“Murder cases are never closed. And murder’s an extraditable offense. So worry about it a little. You killed him to call attention to your expedition.”
“Stick to something you know,” Holloway said pityingly.
“I’ve had it explained to me. You needed two stories. One was official, but nobody believed that. To make sure everybody heard about the Yucatan expedition, all the museum people and other potential buyers, you shot an Indian and planted a knife on him. At first I thought that must be what Scotch was blackmailing you with. Blackmail’s the only thing that fits his financial picture, small sums coming in after regular trips to Miami, a larger sum expected when you dealt off the mask to Terre Haute. Let’s kick this around for a minute. We have time.”
“I don’t see what you’re getting at,” Bruno said worriedly. “One quick question to Shayne. I know they wouldn’t have time to trace the call. What do you hope to accomplish? Seriously. You’ve had more experience than I’ve had. Explain it.”
“Assault is a better kind of trouble than murder. Natalie won’t bring charges against you. You’ve been seeing psychiatrists. That won’t help much, but it’s something.”
“If you think I’m going to sit there while people argue about whether or not I’m sane—”
“Bud, stand still and look at me. It’s hard to do any orderly thinking, tied down like this. Whenever I think I have it, I go out of gear and everything starts racing. You’ve been pretty convincing. If you think you killed Meri, you’ll think you have to kill me.”
“It isn’t what I think, it’s what they think.”
“Meri passed through two sets of hands, yours and Andy’s and Maxine’s. I know how Mike works. He’s been getting the facts together. Now he’s about to start pounding. Wait and see what they say.”
“I don’t have a chance!”
“You don’t have a chance if everybody just hangs up and calls in the lawyers. But Mike’s got them hooked. They want to know what’s going to happen to that two hundred thousand dollars. He’s going to turn them against each other and surprise them into saying damaging and imprudent things. Things that may clear you, Bud. And we can help.”
“I don’t get it,” he said stubbornly. “You’re trying to take advantage of this damn migraine—”
“He’s giving Maxine a breathing spell, but she’s the one he’s after, I think. If Mike’s right, Andy stole nineteen thousand dollars from her tonight, half the money they conned Holloway into giving them. Andy can be picked up at any time. Mike will work on them separately, and try to get one of them to cave in. Let me talk to him, please. I can’t tell him where I am, because I don’t know. Keep your finger on the switch. If I say anything you don’t like, cut me off.”
A light flashed in front of Shayne. He put Holloway on hold, and switched lines.
It was Harmon again.
“Anastasia may be getting discouraged, Mike. He’s been through seven phone books by my count, and now he’s having a drink in a bar. It looks as though he’s settling down. He paid for the drink with a fifty-dollar bill, if that means anything.”
“Holloway’s money, probably,” Shayne said, “out of the thirty-eight thousand. Unless he sold a piece of sculpture, which would surprise the hell out of me. Let him finish the drink, and then bring him in. Holloway?” he said, punching a button to put Holloway back on the air.
“I’m still here, naturally, although if I had any sense I’d go to bed and hope that tomorrow this will turn out to have been an LSD dream.”
“We were talking about Sid Koch. What kind of student was he?”
“Mediocre. I have some grant money for cataloguing and research, and I employed him briefly. I only kept him a few weeks. When I was putting the Yucatan team together, I couldn’t get some of my first choices. He filled in.”
“People have asked why. Heat, insects, diarrhea.”
“I confess I wondered myself.”
“Now I’m guessing again. I think he had a pretty good idea what you were going to find.”
“We had high expectations. We knew the site was there somewhere.”
“How did you date this mask, Holloway?”
“You’ve heard about radio-carbon. You can’t be that ignorant. And the cultural factors—”
“So the terracotta, at least, would have to be from the period.”
The remark dropped like a stone. Holloway let it alone for a moment, before saying with care, “Do I catch an implication? The mosaic chips are bonded to the terracotta. Onyx, chrysolite — I don’t need to say that each of those bits is undoubtedly millions of years old.”
“I’m told that what gives this mask its enormous value is that nothing’s missing. What if you had two partial masks and put them together? Would that still be forgery?”
“Of course. But you’re joking. I don’t know why I’m arguing this with you. You know nothing about the subject.”
“I don’t claim to,” Shayne said. “I’m working backwards, trying to find some logical explanation for the way you people have been behaving. Scotch was probably cynical about you to start with. If he saw something in your shop that made him suspect you were working out some kind of stunt, it would give him a good reason for going to Yucatan. He and Meri were still friends. He wrote her daily letters, which she may have kept. Finding the mask was a big thing, and he must have mentioned it to her. When she decided to block the sale, she could use the letter as evidence that your Bogatá papers were fakes. But if Scotch was collecting from you regularly, naturally he wouldn’t want her to do that.”
Rourke, across the table, told Shayne, “Eliot Tree’s trying to say something.”
Shayne took that phone and put Tree on the air. “Mike. Mike.”
“Yeah.”
“Are you serious about any of this. Did I put up two hundred thousand dollars for a fake?”
“Do you think Holloway’s technically capable of it?”
“Oh, he’s an excellent technician. He’s the expert. The authenticator. And good God, man, do you realize that just by raising that question publicly you’ve destroyed much of the mask’s value?”
“If that’s true, it’s the result of years of fraudulent practice. What do you think of my idea that the Indian was killed to get everybody’s attention up here, including yours?”
“I can accept that. Certainly it worked.”
“But it happened a day early, Tree, before the mask was found. I’m going to put Holloway back on now, to see if he disagrees with any of this. Holloway?”
“I disagree with everything. I want to know what your purpose is here.”
“My usual one,” Shayne said. “I’m trying to explain a particular act of violence, Scotch’s murder.”
“Or suicide.”
“Or suicide. But people don’t think he was the suicidal type. Much less than you are, for example. I think he saw you plant the mask and dig it up. If this whole value structure is so delicate that an unsupported assertion can knock a price down from six hundred thousand to nothing, his eyewitness testimony ought to be worth real money. You put him on temporary retainer, with the big payment to come after you cashed the Terre Haute check. I think a hundred thousand would be about right. And then Meri interfered. I don’t think Scotch knew she hadn’t taken the whole mask, merely a piece. If he could get his hands on it, he could sell it to Tree for up to two hundred, double the amount he could get from you. He and García and two goons have been looking for it all day. When they were working on you, I thought I ought to break it up, but I had to take them one at a time. Scotch was first. I went off with the others when they left. You came out on the porch, and there was the blackmailer, unconscious, who hadn’t been satisfied with one-sixth but wanted it all.”