“Which throws Riley’s statement off a couple of hours.” Shayne spread out his big hands in an impatient gesture. “Leaving that out — conceding that Riley’s estimate of the time was wrong, and using all of your leeway, Doc — what in hell was Towne doing during those two hours after he killed the soldier?”
“Driving around with the body in his car trying to figure out how to get rid of it,” Dyer offered. “A man often gets panicky after committing a murder.”
“Not Jeff Towne,” Shayne objected. “He’d take murder in his stride.”
“Where’s your motive?” Gerlach demanded. “That’s where the whole case bogs down, Mike. We’ll never get a conviction without some sort of motive.”
“Maybe not a conviction,” Dyer interposed, “but enough people will believe it to vote Carter in as mayor.”
They all nodded assent to that. Captain Gerlach glumly passed the bottle to Shayne, who nursed it tenderly as he asked Dyer, “Did you turn up anything else on that pair your men picked up today?”
“The Mexican girl and Mr. Larimer?” Chief Dyer looked at him in surprise. “Nothing important. Her name is Marquita Morales and she lives in El Paso, but spends most of her time in Juarez. She’s just another juvenile delinquent. Larimer runs a straight business, as near as I can learn. You were right about his being a foreigner,” he added grudgingly. “A refugee from Austria. Entered the country legally through Mexico in thirty-nine. Changed his name to Larimer and has been here in business ever since. Hasn’t been in any previous trouble.”
Shayne tilted the cognac bottle and with the mouth scarcely touching his bottom lip, let a drink gurgle in. Passing the bottle to Dyer, his gray eyes narrowed and he said, “Here’s a hunch. Find out if Larimer has had any contact with a man named Lance Bayliss, an American citizen who recently returned from Mexico after dodging out of Germany ahead of the Gestapo.”
“Lance Bayliss?” Gerlach repeated the name thoughtfully. “Isn’t that the name of the young fellow who was sweet on Carmela Towne ten years ago — when Towne hired you to bust it up?”
“That’s right. Don’t ask me what I’m trying to prove. I don’t know — but I’ve got a feeling we’re only starting on this thing.”
There was a moment of quiet. The three men looked steadily at Shayne, who absently massaged his earlobe. Then he said, “I’ve been holding out on you. I’m so damned used to holding out on the police in Miami and New Orleans where I depended on collecting a fee by staying a couple of jumps ahead of them, it’s become second nature with me. This is one time when I don’t have to.”
Captain Gerlach leaned forward and folded his arms on his desk. Chief Dyer took the cognac bottle from his lips and hurriedly passed it to Thompson, rumpled his browless forehead, and glared at Shayne. Thompson set the bottle on the desk, untouched, and turned a humorous twinkle on Shayne.
“Well, what are we waiting for?” Dyer snapped.
“I first got in on this case through a little old lady in New Orleans — name of Delray.” Shayne then related the details of his conference in his New Orleans office.
The chief’s face grew red with anger as he listened. When Shayne finished, he exclaimed, “So that’s why you wanted an autopsy! And that’s how you knew the army wasn’t going to locate his parents in Cleveland. Did you know they buried the body at Bliss this afternoon because they didn’t know what else to do with him?”
“I didn’t know, but I supposed that would be what they’d do. We’ve still got to keep it quiet,” he went on emphatically. “It’s our one ace in the hole. The killer, or gang of killers, doesn’t know about the letter Jimmie Delray wrote his mother, and doesn’t suspect that we know who the boy really is. They think they’re clean. Towne’s arrest has given them a further sense of security.”
“If Towne himself isn’t the killer,” Gerlach muttered.
“That’s right. If Towne isn’t the killer. In the meantime, you can start digging for a motive for Towne to have killed a Jimmie Delray of New Orleans instead of an unknown recruit.”
Captain Gerlach’s telephone rang. He picked it up, talked for a moment, saying finally, “All right. I’ll have a look.”
Replacing the instrument, he said to Dyer, “That was Sheriff Craven from below Ysleta. They’ve just pulled a man’s body out of the river.”
Shayne asked, “Isn’t that well beyond the city limits?”
“Sure. But the sheriff says the body has been in the river for some time and may have floated several miles. That would put it in our jurisdiction.” Gerlach stood up and put his hat on.
Shayne asked, “Mind if I go along?”
“Glad to have you.”
Chief Dyer swore softly, and Doc Thompson chuckled as Gerlach led the way from the office and Shayne followed him with a wave of his hand and a final farewell look at the cognac bottle on the desk.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Captain Gerlach was a big, easygoing man who more than filled his half of the front seat of the police sedan. He switched on his red police light as they wheeled away from headquarters, but he left the siren off and cruised along at a moderate speed until they left the city streets behind them and were on the highway leading to the irrigated Rio Grande Valley.
Shayne had come to know Gerlach quite well ten years previously when the captain was only a sergeant, and they had run into each other a couple of times in the intervening years, so they had things to talk about as Gerlach pushed the accelerator down on the open road and got the sedan up to sixty.
By mutual consent, they avoided any discussion of the current case. Gerlach was a man who never talked much about his cases while they remained unsolved. A stubborn, plodding man without too much imagination, he was a strong believer in routine police work and generally made it pay dividends in the long run.
They talked about some of Shayne’s cases that had made the headlines, and he told Shayne about his nine- year-old son who was already studying plane geometry; and then they were well down into the valley and a flashing red light was signaling them from the center of the highway ahead.
Gerlach braked down gently and pulled to a stop alongside a chunky man wearing overalls and a blue work shirt. He had a flashlight in his hand with a piece of thin red cloth over the lens. He leaned over the door of the sedan and asked, “You the city cop Sheriff Craven phoned in for?”
When Gerlach said he was, the farmer introduced himself: “I’m Deputy Sheriff Graves. Sheriff’s waitin’ for you down by the river. Got my own car here,” he went on. “If you want to foller along, I’ll go ahead.”
Gerlach said that would be fine, and he backed up a little while the deputy trotted to a Ford pick-up parked beside the highway and turned it off the dirt shoulder onto a narrow, unpaved road leading south between small truck farms toward the river.
Gerlach bumped along the dirt road behind the pickup, leaving the farms behind and passing through an area of low swampland, and finally to a wide, clear space on the river’s bank surrounded by willows, where the road led down to a shallow ford across the Rio Grande into Mexico.
Three other cars were parked in a semicircle, with their headlights shining down on a group of men squatting about the corpse.
A yellow moon shed blurred light through a haze of corrugated clouds, and when Gerlach shut off his motor, they could hear a pair of iron-lunged frogs protesting the intrusion in the willows beside the road.
One of the men beside the body got up and came toward them stiffly as they got out. He was a portly man with a bald head shining in the headlights above a fringe of gray hair. He looked like a small-town shopkeeper, but a sheriff’s star was pinned on his unbuttoned vest.
He held out his hand to Gerlach and said in a hoarsely subdued voice, “Glad you came down, Captain. This is sort of outta my line.”
Gerlach shook hands with him and explained Shayne by saying, “Brought a friend along for company.” The three of them walked slowly through the loose sand to look down at the body of a dead man.
He was completely naked, and the body was hideously bloated and looked greenish in the yellow light of the automobile lamps. A heavy, sweetish odor rose from the body. Shayne took a step backward to avoid the odor and thrust his hands deep in his pockets and watched while Gerlach knelt with the sheriff and examined the head
