wounds that had evidently caused death.
They straightened up and stepped back beside Shayne after a few moments, and the sheriff drew in a deep breath of clean air and said, “Hard to figure how long he’s been in the water, I reckon. Some of the fellows here have been guessing a week. They claim the alkali in the water keeps a body from rotting.”
Gerlach shook his head. “Not more than three or four days, I’d say.” He looked inquiringly at Shayne.
The redhead nodded. “Unless there’s a hell of a lot of alkali.”
“Anyhow,” said Sheriff Craven, “that’d be plenty of time for him to float down here from El Paso.”
Gerlach nodded. “You can send him in to the morgue if you want, and we’ll try to identify him. Fix him up the best we can.”
The sheriff plainly showed his relief. He mumbled, “We haven’t got much of a place for that kind of work.” He turned to a boy of about fourteen and beckoned to him with a forefinger. “Come here, Pete, and tell the captain how you come to find the body.”
The boy came sidling toward them, keeping his face averted from the corpse on the sand. “I–I was jest settin’ out some throw-lines fer catfish,” he stammered. “There’s a good deep hole right up yonder above the ford, an’ I fish here lots.”
“Ever catch anything?” Gerlach asked.
“Sure. You betcha.” The enthusiasm died in the lad’s voice. “Like I say, I was settin’ out my throw-lines tonight an’ one of ‘em hooked somethin’. I thought my floats wasn’t workin’ an’ I’d snagged a branch on the bottom, an’ I pulled in an’- an’ there he was. God’lmighty, I was scared. I run a mile ‘thout stoppin’, to where I could phone the sheriff to come quick.”
“Was he floating when you hooked him?” Shayne asked.
“Not on top, I don’t reckon. Leastwise, I didn’t see him. Water’s pretty deep there an’ I use ‘bout four feet of line off my floats.”
Captain Gerlach looked at Shayne and shrugged. They went back to his car and he called to the sheriff, “We’ll take care of fingerprints and all if you send him in.” They got in and he backed around in the sand and drove toward the highway.
“What killed him?” Shayne asked abruptly.
“I’ll leave that to Doc Thompson. He’s been beaten around the head and there are neck lacerations that look as though he might have been hung by the neck.”
“Young fellow, wasn’t he?”
“I’ll leave that to the doc, too. Around twenty-five, I’d say.” He pulled up onto the pavement and headed the sedan back toward the city.
Shayne leaned back and lit a cigarette. “Naked as a jaybird,” he mused. “That’s a funny one. I’ve seen girls come out of the water naked, but-” He let the sentence die unfinished.
“Could have been swimming and hit something when he dived,” Gerlach offered half-heartedly. He shook his head and admitted, “It’s murder, Mike. Those head wounds didn’t come from any diving accident.”
“Maybe the murderer needed some clothes.” Gerlach said, “Maybe. But I can think up easier ways of getting them.”
“Stripped his victim to hide his identity,” Shayne suggested.
Gerlach said, “Maybe,” again, but his tone remained pessimistic. “Lots easier to empty his pockets and cut off laundry marks.”
“Unless he happened to be wearing a particular kind of clothes,” Shayne said in a peculiar tone.
Gerlach turned to look at him slowly. “What do you mean by that?”
“Just a thought.” Shayne shrugged. “If he was a cop, for instance, and his killer for some reason didn’t want him to be identified as a cop. Or wanted to delay identification as long as possible. It wouldn’t do to just cut off the brass buttons. The uniform would still be recognizable as such.”
“We don’t have any youngsters like that on the Force,” Gerlach protested. “Not any more. The army’s got ‘em.”
“That,” said Shayne quietly, “is what I was getting around to.”
Gerlach puzzled over the matter for a moment, then said, “I’m beginning to get you. You’re guessing he was a soldier and was stripped of everything so we wouldn’t know it when his body turned up.”
Shayne said again, “It’s a thought. A soldier’s clothes are issue all the way down to underwear and socks. And as you say, there aren’t too many men of his age out of the army nowadays.”
“It is an angle,” Gerlach agreed. “It’s the only one that makes sense. I’ll call Fort Bliss and check on any missing soldiers as soon as I get in.”
“If we’re right, that makes two of them in a few days.”
A thoughtful frown creased Gerlach’s pudgy face. “Maybe that spy talk isn’t so wild, after all, Mike.”
“How do you mean?” Shayne asked.
“That stuff the boy wrote to his mother in New Orleans. Look — did he say it was the spies that got him to enlist under an alias, or some undercover outfit trying to catch some spies?”
Shayne shook his head and said slowly, “I don’t think Jimmie Delray himself knew when he wrote that letter. In fact, I think he was doing some wishful guessing about the whole thing. Maybe it was just his imagination, and enlisting under an alias didn’t have any connection with spying at all, but he simply hoped it did to clear him of a feeling of guilt because he’d stayed out of the country all these years while it was at war.”
“I’m not so sure he didn’t know what he was talking about,” Gerlach argued. “The FBI and Army Intelligence have been pretty active around El Paso. There was a good organization already set up here for getting stuff back and forth across the border before the war ever started.”
“Smuggling?”
“Sure. We’ve always had more or less of that. Dope and anything else with a high import tax.”
“Would Manny Holden have been in on that organization?”
“If there was a crooked dollar to be made, Manny was in on it,” Gerlach assured him cheerfully. “And now that you’ve thrown the election to Carter, we’ll never be able to touch Manny.”
Shayne sighed. He admitted, “Much as I hate Towne’s guts, I’m sorry I’ve put him on the spot,”
They were approaching the lights of the city. Captain Gerlach slowed to the municipal speed limit and asked, “Where shall I drop you?”
“At the police garage if you don’t mind.” Shayne felt his pocket and nodded. “I’ve still got the key to that crate you loaned me today. Mind if I take it out again?”
Gerlach told him he didn’t mind, that he would be happy to have the detective keep the key and use the coupe as he wished while he was in the city.
Shayne grinned and thanked him. “It’s not bad to be on the legal side of the fence for once,” he admitted.
He got out when the captain pulled up in front of the police garage, and hesitated for a moment “Mind if I make a suggestion?”
“Let’s have it.”
“When Thompson looks over that body from the river, have him check the head wounds closely to see if he finds one corresponding with the hammer blow that killed the soldier.”
The homicide captain nodded. “You think they tie together?”
Shayne said morosely, “I think we’ll know more about it when we find out if there’s another soldier missing.” He went in the garage and wheeled the coupe out and drove off in the direction of Jefferson Towne’s house on the slope of Mount Franklin.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The police coupe was laboring up the slope a block from the arched entrance to Towne’s estate when the lights of a parked car blinked on from a point just this side of the driveway. Shayne eased up on his accelerator and heard the motor of the parked car roar into life. The headlights turned sharply onto the pavement, and the car rolled toward him.
