Brett Halliday - Murder Is My Business

“Damn it, Shayne,” Dyer roared, “are you serious about this thing? Have you got such information?”

“I haven’t looked at it yet,” Shayne told him, “but I’m pretty sure it’s on the level.”

“And you would deliberately keep it out of the hands of the authorities unless Towne paid you for it? I know your reputation for pulling fast ones, Shayne, but I’ve always heard you played fair with justice in the end.”

“Maybe I wouldn’t have held it out,” Shayne argued good-naturedly. “Maybe I was going to turn it over to you anyway. Isn’t justice going to be served this way just as well? And I’ll net ten grand out of it.”

Before Dyer could reply, Shayne went on briskly: “Did you ever get a report from Washington on the fingerprints of that drowned boy? Or find out anything about Jack Barton in California, or anywhere between here and California on the bus?”

“There hasn’t been time on the fingerprints,” Dyer told him, “and so far we haven’t located Barton.”

“I’d like a set of those prints.” Shayne’s gray eyes were very bright. “And I’ve got to make a trip to the marriage-license bureau. Where is it?”

“Marriage-license bureau?” Dyer raged. “You’re not-”

“No,” Shayne said blithely, “I’m not. Where is the bureau?”

“Look here,” said Dyer heavily, “about that information you say you have against Carter and Holden. Suppose Towne refused to pay you for it at the showdown? How do I know you won’t go to Holden for your ten grand?”

“You don’t,” Shayne admitted with a grin.

“I can’t let you play around with important evidence like that for your personal profit,” Dyer sputtered. “Where is it?”

Shayne said, “I’ve got it in a safe place.”

“What is it? What have you got on Holden and Carter?”

Shayne shook his head. “I’ve got to do some bargaining first.”

“You’re compounding a felony by holding out such evidence.”

“Don’t worry about that. Towne will rush it to you as soon as he gets his hands on it.”

“But you threatened to take it to Holden if Towne doesn’t pay off. He won’t turn it over to me.”

“That’s right,” Shayne agreed. “But Towne knows that, too, and that’s why he’ll have to deal with me.”

“Give it to me first,” Dyer urged him. “Keep the documents, or whatever they are, to sell to whoever wants to buy them. But let me have enough information to act on if anything goes wrong. That way, you play both ends against the middle.”

“The stuff is valuable to me only so long as I have the exclusive decision as to how it shall be used,” Shayne argued good-naturedly. “Towne wouldn’t pay out a dime if he knew you already had the dope and were going to use it against Carter whether or not he buys it.”

“But Towne doesn’t have to know it’s already in my possession,” Dyer pointed out. “I won’t double-cross you. Make any sort of crooked deal you want, but cover yourself by giving it to me first.”

“But that wouldn’t be playing it fair,” Shayne said blandly. “This way, I’m actually giving him something for his ten G’s.” He stood up and yawned. “Where did you say the license bureau was?”

Michael Shayne’s first stop was at the police laboratory, where he picked up a set of fingerprints taken from the unidentified body found floating in the river, and got a report from ballistics on the bullet taken from Cochrane’s body and Carmela’s pistol.

The ballistics report was as meager and uninformative as he had feared after viewing the bullet and gun last night. The smashed condition of the bullet, together with the lack of rifling in the sawed-off. 38, made it impossible to make a positive comparison to determine whether the death slug had been fired from that pistol or not. All the external evidence pointed to an affirmative answer, but the police experts would go no further than that. The three empty cartridges had been checked, however, and there was no difficulty in determining whether or not they had been fired from Carmela’s gun.

From the laboratory, Shayne went to the marriagelicense bureau, and he spent fifteen minutes going over old license records with the clerk. He was whistling cheerfully when he emerged from the City Hall and walked up the street to the police coupe parked in front of his hotel.

A shabby little man sauntered along the street behind him. He looked like a western rancher in for a holiday, and was intensely interested in the shop windows along the street. He loitered inconspicuously behind the detective while he was getting in his car, and Shayne watched him in the rear-view mirror as he pulled away. The little man continued to loiter, seemingly unaware of his departure. Shayne thought maybe he was wrong about him.

He drove directly out to Fort Bliss, and without too much difficulty was able to talk with the post adjutant. He introduced himself and explained his interest in the death of Private James Brown, and learned that the body had been given a military burial after all efforts to uncover his real identity had proved unavailing

Shayne kept his own council about the recruit’s letter to his mother in New Orleans. He didn’t think the army would appreciate his holding out that information all this time, and it didn’t seem a good moment to broach the subject. After a brief discussion of the mystifying elements of the case, Shayne said, “I understand you sent a set of fingerprints taken from the body to Washington for possible identification. No luck there?”

The adjutant shook his head. “We didn’t bury the body until the Washington report was received. We had his fingerprints on his enlistment papers, you know, and we sent them in as soon as Cleveland reported no such address as he had given.”

Shayne asked, “May I have a set of those prints from his enlistment record?”

The adjutant didn’t see why he couldn’t, and he sent an orderly to get a set for the detective. Then he eagerly asked what angle Shayne was working on, and what hopes he had of identifying the dead body. Shayne told him it was too theoretical as yet to talk about, but he thought he could promise definite progress within a few hours.

When he went out to his car with Jimmie Delray’s fingerprints in his pocket, he saw a taxi parked half a dozen cars back of his coupe. The shabby little man whom he had last seen loitering in front of the Paso Del Norte was inconspicuously shrunk down in the back seat of the taxi.

Shayne grinned to himself as he drove off. He hadn’t been mistaken after all. He drove straight to his hotel and went up to his room. Lance Bayliss’s briefcase was still in the closet where he and Lance had placed it earlier. It lacked half an hour of his appointment with Jefferson Towne. He opened the briefcase on his bed and looked through the documentary evidence Lance had promised was there.

It was very complete, with names and dates and facts. Lance Bayliss had made a thorough investigation of the business of smuggling deserters across the border into the interior of Mexico. Larimer’s secondhand clothing store was one of three such places in El Paso that specialized in furnishing civilian outfits to the deserters. The registration cards and other identification papers were forged in El Paso, and there was documentary proof that Honest John Carter had been allied with Holden as a financial backer in his pre-war smuggling enterprises, and was continuing to take his profit from this new angle.

Only one thing disappointed Shayne. Neil Cochrane’s name was mentioned several times in Lance’s material, but there was no evidence at all that the reporter had had any actual knowledge of what was going on.