Brett Halliday: Last Seen Hitchhiking

A light flashed in front of Shayne. He put Holloway on hold, and switched lines.

It was Harmon again.

“Anastasia may be getting discouraged, Mike. He’s been through seven phone books by my count, and now he’s having a drink in a bar. It looks as though he’s settling down. He paid for the drink with a fifty-dollar bill, if that means anything.”

“Holloway’s money, probably,” Shayne said, “out of the thirty-eight thousand. Unless he sold a piece of sculpture, which would surprise the hell out of me. Let him finish the drink, and then bring him in. Holloway?” he said, punching a button to put Holloway back on the air.

“I’m still here, naturally, although if I had any sense I’d go to bed and hope that tomorrow this will turn out to have been an LSD dream.”

“We were talking about Sid Koch. What kind of student was he?”

“Mediocre. I have some grant money for cataloguing and research, and I employed him briefly. I only kept him a few weeks. When I was putting the Yucatan team together, I couldn’t get some of my first choices. He filled in.”

“People have asked why. Heat, insects, diarrhea.”

“I confess I wondered myself.”

“Now I’m guessing again. I think he had a pretty good idea what you were going to find.”

“We had high expectations. We knew the site was there somewhere.”

“How did you date this mask, Holloway?”

“You’ve heard about radio-carbon. You can’t be that ignorant. And the cultural factors—”

“So the terracotta, at least, would have to be from the period.”

The remark dropped like a stone. Holloway let it alone for a moment, before saying with care, “Do I catch an implication? The mosaic chips are bonded to the terracotta. Onyx, chrysolite — I don’t need to say that each of those bits is undoubtedly millions of years old.”

“I’m told that what gives this mask its enormous value is that nothing’s missing. What if you had two partial masks and put them together? Would that still be forgery?”

“Of course. But you’re joking. I don’t know why I’m arguing this with you. You know nothing about the subject.”

“I don’t claim to,” Shayne said. “I’m working backwards, trying to find some logical explanation for the way you people have been behaving. Scotch was probably cynical about you to start with. If he saw something in your shop that made him suspect you were working out some kind of stunt, it would give him a good reason for going to Yucatan. He and Meri were still friends. He wrote her daily letters, which she may have kept. Finding the mask was a big thing, and he must have mentioned it to her. When she decided to block the sale, she could use the letter as evidence that your Bogatá papers were fakes. But if Scotch was collecting from you regularly, naturally he wouldn’t want her to do that.”

Rourke, across the table, told Shayne, “Eliot Tree’s trying to say something.”

Shayne took that phone and put Tree on the air. “Mike. Mike.”

“Yeah.”

“Are you serious about any of this. Did I put up two hundred thousand dollars for a fake?”

“Do you think Holloway’s technically capable of it?”

“Oh, he’s an excellent technician. He’s the expert. The authenticator. And good God, man, do you realize that just by raising that question publicly you’ve destroyed much of the mask’s value?”

“If that’s true, it’s the result of years of fraudulent practice. What do you think of my idea that the Indian was killed to get everybody’s attention up here, including yours?”

“I can accept that. Certainly it worked.”

“But it happened a day early, Tree, before the mask was found. I’m going to put Holloway back on now, to see if he disagrees with any of this. Holloway?”

“I disagree with everything. I want to know what your purpose is here.”

“My usual one,” Shayne said. “I’m trying to explain a particular act of violence, Scotch’s murder.”

“Or suicide.”

“Or suicide. But people don’t think he was the suicidal type. Much less than you are, for example. I think he saw you plant the mask and dig it up. If this whole value structure is so delicate that an unsupported assertion can knock a price down from six hundred thousand to nothing, his eyewitness testimony ought to be worth real money. You put him on temporary retainer, with the big payment to come after you cashed the Terre Haute check. I think a hundred thousand would be about right. And then Meri interfered. I don’t think Scotch knew she hadn’t taken the whole mask, merely a piece. If he could get his hands on it, he could sell it to Tree for up to two hundred, double the amount he could get from you. He and García and two goons have been looking for it all day. When they were working on you, I thought I ought to break it up, but I had to take them one at a time. Scotch was first. I went off with the others when they left. You came out on the porch, and there was the blackmailer, unconscious, who hadn’t been satisfied with one-sixth but wanted it all.”

“You aren’t saying I killed him,” Holloway said.

“Didn’t you? The one man who knew how that mask got to Yucatan. Of course you killed him, Holloway. Now the problem of what to do with the body. To dispose of it in your own car would take time you couldn’t account for later. You’d only heard one car leave. Mine had to be somewhere nearby.”

“This staggers the imagination! That out of all the cars on the streets of Coral Gables, I would pick Michael Shayne’s.”

“Why not? When I picked it up later I was still in a hurry, racing to Palm Beach to look at a body. I didn’t look in the back seat. It didn’t matter after that — you took off the ski mask before you killed him, and why would I connect him with the masked man, in the dark, on Professor Holloway’s front steps?”

“You don’t expect any jury to believe—”

“You never know about juries. But by the time it gets to that point, you won’t be a respectable professor in a big university. If your profession is like others I know, there are people all over the country who’ll be delighted to jump on you. Maxine is saying you based your textbook on a stolen thesis. After all this, more people will believe her. You may not find it quite so easy to get graduate students. But I think your real trouble is going to be in Mexico. Think about it. I get the impression they’re just about fed up with North Americans who steal their art and murder their citizens. Yeah. One way or another, you’re going to see the inside of a Mexican jail. Prison conditions down there are gruesome.”

He was still talking casually, conversationally, but his hand was tight on the phone. Rourke signaled that he had a call. Shayne shook his head. Several station officials, as well as Will Gentry, Miami Chief of Police, had joined the engineer in his glassed-in cubicle. The outer office was filled. The others caught Shayne’s tension. On the switchboard, Art, the middle-aged homosexual, stood up so he could see in.

The Holloway phone was the only one cut into the transmitter. There was the sound of heavy breathing. That was all for the moment.

Then Holloway said lightly, “Do you know something, I think you may be right.”

There was a thump, the sound of movement, a shot.

A girl’s voice cried an instant later, “Damn you people! Damn you!”

Shayne recognized the voice; it was Diane, the graduate student who had accompanied Holloway to the St. Albans. “What happened, Diane?”

“You know what happened! You tricked him. You knew he’d been drinking. He’s such a wonderful man, kind, intelligent. You were trying to get him to shoot himself.”

“He left one gun in my car with Scotch. I wasn’t sure he had another.”