Go Home, Stranger

Nine

But what about the trailer? The girl had told somebody she’d found him poking at it with the rod, and the man she’d told had moved it. But did they suspect who he was? Or did they merely think he’d stumbled on it by accident, and had moved it before he could learn what it was? It made a lot of difference. He was playing a dangerous game with somebody in the dark, and if it developed the other man could see, his chances of finding out anything—or even of staying alive—were approaching the vanishing point.

Where did Patricia Lasater fit in? And how could she have any connection with this ugly business, whatever it was? She wasn’t even from this part of the country, judging from her automobile license plates. And how did you tie in those brown eyes and that delightful smile with murder? He grunted, and angrily flipped the cigarette out into the darkness. Brown eyes, hell! She was in this up to her neck.

He got up and went inside the cabin. Switching on the light, he sat down on the bed and spread the newspaper open again. I’m Counsel, he thought doggedly; what do I see? Why do I have to go back to Counsel Bayou with a boat? Everything’s sold, I’ve been away for years. . . . Moths flickered and danced around the light bulb and a mosquito buzzed near his ear. The old sense of futility seized him. He wasn’t Counsel, he didn’t even know Counsel; how could he know what the man had seen?

Why not walk over to the Counselor, and have a drink? Maybe a little rest would freshen his mind so he could see some pattern in all this senseless jumble. Before he went out he put the newspaper and the copy of Mac’s letter in one of the suitcases and locked it.

* * *

The neon sign was a blaze of garish light, and there were a few cars parked in the shell driveway. The front door opened into a short hall, which had been made into a hat check stand. Through an archway on the left he could see the snowy tablecloths of the dining room, while the bar was beyond a smaller door on the right. It was air-conditioned and almost cold after the hot summer night. He sat down on a red leather stool and glanced around in the dimness. Two men in white suits rattled a dice cup against the smooth mahogany at the other end of the bar, and a tall blonde in an abbreviated pirate costume carried a tray of drinks back to the row of leather-upholstered booths. Somebody had spent a lot of money here. A little overripe for the fishing-camp trade, he reflected; there must be gambling upstairs.

“Martini,” he said, when the barman came over.

The drink was good and very cold. He was still sipping it and about to order another when the girl came in. He had been idly watching the door in the dark mirror behind the bar, and at first he didn’t recognize her. Both times he’d seen her before she had been dressed in slacks, but now she was very cool and lovely in a white skirt, white shoes, and a tawny wide-sleeved blouse. She went on past and sat down at one of the booths. Wonder if she gets paid overtime for snooping after five o’clock, he thought.

On sudden impulse Reno got up and walked back to her booth.

“Hello,” he said.

“Oh.” She looked up and smiled.

“Mind if I sit down?”’

“Not at all. You’ll have to pay for your own drink, though. I’m a schoolteacher.”

“I’ll buy you one, if you’ll let me. I’m a patron of the arts.”

When the drinks came, he said, “My name’s Reno. Pete Reno. I already know yours. I asked.”

“Thank you. That’s quite flattering. What do you do, Mr. Reno, when you aren’t being a patron of the arts?” She paused, and smiled charmingly. “Or fishing with your head under water?”

She’s a cool one, he thought. Or didn’t she know he had gone back and found the trailer moved? “I’m a construction stiff,” he answered. “Dams—things like that. You name it, we build it.”

“It sounds interesting.”

“So does painting. Tell me about it. Do you sell them?”

She nodded. “A few. I ruin a lot more than I finish, though.”

“Landscapes?”

“Mostly.”

“How’d you happen to pick this country. I notice from your car that you’re from Ohio.”

She leaned back in the booth. The brown eyes were thoughtful, and a little moody. “It’s hard to explain, exactly, I’d seen it once before, and it interested me. It’s picturesque, but there’s more to it than that. A feeling, you might say.”

“What kind?”

“Peace? No. That’s only partly it. Deceptive peace, with violence just under the surface. I think that’s it. It’s a hard thing to capture, because the violence is only felt. But I’m probably boring you.”

“No,” he protested. “On the contrary.” He held out cigarettes and lit one for her.

“Probably most of it, of course, comes from the bayous themselves,” she went on. “The water is so quiet and dark, and yet you have a feeling of all sorts of things you can’t see, just below the surface.”

Like trailers, he thought. It was a good line, though, and she did it convincingly.

He glanced around at the bar. “Odd place,” he commented. “I understand it used to be a residence.”

She nodded, and he thought he saw a brief shadow of pity cross her face. “The fall of the House of Counsel, I suppose you’d call it. It’s a strange story, and a little tragic. Do you know it?”

“No. Only that they were a wealthy family and owned this part of the country at one time.”

“You might call it from family portraits to neon in three generations. And, incidentally, the portraits are very good. They’re all by the same man, an Italian, dead now, but who used to get very high prices for his commissions. The people who bought the house left them right where they were, and I come over here for dinner two or three times a week so I can look at them.”

“Speaking of dinner,” he said, “I’d like to see them too. How about having it with me, and pointing them out?”

She hesitated, then nodded. “Why, yes. Thank you.”

Probably just what she was hoping for, he thought cynically. It should be an enjoyable meal with each of them trying to pump the other. He paid for the drinks and they went into the dining room.

There were three of the portraits. One was a tough-eyed older man somewhere in his fifties or sixties, the second was a handsome youth in the uniform of a flier in the First World War, but it was the third that caught the eye. It was obviously a young mother and her son, and in it the artist had been fortunate or skillful enough to capture something besides the golden good looks of the two. It was all in the mother’s face, in the way she was looking at the boy. There was adoration, and devotion, and an almost voracious possessiveness. The boy appeared to be about five, with blond curly hair and gray eyes, very much the young aristocrat.

“Robert. The last of the Counsels.”

“Grown up now, I suppose?” Reno asked politely.

She nodded. “He’d be—oh, thirty-three or thirty-four. That portrait was painted in 1923.”

“You didn’t know him, then?”

“Oh, no. Only some of the stories,” she replied. “They say he hasn’t been back here for years.”

Just the routine press release, he thought. And that trailer swam away without any help. He looked at the portraits again, while the waiter brought their menus. “Grandfather, father, and son. Is that it?”

“Yes. The father was killed on the Italian front during the First World War. But not until after he had married. An expatriate American girl studying voice in Milan. In the winter of 1918 she came back here to have her baby. Robert Counsel was born in the same upstairs room as his father and grandfather. I understand there is a dice table there now. He didn’t have any father, of course, and his mother’s devotion to him was, from what they say, very close to neurotic.

“Daniel Counsel—the grandfather, and from all accounts a regular old pirate—was still alive then. I think he died in 1925. The family still had plenty of money, but it must have been a very lonesome life for a small boy, and maybe even a little unhealthy. They spent part of the time in Italy, and when they were here on the plantation he never went to school. Private tutors, mostly English, at least until he was of high-school age—”

She broke off suddenly. Five musicians had come in through the archway and were taking their places on the stand just beyond the small dance floor. It wasn’t this, however, that had stopped her. He followed her gaze and saw a tall, red-haired young man bearing down on them.

The redhead stopped, glanced carelessly from Patricia Lasater to Reno and back again, and grinned. “Howdy, Miss Patricia. How y’all?” He winked at Reno, and said, “Yankee artist, looking for local color. Expects everybody to have a cawn pone in his mouth.”

“Mr. Reno, Mr. Griffin,” she said. Then she added, “Mr. Griffin flies a speedboat.”

Reno stood up and they shook hands. He was conscious of a lean and reckless face, and cool green eyes with perhaps just a shade too much self-assurance. The well-tailored white linen suit and blue tie and handkerchief reminded him suddenly of his own indifferent clothing. What the hell? He thought. Who cared for her opinion?

“You don’t mind if I sit down for a minute, do you?” Griffin asked. “I’ll buy a drink. You can’t eat on an empty stomach. Before Reno could nod assent he pulled out a chair and motioned impatiently for a waiter.

“I was just telling Mr. Reno a little about the house,” Patricia said.

“Oh. Interesting place,” Griffin looked at Reno. “You don’t live around here, then?”

“No,” he replied. “Just on vacation. Bass fishing.”

“Oh, bass!” Griffin dismissed them with good-humored disdain. “Come down to my place and I’ll take you out in the Gulf for some real fishing. Tarpon and kings.”

Patricia looked up at this. “Is your new boat ready to go?”

“Sure. Came down from the yard yesterday. Taking it outside for a shakedown tomorrow or the next day. How about coming along?”

“I’d love it. You can go, can’t you, Mr. Reno?”

Reno looked uncertain. “You too. I meant both of you,” Griffin said, nodding.

“Well, sure. Thanks. I’d like to,” he said. Why? He wondered. Haven’t I got anything better to do than go yachting with these characters? But you never knew where you’d find what you were looking for. And she was going.

Patricia Lasater asked, “Do you think they’ll ever find out what happened to the other one? Have you heard anything yet?”

Griffin shrugged. “Not a word. It’s just one of those things they’ll never solve.”

Reno tried to keep the sudden stirring of interest from showing in his face. Another missing boat? “How’s that?” he asked casually. “Somebody liberate one of your boats?”

Griffin stared at Patricia with burlesque amazement. “Pat, this man’s from Mars. He hasn’t heard about our explosion.”

Patricia made no reply. Reno glanced across at her and saw her face had gone strangely still.

“Explosion?” he asked.

The redhead nodded. “It’s a wonder you didn’t read about it. Big mystery. Made all the papers, and even a blurb in Time.”

“I’ve been in South America,” Reno explained.

“Oh. That accounts for it.” Griffin grinned briefly, and then went on. “A man—or maybe it was two men, they never could be sure—stole one of my boats one night, and it blew up out there in the ship channel.”

“Gasoline tank?”

“Gas tank, my foot! High explosive. You should have seen the few pieces of it they found. . . . But maybe I’d better go back to the beginning. You’re trapped anyway; you can’t run without leaving your dinner, and Pat.

“You see, I run a small boat service down the channel below here; a little towing, oil barges and that sort of stuff. I also have a speedboat I rent to young bucks who want to give their girls a thrill, and I had a charter boat for offshore fishing. I live there on the dock, and don’t keep a night watchman because I’m usually around somewhere. Well, one night in May—the tenth, I think—I had to go into Waynesport for something and didn’t get back until after midnight. The charter boat—a twenty-seven-foot cabin job—was gone. Just gone, like that. I’d barely started inside to call the Coast Guard and the Sheriff when I heard the roar, up the channel. At first I thought the Mid-Gulf refinery had let go. It’s up above here about ten miles.

“This whole end of the country was in an uproar in a few minutes, people calling the Coast Guard and the Highway Patrol, and each other. There was a big crowd here at the Counselor that night, and they could tell the blast was somewhere near on the channel because it rattled the windows. People were out in cars, prowling around the country without even knowing what they were looking for, and the Coast Guard had boats searching the channel. And just before daybreak they found it—”

“Could you sort of play it down a little, Hutch? The next part, I mean?” Patricia interrupted quietly, her face pale.

“Sure.” Griffin patted her hand soothingly, but when he looked around at Reno his eyes were full of sardonic amusement. “Anyway, you’ll see why they were never sure whether it was one man in the boat, or two. It happened in the edge of the channel, near some overhanging trees. It stripped them, and blew out a hole in the bank. They found pieces of planking out in the fields. The only thing left of the boat that was recognizable was the motor, and that was on the bottom in the mud.”

“But what did it?” Reno asked.

Griffin leaned back in his chair and shook his head, smiling. “You tell me. They don’t have any more idea right now than they did the morning they found it.”

“But,” Reno insisted, “the men?” Didn’t anybody ever figure out what they were trying to do?”

“No. And not only that. To this day, they don’t even know who they were. They’re pretty sure there were two, but nobody’s ever turned up missing.”

For a wild instant Reno thought of Robert Counsel; then the idea died. This was in May, Griffin said, and Counsel hadn’t come down here until the twentieth of July.

“But they must have some theory,” he said. “Didn’t anybody ever come up with an idea?”

“Oh, sure,” Griffin replied easily. “Theories were a dime a dozen. There was the floating mine brain storm, first. You remember there were Nazi subs in the Gulf early in the war, potting the tankers, and a lot of people figure now they might have laid a few mines and that one of ‘em drifted fifteen miles up the ship channel. As a theory, it’s pretty sad.

“The unexploded torpedo idea was about the, same. They sink, anyway, I understand. And besides, when the explosives experts came down to look at the pieces, they blew all these theories sky-high; They proved the explosion came from inside the boat. Something about pressures, and the direction some of the bottom planking had ruptured—what little they found.”

Griffin took another sip of his drink and grinned at them. “And then there was the theory I blew it up myself to collect the insurance. Of course, it would seem a little wasteful to blow up the men too, free, gratis, for nothing, because I didn’t have any insurance off them, but it’s easy to get around a little thing like that when you’re theory-hunting.

“Then there was the Max Easter school of thought. He used to be a powder monkey and is known to be a kind of virtuoso with high explosive. This brain storm did have a little more sense to it than most of the others, however, for they were having labor trouble up at Mid-Gulf and Easter’d been fired by them some years back. He’s kind of a professional sorehead. Anyway, somebody worked out this idea Easter might be mixed up in that wildcat strike, and that he and some more hotheads might have been trying to lay a mine in the channel for a Mid-Gulf tanker that came down that night. The only catch to this theory, of course, is the fact that Easter wasn’t in the boat. And if he’d hatched a deal like that he’d have been the one to do it.

“So you can see we’re not completely backward here. We can hatch as many theories as anybody. The only trouble is nobody’s ever found out yet just why the boat did blow up.”

Griffin stopped talking, and for a moment they were all silent. Another crazy thing that doesn’t make sense, Reno thought. Is that all they grow in this country? He looked across at Patricia Lasater. She was still strangely quiet and intent on her own thoughts, drawing aimless designs on the tablecloth with a spoon.

“Those men,” she said at last. “What I can’t get out of my mind is the fact that nobody ever missed them. Wasn’t there a car, or anything?”

“No,” Griffin said. “Nothing. The boat was gone, and that was all—” He broke off suddenly, looking at his watch. He whistled. “Girls, I’ve got to run. It’s H-hour, minus twenty minutes, and tonight’s dreamboat has been known to be ready on time.”

After he was gone the conversation lagged. There were long stretches of silence between them during dinner, and Reno sensed that she was deep in some not-too-happy preoccupation she could not throw off. He himself was conscious of an inability to get Griffin’s story out of his mind. There was something about it that kept bothering him. But how could there be any connection between it and the baffling set of puzzles he was already involved in? Counsel hadn’t come back until after the middle of July.

But that wasn’t quite right. Hadn’t he been through here sometime in May, when he arrived on the ship? Mrs. Conway had said it was in May they were married.

Explosives, Reno thought. That was what stuck in his mind. Counsel had been fascinated by explosives.

They walked back to the camp together in the warm velvet night. Outside her cabin they paused for a moment, and he was irritably conscious of some faint reluctance to leave her. Hell, he thought, let her go.

She said, “Goodnight. And thank you, Mr. Reno,” rather quietly, and turned to go inside.

A deep restlessness had hold of him and he knew he would not sleep if he went to bed. All the old unanswered questions would come back to tear at the edges of his mind the moment he lay down. He would go down to the float and smoke a cigarette. He had started in that direction when he remembered he should open the door and the windows in the cabin to freshen it.

He stepped up on the porch and was feeling for the lock with the key when he thought he heard a sound inside. It was not repeated, and he shrugged off the idea as he opened the door and stepped inside. He clicked on the light, and stood looking, around in amazement and growing anger.

The cabin had been ransacked—and either by a novice or by someone in too big a hurry to take any pains to cover it up. The big cowhide bag had been slit open and clothes were scattered over the floor. In the same sweeping glance, he saw that the door going out into the kitchen was partly open. Snatching the flashlight off the dresser, he crossed the room and pushed the door inward, ready to swing. The kitchen was empty.

He swung about. The bathroom, he thought swiftly. But before he could take a step he heard a faint thud outside, behind the cabin. Running across the room, he hit the light switch and plunged the place into darkness as he shot through the doorway and onto the porch. He switched on the flashlight and as he cut around the corner he probed the darkness along the bank, knowing he was courting a shot if the intruder had a gun. The light encountered nothing but trees and the backs of the other cabins.

Turning, he threw the light out across the bayou in a sweeping arc. There was no sign of a boat. I must have imagined it, he decided. This place is giving me the jumps. The guy who was in there may have been gone for an hour.

Disgustedly, he walked back to the porch and went in side. He reached out for the light switch again with his left hand, seeing nothing but the beam of the flashlight ahead of him, and felt his hand stop abruptly against the sweaty shirt and the chest of a man standing beside him in the darkness.

There was nothing he could do about it then. The night tilted up at him like an opening cellar door.