Brett Halliday - Last Seen Hitchhiking

The feeling of the bills gave her a sort of early sexual excitement. She hadn’t known she cared that much about money. The thoughts that were roaring through her head were anything but disturbing. Perhaps, after all, she could get on a plane and go somewhere and make sense of her life. But what did she want? Everything! The whole schmear. That was the trouble.

She turned on the TV again, coming in on a cluster of commercials. A beautifully groomed woman held out a can of toilet-bowl cleanser, silently mouthing its praises. A man and a girl, both gorgeous, in bathing suits — toothpaste, she guessed, and toothpaste it was. Her stomach gave an indignant growl and she sent the beautiful intruders back to their hiding place in the tube.

The red eye of the radio was looking at her accusingly. It was on, the volume way down. She glanced at her sleeping friends. If it disturbed them, screw it. She needed voices.

She turned the control and heard Biscayne Fats, whose husky voice had whispered to her through many a wakeful night. But it wasn’t the usual Biscayne Fats. He was standing outside the studio, looking in on his show, except that it didn’t seem to be his own show. It was a strange effect that frightened her slightly. Nobody likes to hallucinate at the end of a party.

A police lieutenant was talking. It was a telephone voice, but that was all right, because Fats habitually took phone calls. But the lieutenant wasn’t talking to Fats. Fats was somewhere else, occasionally inserting a word or two to remind his listeners of his presence.

His man, the lieutenant was saying, had returned to the Boca Raton phone booth, as Shayne had suggested, and looked in the book. And sure enough, one of the yellow pages had been torn out.

Sandy, listening intently, was now about ninety-eight percent certain that she was inside a dream of some kind. A yellow page had been torn out. What could it mean?

In the studio — it was Tim Rourke’s studio, she realized, which was queer; were they conglomerating? — another Boca Raton phone book was found and comparisons were made. One of these voices she liked. It was deep and throaty, weary but patient, warm. She knew it came from a large, powerfully built man. She wished she had him face down on the bed beside her, so she could rub the tension out of his back and shoulders.

“Yeah,” he said slowly. “Here it is. Photographers. Pharmacies. Physicians and Surgeons. Pianos. Let’s rule out the pianos. The others are possible.”

“Not pharmacies,” the lieutenant said. “All the places Anastasia has been slowing down in front of are in the middle of the block. Drug stores are usually on a corner. One of my guys here has been keeping a list of addresses. Let me check.”

Sandy poured herself a glass of wine and settled down in front of the radio. She was going to make sense out of this if it took all night. Pharmacies? Pianos?

The lieutenant came back. “You realize this is approximate, Mike. I mean, we don’t have the number, just the street, something like ‘south side, apartment house.’ Seven places in Boca Raton. We could knock out photographers right away. It’s doctors, Mike. They’re all of them doctors, all seven. Can you explain it? When you need a doctor, you phone him and the answering service tells you to take an aspirin and call in the morning. Or you go to his house and bang on the door. That’s not what Anastasia’s doing. He just goes up and down, looks at the house, and drives on.”

Rourke’s voice: “Maybe there’s something distinctive about the house he’s looking for. Or there’s supposed to be somebody who’s still awake, with a light on.”

The lieutenant again: “Now this is funny. Not only doctors. They’re all obstetricians, gynecologists. Is that how you pronounce it?”

Sandy, finishing that glass of wine and starting another, was finding the conversation more and more bizarre. She was beginning to think the whole thing was a late-night, hoax, like the time Fats had three guests who had just come back from a ride on a flying saucer.

Mike: “Which is it? A gynecologist who collects Mexican art? Or a gynecologist who collects girl hitchhikers?”

“And rapes them,” Rourke put in. “And how the hell do you account for that? Considering his line of work. There he is, eight hours a day, bent over that examining table with his speculum and his rubber glove. Wouldn’t you get tired of that particular view, and want to go bowling or something?”

And suddenly Sandy had such a powerful intuition that she spilled wine on her leg. A gynecologist’s examining table — hitchhikers—

She went into a rapid time-warp, and when she returned to the present, Mike was taking a phone call from Fort Myers, on the other side of the peninsula. A dead youth from Fort Myers, Sid Koch by name, had turned up in the back seat of somebody’s car. Sandy puzzled about it, but it seemed to have no connection with gynecologists, or with anything else. Give it time, she said to herself. Sooner or later the kaleidoscope would stop spinning and patterns would emerge.

The caller, a Mrs. Goodman, was an acquaintance of Koch’s mother.

“Did you know Sidney was jailed on drug charges and he stayed there for a week until he could raise bail? God’s truth. The case was dismissed later, but you know the old saw. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. And there was smoke here. Marijuana smoke.” She gave a croak of laughter.

“Mrs. Goodman—”

“And that boy was always a trial and a disappointment to his mother, who is the sweetest individual on earth. There’s no father in the family. Never has been. She scrimped and she slaved to send him to college, and the thanks she got, he turned artistic on her. Not much of a living in that. All he was willing to do after he got the degree was sit around the house with his hair over his eyes playing the drums so loud it drove everybody on that street purely wild.”

The studio voice tried to interject something. Again she rode him down.

“Naturally, you know, his mother came to the end of her patience and cut off his funds, to get him up off his hiney and out in the world to find a job. For all the effect that had, he just went on in his usual ways. He always had money in his pocket, like in one of those fairy stories. You don’t need to be any mind-reader to know where he got it. From peddling marijuana among his age group, and the narcotics police got wind of it after a time. His mother thought they heard it from me, which is far from correct, but there’s been a certain amount of chilliness in that quarter since. I couldn’t care less.”

“Do you have anything more to tell us about Scotch?”

“You call him that too, do you? Plenty! He kept running off to Miami on his motorbike. I have my spies, don’t you know, and whenever he came back was when he was able to make those little purchases — long-playing record albums and the like. Parts for his motorcycle. A pair of boots costing well over forty dollars.”

“You’re saying there’s no legitimate way for him to afford an expensive pair of boots?”

“That’s precisely what I’m saying. His mother doesn’t allot him one penny. The only answer I’ve been able to come up with is marijuana.”

“What kind of friends did he have?”

“Scruffy. Guitar players, so on and so forth. Marijuana smokers all of them, not a doubt in the world.”

“Girls?”

“One in particular, and she happens to be my daughter, and that’s why I take such a special interest in what sort of a boyfriend she’s getting herself mixed up in. She’ll be heartbroken when she hears about it, a lot more so than me — not that I’m gloating. I personally thought he was more likely to go in one of those motorcycle skids. I still don’t think much of that suicide theory. Suicide? He was too egotistic. The reason I’m calling to strike in a claim for a piece of that money, and I know you’re going to be fair about that, Mr. Shayne, is that he’s been telling a lot of stories about how money was not a problem. He suggested to my daughter that they do some traveling together in Europe and so on. That was some time ago now, a matter of let’s say a couple of weeks. Lately he’s been very short-tempered. Disappearing and showing up and disappearing. My personal opinion, I think he was deep in the drug traffic, and that time he went down to Mexico was to line up a source of supply, which would naturally enter this country through the Port of Miami. It’s been giving me a bad case of insomnia, which is why I’m listening to the radio this late. My advice to you, Mr. Shayne, is to stop chasing around the countryside after pieces of masks. That’s not it. In my considered opinion, it’s marijuana. Marijuana,” she insisted.