Go Home, Stranger

by Charles Williams

  “Gasoline tank?”

  “Gas tank, my foot! High explosive. You should have seen the few pieces of it they found. … But maybe I’d better go back to the beginning. You’re trapped anyway; you can’t run without leaving your dinner, and Pat.

  “You see, I run a small boat service down the channel below here; a little towing, oil barges and that sort of stuff. I also have a speedboat I rent to young bucks who want to give their girls a thrill, and I had a charter boat for offshore fishing. I live there on the dock, and don’t keep a night watchman because I’m usually around somewhere. Well, one night in May—the tenth, I think—I had to go into Waynesport for something and didn’t get back until after midnight. The charter boat—a twenty-seven-foot cabin job—was gone. Just gone, like that. I’d barely started inside to call the Coast Guard and the Sheriff when I heard the roar, up the channel. At first I thought the Mid-Gulf refinery had let go. It’s up above here about ten miles.

  “This whole end of the country was in an uproar in a few minutes, people calling the Coast Guard and the Highway Patrol, and each other. There was a big crowd here at the Counselor that night, and they could tell the blast was somewhere near on the channel because it rattled the windows. People were out in cars, prowling around the country without even knowing what they were looking for, and the Coast. Guard had boats searching the channel. And just before daybreak they found it—”

  “Could you sort of play it down a little, Hutch? The next part, I mean,” Patricia interrupted quietly, her face pale.

  “Sure.” Griffin patted her hand soothingly, but when he looked around at Reno his eyes were full of sardonic amusement. “Anyway, you’ll see why they were never sure whether it was one man in the boat, or two. It happened in the edge of the channel, near some overhanging trees. It stripped them, and blew out a hole in the bank. They found pieces of planking out in the fields. The only thing left of the boat that was recognizable was the motor, and that was on the bottom in the mud.”

  “But what did it?” Reno asked.

  Griffin leaned back in his chair and shook his head, smiling. “You tell me. They don’t have any more idea right now than they did the morning they found it.”

  “But,” Reno insisted, “the men? Didn’t anybody ever figure out what they were trying to do?”

  “No. And not only that. To this day, they don’t even know who they were. They’re pretty sure there were two, but nobody’s ever turned up missing.”

  For a wild instant Reno thought of Robert Counsel; then the idea died. This was in May, Griffin said, and Counsel hadn’t come down here until the twentieth of July.

  “But they must have some theory,” he said. “Didn’t anybody ever come up with an idea?”

  “Oh, sure,” Griffin replied, easily. “Theories were a dime a dozen. There was the floating mine brain storm, first. You remember there were Nazi subs in the Gulf early in the war, potting the tankers, and a lot of people figure now they might have laid a few mines and that one of ’em drifted fifteen miles up the ship channel. As a theory, it’s pretty sad.

  “The unexploded torpedo idea was about the same. They sink, anyway, I understand. And besides, when the explosives experts came down to look at the pieces, they blew all these theories sky-high. They proved the explosion came from inside the boat. Something about pressures, and the direction some of the bottom planking had ruptured—what little they found.”

  Griffin took another sip of his drink and grinned at them. “And then there was the theory I blew up myself to collect the insurance. Of course, it would seem a little wasteful to blow up the men too, free, gratis, for nothing, because I didn’t have any insurance on them, but it’s easy to get around a little thing like that when you’re theory-hunting.

  “Then there was the Max Easter school of thought. He used to be a powder monkey and is known to be a kind of virtuoso with high explosive. This brain storm did have a little more sense to it than most of the others, however, for they were having labor trouble up at Mid-Gulf and Easter’d been fired by them some years back. He’s kind of a professional sorehead. Anyway, somebody worked out this idea Easter might be mixed up in that wildcat strike, and that he and some more hotheads might have been trying to lay a mine in the channel for a Mid-Gulf tanker that came down that night. The only catch to this theory, of course, is the fact that Easter wasn’t in the boat. And if he’d hatched a deal like that he’d have been the one to do it.

  “So you can see we’re not completely backward here. We can hatch as many theories as anybody. The only trouble is nobody’s ever found out yet just why the boat did blow up.”

  Griffin stopped talking, and for a moment they were all silent. Another crazy thing that doesn’t make sense, Reno thought. Is that all they grow in this country? He looked across at Patricia Lasater. She was still strangely quiet and intent on her own thoughts, drawing aimless designs on the tablecloth with a spoon.

  “Those men,” she said at last. “What I can’t get out of my mind is the fact that nobody ever missed them. Wasn’t there a car, or anything?”

  “No,” Griffin said. “Nothing. The boat was gone, and that was all—” He broke off suddenly, looking at his watch. He whistled. “Girls, I’ve got to run. It’s H-hour, minus twenty minutes, and tonight’s dreamboat has been known to be ready on time.”

  After he was gone the conversation lagged. There were long stretches of silence between them during dinner, and Reno sensed that she was deep in some not-too-happy preoccupation she could not throw off. He himself was conscious of an inability to get Griffin’s story out of his mind. There was something about it that kept bothering him. But how could there be any connection between it and the baffling set of puzzles he was already involved in? Counsel hadn’t come back until after the middle of July. But that wasn’t quite right. Hadn’t he been through here sometime in May, when he arrived on the ship? Mrs. Conway had said it was in May they were married.

  Explosives, Reno thought. That was what stuck in his mind. Counsel had been fascinated by explosives.

  They walked back to the camp together in the warm velvet night. Outside her cabin they paused for a moment, and he was irritably conscious of some faint reluctance to leave her. Hell, he thought, let her go.

  She said, “Goodnight. And thank you, Mr. Reno,” rather quietly, and turned to go inside.

  A deep restlessness had hold of him and he knew he would not sleep if he went to bed. All the old unanswered questions would come back to tear at the edges of his mind the moment he lay down. He would go down to the float and smoke a cigarette. He had started in that direction when he remembered he should open the door and the windows in the cabin to freshen it.

  He stepped up on the porch and was feeling for the lock with the key when he thought he heard a sound inside. It was not repeated, and he shrugged off the idea as he opened the door and stepped inside. He clicked on the light, and stood looking around in amazement and growing anger.

  The cabin had been ransacked—and either by a novice or by someone in too big a hurry to take any pains to cover it up. The big cowhide bag had been slit open and clothes were scattered over the floor. In the same sweeping glance, he saw that the door going out into the kitchen was partly open. Snatching the flashlight off the dresser, he crossed the room and pushed the door inward, ready to swing. The kitchen was empty.

  He swung about. The bathroom, he thought swiftly. But before he could take a step he heard a faint thud outside, behind the cabin. Running across the room, he hit the light switch and plunged the place into darkness as he shot through the doorway and onto the porch. He switched on the flashlight and as he cut around the corner he probed the darkness along the bank, knowing he was courting a shot if the intruder had a gun. The light encountered nothing but trees and the backs of the other cabins.

  Turning, he threw the light out across the bayou in a sweeping arc. There was no sign of a boat. I must have imagined it, he decided. This place is giving me the jumps. The guy who was in
there may have been gone for an hour.

  Disgustedly, he walked back to the porch and went inside. He reached out for the light switch again with his left hand, seeing nothing but the beam of the flashlight ahead of him, and felt his hand stop abruptly against the sweaty shirt and the chest of a man standing beside him in the darkness.

  There was nothing he could do about it then. The night tilted up at him like an opening cellar door.

  Chapter Ten

  WHY DIDN’T THEY TAKE off his headgear and relieve the pressure? His whole head was an immense, throbbing receptacle of pain, which was going to burst like a soap bubble with the next breath he took. He tried to, open his eyes and look up at the circle of anxious faces that would be leaning over him, the officials and his teammates. Then he remembered. …

  He tried to sit up and it hit him again, the stab of pain at the back of his head. It was a long time before he could get to his feet, clinging weakly to the doorframe, and then the vertigo and nausea swept over him again. When he got the light on he staggered into the bathroom and turned on the shower, collapsing onto his knees with his head under it. This is a stupid thing to do, he thought. If I pass out again, I’ll drown. He let the water run, washing over him like a soothing spring rain.

  When he got to his feet and turned off the water, the cut on his head was still bleeding a little, but he was able to feel it with his fingers and determine that it was not a bad one. Wrapping a towel about his head, he went into the other room.

  Just how had it happened? The man had forced the bathroom window to get in—that much he knew, for the window was still open. And he had apparently ducked back into the bathroom when he heard the key in the lock. But what about the sound outside? Had he only imagined it, or had there been two of them?

  He picked up the flashlight and went back outside, walking unsteadily and feeling the pain like a pressure inside his skull. Because he had an idea what he was looking for now, he threw the light on the ground and found it almost immediately. It was the soap dish from the bathroom, lying near the bayou’s edge.

  Suckered, he thought bitterly. By an old Indian trick like that. The man had been there in the bathroom all the time and, knowing he didn’t have a chance of getting back out the window in time, had sailed the dish out to create a diversion. A thing like that took cool nerves and a devilish intelligence.

  Back inside the cabin, he looked grimly at his scattered belongings. The letter from the man in the FBI was still inside the pocket in the ripped suitcase. Had the prowler read it and put it back? As far as he could see, nothing had been stolen. Somebody was looking for information, he thought; and the sad part of it is I don’t know how much he got.

  He took the letter into the kitchen and burned it in the stove, swearing silently at himself because he hadn’t done it before. This was poor country in which to get careless.

  It was after sunrise of a hot, brilliant morning when he awoke. His head was better, but sunlight stabbed at his eyes and started it aching again. He put on a straw hat and went fishing anyway. Maybe he wasn’t fooling anybody now, but he couldn’t give up.

  It could have been anybody, he thought. I had my hands on him, and all I know is that his shirt was wet with sweat. That and the fact that he was smart and had nerves like ice to wait me out. That would fit Counsel. … He shrugged irritably. Robert Counsel couldn’t have been here all this time unless he was dead. He would have been seen and recognized.

  What about the Lasater girl; where did she fit in? There was no doubt, of course, that she could have followed him over to the Counselor to act as a decoy to keep him there while the man shook down his cabin. But had she? He was only guessing. He recalled the strange silence that had fallen over her while Griffin talked about the explosion. It obviously wasn’t the first time she’d heard the story, but still it fascinated her.

  Thinking about it now, he remembered his own odd feeling about it, the illogical hunch that it could be somehow connected with the mystery in which he was already entangled. There was no basis for it except that it had been an explosion and Gage had said Counsel was an explosives expert. But still, Counsel could have been here then. He’d returned from Italy about that time.

  He abruptly reeled in his lure and rowed back to camp. Mildred. Talley was lying on the float in her bathing suit. She propped herself on one elbow and waved with a cigarette.

  “Hello,” she said. “How are the bass and all the little bass?”

  “Feeling no pain. At least, not from hunger,” he replied, tying up the skiff.

  She smiled. “If you really want to catch the silly things, you ought to go along with Max Easter. He never has any trouble.”

  He looked at her curiously. “He doesn’t?”

  “Not from what I hear—” She stopped abruptly and sat up. Reno looked up the path. Della Malone had come out of the kitchen and was staring coldly at the girl.

  “Oh, oh, I’d better get to work,” Mildred said, climbing to her feet. “Dell’s on the warpath this morning.”

  Della’s jumped her about talking too much, Reno decided as he changed clothes. He remembered Skeeter’s purring drawl: “If you can’t shut her big mouth, I can.” But talking about what? Most of her conversation appeared to be harmless.

  Easter was a good fisherman; so what of it? She was a bird brain. But maybe that was the trouble—they didn’t know what she would talk about.

  Della was alone at the counter. She took his order with cold efficiency and as she departed for the kitchen Reno pulled the morning paper toward him. He unfolded it, and Vickie’s picture leaped up at him from the front page. “Actress Near Collapse,” the headlines read. “Maintains Innocence.” His eyes were bleak as he skimmed through the lead. They couldn’t leave her alone; they had to have more pictures and more rehash of the same old story. “In a highly charged and dramatic interview in the city jail today, Vickie Shane McHugh, radio and motion-picture actress held in connection with the August tenth slaying of her husband, tearfully reiterated her innocence.”

  The screen door opened and closed. Reno looked around. It was Patricia Lasater, disturbingly good-looking in a summery cotton and spectator pumps. She smiled when she saw him, and sat down one stool away at the counter. He was grudgingly conscious of the fact that her smile was a distillation of pure charm, the velvety brown eyes just faintly bantering and amused and yet full of warmth and fringed with the longest and darkest lashes he had ever seen.

  So she’s pretty, he thought, instantly savage. Isn’t that nice? Why don’t I tell her she’s a cute little thing and we can organize a club and just forget about everything else? His face expressionless, he slid the paper along the counter toward her.

  “Here,” he said. “I was just looking at the headlines.”

  “Thank you,” she murmured politely.

  “They really got that actress dead to rights,” he went on. “She hasn’t got a prayer.”

  She glanced down at the picture, and when she looked up he saw her face had gone suddenly still. “Do you think they’ll convict her?” she asked anxiously.

  “Sure.” He gestured with offhand confidence. “It’s open and shut. She drops in on her husband, finds him wandering into the hotel with some stray dish, and blasts him. She might get off with life, but I doubt it.”

  “But I think she’s innocent—”

  “Innocent?” he scoffed. “Fat chance. With the motive she had? She caught her husband playing around, didn’t she?”

  There was something trapped and desperate in the brown eyes now, and she looked away from him. “But maybe it wasn’t the way it looked, at all,” she protested.

  He turned the knife, suddenly and inexplicably detesting himself for doing it. “Well, all I can say is that she’s going to have a sweet time proving it. It’s obvious what it was, the way this good-time babe ducked out and left the country.”

  She made an effort to regain control of herself now, and she said coldly, “You are quite definite in your opinions,
aren’t you, Mr. Reno? Are you always as sure of everything?”

  He shrugged. I had her going there for a minute, he thought grimly. Then he felt very little pride in it. Something was bothering her, and he had the feeling there was a lot here he hadn’t seen yet.

  “No,” he answered. “There are a few things I’m not sure of. Are you going to town this morning?”

  “Why, yes.”

  “I’m going in for a couple of hours, if you’d like a ride. No use taking both cars.”

  She considered it briefly, and her tone thawed to its accustomed friendliness as she accepted. Maybe I’m being stupid, he thought, as they went out onto the highway. Maybe I’m doing it all wrong. What I ought to do is pull right in front of the police station and take her in. She could skip.

  No, he decided impatiently. He was up against the same old argument. If he turned her over to the police and she refused to verify Vickie’s story his sister would be in a worse position than ever, and he would be exposed. They’d know who he was, and he didn’t need a blueprint to see what that could mean.

  Once, during a long period of silence, he turned his head and looked at her. The lovely face was troubled, as she stared moodily ahead at the road. Is that the only reason I don’t take her in, he wondered, or am I getting soft in the head?

  She turned, and caught him looking at her. The brown eyes were a little flustered as she tried to smile.

  “I—I’m sorry,” she said. “Did you say something? I was thinking.”

  “Yeah.” He faced the road again. “Yeah. So was I.” Counsel and Easter weren’t the only explosives experts in this part of the country. There was just a touch of dynamite about this dark-haired girl.

  It was a little after ten when he parked near the post office. “Meet you here at twelve-thirty,” he said shortly. “All right?”

  “Yes. That will do nicely,” she said.

  He started into the post office, but halted before he was up the steps. There wouldn’t have been time to receive a letter from Mrs. Conway. Maybe she hadn’t even reached San Francisco yet; at any rate it might be another two or three days before he heard. He turned away with disappointment and started toward Gage’s office.