Murder Is My Business (10 page)

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 desk.

Captain Gerlach was a big, easygoing 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 pickup, 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 semicircle, 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 on 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 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.”

The sheriff plainly showed his relief. He mumbled, “We haven’t got much of a place for that kind of work.” He turned to a boy of about fourteen and beckoned to him with a forefinger. “Come here, Pete, and tell the captain how you come to find the body.”

The boy came sidling toward them, keeping his face averted from the corpse on the sand. “I — I was jest settin’ out some throw-lines fer catfish,” he stammered. “There’s a good deep hole right up yonder above the ford, an’ I fish here lots.”

“Ever catch anything?” Gerlach asked.

“Sure. You betcha.” The enthusiasm died in the lad’s voice. “Like I say, I was settin’ out my throw-lines tonight an’ one of ‘em hooked somethin’. I thought my floats wasn’t workin’ an’ I’d snagged a branch on the bottom, an’ I pulled in an’— an’ there he was. God’lmighty, I was scared. I run a mile ‘thout stoppin’, to where I could phone the sheriff to come quick.”

“Was he floating when you hooked him?” Shayne asked.

“Not on top, I don’t reckon. Leastwise, I didn’t see him. Water’s pretty deep there an’ I use ‘bout four feet of line off my floats.”

Captain Gerlach looked at Shayne and shrugged. They went back to his car and he called to the sheriff, “We’ll take care of fingerprints and all if you send him in.” They got in and he backed around in the sand and drove toward the highway.

“What killed him?” Shayne asked abruptly.

“I’ll
leave that to Doc Thompson. He’s been beaten around the head and there are neck lacerations that look as though he might have been hung by the neck.”

“Young fellow, wasn’t he?”

“I’ll leave that to the doc, too. Around twenty-five, I’d say.” He pulled up onto the pavement and headed the sedan back toward the city.

Shayne leaned back and lit a cigarette. “Naked as a jaybird,” he mused. “That’s a funny one. I’ve seen girls come out of the water naked, but—” He let the sentence die unfinished.

“Could have been swimming and hit something when he dived,” Gerlach offered half-heartedly. He shook his head and admitted, “It’s murder, Mike. Those head wounds didn’t come from any diving accident.”

“Maybe the murderer needed some clothes.” Gerlach said, “Maybe. But I can think up easier ways of getting them.”

“Stripped his victim to hide his identity,” Shayne suggested.

Gerlach said, “Maybe,” again, but his tone remained pessimistic. “Lots easier to empty his pockets and cut off laundry marks.”

“Unless he happened to be wearing a particular
kind
of clothes,” Shayne said in a peculiar tone.

Gerlach turned to look at him slowly. “What do you mean by that?”

“Just a thought.” Shayne shrugged. “If he was a cop, for instance, and his killer for some reason didn’t want him to be identified as a cop. Or wanted to delay identification as long as possible. It wouldn’t do to just cut
off the brass buttons. The uniform would still be recognizable as such.”

“We don’t have any youngsters like that on the Force,” Gerlach protested. “Not any more. The army’s got ‘em.”

“That,” said Shayne quietly, “is what I was getting around to.”

Gerlach puzzled over the matter for a moment, then said, “I’m beginning to get you. You’re guessing he was a soldier and was stripped of everything so we wouldn’t know it when his body turned up.”

Shayne said again, “It’s a thought. A soldier’s clothes are issue all the way down to underwear and socks. And as you say, there aren’t too many men of his age out of the army nowadays.”

“It is an angle,” Gerlach agreed. “It’s the only one that makes sense. I’ll call Fort Bliss and check on any missing soldiers as soon as I get in.”

“If we’re right, that makes two of them in a few days.”

A thoughtful frown creased Gerlach’s pudgy face. “Maybe that spy talk isn’t so wild, after all, Mike.”

“How do you mean?” Shayne asked.

“That stuff the boy wrote to his mother in New Orleans. Look — did he say it was the
spies
that got him to enlist under an alias, or some undercover outfit trying to catch some spies?”

Shayne shook his head and said slowly, “I don’t think Jimmie Delray himself knew when he wrote that letter. In fact, I think he was doing some wishful guessing about the whole thing. Maybe it was just his imagina
tion, and enlisting under an alias didn’t have any connection with spying at all, but he simply hoped it did to clear him of a feeling of guilt because he’d stayed out of the country all these years while it was at war.”

“I’m not so sure he didn’t know what he was talking about,” Gerlach argued. “The FBI and Army Intelligence have been pretty active around El Paso. There was a good organization already set up here for getting stuff back and forth across the border before the war ever started.”

“Smuggling?”

“Sure. We’ve always had more or less of that. Dope and anything else with a high import tax.”

“Would Manny Holden have been in on that organization?”

“If there was a crooked dollar to be made, Manny was in on it,” Gerlach assured him cheerfully. “And now that you’ve thrown the election to Carter, we’ll never be able to touch Manny.”

Shayne sighed. He admitted, “Much as I hate Towne’s guts, I’m sorry I’ve put him on the spot,”

They were approaching the lights of the city. Captain Gerlach slowed to the municipal speed limit and asked, “Where shall I drop you?”

“At the police garage if you don’t mind.” Shayne felt his pocket and nodded. “I’ve still got the key to that crate you loaned me today. Mind if I take it out again?”

Gerlach told him he didn’t mind, that he would be happy to have the detective keep the key and use the coupé as he wished while he was in the city.

Shayne grinned and thanked him. “It’s not bad to be
on the legal side of the fence for once,” he admitted.

He got out when the captain pulled up in front of the police garage, and hesitated for a moment “Mind if I make a suggestion?”

“Let’s have it.”

“When Thompson looks over that body from the river, have him check the head wounds closely to see if he finds one corresponding with the hammer blow that killed the soldier.”

The homicide captain nodded. “You think they tie together?”

Shayne said morosely, “I think we’ll know more about it when we find out if there’s another soldier missing.” He went in the garage and wheeled the coupé out and drove off in the direction of Jefferson Towne’s house on the slope of Mount Franklin.

The police coupé was laboring up the slope a block from the arched entrance to Towne’s estate when the lights of a parked car blinked on from a point just this side of the driveway. Shayne eased up on his accelerator and heard the motor of the parked car roar into life. The headlights turned sharply onto the pavement, and the car rolled toward him.

They passed in about the middle of the block. Shayne had his spotlight off, but he kept it trained on the front seat of the other car as they approached.

He flashed the spotlight on momentarily as they passed each other, and caught a brief glimpse of the other driver alone in the car. He blinked the spot off and kept driving. He rolled past the arched entrance without slacking speed, watching the taillight of the other car in his rearview mirror. It continued down the hill toward town.

The face he had seen in the brief glare of the police spotlight was that of Lance Bayliss, crouching behind the steering-wheel and staring straight ahead, a pinched look of anger on his features.

Feeling quite certain that Lance had not recognized him as they passed, Shayne nevertheless took the precaution of driving around the block before turning into the curving driveway leading to Towne’s house.

The lower windows were dark, but there were lights on the second floor. Shayne looked at his watch as he cut off the motor. It was a little after eleven o’clock. He got out and went up to the front door and put his finger on the electric button. The ringing of the chimes sounded sepulchral and far away.

Nothing happened for fully two minutes. He kept his finger patiently on the button, and finally a night light came on over his head. He took his finger from the button when he heard a bolt being withdrawn inside.

One of the doors opened inward a few inches, and Carmela’s husky voice called out, “Who is it?”

“Mike Shayne.” He pushed against the door, but a chain held it. Carmela said, “Michael!” sobbing out his name in three syllables, and the chain rattled free. He stepped inside, where the big hallway was dimly lit by a single bulb in a wall bracket.

Carmela’s arms were tightly around his neck before he could turn to look at her. She pressed her long body against him and pulled his face down to hers. Her body trembled and her lips were dry and cold, and a strong odor of whisky was on her breath. She wore a quilted dressing gown and her hair was brushed back from her face.

She pressed her lips against Shayne’s and they softened and became warm. He put his arms around her and his hands felt the hard outline of backbone and rib structure beneath the quilted robe.

When she took her arms from his neck she said, “I’ve been waiting for you to come, Michael.” She
closed the door and threw the bolt, took Shayne’s hand, and led him along the hallway toward a wide stairway. “I’m all alone and was waiting for you,” she said again. “I gave the servants a night off after I found out — Father wouldn’t be home.”

She started up the stairway. She didn’t look at him again, but hurried up the steps as though there was little time.

Shayne hurried beside her, his big hand tightly clutched in hers. Here in her home, seeing her dressed as she was, he was more fully aware of the change ten years had made in her. She looked older than her years, and he wondered what she had been doing since she deserted the only man she would ever love.