Last Seen Hitchhiking

Chapter 4

Seminole Beach, a whistle stop on the Florida East Coast Railway, was mapped out as a real estate speculation during the last days of the great 1920s boom. Canals were dug, street signs were erected. Then everything collapsed. When the boom resumed a generation later, proving title to the tiny lots, and putting them together into large enough parcels to meet the requirements of modern zoning, proved to be difficult. Patches of heavy development were separated by weed-grown gaps. Most of the canals had silted up and were almost too shallow to accept a surfboard. Maxine Holloway’s back lawn ended at one of these sluggish green ditches. The house had been hastily built, and sagged under the weight of an enormous television mast. Most of the gray trim needed to be refreshed.

Shayne was in second as he approached the house, but instead of slowing further to look for a curbside opening, he continued past.

“Mike,” Frieda said.

“Don’t look around.” He turned the next corner before explaining: “The front door is wide open. These houses are all air-conditioned. Why leave the door open and lose that expensive cold air?”

He told her to slide over and take the wheel. “I’ll see what’s happening, if anything. Give me three minutes, and come back around. Use the blinkers and the siren. When you don’t know what questions to ask, it’s a good idea to show up making some noise.”

She touched him under his left arm. “Are you taking a gun?”

He stopped halfway out of the car. “Is there something you haven’t told me?”

“It’s just the way everybody’s acting. I don’t want you to get hurt.”

“You’re more likely to get hurt when you go in with a gun in your hand. It encourages everybody else to start shooting.”

“Wait, Mike. How do you turn on the siren?”

He showed her, and walked away.

Children were roller-skating along the sidewalk. He stepped around and walked past the house with the open door. The third car beyond was a dark sedan, a Chrysler, with a twisted aerial. A man slumped behind the wheel, his seat-belt on. A tennis cap was pulled low over a pair of wraparound dark glasses. He was smoking a small cigar.

When Shayne picked the cigar out of his mouth, he sat up abruptly. He was dark-skinned, with long sideburns ending in a point.

Shayne pitched the cigar away. “Let’s see your driver’s license.”

The man’s hand started for his hip pocket, and his jacket tightened. Shayne added, “And your permit to carry that hand gun.”

Alert now, the man demanded, “What am I doing? What’s the hassle?”

“People don’t sit in cars around here. They get out and go in the house. Where have you got the heroin?”

“Heroin! Heroin! You’re crazy, man,”

“That’s what I get the citations for. Would anybody normal do this kind of work?”

The man stabbed at the horn button, but in this model the horn didn’t work with the ignition turned off. Shayne’s hand darted in and released the seat-belt. He unlatched the door, yanked, and the man spilled out in the street. It was done very fast.

Shayne disarmed him and pulled him erect, holding his right arm stiff in both hands.

“Now, don’t yell. If you do I’ll break your arm. This can’t be that important to you. How many in the house?”

“Three.”

“We can handle three. I’m getting reinforcements in a minute.”

A venerable, once-red VW stood in the driveway. Shayne took his captive to the side door in the attached garage and told him to open it quietly. Maxine’s friend, the sculptor, had changed the garage into a studio. There was a workbench along one wall, and the floorspace was cluttered with scrap metal and fabricating equipment, as well as a few pieces the sculptor probably considered finished. They picked their way through.

“You’re doing nicely,” Shayne said.

Following instructions, the man opened a door into the kitchen. Two people had been having breakfast They had finished their eggs, but there was still coffee in the cups, and a cigarette smoldered in the ashtray. Shayne checked the time and kept moving.

In the living room, a man in a knitted ski mask was pulling books off a two-shelf bookcase. His back was toward Shayne. He had thin shoulders, a forward tilt. He was wearing orange work-gloves. There was what seemed to be a bundle of laundry at one end of the sofa. A pair of bare feet protruded from beneath a dirty sheet.

“García!” the man in Shayne’s hands shouted.

The siren sounded, and a tall man in the same kind of ski mask burst out of a bedroom. He was easily six feet three, but the extra height was almost entirely in his neck and torso, as though those sections had been artificially stretched. He took out a Luger, the long barrel and short butt seeming as misproportioned as his own body.

The siren, at full wail, turned the corner. Another man appeared. All four were shouting excitedly at each other in Spanish. When the tall man swung around toward Shayne, lifting the gun, Shayne pushed the driver at him. A consensus quickly emerged; it was time to leave. The driver was the first out the door, the tall man the last.

“Run,” Shayne told them. “You can make it.” Strangled noises came from the bundle on the sofa. From the front doorway, Shayne watched the black Chrysler zoom away. His own Buick pulled up, and Frieda leaned across to see what Shayne wanted her to do next. He signaled. She parked in the open slot, the siren dying.

Shayne returned to the sofa and unveiled a furious woman with her hands tied and a gag in her mouth. She was a little too plump, in shorts and a halter, with all the exposed surfaces nicely tanned. She was wriggling and gobbling, using body language to order Shayne not to stand there calmly lighting a cigarette but to rush after the intruders and apprehend them.

When Frieda came in, Shayne said, “Is this the professor’s ex-wife?”

“I’ve never seen her, but she’s the right age and this is the right address.”

“What do you think about all this?”

“Four men. It bears out my guess that there’s quite a bit of money involved. Shouldn’t we take that thing out of her mouth and ask her some questions?”

“Look around first. We don’t have a search warrant, and she might object.”

The woman made a strong objection, muffled but unmistakable, as Shayne began a slow search of the house, having to move sideways between jagged constructions of rusty steel, meaningless shapes a little too big to stand comfortably under a ceiling. The household was clearly in need of money. The carpet was threadbare where walked upon, frayed at the edges. Cigarette burns on the furniture had been left unrepaired. There were several Mayan and Mexican objects, a framed photograph of a Mayan temple.

“Am I warm?” Shayne asked her.

The woman had stopped wriggling. She watched without moving her head.

There were two bedrooms, only one of which had been used the previous night. In the bathroom, a man in a bath towel was sitting on the closed toilet, hands on his knees. The masked intruders hadn’t considered it necessary to bind or gag him. He didn’t seem surprised to see Shayne. He had a full black beard, which had been allowed to grow as it pleased.

“Can I come out now?”

“Not yet,” Shayne told him. “I’ll let you know.”

He looked through the medicine cabinet. Somebody in the house suffered from ulcers. Somebody else used anti-depressants. The woman, not the man, took the necessary measures to prevent conception.

Shayne spent a few minutes at the desk in the larger bedroom. Several of Mrs. Holloway’s recent personal checks had bounced, and her bank had fined her severely so she would remember not to do it again. More than one unpaid bill had the notation: “Please!” The Holloway textbook was out on the desk. When Shayne picked it up, it opened to a place marked with a Kleenex: a tipped-in four-color insert showing various Toltec funerary articles, including masks. A name was written on a memo pad by the phone: “Eliot Tree, St. Albans, until Tuesday” — the St. Albans being one of the Beach hotels.

He continued the search. Returning to the living room after several more minutes, he freed the woman’s wrists and ankles and finally removed the gag.

She sputtered meaningless sounds until her talking muscles were working normally.

“Who were those guys? Did they all get away? They walked in and grabbed me and didn’t let me say one single word.”

“We didn’t get here soon enough, I’m afraid,” Shayne said. “On the other hand, nobody got shot, which is a plus. Did they take anything?”

“I don’t even know what they were looking for! They didn’t take me into their confidence! They handled me like a sack of sugar. If they wanted any real loot, they sure as hell came to the wrong place. Andy!” she said suddenly. “He was taking a shower. Is he all right?”

“He seems to be. What’s his last name?”

“Anastasia. The sculptor. He’s been staying here. Is that O.K., or do we have to be married?”

“Marriage isn’t the sacrament it used to be,” Shayne said. “He seems to be comfortable in there. Mrs. Field wants to ask you some questions.”

Mrs. Holloway started to push up. “I know they slugged him.”

“They just told him to stay in the bathroom, Mrs. Holloway. Talk to us for a minute, and I’ll get him.”

“I can’t tell you anything. It’s all a big mystery to me.”

Shayne didn’t try to block her off from the doorway. He exchanged a look with Frieda, and went to see how Mrs. Holloway and her friend greeted each other after their adventure. They were embracing hard.

“Max, are you all right?” Andy demanded. “I’ve been going crazy in here.”

They caressed and hugged each other, and for a moment were both talking at once.

“Andy, I was so scared! They were getting madder and madder. They put a sheet over me. Then the sirens and the yelling—”

“Are you hurt?”

“Oh, God, darling, my wrists — look at the marks.”

Shayne let them question and reassure each other for a moment more before breaking it up. Andy was the first to pull away.

“Baby, he’s right. I mean, there are a lot more logical places in Seminole Beach; why pick on us? Maybe he can help figure it out.” He reknotted the towel. “Whoever the hell he is.”

“I’m Michael Shayne,” Shayne told him. “We’re trying to locate a missing girl named Meri Gillespie.”

The bearded man’s eyes jumped to Maxine, who said, “Missing?”

“She’s disappeared. Mrs. Field is trying to find out how and why. If we hadn’t come along when we did, you might have sat on that sofa and that toilet seat all day, so I know you’re grateful, and you’ll be glad to answer a few questions.”

“You’re private detectives,” Maxine announced. “Working for Sam.”

“That’s right. Professor Samuel J. Holloway.”

“Ph.D. Never forget to add that. Doctor of Phoniness and Philandering.”

They returned to the cluttered living room.

“You’d better know right away,” Anastasia said, sitting beside Maxine and taking her hand, “that nobody in this house is impartial on the subject of Herr Professor. A good piece of advice, don’t believe a word he tells you. What did he tell you?”

Frieda answered, “That his current graduate-student-in-residence ran off taking something of his. She was hitchhiking, and we’re all hoping she hasn’t been murdered. You were seen talking to her in Miami last week, Mrs. Holloway, and according to the girl who saw you, talking hard. About what?”

Maxine found her glasses and put them on, putting on at the same time what was probably her usual manner. The glasses slid half an inch down her nose, so she could look at Frieda over the rims.

“Does anybody want coffee? I don’t advise it, I make lousy coffee. Of course I talked to the girl. When was I down in Miami, honey? I bought those prints.”

“They don’t care when,” Anastasia said. “They want to know why. The ex-girl and the current girl. Besides Holloway and pre-Columbian art, what do you have in common?”

“She wrote me,” Maxine explained. “She had a research problem she wanted help with, if I wasn’t too bitter. To call her when I was down next. So I was curious, I called her, and we had some ice cream. Great for the figure. God, I hate girls like that! She had a double chocolate sundae with whipped cream, and you knew from the way she licked the spoon that she wouldn’t gain an ounce. The question was legit, I mean not just a pretext. I used to know quite a lot about the subject. I’m a bit rusty.”

“You keep up,” her friend said. “If I did as much reading as you do I’d go blind.”

She pushed up her glasses. “I try, but there’s too much, when I also have to make a living and keep the goddamn house picked up and be nice to a man. It happened that I knew where to tell her to look, and we got that out of the way in thirty seconds. After that we talked about Sam, really about why we broke up.”

“Why did you?” Frieda said.

“Sam’s version goes this way. Everything was companionable and easy, we were into the same things and I had respect for his brain and his power to hypnotize large masses of undergraduates, and then a guy named Andy Anastasia came along.”

Wrinkling her nose against the pressure of her glasses, she smiled at the man beside her. “There was no real comparison. Sexually Andy was major-league, hitting in the top ten. Whereas Professor Holloway, Ph.D, struck out too often and was strictly bush. My version of this is that I was disillusioned with Sam long before Andy loomed on the horizon. I didn’t care about those occasional episodes with his female students, the tutorial conferences ending with professor and student partially undressed. Sam needed that, and I could adapt. But living in the same house with him, I began to see the character flaws, the greatest of which was vanity.”

“Man,” Andy said.

“He wanted to be petted all the time. And the petting went only one way. When you find out that the man you’re living with is a bastard, the magic goes.”

“I sat in on one of his lectures once,” Andy contributed. “‘The Artistic Imperative.’” He put it in quotes with a quick downward slash of his fingers. “That’s why all his graduate students are women. Men see through the act quicker.”

“Another objective witness heard from,” Maxine said, patting his knee.

“I’ve never tried to conceal the fact that he burns my gass. Five thousand creative artists starving in this country, and creeps like that eat caviar and filet mignon.”

“I told Meri a few things Sam would really like me to keep to myself,” Maxine went on. “I can be a bitch, and over that scoop of lemon sherbet I was very, very bitchy. I haven’t felt so purged in years. Of course she already knew it all, she needed confirmation. He’d asked her to marry him — did I say that? Panic sets in as the hairline retreats. She didn’t need me to tell her she’d be nutty to do it. But she needed reasons. Reasons I gave her. It was the first time I’d met the girl, and I liked her, sort of. How did they part, friends? I guess not.”

“A cup was thrown,” Frieda said.

“Hey,” Maxine said, pleased. “I thought she might turn out to be that type. A little more militance is what we need.”

“Did she call you after that?”

“Not while I was home.”

She looked at the man beside her. He shook his head. Shayne put in, “Somebody named Eliot Tree, staying at the St. Albans. Who is he?”

She looked at him in astonishment. “Eliot Tree — you’re really out of it. The Fine Arts, in the big city. I thought he was the one museum director everybody knows. He used to be a curator down here and I knew him. He was trying to get the museum interested in pre-Columbian, but the time hadn’t come.”

She checked herself, adjusted her glasses again, and said slowly, “Did she pinch the Toltec mask?”

“A piece of it,” Frieda said.

“Terrific!” Maxine said with enthusiasm. “No wonder Sam was so quick to bring in detectives. I’ve heard of you, Shayne, the prices you charge. I knew it couldn’t be anything small. Now wait a minute. Wait one minute.”

She slid the glasses back and forth along the well-traveled half inch. “That’s what those guys were after. They thought it was here.”

“What did you tell the chick,” Andy said, “that if she wanted to shoplift something, you’d handle it for her?”

“No, no, no. She showed me a Kodachrome and she wanted me to give her a rough idea of how much it was worth. The quality, Andy! Sometimes you can’t tell from a photograph. The colors come out brighter than they really are. But this looked fantastic. Sam was authenticating it, I don’t know who for. If she knew, she didn’t tell me.”

“Holloway says he bought it in Colombia,” Frieda said.

“If so,” Maxine said, as her glasses slid, “that’s going to put him in a different bracket. He’s always been the technician, not the dealer. Of course he does love money. He was always talking about some pot or some clay dog he could have bought for fifty dollars that went for five thousand at Parke-Bernet. Interesting! Very.”

“Baby, a mask?” Andy said. “I don’t visualize it.”

“A mosaic,” she explained. “Colored chips on terracotta. Onyx, turquoise, jadeite, red crysolite. Human teeth, two fangs. Resin. A beard may have been attached to it once, not as wild as yours. There are some examples around — Chicago has one that’s eighty percent intact. The point is, this is one hundred percent, or ninety-nine plus, in mint condition. It was found in pieces, but all the pieces were there and the breaks ran along the mosaic lines, so putting it together was no job at all. Maybe something else of the same quality has been found while I haven’t been paying attention, but I doubt it. If it’s the only one of its kind, only the richest museums are going to be able to afford it, and that’s what I told her. Then I got to wondering. I happened to see that Tree was down for some kind of directors’ meeting. I called him. You get cautious awfully fast in that business, but he agreed — cautiously — that a mask like that might command a rather high price. He himself, in light of the stock market slide and the tightness of his board of trustees, wouldn’t be able to bid on it, which was too bad because he’s getting a big exhibition ready and he needs something spectacular to top it off.”

“Has it been offered to him?” Frieda asked.

Maxine hesitated. “I think so. He didn’t admit it to me.”

“When you say a high price, how high?”

“How high is up? How much do you think these pieces of Andy’s are worth? They’re worth exactly what people are willing to pay for them. They ought to sell for about a thousand apiece, and it’s my prediction that that’s going to happen someday. Right now, write him a check for a hundred dollars and you can have all three.”

“Sweetheart,” Andy said.

“They know I’m not serious, I’m making a point. A broken mask, like the one in Chicago, might go for nine or ten thou. A few years ago an intact mask like this one, with the right kind of papers, verified by a top expert like Holloway, well, thirty or forty thousand. But funny things have been happening lately. Five and a half million for a not very good Velásquez. Etruscan kraters. Seventy thousand used to be high. All at once along came a perfect example by the best-known Greek master, and everybody wanted it. Money was available, because gifts to museums are tax-deductible. A record-breaking price brings people into museums, not to see a famous piece of art, but to see a piece of art that has changed hands at a famous price. That’s how museums measure success, by the number of people they draw. So the krater went for a million three. Maybe the same kind of breakthrough could happen here. People have been saying for years that pre-Columbian was the next hot category. In an auction situation, with half a dozen hungry museums bidding—” She stopped, and looked grave. “A half million?”

“I did hear you say a half million dollars,” Andy said. “I know it sounds crazy, but one of these days pre-Columbian’s going through the roof. It has to happen. And this might be the piece to start it.”

“It’s disgusting. Why do any of us bother?”

“Did Meri tell you about any offers for it?”

“She wasn’t giving away anything more than she had to. But you realize, don’t you, that this whole traffic is highly illegal? Every Central American country has laws against export. To get to the United States, it has to be stolen first, then smuggled. Sam used to stay out of that whole end. The academic expert, clean hands. Always a witness, never a defendant. I hope you don’t think he really bought it in Colombia? Bullshit. What if Meri knew where he really got it? She’s an intelligent girl, privy to his secrets, as we say. She could blow him out of the water if she was feeling mean enough — get the mask confiscated and sent back. Money and effort wasted.”

She came forward and let go of Andy’s hand to make her gestures more emphatic. “Did Sam know she was going to be hitchhiking?”

“He overheard a phone call.”

“Then what if he’s the one who stopped and picked her up? Do you like that theory?”

“And killed her?” Shayne said.

“Taking advantage of all the furor about the hitchhiking murderer. Now you’re going to ask me if he’s capable of it. I lived with him five long hard years. If the price is right,” she said grimly, “he’s capable of it.”

Andy moved uneasily.

“All right, I know,” she said. “The ex-wife speaking. Frankly, I hate him.”

“But tactically,” Andy said, “it might be smarter to let these people figure some of this out for themselves. You did call the museum guy. Guys with guns did walk in and tie you up and take the place apart.”

“I admit I can’t explain it.”

“Maxine, honey,” Andy said gently, taking her hand again, “you’ve got to try, or they’ll go away thinking you’re the mastermind.”

Maxine said helplessly, “Somebody already thinks that. But who? Sam? Ellie Tree? I only had one conversation with the girl! I didn’t give her any advice on how she could screw Sam. I’m an innocent bystander.”

“I believe you,” Andy said, “and I just hope they do, because I’ve heard of Shayne, too, and I’ve heard he’s a bad man to have mad at you.”

Frieda took out her photographs. “I want to be sure this is the same girl and the same mask.”

“That’s Meri Gillespie,” Maxine said. “And that’s the picture she showed me. Do you see what I mean? My God! It leaps out at you. If it has that same quality in three dimensions, it’ll really pull people in. I hope to hell it hasn’t been dumped in some swamp somewhere. Well, I hope she hasn’t either, but there are plenty of young girls. This mask is one of a kind.”

Andy took the picture. “Half a million bucks? You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Mike, any questions?” Frieda said.

“You helped with his textbook, Mrs. Holloway. Do you get any royalties?”

“I do not,” Maxine snapped. “Nor do I get any alimony, which is something I don’t happen to believe in. I do believe in royalties, but unfortunately my name doesn’t appear on the copyright page or in the contract. At the time I didn’t think it mattered. We were husband and wife, so why be picky? And a year after the divorce, the book began to move.”

“Did Meri mention anything to you about somebody named Sid Koch?”

“Koch? No.”

“Did you expect to see her again?”

“Not really. She said if there was anything else she needed to know, she’d call.”

“When you were talking to Tree, did you tell him you knew who had a mask like the one you were describing?”

“I guess I implied it. And it did cross my mind — Tree’s in Miami, Sam Holloway’s in Miami. If the mask is still up for grabs, is that the real reason Tree happens to be in town?”

“What’s your own idea about what ought to be done with a thing like this? It’s stolen goods. Do you think it ought to go back?”

“I suppose I do,” she said slowly. “It comes from Quintana Roo in Yucatan. At least that’s what he’s letting us understand. The National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City is damn good, and that’s really the place for it. But if it was Guatemalan, my answer might be different. As the star piece in a North American collection, hundreds of thousands of people a year would see it, and presumably get something out of it. It would be well displayed and described, and carefully watched so it wouldn’t be stolen a second time. But if sending it back would mean doing Sam Holloway out of a dirty bonanza, I’d think very seriously about it.”

“We all have lots to think about,” Andy said. “But first we’d better find out if the kid’s been murdered. That would make the whole thing academic.” His face worked. “Academic — I even hate to pronounce the word.”