Go Home, Stranger

by Charles Williams

  “What about those attorneys Carstairs arranged for you when he came down?” he asked. “Durand and Gage, isn’t it? What are they doing?”

  “Being obscenely cheerful, most of the time, just like doctors.” Pete, thank God you woolly-eared construction stiffs don’t have to take a course in Bubbling Optimism when you’re going to school.”

  “We’ll find out who did it, Vick.”

  “Is this your bedside manner?”

  He shook his head. “No. It’s a hunch. There’s something about this Conway thing that smells. If I can’t tout the police onto him, I’m going to buy a piece of him myself. I want to have a nice, long talk with Mr. Conway.”

  She gestured hopelessly. “But, Pete, Mac used to be in the FBI. And if he couldn’t find him—”

  “Uh-uh,” Reno said. “I think that’s where everybody’s missed the boat.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Mac did. But he got in front of him.”

  Chapter Two

  IT HAD SOUNDED BRAVE and convincing enough there at the jail while he was trying to give her something to cling to, but where did he go from here? Suppose it was Conway? And suppose Mac had found him? Everything he had learned was gone now, into the grave with Mac himself.

  He had come back to the hotel, knowing he had to get some sleep before long or collapse, but it hadn’t been any good. Every time his eyes closed he started seeing black headlines that screamed, “Actress Found Guilty in Slaying.” He stopped his pacing up and down the room and wearily ground another cigarette into the tray.

  He reached for the telephone again. Two previous attempts had been fruitless. Carstairs was in court, the girl had said.

  He jiggled the hook. “Operator, will you try that call to San Francisco again? Person-to-person to Carstairs of Carstairs and McHugh. … Oh. Good. Yes, I’ll hold on.”

  This time his luck was better. In a moment he heard the familiar voice on the other end. He and Carstairs and Mac had all gone to college together. “Hello, Dick?” he said. “This is Pete Reno, in Waynesport.”

  “Oh, Pete. I was just about to call you,” Carstairs replied. “Has anything new turned up?” Carstairs had flown to Waynesport when it happened. He had arranged for attorneys for Vickie and had taken Mac’s body back to San Francisco for burial after the inquest.

  “No,” Reno said. “Maybe they figure they’ve got it made. They’ve got her.”

  “Pete, we’ve known each other too long for me to try to kid you. They’ve got a case. A hell of a case. A D.A.’s dream.”

  “Except that she didn’t do it.”

  “Check. But that’s because we know her. They don’t. All they’ve got is the only thing they’re supposed to pay any attention to, and that’s the evidence. Motive, for one thing. And she was there in the room with him, and can’t prove anybody else was.”

  “I know they’ve got a case. If they didn’t, I’d get some sleep. But I called about something else.”

  “What?”

  “Conway. We find him, we’ve got the guy who killed Mac.”

  “You’ve been going to movies.”

  “No,” Reno said. “Listen. Conway didn’t need looking for because he didn’t know the way home. Any filling station would give him a road map. So maybe he didn’t want to be found. And suppose Mac was getting too warm.”

  “But, dammit, Pete, Conway wasn’t a gangster.”

  “Well, what was he?”

  “Frankly, you’ve got me there. I never met him. But I know his wife, and she’s no gun moll. Very wealthy, in a quiet sort of way, cultured, old California family—that sort of thing.”

  “I’m not talking about Conway’s wife. Maybe she was Joan of Arc, or Little Bo Peep. I’m talking about Conway himself. What do you know about him?”

  “Well,” Carstairs said hesitantly, “not too much. They’d been married only a few months, I understand. He was her second husband.”

  “All right. But just why was Mac looking for him?”

  “Because she was paying us.”

  “I thought you guys were running a law office. When’d you go into the keyhole and dictaphone business?”

  “We didn’t. This was a sort of special deal. You see, she knew Mac had been in the FBI and was a trained bloodhound, and she insisted. We’d done quite a bit of legal work for her and hoped to do more in the future, and as I say, she’s well-to-do. You just don’t brush off that kind when you’re trying to build up a legal practice.”

  “Why didn’t she go to the police?”

  “Well, there could be a number of reasons for that. A desire to avoid publicity and embarrassment, for one thing. She’s a shy type. Maybe she just didn’t want to face them, and the inference they would draw—that her husband was running out on her.”

  “You think that’s all?” Reno asked, conscious of bitter disappointment.

  “Actually, I couldn’t say. You see, Mac handled the whole thing. But wouldn’t that be your guess?”

  “I suppose so,” Reno said wearily. “But listen, Dick. I’ve got to have something to start with. I’ll go off my rocker, just sitting around here, and Conway’s the only thing I’ve got. So will you get hold of her and see what you can find out? I mean, any reports Mac might have sent her …”

  “She wouldn’t go for that,” Carstairs protested. “I mean, the thing was confidential, or she wouldn’t have come to us in the first place.”

  “But for God’s sake, Dick, will you try?” Reno said desperately. “Ask her. Get a description. Find out why Mac was looking in Waynesport, of all places. Find out anything you can. And any way you can. Tell her I’ll try to find Conway for her.”

  “All right, Pete, I’ll try. But I can’t promise anything.”

  “Good! Now you’re talking. Call back in an hour. Boardman Hotel.”

  “Roger.”

  It was the longest hour of his life, sitting there staring at the telephone, and when it did ring at last he, looked at his watch and noted, without believing it, that it hadn’t been an hour at all. It had been twenty minutes.

  “San Francisco is calling,” the operator said. “Go ahead, please.”

  “Yes,” he said, prodded with impatience. “Yes. Dick? Is that you?”

  “Carstairs here,” the voice said on the other end of the line. “Pete, I’m afraid I’ve got bad news for you.”

  “What’s that?” Reno barked.

  “Mrs. Conway. She’s disappeared.”

  “What!”

  “She’s left town. And the manager of the apartment house says she didn’t leave any word as to where she was going or how long she’d be gone.”

  He could feel the hope ooze out of him. He sat down on the side of the bed. “Oh, no,” he said.

  After he had hung up he sat for a long time staring dumbly out the window. They’d had one thin lead to work on, and now that was gone. The police hadn’t been able to find that girl in ten days, and now the only other person in the world who apparently knew anything about Conway had evaporated along with her. It was like chasing ghosts.

  When he couldn’t stand the room any longer, he went out and wandered aimlessly through sun-blasted streets and then sat for an indefinite period of time he couldn’t even remember in the inviting dimness of a bar over a Scotch he forgot to drink. He was seized with a helplessness he had never known before. If there were only something he could get his hands on! All his life he had gone at everything by frontal assault, but there was nothing to attack here, no place even to start. It was terrifying. The only thing between Vickie and disaster was a fantastic story a prosecutor would tear to shreds.

  He shoved back the untouched drink and stalked over to the telephone booth.

  Howell Gage, of Durand and Gage, was a rail-thin young man in his early thirties, abrupt, bony-faced, and full of an explosive nervous energy that defied the heat. His blue eyes reflected the quick and lunging intelligence that sometimes outran his tongue.

  “Get it, Reno,” he burs
t out, shoving up from his chair behind the big desk to go striding across the office. “There’s self-defense. There’s temporary insanity. There’s the outright accident—‘I didn’t intend to do it, I didn’t know the gun was loaded.’ There’s the struggle for the gun. Good God, man, there’s everything, the world’s full of ’em, of ways we could get the charge reduced, or get a light sentence, or get an acquittal. But listen.” He whirled, jerked a hand through the bristling red hair, and jabbed it at Pete Reno. “We can’t. You see the gruesome joke of it? The irony? It’s maddening. We can’t—because she didn’t kill him. That stupid story of hers is true. I’d bet my life on it. So what can we do? We walk right into the meat chopper. We go into court and plead not guilty to murder in the first degree, the way the charge stands now, with nothing but that crazy story to back us up. And they’ll clobber us. I haven’t told your sister; she’s got enough to handle now.”

  “But wait,” Reno said desperately. “You believe it. I believe it. Why not the jury? Anybody could see that if she was going to make up a story she wouldn’t have made up that one.”

  Gage broke in on him. “A small-town jury? Packed with Solid Burghers and Mrs. Solid Burghers? Who’ve all been married twenty years or more? Look, Reno. She was separated from her husband. Sinful! She was an actress. Hmmmph! Wait’ll the D.A. gets through with that. The lousy ham—I can see him already, the barefoot boy drawing the mantle of all the homespun virtues about himself to denounce the big-city Jezebel, the shameless hussy who should have been home darning her husband’s socks instead of gallivanting around the country play-acting and spying on him. And shooting him. And throwing the gun out the window.”

  “She didn’t throw the gun out of any window,” Reno said. “She didn’t have a gun.”

  Gage came back and perched on the side of the desk. He took out a pack of cigarettes and offered one to Reno. “But the gun was found in the alley, fourteen floors below the window, smashed all to hell.”

  Reno gestured impatiently. “It could have been put there by whoever killed Mac.”

  Gage pointed the cigarette at him. “Right. But let me show you how it works. And duck, because you’re going to have egg on your face. You’re Vickie Shane. I’m the District Attorney. Now, my dear Miss Shane, you say the gun could have been placed there by the murderer. Good. But just how do you account for the fact that it was broken, as if it had fallen from some great height—say, oddly enough, fourteen floors?”

  “That’s easy,” Reno said. “The murderer merely slammed it down against the pavement to make it look as if it had fallen that far.”

  “But why. Miss Shane? Why? Doesn’t that strike you as an odd pastime for a man who’s just killed another man? A compulsion, perhaps? An irresistible urge to go around throwing guns down against paving stones so they’d break?”

  “It’d be obvious to any moron,” Reno said, “that he did it to frame her. He knew she was in the room.”

  “Oh.” Gage smiled coldly, and then pounced. “He knew you were in the room? So this mental case, this utter idiot, went up to a hotel room where he knew there were two people, with the intention of murdering one of them and leaving the other for a witness? Come, Miss Shane, you don’t expect us to believe that? These are all mature, intelligent men and women in this jury box.”

  “But, damn it,” Reno burst out, “he didn’t know Vickie was in the room until she screamed.”

  “So!” Gage exclaimed triumphantly. “That explains everything, doesn’t it? Surprised in the act of murder, with a loaded gun in his hand, this man merely went on out and closed the door, leaving behind a living witness to his crime, when he could have killed you with just one more shot, which wouldn’t have taken a tenth of a second. He had no way of knowing you hadn’t seen his face before you screamed. You might send him to the death house. But still he went off and left you there, and just contented himself with some asinine and childish prank like throwing the gun against the paving under your window. Miss Shane, I must warn you that you’re trying our patience.”

  “It has to be that way,” Reno said. “That’s what actually happened, so there must be a way of explaining it. Maybe he lost his nerve. Maybe he panicked and ran.”

  Gage shook his head. He was himself again, already bored with being the District Attorney. “No. You’ve got the right idea, but you’re off the track. It’s simpler than that. There was a very good reason he didn’t kill her, but we can’t prove one damned word of it.”

  “Well, good God,” Reno said furiously. “Don’t just stand there. What was it?”

  “Inertia.”

  “What?”

  “Lag. Interval. Reflex, time. Whatever you want to call it,” Gage explained impatiently, in staccato outbursts. “You remember what happened when the house detective went up there? The door was locked. It’s a spring lock, like all hotel doors. And remember what she said? She screamed, and then almost at the same time she heard the door close. Get it now?”

  “Yes,” Reno said excitedly. “Yeah. I see it now.”

  “Exactly. He was going out the door when she cut loose. And in that infinitesimal fraction of a second it took him to realize there was somebody else in the room, he couldn’t stop himself, and had pulled the door shut. And he couldn’t get back in. If she’d screamed a tenth of a second earlier, your sister wouldn’t be charged with murder. She’d be dead.”

  “Well, that does it,” Reno said, rising from his chair in his eagerness. “They’ll have to believe it.”

  Gage sat down behind the desk again and shook his head. “I hate to tell you this, Reno,” he said, “but they won’t believe a word of it.”

  “They have to!”

  “I’m sorry. It’s conjecture, pure and simple. Courts deal in evidence, and there’s not the slightest bit of proof there was ever anybody except your sister in that room.”

  He went back to the hotel at last because there wasn’t anywhere else to go, and as he approached the doors he noted absently that the airport limousine was discharging passengers under the marquee.

  Two or three guests were checking in at the desk. He got his key and had started to turn away when something the clerk said arrested him with the suddenness of a gunshot. It was a name.

  “Oh, yes, Mrs. Conway. We have your reservation.”

  He stopped dead still, and then took out a cigarette and carefully lighted it as he let his face swing back toward the desk. She was a very pretty woman in her early thirties, a little over average height and very smartly and expensively turned out in a suit that was out of place in this climate. San Francisco? he wondered. She had the look. But hell, the world was full of Conways.

  She was reaching for the registration card the clerk had pushed across the desk. Reno walked slowly over to the sand-filled urn beyond her, dropped the match in it, and as he turned back let his gaze sweep across the card. Excitement whispered along his nerves.

  “Mrs. Rupert Conway,” it said. “San Francisco.”

  He stepped over to the newsstand adjoining the desk. Picking up a magazine, he started leafing idly through it while he strained his ears to catch the clerk’s voice. He heard the tinkle of the bell. And then it came.

  “Mrs. Conway to Twelve-o-six.”

  He heard the boy gathering up the bags and the sound of their footsteps retreating toward the elevators. Dropping a quarter on the glass to pay for the magazine, he turned and picked them out of the drifting throngs in the lobby. There was no one with her except the bellboy.

  The boy came down in a few minutes and he strolled leisurely into the elevator, hiding his impatience. She’d be alone now. “Twelve,” he said. They went up, and when he got out and walked along the silent corridor looking at numbers, he was conscious of the excitement again and the feeling he was getting close to something. Why had she come? Was she still looking for Conway? Suppose she won’t talk? he thought. He wished he had Mac’s personality and gift of gab. He was too abrupt and blunt himself for anything requiring finess
e.

  He knocked at 1206, and wondered if he should try to get his foot in the door. He’d have to talk fast. He heard her moving around inside, and then the door opened a crack and he could see the, big violet eyes, a little apprehensive as they peered out at him.

  “Mrs. Conway?” he asked quickly. “I wonder if I could talk to you a minute. I’m—”

  He didn’t have a chance to finish. To his amazement she pulled the door back. “Yes,” she said urgently. “Yes. Come in.”

  When he was inside she closed the door and turned to face Kim, obviously under intense strain and trying to control herself. “How did you know I was here?” she asked. “I just this minute—”

  “I was down at the desk when you checked in,” he said, puzzled. Who did she think he was? Getting in had been too easy.

  “Please,” she said hurriedly, not even listening. “What do you know about my husband?”

  Reno studied her face. The large eyes were imploring, and yet they were worried and frightened. She’s looking for something, he thought, that she’s afraid she’s not going to like when she finds it.

  “I don’t know anything about your husband,” he said, as gently as he could. “That’s what I came here to ask you.”

  She stepped back as if he had slapped her. “But—I don’t understand. You called me. Long-distance. You said—”

  He shook his head. “I’m sorry. I didn’t call you. Maybe I’d better introduce myself. My name’s Reno.”

  “Oh,” she said. The eyes were full of confusion. “I thought you were somebody else. I don’t think I know anyone named Reno, do I?”

  “I’m not sure,” he said. “But I’m a friend of somebody you do know. A dead man by the name of McHugh.”

  She stared at him almost without comprehension at first, and then he could see the fear and shock come into her face. “Oh,” she said. “Oh.” Then she sat down.

  Chapter Three

  FOR A MOMENT NEITHER of them said anything. The silence seemed to stretch out, and he could hear the faint hum of traffic far below. He took out a pack of cigarettes and offered her one. She thanked him in a strained voice. He lit it, and another for himself, and looked about for a chair. The room, he noticed now for the first time, was the living room of a suite.