Charles Williams: Go Home, Stranger

Go Home, Stranger

by

Charles Williams

1954

One

It took the message over a week to catch up with him because after he had finished the job in the sierra he went over into the jungles of the lower Ucayali to hunt jaguars. When he had read it he came up out of South America traveling very fast, a big, hard-shouldered young man in an ill-fitting suit, his face cooked dark by the sun and his hair badly in need of cutting. He would have had time to get a shave between planes in Miami, but he spent the time instead in a stifling telephone booth making one long-distance call after another, relentlessly shoving quarters into a slot and rasping questions over thousands of miles of wire while the cold ball of fear grew heavier inside him. On the third day after leaving the little town in the Peruvian jungle he walked up the steps of the police station in Waynesport, on the Gulf Coast of the United States.

It was a little after eight of a hot, breathless morning, and he couldn’t remember when he had slept. It was the twenty-first of August, and since the tenth of the month his sister, who was Vickie Shane McHugh, the radio and television actress, had been in the Waynesport jail, charged with the murder of her husband.

The Chief wouldn’t be in until around nine, the desk man said, but he led him down a dim hallway to the office of Lieutenant Wayland. The man behind the desk was big across the shoulders, with a heavy neck and a graying shock of tough, wiry hair. Sharp brown eyes sized him up as he came into the room.

He stood up and held out his hand. “Reno? Oh, yes. You talked to the Chief yesterday.”

“When can I see her?” Reno asked abruptly.

Wayland sat down and bit the end off a small cigar. He leaned back in his chair. “This morning. Incidentally, how does it happen her name is Shane, if she’s your sister?”

“Professional name,” Reno said impatiently. “Actually, it was our mother’s. But never mind all that. I’m still trying to find out what happened. And why you’re holding her.”

“You look tough enough to take it straight,” Wayland said, appraising him thoughtfully. “It’s simple enough. McHugh was murdered. And the evidence says she did it.”

“But she says she didn’t?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, I’ll buy her, and you buy the evidence. But just what happened?”

“I guess you knew they were separated,” Wayland said. “That’s the first item.”

Reno said, “They were always separating, or separated, or making up. Living with either one of ‘em would be like trying to set up housekeeping in a revolving door. They both had more talent and temperament than they needed, but they were crazy about each other. They always made up.”

“The trial will be held in court,” Wayland said. “Not here. You want to hear what happened, or do you want to make a speech?”

Reno lit a cigarette and sat down, hunching forward in the chair. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Give me the whole story. I’ll try not to butt in.”

“It’s all right,” Wayland replied. “As you probably know by now, McHugh was down here alone, on business. Had been for five days. He was trying to run down some guy named—I’ve forgotten now, but it doesn’t matter. Anyway, to get to the night he was killed, your sister showed up unexpectedly. Didn’t wire she was coming, as far as we know now. What she keeps telling us is that she was driving from New York to the Coast, and since she knew he was down here she decided to surprise him by dropping in to see him. And apparently she did. Surprise him, I mean. They’d been separated about four months, and she’d been in some television work in New York. So she arrived at the Boardman Hotel here, where McHugh was staying, around midnight. McHugh wasn’t in his room. But while she was calling from the desk, he came in from the street. With this other girl.”

Reno’s eyes jerked upward and he stared at the Lieutenant. “So that’s the idea? You’re all wrong. I’ve known Mac all my life, and he wasn’t that kind. There hasn’t been any playing around with babes since he was married.”

Wayland shrugged. “You asked me what happened, and I’m telling you. McHugh’s wife drops in unexpectedly and finds him wandering into the hotel at midnight with a stray babe, and about an hour later McHugh is dead. Anyway, the clerk didn’t hear anything that was said, except that there didn’t appear to be any row to speak of, and the other girl shoved off. McHugh and your sister went up to his room.

“At five minutes past one, some guest of the fourteenth floor called the desk and said he’d heard something like a shot and a scream in the next room. The clerk sent the house detective up there on the double. The door was closed and locked, but he could hear something that sounded like moaning inside, so he passkeyed his way in.

“McHugh was lying on the floor and she was down beside him with his head in her arms, rocking and whimpering, and then she passed out. The detective threw a couple of sheets over them—over her because she didn’t have on enough clothes to wad a popgun, and over McHugh because he was dead.

“He called us. We had some men over there before she snapped out of it. When she did come around she was unraveling all over the place and not much of what she said made any sense. She finally calmed down enough to tell us that she'd been in the bathroom changing into a nightgown when she’d heard voices out in the room, as if somebody had come in to see McHugh. She didn’t look out, she said, because she wasn’t dressed. Then she heard the shot, and she screamed. She ran out of the bathroom, and just as she did she heard the door going out into the corridor slam shut.

“McHugh had been shot in the back of the neck, just at the base of the skull—with a twenty-five automatic, we found out as soon as we got a look at the slug. The house detective didn’t see anybody else in the corridors, and nobody came down in the elevators.”

Reno drew a hand savagely across his face and gestured as he hitched around in the chair. “But how about the gun? There must have been fingerprints on it.”

“We didn’t find the gun until after ten o’clock, and when we did there weren’t any fingerprints on it. There wasn’t much of anything on it. It was—or had been—one of those junior-miss gimcracks with pearl handles, and the pieces of it were lying beside some garbage cans in the alley next to the hotel. The alley is paved, and it was fourteen floors down from McHugh’s room. They don’t make those kiss-me-quick guns for that kind of duty.”

Well, I had to be sure, Reno thought, conscious of the cold void inside him. It was the same way Carstairs had said it was. It was dynamite.

Wayland was looking at him with something like regret. “I’m sorry. But you see how it is. Those hotel windows are closed all the time in summer, because the place is air-conditioned. And that one was still closed when our men got there. It would have had to be opened, the gun heaved put, and then closed again. And she says she came running out of the bathroom as soon as she heard the shot, and that the man she says was in there was already going out the door into the corridor. So, by her own story, nobody would have had time to throw that gun out except her.”

“But wait a minute,” Reno said, shaking his head. “Can’t you see she has to be telling the truth? She’s not stupid. Do you think that if she was going to lie about it she'd make up a dumb story like that?”

“Yes. I know. We’ve thought about that. But don’t forget that your sister is high-strung and hotheaded, and that when she told us this she was just coming out of a faint and was on the edge of hysteria. She said the first thing she could think of, and afterward she had to stick to it. I’ve been in police work a long time, and I’ve never seen a woman on a rampage with a gun yet who seemed to have much logic about it.”