Murder is My Business

by Brett Halliday

  "But you sent him to the Free Press instead. Without even consulting me."

  "I'm not working for you," Shayne reminded him. "You told me this morning you wouldn't need me."

  Towne doubled his fists and moved toward the redhead, muttering hoarse blasphemies. Shayne lunged to his feet, but Captain Gerlach got between them. The Homicide captain was a big man. He shoved Towne back urgently while he growled over his shoulder to Shayne, "Lay off. He doesn't know what he's saying."

  Shayne's wide nostrils flared. He said, "Sure, I'll lay off. When they kick the trap I'll be sitting in the front row laughing."

  "Forget it," Dyer commanded. "It would have been paying blackmail to buy Riley off," he reminded Towne.

  "Bring Riley in here," Towne said angrily. "I have a right to face him. He won't dare repeat those lies in front of me."

  Dyer nodded to Gerlach. "Tell one of the boys to bring Riley in." He warned Towne sharply, "And don't start anything. I'll put handcuffs on you if I have to."

  Shayne sank back in his chair and lit a cigarette. He didn't look at Towne, who now stood on the other side of the desk breathing audibly.

  Captain Gerlach came back into the office, and Josiah Riley slunk in through the door a few minutes later. He threw a frightened glance at Towne and then quavered, "You said you'd pertect me. You promised—"

  "Stand up and face him like a man," Dyer said. "Do you swear he's the man you saw choking Private Brown near the river Tuesday afternoon?"

  "Yes, sir." Riley bobbed his head up and down emphatically. "I'll swear it on a stack of Bibles."

  "He's a lying old goat," Towne fumed. "He's trying to get back at me because I fired him from my silver mine in the Big Bend for trying to pull a fast one. He's had it in for me ever since, and—"

  "That's a lie." Riley's voice trembled but he straightened up and looked Towne in the face. "I told you then it was a mistake. The kinda mistake any man can make. You didn't only fire me but you got me blackballed out of mining. I never could get no other job after that."

  "You didn't deserve one," Towne told him coldly. "He was my superintendent in the Big Bend in 1934," he explained to the others. "He shut down the mine and came to me with a story about the vein being pinched out. If I had accepted his verdict, I would have closed down operations and later he could have picked up the property for a song and pretended he had found a new vein. But I suspected the trick and went down myself to investigate. You know the rest of it. It's been one of the biggest silver producers in the country ever since. Of course I blackballed him with every mining firm in the country," he ended contemptuously.

  "It's a goldarned lie," Riley insisted wrathily. "I guess I did make a mistake about the vein pinchin' out. But it was a honest mistake."

  "All that," said Dyer wearily, "hasn't anything to do with the murder you claim you witnessed Tuesday. Are you going to stand by your story?"

  "You bet I am. It's the truth, that's what. I say it's the plumb honest truth."

  Dyer jerked his head toward the door. A policeman led the old man out. The chief told Towne, "I'm booking you on suspicion of murder."

  Jefferson Towne's big body seemed to shrink a little. "Just on the unsupported word of that old buzzard?" he asked hoarsely. "What motive would I have? If I did kill a soldier do you suppose I'd later run over the body and then immediately report it? Do you think I'm insane as well as a murderer? You know I jeopardized my chances in the election when I did that."

  "I know all that," Dyer admitted. "I don't know the answers any more than you do. But the Free Press has forced my hand. If I don't put you under arrest now they'll make it worse than it is,"

  "Yes, I can see that," Towne admitted stiffly. He glared at Shayne. "That was your doing. Sending Riley to Cochrane!"

  "You had a chance to retain me this morning—at a modest fee. I warned you that you would need me before this was cleared up."

  Jefferson Towne tightened his lips and swallowed with difficulty. "I guess I made a mistake," he muttered. "You're retained now, and you can name your own fee. You've brought things to a point where we have to find out who murdered that soldier."

  Shayne shook his head and said sardonically, "Hire yourself someone else to pull your chestnuts out of the fire."

  Towne's face became suffused with anger. He doubled his fists again, but Captain Gerlach got in front of him and shoved him out the door.

  Dyer looked at Shayne wonderingly and shook his head. "And he said you could name your own fee."

  "I'm a fool," Shayne said bitterly, "but I never have liked to be cussed out." He got up and stretched. "I'll buy you a drink."

  XI

  Captain Gerlach stuck his head through the door with a big smile on his moonlike face and asked. "What's that about a drink?"

  Shayne said, "I'll buy one."

  "You're not in New Orleans," Gerlach reminded him. "We're pure in Texas. You have to buy it by the bottle and swill it in private."

  "All right," said Shayne happily, "I'll buy a bottle and we'll swill it." He turned to Dyer to ask, "How about it. Chief? Closing up for the night?"

  "Might as well, but I don't know—"

  "Let's adjourn to my office," Gerlach suggested. "You used to drink cognac, Mike."

  "In the dim, dead days of long ago." Shayne sighed. "Before the Wehrmacht rolled over France and cut off shipments."

  "How does nineteen twelve Napoleon strike you?" the captain asked gently.

  Shayne made a comical grimace and said, "I wouldn't dare touch the stuff without a physician handy. Where've you got it stashed?"

  Gerlach chuckled and said, "Maybe we can pick up Doc Thompson." He led the way along the corridor back of Dyer's office, stopping en route to tap on a closed door.

  "Who is it?" Thompson asked.

  Gerlach opened the door a crack and said, "Bottle of brandy bites man. In my office."

  "That I must see," the police surgeon answered happily. He switched off his light and joined the trio in the corridor, looking suspiciously at Shayne over the sizzling bowl of his pipe. "It's the hot-shot again. I'm thinking Towne didn't get any bargain when he imported you to dig into this mess."

  Shayne grinned and asked, "Did Towne kill the boy?"

  "How should I know? The Free Press has him drawn and quartered for it whether he did or not."

  The three of them followed the Homicide captain another twenty feet down the hall to an office similar to Chief Dyer's, though slightly smaller. There were half a dozen chairs around the wall, but the three men waited in an expectant group while Gerlach took out his key ring and went to a square safe in the back of the room. Squatting before the door, he opened the safe, saying cheerfully over his shoulder, "This is where I preserve the evidence in important cases."

  Groping inside, he drew out a bottle of aged Napoleon brandy which he held triumphantly above his head. After closing and locking the safe, he stood up with the bottle dangling from his fingers. "Remember this?" he asked Dyer and Thompson.

  The police surgeon stepped forward on his short legs to peer nearsightedly at the bottle. He whistled softly and said, "Didn't I analyze those bloodstains five years ago?"

  "The Langley case," Dyer reminded him. "Mrs. Langley beat her husband's head to a pulp with that bottle."

  "And not a crack in it," Captain Gerlach added, setting the bottle on his desk. He rummaged in a drawer for a corkscrew, and sat down to wrestle with the pre-war cork.

  The others pulled up chairs in a semi-circle around the desk. Shayne's gray eyes were intent upon Gerlach struggling with the corkscrew, but he asked Thompson, "How do you like Jeff Towne as a killer?"

  "I like him." Thompson sucked on his gurgling pipe. "If I'd known what I know now, I'd have made that p. m. stronger. Hell," he added irritably, "I thought you were clearing the man, not hanging him for murder."

  "I thought so, too," Shayne admitted wryly. "But that's beside the point now. The only thing I'm going to get out of this case is the satisfaction of seei
ng someone hang." The cork came out of the cognac bottle with a soft plop. "If Towne fits the noose," he continued mildly, "I want to see him wear it."

  Gerlach passed the bottle to Shayne. After reverently sniffing the bouquet, he took a long drink and passed it on to Dyer.

  Gerlach settled back in his desk chair and said, "There should be a handout from Manny Holden on this for you, Mike. Carter's election will be a walkover."

  "That's the only thing I don't like about it," Shayne confessed, frowning. "I won't have done you boys any favor if Honest John Carter gets elected."

  Gerlach nodded gloomily. "That's a cinch. He'll probably appoint Holden police commissioner." He took the depleted bottle from Thompson and poured down a stiff drink.

  "The time element is the only thing wrong in the Towne set-up," Shayne mused. "Riley sets the time of murder about two hours before sundown. But you figured the soldier couldn't possibly have been dead more than half an hour before Towne ran over him at dusk."

  "Not more than that," the police surgeon agreed, "else Towne and the ambulance attendant would certainly have noticed the condition of the body."

  "Which throws Riley's statement off a couple of hours." Shayne spread out his big hands in an impatient gesture. "Leaving that out, conceding that Riley's estimate of the time was wrong, and using all of your leeway. Doc—what in hell was Towne doing during those two hours after he killed the soldier?"

  "Driving around with the body in his car trying to figure out how to get rid of it," Dyer offered. "A man often gets panicky after committing a murder."

  "Not Jeff Towne," Shayne objected. "He'd take murder in his stride."

  "Where's your motive?" Gerlach demanded. "That's where the whole case bogs down, Mike. We'll never get a conviction without some sort of motive."

  "Maybe not a conviction," Dyer interposed, "but enough people will believe it to vote Carter in as mayor."

  They all nodded assent to that. Captain Gerlach glumly passed the bottle to Shayne, who nursed it tenderly as he asked Dyer, "Did you turn up anything else on that pair your men picked up today?"

  "The Mexican girl and Mr. Larimer?" Chief Dyer looked at him in surprise. "Nothing important. Her name is Marquita Morales and she lives in El Paso, but spends most of her time in Juarez. She's just another juvenile delinquent. Larimer runs a straight business, as near as I can learn. You were right about his being a foreigner," he added drudgingly. "A refugee from Austria. Entered the country legally through Mexico in '39. Changed his name to Larimer and has been here in business ever since. Hasn't been in any previous trouble."

  Shayne tilted the cognac bottle and with the mouth scarcely touching his bottom lip, let a drink gurgle in. Passing the bottle to Dyer, his gray eyes narrowed and he said, "Here's a hunch. Find out if Larimer has had any contact with a man named Lance Bayliss, an American citizen who recently returned from Mexico after dodging out of Germany ahead of the Gestapo."

  "Lance Bayliss?" Gerlach repeated the name thoughtfully. "Isn't that the name of the young fellow who was sweet on Carmela Towne ten years ago, when Towne hired you to bust it up?"

  "That's right. Don't ask me what I'm trying to prove. I don't know; but I've got a feeling we're only starting on this thing."

  There was a moment of quiet. The three men looked steadily at Shayne, who absently massaged his ear lobe. Then he said, "I've been holding out on you. I'm so damned used to holding out on the police n Miami and New Orleans where I depended on collecting a fee by paying a couple of jumps ahead of them, it's become second nature with me. This is one time when I don't have to."

  Captain Gerlach leaned forward and folded his arms on his desk. Chief Dyer took the cognac bottle from his lips and hurriedly passed t to Thompson, rumpled his browless forehead, and glared at Shayne. Thompson set the bottle on the desk, untouched, and turned a humorous twinkle on Shayne.

  "Well, what are we waiting for?" Dyer snapped.

  "I first got in on this case through a little old lady in New Orleans--name of Delray." Shayne then related the details of his conference n his New Orleans office.

  The chief's face grew red with anger as he listened. When Shayne finished, he exclaimed, "So that's why you wanted an autopsy! And that's how you knew the army wasn't going to locate his parents in Cleveland. Did you know they buried the body at Bliss this afternoon because they didn't know what else to do with him?"

  "I didn't know, but I supposed that would be what they'd do. We've still got to keep it quiet," he went on emphatically. "It's our one ice in the hole. The killer, or gang of killers, doesn't know about the better Jimmie Delray wrote his mother, and doesn't suspect that we know who the boy really is. They think they're clean. Towne's arrest has given them a further sense of security."

  "If Towne himself isn't the killer," Gerlach muttered.

  "That's right. If Towne isn't the killer. In the meantime, you can start digging for a motive for Towne to have killed a Jimmie Delray of New Orleans instead of an unknown recruit."

  Captain Gerlach's telephone rang. He picked it up, talked for a moment, saying finally, "All right, I'll have a look."

  Replacing the instrument, he said to Dyer, "That was Sheriff Craven from below Ysleta. They've just pulled a man's body out of the river."

  Shayne asked, "Isn't that well beyond the city limits?"

  "Sure. But the sheriff says the body has been in the river for some time and may have floated several miles. That would put it in our jurisdiction." Gerlach stood up and put his hat on.

  Shayne asked, "Mind if I go along?"

  "Glad to have you."

  Chief Dyer swore softly, and Doc Thompson chuckled as Gerlach led the way from the office and Shayne followed him with a wave of his hand and a final farewell look at the cognac bottle on the table.

  XII

  Captain Gerlach was a big, easy-going man who more than filled his half of the front seat of the police sedan. He switched on his red police light as they wheeled away from headquarters, but he left the siren off and cruised along at a moderate speed until they left the city streets behind them and were on the highway leading to the irrigated Rio Grande Valley.

  Shayne had come to know Gerlach quite well ten years previously when the captain was only a sergeant, and they had run into each other a couple of times in the intervening years, so they had things to talk about as Gerlach pushed the accelerator down on the open road and got the sedan up to sixty.

  By mutual consent, they avoided any discussion of the current case. Gerlach was a man who never talked much about his cases while they remained unsolved. A stubborn, plodding man without too much imagination, he was a strong believer in routine police work and generally made it pay dividends in the long run.

  They talked about some of Shayne's cases that had made the headlines, and he told Shayne about his nine-year-old son who was already studying plane geometry; and then they were well down into the valley and a flashing red light was signaling them from the center of the highway ahead.

  Gerlach braked down gently and pulled to a stop alongside a chunky man wearing overalls and a blue work shirt. He had a flashlight in his hand with a piece of thin red cloth over the lens. He leaned over the door of the sedan and asked, "You the city cop Sheriff Craven phoned in for?"

  When Gerlach said he was, the farmer introduced himself, "I'm Deputy Sheriff Graves. Sheriff's waitin' for you down by the river. Got my own car here," he went on. "If you want to foller along, I'll go ahead."

  Gerlach said that would be fine, and he backed up a little while the deputy trotted to a Ford pick-up parked beside the highway and turned it off the dirt shoulder onto a narrow, unpaved road leading south between small truck farms toward the river.

  Gerlach bumped along the dirt road behind the pick-up, leaving the farms behind and passing through an area of low swampland, and finally to a wide, clear space on the river's bank surrounded by willows, where the road led down to a shallow ford across the Rio Grande into Mexico.

  Three other
cars were parked in a semi-circle, with their headlights shining down on a group of men squatting about the corpse.

  A yellow moon shed blurred light through a haze of corrugated clouds, and when Gerlach shut off his motor, they could hear a pair of iron-lunged frogs protesting the intrusion in the willows beside the road.

  One of the men beside the body got up and came toward them stiffly as they got out. He was a portly man with a bald head shining in the headlights above a fringe of gray hair. He looked like a small-town shopkeeper, but a sheriff's star was pinned to his unbuttoned vest.

  He held out his hand to Gerlach and said in a hoarsely subdued voice, "Glad you came down. Captain. This is sort of outta my line."

  Gerlach shook hands with him and explained Shayne by saying,

  "Brought a friend along for company." The three of them walked slowly through the loose sand to look down at the naked body of a dead man.

  He was completely naked, and the body was hideously bloated and looked greenish in the yellow light of the automobile lamps. A heavy, sweetish odor rose from the body. Shayne took a step backward to avoid the odor and thrust his hands deep in his pockets and watched while Gerlach knelt with the sheriff and examined the head wounds that had evidently caused death.

  They straightened up and stepped back beside Shayne after a few moments, and the sheriff drew in a deep breath of clean air and said, "Hard to figure how long he's been in the water, I reckon. Some of the fellows here have been guessing a week. They claim the alkali in the water keeps a body from rotting."

  Gerlach shook his head. "Not more than three or four days, I'd say." He looked inquiringly at Shayne.

  The redhead nodded. "Unless there's a hell of a lot of alkali."

  "Anyhow," said Sheriff Craven, "that'd be plenty of time for him to float down here from El Paso."

  Gerlach nodded. "You can send him in to the morgue if you want, and we'll try to identify him. Fix him up the best we can."