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defeated. I thought you might be in touch with him. I thought that might be the reason you are here.”
    Shayne cocked his red head and said sardonically,“If you read the Free Press you know I’m here to help your father get himself elected mayor of El Paso.”
    “That’s not what he says.” For the first time since Shayne had entered the room there was a hint of laughter in her voice. “You should have heard him raving this morning after you left the house.”
    “After I fixed an autopsy to show he didn’t kill the soldier,” murmured Shayne. “You’d think he’d be grateful.”
    “He knows no one will believe the autopsy. He’d much rather take the blame and have the incident forgotten.”
    Shayne said, “He’d make a better mayor than John Carter.”
    “I hope he’s defeated,” Carmela exclaimed passionately. “He’s always had everything his way. He thinks he’s a man of destiny. No one has ever successfully opposed him. Not for ten years. You don’t know his cruelty and his arrogance.”
    Shayne reached for the bottle of cognac. He held it out toward her. Carmela relaxed and nodded listlessly. She picked up the overturned glass beside her chair and held it while Shayne poured it a quarter full. She drank half of it as though it were water.
    “No one knows how I hate him. It’s a horrible thing to say about one’s father, but it’s true. He’s made me hate myself. I’ll never forgive him for that.”
    “What do you suppose he was doing at the corner of Lawton and Missouri when he ran over the soldier? It’s a block off the route out to his smelter.”
    “I suppose he was on his way to see that woman,” she said without looking up.
    “What woman, Carmela?”
    Carmela lifted one thin shoulder in a shrug of disgust and drank the rest of the cognac. “There’s a woman, in the next block on Missouri. I’ve known about her for a long time. Her name is Morales. He doesn’t know I know, but I haven’t cared what he did. She lives in a little house set back from the street with a high cedar hedge in front. I trailed him there once, out of curiosity.”
    “Does he go to see her regularly?” Shayne asked the question in a casual tone.
    “Two or three times a week,” she replied with hard indifference. “I don’t think he has regular days, if that’s what you mean.”
    “It is what I mean,” he said harshly. “You see, Carmela, whether anyone believes it or not, that soldier was dead before your father’s car ran over him. Murdered — and then placed in the street to be run over.”
    Carmela’s black eyes flickered toward the cognac bottle. The tip of her tongue moistened her lips. Shayne poured a small drink and handed it to her. “So I’m trying to find out who might have known Towne would be turning that corner at just that time. Someone put the body there. Someone who wanted Jefferson Towne to run over it.”
    Carmela was turning the glass around and around in her hands, staring into the amber fluid as though it fascinated her. “Would anyone go to that trouble — commit a murder just to make Father think he had accidentally run over a man?”
    “It’s likely to make the difference in the coming election,” he said. “And it might not have been a murdercommitted for that single purpose.” He paused, then added, “It’s a neat way to dispose of a body, to cover up a murder. It would have stayed on the books as a traffic accident if I hadn’t horned in with an autopsy.”
    “Why don’t you leave it the way it is?” Carmela cried out suddenly. “If you solve the case and prove that someone else murdered the soldier and put him there it’ll clear Father completely. He’ll win the election. I thought you hated him as I do. Ten years ago, you said—”
    “Ten years ago,” Shayne told her flatly, “I told your father what I thought of a man who would pay to have me dig up non-existent dirt against Lance Bayliss to prevent his daughter’s marriage. My opinion