Charles Williams: Go Home, Stranger

“Then she did it, as far as you’re concerned?” Reno said harshly. “You can quit looking. You’ve got it made.”

Wayland started to make some quick retort, but checked himself. “Cool off, Reno,” he said without emotion. “I know how you feel. But they don’t pay me to draw conclusions, or prosecute anybody. That’s up to the District Attorney. I'm just supposed to dig up the facts.”

“Well, what have you dug up about this guy Mac was looking for?”

“There isn’t anything there, as far as I can see. McHugh was trying to find him, and apparently didn’t. People seldom get shot for that, except maybe in Russia.”

Reno shook his head, dissatisfied. “It’s not that simple. There’s something screwy about it. In the first place, Mac wasn’t a gumshoe or a skip-tracer; he was a lawyer, and a damned smart one. He wouldn’t have been down here playing cops-and-robbers like some kid.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Wayland said wearily. “All I know is that he was. Bannerman, over in Missing Persons, remembered him. McHugh came into Headquarters the first day he was in town, trying to run down this—this— Oh, what the hell was his name? Wait a minute.” He paused, shuffling through the papers on his desk. “Here it is. Conway. Rupert Conway.’ McHugh was trying to locate this guy—apparently for the guy’s wife—but didn’t have any picture of him, only a description and the dope on his car. There was one funny thing about it.” Wayland stopped and frowned thoughtfully at the cigar smoke.

“What was that?” Reno asked.

“It was a goofy sort of coincidence. We had the car. Conway’s car, I mean. Traffic Detail had had it in the garage for two weeks. Picked it up in a tow-away zone.”

“But you don’t think it had any connection with Mac’s being killed?” Reno insisted.

Wayland dismissed the idea with a curt “No.”

Reno was silent for a moment, moodily watching smoke drift through the shaft of sunlight slanting in through the window and falling across the desk. So this was all there was to it. This was the way it ended. The best friend he’d ever had was dead, and they could send Vickie to the penitentiary or to her death for killing him.

His face hardened with anger. Maybe they’d better think again about that. It was too simple, too pat, and somewhere the man who’d killed Mac was smiling about it. He crushed out his cigarette in a tray and stood up.

“Can I see her now?” he asked.

* * *

It was a bare, harshly lighted room without windows. Reno prowled restlessly up and down, dead tired but unable to stop or sit still. At last he heard footsteps in the corridor, and turned.

The door opened and Vickie was standing in it, with the detective behind her. She was as straight and lovely as ever, even in the plain tailored suit and wearing no makeup. She was tall and strikingly blonde, with deep blue eyes that were very tired.

“Hello, Pete,” she said calmly. “Have you got a cigarette?”

Maybe we all should have had dramatic training, he thought. We haven’t seen each other for two years and she’s in jail charged with killing Mac, so I’ve just been out to buy some smokes.

She stepped across the room and kissed him lightly on the cheek. They sat down across from each other at the table while the detective leaned back against the wall in a chair and watched them. Reno gave her a cigarette and held the match.

“Thanks, Pete,” she said. “It’s an awful home-coming for you, isn’t it? I’m sorry.”

They understood each other, and always had. He was four years older than she was, and there had always been something fiercely protective and very proud in his relationship with her. They had been alone since their mother had died while Vickie was still in high school, and he had sent her to college and drama school out of his earnings as a construction engineer in Arabia and Alaska and South America. Tough and hard-bitten himself, with scant social grace and little talent except for the clear-cut and hard-cornered realities of the man’s world he lived in, he was intensely devoted to her—as he had been to Mac—for the qualities the two of them had in such abundance, personality and talent and a sort of heartwarming charm. And he knew her well enough to know that right now he was seeing another quality, which was bravery—or, as he would have expressed it succinctly, guts. She was ‘walking very carefully along the ragged edge of horror and letting none of it show. I’ve got to make it as easy as I can for her, he thought; and still I’ve got to ask her about it.

“All right, Vick,” he said gently. “Tell me.”

“I think they’ve been reading detective stories,” she said. “They’re under the impression I came here to kill M-Mac.” The only outward sign of what was inside her was that almost imperceptible tremor in pronouncing the name.

“I’ve already talked to Lieutenant Wayland,” Reno said. “And to Carstairs, in San Francisco. So we can skip all the obvious stuff. What I want to know is whether Mac told you why he was down here. And did he say who that girl was?”

“He was looking for somebody. A man named—I’ve forgotten, Pete. He told me the man’s name, but I didn’t pay much attention.”

“The man’s name was Conway,” Reno said. “I know that much. But did Mac say why he was doing a crazy thing like that?”

“No,” she said helplessly. “We didn’t talk about it much. I do know, though, that he had something on his mind. Oh, of course, we were both delirious about being together again and full of plans for when we got back to San Francisco, but you know how Mac is when he’s working on something—he’s all wound up in it.” She stopped suddenly and looked at him and they could both feel the horror of it, of that slip of the tongue that had referred to Mac in the present tense.

“But about the girl,” Reno cut in, to cover it. “Did he say who she was, and why she was there?”

“Yes.” She nodded, her face very white. “It was about this—what’s-his-name—Conway. She had something to tell him, or had already told him, and they were going into the hotel bar. Mac wanted to write it down.”

“Did Mac introduce you?”

“Yes.”

“What was her name?”

She stared at him and sighed. “Pete, I don’t know. Even if I had paid any attention at the time—”

“Could you describe her?”

“Pete, dear, any woman can always describe any other woman she sees with her husband. But, for the love of heaven, do we have to talk about her? That’s what the police have been harping on until I’m half crazy. She didn’t have anything to do with it. The person I heard talking to Mac while I was in the bathroom was a man.”

He shook his head. “You don’t get what I’m driving at, Vick. Of course she didn’t have anything to do with it— at least, not in the way they think. But look. Somebody killed Mac; and he didn’t have any enemies as far as either of us knows, or as far as Carstairs knows. So the only thing in God’s world we’ve got to go on is this stupid Conway deal. And she must have been mixed up in that some way. What did she look like?”

“She was about twenty-five, I should say. Very striking brunette, in summer clothes. Cottons, you know—white.”

“Never mind what she was wearing,” Reno said. “It’s been ten days, and she just might have changed into something else.”

“Oh. Well, she was about five feet six, I’d guess, good figure, dark brown eyes, jet-black hair cut short and curled close to her head, something like the poodle haircut—or did they have that in the Andes? She had a dimple in her chin, and a good sun tan. Educated, good voice very close to contralto, no Southern drawl. Poised.”