Brett Halliday: Stranger in Town

“I recognized my daughter, Amy, immediately,” he stated to a representative of the Courier who was on hand at the hospital when the happy reunion occurred, “though I haven’t yet the vaguest idea how she came to be wandering on the highway near Brockton in such a condition.”

She had left the hotel two days ago to visit friends in St. Petersburg, he explained, driving her own car, a two-toned, 1954 Pontiac convertible, and expected to reach St. Petersburg late that evening. When he received no word of her safe arrival yesterday morning, he telephoned her friends in St. Petersburg and learned that she had not arrived in that city as expected.

“I wasn’t actually worried at first,” Mr. Buttrell explained. “Amy is a competent and careful driver and I knew she had sufficient cash to tide her over any ordinary emergency. I was surprised, though, that she hadn’t called either her friends or me to explain the delay, for Amy is usually very punctilious about such things. I was completely bowled over when I recognized her picture on the front page of the Courier which I just happened to see at a newsstand. I drove here at once, of course, to find her in this distressing state.”

Though Brockton is not on the most direct route between Miami and St. Petersburg, it is on an alternate route which Miss Buttrell might easily have chosen for her trip.

The whereabouts of her automobile, however, remains a complete mystery as we go to press, as do the events leading up to her dramatic appearance at the door of the local hospital in the small hours of the morning. A statewide description of the missing automobile has been broadcast by the police, and Chief Ollie Hanger has issued an urgent request that anyone possessing any information at all about the girl or her car should communicate at once with the Brockton police.

There were a couple more paragraphs of straight sob stuff describing the meeting between the distraught father and his beautiful daughter who did not recognize him, with some reassuring words from Dr. Philbrick to the effect that he was positive she would swiftly recover her memory when returned to familiar surroundings.

Shayne folded the paper thoughtfully, picked up the preceding issue that carried Amy Buttrell’s picture and the first story, and as an afterthought, also gathered up all the following issues so that he might go over them at his leisure to see if anything further had been learned about the girl and the accident that had brought on her attack of amnesia.

He paid for the papers at the Information desk and hurried back to his hotel room with them tucked under his arm. He dropped the pile of papers on the floor and strode directly to the telephone where he asked the hotel operator to connect him with the Roney Plaza hotel in Miami Beach.

After a brief wait, “The Roney Plaza, good morning,” came through the receiver, and he asked for Mr. Amos Buttrell.

There was a short wait while Shayne sank into a chair, worried a cigarette out of a limp package and got it lighted with his free hand. Then the voice said, “I’m sorry, sir. We don’t have any Mr. Buttrell. Did I get the name correctly?”

“B-u-t-t-r-e-l-l,” Shayne spelled it out for her patiently. “Amos Buttrell.”

“Yes, sir.” The voice was doubtful. “He isn’t registered, I’m afraid.”

“He was a few days ago. Last Friday or Saturday. If he’s checked out since, can you give me an address where he can be reached?”

“I’ll connect you with the office if you wish.”

Shayne said, “Please do.” A deep frown creased his forehead and his nostrils tightened as he drew a deep lungful of smoke. When a brisk male voice asked if he could be of service, Shayne explained tersely, adding, “This is long distance and very important police business. I’ll hold on.”

He held on until the cigarette was smoked down close to his fingertips. Then the brisk voice told him apologetically, “I’m afraid there is some mistake. Our records don’t show any Mr. Buttrell registered here at all during the past two weeks.”

“How about a Miss Buttrell?” Shayne asked harshly. “Amy.”

“No one by that name at all, sir.”

“You’re positive there’s no mistake?”

“Quite positive.” The voice was very firm and somewhat offended that anyone could dare challenge the accuracy of the Roney Plaza’s records.

Shayne hung up thoughtfully and reached a long arm for the open bottle of cognac. He took a short drink from the bottle, then got up abruptly to check the newspaper story on the chance he had misread the information it contained.

He hadn’t misread it. The Courier stated explicitly that Mr. Amos Buttrell was wintering at the Roney Plaza Hotel in Miami Beach.

Either the news story was in error, or Mr. Buttrell had lied for reasons best known to himself.

Michael Shayne strode up and down the length of the hotel sitting room, clawing at his coarse red hair with his right hand and tugging at his earlobe with his left.

What in hell did it all add up to? A beautiful victim of amnesia, supposedly the daughter of a wealthy New Yorker, walking into the bar last night and fingering him for a trio of murderers!

Yet she had never seen him before in his life. At least, he had never seen her. Could that be a quirk of an amnesiac, he wondered. If they couldn’t remember things back beyond a certain point, were they likely to have hallucinations and think they remembered someone?

But what was the girl doing in Brockton last night when she supposedly had been taken away by her father the preceding Saturday? Had she regained her memory in the meantime and come back to Brockton to identify the man or men who had attacked her in the first place? That was, supposing she had been attacked on the highway and a simple automobile accident wasn’t the reason for her appearance at the hospital in the condition she had been in.

Nothing made sense any way you looked at it. Shayne needed a lot more answers before he could possibly start theorizing. He stopped by the telephone stand and looked up the number of the Courier, called it and got the City Desk.

He asked, “Could you tell me the name of the reporter who covered the story of the identification of the girl-amnesia victim last week by her father?”

“Wait a minute.” The voice was brusque and disinterested. Shayne waited, listening to the typical background noises of a busy City Room over the wire as he did so.

“Yeh. That was Hy Brown. You got something new on it?”

“I might have,” said Shayne cautiously. “He around now?”

“Covering the police beat. Who’s calling?”

The redhead hesitated. Then he said firmly, “Michael Shayne. If Brown comes in…”

“Shayne? Hey, we got an item here…” There was a lengthy pause. Then a pleased chuckle. “Private detective from Miami, huh? How you like our hoosgow? Give us a quote, Mr. Shayne?”

“You couldn’t print it,” Shayne said amiably. “Yeh. Your alert police force protected Brockton’s innocent children from my reckless driving last night. Okay. If I could get in touch with Brown…”

“You still in town?” the voice demanded.

“At the Manor Hotel. I’d like…”

“Hy’d like too, I bet. An interview from you would make the front page, Shamus. You’re by way of being famous in Florida, you know.”

Shayne said, “I didn’t know, but swell. If you could…”

“You at the hotel now?”

“In my room.”

“I’ll have Hy around there in three shakes. Sit tight, huh?”

Shayne said he would and hung up. He took the pile of newspapers dating back to the morning after Amy Buttrell had turned up at the hospital, and started going through them carefully. There was no Sunday edition, but the Monday paper carried a short item on the front page stating that no progress had been made by the local police toward solving the mystery of what had happened to Amy.