The Sailcloth Shroud

8

It was datelined Southport.

The aura of mystery surrounding the voyage of the ill-fated yacht Topaz deepened today in a strange new development that very nearly claimed the life of another victim.

Still in critical condition in a local hospital this afternoon following an overdose of sleeping pills was an attractive brunette tentatively identified as Miss Paula Stafford of New York, believed by police to have been close to Wendell Baxter, mysterious figure whose death or disappearance while en route from Panama to Southport on the Topaz has turned into one of the most baffling puzzles of recent years. . . .

I plunged ahead, skipping the parts of it I knew. It was continued in a back section. I riffled through it, scattering the pages, and went on. Then I sat down and read the whole thing through again.

It was all there. The hotel detective had gone up to her room shortly after 3:30 a.m. when guests in adjoining 100ms reported a disturbance. He found her wildly upset and crying out almost incoherently that somebody had been killed. Since there were no evidences of violence and it was obvious no one else was there, dead or otherwise, he had got her calmed down and left her after she’d taken one of her sleeping pills. At 10 a.m., however, when they tried to call her and could get no response, they entered the room with a pass key and found her unconscious. A doctor was called. He found the remaining pills on the table beside the bed, and had her taken to a hospital. It wasn’t known whether the overdose was accidental or a suicide attempt, since no note could be found, but when police came to investigate they found the letter from Baxter. Then everything hit the fan.

My visit came out. The elevator boy and night clerk gave the police my description. They went looking for me, and I’d disappeared from the boatyard. The letter from Baxter was printed in full. There was a rehash of the whole story up to that time, including Keefer’s death and the unexplained $4000.

Now apparently $19,000 more was missing, I was missing, and nobody had an idea at all as to what had really happened to Baxter.

... in light of this new development, the true identity of Wendell Baxter is more deeply shrouded in mystery than ever. Police refused to speculate as to whether or not Baxter might even still be alive. Lieutenant Boyd parried the question by saying, “There is obviously only one person who knows the answer to that, and we’re looking for him.”

Local agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation had no comment other than a statement that Captain Rogers was being sought for further questioning.

I pushed the paper aside and tried the cigarette again. This time I got it going. The letter itself wasn’t bad enough I thought; I had to make it worse by running. That’s the way it would look; the minute I read it I took off like a goosed gazelle. By this time they would have traced me to the Bolton and then to the airport. And I’d rented the car in Tampa under my own name, and then turned it in here. As soon as the man in the Hertz agency read the paper he’d call them; the taxi driver would remember bringing me to the hotel. Then it occurred to me I was already thinking like a fugitive. Well, I was one, wasn’t I? There was a light knock on the door.

I went over. “Who is it?”

“Bill.”

I let him in and closed the door. He sighed and shook his head. “Pal, when you get in a jam, you’re no shoestring operator.”

We’re the same age and about the same height, and we’ve known each other since we were in the third grade. He’s thin, restless, blazingly intelligent, somewhat cynical, and one of the world’s worst hypochondriacs. Women consider him handsome, and he probably is. He has a slender reckless face, ironic blue eyes, and dark hair that’s prematurely graying. He smokes three packs of cigarettes a day, and quits every other week. He never drinks. He’s an AA.

“All right,” he said, “let’s have it.”

I told him.

He whistled softly. Then he said, “Well, the first thing is to get you out of here before they pick you up.”

“Why?” I asked. “If the FBI is looking for me, maybe I’d better turn myself in. At least they won’t kill me. The others will.”

“It can wait till morning, if that’s what you decide. In the meantime I’ve got to talk to you. About Baxter.”

“Have you got any lead on him at all?” I asked.

“I’m not sure,” he said. “That’s the reason I’ve got to talk to you. What I’ve come up with is so goofy if I tried to tell the police they might have me committed. Let’s go”

“Where?” I asked.

“Home, you goof. Lorraine’s scrambling some eggs and making coffee.”

“Sure. Harboring a fugitive’s just a harmless prank. Be our guest in charming, gracious Atlanta.”

“Oh, cut it out, Scarface. How would I know you’re a fugitive? I never read anything but the Wall Street Journal.”

I gave in, but insisted we leave the hotel separately. He told me where the car was, and left. I waited five minutes before following. The streets were deserted. I climbed in, and he swung onto Biscayne Boulevard, headed south. They lived close to downtown, in a small apartment house on Brickell Avenue. From habit, I looked out the rear window. As far as I could tell, nobody was following us.

“The Stafford woman’s still alive, the last we got,” he said, “but they haven’t been able to question her yet.”

“I’ve got a sad hunch she doesn’t know too much about him, anyway,” I said. “She told me she didn’t know who those men were, or what they wanted, and I think she was telling the truth. I’m beginning to doubt Baxter even existed; I think he’s an hallucination people start seeing just before they crack up.”

“You haven’t heard anything yet,” he said. “When I tell you what I’ve come up with you’ll think we’re both around the bend.”

“Well, be mysterious about it,” I said sourly. “That’s just what I need.”

“Wait’ll we get inside.” He swung into a driveway between shadowy palms and parked beside the building. It had only four apartments, each with its own entrance. Theirs was the lower left. We came back around the hibiscus-bordered walk, and went in the front. The living room was dim and quiet, and cool from the air-conditioner. There were no lights on, but there was enough illumination from the kitchen to find our way past the hi-fi and record albums and rows and stacks of books, and the lamps and statuary Lorraine had made. She does ceramics.

At the moment she was scrambling eggs, a long-legged brunette with a velvety tan, rumpled dark brown hair, and wide, humorous, gray eyes. She was wearing Bermuda shorts and sandals, and a white shirt that was pulled together and knotted around her waist. Beyond the stove was a counter with a yellow formica top and tall yellow stools, a small breakfast nook, and a window hung with yellow curtains.

She stopped stirring the eggs long enough to kiss me and wave a hand toward the counter. “Park it, Killer. What’s this rumble you’re hot?”

“Broads,” Bill said. “Always nosy.” He set a bottle of bourbon and a glass on the counter in front of me. His theory was that nobody could be sure he didn’t drink if there was none around. I poured a big slug and downed it, had a sip of scalding black coffee, and began to feel better. Lorraine put the eggs on the table and sat down across from me, rested her elbows on the counter, and grinned.

“Let’s face it, Rogers. Civilization just isn’t your environment. I mean land-based civilization. Any time you come above high tide you ought to carry a tag, the way sandhogs do. Something like “This man is not completely amphibious, and may get into trouble ashore. Rush to nearest salt water and immerse.’“

“I’ll buy it,” I said. “Only the whole thing started at sea. That can scare you.”

“Have you told him yet?” she asked Bill.

“I’m going to right now.” He pushed the untouched eggs off his plate onto mine and lighted a cigarette. “Try this on for size—your man was forty-eight to fifty, six feet, a hundred and seventy pounds, brown hair with a little gray in it, brown eyes, mustache, quiet, gentlemanly, close-mouthed, and boat-crazy.”

“Right,” I said. “Except for the mustache.”

Somebody may have told him about razors. He came here about two and a half years ago—February of nineteen-fifty-six, to be exact—and he seemed to have plenty of money. He rented a house on one of the islands—a big, elaborate one with private dock—and bought that sport fisherman, a thirty-foot sloop, and a smaller sailboat of some kind. He was a bachelor, widower, or divorced. He had a Cuban couple who took care of the house and garden, and a man named Charley Grimes to skipper the fishing boat. Apparently didn’t work at anything, and spent nearly all his time fishing and sailing. Had several girl friends around town, most of whom would have probably married him if he’d ever asked them, but it appears he never told them any more about himself than he told anybody else. His name was Brian Hardy, and the name of the fishing boat was the Princess Pat. You begin to get it now?”

“It’s all fits,” I said excitedly. “Every bit of it. That was Baxter, beyond a doubt.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Bill replied. “Brian Hardy’s been dead for over two months. And this is the part you’re going to love. He was lost at sea.”

It began to come back then. “No!” I said. “No—”

Lorraine patted my hand. “Poor old Rogers. Why don’t you get married, so you can stay out of trouble? Or be in it all the time and get used to it.”

“Understand,” I said, “I’m not prejudiced. Some of my best friends are married. It’s just that I wouldn’t want my sister to marry a married couple.”

“It happened in April, and I think you were somewhere in the out islands,” Bill went on. “But you probably heard about it.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Explosion and fire, wasn’t it? Somewhere in the Stream.”

“That’s right. He was alone. He’d had a fight with Grimes that morning and fired him, and was taking the Princess Pat across to Bimini himself. He’d told somebody he planned to hire a native skipper and mate for a couple of weeks’ marlin fishing. It was good weather with hardly any wind, and the Stream was as flat as Biscayne Bay. He left around noon, and should have been over there in three or four hours. Afterward, there were two boats that reported seeing him drifting around, but he didn’t ask for help so they didn’t go over. Some time after dark he called the Coast Guard—”

“Sure,” I broke in. “That was it. I remember now. He was talking to them right at the moment she blew up.”

Bill nodded. “It was easy enough to figure out what happened. When he got hold of them, he said he’d been having engine trouble all afternoon. Dirt or rust in the fuel tanks. He’d been blowing out fuel lines and cleaning strainers and settling bowls and probably had the bilges full of gasoline by that time. He’d know enough not to smoke, of course, so it must have been the radio itself that set it off. Maybe a sparking brush on the converter, or a relay contact. That was the Coast Guard theory. Anyway, he went dead right in the middle of a sentence. Then about fifteen minutes later a northbound tanker pretty well out in the Stream off Fort Lauderdale reported what looked like a boat afire over to the eastward of them. They changed course and went over, and got there before the Coast Guard, but there wasn’t anything they could do. She was a mass of flame by then and in a matter of minutes she burned to the waterline and sank. The Coast Guard cruised around for several hours, hoping he’d been able to jump, but if he had he’d already drowned. They never found any trace of him. There wasn’t any doubt, of course, as to what boat it was. That was just about the position he’d reported. He’d been drifting north in the Stream all the time his engines were conked out.”

“Did they ever recover his body?” I asked.

“No.”

“Did his life-insurance companies pay off?”

“As far as anybody could ever find out, he didn’t carry any life insurance.”

We looked at each other in silence. We both nodded.

“When they come after you,” Lorraine said, “tell them to wait for me. I think so too.”

“Sure,” I said excitedly. “Look—that’s the very thing that’s been puzzling me all the time. I mean, why those three goons were so sure I’d put him ashore somewhere, without even knowing about the letter. It’s simply because he’d done it to ‘em once before.”

“Not so fast,” Bill cautioned. “Remember, this happened at least twenty miles offshore. And on his way out that day he stopped at a marine service station in Government Cut and gassed up. They were positive he didn’t have a dinghy. Sport fishermen seldom or never do, of course, so they’d have noticed if he had.”

“That doesn’t prove a thing,” I said, “except that we’re right. He wanted it known he didn’t have another boat with him. Somebody else took him off, and five will get you ten it was a girl named Paula Stafford. The Stream was flat; she could have come out from Fort Lauderdale in any kind of power cruiser, or even one of those big, fast outboard jobs. Finding him in the dark might be a tough job for a landlubber, unless he gave her a portable RDF and a signal from the Princess Pat to home on, but actually she wouldn’t have to do it in the dark. She could have been already out there before sundown, lying a mile or so away where she wouldn’t have any trouble picking up his lights. Or if there were no other boats around, she could have gone alongside before it got dark.”

“But neither the tanker nor the Coast Guard saw any other boat when they got there.”

“They wouldn’t,” I said. “Look. They took it for granted the explosion occurred while he was talking to them, because his radio went dead. Well, his radio went dead simply because he turned it off. Then he threw several gallons of gasoline around the cabin and cockpit, rigged a fuse of some kind that would take a few minutes to set it off, got in the other boat, and shoved. It would have taken the tanker possibly ten minutes to get there, even after they spotted the fire. So with a fast boat, Baxter was probably five to seven miles away and running without lights when it showed up, and by the time the Coast Guard arrived he was ashore having a drink in some cocktail lounge in Fort Lauderdale. It would be easy. That’s the reason I asked about the insurance. It would be so simple to fake that if he had a really big policy they probably wouldn’t pay off until after seven years, or whatever it is.”

“Well, he didn’t have any,” Bill replied, “so that was no strain. He also had no heirs that anybody has been able to locate, and the only estate besides the other boats seems to be a checking account with about eleven thousand in it.”

“What else did you find out?” I asked.

“I pulled his package in the morgue, but there wasn’t a great deal in it after the clippings for those first few days. So I started calling people. The police are still trying to locate some of his family. The house is sitting there vacant; he had a lease, and paid the rent on a yearly basis, so it has until next February to run. Nobody can understand his financial setup. The way he lived was geared to a hell of a big income, but they don’t know where it came from. They couldn’t find any investments of any kind, no stocks, bonds, real estate, savings, or anything. Just the checking account.”

“Well, the bank must know how the checking account was maintained.”

“Yes. Mostly by big cashiers’ checks, ten thousand or more at a time, from out-of-town banks. He could have bought them himself.”

“That sounds as if he were on the run, and hiding from somebody, even then. If he had a lot of money it was in cash, and he kept it that way so he could take it with him if he had to disappear.”

“The police figure it about the same way. After all, he wouldn’t be exactly unique. We get our share of lamsters, absconding bank types, and Latin American statesmen who got out just ahead of the firing squad with a trunk full of loot.”

I lighted a cigarette. “I want to get in that house. Do you know the address?”

He nodded. “I know the address, but you couldn’t get in. It’d be tough, even for a pro. That’s about seventy thousand dollars’ worth of house, and in that class they don’t make it easy for burglars.”

“I’ve got to! Look—Baxter’s going to drive me insane, get me killed, or land me in jail. There must be an explanation for him. If I could only find out who the hell he really was, I’d at least have a place to start.”

He shook his head. “You wouldn’t find it there. The police have been over every inch of it, and they found absolutely nothing that would give them a lead, not a letter or a clipping or a scrap of paper, or even anything he’d bought before he came to Miami. They even checked the labels and laundry marks in his clothes, and they’re all local. He apparently moved in exactly the way a baby is born—naked, and with no past life whatever.”

I nodded. “That’s the impression you begin to get after a while. He came aboard the Topaz the same way. He just appears, like a revelation.”

“But about the house,” Bill went on, “I haven’t told you everything yet. I was in it this afternoon, and there’s just a chance I stumbled onto something. I don’t know.”

I looked up quickly. “What?”

“Don’t get your hopes up. The chances are a thousand to one it’s nothing at all. It’s only an autographed book and a letter.”

“How’d you get in?” I demanded. “What book is it, and who’s the letter from?”

He lighted another cigarette. “The police let me in. I went to a lieutenant I know and made him a proposition. I wanted to do a Sunday-supplement sort of piece on Hardy, and if they’d cooperate it might help both of us. Any newspaper publicity is always helpful when you’re trying to locate friends or relatives of somebody who’s dead. You know.” He made an impatient gesture, and went on.

“Anyway, they were agreeable. They had a key to the place, and sent a man with me. We spent about an hour in the house, prowling through all the desks and table drawers and his clothes and leafing through books and so on—all the stuff that had been sifted before. We didn’t find anything, of course. But when we were leaving, I noticed some mail on a small table in the front hall. The table was under the mail slot, but we hadn’t seen it when we came in because it’s behind the door when it’s open.

“Apparently what had happened was that this stuff had been delivered between the time the police were there last—shortly after the accident—and the time somebody finally got around to notifying the Post Office he was dead. Anyway, it was all postmarked in April. The detective opened it, but none of it amounted to anything. There were two or three bills and some circulars, and this letter and the book. They were both postmarked Santa Barbara, California, and the letter was from the author of the book. It was just a routine sort of thing, saying the book was being returned, autographed, as he’d requested, and thanking him for his interest. The detective kept them both, of course, but he let me read the letter, and I got another copy of the book out of the public library. Just a minute.”

He went into the living room and came back with it. I recognized it immediately; in fact, I had a copy of it aboard the Orion. It was an arty and rather expensive job, a collection of some of the most beautiful photographs of sailing craft I’d ever seen. Most of them were racing yachts under full sail, and the title of it was Music in the Wind. A good many of the photographs had been taken by the girl who’d collected and edited the job and written the descriptive material. Her name was Patricia Reagan.

“I’m familiar with it,” I said, looking at him a little blankly. I couldn’t see what he had in mind. “They’re beautiful photographs. Hey, you don’t mean—”

He shook his head. “No. There’s no picture of anyone in here who resembles the description of Brian Hardy. I’ve already looked.”

“Then what is it?” I asked.

“A couple of things,” he replied. “And both pretty far out. The first is that he had hundreds of books, but this is the only one that was autographed. The other thing is the name.”

“Patricia!” I said.

He nodded. “I checked on it. When he bought that fishing boat its name was Dolphin III, or something like that. He was the one who changed it to Princess Pat.”