio, and he’s nodding. He understands the message.”

“I’m allowed to ask you only one question, and it has to be quick.”

Gentry had left the engineer’s booth to get a trace started on the call.

“Let me say first,” Shayne said, “that it’s nice to hear your voice.”

“It’s nice to hear yours. The question is this. Was Meri raped?”

“You just made the point that rape is a hard thing to establish. ‘Sexually molested,’ we usually have to call it. We’ll know better after the autopsy. Can you be more specific about what you want to know?”

“Don’t try to drag this out, Mike. It’s a toll call and you can’t trap it. But I think it really is going to be all right. Just answer the question.”

“What sexually molested usually means is that there are traces of male semen on the woman’s labia. Put it like that, and the answer is yes.”

Bruno cut the connection abruptly. He was flushed and sweating, breathing heavily. He picked up the gun he had found in Frieda’s bag, examined it for an instant and put it down.

“He guessed what you wanted him to say,” he said.

“How could he, Bud? How could he know Meri got away before you were able to have any sex with her? I asked him a clear question. This proves you didn’t kill her.”

“Do you think they’ll take a semen sample and make a lab comparison? Do you think if I stand here waiting for them, they’ll really keep those guns in their holsters? For a private detective, you’re pretty dumb.”

“Don’t drink any more, Bud. I want you to listen to me for another minute, and after that decide what to do. I don’t know Anastasia, but don’t you get a picture of a man who’s eaten up with bitterness and resentment? Fakers like Holloway get the good jobs and the six hundred thousand dollars, while Andy Anastasia is supported by a woman and has to work four hours a day in a gift shop, which must be torture for him. Maybe Meri wasn’t as far gone as you thought when she left here. Sometimes a head wound can look really frightening, and after the blood’s washed off it may not even need stitches. Anastasia jumped at the chance to collect some old debts by writing Holloway that extortion letter. But Meri wouldn’t have anything to do with a trick like that. She wasn’t that kind of girl. If she woke up and heard them talking—”

“How can you know all that?”

“I’m like Mike, I’m trying to find an explanation that fits. Not the facts, because we don’t have many of those, but the people. If the money had already been collected, Meri could send both of them to prison, and she’d do it without a qualm.”

At least she had him thinking.

“How easy it would be to kill her, Anastasia would think,” she said. “How safe. One more victim of Bruno Lorenz, the Mad Doctor. Listen.”

On the radio, a voice Frieda recognized as Maxine’s was saying shrilly, “I had nothing to do with that! I went to Miami for the money. That was the one single thing I did, the only thing. I didn’t write the note, that was his idea. He’ll have to admit it. Yes, she kept talking about the flamingo! About the doctor’s table. When I came back she was gone! He told me she got excited and climbed out the window when he went to get an ice bag to calm her down. We looked all over, up and down the streets. We thought she fell in the canal. And she was on the golf course! Where he’d put her! And to make sure the rapist would get the blame, he came on her! The sick bastard. Oh, how he wanted that money.”

Suddenly Bruno muttered, “Watching us. Eyes.”

The gun went off. Frieda stiffened. He had fired at the Toltec eye on the bookcase. Taking more careful aim, he fired again. He hit the fragment, shattering the earth-colored terracotta. The pupil of the eye remained. He fired twice more. It danced to a new position.

“Can’t do anything right,” he whispered.

He went closer. Putting the muzzle less than an inch from the glinting bit of stone, he fired again.

“Now we can be alone for a minute.” He began fumbling at the strap across her chest. “I’ll take you with me. Call him again, call Shayne. Tell him if anybody tries to stop us, if I hear a siren, I’ll kill you. And I will, Frieda! I won’t want to, but I surely will. You’re so lovely, the best of the four.”

He fell on her heavily, kissing her neck, her shoulders.

“You should hurry, Bud,” she whispered. “They have the address.”

He pulled back and looked into her eyes. “Yes. We can do this later.”

He pointed the gun at her. “Now you understand? I’ll unfasten the straps carefully. You will come to the garage with me after you make the phone call to Shayne. Remember every minute how dangerous I am.”

“Bud, the gun’s empty. You used up the bullets.”

He looked down, perplexed. To make sure, he aimed the gun at Frieda, then changed his mind and pressed it against his own forehead, and to make a joke out of it, crossed his eyes and put on a goofy look.

“Me worry?”

The hammer clicked.

“I love you, Frieda. Passionately. You handled me very well. I hope you’ll be happy.”

He threw the gun down and ran from the room. In a moment more a car left the garage and went careening away.

She closed her eyes for a long moment, her fingernails digging into her palms. She breathed deeply and relaxed.

Rourke had taken back control of his program. The calls continued to come in. The listener across the street had seen Bruno’s car burst out of the garage. She described it. Another listener spotted it heading toward the interstate. A truck driver left a luncheonette and swung his trailer across the ramp and the approach road. Bruno reversed and darted away. Blocked again, he left the car and ran. He was caught in a cemetery some minutes later by three women, all regular listeners to the Rourke show, the wife of a banker, a waitress on a late shift, and a call girl between calls.

Shayne and the police were careful about breaking into the building. They made the final move only when it was absolutely clear that the reports coming in were true and Bruno was elsewhere. Frieda was crying as Shayne unbuckled the straps.

“Mike, you bastard. Telling everybody we went away for a weekend when Harry was alive.”

He smiled down. “I know it didn’t happen. I have a better memory than that. I wanted people to realize I was serious.”

He freed her wrists. Her arms closed around his neck.

“At the same time,” he said a moment later, “I don’t like to be known as a liar. What’s today — Tuesday. As soon as we can get rid of these cops, let’s find a motel and start the weekend early.”