Last Seen Hitchhiking

Chapter 3

Harry Field, when he was an FBI agent working out of the Miami office, had been one of Michael Shayne’s few friends inside that suspicious, close-mouthed organization. On one occasion, Shayne had disarmed a demented youth who was holding Field hostage with a sawed-off shotgun. Shortly after that, following a dispute with the district director, Field resigned from the bureau and set up his own detective agency.

More and more in recent years, independent operators in this field had been moving the other way, closing their one-man offices to join a big nationwide firm that could provide a variety of services and send a single bill, usually a large one. Except for a few established people like Shayne, the independents who managed to survive did so by becoming experts in a single area and working it intensively. Field’s was property insurance, particularly jewelry and art objects. He and Shayne worked together once or twice. Field was cool and patient and likable. He also liked to drink. For a time he and Shayne were part of the same floating poker game. His business broke even from the start, and soon began making money. Shayne sometimes recommended him when he himself was too busy for something, or not interested enough. On one such case, which appeared to be a routine jewelry theft in a Miami Beach hotel, Field was shot and killed.

His widow, Frieda, elected to continue the agency.

She was in her mid-twenties, dark-haired and personable. It was generally agreed that she had been responsible for much of the agency’s early success, but few people in town believed that she could make it on her own. She herself contended that there were kinds of investigative work that could be done better by a woman than a man. This assertion startled many of her clients, and she had lost several big retainers. It was a question whether she could hang on until she established her own reputation. Shayne continued to steer business to her. She called him occasionally for advice, always reluctantly.

She caught him at breakfast.

“Mike, it’s your butterfingered friend once again. I’ve got another one I’m not sure of, and I wonder—”

Shayne had carried his coffee to the phone. “Sure, tell me about it. I’ve got a free day.”

“Have you, Mike? I’m hoping there may be enough money in it so I can bring you in as a consultant. I wish I could afford to learn by making my own mistakes, but this seems to be a little special.”

“Let’s see,” Shayne said. “First I was going to read the paper, then add up my checkbook, get a haircut, and play a few rounds of golf. The evening’s open. I was going to have dinner with somebody, but she just called it off.”

“If you’re serious — well, for various good financial reasons I had to take this, but I’m beginning to think it may be over my head.”

He assured her again that he had nothing on the calendar, which wasn’t quite true. He had never felt responsible for sending her husband to his death, but he owed her something, nonetheless. Field’s FBI experience had taught him nothing about that kind of hotel thief. Shayne himself, who better than anybody else in the area knew the Beach hotels and their regular guests and the regular criminals who preyed on them, might have sensed what was coming and been ready for it. But the case had been too small, too routine. He had given it to Harry Field as a favor. Some favor, it turned out.

He finished his coffee and made a few rearrangements in his schedule by phone before leaving. He met Frieda in her bay-front apartment in the northern part of the city. She looked very good to Shayne, fresh and lovely. Her long dark hair was pinned up in back. She rarely used makeup. In college, Shayne had discovered by chance, she had been admitted to Phi Beta Kappa in her junior year. She and her husband had played competitive bridge, and had been able to beat everybody in town. She was wearing white slacks this morning, a ribbed top, and a silver necklace.

She kissed him lightly.

“Michael, you’re a comfort. One of these days I may develop enough self-confidence to stop calling you.”

He grinned at her. “You mentioned money. The subject always interests me.”

“Potentially there’s money. But God, Mike, the complications.”

When she asked about breakfast, he admitted that he could drink another cup of coffee. She loaded a tray and carried it out to the little terrace looking across Miami Beach to the sea.

“Did you listen to the news?” she said, pouring. “There’s another hitchhiker missing.”

“Girls leave home every day,” Shayne said. “Some of them turn up, and some of them just don’t feel like telling their parents where they are. Then one of these scares gets started, and they’re all victims of the same mad rapist.”

“I guess so, and I hope it’s going to be that way with the girl I ought to be out looking for right now, instead of sitting here on a nice day with a nice man having coffee. Mike, I want to plunge right in, because I’ve got three or four people to tell you about. I don’t know how you are on art professors. Holloway. Samuel J. Holloway. He’s the client.”

Shayne scraped his chin. “At the University? He was an expert witness in some kind of art case a few years back. I don’t remember what it was about or which side he was on.”

“That’s the man. The museums use him to authenticate stuff. His period’s pre-Columbian, Mexico and Central America. He wrote the text everybody uses. I get the impression that when he’s called to New York or Chicago to give his expert opinion, the per diem fees are very handsome. He’s a bit pompous, but that seems to go with the job. Within those limits, reasonably O.K. We used him once on some insurance thing, and he was a little surprised when I showed up day before yesterday instead of Harry. But he told me what he needed, and I persuaded him I could do it better than some tough, cool red-headed free-swinging male, in marvelous shape, with a.38 in his pocket.”

She smiled and touched Shayne’s knee. “I’m not referring to you, Mike. In addition to all your other qualities, there’s a rumor around that you have brains.”

“I don’t know how that got started,” Shayne said dryly.

“To be serious, you also seem to have some kind of instinct for knowing when somebody’s lying, and that may be the thing I need right now. I’m picking some funny messages out of the air. There’s more tension than there ought to be, and it’s even the wrong kind of tension. Various things don’t jibe.”

She sugared her coffee. “Here’s our cast of characters. Start with a girl named Meri Gillespie. Spelled M-e-r-i, presumably her parents’ idea. Twenty-three, from North Olmsted, Ohio. Graduate student. Professor Holloway’s her adviser. He didn’t tell me so, but I find that the relationship has been a bit more personal than that. They’ve been living in the same house. He’s doing a new book on the Toltecs, and she’s been researching it for him. I have some pictures.”

She opened a folder and showed Shayne a posed graduation picture and two color snapshots, one in a bathing suit and the other in a sweat shirt and patched pants.

“She should have no trouble getting rides,” Shayne commented.

“Especially in the bathing suit, right? He forty-six, twice her age. She took two courses with him as an undergraduate, and he persuaded her to go on to grad school. I checked with some people in the department, and apparently this isn’t the first time such a thing happened. His ex-wife — I’ll get to her in a minute — was also one of his students. I don’t think I’d find him hard to resist, but to be fair, I’ve never seen him in action. He’s supposed to be one of the best lecturers there. So. Twelve happy months went by, with the professor flying around the country being important and Meri slaving away in his office — and his bed, too, I suppose, when he was in town. It couldn’t last. They had a big fight, and she walked out. She’d kept in touch with her college boyfriend. His name is Sid Koch, and he seems to be called Scotch by everybody. She’d been seeing him, and the professor didn’t like that. And probably some of the magnetism had worn off and she was getting restless. It wasn’t a quiet departure. A cup of coffee was thrown — I saw the mark on the wallpaper. All she took was a knapsack. He owed her a week’s salary, but she tore up the check and threw it at him. Probably the door slammed when she left. He didn’t sound too unhappy about all this — colleges get a new crop of girls every year. The unhappiness started when he discovered that she’d walked off with something that didn’t belong to her.”

“Something valuable.”

“It has to be fairly valuable, Mike, because he’s paying double my usual rates and he’s not being stingy about expenses. It’s a mask, part of one. A funerary mask.”

She showed him another color photograph. Shayne had never seen anything remotely like it. Bits of brilliantly colored stone had been bonded to some kind of ceramic material to make a mask. There were four colors, blue, green, black, and red. The facial expression was extraordinarily alive — bold and at the same time somewhat sly.

“He glued it together temporarily so he could photograph it,” she said. “If you look closely, you can see the fracture lines. He bought it from a dealer in Columbia, and he says several museums are interested in it. Meri knew what it meant to him. I saw that, too. He gets a religious look when he talks about it — and it really is an exciting thing. The piece she took is about one fifth, part of the forehead, the left eye, a slice of one cheek, and by itself it isn’t worth anything. His idea is that she saw it in the workshop when she went up to get her toothbrush, and decided to take it along, to make him sorry for some of the nasty things he’d said. You begin to get a picture of the parting scene. Bad feeling on both sides. He jittered around the room when he told me about it, couldn’t sit still. ‘She hates me, she’s capable of anything — smashing it, throwing it away.’ What I’ve been hired to do is overtake her before anything bad can happen to the fragment, and use my feminine trickery to get it back. And if I can’t, have her arrested.”

“Does he know where she went?”

“To Fort Myers. That’s where Scotch lives now, the ex-boyfriend. There’d been a phone call that morning, and Holloway overheard her end of it. That was how the fight started — what was he doing eavesdropping and so on. She’d already decided to leave, and she told Scotch she wanted to hitchhike over, to get the taste of Professor Samuel J. Holloway out of her mouth. I chartered a light plane with Holloway’s money and got to Fort Myers in plenty of time. She couldn’t have beaten me hitching. I don’t think I did anything wrong. I got a good look at Scotch and watched the house. I thought it would be better to intercept her before she saw him. She didn’t show up. I kept in touch with Holloway, and he was getting more and more frantic. He keeps thinking about these hitchhiking murders. If Meri’d been murdered, what would the murderer do with that fragment? Bury it, of course. Gone forever. I may be doing my client an injustice. I think he was also slightly worried about the girl herself.”

“You don’t seem to like the man.”

“I remember something you told me once — the client never tells you the full story the first time. At that point, he agreed I should talk to Scotch. Scotch was a student of his, and Holloway took him on some kind of field excursion last year. Scotch had already called the Highway Patrol — everybody’s jumpy. He said she’s the kind of girl who makes a point of not reading newspapers. He’d offered to bike over and get her, but she told him she’d been hitching all her life, and she wasn’t going to change at this late date. Well, there it is, Mike. The Highway Patrol has her picture. I don’t know what they’ll do with it.”

“Show it around, to toll-station attendants and gas jockeys and so on. If they don’t get any positive response, all they can do is wait for the body to show up.”

She made a quick face. “Fine. Meanwhile, I’ve been calling people. Friends, family. After she walked out, there’s a possibility that she changed her mind, and decided to go somewhere else to sort things out, not to Fort Myers. But Holloway was reasonably certain that she didn’t have more than a few dollars and change, not enough for bus fare. I pressed him on this, and he admitted that he went through her purse while she was making the call to Fort Myers. He was looking for mail. A matter of self-protection, he said.”

“How did he mean that? She hadn’t stolen anything at that point.”

“Don’t ask me. He says he always demands absolute loyalty from his graduate students. It does seem out of proportion. Anyway, there was a letter from Scotch, which he read in a hurry. She was working herself up to something, it wasn’t clear what, and Scotch told her to cool it, not to do anything dumb until he could talk to her. The letter wasn’t dated.”

“Maybe she was planning to take the mask, or as much of it as she could get hold of.”

“That’s the way it looks.”

“She must have friends. Maybe she didn’t leave town.”

“Holloway gave me a list. The first one I called was her college roommate, a girl named Joanne. She has her own car, and she drove Meri out to the 8th Street interchange, which means she definitely started for Fort Myers.”

Shayne moved his cup in a small circle, watching the patterns on the surface of the coffee for a moment, thinking.

“How did Meri seem to this roommate? Sad, happy?”

“Excited. Carrying on about what a jerk and a phony Holloway had turned out to be. Joanne had never liked the professor. She hadn’t expected it to last even this long. She didn’t sound too enthusiastic about Scotch, either. I tried to get her to tell me the conversation line by line, but there were long stretches of silence, apparently, with Meri sitting there seething. But one thing she said, and she said it twice, so it may mean something: ‘I don’t know how to handle it.’ Joanne thinks she was talking about her M.A., which is going to be hard to get with Holloway against her. It did cross Joanne’s mind that she might be pregnant. They talked about hitchhiking, and Joanne told her she was out of her mind to hitch alone. Meri said she was in a hurry and it couldn’t wait. In a hurry and it couldn’t wait. Joanne dropped her at the interchange and went back to town.”

“Without waiting to see her get her first ride.”

“Right, Mike. Hitchhikers don’t keep a regular schedule. When they’re traveling for fun, they don’t necessarily travel in a straight line. But after all the phoning I’ve done, I think I have a pretty good idea of this girl. She was a diver in college. You have to be serious about that to be good at it, and most of the time she was first. You don’t know how well a dive worked until the judges hold up their cards. You aren’t competing against time, but against three judges with their different ideas of perfection. If she started for Fort Myers, she would have stayed on the Trail until she got to Fort Myers, unless somebody forcibly removed her. I’m betting on that.”

“Unless she didn’t intend to go there in the first place.”

“And staged the phone call to Scotch because she knew Holloway would be listening. And then if he sent somebody like me after her, I’d go the wrong way. The thing about a right-angle interchange, you can go either north-south or east-west. And there’s one more thing. Last week Joanne was in an ice-cream place near the campus, where everybody goes, and she saw Meri talking excitedly, with gestures, to an older woman. And somebody said this was Holloway’s ex-wife and ex-graduate student, Maxine. I’ve asked around. She had five years with Holloway, the last three of them married. She worked on his book. Everybody says that if she were a man, she’d be an assistant professor. Instead of which, she runs a gift shop in Seminole Beach. She didn’t remarry, but there’s a man, a sculptor. So here’s a theory. Maxine was in on it. She’s an expert on pre-Columbian objects. She’d know how to market the mask, or how much to ask for it if they decided to sell it back to Holloway. Or how to go about returning it to Mexico. I called her, and I thought she hesitated a tick. She took time to breathe. And then to make up for it, for the rest of the conversation she was too fast and glib. But I don’t know! I told her I might drop in today, and I hope you’ll come along and listen and give me an expert’s opinion.”

Shayne finished his coffee and set it down. “But that’s not all you want me for, is it?”

She gave him a direct look. “No. Let’s check this first. If nothing comes of it, I’ll tell you my other idea.”

“Can I argue against it?”

“Certainly — freedom of speech. But I’ve made up my mind I’m going to do it. I really think I have to.”