Murder Is My Business by Brett Halliday

Author:Brett Halliday [Halliday, Brett]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Mystery
ISBN: 9780857684042
Publisher: Titan
Published: 1945-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Shayne read the morning paper with his breakfast in the coffee shop downstairs. It gave a full and fair account of Josiah Riley’s accusation and Jefferson Towne’s arrest, pointing out the discrepancy in time between the struggle Riley had purportedly witnessed and the time when Towne’s automobile ran over the body, and giving a full account of the bad blood between the two men without pointing out that this might be a motive for Riley to falsify what he had claimed to see on Tuesday afternoon.

On the second page there was a gruesome photograph of the corpse that had been fished out of the Rio Grande the preceding night. To make the morning edition, the newspaper photographer hadn’t had time to wait for the body to be fixed up any, and the bloated features in the picture were hardly distinguishable as those of a man. A complete description of the body was given, however, and the public was urged to view the remains at the city morgue that afternoon to try to identify the dead man. The news story did not venture any speculations as to why the body was stripped of all its clothing, nor was there any hint of a possible connection between the two deaths.

Shayne left the paper folded on the table when he finished breakfast. He found Chief Dyer in his office at headquarters, and the chief didn’t appear happy. He greeted the detective with a surly grunt. “Why do you private dicks always try to complicate things?”

Shayne grinned and asked him what he meant.

“Trying to find a tie-up between an open-and-shut murder and an unidentified body,” Dyer snarled. “Spy rings and so on! Gerlach says you told him to look for a similar head wound on this new body. Good God, Shayne, do you think Towne’s gone in for wholesale murder?”

“What does Thompson say about it?”

“He says ‘No.’ There are neck abrasions, but death came from being beaten over the head with some blunt instrument. Not a single blow with a hammer.”

Shayne shrugged. “That would have made it too easy,” he admitted. “How long does Thompson give him in the water?”

Chief Dyer scowled, and waved his cigarette in its long holder. “You know how a medico is. With a lot of hedging and buts and maybes — from two to five days, and be damned if he’ll set it any closer.”

Shayne said, “Knowing the flow of the river, we can figure out some limits as to where the body could have been thrown in.”

Dyer shook his head. “I tried him on that, too. Nothing doing. Some bodies sink to the bottom and lie there for days. Others never sink at all. That’s no good.”

“Located any missing soldiers?”

Dyer shook his head dispiritedly. “That’s another blind alley. Fort Bliss hasn’t any reports on any. But with all the men on furloughs and passes — and going through the city from other posts — it’ll be weeks before we’ll know for sure.”

The door opened, and Captain Gerlach poked his head in.

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