The Sailcloth Shroud

12

They crowded around the table, staring down at the instrument and the sudden, spasmodic jerking of its styli.

I gripped the arms of the chair as it all began falling into place—the nameless fear, and what had actually caused it, and the apparently insignificant thing that had lodged in my subconscious mind on an afternoon sixteen years ago aboard another boat, a chartered sport fisherman off Miami Beach. I had killed Baxter. Or at least I was responsible for his death.

Bonner growled, and swung around to grab me by the shirt. “You’re lying! So now let’s hear what really happened—”

I tried to swing at his face, but Slidell grabbed my arm before I could pull the instrument off the table by its connecting wires. “Shut up!” I roared. “Get off my back, you stupid ape! I’m trying to understand it myself!”

Slidell waved him off. “Get away!” Bonner stepped back, and Slidell spoke to me. “You didn’t get the bathrobe?”

“No,” I said. All the rage went out of me suddenly, and I leaned back in the chair with my eyes closed. “I touched it with the end of the boathook, but I couldn’t get hold of it.”

That was what I’d seen, but hadn’t wanted to see, the afternoon we buried him. It wasn’t his body, sewn in white Orlon, that was fading away below me, disappearing forever into two miles of water; it was that damned white bathrobe. And all the time I was trying to bury it in my subconscious, the other thing—already buried there—was trying to dig it up.

“And they were the only ones he had?” Slidell asked.

“I guess so,” I said dully. I could hear Patricia Reagan crying softly over to my left.

Bonner’s rasping voice cut in. “What the hell are you talking about?”

Slidell paid no attention. Or maybe he gestured for him to shut up. My eyes were still closed.

“And he still didn’t tell you what they were?” Slidell went on. “You didn’t realize it until he had the second one, the one that killed him—”

“Look!” I cried out angrily. “I didn’t even realize it then! Why should I? He said it was indigestion, and he took a pill for it, and then he took another one, and he lay there resting and getting a suntan for about a half hour and then went below and turned in. He didn’t groan, or cry out. It wasn’t anything like the other one; the pain probably wasn’t anywhere near as bad, or he wouldn’t have been able to cover it up that way.

“I had no reason to connect the two. I understand now why he didn’t say anything about it, even when I told him about the bathrobe. He knew I’d take him back to Panama, and he’d rather risk another ten days at sea without the medicine than do that. But why would I have any reason to suspect it? All I knew about him was what he’d told me. His name was Wendell Baxter, and he got indigestion when he ate onions.”

No, I thought; that wasn’t completely true. Then, before I could correct myself, Flowers’ voice broke in. “Wait a minute—”

He’d never even looked up, I thought; people as such didn’t really exist for him; they were just some sort of stimulating devices or power supplies he hooked onto his damned machine so he could sit there and stare enraptured into its changing expressions. Maybe this was what they meant about the one-sided development of genius.

“All right,” I said. “I’m lying. Or I was. I was lying to myself. There was a reason I should have known it was a heart attack, but I didn’t understand what it was until today, when I thought about the one my uncle had.”

“What was that?” Slidell asked.

“He didn’t swallow those pills,” I said.

“Why?” Bonner asked. “What’s that got to do with it?”

“They were nitroglycerin,” Slidell told him impatiently. I straightened up in the chair and groped mechanically for a cigarette.

“I think it must have stuck in my mind all those years,” I went on. “I mean, it was the first time I’d ever heard of pills you took but didn’t swallow. You dissolved them under your tongue. Reagan was doing the same thing, but it didn’t quite click until just now. I merely thought he was swallowing them without water.”

Slidell sat down again, lighted a cigarette, and regarded me with a bleak smile. “It’s regrettable your medical knowledge isn’t as comprehensive as that stupid conscience of yours and its defense mechanisms, Rogers. It would have saved us a lot of time.”

I frowned. “What do you mean?”

“That it probably wouldn’t have made the slightest difference if he’d had a tubful of those nitroglycerin pills. They’re a treatment for angina, which is essentially just the warning. The danger signal. Reagan, from your report, was killed by a really massive coronary, and you could just as well have given him aspirin or a Bromo-Seltzer.”

“How do you know so much about it?” I asked.

“I went to a doctor and asked,” he said. “When you’re dealing with sums in the order of a half million dollars you cover all bases. But never mind. Let’s get on with it.”

I wondered what he hoped to find out now, but I didn’t say it aloud. With Reagan admittedly dead and lying on the bottom of the Caribbean with his secret the show was over, but as long as he refused to accept it and kept me tied to this machine answering questions Patricia Reagan and I would stay alive. When he gave up, Bonner would get rid of us. It was as simple as that.

“We can assume,” he went on, “that we know now why Reagan didn’t ask you to put him ashore. That first heart attack—and losing his medicine—scared him off. There’s no doubt he’d already been suffering from angina, or he wouldn’t have had the nitroglycerin, but this was more than that—or he thought it was, which amounts to the same thing. Of course, he still might die before he reached Southport, but even at that he’d have a better chance staying with the boat than he would landing on a deserted stretch of beach and having to fight his way through a bunch of jungle alone. So he played the percentages.”

“Yes,” I said. That seemed more or less obvious now.

“What was he wearing when he died?”

“Dungarees,” I said, “and a pair of sneakers.”

“If he’d had a money belt around him, you would have seen it?”

“Yes. But he didn’t have one.”

Flowers and Bonner were silently watching the machine. I turned and shot a glance at Patricia Reagan. Her face was pale, but she didn’t avoid my eyes now. That was something, anyway. Maybe she didn’t blame me for his death.

“Did you put any more clothes on him when you buried him?”

“No,” I said.

“And everything he owned was turned over to the US marshal?”

“That’s right.”

He exhaled smoke and stared up at the ceiling. “Now I think we’re getting somewhere, wouldn’t you say? Somewhere around nineteen thousand dollars of that money is still missing. It didn’t go ashore with his things, it wasn’t buried with him, Keefer didn’t have it, you haven’t got it, and I don’t think there’s a chance it’s on your boat. What does that leave?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Unless he just didn’t have it with him.”

He smiled coldly. “But I think he did.”

I began to get it then. You had to remember two things. The first was that he wasn’t even remotely interested in $19,000 worth of chicken-feed; from his point of view the fact that it was missing was the only good news he had left. And the other thing you had to keep in mind was that Reagan had been warned. He knew there was at least a chance he wouldn’t reach the States alive.

Excitement quickened along my nerves. All the pieces were beginning to make sense now, and I should know where that money was. And not only the money. The same thing he was looking for—a letter. I could have done it long ago, I thought, if I hadn’t subconsciously tried to reject the idea that I was to blame for Reagan’s death.

“Here’s something,” Flowers called out softly.

I glanced up then, and finally realized the real beauty of the trap they had me in. Even thinking of the answer would get me killed. Bonner’s hard eyes were on my face, and Slidell was watching me with the poised deadliness of a stalking cat.

“Have you thought of something?” he asked.

The telephone rang.

The unexpected sound of it seemed to explode in the silence, and everybody turned to look at it except Slidell. He stood up and nodded curtly to Patricia Reagan. “Answer it, and get rid of whoever it is. If it’s somebody looking for Rogers, he left. You don’t know where he went. Understand?”

She faced him for a moment, and then nodded, and crossed unsteadily to the desk. He was beside her as she picked up the receiver, and motioned for her to tilt it so he could hear too. Bonner turned and watched me. “Hello,” she said. Then, “Yes. That’s right.”

There was a longer pause. Then she said, “Yes. He was here. But he left. . . . No, he didn’t say. . . .”

So it was Bill. She was listening. She looked helplessly at Slidell. He pulled the receiver down, put his hand over it, and said, “Tell him no. It couldn’t have been. And hang up. She repeated it. “You’re welcome,” she said, and replaced the instrument.

What would he do now? There was no doubt as to what he’d asked. And I’d told him if the Reagan lead proved a dead end I was going to call the FBI. As a reporter he could conceivably find out whether I had or not. How much time would go by before he decided something was wrong? It was only a very slight one, and there was no way he could have known, but Slidell had finally made a mistake.

He motioned for her to go back, and picked up the phone himself. “Southport, Texas,” he said. “The Randall Hotel, and I want to speak to Mr. Shaw.”

He held on. Patricia sat down on the couch, and when I turned toward her she made a helpless, almost apologetic sort of gesture, and tried to smile. I nodded and tried it myself, but it wasn’t much more successful.

“Hello?” Slidell said. “Yes. Some progress here. We ran into an old friend, and we’re having quite a discussion. Anything new there? . . . I see. . . . But they still haven’t been able to talk to her? . . . Good. . . . What about the other one? . . . That’s fine. . . . Sounds just about right. Well, stand by. I’ll call you when we get something.” He hung up.

There were only parts of it I understood. One man was still in Southport, covering that end of it. Paula Stafford was alive, but the police hadn’t been able to question her yet, as far as he knew. But I couldn’t guess what he meant by the “other one.”

He came back and sat down. I wondered what Bill would do, and how much longer we had.

“Let’s consider what Reagan would do,” he said. “He knew he could die before he reached the States. You would turn his suitcase over to the US marshal or the police, and the money would be discovered. At first glance, that would seem to be no great hardship, since he wouldn’t need it any longer, but it’s not quite that simple. I’ve made a rather thorough study of Reagan—anybody who steals a half million dollars from me is almost certain to arouse my interest—and he was quite a complex man. He was a thief, but an uncomfortable thief, if you follow me. It was gambling that always got him into trouble. But all that’s beside the point. What I’m getting at is that he loved his daughter very much. He’d made a mess of his life—that is, from his viewpoint—and while he was willing to take the consequences himself, he’d do almost anything to keep from hurting her again.”

Patricia made a little outcry. Slidell glanced at her indifferently and went on.

“I’m fairly certain the real reason, or at least one reason, he agreed to go along with us is that he’d been dipping into the till at the Drovers National, as he had at the other bank, and he saw a way to put the money back before they caught up with him. But there was risk in this too, so he decided to take it all and fade.

“At any rate, if you’re still following me, he was dead, buried, and honest, as far as his daughter was concerned. But if all that money came to light there’d be an investigation, eventually they’d find out who he really was, and she’d have to bury him all over again, this time as one of the most publicized thieves since Dillinger.

“So he had to do something with it? But what? Throw it overboard? That might seem just a little extreme later on when he arrived in Southport still in good health. Hide it somewhere on the boat? That would be more like it, because then if he arrived all right he merely pulled it out of the hiding place and went on his way. But there are two difficulties; it’d be pretty hard, if not downright impossible, to hide anything permanently on a forty-foot boat, to begin with, and then there was Paula Stafford. She knew he had it, of course, so when it turned up missing she might come out of hiding and jump you about it, which could lead to an investigation, the very thing he was trying to avoid. And there’s no doubt he would much rather she had it anyway. Along with the rest of it. So the chances are he’d try to arrange for her to get it, in case he died, without anyone’s ever knowing he had it aboard. But how? And what went wrong?”

He was approaching it from a different direction, but he was leading me toward it as inevitably as I’d been headed for it myself. I wondered how near we would get before the machine betrayed me, or before the conscious effort of my holding back was written there in its jagged scrawls for Flowers to see. The things it measured were outside voluntary control.

His eyes shifted from the machine to my face like those of a big cat, just waiting. “We don’t know how he tried to do it. But what went wrong, obviously, was Keefer. When he had the big one, how long was it from the time it struck until he died?”

“I guessed it at about twenty minutes,” I said. “Naturally, I wasn’t watching a clock. And it’s not an easy thing to tell, anyway, in spite of the offhand way they do it on television. He could have been dead five or ten minutes before we were sure.” Add all the details possible, I thought, as long as they’re true and don’t really matter.

“Thank you, Doctor,” he said, with a bleak smile. “Approximately how long was he conscious?”

“Just the first few minutes. Five at the most.”

“He didn’t say anything?”

“No.” Nothing coherent, I started to add, but thought better of it. She was having a bad enough time of it as it was without being told the kind of sounds he made.

“Was Keefer alone with him at any time?”

“No,” I said.

“So he was the one who went to look in the suitcase for medicine?”

“Yes.”

Flowers was watching the scrawls with rapt attention, but he had said nothing yet. As long as I concentrated on one question at a time I was all right. But each one was a step, leading up to where the noose was waiting.

“When did you inventory his things?”

“The next morning.”

“And at least half of that time you would have been on deck, at the wheel, while he was below alone?”

“If you mean could he have gone through Reagan’s suitcase,” I said coldly, “of course he could. And he probably did, since he had four thousand dollars when we arrived in Southport. But he couldn’t have carried twenty-three thousand ashore with him unless it was in five hundred-or thousand-dollar bills. He didn’t have it, anyway, or the police would have found it.”

“I know that,” he broke in. “But let’s plug all the holes as we go. You docked in Southport Monday afternoon, the sixteenth. Was that at the boatyard?”

“No,” I said. “We didn’t go alongside a pier at all that day. We anchored at the City Yacht Basin.”

“Did you go ashore?”

“I didn’t. Keefer did. He put the bite on me for another twenty-dollar advance and went uptown.”

“Then he wasn’t entirely stupid. You knew he was broke, so he had sense enough to ask you for money. Could he have been carrying any of it then?”

“Not much,” I said. “I was below when he washed up and dressed, so he didn’t have it tied around his body anywhere. I saw his wallet when he put the twenty in it. It was empty. He couldn’t have carried much just in his pockets.”

“You didn’t leave the boat at all?”

“Only when I rowed him over to the pier in the dinghy. I went over to the phone in the yacht club and called the estimators in a couple of boatyards to have them come look the job over.”

“What time did Keefer come back?”

“The next morning, around eight. About half drunk.”

“He must have had some of the money, then, unless he set a world’s record for milking a twenty. What about that morning?”

“He shaved and had a cup of coffee, and we went up to the US marshal’s office. He couldn’t have picked up anything aboard the boat because it was only about ten minutes and I was right there all the time. We spent the morning with the marshal and the Coast Guard, and went back to the Yacht Basin about two-thirty p.m. I paid him the rest of his money, he rolled up the two pairs of dungarees, the only clothes he had to carry, and I rowed him over to the pier. He couldn’t have put anything in the dungarees. I wasn’t watching him deliberately, of course; I just happened to be standing there talking to him. He rode off with the truck from Harley’s boatyard. They’d brought me some gasoline so I could get over to the yard; the tanks were dry because we’d used it all trying to get back to Cristobal when we were becalmed. The police say he definitely had three to four thousand with him a half hour later when he checked in at the hotel, so he must have had it in his wallet.”

“You moved the boat to Harley’s boatyard that afternoon, then? Did you go ashore that night?”

“No.”

“Wednesday night?”

“No,” I said. “Both nights I went up to that Domino place for a bite to eat and was gone a half hour or forty-five minutes at the most, and that was before dark. I had too much work to do for any night life.”

“You didn’t see Keefer at all during that time?”

“No,” I said.

“But you did go ashore Thursday night, and didn’t get back till twelve. Keefer could have gone aboard then.”

“Past the watchman at the gate?” I said, wondering if would get by with it. “The cabin of the boat was locked, anyway.”

“With a padlock anybody could open with one rap of stale doughnut.”

“Not without making enough noise to be heard out at he gate,” I said. “That’s the reason your man used bolt-cutters on the hasp.”

We were skirting dangerously close now, and I had to decide in the next minute or so what I was going to do. Sweat it out, and hope they would hold off until that man in Southport could go check? It would be another seven or eight hours before he’d be able to, because he’d have to wait at least until after it was dark, and even as isolated as this place was they couldn’t hang around forever. And as he had said, we were closing the holes as we went; when we got to the last one, what was left?

“How many keys were there to that padlock?” he asked.

“Only one,” I said, “as far as I know.”

“But there could have been another one around. Padlocks always come with two, and the lock must have been aboard when you bought the boat. Where was the key kept when you were at sea?”

“In a drawer in the galley. Along with the lock.”

“So if Keefer wanted to be sure of getting back in later on, he had ten days to practice picking that lock. Or to make an impression of the key so he could have a duplicate made. It wouldn’t take much more than a hundred-and-forty IQ to work that out, would it?”

“No,” I said.

“All right. He had the rest of that money hidden somewhere in the cabin so he could pick it up when you weren’t around. You and the yard people were working on the boat during the day, and you didn’t go ashore at night, so he was out of luck for the next two days. Then Thursday night you went uptown to a movie. You’d hardly got out of sight when he showed up at the gate and tried to con the watchman into letting him go aboard. The watchman wouldn’t let him in. So he did the same thing we did, picked up a skiff over at that next dock where all the fishing boats were, and went in the back way.”

“It’s possible,” I said. “But you’re only guessing.”

“No. Shaw talked to that girl he was with in the Domino. She said Keefer was supposed to pick her up at eight-thirty. He called and said he might be a little late, and it was almost ten when he finally showed. Now guess where he’d been.”

“Okay,” I said. “But if he came aboard and got it, what became of it? He picked the girl up at ten, he was with her until I ran into them a little before midnight, and you know what happened to him after that.”

He smiled coldly. “Those were the last two holes. He didn’t give it to the girl, and we know he didn’t throw it out of the car when Bonner and Shaw ran him to the curb about twenty minutes later and picked him up to ask him about Reagan. Therefore, he never did get it. When he got aboard, it was gone.”

“Gone?” I asked. “You mean you think I found it?”

He shook his head. “What equipment was removed from that boat for repairs?”

“The refrigerator,” I said, and dived for him.

He’d been watching Flowers, and was already reaching for the gun.