The Sailcloth Shroud (11 page)

“So we wind up right where we started.”

“That’s right,” I said. “With the same two questions. What became of the rest of the money? And why did he change his mind?”

The doorbell chimed.

We exchanged a quick glance, and got to our feet. There’d been no sound of a car outside, nor of footsteps on the walk. She motioned me toward the hallway and started to the door, but before she got there it swung open and a tall man in a gray suit and dark green glasses stepped inside and curtly motioned her back. At the same instant I heard the back door open. I whirled. Standing in the arched doorway to the kitchen was a heavy-shouldered tourist wearing a loud sport shirt, straw cap, and an identical pair of green sunglasses. He removed the glasses and grinned coldly at me. It was Bonner.

Escape was impossible. The first man had a gun; I could see the sagging weight of it in his coat pocket. Patricia gasped, and retreated from him, her eyes wide with alarm. She came back against the desk beside the entrance to the hall. Bonner and the other man came toward me. The latter took out a pack of cigarettes. “We’ve been waiting for you, Rogers,” he said, and held them out toward me. “Smoke?”

For an instant all three of us seemed frozen there, the two of them in an attitude almost of amusement while I looked futilely around for a weapon of some kind and waited dry-mouthed for one of them to move. Then I saw what she was doing, and was more scared than ever. She couldn’t get away with it, not with these people, but there was no way I could stop her. The telephone was directly behind her. She had reached back, lifted off the receiver, set it gently on the desk top, and was trying to dial Operator. I picked up one of the Coke bottles. That kept their eyes on me for another second or two. Then the dial clicked.

Bonner swung around, casually replaced the receiver, and chopped his open right hand against the side of her face. It made a sharp, cracking sound in the stillness, like a rifle shot, and she spun around and sprawled on the floor in a confused welter of skirt and slip and long bare legs. I was on him by then, swinging the Coke bottle. It hit him a glancing blow and knocked the straw cap off. He straightened, and I swung it again. He took this one on his forearm and smashed a fist into my stomach.

It tore the breath out of me, but I managed to stay on my feet. I lashed out at his face with the bottle. He drew back his head just enough to let it slide harmlessly past his jaw, grinned contemptuously, and slipped a blackjack from his pocket. He was an artist with it, like a good surgeon with a scalpel. Three swings of it reduced my left arm to a numb and dangling weight; another tore loose a flap of skin on my forehead, filling my eyes with blood. I tried to clinch with him. He pushed me back, dropped the sap, and slammed a short brutal right against my jaw. I fell back against the controls of the air-conditioner unit and slid to the floor. Patricia Reagan screamed. I brushed blood from my face and tried to get up, and for an instant I saw the other man. He didn’t even bother to watch. He was half-sitting on the corner of the desk, idly swinging his sunglasses by one curved frame while he looked at some of her photographs.

I made it to my feet and hit Bonner once. That was the last time I was in the fight. He knocked me back against the wall and I fell again. He hauled me up and held me against it with his left while he smashed the right into my face. It was like being pounded with a concrete block. I felt teeth loosen. The room began to wheel before my eyes. Just before it turned black altogether, he dropped me. I tried to get up, and made it as far as my knees. He put his shoe in my face and pushed. I fell back on the floor, gasping for breath, with blood in my mouth and eyes. He looked down at me. “That’s for Tampa, sucker.”

The other man tossed the photographs back on the desk and stood up. “That’ll do,” he said crisply. “Put him in that chair.”

Bonner hauled me across the floor by one arm and heaved me up into one of the bamboo armchairs in the center of the room. Somebody threw a towel that hit me in the face. I mopped at the blood, trying not to be sick.

“All right,” the other man said, “go back to the motel and get Flowers. Then get the car out of sight. Over there in the trees somewhere.”

Patricia Reagan was sitting up. Bonner jerked his head toward her. “What about the girl?”

“She stays till we get through.”

“Why? She’ll just be in the way.”

“Use your head. Rogers has friends in Miami, and some of them may know where he is. When he doesn’t come back they may call up here looking for him. Put her on the sofa.”

Bonner jerked a thumb. “Park it, kid.”

She stared at him with contempt.

He shrugged, hauled her up by one arm, and shoved. She shot backward past the end of the coffee table and fell on the sofa across from me. Bonner went out.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s my fault. But I thought I’d lost them.”

“You did, temporarily,” the man put in. “But we didn’t follow you here. We were waiting for you.”

I stared at him blankly.

He pulled the other chair around to the end of the coffee table and sat down where he could watch us both. If Bonner was a journeyman in the field of professional deadliness, this one was a top-drawer executive. It was too evident in the crisp, incisive manner, the stamp of intelligence on the face, and the pitiless, unwavering stare. He could have been anywhere between forty and fifty, and had short, wiry red hair, steel-gray eyes, and a lean face that was coppery with fresh sunburn.

“She doesn’t know anything about this,” I said.

“We’re aware of that, but we weren’t sure you were.

When we lost you in Tampa we watched for you here among other places.”

Blood continued to drip off my face onto my shirt. I mopped at it with the towel. My eyes were beginning to close and my whole face felt swollen. Talking was difficult through the cut and puffy lips. I wondered how long Bonner would be gone. At the moment I was badly beaten, too weak and sick to get out of the chair, but with a few minutes’ rest I might be able to take this one, or at least hold him long enough for her to get away. Then, as if he’d read my thoughts, he lifted the gun from his pocket and shook his head.

“Don’t move, Rogers,” he said. “You’re too valuable to kill, but you wouldn’t get far without a knee.”

The room fell silent except for the humming of the air-conditioner. Patricia’s face was pale, but she forced herself to reach out on the coffee table for a cigarette and light it, and look at him without wavering.

“You can’t get away with this,” she said.

“Don’t be stupid, Miss Reagan,” he replied. “We know all about your working habits; nobody comes out here to bother you. You won’t even have any telephone calls unless it’s somebody looking for Rogers. In which case you’ll say he’s been here and gone.”

She glared defiantly. “And if I don’t?”

“You will. Believe me.”

“You’re Slidell?” I said.

He nodded. “You can call me that.”

“Why were you after Reagan?”

“We’re still after him,” he corrected. “Reagan stole a half million dollars in bonds from me and some other men. We want it back, or what’s left of it.”

“And I suppose you stole them in the first place?”

He shrugged. “You might say they were a little hot. They were negotiable, of course, but an amount that size is unwieldy; fencing them through the usual channels would entail either a lot of time or a large discount. I met Reagan in Las Vegas, and when I found out what he did I sounded him out; he was just the connection we needed. He didn’t want to do it at first, but I found out he owed money to some gamblers in Phoenix and arranged for a little pressure. He came through then. He disposed of a hundred thousand dollars’ worth for the commission we agreed on, and we turned the rest of them over to him. I suppose she’s told you what happened?”

I nodded.

He went on. “We were keeping a close watch on him, of course, and even when he started out on the hunting trip that Saturday morning we followed him long enough to be sure he wasn’t trying to skip out. But he was smarter than we thought. He either had another car hidden out there somewhere, or somebody picked him up. It took us two years to run him down, even with private detectives watching for him in all the likely spots. He was in Miami, but staying out of the night clubs and the big flashy places on the Beach. It was just luck we located him at all. Somebody spotted a picture in a hunting and fishing magazine that seemed to resemble him, and when we ran down the photographer and had a blowup made from the original negative, there was Reagan.

“But he beat us again. He apparently saw the picture too, and when we got to Miami and tracked him down we found he’d been killed two weeks before when his boat exploded and burned between Florida and the Bahamas. At first we weren’t too sure this was a fake, but when we searched the house and grounds and couldn’t turn up even a safe-deposit key, we began checking his girl friends and found one who’d left for Switzerland the very same day. Or so she’d told everybody. But she was careless. When we searched her apartment we found a travel-agency slip in her wastebasket confirming reservations for a Mr. and Mrs. Charles Wayne on a flight to San Juan. He must have seen us there, because by the time we located him he was gone again. We trailed him to New York. By this time they’d separated and he’d hidden her somewhere because he knew we were closing in on him. He flew to Panama. I was one day behind him then, and missed him by only twelve hours in Cristobal when he left with you.”

“And now he’s dead,” I said.

He smiled coldly. “For the third time.”

“I tell you—” I broke off. What was the use? Then I thought of something. “Look, he must have cached the money somewhere.”

“Obviously. All except the twenty-three thousand he was using to get away.”

“Then you’re out of luck. Don’t you see that? You know where she is; she’s in the hospital in Southport, and if she lives, the police are going to get the whole story out of her. She’ll have to tell them where it is.”

“She may not know.”

“Do you know why she came to Southport?” I said. “She wanted to see me, because she hadn’t heard from him. Don’t you see I’m telling the truth? If he were still alive he’d have written her.”

“Yes. Unless he was running out on her too.”

I slumped back in the chair. It was hopeless. And even if I could convince them I was telling the truth, what good was it now? They’d kill us anyway.

“However,” he went on, “there is one serious flaw in that surmise. If he’d intended to run out on her, there would have been no point in writing her that letter from Cristobal.”

“Then you’ll admit he might be dead?”

“That’s right. There are a number of very strange angles to this thing, Rogers, but we’re going to get to the bottom of them in the next few hours. He could be dead for any one of a number of reasons. You and Keefer could have killed him.”

“Oh, for God’s sake—”

“You’re a dead duck. Your story smelled to begin with, and it gets worse every time you turn it over. Let’s take that beautiful report you turned in to the US marshal’s office, describing the heart attack. That fooled everybody at first, but if I’ve found out how you did it, don’t you suppose the FBI will too? They may not pay as much for information as I do, but they’ve got more personnel. You made it sound so convincing. I mean, the average layman trying to make up a heart attack on paper would have been inclined to hoke it up and overplay it a little and say Reagan was doing something very strenuous when it happened, because everybody knows that’s always what kills the man with coronary trouble. Everybody, that is, except the medics. They know you can also die of an attack while you’re lying in bed waiting for somebody to peel you a grape. And it turns out you know that too. One of your uncles died of a coronary thrombosis when you were about fifteen—”

“I wasn’t even present,” I said. “It happened in his office in Norfolk, Virginia.”

“I know. But you
were
present when he had a previous attack. About a year before, when you and he and your father were fishing on a charter boat off Miami Beach. And he wasn’t fighting a fish when it happened. He was just sitting in the fishing chair drinking a bottle of beer. It all adds up, Rogers. It all adds up.”

It was the first time I’d even thought of it for years. I started to say so, but I happened to turn then and glance at Patricia Reagan. Her eyes were on my face, and there was doubt in them, and something else that was very close to horror. Under the circumstances, I thought, who could blame her? Then the front door opened. Bonner came in, followed by a popeyed little man carrying a black metal case about the size of a portable tape recorder.

“Both of you stay where you are,” Slidell ordered. He stood up and turned to Bonner. “Bring Flowers a table and a chair.”

Bonner went down the hall and came back with a small night table. He set it and one of the dining chairs near the chair I was in, and swung me around so I was facing the front window with the table on my right. Then he lighted a cigarette and leaned against the front door, boredly watching.

“This jazz is a waste of time, if you ask me,” he remarked.

“I didn’t,” Slidell said shortly.

Bonner shrugged. I glanced around at Patricia Reagan, but she avoided my eyes and was staring past me at Flowers, as mystified as I was. He was a slightly built little man in his thirties with a bald spot and a sour, pinched face that was made almost grotesque by the slightly bulging eyes. He set the black case on the table and removed the lid. The top panel held a number of controls and switches, but a good part of it was taken up by a window under which was a sheet of graph paper and three styli mounted on little arms.

I glanced up to find Slidell’s eyes on me in chill amusement. “We are about to arrive at that universal goal of all the great philosophers, Rogers. Truth.”

“What do you mean?”

“That’s a lie-detector.”

“Cut it out. Where the hell would you get one?”

“There is nothing esoteric about a lie-detector. Almost anybody could make one. Operating it, however, is something else, and that’s where we’re very fortunate. Flowers is a genius. It talks to him.”

Flowers paid no attention. He ran a long cord over to an electrical outlet, and turned the machine on. Then he began connecting it to me as calmly and methodically as if this were a police station. If it occurred to him at all that there was any quality of madness in the situation, he apparently dismissed it as irrelevant. The whole thing was merely a technical problem. He wrapped a blood-pressure cuff about my right arm above the elbow and pumped it up. Then a tube went about my chest. He threw another switch, and the paper began to move. The styli made little jagged lines as they registered my pulse, blood pressure, and respiration. The room became very quiet. He made minor adjustments to the controls, pulled up the chair and sat down, hunched over the thing with the dedicated expression of a priest. He nodded to Slidell.

“All right, Rogers,” Slidell said. “All you have to do is answer the questions I put to you. Answer any way you like, but answer. Refuse, and you get the gun barrel across your face.”

“Go ahead,” I said. It did no good now to think how stupid I’d been not to think of this myself. I could have asked the FBI to give me a lie-detector test.

“It won’t work,” Bonner said disgustedly. “Everybody knows how they operate. The blood pressure and pulse change when you’re upset or scared. So how’re you going to tell anything with a meatball that’s scared stiff to begin with?”

“There will still be a deviation from the norm,” Flowers said contemptuously.

“To translate,” Slidell said, “what Flowers means is that if Rogers is scared stiff as a normal condition, the instrument will tell us when he’s scared rigid. Now shut up.”

Bonner subsided.

“What is your name?” Slidell asked.

“Stuart Rogers.”

“Where were you born?”

“Coral Gables, Florida.”

“Where did you go to school?”

“The University of Miami.”

“What business is your father in?”

“He was an attorney.”

“You mean he’s dead?”

“Yes,” I said.

“What did he die of?”

“He was killed in an automobile accident.”

There were fifteen or twenty more of these establishing questions while Flowers intently studied his graphs. Then Slidell said, “Did you know a man who told you his name was Wendell Baxter?”

“Yes,” I said.

“And he sailed with you from Cristobal on June first aboard your boat?”

“Yes.”

“And you put him ashore somewhere in Central America or Mexico?”

“No,” I said.

Slidell was leaning over Flowers’ shoulder, watching the styli. Flowers gave a faint shake of the head. Slidell frowned at me.

“Where
did
you put him ashore?”

“I didn’t,” I said.

“Where is he?”

“He’s dead.”

Flowers looked up at Slidell and spread his hands.

“You don’t see any change in pattern at all?” Slidell asked.

“No. Of course, it’s impossible to tell much with one short record—”

Bonner came over. “I told you it wouldn’t work. Let me show you how to get the truth.” His hand exploded against the side of my face and rocked me back in the chair. I tasted blood.

“You’ll have to keep this fool away from him,” Flowers said bitterly. “Look what he’s done.”

The styli were swinging violently.

“Hate,” Flowers explained.

I rubbed my face and stared at Bonner. “Tell your machine it can say that again.”

“Get away from him,” Slidell ordered.

“Let me have that gun, and give me five minutes—”

“Certainly,” Slidell said coldly. “So you can kill him before we find out anything, the way you did Keefer. Can’t you get it through your head that Rogers is the last? He’s the only person on earth who can answer these questions.”

“Well, what good is that if he keeps lying?”

“I’m not sure he is. Reagan could be dead this time. I’ve told you that before. Now get back.”

Bonner moved back to the door. Slidell and Flowers watched while the styli settled down. Patricia Reagan had turned away with her face down on her arms across the back of the couch. I couldn’t tell whether she was crying.

“Listen, Rogers,” Slidell said, “we’re going to get the truth of what happened out there on that boat if it takes a week, and you have to account for every hour of the trip, minute by minute, and we repeat these questions until you crack up and start screaming. The police will never find you, and you can’t get away. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I said wearily.

“Good. Is Reagan dead?”

“Yes.”

“When did he die?”

“Four days out of Cristobal. On June fifth, at about three-thirty p.m.”

“Did you and Keefer kill him?”

“No.”

“How did he die?”

“Of an attack of some kind. The doctor who reviewed the report said it was probably a coronary thrombosis.”

“Did you make up the report?”

“I wrote it.”

“You know what I mean. Was it the truth?”

“It was the truth. It was exactly as it happened.”

Slidell turned to Flowers. “Anything yet?”

Flowers shook his head. “No change at all.”

“All right, Rogers. You read the letter Reagan wrote to Paula Stafford. He said he had twenty-three thousand dollars with him, and that he was going to ask you to put him ashore somewhere. Nineteen thousand dollars of that money is missing. Reefer didn’t have it, and it’s not on your boat. If Reagan is dead, where is it?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“You stole it.”

“I’ve never even seen it.”

“Did Regan ask you to put him ashore?”

“No.”

“In four days he didn’t even mention it?”

“No.”

“Why didn’t he?”

“How do I know?” I said.

Flowers held up a hand. “Run through that sequence again. There’s something funny here.”

I stared at him. One of us must be mad already.

“You’re lying, Rogers,” Slidell said. “You have to be. Reagan sailed on that boat for the purpose of having you slip him ashore. He even told Paula Stafford that. You read the letter.”

“Yes.”

“And you mean to say he didn’t even ask you?”

“He never said anything about it at all.”

“Why didn’t he?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“There it is again,” Flowers interrupted. “A definite change in emotional response. I think he does know.”

“You killed him, didn’t you?” Slidell barked.

“No!” I said.

Then I was standing at the rail again on that Sunday afternoon watching the shrouded body fade into the depths below me, and the strange feeling of dread began to come back. I looked at the machine. The styli jerked erratically, making frenzied swings across the paper.

Slidell shoved his face close to mine.
“You and Keefer killed him!”

“No!” I shouted.

Flowers nodded. “He’s lying.”

My hands were tightly clenched. I closed my eyes and tried to find the answer in the dark confusion of my thoughts. It was there somewhere, just beyond my reach. In God’s name, what was it? The water closed over him and a few bubbles drifted upward with the release of air trapped within the shroud, and he began to fall, sliding deeper and fading from view, and I began to be afraid of something I couldn’t even name, and I wanted to bring him back. I heard Patricia Reagan cry out. A hand caught the front of my shirt and I was half lifted from the chair, and Bonner was shouting in my face. I lost it completely then; everything was gone. Slidell’s voice cut through the uproar like a knife, and Bonner dropped me, and the room was silent.

“When did you kill him?” Slidell barked.

“I didn’t!”

He sighed. “All right. Begin with the first day.”

We ran out of the harbor on the auxiliary, between the big stone breakwaters where the surf was booming. Baxter took the wheel while Keefer and I got sail on her. It was past midmorning now and the Trade was picking up, a spanking full-sail breeze out of the northeast with a moderate sea in which she pitched a little and shipped a few dollops of spray that spatted against the canvas and wet the cushions of the cockpit. She was close-hauled on the starboard tack as we began to beat our way offshore.

“How does she handle?” I asked Baxter.

He was bareheaded and shirtless, as we all were, and his eyes were happier than they had been. “Very nicely,” he said. “Takes just a little weather helm.”

I peered into the binnacle. “Any chance of laying the course?”

He let her come up a little, and slides began to rattle along the luff of the mains’l. The course was still half a point to windward. “It may haul a little more to the easterly as we get offshore,” he said.

I took her for a few minutes to see how she felt, and called to Blackie. “If you want to learn to be a helmsman, here’s a good time to start.”

He grinned cockily, and took the wheel. “This bedpan? I could steer it with a canoe paddle. What’s the course?”

“Full-and-by,” I told him.

“What’s that?”

“It’s a term seamen use,” I said. “Mr. Baxter’ll explain it to you while I make some coffee.”

I made sandwiches at noon and took the helm. The breeze freshened and hauled almost a point to the eastward. Baxter relieved me at four with the mountains of Panama growing hazier and beginning to slide into the sea astern. She was heeled over sharply with all sail set, lifting to the sea with a long, easy corkscrew motion as water hissed and gurgled along the lee rail with that satisfying sound that meant she was correctly trimmed and happy and running down the miles. Spray flew aft and felt cool against our faces. When he took the wheel I looked aloft again and then eyed the main sheet with speculation. He smiled, and shook his head, and I agreed with him. You couldn’t improve on it.

“What’s her waterline length?” he asked.

“Thirty-four,” I said.

There is a formula for calculating the absolute maximum speed of a displacement hull, regardless of the type or amount of power applied. It’s a function of the trochoidal wave system set up by the boat and is 1.34 times the square root of the waterline length. I could see Baxter working this out now.

“On paper,” I said, “she should do a little better than seven and a half knots.”

He nodded. “I’d say she was logging close to six.”

As I went below to start supper I saw him turn once and look astern at the fading coastline of Panama. When he swung back to face the binnacle, there was an expression of relief or satisfaction in the normally grave brown eyes.

The breeze went down a little with the sun, but she still sang her way along. Keefer took the eight-to-twelve watch and I slept for a few hours. When I came on deck at midnight there was only a light breeze and the sea was going down. . . .

“What the hell is this?” Bonner demanded. He came over in front of us. “Are we going to sail that lousy boat up from Panama mile by mile?”

“Foot by foot, if we have to,” Slidell said crisply, “till we find out what happened.”

“You’ll never do it this way. The machine’s no good. He fooled it the first time.”

Flowers stared at him with frigid dislike. “Nobody beats this machine. When he starts to lie, it’ll tell us.”

“Yeah. Sure. Like it did when he said Baxter died of a heart attack.”

“Shut up!” Slidell snapped. “Get back out of the way. Take the girl to the kitchen and tell her to make some coffee. And keep your hands off her.”

“Why?”

“It would be obvious to anybody but an idiot. I don’t want her screaming and upsetting Rogers’ emotional response.”

We’re all crazy, I thought. Maybe everybody who had any contact with Baxter eventually went mad. No, not Baxter. His name was Reagan. I was sitting here hooked up to a shiny electronic gadget like a cow to a milking machine while an acidulous gnome with popeyes extracted the truth from me—truth that I apparently no longer even knew myself. I hadn’t killed Reagan. Even if I were mad now, I hadn’t been then. Every detail of the trip was clear in my mind. But how could it be? The machine said I was trying to hide something. What? And when had it happened? I put my hands up to my face, and it hurt everywhere I touched it. My eyes were swollen almost shut. I was dead tired. I looked at my watch, and saw it was nearly two p.m. Then it occurred to me that if they had arrived five minutes later I would already have called the FBI. That was nice to think about now.

Bonner jerked his head, and Patricia Reagan arose from the couch and followed him into the kitchen like a sleepwalker, or some long-legged mechanical toy.

“You still have plenty of paper?” Slidell asked Flowers. The latter nodded.

“All right, Rogers,” Slidell said. He sat down again, facing me. “Reagan was still alive the morning of the second day—”