Brett Halliday: Murder Is My Business

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 Senora 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 coupe 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.