The sailcloth shroud

  “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.”

&n
bsp; “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.”

  10

  She brushed sand from her bare feet and opened the door at the left end of the porch. The kitchen was bright with colored tile and white enamel. I followed her through an arched doorway into a large dining and living room. “Please sit down,” she said. “I won’t be long.” She disappeared down a hallway to the right.

  I lighted a cigarette and looked around at the room. It was comfortable, and the light pleasantly subdued after the glare of the white coral sand outside. The drapes over the front window were of some loosely woven dark green material, and the lighter green walls and bare terrazzo floor added to the impression of coolness. Set in the wall to the left, next to the carport, was an air-conditioner unit whose faint humming made the only sound. Above it was a mounted permit, a very large one. Between it and the front window on that side was a hi-fi set in a blond cabinet. At the rear of the room was a sideboard, and a dining table made of bamboo and heavy glass. A long couch and two armchairs with a teak coffee table between them formed a conversational group near the center of the room. The couch and chairs were bamboo with brightly colored cushions. On the other side of the room, between the hallway and the front, were stacks of loaded book shelves. Just to the right of the hallway was a massive desk on which were a telephone, a portable typewriter, several boxes of paper, and two more cameras, a Rollieflex and a 35-mm job. I walked over to the desk arid saw that it also held several trays of colored slides and a pile of photographs of Keys scenes, mostly eight-by-ten blowups in both black-and-white and color. I wondered if she’d done them, and then remembered Music in the Wind. She was an artist with a camera. Somewhere down the hall was the muted sound of a shower running.

  In a few minutes she came back. She had changed to a crisp summery dress of some pale blue material, and was bare-legged and wearing sandals. Her hair, cut rather short in a careless, pixie effect, seemed a little darker than it had in the sun. Patricia Reagan was a very attractive girl. She had regained her composure somewhat, and managed a smile. “I’m sorry to keep you waiting.”

  “Not at all,” I said. We sat down and lighted cigarettes.

  “How did you locate me?” she asked.

  I told her. “Your roommate in Santa Barbara said you were doing some magazine articles.”

  She made a deprecating gesture. “Not on assignment, I’m afraid. I’m not a professional yet. An editor has promised to look at an article on the Keys, and I had a chance to stay in this house while Mr. and Mrs. Holland are in Europe. They were neighbors of ours in Massachusetts. And in the meantime I’m doing some colored slides, under-water shots along the reefs.”

  “Skin-diving alone’s not a very good practice,” I said.

  “Oh, I’m just working in shallow water. But the whole area’s fascinating, and the water’s beautiful.”

  I grinned. “I’m a Floridian, and I don’t like to sound unpatriotic, but you ought to try the Bahamas. The colors of the water under the right light conditions almost make you hurt.”

  She nodded somberly. “I was there once, when I was twelve. My mother and father and I cruised in the Exumas and around Eleuthera for about a month in a shallow-draft yawl.”

  “A charter?” I asked.

  “No. It was ours. He and I brought it down, and Mother flew to Nassau to join us. She always got sick offshore.”

  “What was the name of the yawl?”

  The brown eyes met mine in a quick glance. Then she shook her head, a little embarrassed. “Enchantress. Princess Pat was a pet name, one of those top-secret jokes between fathers and very young daughters. He was the only one who ever used it.”

  “I’m sorry about all this,” I said. “But how did he get to Phoenix?”

  Downhill, as it turned out. She told me, and even after all this time there was hurt and bewilderment in it. The Reagans were from a small town named Elliston on the coast of Massachusetts near Lynn. They’d always been sailors, either professional or amateur, several having been mates and shipmasters during the clipper-ship era in the 4os and 50s and another a privateer during the Revolution. Clifford Reagan belonged to the yacht club and had sailed in a number of ocean races, though not in his own boat.

  I gathered his father was fairly well-to-do, though she made as little of this as possible. He’d been in the foundry business and in real estate, and owned considerable stock in the town’s leading bank and was on its board of directors. Clifford Reagan went to work in the bank when he finished college. He married a local girl, and Patricia was their only child. You could tell she and her father were very close when she was small. Then when she was sixteen the whole thing went on the rocks.

  Her mother and father were divorced, but that was only the beginning. When her mother’s attorneys wanted an accounting of the community property the rest of it was discovered; he’d lost not only everything they owned gambling on Canadian mining stocks, but also $17,000 he’d taken from the bank.

  “Nobody ever knew about it except the president of the bank and the family,” she said, staring down at her hands in her lap. “My grandfather made the shortage good, so he wasn’t prosecuted. The only stipulation was that he resign, and never work in a bank again.”

  “But he was working in one in Phoenix,” I said.

  She nodded. “Actually, there was no way anyone could stop him. It had all been so hushed up before that even the bonding company didn’t know about it. Grandfather was afraid it would happen again, but what could he do? Tell the bank out there that his own son had stolen money? And perhaps ruin the last chance he’d ever have to live it down and redeem himself?”

  “But how did a man who was already past forty get a job in a bank without references?” I asked.

  “A woman,” she said. “His second wife.”

  Reagan had probably settled on Arizona as being about as remote from any connection with his past life as it would be possible to get and still stay on the same planet. He’d worked fo
r a while as an account representative in a brokerage office, and soon came to know a great many people in some of the high-bracket suburbs of Phoenix. He met Mrs. Canning about that time, and married her in 1951. She was the widow of a Columbus, Ohio, real-estate developer who had bought a big ranch near Phoenix and raised quarter horses. She also owned a big block of stock in the Drovers National, so nothing could be simpler than Reagan’s going to work there if that was what he wanted to do.

  The marriage didn’t last—they were separated in 1954—but oddly enough the job did. They liked him at the bank, and he worked at the job and was good at it. The distinguished appearance, quiet, well-bred manner, and the fact that he was on good terms with lots of wealthy potential customers did him no harm either. He was promoted several times, and by 1956 was in charge of the trust department.

  “He was unhappy, though,” she went on. “I think desperately unhappy. I could sense it, even though we couldn’t talk to each other the way we used to. I saw him only once a year, when I went out there for two weeks after school was out. We both tried very hard, but I guess it’s a special kind of country that fathers and very young daughters live in, and once you leave it you can never go back. We’d play golf, and go riding, and skeet shooting, and he’d take me to parties, but the real lines of communication were down.”

  She realized that he hated the desert. He was in the wrong world, and he was too old now to go somewhere else and start over. She didn’t think he drank much; he simply wasn’t the type for it. But she thought there were lots of girls, each one probably progressively younger, and trips to Las Vegas, even though he would have to be careful about that in the banking business.

  She was a senior in college that January in 1956 when the call came from the sheriff’s office. She flew out to Phoenix. “I was afraid,” she went on, “and so was Grandfather. Neither of us believed they’d ever find him alive. Suicide was in our minds, though for different reasons. Grandfather was afraid he’d got in trouble again. That he’d taken money from the bank.”

  “But he hadn’t?” I asked.