He continued the search. Returning to the living room after several more minutes, he freed the woman’s wrists and ankles and finally removed the gag.
She sputtered meaningless sounds until her talking muscles were working normally.
“Who were those guys? Did they all get away? They walked in and grabbed me and didn’t let me say one single word.”
“We didn’t get here soon enough, I’m afraid,” Shayne said. “On the other hand, nobody got shot, which is a plus. Did they take anything?”
“I don’t even know what they were looking for! They didn’t take me into their confidence! They handled me like a sack of sugar. If they wanted any real loot, they sure as hell came to the wrong place. Andy!” she said suddenly. “He was taking a shower. Is he all right?”
“He seems to be. What’s his last name?”
“Anastasia. The sculptor. He’s been staying here. Is that O.K., or do we have to be married?”
“Marriage isn’t the sacrament it used to be,” Shayne said. “He seems to be comfortable in there. Mrs. Field wants to ask you some questions.”
Mrs. Holloway started to push up. “I know they slugged him.”
“They just told him to stay in the bathroom, Mrs. Holloway. Talk to us for a minute, and I’ll get him.”
“I can’t tell you anything. It’s all a big mystery to me.”
Shayne didn’t try to block her off from the doorway. He exchanged a look with Frieda, and went to see how Mrs. Holloway and her friend greeted each other after their adventure. They were embracing hard.
“Max, are you all right?” Andy demanded. “I’ve been going crazy in here.”
They caressed and hugged each other, and for a moment were both talking at once.
“Andy, I was so scared! They were getting madder and madder. They put a sheet over me. Then the sirens and the yelling—”
“Are you hurt?”
“Oh, God, darling, my wrists — look at the marks.”
Shayne let them question and reassure each other for a moment more before breaking it up. Andy was the first to pull away.
“Baby, he’s right. I mean, there are a lot more logical places in Seminole Beach; why pick on us? Maybe he can help figure it out.” He reknotted the towel. “Whoever the hell he is.”
“I’m Michael Shayne,” Shayne told him. “We’re trying to locate a missing girl named Meri Gillespie.”
The bearded man’s eyes jumped to Maxine, who said, “Missing?”
“She’s disappeared. Mrs. Field is trying to find out how and why. If we hadn’t come along when we did, you might have sat on that sofa and that toilet seat all day, so I know you’re grateful, and you’ll be glad to answer a few questions.”
“You’re private detectives,” Maxine announced. “Working for Sam.”
“That’s right. Professor Samuel J. Holloway.”
“Ph.D. Never forget to add that. Doctor of Phoniness and Philandering.”
They returned to the cluttered living room.
“You’d better know right away,” Anastasia said, sitting beside Maxine and taking her hand, “that nobody in this house is impartial on the subject of Herr Professor. A good piece of advice, don’t believe a word he tells you. What did he tell you?”
Frieda answered, “That his current graduate-student-in-residence ran off taking something of his. She was hitchhiking, and we’re all hoping she hasn’t been murdered. You were seen talking to her in Miami last week, Mrs. Holloway, and according to the girl who saw you, talking hard. About what?”
Maxine found her glasses and put them on, putting on at the same time what was probably her usual manner. The glasses slid half an inch down her nose, so she could look at Frieda over the rims.
“Does anybody want coffee? I don’t advise it, I make lousy coffee. Of course I talked to the girl. When was I down in Miami, honey? I bought those prints.”
“They don’t care when,” Anastasia said. “They want to know why. The ex-girl and the current girl. Besides Holloway and pre-Columbian art, what do you have in common?”
“She wrote me,” Maxine explained. “She had a research problem she wanted help with, if I wasn’t too bitter. To call her when I was down next. So I was curious, I called her, and we had some ice cream. Great for the figure. God, I hate girls like that! She had a double chocolate sundae with whipped cream, and you knew from the way she licked the spoon that she wouldn’t gain an ounce. The question was legit, I mean not just a pretext. I used to know quite a lot about the subject. I’m a bit rusty.”
“You keep up,” her friend said. “If I did as much reading as you do I’d go blind.”
She pushed up her glasses. “I try, but there’s too much, when I also have to make a living and keep the goddamn house picked up and be nice to a man. It happened that I knew where to tell her to look, and we got that out of the way in thirty seconds. After that we talked about Sam, really about why we broke up.”
“Why did you?” Frieda said.
“Sam’s version goes this way. Everything was companionable and easy, we were into the same things and I had respect for his brain and his power to hypnotize large masses of undergraduates, and then a guy named Andy Anastasia came along.”
Wrinkling her nose against the pressure of her glasses, she smiled at the man beside her. “There was no real comparison. Sexually Andy was major-league, hitting in the top ten. Whereas Professor Holloway, Ph.D, struck out too often and was strictly bush. My version of this is that I was disillusioned with Sam long before Andy loomed on the horizon. I didn’t care about those occasional episodes with his female students, the tutorial conferences ending with professor and student partially undressed. Sam needed that, and I could adapt. But living in the same house with him, I began to see the character flaws, the greatest of which was vanity.”
“Man,” Andy said.
“He wanted to be petted all the time. And the petting went only one way. When you find out that the man you’re living with is a bastard, the magic goes.”
“I sat in on one of his lectures once,” Andy contributed. “‘The Artistic Imperative.’” He put it in quotes with a quick downward slash of his fingers. “That’s why all his graduate students are women. Men see through the act quicker.”
“Another objective witness heard from,” Maxine said, patting his knee.
“I’ve never tried to conceal the fact that he burns my gass. Five thousand creative artists starving in this country, and creeps like that eat caviar and filet mignon.”
“I told Meri a few things Sam would really like me to keep to myself,” Maxine went on. “I can be a bitch, and over that scoop of lemon sherbet I was very, very bitchy. I haven’t felt so purged in years. Of course she already knew it all, she needed confirmation. He’d asked her to marry him — did I say that? Panic sets in as the hairline retreats. She didn’t need me to tell her she’d be nutty to do it. But she needed reasons. Reasons I gave her. It was the first time I’d met the girl, and I liked her, sort of. How did they part, friends? I guess not.”
“A cup was thrown,” Frieda said.
“Hey,” Maxine said, pleased. “I thought she might turn out to be that type. A little more militance is what we need.”
“Did she call you after that?”
“Not while I was home.”
She looked at the man beside her. He shook his head. Shayne put in, “Somebody named Eliot Tree, staying at the St. Albans. Who is he?”
She looked at him in astonishment. “Eliot Tree — you’re really out of it. The Fine Arts, in the big city. I thought he was the one museum director everybody knows. He used to be a curator down here and I knew him. He was trying to get the museum interested in pre-Columbian, but the time hadn’t come.”
She checked herself, adjusted her glasses again, and said slowly, “Did she pinch the Toltec mask?”