Last Seen Hitchhiking

Chapter 8

Shayne, a quarter of a mile to the north, checked his tires and the oil level and went into the gas station to draw coffee from the vending machine. After one taste he poured it out and returned to his car.

The phone was ringing. His operator told him she had a call from Professor Sam Holloway in Coral Gables. Did Shayne want it?

“Yeah, put him on.”

“Michael Shayne?” a voice said. “Is Frieda with you?”

“Down the road.”

“She gave me your name and operator’s number. I don’t know how much she’s told you about this—”

“Probably most of it by now,” Shayne said impatiently. “Do you want to talk to her?”

“Not necessarily, if you’ll give her a message. Tell her I’ve just received an interesting communication and she can call off this wild adventure.”

“O.K. Tell the operator where she can reach you. I’ll get back to you in five minutes.”

“But Shayne—”

Shayne hung up. He joined the northbound traffic and blinked his way into the high-speed lane. He set his emergency lights to warn all cars within collision range that he was about to make a forbidden move. As soon as he came to an opening in the divider, he ran off onto the parched grass, down a short incline and up the opposite side.

The southbound traffic was heavy and fast-moving. He used his siren to get in, and stayed in the fast lane, trying to keep track of the cars traveling north in the parallel lanes. He was on the wrong side to see Frieda’s yellow scarf.

At the cloverleaf, he left the expressway and came back underneath. Frieda was gone.

Without hesitation Shayne shot past the spot where he had seen her last and went back to the highway with his headlights on and all the Buick’s attention-getting gadgets in operation. By the time he reached the gas station where he had been waiting, he was doing ninety. He had missed perhaps twenty cars while he was southbound. He had already overtaken four. He continued to count. After reaching forty, he pursued and passed ten more, still without sighting the telltale yellow scarf.

He was swearing. He had known there were too many ways this could go wrong. At the same time, he could only have stopped it at the cost of losing her friendship.

He braked to a stop in the outside lane, set an emergency flare, drove another hundred yards and stopped again, forcing the oncoming traffic to funnel past him. He counted again. After sixty cars passed him, he backed down to the flare and put it out in the dirt.

A highway patrolman arrived, a young man with sideburns and a big mustache. Shayne showed his identification.

“Mike Shayne, sure,” the trooper said. “What’s going on?”

Shayne explained quickly.

“How long was she standing down there?” the trooper asked.

“Fifteen minutes at the most.”

“Hey,” the trooper said, beginning to show excitement. “This is as close as we’ve come to the son of a bitch. Let’s get a few checkpoints on the side roads.”

He jumped to his radio. Returning to his own car, Shayne signaled his operator and had her ring the number Professor Holloway had given her.

“We’ve lost her,” Shayne said abruptly when the connection was made. “But they’re working on it, and it may still be O.K.”

“Lost her!” the professor exclaimed. “How did you manage to do that? She told me you’d worked out a way so there was no chance of a slip-up.”

“Apparently not quite. What may have happened is that after she was picked up, the guy backed down the ramp. Or else he slugged her and put her on the floor so I wouldn’t see her. We’ll have another dozen police cars here in a few more minutes. What’s happened at your end?”

“I’m not sure I want to talk about it on this kind of telephone connection. I suppose it’s all right to say that I’ve heard from Meri Gillespie. Obviously that alters the picture considerably.”

“Yeah. Too bad we didn’t know about it fifteen minutes ago. Heard from her how?”

“By letter. We’ve been acting on a certain theory, namely that Meri was picked up hitchhiking and possibly killed. We know now that didn’t happen. She’s in good health, the greedy bitch. Which makes this thing with Frieda extremely painful. I have something important I must do right now, and you’ll be tied up there for a while, won’t you? Give me an hour and a half, and after that I’ll be home all evening. Will you call me?”

“Before you hang up,” Shayne said, “I have a friend on the News, Tim Rourke. He did a couple of pieces last summer about art objects being smuggled into the United States from Mexico and sold at high prices to museums. He’d be interested in this. He has a radio show. I could fix it for you to go on as a guest.”

After a moment the professor said, “I wasn’t sure Frieda had told you all that. I’d prefer no publicity, naturally. Are you implying that there’s some connection between this kidnapper of hitchhikers and the letter from Meri? I doubt it.”

“You haven’t told me what’s in the letter. All I can do here is stand around listening to calls on the police band. Maybe you can think of a way I can be more useful.”

“I could do with a little advice and assistance,” Holloway said slowly. “How far are you from the International Airport?”

“In Miami? Forty minutes.”

“Meet me in front of the Arrival Building. I know you’re red-haired. I expect I’ll recognize you.”

He clicked off. Shayne weighed the phone for a moment before putting it back.

He had started a cigarette. He threw it down as though it was a bomb that would detonate if it hit the road hard enough, and ground it under his heel. He strapped himself into the Buick and made another illegal U-turn across the grass. Using his siren, he began working his way south at a high speed, slipping back and forth between lanes.

Professor Holloway carried his head tipped well back with his chin out, thrusting a neat beard forward like a challenging question. He was a short man. His eyebrows were bushy, flecked with gray.

Shayne was a smaller audience than he was used to, but he gave it his best. If he had sounded less than sympathetic about Frieda on the phone, he made up for it now. He shook Shayne’s hand and at the same time pressed Shayne’s arm.

“Awful. Awful. I was very impressed with that young woman. Her air. She assured me the danger was minimal.”

“She knew what she was doing,” Shayne said shortly. “What have you got?”

“And yet, it’s ironic,” Holloway said, unwilling to let it go. “My dear Meri took full advantage of this hitchhiking business. She lay low and let just enough time lapse so she knew I’d be pacing the floor gnawing my fingernails. Something’s been left for me here. I’ll nip in and pick it up and then we can talk to our heart’s content over a drink.”

“What did you buy, a key or a baggage check?”

Holloway looked at him sharply. “A key. I suppose this is all familiar country to you, but it’s new to me, brand new, and needless to say, I’m hoping that nothing remotely like it ever happens again.”

They entered the crowded building. Holloway had been fingering something in one of his pockets, and now he brought out a key to a coin locker. They began looking for the matching number, finding it finally in a secluded corridor on the lower level, near the incoming baggage carousels.

Holloway made a sound as though he had been rabbit-punched without warning. The door of the locker was sprung.

He pulled it open, looked inside, and said “Shit!” in a booming voice. “I’ve been fooled.”

He slammed the door furiously. It clanged open, shut, open again.

Shayne motioned him aside and examined the lock. The thin metal covering the bolt had been pried out with an edged tool, probably an ordinary screwdriver, and then the bolt had been forced back — a crude, unprofessional job.

Holloway, blowing, had one hand over his heart, as though to keep it from battering its way out.

“The situation’s still the same,” Shayne said. “Two people are still missing. The only difference is that you’re out some money. How much did it cost you?”

“Thirty-eight thousand.”

“I’d better hear about that.”

“A drink—”

“We have a choice of some noisy bars. Or if you want privacy I have booze and ice in my car.”

“Shayne, that letter was authentic! I know the girl, I know how she expresses herself. Somebody else found out about it and beat us to the locker.”

“There’s been a lot of breaking and entering out here lately.”

At the end of the corridor, still dwelling on the unfairness of what had just happened, Holloway started in the wrong direction. Shayne set him right. With a visible effort, the smaller man tried to get back inside his usual public personality. It returned gradually — the cocky walk, the tipped head, the cold stare.

“Are you going to help me get to the bottom of this, Shayne?”

Shayne didn’t answer.

They left the building. It was a long, zigzag walk to where Shayne had left his Buick. Holloway started several questions, but a look from Shayne stopped him before he went all the way to the question mark.

Shayne made drinks.

“I’m going to tape this conversation,” he said. “Don’t let it bother you. I may want to check on something later. Pre-Columbian art has never been one of my main subjects.”

Holloway was drinking straight Scotch without ice. He finished the first shot and Shayne refilled his glass.

“I’ve never been much of a drinker, either,” Holloway said. “I’m making up for it today. I suppose you have some agreement with Frieda about splitting the fee.”

“I’ll deal with you direct. The fee is ten percent of the selling price of the mask, on recovery of the fragment.”

Holloway flinched. “That’s high.”

When Shayne didn’t dispute this, he went on, “Unless you don’t recover, in which case I get ninety percent of nothing. Do you know how much we’re talking about, in round numbers?”

“Your ex-wife suggested half a million.”

The overgrown eyebrows went up and down. “You’ve been to Maxine!”

“Meri’s been in touch with her. They exchanged views about Professor Holloway and Toltec masks. Frieda was beginning to think that instead of starting for Fort Myers, Meri really started for Seminole Beach.”

Holloway brought his hand in smartly against his leg. “A conspiracy of women! Maxine. She’d like nothing better than to cut me into bite-size pieces and feed me to the sharks. I’m fed up with that entire sex.”

“How close did she come to the price?”

“A bit low,” Holloway said with a glint of satisfaction. “Not five hundred thousand. Six. Not that it means a thing unless I can deliver, but the mere fact that the offer has been made is a tremendous achievement. I won’t pretend that I’m indifferent to money. It’s a nice thing to have. But I think what gives me the most pleasure is that this puts the art of our hemisphere on a competitive basis with European easel painting, at long last. And I did it all with my little hatchet. Everything clicked, click, click, click. The Carpenter Museum in Terre Haute, Indiana — do you know it? They’ve had a fabulous new bequest from the Carpenter family, and my mask is the piece they need to put them up with the leaders. And now.” He gestured. “That bitch — those two bitches — Meri, Maxine—”

He drank.

“How much is it worth without the missing piece?”

“Peanuts. I’d hardly recover expenses.”

“Can you make the sale legally?”

“No problem. And would you mind turning off your tape recorder?”

Shayne snapped a switch on the dashboard.

Holloway continued, “I bought it from a Bogota dealer who frequently acts as broker for collectors in Colombia and Venezuela. The old landholding families are chronically short of cash. Estates have to be settled. I’ve used this man before, and he’s completely trustworthy. His principal’s grandfather purchased the mask on a trip to Mexico early in the century. And so on and so forth. Naturally this has all been trumped up out of nothing, to circumvent certain quibbling requirements controlling the international transport of art objects. Everybody knows I dug up the mask in Yucatan last winter. By everybody, I mean everybody in the art world. My Columbia man gives me a provenance for the piece in return for his commission on a fictitious sale. I paid duty, on a declared valuation of thirty-five hundred. And God, it’s a lovely thing, Shayne.”

“Frieda showed me a picture.”

“But when you actually see it! We were looking for a temple site that was reported by a Peabody expedition in 1910, but never surveyed or developed. We did considerable floundering around, and never did find it. A few broken stellae, a ballcourt. The weather was bad and our helicopter pilot couldn’t come for us, so to keep the men occupied, I had them do some random probes where one of the chicleros thought he’d seen stone work. And when the mask came up, Shayne—”

He paused, seeing the scene again as it happened. “It lit up the jungle. That was a holy experience for me. Really. In fragments, of course. I washed them in the river and fitted them together. Complete! A breathtaking thing. All right. I’ve found an object or two over the years, and I recorded them all dutifully and I have letters of thanks and acknowledgment from the National Museum of Anthropology, from the Parco de La Vente. I’ve framed the letters, and as for the objects — some jade vases, a fine ornamental urn — they’re in some dusty basement, jumbled together with hundreds of other pieces. And I made a vow, Shayne, when I looked at the mosaic mask glistening with drops of river water, that this one was going to be different. All the currents of my life came together. And what happened? Meri happened! I had to involve myself with a confused, neurotic girl. I realize now that I should have had nothing to do with her at all, or I should have been more attentive. She wanted the day to revolve around her. She liked to be made love to at odd hours, in odd places. She wanted me to jog. I have achieved a certain position in the academic community, and can you picture me jogging around the streets of Coral Gables wearing a sweat-suit? I said no to a few other things as well. She became huffy, and off she went, taking the fragment with her. I had some murderous thoughts. Visions of smashed cars, ambulances, corpses at the side of the road.”

He covered his glass when Shayne offered the bottle again.

“I need a clear head. How to explain that empty locker? Having lost thirty-eight thousand dollars, which I definitely can’t afford, and having had two jolts of Scotch in quick succession, I may not be my usual lucid self. But let me try to list hypotheses. That a common thief broke into a locked locker without knowing what it contained, and still doesn’t understand the significance of what he has. That somebody else than the extortionist knew about the extortion and decided to short-circuit it. That I paid money for nothing, that the extortionist never possessed the fragment, and bollixed the locker so it wouldn’t be so obvious to me that I too had been bollixed.”

“Do you have the letter?”

“It’s at home. But I went over it carefully, and I think I can give it to you more or less verbatim. Neatly typed. ‘Dear Uncle Sammy.’ Meri called me that. No one else ever did. ‘Dear Uncle Sammy, you’ve finally succeeded in convincing me. Why should other people always make the big money? Whether the mask sells for six hundred or six hundred thousand has nothing to do with its real worth. So I’ve been brooding. You’re probably out of your mind with grief — not for me, I know, but for the missing eye. Carpenter won’t pay you any fancy prices for a one-eyed Toltec god. I’m a little bitter. I want to punish you for some of those last remarks.’”

He explained, “We both said things designed to wound. I have experience, but she has youth and endurance. We came off about even.”

“Finish the letter.”

“She considered options. Her first plan was to call a press conference, and if anybody came to it she’d announce that my cover story was a damnable lie and she had letters to prove it. I don’t know what letters, but she had access to my files and I daresay I’ve been careless. I never anticipated anything like this. And that would blow my deal into tiny bits. Then she had second thoughts while she was out on the highway waiting for a ride. Cynicism set in. I’m quoting again now: ‘Go ahead, damn you, you’re typical of the whole bloody business, collect your money, but set a little aside for me, as payment for all the psychological wear and tear.’ That phrase I remember clearly. ‘Psychological wear and tear.’ ‘Thirty-eight thousand would be about right, and don’t give me a short count or I’ll call that press conference and make you really famous. They’ll take your professorship away and tear off your buttons in front of the adoring freshman class.’ That’s pretty much the way she talked — hyperbolic. After that, precise directions. Quote, the way it’s done on television, unquote. She knew I had money in safe deposit, and her guess at the amount was close. I kept trying to call you, to ask Frieda’s opinion, but the operator couldn’t get an answer. I was in a rush to get to the bank before it closed. I followed instructions exactly. The money in a flight bag. I left it in a certain outside phone booth, then to another booth halfway across town, and opened the directory to the page on which my own phone number appeared. There, as predicted, I found a note instructing me further. The tone was somewhat playful. Teasing. A tone she used when she thought I was being too pompous, too much the professor. I never for a moment doubted that the letter was from her and I was really buying the fragment back.”

“Signed?”

“A typed initial. It was pushed under my front door. The doorbell rang, and I almost didn’t go. I was in no mood for a Jehovah’s Witness or somebody selling dance lessons.”

Leaning forward, Shayne picked the phone off its bracket and asked the operator, “Did Professor Holloway call earlier?”

“Once. About five-thirty. Shall I look it up?”

“No, that’s O.K.” He put the phone back. “You didn’t try too hard.”

“I thought — well, the fewer people involved, the better. If Meri, or whoever, spotted a private detective hanging around when she came to pick up the money—”

“So far it’s our only link.”

“I thought the matter was closed. That was naive of me, I agree—”

“You thought Meri might be dead,” Shayne said, “and it was her killer who was selling you the fragment. You didn’t want a simple commercial transaction fuzzed up with a lot of sentimentality about death and punishment. You did a stupid thing, Holloway. At least it cost you some money. Where’s the rest of the mask? I’d like to see it.”

“I have it locked up at home. I’d just as soon keep it that way.”

“You’d better move it. Give it to the cops to hold overnight and put it in the bank in the morning.”

“I don’t understand,” Holloway said, bringing the eyebrows down.

“Whoever has the fragment, the one eye, is going to want the rest.”

“They couldn’t sell it!” Holloway said, alarmed.

“Why not? All they’d have to do is fake up a new set of papers. It doesn’t belong to you, as I understand it, it belongs to some museum in Mexico City.”