The Sailcloth Shroud

9

“You both have a boarding-house reach,” Lorraine said.

“Where I’m sitting, I need one,” I replied. “How was the letter worded? Any indication at all that she knew him?”

“No. Polite, but completely impersonal. Apparently he’d written her, praising the book and sending a copy to be autographed. She signed it and sent it back. Thank you, over, and out. The only possibility is that she might have known him by some other name.”

“You don’t remember the address?”

He looked pained. “That’s a hell of a question to ask a reporter. Here.” He fished in his wallet and handed me a slip of paper. On it was scrawled, “Patricia Reagan, 16 Belvedere Pl., Sta. Brba., Calif.”

I looked at my watch and saw that even with the time difference it would be almost one a.m. in California. “Hell, call her now,” Bill said. I went out in the living room, dialed the operator, gave her the name and address, and held on. While she was getting Information in Santa Barbara I wondered what I’d do if somebody woke me up out of a sound sleep from three thousand miles away to ask me if I’d ever heard of Joe Blow the Third. Well, the worst she could do was hang up.

The phone rang three times. Then a girl said sleepily, “Hello?”

“Miss Patricia Reagan?” the operator asked. “Miami is calling.”

“Pat, is that you?” the girl said. “What on earth—”

“No,” the operator explained. “The call is for Miss—”

I broke in. “Never mind, Operator. I’ll talk to anyone there.”

“Thank you. Go ahead, please.”

“Hello,” I said. “I’m trying to locate Miss Reagan.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” the girl replied. “She’s not here; I’m her roommate. The operator said Miami, so I thought it was Pat that was calling.”

“You mean she’s in Miami?”

“Yes. That is, Florida. Near Miami.”

“Do you know the address?”

“Yes. I had a letter from her yesterday. Just a moment.”

I waited. Then she said, “Hello? Here it is. The nearest town seems to be a place called Marathon. Do you know where that is?”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s down the Keys.”

“She’s on Spanish Key, and the mailing address is care of W. R. Holland, RFD One.”

“Does she have a telephone?”

“I think so. But I don’t know the number.”

“Is she a guest there?” I didn’t like the idea of waking up an entire household with a stupid question.

“She’s staying in the house while the owners are in Europe. While she works on some magazine articles. I don’t know how well you know her, but I wouldn’t advise interrupting her when she’s working.”

“No,” I said. “Only while she’s sleeping. And thanks a million.”

I hung up. Bill and Lorraine had come into the living room. I told them, and put in the call to the Marathon exchange. The phone rang, and went on ringing. Five. Six. Seven. It was a very big house, or she was a sound sleeper.

“Hello.” She had a nice voice, but she sounded cross. Well, I thought, who wouldn’t?

“Miss Reagan?” I asked.

“Yes. What is it?”

“I want to apologize for waking you up this time of morning, but this is vitally important. It’s about a man named Brian Hardy. Did you ever know him?”

“No. I’ve never heard of him.”

“Please think carefully. He used to live in Miami, and he asked you to autograph a copy of Music in the Wind. Which, incidentally, is a very beautiful book. I have a copy of it myself.”

“Thank you,” she said, a little more pleasantly. “Now that you mention it, I do seem to have a hazy recollection of the name. Frankly, I’m not flooded with requests for autographs, and as I recall he mailed the book to me.”

“That’s right. But as far as you know, you’ve never met him?”

“No. I’m positive of that. And his letter said nothing about knowing me.”

“Was the letter handwritten or typed?”

“Typed, I think. Yes, I’m sure of that.”

“I see. Well, did you ever know a man named Wendell Baxter?”

“No. And would you mind telling me just who you are and what this is all about? Are you drunk?”

“I’m not drunk,” I said. “I’m in trouble up to my neck, and I’m trying to find somebody who knew this man. I’ve got a wild hunch that he knew you. Let me describe him.”

“All right,” she said wearily. “Which shall we take first? Mr. Hardy, or the other one?”

“They’re the same man,” I said. “He would be about fifty years old, slender, maybe a little over six feet tall, brown eyes, graying brown hair, distinguished looking, and well educated. Have you ever known anybody who would fit that?”

“No.” I thought I detected just the slightest hesitancy, but decided I was reaching for it. “Not that I recall. Though it’s rather general.”

“Try!” I urged her. “Listen. He was a quiet man, very reserved, and courteous. He didn’t use glasses, even for reading. He was a heavy smoker. Chesterfields, two or three packs a day. Not particularly dark-complexioned, but he took a good tan. He was a superb small-boat sailor, a natural helmsman, and I would guess he’d done quite a bit of ocean racing. Does any of that remind you of anyone you’ve ever known?”

“No,” she said coldly. “It doesn’t.”

“Are you sure? No one at all?”

“Well, it does happen to be an excellent description of my father. But if this is a joke of some kind, I must say it’s in very poor taste.”

“What?”

“My father is dead.” The receiver banged in my ear as she hung up.

I dropped the instrument back on the cradle and reached dejectedly for a cigarette. Then I stopped, and stared at Bill. How stupid could I get? Of course he was. That was the one thing in common in all the successive manifestations of Wendell Baxter; each time you finally ran him down, he was certain to be dead.

I grabbed up the phone and put in the call again. After it had rung for three minutes with no answer I gave up.

“Here’s your ticket,” Bill said. “But I still think you ought to take the car. Or let me drive you down there.”

“If they picked me up, you’d be in a jam too. I’ll be safe enough on the bus, this far from the Miami terminal.”

It was after sunrise now, and we were parked near the bus station in Homestead, about thirty miles south of Miami. I’d shaved and changed into a pair of Bill’s slacks and a sport shirt, and was wearing sun glasses.

“Don’t get your hopes too high,” Bill cautioned. He was worried about me. “It’s flimsy as hell. She’d know whether her own father was dead or not.”

“I know,” I said. “But I’ve got to talk to her.”

“Suppose it’s nothing, then what? Call me, and let me come after you.”

“No,” I said. “I’ll call the FBI. I’m not doing myself any good, running like this, and if I keep it up too long Bonner and those other goons may catch up with me.”

The bus pulled in. Bill made a gesture with his thumb and forefinger. “Luck, pal.”

“Thanks,” I said. I slid out of the car, and climbed aboard. The bus was about two-thirds filled, and several passengers were reading copies of the Herald with my description on the front page, but no one paid any attention to me. There was no picture, thank God. I found a seat in the rear beside a sailor who’d fallen asleep, and watched Bill drive away.

In a little over an hour we were on Key Largo and beginning the long run down the Overseas Highway. It was a hot June morning with brilliant sunlight and a gentle breeze out of the southeast. I stared out at the water with its hundred gradations of color from bottle green to indigo and wished I could wake up from this dream to find myself back aboard the Orion somewhere in the out islands of the Bahamas. How long had it been going on now? This was—what? Monday? Only forty-eight hours. It seemed a month. And all it ever did was get worse. I’d started out with one dead Baxter, and now I had three.

And what would I prove, actually, if I did find out who he was? That wouldn’t change anything. It would still be my unsupported word against the rest of the world as to what had become of him and that money he’d said he had. I was beating my brains out for nothing. No matter how you sliced it, there was only one living witness, I was it, and there’d never be any more.

We passed Islamorada and Marathon. It was shortly after eleven when we rolled onto Spanish Key and pulled to a stop in front of the filling station and general store. I got down, feeling the sudden impact of the heat after the air-conditioning, and the bus went on. I could see the secondary road where it emerged from the pines about a quarter of a mile ahead, but I didn’t know which branch I wanted. A gaunt, leathery-faced man in overalls and a railroad cap was cleaning the windshield of a car in the station driveway. I called over to him.

“Holland?” He pointed. “Take the road to the left. It’s about a mile and a half.”

“Thanks,” I said.

For the first half mile there were no houses at all. The unsurfaced marl road wound through low pine and palmetto slash that was more like the interior of Florida than the Keys. From time to time I caught glimpses of water off to my right. Then the road swung in that direction and I passed near some beach houses and could see out across the half-mile channel separating Spanish Key from the next one to the westward. The houses were boarded up with hurricane shutters as if their owners were gone for the summer. I stopped to light a cigarette and mop the sweat from my face. All sound of cars passing on the Overseas Highway had died out behind me now. If she wanted an isolated place to work, I thought, she’d found it.

The pine began to thin out a little and the road swung eastward now, paralleling the beach along the south side of the Key. The next mailbox was Holland’s. The house was on the beach, about a hundred yards back from the road, with a curving drive and a patch of green lawn in front. It was large for a beach house, solidly constructed of concrete block and stucco, and dazzling white in the sun, with a red tile roof and bright aluminum awnings over the windows and the door. In the carport on the right was an MG with California license plates. She was home.

I went up the short concrete walk and rang the bell. Nothing happened. I pushed the button again, and waited. There was no sound except the lapping of water on the beach around in back, and somewhere farther offshore an outboard motor. About two hundred yards up the beach was another house somewhat similar to this one, but there was no car in evidence and it appeared to be unoccupied. There was still no sound from inside. The drapes were drawn behind the jalousie windows on either side of the door. The outboard motor sounded nearer. I stepped around the corner and saw it. It was coming this way, a twelve- or fourteen-foot runabout planing along at a good clip. At the wheel was a girl in a brief splash of yellow bathing suit.

There was a long low porch back here, another narrow strip of lawn, a few coconut palms leaning seaward, and a glaring expanse of white coral sand along the shore. There were several pieces of brightly colored lawn furniture on the porch and under the palms, and a striped umbrella and some beach pads out on the sand. The water was very shoal, and there was no surf because of the reefs offshore and the fact that the breeze had almost died out now. Far out I could see a westbound tanker skirting the inshore edge of the Stream. A wooden pier ran out into the water about fifty feet, and the girl was coming alongside it now.

I started out to take a line for her, but she beat me there. She lifted out a mask and snorkel and an under-water camera in a clear plastic housing, and stepped onto the pier.

She was slender and rather tall, a girl with a deep tan and dark wine-red hair. Her back was toward me momentarily as she made the painter fast. She straightened and turned then, and I saw her eyes were brown. The face was slender, with a very nice mouth and a stubborn chin, and was as smoothly tanned as the rest of her. There was no really striking resemblance to Baxter, but she could very well be his daughter.

“Good morning,” I said. “Miss Reagan?”

She nodded coolly. “Yes. What is it?”

“My name is Stuart Rogers. I’d like to talk to you for a minute.”

“You’re the man who called me this morning.” It was a statement, rather than a question.

“Yes,” I said, just as bluntly. “I want to ask you about your father.”

“Why?”

“Why don’t we go over in the shade and sit down?” I suggested.

“All right.” She reached for the camera. I picked it up and followed her. She was about five feet eight inches tall, I thought. Her hair was wet at the ends, as if the bathing cap hadn’t covered it completely, and tendrils of it stuck to the nape of her neck. It was a little cooler on the porch. She sat down on a chaise with one long smooth leg doubled under her, and looked up questioningly at me. I held out cigarettes, and she thanked me and took one. I lighted it for her.

I sat down across from her. “This won’t take long. I’m not prying into your personal affairs just because I haven’t got anything better to do. You said your father was dead. Could you tell me when he died?”

“In nineteen-fifty-six,” she replied.

Hardy had showed up in Miami in February of 1956. That didn’t allow much leeway. “What month?” I asked.

“January,” she said.

I sighed. We were over that one.

The brown eyes began to burn. “Unless you have some good explanation for this, Mr. Rogers—”

“I do. I have a very good one. However, you can get rid of me once and for all by answering just one more question. Were you present at his funeral?”

She gasped. “Why did you ask that?”

“I think you know by now,” I said. “There wasn’t any funeral, was there?”

“No.” She leaned forward tensely. “What are you trying to say? That you think he’s still alive?”

“No,” I said. “I’m sorry. He is dead now. He died of a heart attack on the fifth of this month aboard my boat in the Caribbean.”

Her face was pale under the tan, and I was afraid she was going to faint. She didn’t, however. She shook her head. “No. It’s impossible. It was somebody else—”

“What happened in nineteen-fifty-six?” I asked. “And where?”

“It was in Arizona. He went off into the desert on a hunting trip, and got lost.”

“Arizona? What was he doing there?’.’

“He lived there,” she replied. “In Phoenix.”

I wondered if I’d missed, after all, when I’d been so near. That couldn’t be Baxter. He was a yachtsman, a seaman; you couldn’t even imagine him in a desert environment. Then I remembered Music in the Wind. She hadn’t acquired that intense feeling for the beauty of sail by watching somebody’s colored slides. “He wasn’t a native?” I said.

“No. We’re from Massachusetts. He moved to Phoenix in nineteen-fifty.”

Now we were getting somewhere. “Look, Miss Reagan,” I said, “you admitted the description I gave you over the phone could be that of your father. You also admit you have no definite proof he’s dead; he merely disappeared. Then why do you refuse to believe he could be the man I’m talking about?”

“I should think it would be obvious,” she replied curtly. “My father’s name was Clifford Reagan. Not Hardy—or whatever it was you said.”

“He could have changed it.”

“And why would he?” The brown eyes blazed again, but I had a feeling there was something defensive about her anger.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“There are several other reasons,” she went on. “He couldn’t have lived in that desert more than two days without water. The search wasn’t called off until long after everybody had given up all hope he could still be alive. It’s been two and a half years. If he’d found his way out, don’t you consider it at least a possibility he might have let me know? Or do you think the man who died on your boat was suffering from amnesia and didn’t know who he was?”

“No,” I said. “He knew who he was, all right.”

“Then I believe we’ve settled the matter,” she said, starting to get up. “It wasn’t my father. So if you’ll excuse me—”

“Not so fast,” I snapped. “I’m already in about all the trouble one man can get in, and you can’t make it any worse by calling the police and having me thrown in jail. So don’t try to brush me off till we’re finished, because that’s the only way you’re going to do it. I think you’d better tell me how he got lost.”

For a moment I wouldn’t have offered much in the way of odds that she wasn’t going to slap me across the face. She was a very proud girl with a lot of spirit. Then she appeared to get her temper in hand. “All right,” she said.

“He was hunting quail,” she went on. “In some very hilly and inaccessible desert country ninety or a hundred miles southwest of Tucson. He’d gone alone. That was Saturday morning, and he wasn’t really missed until he failed to show up at the bank on Monday.”

“Didn’t you or your mother know where he was?” I asked.

“He and my mother were divorced in nineteen-fifty,” she replied. “At the same time he moved to Phoenix. We were living in Massachusetts. He had remarried, but was separated from his second wife.”

“Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry. Go on.”

“The bank called his apartment, thinking he might be ill. When they could get no answer, they called the apartment-house manager. He said he’d seen my father leave on Saturday with his gun and hunting clothes, but he wasn’t sure where he’d planned to hunt or how long he intended to stay. The sheriff’s office was notified, and they located the sporting-goods store where he’d bought some shells Friday afternoon. He’d told the clerk the general locality he was going to hunt in. They organized a search party, but it was such an immense area and so rough and remote that it was Wednesday before they even found the car. It was near an old trace of a road at least twenty miles from the nearest ranch house. He’d apparently got lost while he was hunting and couldn’t find his way back to it. They went on searching with jeeps and horses and even planes until the following Sunday, but they never did find him. Almost a year later some uranium prospectors found his hunting coat; it was six or seven miles from where the car had been. Are you satisfied now?”

“Yes,” I said. “But not quite the way you think. Have you read the paper this morning?”

She shook her head. “It’s still in the mailbox. I haven’t gone after it yet.”

“I’ll bring it,” I said. “I want you to read something.”

I went and got it. “I’m the Captain Rogers referred to,” I said as I handed it to her. “The man who signed himself Brian in the letter is the same one who told me his name was Wendell Baxter.”

She read it through. Then she folded the paper and put it aside defiantly. “It’s absurd,” she said. “It’s been two and a half years. And my father never had twenty-three thousand dollars. Nor any reason for calling himself Brian.”

“Listen,” I told her. “One month after your father disappeared in that desert a man who could be his double arrived in Miami, rented a big home on an island in Biscayne Bay, bought a forty-thousand-dollar sport fisherman he renamed the Princess Pat—”

She gasped.

I went on relentlessly. “—and lived there like an Indian prince with no apparent source of income until the night of April seventh of this year, when he disappeared. He was lost at sea when the Princess Pat exploded, burned to the waterline, and sank, twenty miles off the Florida coast at port Lauderdale. And again, no body was ever found. His name was Brian Hardy, and he was the one who sent you that book to be autographed. Slightly less than two months later, on May thirty-first, Brian Hardy came aboard my ketch in Cristobal, using the name of Wendell Baxter. I’m not guessing here, or using descriptions, because I saw a photograph of Hardy, and this was the same man. And I say Hardy was your father. Do you have any kind of photograph or snapshot?”

She gave a dazed shake of the head. “Not here. I have some in the apartment in Santa Barbara.”

“Do you agree now it was your father?”

“I don’t know. The whole thing is so utterly pointless. Why would he do it?”

“He was running from somebody,” I said. “In Arizona, and then in Miami, and again in Panama.”

“But from whom?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I was hoping you might. But the thing I really want to know is this—did your father ever have a heart attack?”

“No,” she said. “Not that I ever heard.”

“Is there any history of heart or coronary disease in the family at all?”

She shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

I lighted a cigarette and stared out across the sun-drenched blues and greens over the reefs. I was doing just beautifully. Apparently all I’d accomplished so far was to establish that aboard the Topaz Baxter had died for the third time with great finality and dramatic effect without leaving a body around to prove it. So all I had to do was convince everybody that this time it was for real. If he died of bubonic plague on the speaker’s platform at an AMA convention, I thought bitterly, and was cremated in Macy’s window, nobody would take it seriously. He’ll turn up fellas; just you wait.

“Does the name Slidell mean anything to you?” I asked

“No,” she said. I was convinced she was telling the truth. “I’ve never heard it before.”

“Do you know where he could have got that money?”

She ran despairing hands through her hair, and stood up. “No. Mr. Rogers, none of this makes the slightest sense to me. It couldn’t have been my father.”

“But you know it was, don’t you?” I said.

She nodded. “I’m afraid so.”

“Did you say he worked for a bank?”

“Yes. In the Trust Department of the Drovers National.”

“There was no shortage in his accounts?”

For an instant I thought the anger was going to flare again. Then she said wearily, “No. Not this time.”

“This time?”

She made a little gesture of resignation. “Since he may be the one who got you into this trouble, I suppose you have a right to know. He did take some money once, from another bank. I don’t see how it could have any bearing on this, but maybe it has. If you’ll wait while I shower and change, I’ll tell you about it.”