Murder Is My Business (18 page)

“Don’t pull an act on me,” Shayne growled. “You knew what might happen when she went over there. You advised her to pack that sawed-off cannon with her. And then you calmly went to bed. You must have had a hunch she wouldn’t be back tonight,” he probed fiercely. “The door was barred and chained so she couldn’t get in.”

“She has her key to the side door,” Towne mumbled. His rugged face was flaccid for a brief moment, and his big body appeared to shrink before Shayne’s hard gaze. Then he got hold of himself and went on angrily: “Whatever happened is the result of her own stubbornness. She
would
go to see for herself. Who’s dead? How did it happen?” He descended the last three steps, and his eyes were level with Shayne’s.

“A bullet out of her gun killed Neil Cochrane.”

“Cochrane?” The name seemed to surprise Towne more than Shayne’s blunt announcement of her predicament.

“Cochrane,” Shayne repeated. “Who did you expect her to kill when you let her go off like that?”

“I don’t know,” Towne confessed. “Somehow, I thought of Bayliss. How did it happen? Why the devil did she turn on Cochrane?”

Shayne shrugged his broad shoulders. “She claims she didn’t do it.” He hesitated. “Did you see her gun before she started out?”

“No. But she promised me she’d take it with her.”

“How lately have you seen it?” Shayne persisted.

“I don’t know. It’s been years since I thought of it. What’s that got to do with it, Shayne?”

“The only way she can beat the rap is by proving the gun held an empty cartridge before she started out. Which I don’t believe,” he went on frankly. “All three cartridges appear to be freshly fired.”

“Wait a minute,” Towne protested. “You’re talking in riddles.” He moved past Shayne toward the library, muttering, “I need a drink.”

“I can use one myself.” Shayne followed him inside the somber room.

Towne went directly to a built-in cabinet beside the fireplace and opened it. He stooped and got a tall bottle and two thin-stemmed goblets. He poured bonded
tequila
into both glasses and handed one to Shayne. He seemed dazed and unsure of himself, as though he was just awakening to the full seriousness of Shayne’s
news. He tilted his glass and drank it down as though he enjoyed it, breathing gustily as he finished.

Shayne grimaced at the odor rising from his glass but tried a gulp of the Mexican liquor. To his surprise, it wasn’t half bad. Towne poured himself some more, and set the bottle down on a table in front of Shayne. He said, “Suppose you tell me what happened.”

“The Mexican police can give you all the details. From all the evidence at present, one of those lovely, homemade dumdums from Carmela’s thirty-eight killed Cochrane in the alley leading to Papa Tonto’s. Carmela declares she fired twice at some vague form running away in the darkness
after
Cochrane was killed. But three bullets have been fired from her gun. Only three shots were fired altogether. One of them killed Cochrane.”

“If they find the bullet, can’t they compare it with one fired from her gun?” Towne asked eagerly.

“A dumdum?” Shayne snorted. “Fired from a gun with less than half an inch of rifling? Not a chance in the world of getting a decent comparison.”

“You think she’s lying?” Towne muttered.

Shayne said, “It looks as though she might have recognized the man lurking in the alley who grabbed her pistol and shot Cochrane — and is covering up for him.”

“Then that can mean only one man,” Towne pointed out. “Lance Bayliss. And he’s mixed up in some crooked work, Shayne. Neil Cochrane came here this afternoon and threatened to tell Carmela the whole story if I didn’t pay him to keep it quiet.”

“And you paid him?” Shayne asked curiously.

“I promised to. What else could I do? Carmela still loves the man. I couldn’t see her hurt.”

“That’s quite a change of heart,” Shayne snorted. “Ten years ago, when Lance was decent, you broke her heart by separating them.”

“She was too young to know what she wanted. I distrusted the fellow. And rightly, too. You can see that now. Her life would have been like hell if she had married him.”

Shayne finished his
tequila.
He set his glass down and asked, “What is the English translation for
plata azul?”

Towne looked at Shayne as though he thought he had lost his senses.
“Plata azul?
Blue silver. Silver blue, actually, but the Mexicans put their adjectives behind—”

“I know,” Shayne said impatiently. “Does that have any particular meaning to you?”

“There’s a silver mine in Mexico by that name. I don’t know—”

“What about
Señora
Telgucado?” Shayne interrupted.

“What about her? What the hell are you getting at, Shayne?”

“I don’t know,” the detective admitted. “But I hope to before long.” He turned on his heel and started to walk out.

“Wait a minute!” Towne hurried after him. “I want to talk to you about this, Shayne. About Carmela. We’ll have to find Lance Bayliss. You can name your own price—”

Shayne kept on going toward the front door. He flung over his shoulder, “I expect to name my own price, Towne. And you’re going to be damned glad to pay it.” He went out the door and pulled it shut behind him.

He got into his car and drove away, swinging east to avoid the business section and to hit the highway leading down into the Rio Grande Valley — and on toward the Big Bend and a closely guarded silver mine from which Jefferson Towne had taken a fortune in the past ten years.

Michael Shayne began slowing down when he approached the intersection of the road from Marfa to the Lone Star mine. He was still a good mile from the locked gates that had kept him out the other time, but he pulled to the side of the mountain road on the other side of the intersection, swung around in a sharp U-turn, cut off his motor, and left the coupé parked with its headlights pointing downhill on the road over which he had just driven.

After taking a flashlight from the glove compartment and a pair of heavy wire cutters from the floor, he switched off the headlights, left the keys in the ignition, and got out to trudge up the road beside the spur track toward the silver mine. Brisk, long-legged strides brought him to the padlocked gates in less than fifteen minutes. He stopped in the road when he saw the heavy galvanized wire glistening in the moonlight.

Peering ahead intently, Shayne could make out the blurred outline of the guard shack, but there was no light in it. Beyond, where he knew the mining camp lay, there was only the light of the moon.

He didn’t take a chance on the gates being totally unguarded at night, but turned to the left of the road, pushing through the underbrush and climbing the steep slope for a hundred yards before circling over to
strike the woven-wire barrier. With his heavy cutters he started carefully snipping a large hole in the fence.

When the hole was large enough to go through easily, he laid the cutters down and entered Jefferson Towne’s carefully protected border property, pausing for a moment to take his bearings. He then strode forward boldly on a course that intercepted the wooden ore chute between the headframe and the bin below where railroad cars received their loads of pay dirt.

He followed the chute up the hillside toward the steel headframe outlined starkly against the horizon. He had only the vaguest idea of what he was looking for or hoped to accomplish. He knew only that a lot of fingers seemed to point toward this silver mine in the Big Bend.

His suspicions were aroused by the manner in which the place was guarded against strangers. The heavy fence and an armed guard at the padlocked gates just didn’t make sense around a silver mine. His knowledge of mining was limited, but he knew that the ore itself wasn’t very valuable until it was smelted, and he doubted whether such precautions had to be taken against border raiders.

He only hoped he would know what he was looking for when he found it. With his scant knowledge, he should have brought an expert along, but he didn’t know any experts in El Paso, and it might prove embarrassing to let anyone in on his hunch until it was proved correct

A hundred feet below the headframe over the original shaft, the chute ended abruptly at another huge
storage bin similar to the one below where the cars were loaded. But this bin sat flush with the ground, with the chute leading out from the lower end. Shayne circled it and discovered that the ore chute did not extend beyond the very edge of a crater-like depression not unlike a huge gravel pit that has been in use for a number of years.

He could see the gaunt outlines of two steam shovels squatting in the bottom of the pit, and a long boom slanted upward from the bottom to the edge of the bin over his head. With his flashlight, he turned a beam upward onto the boom and saw a long line of elevatingbuckets on an endless chain that was evidently used to carry material up from the pit and dump it into the storage bin at the top of the gravity chute.

He turned off the flash and squatted beside the bin to mull over his discovery. There was no doubt that the original shaft and its headframe had long since been abandoned as a source of ore, and he remembered the mistake which Josiah Riley had supposedly made in reporting that the original vein had pinched out.

To Shayne, totally unversed in such things, it was clear that the present mining procedure consisted in the use of steam shovels in the bottom of the huge pit digging out the entire hillside and sending the muck up to the bin, where it was fed down by gravity into railroad cars below.

This seemed to indicate that Riley’s report on the original vein might have been correct; and now, instead of sinking a new shaft and driving new tunnels into the mountain, Towne was simply scraping the surface for
his loads of rich ore that went into his El Paso smelter every day.

Shayne squatted on his heels and lit a cigarette, carefully shielding the match and the glow from the direction of the silent camp below. He wished to God he knew more about hard-rock mining. This seemed to him an unorthodox way to operate a silver mine, but he didn’t know that it
couldn’t
be done that way. It was a revolutionary method, at least, he finally decided. If Jefferson Towne had worked out a secret process for extracting valuable ore from the side of a mountain, it wasn’t surprising that he took such precautions to keep it a secret.

He finished his cigarette and decided that it was not worthwhile to explore any more. He didn’t yet know the full meaning of his discovery, but he had learned all he could for the night. He stood up and retraced his steps down the hillside, found his hole in the fence, and proceeded on to his car without being challenged.

Daylight was approaching when he started back to El Paso, and the sun had been up more than an hour when he pulled up in front of the Paso Del Norte Hotel.

He went up to his room and began stripping off his clothes. He was physically weary, but his mind was working furiously as he went over hypothesis after hypothesis, rejecting one after the other. He had an irritating, nagging feeling of being on the verge of an answer to the mysterious deaths of three men, but the final piece in the pattern, the
reason
behind it all, continued to elude him.

He shaved and took a shower, then came back into
the room clad only in undershirt and shorts, and poured a long drink. Sitting by the window with the drink in his hand, he scowled out at the bright sunlight. There it was — the answer — just in front of him, but he couldn’t see it. The image dimmed each time he tried to take hold of it and examine it objectively.

A knock sounded on his door as he took a long drink of whisky. He got up and padded toward it in his bare feet, and pulled it open. Lance Bayliss pushed past him into the center of the room. He carried a morning paper and a briefcase and his face was strained and terrified. He dropped the briefcase and turned to demand hoarsely, “Is this stuff in the paper about Carmela true?”

Shayne closed the door and said, “I haven’t seen the paper, Lance, but I imagine it’s fairly correct.”

“That she’s in that filthy Juarez jail! Accused of murdering Neil Cochrane!” He struck the paper with his free hand.

“That’s about it.” Shayne walked over and picked up the whisky bottle and asked, “Have a drink?”

“You helped put her there,” Lance charged. “It says in the paper you’re one of the witnesses against her — that you’re convinced she did it.”

“That her
gun
did it,” Shayne corrected. “It’s my personal theory that she’s shielding someone — that she’ll probably go to the electric chair shielding him.” His eyes met Lance’s and held them steadily.

Lance drew in a long breath. “It also says the police have reason to believe I was in that vicinity last night.”

“Carmela placed you there herself.
She
thinks you were there, Lance.”

Bayliss dropped the paper to the floor and said, “All right. I was there. I grabbed the gun and killed Cochrane. I didn’t think she recognized me in the dark.”

Shayne poured a drink and handed it to Lance. He asked, “Why did you kill Cochrane?”

Bayliss gulped down a big drink and said, “I guess I went crazy for a moment.” He walked over to the window and stared out, his back turned to Shayne, and continued. “I suppose it was seeing her with that rat — going to that foul dive with him. I’ve dreamed about her for ten years, Shayne — of coming back to her. I had an idea, God help me, she’d be the same.”

“Why didn’t you go in to see her the night you went to the house — when she was alone and waiting for you?”

Lance turned slowly, the muscles in his thin face quivering. “What do you know about it?”

“I saw you parked in the street in front of the house. You drove away as I passed.”

“So that was you — with the spotlight,” Lance said. “I parked there for an hour trying to get up enough nerve to go in. I didn’t know whether she’d want to see me or not. I’ve changed a lot myself.”

Shayne sat down on the bed and sipped his drink thoughtfully, then asked, “What were you doing in that Juarez alley last night?”