Brett Halliday - Last Seen Hitchhiking

Holloway shrugged. “Wait till something else turns up.”

“That’s not good enough. Here’s the arbitrator’s award. I award the mask to Eliot Tree, for a payment of two hundred thousand dollars. We won’t pay out a penny of that until the missing piece is recovered. If that happens, Tree’s museum has a bargain and you’re out in the cold, Holloway. But he tells me there are various lesser ways you can be compensated. And if you can locate the goddamn left eye without spending any of this money, we redeal. He gets the money back, you get the mask and you can go through with your sale.”

“Tell me I’m not hearing this,” Holloway said. “I’ll wake up in a minute. Who do you thing you are, the Supreme Court? What makes you think you can enforce a decision like that?”

“We all have guns in our pocket,” Shayne said. “I’m the only professional in the room.”

“My God, you are groovy,” the girl said, sparkling.

“But I have a better way,” Shayne continued. “Nobody really knows what Meri was planning. One theory is that she was thinking of calling a press conference to announce that Holloway’s famous Toltec mask didn’t belong to Holloway, he stole it and smuggled it out. I know enough by now so I can break the same story, with a bigger cast. New York museum hotshot and Miami U. professor caught with concealed pistols. It would get laughs. Goodbye mask. Why I should care where the thing ends up, in Mexico or New York or Indiana? It’s something I really and truly don’t give a shit about. Believe me.”

“I guess I believe you,” Holloway said.

“It’s a gamble, Holloway. Nothing or six hundred thousand. But if you don’t take it, you get nothing anyway.”

“And what’s to stop you from collecting the full reward, regardless, and handing the mask to Tree?”

“The difference between you and me is,” Shayne said, “if people don’t trust you in the private detective business you don’t get jobs.”

Holloway considered. “Elly? Disregarding the innuendo and the insults, are you going to buy this?”

“I think I have to, Sam. If I spend two hundred thousand out of acquisition funds and don’t acquire anything, I’m in trouble, but I’m in trouble already.”

“Sam?” the girl said. This was probably the first time she had used his first name; her lips had started to say “Professor.” “The thing we heard on the radio coming over. You were going to tell Mike.”

“I was about to,” Holloway said. “The newspaperman, Tim Rourke, wants you to call him, Shayne.”

“How did you get that message?”

“My car radio was on. Some kind of squalling homosexual argument — you know the kind of program. Rourke interrupted. He wanted to talk to Mike Shayne, and if anybody knew where he was, to pass it on.”

Shayne picked up the phone and punched the button for an outside line. A moment later he was talking to Rourke.

“See? It worked,” Rourke said. “That says something about my far-flung audience. This may not be anything for you, Mike, but aren’t you doing something about the hitchhiking killer, as we call him because we don’t know his real name?”

“Trying to.”

“A woman’s body has been found on the West Palm Beach municipal golf course. Do you want the few details I have?”

“How old is she?”

“Young is all I know. It came in as I was leaving the paper. In the rough on one of the late holes. Guy was playing around, trying to finish before dark. He saw something that looked like a body, but he was playing his best golf of the year and didn’t want to break his concentration. A real enthusiast. He finished the round before phoning the cops. The woman was naked, under some kind of rain cape. No shoes, no identification. Somewhat bruised. She couldn’t have been out hitchhiking without any clothes on, but whenever anybody finds a dead female these days, they think about the mad Mr. X.”

“You don’t know if she was blonde or brunette?”

“That wasn’t included, Mike. I’ve got to get back. It’s the time of night when my guests start to bicker if I’m not there to ump. Are you coming in later?”

“I hope to. I’ll check this out first. Tell your people not to go to bed. I’ll have a major announcement. I’m posting a two-hundred-thousand-dollar reward.”

“Gulp,” Rourke said. “And you’re using me as a vehicle? That’s nice. Hurry, Mike. I’ll pitch you an audience.”

Shayne picked up his Buick where he had left it, near Holloway’s Moorish gatehouse in Coral Gables. He hit the interstate and went north at what was turning out to be his usual speed tonight, close to a hundred miles an hour. After juggling the times Rourke had given him, he had decided that he had a chance of arriving before the body was taken away. He kept his mind deliberately blank, concentrating on the road, the cars he was passing, the speedometer needle. If it was Frieda, there was nothing he could do except make the identification, and clear his calendar so he could concentrate on tracking down her killer.

He left the interstate at the West Palm interchange. He had never played on the municipal course here, but he knew how to reach it. The clubhouse was ablaze with light but cars were beginning to move out. Seeing an ambulance approaching, Shayne set his blinkers, flicked his headlights from high to low and back to high, and turned abruptly into its path.

A horn blatted. The heavy vehicle ran out on the shoulder and came to a stop with one blinking light less than a yard from Shayne’s fender. The driver came out yelling. Shayne dismounted without hurrying and stepped into the headlights.

“Are you carrying a body?”

“Yes, indeed, I’m carrying a body! And you nearly made a few more with that dumb move.”

“I want to look at her before you disappear.”

Other cars jammed up behind the ambulance, and a crowd gathered quickly. The top-ranking cop on the scene was a homicide lieutenant named Harmon. Shayne explained: he was trying to find a missing woman, and it was possible that she might be the one being taken away, though he hoped not. Noting from the way Shayne held himself that he didn’t intend to move his Buick until they did as he asked, the lieutenant signed to one of the attendants.

“Take a minute.”

With the air of a man being seriously inconvenienced, the attendant opened the double doors. Shayne climbed in. Harmon watched from outside as he turned back the sheet. Shayne’s face tightened.

“Do you know her?” Harmon asked.

After a moment Shayne said, “I’ve seen photographs. Her name’s Meri Gillespie. Spelled M-e-r-i. A University of Miami grad student. She was hitchhiking.”

“Hitchhiking,” Harmon repeated.

Shayne scraped his thumbnail across his chin, looking down at the dead girl. “But there are some fancy angles.”

“Like what, Shayne?”

Another moment passed. Answering was an effort. Shayne had begun to think that he had two separate problems, that Meri was still alive and had staged her own disappearance for her own reasons.

“Her employer got a letter from her tonight. He knows her well, and the letter seemed plausible. If she didn’t write it, whoever did, knew how she expressed herself and what she was up to. In other words, not a stranger.”

He folded the sheet all the way down. The overhead bulb was too dim. He asked for something stronger, and somebody handed in a battery lantern. He moved the light slowly from one contusion and discoloration to the next. The body had been badly battered. A mark several inches wide, with regular edges, ran across her chest.

“Seat-belt?”

“That’s what it looks like,” Harmon said. “There’s another like it on her left wrist, as though she had her hand looped in the belt. There’s a scalp laceration, and that may be what killed her. We’ll know in the morning. If we’d pulled her out of a wrecked car, cause of death would be obvious. Here on a golf course, in this rain cape—”