Her face was unhappy. “That’s it. Mr. McHugh believed—and I did, too—that there was some strange connection between the disappearances, some terrible thing we hadn’t even guessed—”
“Wait,” Reno broke in, his head jerking erect at her use of the plural. “You mean there was another one? Besides Conway?”
“Yes.” She took a puff on the cigarette and turned to look out across the blasted trees and the ship channel. “There was another one.” There was an infinite weariness in her tone.
Then she appeared to gather herself up, and went on, “But I’m trying to show you why I kept putting off going to the District Attorney. I was terrified. Suppose there was some connection, that it was all part of something terrible that we didn’t know about? He’d been killed, and if I went to the police it might get in the papers. I’d be exposed, with no place to hide; and even if the same man didn’t kill me, I’d never find out what I was trying to. Don’t you see, Mr. Reno?”
“Yes,” he said quietly. “I see, all right. And, incidentally, my name is Pete.” Then he added, “But you did go to the police today. Why?”
“I don’t know, actually. I guess I just couldn’t stand it any longer. I mean, knowing what Miss Shane was going through there all alone and that I was withholding the little help I could give her.”
“I don’t know whether you sit up nights worrying about my opinion,” he said. “But you’re all right, in my book.” Then he asked, “What happened? Today, I mean.”
“I went to the police first,” she said. “And talked to Lieutenant Wayland. He took me in to see the District Attorney. I told them about calling Mr. McHugh at his hotel that night and how he had met me in the lobby. I had something to tell him, so we walked around for a while, and then we sat on a bench over in the park for about an hour, talking about it—”
“Just a minute,” Reno interrupted. “What was it you told McHugh?”
“That I’d just come from the library, from looking up something in the back copies of the paper, and that I’d found out the ship this man Conway came back from Italy on had gone up the channel—”
“Just before Griffin’s boat blew up,” Reno finished softly.
She looked at him, startled. “How did you know?”
“I looked it up too. There’s one thing about all this mess—sooner or later you always get back to Counsel. But never mind that,” he went on quickly. “What did the District Attorney say? Maybe this will change their tune.”
She shook her head with regret. “I’m sorry, Pete. I’m not sure they even believed me.”
“Didn’t believe you?” he asked angrily. “Don’t they know you’ll make the same statement on the stand? And that if Vickie knew who you were and why you were there, what they call a motive is nothing but eyewash?”
“Yes, I know, Pete. But consider the way they’re looking at it. They have only my word for it. And they can still claim Miss Shane didn’t know who I was or didn’t believe it when she was told. And there’s all the other evidence. The only thing I really hoped was that they’d start looking into it from the angle of Conway’s—or Counsel’s—disappearance before it’s too late, but I don’t know …” Her voice trailed off hopelessly.
She’s right, he thought bitterly. It might raise a reasonable doubt, at the trial itself, but the only way I’ll ever clear Vickie for good is to find the man who did it.
He turned away from his bleak contemplation of the ship channel and looked at her. “Let’s forget my troubles for the moment, Pat,” he said. “You were going to tell me how you got mixed up in this. And who is this other man who disappeared?”
“Two other men,” she corrected.
“Two?” he asked incredulously. “Who were they? And when?”
She crushed out her cigarette in the ash tray. “One of them was my brother.”
“When?” he asked again, very softly, but he was afraid he already knew.
“The last word I ever received from him was a post card mailed from Waynesport on May ninth.”
Chapter Thirteen
HE SAID NOTHING FOR a moment as he sat looking at the neat and well-ordered and utterly terrible beauty of the way the pieces could fit together. The two men in the cruiser almost had to be strangers in this area—nobody here had ever turned up missing. But, still, he thought, there could be a hundred other explanations.
“Look, Pat,” he said. “It’s probably just a coincidence. Maybe he went on somewhere else. And just hasn’t written yet.” Yet, he thought. It had been three months.
“No,” she said quietly. She looked at him and her face was calm, perfectly controlled, but he could see the infinite unhappiness in the eyes. “There’s more. There’s no way to escape it. But the awful thing is why? Why? There’s no reason he should have come here. He’d never been here before in his life. Why should he take Griffin’s boat? Why did it explode? What were they trying to do out there?”
“Maybe you’d better start at the beginning,” he said gently. “What makes you so sure he was on board?”
She stared directly at him. “Something I overheard them say. A word I’m beginning to hate.”
“What word?”
“Robert.”
“I must be slowing up,” he said wearily. “I should have guessed that one.”
“Yes. How on earth could just one person—” She stopped and looked at him hopelessly. “What is it, Pete? Where is he? Is he dead? Is he still here?”
“I don’t know. The thing that puzzles me most, though, is how there could have been only one Robert Counsel. He must have been triplets, at least.” He shook his head. “But go ahead.”
“To begin with,” she said, “my name isn’t Lasater. It’s Devers. Patricia Devers. And I’m not from Ohio. I’m from Chicago. My brother’s name was Carl, and the man who was killed with him was Charles Morton, but Carl always referred to him as Chappie.”
“Was he an old friend of your brother?” Reno asked.
“Not exactly. He was somebody he knew in the Army during the war. He was from New York.”
“I see,” Reno said thoughtfully. “But how did they happen to come down here?”
“I’ll get to that in a minute, Pete. But first, when Carl came back from the Army in 1946, he was changed somehow. I don’t know exactly how to put it, but his attitude toward everything, and especially his job, seemed to be different. He lost that job, and I don’t know how many more, and when I would try to talk to him about it all I’d ever get was an impression he was just waiting for some big deal or that he considered work a stupid pastime for suckers. I don’t like to say all this, Pete, but it’s part of it and I can’t leave it out. Six years is a long time to readjust to civilian life.
“And then in April of this year he received a letter from Italy. I think it was from a girl he knew when he was there with the Army. Anyway, it was addressed in a girl’s handwriting.”
Reno stared thoughtfully. “He was in Italy during the war?”
“Yes. Africa, and then over there. Anyway, a day or two after this letter from Italy, he received one from this Charles Morton in New York. Carl became strangely excited, and for two or three weeks he wrote a lot of letters. He got another one, air mail, from the girl in Italy, and several from Morton.
“It was around the third or fourth of May when Morton arrived from New York to see Carl. He stayed overnight with us. There was a great deal of talk in Carl’s room, and that’s when I heard them mention the name Robert.
“The next day,” she went on, “Carl asked to borrow my car for a trip down to the Gulf Coast. They were going fishing, he said. He’d quit his job too. I let him have the car anyway. There was no point in arguing about it; it was so like him to quit a job for the slightest reason.
“They left that night. I received a couple of post cards from him from various places on the way down, and one last one from Waynesport. Two weeks went by before Mother began to be really worried about him. I still didn’t think anything wa
s wrong, but to soothe her I wrote to the police at Waynesport and several other cities along the coast, giving them the information on the car and descriptions of Carl and Charles Morton.
“They all answered promptly and tried to be of help in any way they could, but there was absolutely no trace of the men or the car. They’d just vanished. Mother began to be frantic, and I had to have the doctor for her. It was about this time I began to have that awful feeling about it myself. I don’t know what it was exactly, except that I knew somehow they hadn’t been going fishing at all and that something terrible had happened to them. I began to think about those letters, but when I went through Carl’s room they weren’t there—any of them. That was odd, in itself, for he always just threw letters in a drawer of his desk. And there was another thing. A gun, an Italian pistol he had brought back as a souvenir, was gone too.
“I had read about the odd explosion on a fishing boat somewhere down here on the Gulf, but at the time it happened, on the tenth, I hadn’t received Carl’s card and didn’t even know they were down here. There’d only been a few lines about it in our paper, anyway.
“Then one night while I was lying awake and worrying it just hit me, all at once. I almost went crazy between then and daylight, trying to remember exactly where the explosion had been, and when. I didn’t have a class that morning, so I went to the public library and looked it up. When I found it, I was scared—more scared than I’d ever been in my life.
“I didn’t tell Mother. I called the Waynesport police from a pay phone and asked if the two men had ever been identified. They said no, and wanted to know who I was. I told them they had the information on the car in their files, and asked them to check on it. They came back and said it couldn’t be Carl and Morton because no such car had ever been picked up or even seen. And naturally, if they had been killed in the explosion the car would still be there wherever they’d left it to get aboard the boat. I didn’t press it any further, but I did see there was one flaw in that.”
“Yes,” Reno said. “There’s one, anyway.”
“That’s right,” she went on. “The car could have been stolen when they didn’t come back. We never heard any more. After school was out I came down here. I didn’t use my own name or say what I was looking for because by then I was convinced that there was something terrible behind all this.
“I began to hear about Robert Counsel, because this country is saturated with him and his family. There was a horrible fascination in the names. Try it. Counsel Bayou, where the boat exploded. Robert, the man they were talking about. Robert Counsel. Then early this month I met Mr. McHugh. He came by the camp asking questions about a man named Conway. Rupert Conway. You see? Names again—but I’ll get to that in a minute.
“Conway was supposed to be driving a Cadillac with California license plates and towing a boat. I’d seen him. I told Mr. McHugh about it, how the man had turned off into the timber just beyond the camp one evening at dusk. We talked about it for a long time, and the more he told me about the man the more he sounded like all the things I’d heard about Robert Counsel.
“We were both excited about it. Mr. McHugh made more inquiries and came to the conclusion they were the same man. But that brought us up against something else, something that didn’t fit. Why the assumed name? Counsel wasn’t a criminal. And that wasn’t all the puzzle. Assuming he did want to change his name for some reason we couldn’t even guess, why would a man as brilliant as they say he was fall into the same error as a lot of the more stupid type of criminals? Mr. McHugh pointed it out. You see? The same initials, the same four syllables altogether, and even the same accent, or beat. Try them aloud. Mr. McHugh had a theory about the initials.”
“Yes,” Reno said musingly. “That’s an old story. Monogrammed possessions he’d have had to throw away otherwise.” But that wasn’t all of it. He was thinking of something else, of a boy who liked to cut the fuses short. It was a game, playing with danger.
He turned, and the fine brown eyes were regarding him with an unhappiness in which there was no longer very much hope. “What do you think it all means, Pete?” she asked. “What is it?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. But has it occurred to you that one of the craziest things about the whole mess is the way we’re obsessed with this Counsel guy? Just take a look at it. There isn’t any evidence at all that he had anything to do with killing Mac, and I don’t see how on earth he could have had any connection with that boat explosion, even if it was certain your brother was aboard. But what do we do? We look for Counsel, we try to guess what he was doing, why he came back here, where he is now, whether he’s dead or not, why he changed his name … What for? What is there about it?”
“Just the fact,” she said slowly, “that we both know he’s at the bottom of it somewhere. Mr. McHugh felt it too. He said that if we ever really understood Robert Counsel we’d see the answer to it.”
“Yes. I know that,” Reno said. “But why? Let’s look at it objectively. He couldn’t be here unless he’s dead, because he’s too well known. And if he’s dead, he couldn’t have shot Mac, or set off those explosions we heard today, or chased us out of there with a rifle, or moved that trailer—” He stopped, suddenly conscious he had forgotten about that.
“Trailer?” she asked, puzzled.
“Yes. Don’t you remember when you came up in your boat while I was poking at something with the rod, with my head under water?”
“Yes. But what?”
“That was a boat trailer. And it almost had to be the one Counsel was pulling. But when I went back the next morning to pull it out, it was gone.”
“Oh.” Her eyes widened with comprehension. “I see it now. You thought I knew what you’d found and moved it, or told somebody about it.”
“Frankly, yes. It was the obvious guess. But you didn’t even mention it to anybody? I mean, that you saw me there.”
“No,” she said.
She was telling the truth. There was no doubt of that. “Then somebody else saw me,” he said.
She turned suddenly, and her eyes were full of excitement. “Max Easter!”
“What!”
“He was right around that next bend. I remember now. I hadn’t heard his motor start.”
“What was he doing up there?” Reno demanded swiftly.
“Fishing. I was sketching him, until the light failed. He must have been still there.”
“All right,” Reno said. He went, on, talking fast, his eyes growing hard. “So Easter has to be our boy. Counsel disappeared off the earth at that spot, so far as we know. But Easter doesn’t know that anybody ever trailed him that far. The only thing he could see was that I was about to uncover the trailer and stumble on the fact that Counsel had been there. So he moved it, to cover up the evidence. Counsel was dead, but he didn’t want anybody to find out. You can see what that adds up to. And I suppose you know about Counsel and Easter’s wife.”
“Yes,” she said. “I’ve heard that. They still talk about it around here. But, Pete, you’re looking for the man who killed Mr. McHugh, and I don’t think it was Easter.”
“Why?”
“Because Mr. McHugh was shot right at one o’clock in the morning, according to the papers. It was about twenty after one when I got back to the camp, and I saw Max Easter’s pickup truck come out onto the highway just as I turned in. So he couldn’t possibly have been in town at one. I’m sorry, Pete.”
He felt the whole thing come crashing down on him again. For almost a minute he’d been certain he was very close to the answer. “You’re sure it was Easter?” he said wearily.
“I’m positive it was his truck. I’ve seen it lots of times.”
“But you didn’t actually see who was driving it?”
“No. It was too dark. But it’s not likely anybody else would be.”
He sighed. “All right. But how do we get away from the fact that it almost had to be Easter who moved that trailer?”
“We can’t. T
hat’s the terrible part of this whole thing. As soon as you learn something you turn up another fact that denies it. I’ve studied Easter a long time. He has posed for me, and I’ve had him guide me a lot. He tolerates me, but I think he hates women, or is contemptuous of them, probably because of his wife’s leaving him. He’s intelligent, self-educated, radical, and very bitter, and I believe that if he were convinced Robert Counsel had wronged him, he’d kill him with no regret. But I don’t believe he’d try to hide it. He’d do it openly, with nothing but contempt for the consequences.
“Sometimes I’ve been so afraid of him I get cold all over, knowing what he’d do if he had an idea I was spying on him. I’ve seen him staring at me with those cold, utterly emotionless eyes of his, and wondered what he was thinking—” She shivered.
“Not any more,” Reno said flatly. “You don’t go anywhere with him alone again. We’re in this together now, and you can’t take any more chances like that.”
She faced him quietly. “I’m glad we are, Pete. I don’t feel so alone now.”
It was strange, but he knew what she meant. He felt it himself. It was as if he’d never been conscious of being alone in all his self-sufficient existence until this moment had called it to his attentions
“Did you have any particular reason to think Easter was mixed up in that boat explosion?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “Except that explosives had been his trade. And those theories Hutch Griffin told you about. But I’ve never had anything to go on. I’ve just been groping blindly.”
He nodded. “The same as I have. And that’s the reason you followed me?”
“Yes. I was beginning to have an idea of what you were up to, but I wasn’t sure. And when I saw where you were heading, I began to wonder if you knew something I hadn’t found out yet. You see, I think Robert Counsel is up there somewhere.”
“What!”
“If he really vanished, as you say, I don’t think it was down there where the trailer was. He was up there where we were today. That’s where I found this.”
Go Home, Stranger Page 12
