Murder Is My Business

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

It was less than a three-hour drive back from the mine. Shayne drove straight to police headquarters and went in. He found Chief Dyer with his hat on ready to go out to eat. The chief looked tired and disgusted. He grunted, “Where’ve you been hiding all afternoon?”

“Around and about.” Shayne eyed him speculatively. “Things been happening?”

Dyer nodded. He took off his hat and looked at it as if surprised to find it on his head. He threw it down on his desk and said, “Plenty.”

“Have you got time to bring me up to date?”

Chief Dyer sighed and sat down in his swivel chair. “I haven’t any place to go,” he confessed. “I just wanted to get away from this damned office before a couple of gremlins sneak in to inform me that there haven’t been any murders or dead bodies or any other damned thing.”

“Is it that bad?” asked Shayne.

“Just about. The whole thing’s blown up. We’re all the way out on a limb, and I’m wailing for it to be sawed off.”

Shayne draped himself on a chair and said, “Give.”

“First thing is the Bartons. They came down about two o’clock with a note they’d just received in the mail from their son. It was postmarked last Tuesday. Mailed in a downtown box.”

“With ten onehundred-dollar bills?”

“That’s right. Just like Towne said.”

“What the hell has it been doing in the mail ever since Tuesday?”

“One of those things,” Dyer groaned, “that walk up and slap us in the face sometimes. I don’t live right, Shayne. That’s all there is to it. What happens to me shouldn’t happen to a dog.”

Shayne said, “I’m listening.”

“The envelope was addressed wrong. In his hurry or excitement, Jack Barton neglected to put a ‘South’ in front of the street name. So it went out by the wrong carrier. Came back to the main post office, where they looked in the directory and found the Bartons lived on South Vine. So it didn’t reach them until the afternoon delivery today.”

“No doubt about its authenticity?”

“None at all,” Dyer sighed. “They recognized their son’s handwriting, and I had it checked by an expert with the other note he left. In it, he told them he was leaving town hurriedly and for them to tear up the other note he’d left behind without reading it. Exactly what Towne told us he dictated to him.”

“I wondered about that,” Shayne admitted. “It sounded like the sort of thing Towne would do. He couldn’t afford to ship Jack Barton out of the city without taking some precaution to prevent the other letter from reaching us. He figured the grand would tie the old folks’ hands — that, and the knowledge that their son was a blackmailer. It seems to me that arrival of the note clarifies things,” he added encouragingly.

“You haven’t heard half of it yet,” Dyer growled. “I insisted that they look at the body anyway, with some crazy idea, I guess, that Cochrane had gotten mixed into it after Towne made the payoff.”

“And the body isn’t Jack Barton?” Shayne guessed easily.

“Definitely not. They’re both absolutely positive. I watched their faces while they looked at it, and I’m convinced they were telling the truth.”

Shayne shrugged. “It really couldn’t have been Barton. It didn’t make sense that way. Towne would know a body thrown in the river would have to show up eventually. If he killed Barton he certainly would have disposed of the body so it couldn’t ever be identified again.”

“I don’t know about that,” Dyer argued. “Getting rid of a corpse isn’t that easy. Plenty of murderers have tried it and failed. All sorts of elaborate schemes. You know that.”

“Sure, it’s difficult,” Shayne agreed. “But he could have devised something a lot better than just stripping the body and throwing it into the river. No, after I heard Towne’s story this morning, I felt sure the naked body wasn’t Jack Barton.”

“Who is it, then?” Chief Dyer demanded hoarsely.

“If I knew that, I’d know the rest of the story. I suppose you checked the other angles Towne gave us this morning?”

“Sure. And they all proved out just like he said. He withdrew ten thousand dollars from his bank Tuesday in hundred-dollar bills. He specified old bills without consecutive serial numbers. A bus leaves for Frisco at six P.M. and the ticket seller vaguely remembers a man like Towne buying a ticket a short time before departure, and the driver remembers him hanging around until the bus pulled out. He couldn’t positively identify a picture of Jack Barton as a passenger, but thinks he was probably aboard.”

“Were you able to get anything more out of Towne on his reason for paying blackmail?”

“Not a damned thing. He insists that’s his own business, and there’s no law to compel him to tell.” Chief Dyer spread out his hands morosely. “There you are. The whole damned thing blown up in our faces. Towne’s in the clear. He admits having an altercation with the boy and beating him up some, but hell, we can’t hang a charge on that.”

“So you released him?”

“What else could we do? The Barton story blows Riley’s accusation sky-high.” Dyer’s voice trembled with indignation. “Riley backed down completely when confronted with the facts. He admitted the man he saw Towne attack might have been dressed in khaki prospecting clothes instead of a uniform as he supposed, and that he wasn’t actually close enough to positively identify any features. Damn witnesses who tell one story and then crawl out of it,” he ended angrily.

Shayne settled back, lit a cigarette, and puffed thoughtfully. “No more dope on any other missing soldiers or any of those angles?”

“Not a single damned thing.” Dyer thumped his desk with an exasperated fist. “We’re right back where we started. I don’t see that the body in the river has anything to do with the other thing.”

“No identification yet?”

“None at all. We got a set of prints and sent them in to Washington after checking with our files. A thousand people have looked at him in the morgue this afternoon, and none of them ever saw him before. There is one thing, though,” he added grudgingly.

Shayne tugged at his left earlobe and waited.

“It isn’t much. Probably nothing. We’ve been tailing that Mexican girl, you know?”

“Marquita Morales?”

“Yes. And by the way, her mother seems to be a very decent sort. Thinks her daughter is a good girl going to school in Juarez. Doesn’t suspect her extracurricular activities.”

Shayne nodded gravely. “That doesn’t surprise me.”

“She made another pick-up this afternoon. Couple of young privates from Bliss with a three-day pass. She took them into a secondhand clothing store about an hour ago, and came out with two young fellows in civilian clothes.”

“Larimer’s shop?” Shayne asked sharply.

“No. Another one of the same type about two blocks away. My man had his instructions this time and didn’t ball things up by pulling a pinch. We notified Army Intelligence and they put a watch on the shop.”

“And the girl?”

“She went over to Juarez on a streetcar with her pick-ups.”

“How do they get away with it?” Shayne demanded. “Don’t persons crossing the border have to produce some sort of identification in wartime?”

“Sure they do. And they had it. My man was on the car with them. The two soldiers had registration cards all in order. 4-Fs, both of them.”

Shayne nodded slowly. His eyes were alight now. “It begins to look like a well-planned business. Renting civvies and fake identification cards to soldiers who want to cross the border.”

“Looks like it,” Dyer agreed unemotionally. “Not too much harm in that, though. The boys have to blow off steam somehow.”

“If that’s all it amounts to,” Shayne agreed. “Is your tail still on Marquita and her two escorts?”

“That’s out of our jurisdiction. But he did turn her over to a Mexican detective on the other side. They’re keeping watch on her tonight — and on the two soldiers.”

“The Juarez police sound more cooperative than they used to be,” Shayne commented wryly.

“There’s a new municipal set-up over there. They’ve helped us all they could.”

Shayne asked, “How about putting me in touch with the right people on that side?”

“What for?”

“I’ve got a hankering to take a look at the seamier side of Juarez, and I imagine following Marquita around would be a good way to see it all.”

Dyer studied him suspiciously for a moment, but Shayne’s wide-mouthed grin gave no indication of the detective’s real thoughts. He lifted his telephone and gave a Juarez number. He talked to a Captain Rodriquiz for a time, and then hung up and nodded to Shayne.

“They’ve got a man on her. See Captain Rodriquiz at headquarters and he’ll arrange a contact. And I,” he added violently, “am going to buy a bottle of aspirin and a quart of whisky and go home to bed.”

Shayne’s grin widened, and he warned him, “Don’t hit either of them too hard. An inner voice tells me that things are ready to start popping again.” He went out with a blithe wave of his hand.