“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?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
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.
Shayne sighed, and replaced the papers in the briefcase. It was dynamite, right enough. Plenty strong enough to blow Honest John Carter right out of the mayoralty race, leaving Towne unopposed.
Shayne sympathized with Lance’s wish to keep the evidence under cover until after the election. If it wasn’t made public until after Carter was elected, he would simply be removed from office and someone else would be appointed to serve out his term in accord with city statutes. Any danger of Towne’s filling the position would be definitely eliminated. Knowing Lance’s bitter hatred for Towne, Shayne could understand why he wanted the information handled that way. But if he waited until Towne was elected, the stuff wouldn’t be worth a penny to the new mayor. Before election, it was easily worth ten thousand dollars to him. It was as simple as that.
Shayne poured himself a drink, and put a gun in his coat pocket. He tossed off the liquor, picked up the briefcase, and went out. He didn’t bother to look around for the shabby little man as he drove off to keep his appointment with Towne. It was unlikely that they would bother to tail him any farther.
He didn’t have to wait at Towne’s front door this time. The Mexican butler recognized him with a nod and led the way back to the library. Towne was standing in front of the fireplace with his hands clasped behind his back. He nodded with a scowl, his gaze going to the briefcase Shayne carried. “That the stuff you described over the telephone?”
Shayne said, “This is it. Guaranteed to knock Carter out of the race.” He set the briefcase down on a table, put his big hand up warningly when Towne stepped forward. “Let me see your end of the deal before you look at mine.”
Towne laughed shortly. “I had to answer some embarrassing questions at the bank this morning when I drew out this second ten thousand.” He drew an envelope from his pocket, opened it to riffle a sheaf of bills before Shayne. “When the police investigated the money I drew out for Barton, they practically told the bank it was for blackmail,” he went on bitterly.
Shayne said, “If you lived right, you wouldn’t be embarrassed by having to pay out blackmail.” He nodded. “I’m satisfied. Look it over and see if you are.” He unstrapped the briefcase and stepped back.
Towne replaced the money in his pocket and went to the briefcase. He took the papers out and began studying them eagerly. It was dark and gloomy inside the library, with the windows closed and half covered with dark drapes. Shayne strolled to one of the end windows and pulled the drapes back to let sunlight slant in. The windows were set in steel frames, opening on a rachet arrangement operated by a hand crank.