Charles Williams: Go Home, Stranger

“Yes. On the twentieth.”

A little over a month ago, Reno thought. And for nearly all that time his car was in a police garage. Something either happened to him, or he was doing a deliberate runout on her. But why did he keep writing until he got here if he intended to fade? It didn’t make sense. He got up and prowled around restlessly.

“All right, Mrs. Conway,” he said. “Can you tell me what you heard from McHugh from the time he got here?”

“Just a minute, please.” She went out into the bedroom. In a minute she came back carrying two thick envelopes and a telegram. “This is all of it,” she said, “except one long-distance telephone call. The phone call was last, and the strangest of all, and it made me think that maybe he had found something.” She was quiet for a moment as she sat down and Reno could see she was trying not to break down and cry again. “But I’ll give them to you in order. The first was the telegram.”

Reno reached for it and unfolded the yellow sheet. “Please advise if car had trailer hitch,” it said. “McHugh.”

She shook her head at his questioning look. “I didn’t understand it either, at the time. If he thought he had located the car, he had the license number and motor number.”

“No,” Reno said. “He wasn’t trying to identify the car. But was there a hitch on it?”.

“Not when it left San Francisco.”

Reno nodded. “That was what Mac wanted to know. So there was one on it when he located it. Did he find the trailer?”

“That was another strange thing,” she said. “It wasn’t a trailer.”

Four

He stared at her, incredulous and puzzled, and had just opened his mouth to speak when the telephone rang in the bedroom. “Excuse me,” she said, and arose.

He eyed the two envelopes hungrily, and then shrugged. He could wait until she returned. Another minute or two wouldn’t make any difference, and he had to be careful about rushing her. But what on earth had she meant by saying it wasn’t a trailer? There was one other ‘possibility, of course, but that didn’t make sense either.

Suddenly he was conscious that he could hear her in the other room. “Yes. Yes. I understand,” she was saying in a low voice charged with emotion. “Of course not, if you say so. No one. No one at all.... Where?... Counsel Bayou? And then turn— I’ll find it.”

He heard the telephone drop into the cradle, and she appeared in the doorway. Her eyes avoided his.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Reno,” she said awkwardly, “but I’ll have to ask you to leave.”

“But Mac’s reports—”

“I’ve changed my mind. It was foolish to think I could let anyone read them.”

“But you can’t do that! I’ve got to see them.”

“Please,” she said, almost tearfully, her voice beginning to be a little wild. “Will you go? I—I can’t talk about it any more.”

He stood up. He was beginning to understand now. “So he called you again?”

She made no answer, but her eyes begged him to get out. He thought bitterly of the two reports lying there on the table, but there was nothing he could do now.

“All right,” he said, then paused with his hand on the door. “But there are a couple of things I’ve got to tell you. One of them is that your friend on the phone sounds like a bad check to me, and you’d better take a good look at anything he sells you.

“The other one is that I’m still looking for the joker in this deal. And if I find it, things are going to get rugged.”

He was still burning with anger and disappointment as he went down in the elevator. In another five minutes he’d have learned what Mac had found out. Well, it couldn’t be helped now. The man who had called her had warned her to talk to no one; that was obvious. And he’d told her where to meet him.

He was crossing the lobby when the idea struck him. He stopped and considered it, his eyes growing hard, and turned and headed for the telephone booths. The caller claimed to know something about Conway. Maybe, then, if Mrs. Conway would lead the way out there . . .

He looked up U-Drive agencies in the book and hurried over to the nearest one. After he had rented a car and secured a road map, he had to circle the block five or six times before a parking place opened up where he could watch the hotel entrance. He slid into it, put a nickel in the meter, and settled down to wait. He looked at his watch. It was a quarter of five.

Sunlight tilted brazenly into the street, and the glare hurt his eyes. Fifteen minutes dragged by. Maybe he had missed her. He got the road map out of the glove compartment and studied it between glances at the hotel doors. Counsel Bayou was about thirty-five miles to the southeast, one of the myriad waterways intersecting the main ship channel on its meandering way to the Gulf.

He glanced up suddenly. A car was pulling into the hotel loading zone, a gray Cadillac with California license plates. That would be Conway’s car. He saw the white-coated garage attendant get out, and Mrs. Conway came out of the hotel.

He slid in behind the big car as it pulled out of the zone. Keeping well closed up, he followed her through the downtown traffic, and when they were on the open highway he fell back about a quarter mile, allowing two or three cars to get between them. The sun was setting now, and shadows were thickening in the moss-hung labyrinths of the live oaks on both sides of the road. Farmhouses were farther apart as they wound on into the bayou country.

As he watched the cars ahead he wondered suddenly and angrily if all this had anything to do with Vickie. Maybe he was just wasting time. But why, in the name of heaven, would a man who was trying to disappear announce where he was going, write a letter every day until he got there, and leave his car on the street to be picked up by the police?

He shook his head impatiently. The whole thing was crazy. What about the trailer hitch? If it hadn’t been a trailer Conway was pulling when he got here, it had to be a boat. But why? Was he going fishing? That was stupid; there were hundreds of places all over this bayou country that rented boats to fishermen. Not even an idiot would spend from three to five hundred dollars for a boat-and-trailer rig and go dragging it across the continent for a couple of days’ fishing when he could rent one.

And, he thought angrily, as he kept his distance behind the big car ahead, whoever had killed Mac had been no idiot. He had covered himself too beautifully; and Mac was nobody’s pushover, to begin with. He slowed abruptly. Up ahead in the gathering dusk the Cadillac had swung off the highway onto a shell-surfaced road leading south through the trees. Then he noticed with surprise that one of the cars between them was turning also. Was somebody else following her? Probably just a coincidence, he thought; if he was tailing her too, he’d be back here jockeying for third place with me.

He remembered, from his study of the road map, that the ship channel should be somewhere ahead in the direction they were going now. The highway roughly paralleled it, on the north side. Suddenly they were upon it. He came around a turn in the road and found the other two cars stopped at the approach to a big steel bridge showing ghostly in the twilight. The span was lifting, and a deep-laden tanker was easing slowly down the channel, its running lights glowing brightly against the dark walls of timber.

He stopped, grateful for the car between them. The tanker passed, a muted rumble of Diesels coming up through the ventilators, and the span started swinging down. About a mile farther along the middle car turned off onto a dirt road. And then she switched on her lights. It was going to be difficult from here on. In another few minutes at most he’d have to turn on his own, and she couldn’t help knowing there was a car behind her.