“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.”
“Well, it’s lucky I was here — it’s just in his shoulder. Will a doctor come quickly, please?”
A woman’s voice: “Mike Shayne? Is that really you I’m talking to, Mike?”
“Yeah, go ahead. Who’s this?”
“Nobody special, you don’t know me. But this is the one and only chance I’ll ever get to call you by your first name and I intend to take full advantage of it. All the time you-all were talking about gynecologists, Mike, I could feel something tugging and grabbing in the back of my mind. All of a sudden it went off like a bomb!”
Silence.
“Just taking a drink of my warm milk. I have that kind of doctor right across the street from me, Dr. Bertram Ainsworth, and he’s on vacation right now, a honeymoon as a matter of fact, been gone about three weeks. I go to him myself for the menopause. He left his lights burning to discourage thieves.”
“Where are you?” Shayne said quickly.
“I gave them the address when they asked what I was calling about. I’m right here in Lake Worth, and I can’t ever get to sleep before three in the morning. I raised the shade and looked out, and somebody’s using the house, Mike! Sure as you’re born. Because ten or fifteen minutes ago this fattish young man came out in a pair of pants and he took the flamingo in off the lawn. And I thought I’d call you and tell you. I had a terrible time getting through.”
Suddenly Art, on the switchboard, rose straight up, both hands flying. He rapped on the glass and signaled to Shayne, his small hoop-earring shaking.
“Three!” he shouted, holding up three fingers. “Three!”
Shayne cut his caller off abruptly and punched a button.
“Shayne.”
A quiet voice said, “Mike, this is Frieda.”
Like Art, Shayne came to his feet. The room was still.
“Go on.”
“I’m all right,” she said, “and I want everybody to remember that not much is known about rape or how rapists get that way, and I hope all those cops who are closing in on us will use their heads for once instead of their service revolvers.”
“Will Gentry’s here in the studio, and he’s nodding. He understands the message.”
“I’m allowed to ask you only one question, and it has to be quick.”
Gentry had left the engineer’s booth to get a trace started on the call.
“Let me say first,” Shayne said, “that it’s nice to hear your voice.”
“It’s nice to hear yours. The question is this. Was Meri raped?”
“You just made the point that rape is a hard thing to establish. ‘Sexually molested,’ we usually have to call it. We’ll know better after the autopsy. Can you be more specific about what you want to know?”
“Don’t try to drag this out, Mike. It’s a toll call and you can’t trap it. But I think it really is going to be all right. Just answer the question.”
“What sexually molested usually means is that there are traces of male semen on the woman’s labia. Put it like that, and the answer is yes.”
Bruno cut the connection abruptly. He was flushed and sweating, breathing heavily. He picked up the gun he had found in Frieda’s bag, examined it for an instant and put it down.
“He guessed what you wanted him to say,” he said.
“How could he, Bud? How could he know Meri got away before you were able to have any sex with her? I asked him a clear question. This proves you didn’t kill her.”
“Do you think they’ll take a semen sample and make a lab comparison? Do you think if I stand here waiting for them, they’ll really keep those guns in their holsters? For a private detective, you’re pretty dumb.”
“Don’t drink any more, Bud. I want you to listen to me for another minute, and after that decide what to do. I don’t know Anastasia, but don’t you get a picture of a man who’s eaten up with bitterness and resentment? Fakers like Holloway get the good jobs and the six hundred thousand dollars, while Andy Anastasia is supported by a woman and has to work four hours a day in a gift shop, which must be torture for him. Maybe Meri wasn’t as far gone as you thought when she left here. Sometimes a head wound can look really frightening, and after the blood’s washed off it may not even need stitches. Anastasia jumped at the chance to collect some old debts by writing Holloway that extortion letter. But Meri wouldn’t have anything to do with a trick like that. She wasn’t that kind of girl. If she woke up and heard them talking—”
“How can you know all that?”
“I’m like Mike, I’m trying to find an explanation that fits. Not the facts, because we don’t have many of those, but the people. If the money had already been collected, Meri could send both of them to prison, and she’d do it without a qualm.”
At least she had him thinking.
“How easy it would be to kill her, Anastasia would think,” she said. “How safe. One more victim of Bruno Lorenz, the Mad Doctor. Listen.”
On the radio, a voice Frieda recognized as Maxine’s was saying shrilly, “I had nothing to do with that! I went to Miami for the money. That was the one single thing I did, the only thing. I didn’t write the note, that was his idea. He’ll have to admit it. Yes, she kept talking about the flamingo! About the doctor’s table. When I came back she was gone! He told me she got excited and climbed out the window when he went to get an ice bag to calm her down. We looked all over, up and down the streets. We thought she fell in the canal. And she was on the golf course! Where he’d put her! And to make sure the rapist would get the blame, he came on her! The sick bastard. Oh, how he wanted that money.”