Murder Is My Business ms-11

by Brett Halliday

  The news story concluded with a brief paragraph that caused a slow grin to spread over Shayne’s rugged face:

  The citizens of El Paso are warned that no effort or expense will be spared by Jefferson Towne to whitewash his criminal negligence in this matter. As we go to press, the Free Press learns from a reliable source that a private detective of unsavory reputation from New Orleans has been retained to aid in confusing the electorate on this issue and to hide the full truth from our citizens.

  For an interesting commentary on this desperate expedient of Candidate Towne, be sure to read the editorial by our Crime Reporter, Neil Cochrane, on this page.

  A waitress brought Shayne’s coffee and eggs. He took a sip of coffee and scowled across the room. He remembered Neil Cochrane from ten years ago. Neil had been a friend of Lance Bayliss — and of Carmela Towne. A thin, waspish, eager lad, with a head too big for his undersized body, and a sharp, incisive intellect. Shayne had an idea that Neil, too, had fancied himself in love with Carmela in those days, though he must have known there could be no one but Lance in her life. Now Neil Cochrane was a reporter on the Free Press, violently opposing the election of Carmela’s father.

  Shayne folded the paper and read a boxed editorial near the center of the page. It was starkly titled, WARNING!

  Jeff Towne is a two-fisted fighting man. Those of us in El Paso who have followed his career with interest during the past decade know this to be true. He is a man accustomed to ride roughshod over his enemies, crushing and casting aside those who oppose him, surging upward through sheer aggressiveness to a position of industrial and financial leadership in this community.

  Now, looking for more worlds to conquer, Jeff Towne has acquired political ambitions, and he brings to the political arena those same ruthless characteristics that have not failed him in the past. Jeff Towne is determined to be the next mayor of El Paso!

  Yesterday a young soldier died beneath the wheels of Jeff Towne’s speeding limousine in the streets of this city. Crushed, as other men have been crushed when they stood in Jeff Towne’s way.

  Fearful of a public reaction which will smash his political aspirations beneath a landslide of votes for Honest John Carter, Jeff Towne is fighting back!

  With a vast fortune at his disposal, Towne has retained the services of a notorious private detective to fly here from New Orleans in a desperate attempt to cover up the true facts in this case.

  Some of us in El Paso know Michael Shayne personally, and most of us know of him through newspaper accounts of his past exploits in cleverly circumventing the Law and disproving the guilt of wealthy clients.

  The citizens of El Paso are solemnly warned to expect subtle trickery and distortion of facts by this detective when he takes over the case against Jeff Towne. An indication of his methods is his telephonic demand of yesterday upon Chief Dyer that an autopsy be immediately performed upon the body of Towne’s victim for the ostensible purpose of ascertaining the cause of death.

  An autopsy on a traffic victim!

  Yet we learn from Chief Dyer himself that he has weakly acceded to this ridiculous demand and that an autopsy has been ordered.

  We await the result of this farcical proceeding with indignation and with interest, and we warn our readers to accept with a grain of salt any medical testimony which attempts to shift the blame for the death of Private James Brown from the shoulders of Candidate Towne where it belongs.

  The boxed editorial was signed by Neil Cochrane.

  Shayne drank his cup of coffee and ate his scrambled eggs. He got a second cup of coffee and leisurely smoked a cigarette while he drank it. It was 9:30 when he left the hotel and strolled down the street to police headquarters.

  Chief Dyer looked up from his desk with a tired smile when a sergeant ushered Shayne into his private office. He shoved aside some papers and leaned forward to shake Shayne’s hand heartily, saying, “You didn’t waste any time getting here.”

  “I flew in.” Shayne pulled up a chair and sat down.

  Chief Dyer was bald, and a complete absence of eyebrows gave his face a naked look. He had a sharp nose with vertical creases on each side leading down to the corners of his mouth. His chin was pointed and jutted forward aggressively. He smoked cigarettes in a long holder, and had a way of never looking at a man when he talked to him. “I don’t get this,” he complained. “When you telephoned yesterday I assumed you were acting for Towne, but after the Free Press appeared last night Towne came storming in and swore he hadn’t retained you.”

  Shayne said, “I just finished reading the Free Press.”

  “Towne’s plenty sore,” Dyer told him. “He figures it won’t do him a damned bit of good to have someone like you jump to his defense.”

  Shayne looked surprised. “He ought to be glad to have an autopsy. If we can find a few shreds of evidence pointing to a bad heart, or to a prior attack of some sort-”

  “That’s exactly what he doesn’t want,” Dyer exploded. “Don’t you see the position he’s in, Shayne, with the Free Press riding him, and warning people to expect you to pull a fast one? If the autopsy does show anything like that, no one will believe it. Towne figures it would be a lot better to let it ride as a straight traffic accident. He’s legally in the clear on it that way. All the evidence indicates that he was driving slowly and the soldier either fell or threw himself under his car. He stopped immediately and gave first aid and reported the accident.”

  Shayne shrugged, and leaned back to cross one long leg over the other. “Jeff Towne has changed a lot during the past ten years if he won’t pay out money for a cover-up.”

  “He hasn’t changed, if you mean developing a conscience or something like that. A traffic accident can happen to anyone. It’ll lose him a few votes, but people will think more of him if he squarely accepts the blame without trying to weasel out of it on a technicality.”

  “So he halted the autopsy?”

  Dyer looked at him in surprise. “Did I say that? Towne doesn’t run this department — yet. Doc Thompson’s report should be ready any moment.”

  “How do you stand on the election?”

  “The police department isn’t in politics,” Dyer told him. “Towne has the backing of the Reform Group, and Honest John Carter is backed by the Free Press. That ought to give you an idea.”

  Shayne lit a cigarette. “Towne might make El Paso a good mayor,” he mused. “He’s got enough money so graft won’t interest him. He’s honest enough — in his own peculiar way.”

  “He will make a good mayor,” Dyer assured him. “Look here, Shayne, who the hell are you working for if Towne didn’t retain you on this case? Somebody must be paying the bill, from what I’ve been reading about you these past few years.”

  “I’m taking a chance that somebody will,” Shayne told him cautiously. “I suppose you haven’t located Brown’s folks yet?”

  “No. That’s one of the queer things about it. I wondered why you asked that question over the phone yesterday. James Brown appears to have been an alias and the Cleveland address a phony.”

  “Who identified the body?” Shayne asked abruptly.

  “He had his dog tags on. We called Fort Bliss and a sergeant came down. The fellow had just enlisted the day before, so no one at the Post was actually acquainted with him, but the sergeant confirmed the identification.”

  “Check his fingerprints with Washington?”

  Chief Dyer blinked suspiciously at the private detective from New Orleans. “You’re holding out,” he charged.

  “Maybe.” Shayne was noncommittal about it. “Did you?”

  “The army is doing that. They took his fingerprints when he enlisted, and they’ve shot them in to the FBI.”

  “How did Jefferson Towne make his sudden jump to the top of the local heap?” Shayne asked suddenly. “Ten years ago he was a small operator.”

  “Guts and hard work and luck.” Dyer shrugged his shoulders. “You know how a career like that rolls up. The Free Press
is right enough about him trampling anyone who got in his way, but hell, that’s the way men make money.”

  “Sure. It used to be rugged individualism.”

  Dyer nodded. “You were doing a job for him ten years ago when you were in town for World-Wide, weren’t you?”

  Shayne made a wry face. “It wasn’t much of a job, and I didn’t please Towne the way I handled it. Trying to dig up some dirt on a kid he didn’t want his daughter to marry. There wasn’t any dirt, so I didn’t dig any.”

  “And he wanted some if you had to manufacture it?” Dyer supplied with a grin.

  “Sure. That’s why he was paying World-Wide. He took his daughter off on a foreign tour to make her forget the lad.”

  “Carmela Towne.”

  “Do you know her?”

  “See her name and picture in the papers. His foreign tour must have worked, because she never married.”

  “I hear Towne’s a mining and smelter magnate now.”

  “That’s right. He first hit it lucky about 1935 with a mine in the Big Bend — just after the government upped the price on domestic silver. It’s been a big producer ever since and he’s bought up smelters and whatnot. I wondered,” the chief went on reflectively, “why he was so damned sore about your horning in on this case. Didn’t know he was carrying a ten-year grudge against you.”

  Shayne grinned. He was about to reply when the door was pushed open by a short man wearing a shabby and rumpled suit. He had a short-stemmed pipe clenched between his teeth, and his bristly mustache was yellow with nicotine. Waving a sheet of paper at Dyer, the short man said, “Here’s your p.m. on that boy.”

  Chief Dyer said to Shayne, “This is Doc Thompson, and, Doc, this is the shamus from New Orleans who suggested you do the job.”

  Thompson put the report on Dyer’s desk and nodded to Shayne. Removing his pipe, he said, “Shayne, eh? You had an Irish hunch on this one, or maybe you bumped the lad yourself.”

  Shayne stiffened. “You mean Private James Brown?”

  “Who else have I been cutting up these past hours?”

  Dyer had picked up the report and was studying it with a look of incredulity on his naked face. “Post-mortem damage,” he read. “Lack of ecchymosis due to extravasation, and absence of coagulation about the mangled area. Invagination of wound edges, lack of external hemorrhage, m-m-m, point to post-mortem bruising and prior death.” Glaring at Thompson, he yelled, “What the devil do all these ten-dollar words mean?”

  “It’s stated clearly enough,” Thompson said. “The boy was dead before the car wheels passed over him.”

  There was silence in the office for a moment. Then Dyer ruffled the report, sighed, and asked, “How long before?”

  “That’s impossible to determine from an examination at present. However, I think you can safely assume not many minutes had elapsed. Certainly not more than half an hour, else the condition of the body would have been noted by Towne, or more certainly by the ambulance attendant who arrived very soon afterward.”

  “Rigor mortis?” Chief Dyer asked.

  “Not necessarily. But there would be a noticeable, cooling of the body after, say, fifteen or twenty minutes.”

  “What caused his death?” Shayne asked.

  “There’s a head wound that didn’t come from the tires of a car,” Thompson answered bluntly. “It was incurred before the wheels ran over him, and caused almost instant death.”

  “What sort of wound?”

  “Roundish. Half an inch in diameter. A single blow from a hammer would be my guess.”

  “How the devil did he get in the street in front of Towne’s car?” Dyer exploded.

  “That’s your problem.” Thompson walked stiffly from the room.

  “This is one hell of a mess,” Dyer said to Shayne. “You come along and ask for an autopsy, and now I’ve got a murder on my hands.”

  “Don’t tell me it’s unexpected,” Shayne said gently.

  “What do you mean? Of course I didn’t expect it.” Dyer got up and walked up and down his office fuming aloud. “Why should I suspect murder? It was open and shut. Now I’ve got this damned autopsy.” He stopped to glare at Shayne. “How’d you get onto it? Down in New Orleans. By God, Shayne, you’d better come clean.”

  Shayne shook his head. “I’ve got to figure a way to make an honest dollar. Have you traced the boy’s movements yesterday?”

  “Only that he got a pass to come to town right after lunch, to finish up some unfinished civilian affairs. We haven’t any further trace of him until Towne ran over his body at dusk.”

  He slumped down into his chair and fitted a cigarette into the end of a long holder. Shayne struck a match and leaned forward to hold the flame to the tip of the chief’s cigarette. “It happened at the corner of Missouri and Lawton,” he mused. “What was Towne doing there at that hour?”

  “He didn’t say. It’s sort of a blind corner, and the accident occurred just as he was turning onto Missouri, headed east. At dusk like that, he could easily run over a body as he turned the corner before he saw it.”

  “I think I’d find out who knew he was going to be turning that corner at dusk,” Shayne suggested.

  Dyer removed the cigarette holder from his mouth slowly. “Do you think it was planted there? So he would run over it and think he killed him?”

  Shayne shrugged. “It pretty well knocks his chance of being elected mayor.”

  Dyer’s fist pounded his desk. “With the Free Press backing Carter — and with Manny Holden making book on the election with even money against Towne — by God, Shayne, you may have it.”

  “Manny Holden?”

  “A leftover from Prohibition,” Dyer grunted sourly. “He’s slippery as hell and back of most of our rackets. It’d be worth plenty to him for Carter’s crowd to get control of the city machinery.

  “It’s a thought,” Shayne told him cheerily. He got up and pushed his chair back. “Towne ought to be grateful to me for pushing an autopsy. It’ll clear his conscience of the boy’s death.”

  “He’s going to hate your guts for it,” Dyer growled. “Don’t you see this is just what the Free Press hinted at this morning — what Neil Cochrane was preparing their readers for? Everyone will suspect it’s the old cover-up.”

  “That’s something else I’d inquire into,” Shayne said breezily, turning toward the door. “How Cochrane guessed an autopsy would turn out as it did.”

  “Do you think Cochrane was in on it?”

  Shayne said, “I’m just leaving you a few ideas to play with. Right now I’m looking for a client with a bankroll.” He went out and closed the door firmly behind him.

  CHAPTER THREE

  A taxi took Shayne to Jefferson Towne’s house on Austin Terrace, located in an exclusive residential section on the slope of Mount Franklin above the city. The address was not the same Shayne had known ten years before. At that time, Towne and his daughter lived in a modest five-room bungalow in Five Points.

  His present residence was neither bungalow nor modest. Shayne sat up straight, and a grim smile tightened his wide mouth when the taxi turned under a high marble archway onto a curving concrete drive and circled across a terraced lawn to pull up in front of an ugly, three-story, turreted pile of stone.

  Shayne got out, said to the driver, “You’d better wait. I don’t think I’ll be very long.” He went up marble steps to a pair of heavy oak doors and put his finger to the electric button.

  The left-hand door opened inward and a frock-coated Mexican stood stiffly at attention looking impassively at Shayne. He had a figure like Joe Louis, with the piercing black eyes and high, swarthy cheekbones of an Indian.

  Shayne said, “I think Jefferson Towne expects me.”

  The Mexican inclined his head and turned and marched down a vaulted hallway with frescoed walls and a thick red carpet underfoot.

  It was cold inside the big stone house, and there was an echoing, lonely silence about the hallway. Shayne’s big shoes sa
nk softly into the carpet as he followed at the man’s heels. The Mexican stopped in front of open sliding doors and said gutturally, “Mr. Towne in here.”

  It was the library. Shayne could tell that by the rows of books along two walls. It had a low, beamed ceiling and the woodwork was dark walnut. There were dark leather chairs and smoking stands and a fireplace of Aztec tile at the far end of the room.

  Jefferson Towne stood in front of the fireplace, with his legs widely spread and his hands clasped behind him. He was a big man, with a rangy frame that didn’t carry any spare flesh even now after years of soft living. A man of heavy bones and whipcord muscles, seasoned by the Texas wind and the border sun. Tanned skin was tightly drawn on prominent cheek and jawbones, making his face a series of harsh contours. He had been a mule skinner and a prospector in his young days, and the look of those earlier days still clung to him.

  He said nothing and made no move as Shayne walked toward him. He waited until the detective was ten feet away before saying harshly, “I thought you’d be out to see me.”

  Shayne said, “I’m glad I didn’t disappoint you.” He stood for a moment eyeing Towne levelly, and neither of them made any motion to shake hands. Shayne lifted his left shoulder in an almost imperceptible shrug, and turned aside to sit in a leather upholstered chair. Towne didn’t move from his position on the tiled hearth.

  Shayne said, “It looks as though you’ve got yourself into a mess.”

  “I didn’t send for you.”

  Shayne lit a cigarette and grinned up at the big man. “I figured maybe you didn’t know how to reach me.”

  “You had no right to tell Dyer you were acting for me. Demanding an autopsy of all the damn-fool things.”