Brett Halliday: Murder Is My Business

Towne had drunk half the tequila in his glass. He said, “It seemed like a good idea.”

“It was,” Shayne approved, “for a makeshift plan of murder. Nothing like as foolproof or elaborate as your other plan.”

“Barton?” Dyer guessed hopefully.

Shayne nodded. “And a young soldier whom Towne induced to enlist under an alias. Jimmie Delray had been working in the Plata Azul,” he went on conversationally. “Did he suspect what was going on there, so it was really killing two birds with one stone when you used him in your murder plan?”

Towne drank some more tequila. He nodded absently. “That’s where I got the whole idea. He wrote me he was quitting down there and was coming to El Paso to give himself up to the army. I recalled he looked a little like young Barton, same build and all, and I saw a way to get rid of them both.” He spoke in a faintly regretful tone.

“He had already planned to kill Barton,” Shayne explained to Dyer, “but he needed a positive way of getting rid of the body so it could never be identified. He fed Delray some hocus-pocus about catching spies, and got him to enlist under an alias. That was necessary, because he wanted Jack Barton to be buried in Delray’s uniform and he couldn’t afford to have it shipped home where his mother would immediately know it wasn’t her son. It was safe enough as long as it was buried here. Delray had just enlisted and no one knew him. In Delray’s uniform, with his identification tags, after being choked and hit on the head and run over, the body looked enough like the unknown recruit to get by.”

“Wait a minute,” Dyer protested nervously. “I still don’t quite get the bodies straight. Who was the naked man in the river?”

“That was Jimmie Delray. The soldier. The one Josiah Riley actually saw Towne murder by the river. He stripped the uniform off him and put it on Jack Barton, whom he must have had tied up at the time, keeping him alive until dusk, when he planned to kill him just a few minutes before he laid the body in the street and drove his car over it.”

“So he did all that,” Dyer muttered, “by himself?”

“It was smart and damned near perfect,” Shayne said wryly. “He reported it at once as a traffic accident, and expected it to be accepted as one. With Barton’s body safely buried in a soldier’s grave, he knew the crime could never be proved against him even if Barton did disappear and he was suspected. With no corpus delicti, he was safe.”

“It might have worked if it hadn’t been for the autopsy,” Dyer exclaimed.

“That’s right.” Towne’s voice was thick with drink and self-pity. “That’s when things started to go to hell. What made you suspicious?”

“A letter from Jimmie Delray to his mother — and being acquainted with you ten years ago,” Shayne told him grimly. “It didn’t make sense — you rushing to the telephone like an ethical citizen and reporting an unwitnessed traffic fatality. It was out of character — particularly with you trying to win an election. If you had accidentally run over a soldier, I knew damned well you’d keep right on driving without reporting it.”

“Why didn’t he do that?” Dyer exploded.

“Because he realized there’d be a much closer investigation into the cause of death if the man was found lying in the street later. By reporting it at once, his story was immediately accepted and no one thought of even looking for another wound.”

Dyer still looked slightly bemused, but he went over and tapped Towne sternly on the shoulder. “Come along with me if you’re sober enough to stand up.”

Towne shambled to his feet, his right arm hanging loosely at his side. His bleared gaze swept around the library and settled on the briefcase. “Gotta take thish,” he muttered. “Paid ten thoushand for thish sho Carter won’t get ’lected.”

Shayne picked up the briefcase and gravely placed it in his groping left hand. “That’s right. It’s all paid for.”

“Hell of a lot of good it’ll do him,” Dyer said. “This doesn’t leave us any candidate for mayor. He could have saved himself ten thousand if he’d known you were on to him.”

“That,” said Shayne cheerfully, “is why I got the money before I started needling him about murder.” He patted the bulky envelope in his coat pocket and followed the others out.