Charles Williams: Go Home, Stranger

“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 burst 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.”