Brett Halliday: Last Seen Hitchhiking

“He glued it together temporarily so he could photograph it,” she said. “If you look closely, you can see the fracture lines. He bought it from a dealer in Columbia, and he says several museums are interested in it. Meri knew what it meant to him. I saw that, too. He gets a religious look when he talks about it — and it really is an exciting thing. The piece she took is about one fifth, part of the forehead, the left eye, a slice of one cheek, and by itself it isn’t worth anything. His idea is that she saw it in the workshop when she went up to get her toothbrush, and decided to take it along, to make him sorry for some of the nasty things he’d said. You begin to get a picture of the parting scene. Bad feeling on both sides. He jittered around the room when he told me about it, couldn’t sit still. ‘She hates me, she’s capable of anything — smashing it, throwing it away.’ What I’ve been hired to do is overtake her before anything bad can happen to the fragment, and use my feminine trickery to get it back. And if I can’t, have her arrested.”

“Does he know where she went?”

“To Fort Myers. That’s where Scotch lives now, the ex-boyfriend. There’d been a phone call that morning, and Holloway overheard her end of it. That was how the fight started — what was he doing eavesdropping and so on. She’d already decided to leave, and she told Scotch she wanted to hitchhike over, to get the taste of Professor Samuel J. Holloway out of her mouth. I chartered a light plane with Holloway’s money and got to Fort Myers in plenty of time. She couldn’t have beaten me hitching. I don’t think I did anything wrong. I got a good look at Scotch and watched the house. I thought it would be better to intercept her before she saw him. She didn’t show up. I kept in touch with Holloway, and he was getting more and more frantic. He keeps thinking about these hitchhiking murders. If Meri’d been murdered, what would the murderer do with that fragment? Bury it, of course. Gone forever. I may be doing my client an injustice. I think he was also slightly worried about the girl herself.”

“You don’t seem to like the man.”

“I remember something you told me once — the client never tells you the full story the first time. At that point, he agreed I should talk to Scotch. Scotch was a student of his, and Holloway took him on some kind of field excursion last year. Scotch had already called the Highway Patrol — everybody’s jumpy. He said she’s the kind of girl who makes a point of not reading newspapers. He’d offered to bike over and get her, but she told him she’d been hitching all her life, and she wasn’t going to change at this late date. Well, there it is, Mike. The Highway Patrol has her picture. I don’t know what they’ll do with it.”

“Show it around, to toll-station attendants and gas jockeys and so on. If they don’t get any positive response, all they can do is wait for the body to show up.”

She made a quick face. “Fine. Meanwhile, I’ve been calling people. Friends, family. After she walked out, there’s a possibility that she changed her mind, and decided to go somewhere else to sort things out, not to Fort Myers. But Holloway was reasonably certain that she didn’t have more than a few dollars and change, not enough for bus fare. I pressed him on this, and he admitted that he went through her purse while she was making the call to Fort Myers. He was looking for mail. A matter of self-protection, he said.”

“How did he mean that? She hadn’t stolen anything at that point.”

“Don’t ask me. He says he always demands absolute loyalty from his graduate students. It does seem out of proportion. Anyway, there was a letter from Scotch, which he read in a hurry. She was working herself up to something, it wasn’t clear what, and Scotch told her to cool it, not to do anything dumb until he could talk to her. The letter wasn’t dated.”

“Maybe she was planning to take the mask, or as much of it as she could get hold of.”

“That’s the way it looks.”

“She must have friends. Maybe she didn’t leave town.”

“Holloway gave me a list. The first one I called was her college roommate, a girl named Joanne. She has her own car, and she drove Meri out to the 8th Street interchange, which means she definitely started for Fort Myers.”

Shayne moved his cup in a small circle, watching the patterns on the surface of the coffee for a moment, thinking.

“How did Meri seem to this roommate? Sad, happy?”

“Excited. Carrying on about what a jerk and a phony Holloway had turned out to be. Joanne had never liked the professor. She hadn’t expected it to last even this long. She didn’t sound too enthusiastic about Scotch, either. I tried to get her to tell me the conversation line by line, but there were long stretches of silence, apparently, with Meri sitting there seething. But one thing she said, and she said it twice, so it may mean something: ‘I don’t know how to handle it.’ Joanne thinks she was talking about her M.A., which is going to be hard to get with Holloway against her. It did cross Joanne’s mind that she might be pregnant. They talked about hitchhiking, and Joanne told her she was out of her mind to hitch alone. Meri said she was in a hurry and it couldn’t wait. In a hurry and it couldn’t wait. Joanne dropped her at the interchange and went back to town.”

“Without waiting to see her get her first ride.”

“Right, Mike. Hitchhikers don’t keep a regular schedule. When they’re traveling for fun, they don’t necessarily travel in a straight line. But after all the phoning I’ve done, I think I have a pretty good idea of this girl. She was a diver in college. You have to be serious about that to be good at it, and most of the time she was first. You don’t know how well a dive worked until the judges hold up their cards. You aren’t competing against time, but against three judges with their different ideas of perfection. If she started for Fort Myers, she would have stayed on the Trail until she got to Fort Myers, unless somebody forcibly removed her. I’m betting on that.”

“Unless she didn’t intend to go there in the first place.”

“And staged the phone call to Scotch because she knew Holloway would be listening. And then if he sent somebody like me after her, I’d go the wrong way. The thing about a right-angle interchange, you can go either north-south or east-west. And there’s one more thing. Last week Joanne was in an ice-cream place near the campus, where everybody goes, and she saw Meri talking excitedly, with gestures, to an older woman. And somebody said this was Holloway’s ex-wife and ex-graduate student, Maxine. I’ve asked around. She had five years with Holloway, the last three of them married. She worked on his book. Everybody says that if she were a man, she’d be an assistant professor. Instead of which, she runs a gift shop in Seminole Beach. She didn’t remarry, but there’s a man, a sculptor. So here’s a theory. Maxine was in on it. She’s an expert on pre-Columbian objects. She’d know how to market the mask, or how much to ask for it if they decided to sell it back to Holloway. Or how to go about returning it to Mexico. I called her, and I thought she hesitated a tick. She took time to breathe. And then to make up for it, for the rest of the conversation she was too fast and glib. But I don’t know! I told her I might drop in today, and I hope you’ll come along and listen and give me an expert’s opinion.”

Shayne finished his coffee and set it down. “But that’s not all you want me for, is it?”

She gave him a direct look. “No. Let’s check this first. If nothing comes of it, I’ll tell you my other idea.”

“Can I argue against it?”

“Certainly — freedom of speech. But I’ve made up my mind I’m going to do it. I really think I have to.”