Brett Halliday: Last Seen Hitchhiking

She was in her mid-twenties, dark-haired and personable. It was generally agreed that she had been responsible for much of the agency’s early success, but few people in town believed that she could make it on her own. She herself contended that there were kinds of investigative work that could be done better by a woman than a man. This assertion startled many of her clients, and she had lost several big retainers. It was a question whether she could hang on until she established her own reputation. Shayne continued to steer business to her. She called him occasionally for advice, always reluctantly.

She caught him at breakfast.

“Mike, it’s your butterfingered friend once again. I’ve got another one I’m not sure of, and I wonder—”

Shayne had carried his coffee to the phone. “Sure, tell me about it. I’ve got a free day.”

“Have you, Mike? I’m hoping there may be enough money in it so I can bring you in as a consultant. I wish I could afford to learn by making my own mistakes, but this seems to be a little special.”

“Let’s see,” Shayne said. “First I was going to read the paper, then add up my checkbook, get a haircut, and play a few rounds of golf. The evening’s open. I was going to have dinner with somebody, but she just called it off.”

“If you’re serious — well, for various good financial reasons I had to take this, but I’m beginning to think it may be over my head.”

He assured her again that he had nothing on the calendar, which wasn’t quite true. He had never felt responsible for sending her husband to his death, but he owed her something, nonetheless. Field’s FBI experience had taught him nothing about that kind of hotel thief. Shayne himself, who better than anybody else in the area knew the Beach hotels and their regular guests and the regular criminals who preyed on them, might have sensed what was coming and been ready for it. But the case had been too small, too routine. He had given it to Harry Field as a favor. Some favor, it turned out.

He finished his coffee and made a few rearrangements in his schedule by phone before leaving. He met Frieda in her bay-front apartment in the northern part of the city. She looked very good to Shayne, fresh and lovely. Her long dark hair was pinned up in back. She rarely used makeup. In college, Shayne had discovered by chance, she had been admitted to Phi Beta Kappa in her junior year. She and her husband had played competitive bridge, and had been able to beat everybody in town. She was wearing white slacks this morning, a ribbed top, and a silver necklace.

She kissed him lightly.

“Michael, you’re a comfort. One of these days I may develop enough self-confidence to stop calling you.”

He grinned at her. “You mentioned money. The subject always interests me.”

“Potentially there’s money. But God, Mike, the complications.”

When she asked about breakfast, he admitted that he could drink another cup of coffee. She loaded a tray and carried it out to the little terrace looking across Miami Beach to the sea.

“Did you listen to the news?” she said, pouring. “There’s another hitchhiker missing.”

“Girls leave home every day,” Shayne said. “Some of them turn up, and some of them just don’t feel like telling their parents where they are. Then one of these scares gets started, and they’re all victims of the same mad rapist.”

“I guess so, and I hope it’s going to be that way with the girl I ought to be out looking for right now, instead of sitting here on a nice day with a nice man having coffee. Mike, I want to plunge right in, because I’ve got three or four people to tell you about. I don’t know how you are on art professors. Holloway. Samuel J. Holloway. He’s the client.”

Shayne scraped his chin. “At the University? He was an expert witness in some kind of art case a few years back. I don’t remember what it was about or which side he was on.”

“That’s the man. The museums use him to authenticate stuff. His period’s pre-Columbian, Mexico and Central America. He wrote the text everybody uses. I get the impression that when he’s called to New York or Chicago to give his expert opinion, the per diem fees are very handsome. He’s a bit pompous, but that seems to go with the job. Within those limits, reasonably O.K. We used him once on some insurance thing, and he was a little surprised when I showed up day before yesterday instead of Harry. But he told me what he needed, and I persuaded him I could do it better than some tough, cool red-headed free-swinging male, in marvelous shape, with a.38 in his pocket.”

She smiled and touched Shayne’s knee. “I’m not referring to you, Mike. In addition to all your other qualities, there’s a rumor around that you have brains.”

“I don’t know how that got started,” Shayne said dryly.

“To be serious, you also seem to have some kind of instinct for knowing when somebody’s lying, and that may be the thing I need right now. I’m picking some funny messages out of the air. There’s more tension than there ought to be, and it’s even the wrong kind of tension. Various things don’t jibe.”

She sugared her coffee. “Here’s our cast of characters. Start with a girl named Meri Gillespie. Spelled M-e-r-i, presumably her parents’ idea. Twenty-three, from North Olmsted, Ohio. Graduate student. Professor Holloway’s her adviser. He didn’t tell me so, but I find that the relationship has been a bit more personal than that. They’ve been living in the same house. He’s doing a new book on the Toltecs, and she’s been researching it for him. I have some pictures.”

She opened a folder and showed Shayne a posed graduation picture and two color snapshots, one in a bathing suit and the other in a sweat shirt and patched pants.

“She should have no trouble getting rides,” Shayne commented.

“Especially in the bathing suit, right? He forty-six, twice her age. She took two courses with him as an undergraduate, and he persuaded her to go on to grad school. I checked with some people in the department, and apparently this isn’t the first time such a thing happened. His ex-wife — I’ll get to her in a minute — was also one of his students. I don’t think I’d find him hard to resist, but to be fair, I’ve never seen him in action. He’s supposed to be one of the best lecturers there. So. Twelve happy months went by, with the professor flying around the country being important and Meri slaving away in his office — and his bed, too, I suppose, when he was in town. It couldn’t last. They had a big fight, and she walked out. She’d kept in touch with her college boyfriend. His name is Sid Koch, and he seems to be called Scotch by everybody. She’d been seeing him, and the professor didn’t like that. And probably some of the magnetism had worn off and she was getting restless. It wasn’t a quiet departure. A cup of coffee was thrown — I saw the mark on the wallpaper. All she took was a knapsack. He owed her a week’s salary, but she tore up the check and threw it at him. Probably the door slammed when she left. He didn’t sound too unhappy about all this — colleges get a new crop of girls every year. The unhappiness started when he discovered that she’d walked off with something that didn’t belong to her.”

“Something valuable.”

“It has to be fairly valuable, Mike, because he’s paying double my usual rates and he’s not being stingy about expenses. It’s a mask, part of one. A funerary mask.”

She showed him another color photograph. Shayne had never seen anything remotely like it. Bits of brilliantly colored stone had been bonded to some kind of ceramic material to make a mask. There were four colors, blue, green, black, and red. The facial expression was extraordinarily alive — bold and at the same time somewhat sly.