“The fight’s over,” Shayne announced, snuffing out the flame. “It’s the lady’s house, and apparently she wants you to leave.”
“I’m leaving. Emotionally I’ve already left.” He picked up her purse from the bench and rummaged through it, removing a handful of bills. “Severance pay. With that great greeting-card business you’ve got, you can spare it.”
He picked up a blue work-shirt and threw it over one shoulder. He went out. A moment later a car could be heard moving off.
“At least he took his own car,” she observed.
She poked at her hair, taking deep breaths. Her face was flushed in streaks. She looked appraisingly at the sculpture Shayne had mutilated.
“I like it better that way. Three years! Finished. I’m going to get soused. That’s an old-fashioned word, but it’s an old-fashioned thing. Come join me. That couldn’t have been very high-style entertainment for you. I hate to get that mad. Everything’s been so upsetting and tense. I wish the damn girl would show up.”
Shayne said, “She showed up tonight on a golf course in West Palm Beach. Dead.”
Maxine’s hand went to her stomach, as though Shayne had hit her there. She rocked back. It was the reaction he’d been looking for.
“Tell me. Tell me, please.”
“She was wearing a red rain cape. Nothing else. No sign of her knapsack. They think she died from a blow on the head. That looked about a day old, but there were recent scratches. She may have got them climbing over the fence to get into the golf course. We’ll know more about it after the autopsy.”
Item by item, Maxine was putting herself back together. Saying nothing, she took Shayne into the kitchen, where she poured whiskey and drank it.
She breathed out in a shudder. “I’ve been hoping it might turn out to be all right for her. I suppose I knew it wouldn’t.”
She waved at the bottles and ice-bucket. “Fix yourself something. It’s so funny. Look at all the things involved in this — that huge amount of money, the reputations, the struggle of the great museums, one of the biggest art discoveries and art sales in years — and a psychotic killer wrecks it all by picking up a hitchhiker. Are you still interested in what my plans were for that mask? Probably less so now. I don’t mind telling you, if you want to sit still for it. Everything seems so — dirtied. Utterly, without any redeeming social value.”
Shayne made a drink and sat down. Having finished her first strong bourbon, Maxine poured herself another, with nothing to dilute it but the melting ice, and she clearly had no intention of letting it stay in the glass long enough to be seriously weakened.
She plunged ahead. “We were O.K. here, Andy and I. I think really O.K., as good as it gets. When the work’s going well, he’s nice and easy, and money has just never been a problem. We had enough to get by on. He worked in the store four hours a day. The sociability was good for him. Who makes money as a sculptor? About three people in the country. So you don’t expect it, and it doesn’t bother you. Then this. Six hundred thousand. I put Sam onto that site, incidentally. He’s saying he heard about it from chicle gatherers — not true. I figured it out from the field notes of a Boston expedition seventy years ago. Sam went down with foundation money, and sure enough, there it was. I wasn’t bitter about it. Such things happen all the time in real life.”
“And then Meri got in touch with you.”
“I was fibbing about that. I got in touch with her. This sale to Terre Haute was just too much. I worked her up. A nice girl, idealism running out of her ears. I persuaded her to pinch the mask, to bring it here and then we’d really set off a few fireworks. Blow that son of a bitch Holloway out of the water. Send the mask back to its proper owners, the descendants of the people who made it. That was the scenario I’d worked out, and she bought it, like a nice little liberal arts major.”
“But that wasn’t your real scenario.”
“Definitely not. The moment she walked in the door, the debriefing was going to begin. There are arguments on both sides, you know. What’s ethical, what stinks. I was going to have Ellie Tree talk to her, and when he gets going he can charm a bird off a bough. And if worst came to worst, and she still wanted to ship it back to Old Mexico—”
She stopped to drink. Shayne supplied, “You were going to mug her.”
“You know it. With some help from Andy. Did you notice his biceps and triceps? At that point the mask would be fair game. Sam stole it from Mexico, she stole it from Sam, we stole it from her. I had a big argument with Andy about how much of a percentage we should give her. I was surprised he was so greedy. He didn’t want to give her a dime. He hasn’t been sleeping more than a couple of hours a night lately. When you pass a half million, money takes on a certain glamour, you know?”
“Was Meri planning to steal the whole thing, not just one piece?”
“That was the idea, but I guess Sam felt something coming. Where is it now, what would the guy do with it after he killed her? He’d throw it away, bury it. Two hundred years from now, somebody’ll dig it up and wonder how the Toltecs got so far north.”
She drank again, and burst out, “I’m sorry about Meri, damn it! I didn’t stop to think about her, I was so busy thinking of ways I could take Sam. I don’t know if I told you he stole my thesis? Whole passages, word for word. It’s been eating away at me, I guess. What the hell! Get drunk. Take off your shoes. Because what can somebody do about this besides nothing?”
There was a clock radio on the spice cabinet beside the stove, already turned to FM. Shayne switched it on and found Tim Rourke’s station. Voices were arguing about whether or not the passive male homosexual experienced lubrication during the arousal phase.
“Stay tuned,” Shayne said. “We’re going to be talking about you in a few minutes.”
“About me!”
“If you hear anything you don’t agree with, call in.”
She looked up, her eyes partly closed, as though she was trying to make him out through thickening mist. “You don’t feel like staying?”
“Not tonight.”
“Because I think Andy’s going to come back, with blood in his eye. And if he lays a finger on me, I’ll shoot him. I know you don’t care enough about it to prevent a murder.”
“Be sure to hit him with your first shot.”
Shayne finished his drink and returned to the Buick, where he asked his operator to locate a police lieutenant named Harmon in Palm Beach. Shayne had broken out on the interstate by the time she completed the connection. Harmon was still wrapping the discovery of Meri’s body in the necessary red tape. Shayne described Andy Anastasia and suggested that Harmon send some men to watch Maxine’s house.
“Preventive maintenance. At this time of night, nobody’s going to want to volunteer. But these people are connected to the body you found, and there’s a big score in it for some lucky guy. I don’t have time to explain. Listen to WKMW in Miami. As soon as I get down there I’m going to start something a little weird. It may not work, but it ought to be interesting.”
Chapter 13
When Timothy Rourke, tall, gangling, unprogrammed, took over a moribund late-night talk show on a struggling FM station, few of his friends expected him to stick with it for more than a few weeks. He had been in charge now for six months, and the station was beginning to build an audience and draw advertisers. He still worked on the News as their Number One crime-and-corruption reporter, but he had been breaking some of his best stories on the air, to the disgruntlement of his editors. Rourke probably knew more people in Dade County than any other man, and he had no trouble filling the studio with guests, who were provided with all the booze they could drink and freedom to say absolutely anything they pleased.