Murder Is My Business (5 page)

Shayne’s alert gray eyes swiftly circled the room, returning to her face while he slowly pocketed the gun.

“Carmela Towne,” he said in a flat tone.

Carmela pushed herself up from the chair with both hands gripping the arms. Her black eyes searched his face and she said, “Michael,” making three syllables of his name, her voice throaty and a little blurred.

“Some day you’ll get yourself shot,” he said, and went toward her.

Carmela Towne giggled, “I’m already half-shot, Michael,” and held out her arms to him. Her lips were dry and hot and hard. Ten years had done some shocking things to her. She had been a leggy youngster with a rich, dark beauty that burned beneath the surface and glowed in her eyes. She had been vital and alive, tingling with youth and a fervid passion for life and love.

Now her long-limbed body was thin and taut, her face almost haggard. Two spots of rouge far back on her cheeks gave her a feverish look, and her eyes glittered with the same unnatural brightness. She was the embodiment of a woman who for a long time had made a habit of drinking too much, and sleeping and eating too little.

Shayne stepped back from her embrace, and she slid her hands down his arms to grip his fingers tightly. She asked, “Do you always come into your room with a bound like that?”

“How did you get in?”

“Oh, I bribed the bellboy. He asked me if I was Mrs. Shayne, and I told him I wasn’t, and he seemed to think that made everything all right.”

Shayne released his hands from hers and went back to close the door. He said morosely, “You spilled some of my cognac. It’s hard to get nowadays.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t spill much, Michael.” She sank back into her chair, and got a cigarette from her bag. She put it between her red lips and looked to him for a light. When Shayne struck a match to it, she inhaled deeply and let the smoke filter through her nostrils. Tilting her head back to look into his eyes, she said, “It’s been a long time,” and for a moment forgot to be glib and flippant.

He nodded and extinguished the match. He moved back to sit on the edge of the bed and asked, “How did you know I was here?”

“I read the
Free Press.
And I know you were out to see Father this morning.”

“At this hotel — I mean.”

“You stayed here ten years ago. I took a chance and asked at the desk.” Carmela made an impatient gesture with the long, thin fingers of her right hand. “Have you seen Lance?”

“Not for ten years.” Shayne reached for the bottle of cognac by the bedside table and poured a drink. He didn’t offer Carmela one. She didn’t appear to notice. Her great dark eyes were fixed on his face. She said, “He’s here.”

“In El Paso?”

She nodded. “I saw him three days ago in a taxi downtown. He didn’t see me. He was riding with a Mexican girl. A common little Mexican wench whom he must have picked up in Juarez on the
Calle de Diablo.
He looked terrible,” she ended in a lifeless tone.

Shayne took a drink of cognac and murmured, “I’ve wondered what became of him.” After a moment’s
hesitation he asked, “Did you ever see him after you came back from your trip abroad?”

“No. He’d left town. He never wrote to me, Michael,” she answered softly, as though for an instant she lived in a dream.

“Why would he?” Shayne asked angrily. “Lance wasn’t the kind to come crawling back after you kicked him in the teeth.”

“I know.” Her upper lip trembled, and a semblance of the fire Shayne had seen years ago kindled in her eyes. “I’ve hated myself for letting Father do that to me. But I was so young, Michael. I had been reared to think he was like God. My mother was Spanish, you know. She taught me that it was a woman’s place to submit.”

Shayne ignored the plea in her voice. He asked impatiently, “Do you know where Lance has been? What he’s been doing?”

“I heard indirectly that he went to China. And later to Germany. Neil Cochrane called me once to say he had heard a short-wave propaganda broadcast from Berlin by Lance. I didn’t believe it, but Neil later sent me a news clipping giving Lance’s name as one of a group of renegade American journalists aiding Hitler.”

Shayne scowled over a drink of cognac and was silent. The girl in front of him needed to talk things out. She had kept too much bottled up for too long.

“And now Lance is back in El Paso,” she went on drearily. “He looks old and bitter and defeated. I thought you might be in touch with him. I thought that might be the reason you are here.”

Shayne cocked his red head and said sardonically,
“If you read the
Free Press
you know I’m here to help your father get himself elected mayor of El Paso.”

“That’s not what he says.” For the first time since Shayne had entered the room there was a hint of laughter in her voice. “You should have heard him raving this morning after you left the house.”

“After I fixed an autopsy to show he didn’t kill the soldier,” murmured Shayne. “You’d think he’d be grateful.”

“He knows no one will believe the autopsy. He’d much rather take the blame and have the incident forgotten.”

Shayne said, “He’d make a better mayor than John Carter.”

“I hope he’s defeated,” Carmela exclaimed passionately. “He’s always had everything his way. He thinks he’s a man of destiny. No one has ever successfully opposed him. Not for ten years. You don’t know his cruelty and his arrogance.”

Shayne reached for the bottle of cognac. He held it out toward her. Carmela relaxed and nodded listlessly. She picked up the overturned glass beside her chair and held it while Shayne poured it a quarter full. She drank half of it as though it were water.

“No one knows how I hate him. It’s a horrible thing to say about one’s father, but it’s true. He’s made me hate myself. I’ll never forgive him for that.”

“What do you suppose he was doing at the corner of Lawton and Missouri when he ran over the soldier? It’s a block off the route out to his smelter.”

“I suppose he was on his way to see that woman,” she said without looking up.

“What woman, Carmela?”

Carmela lifted one thin shoulder in a shrug of disgust and drank the rest of the cognac. “There’s a woman, in the next block on Missouri. I’ve known about her for a long time. Her name is Morales. He doesn’t know I know, but I haven’t cared what he did. She lives in a little house set back from the street with a high cedar hedge in front. I trailed him there once, out of curiosity.”

“Does he go to see her regularly?” Shayne asked the question in a casual tone.

“Two or three times a week,” she replied with hard indifference. “I don’t think he has regular days, if that’s what you mean.”

“It is what I mean,” he said harshly. “You see, Carmela, whether anyone believes it or not, that soldier
was
dead before your father’s car ran over him. Murdered — and then placed in the street to be run over.”

Carmela’s black eyes flickered toward the cognac bottle. The tip of her tongue moistened her lips. Shayne poured a small drink and handed it to her. “So I’m trying to find out who might have known Towne would be turning that corner at just that time. Someone put the body there. Someone who wanted Jefferson Towne to run over it.”

Carmela was turning the glass around and around in her hands, staring into the amber fluid as though it fascinated her. “Would anyone go to that trouble — commit a murder just to make Father think he had accidentally run over a man?”

“It’s likely to make the difference in the coming election,” he said. “And it might not have been a murder
committed for that single purpose.” He paused, then added, “It’s a neat way to dispose of a body, to cover up a murder. It would have stayed on the books as a traffic accident if I hadn’t horned in with an autopsy.”

“Why don’t you leave it the way it is?” Carmela cried out suddenly. “If you solve the case and prove that someone else murdered the soldier and put him there it’ll clear Father completely. He’ll win the election. I thought you hated him as I do. Ten years ago, you said—”

“Ten years ago,” Shayne told her flatly, “I told your father what I thought of a man who would pay to have me dig up non-existent dirt against Lance Bayliss to prevent his daughter’s marriage. My opinion remains the same today. But I’ve stumbled onto a murder, Carmela. Murder is my business. And I’ve got some money and time invested in this thing now. I’ve got to figure a way to collect a fee.”

“I won’t help you exonerate Father!” Carmela cried shrilly. “I’ll see him in hell first. I hope whoever did it gets away with it and he doesn’t get a vote in the election.”

Shayne said, “You should have exhibited some of this brave spirit ten years ago.”

Carmela Towne put her fingers over her face and bowed her head and began to cry. Her weeping had an obscene sound. It was as though something had rotted away inside of her, and her tears were a suppurating excrement bubbling up under the pressure of long decay.

Shayne got up and walked away from her. The
sound of her weeping followed him across the room. He clawed at his red hair and watched somberly, but made no move toward her and said nothing to halt the flow of tears.

His telephone shrilled loudly. Carmela took her hands away from her tear-streaked face to look at him as he strode across to answer it. Shayne said, “Yes?” and listened. His eyes narrowed and his gaunt features hardened. He started to protest, “Not right now,” but he shrugged and replaced the instrument.

“He hung up on me before I could stop him,” he told Carmela quietly. “It was Lance. He’s on his way up here.”

She jumped up with an abject cry of fright.

Shayne went to her swiftly and put his arm about her shoulders. He swung her toward the open bathroom door and gave her a little shove. “Go in there and lock the door. It might do you good to listen in at the keyhole and see what Lance has to say for himself.”

She stumbled toward the door and went inside, pulled it shut behind her. Shayne waited until he heard the click of the lock from the inside, then went slowly across to open his door. He heard the elevator stop down the hall and let out a passenger, and waited to meet Lance Bayliss.

Bayliss would have been almost as tall as Shayne had Bayliss stood erect. He didn’t. His shoulders drooped wearily, and his back appeared to be permanently bowed. His head was lowered, and he walked with a curious shuffle as though to balance his body with each step. Tendons stood out on each side of his neck, and he wore a shabby gray suit and a black bow tie about the frayed collar of a dingy white shirt. Ten years had thickened his torso and he looked well-fed, but his eyes held an expression of secretive wariness, and he seemed prepared to cringe should a hand suddenly be lifted against him.

Shayne put out his hand and said heartily, “Lance Bayliss!” After a moment’s hesitation Lance put his hand in Shayne’s. He didn’t lift his head to look directly into the detective’s eyes when he muttered, “Hello, Shayne. I didn’t suppose I’d ever see you again.”

Shayne kept hold of his hand and stepped back, urging him inside the room. “Come on in and have a drink.”

He narrowed his eyes as he noted the manner in which Lance Bayliss entered the hotel room. It told him a lot about what had happened to the man during the past ten years. Lance came in with a sort of furtive
stealth, darting his eyes around in all directions suspiciously, behind the door and under the bed, and at the open closet door and the closed bathroom door. He kept moving toward the center of the room, and then stopped to look back slyly over his shoulder while Shayne closed the door. He said, “I guess I could use a drink.”

Shayne went past him and picked up Carmela’s glass and set it beside his own on the bedside table. He split the remainder of the cognac in the two glasses.

When he turned to offer one to Lance, his guest said, “I hope I didn’t interrupt anything by coming up.”

“Nothing important,” Shayne told him pleasantly.

“I couldn’t help noticing the two glasses,” Lance apologized. “You’re not — married?”

Shayne said, “No,” shortly. “Are you?”

Lance Bayliss shook his head. His hand trembled slightly as he lifted the glass to his lips. He murmured sardonically, “To older and happier days.”

Shayne sat down abruptly in the chair Carmela had occupied. He indicated another chair and asked, “What have you been doing with yourself?”

“Nothing important. Bumming around here and there.”

“Writing any poetry?”

“Hardly.” Lance balanced his glass on his knee and watched it carefully, as though he feared it might disappear from his hand if he didn’t keep his eyes fixed on it.

“Too busy writing propaganda for the Third Reich?” Shayne purposely made his voice harsh.

Lance Bayliss wet his lips. He didn’t look up. “So you know about that?”

“Carmela Towne told me.”

He winced at the sound of her name. “It was a dirty business,” he said quietly. “I didn’t think anything mattered during those years. I was being very cynical and disillusioned. The war woke me up.” He lifted his eyes to Shayne’s momentarily. “You’ve got to believe me,” he said strongly. “I pulled out of it when Hitler marched into Poland.”

“Since then?”

Lance shrugged. “Dodging the Gestapo mostly. I got to Mexico finally and ghosted a book there.”

“What sort of a book?”

“Dictators I Have Known.”

Shayne jerked to closer attention. “That was by the war correspondent Douglas Gershon.”

“His name was signed to it,” Lance admitted wryly. “I understand it sold well.”

“It caused a lot of controversy. Half the people who read it found it pro-Fascist.”

“It wasn’t at all,” Lance protested. “People felt that merely because it represented the dictators as human beings. They are human, and all the more despicable because of that. Hell, the book was banned in Germany and all the occupied countries.” His grayish-blue eyes flashed fire at Shayne, then flickered away.

“Which might have been smart propaganda to get it more widely read over here,” Shayne pointed out.

Lance Bayliss sighed and finished his drink. He set the empty glass down and said, “I can’t prove it, but I’m
on the Gestapo blacklist for having ghosted the book. I had to get out of Mexico in a hurry. You know what happened to Douglas Gershon,” he ended hoarsely.