The sailcloth shroud

  “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.

  11

  “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—”

  “He was alive until after three-thirty p.m., of the fourth day.”

  He cut me off. “Stop interrupting. He was alive the morning of the second day, and he still hadn’t said anything about putting him ashore?”

  “Not a word,” I said.

  He nodded to Flowers to start the paper
again. “Go on.”

  We went on. The room was silent except for the sound of my voice and the faint humming of the air-conditioner. Graph paper crawled slowly across the face of the instrument from one roll to another while the styli kept up their jagged but unvarying scrawls.

  * * *

  Dawn came with light airs and a gently heaving sea, and we were alone with no land visible anywhere. As soon as I could see the horizon, Baxter relieved me so I could take a series of star sights. I worked them out under the hooded light of the chart table while Keefer snored gently in the bunk just forward of me. Two of them appeared to be good. We were eighty-four miles from Cristobal, and had averaged a little better than four and a half knots. We’d made slightly more leeway than I’d expected, however, and I corrected the course.

  At seven I called Keefer and began frying eggs and bacon. When I was getting them out of the refrigerator, I noticed it was scarcely more than cool inside and apparently hadn’t been running the way it should. After breakfast I checked the batteries of the lighting system, added some distilled water, and ran the generator for a while. We were shaking down to the routine of sea watches now, and Baxter and I were able to get a couple of hours’ sleep while Keefer took the morning watch from eight to twelve. He called me at eleven-thirty.

  I got a good fix at noon that put us a little over a hundred miles out from Cristobal. Baxter took the wheel while I worked it out, and Keefer made a platter of thick sandwiches with canned corned beef and slices of onion. I ate mine at the wheel after I took over for the twelve-to-four trick. I threw the empty milk carton overboard, watched it fall astern as I tried to estimate our speed, and lighted a cigarette. I was content; this was the way to live.

  It was a magnificent day. The wind had freshened a little since early morning and was a moderate easterly breeze now, directly abeam as she ran lightfooted across the miles on the long reach to the northward, heeled down with water creaming along the rail. The sun shone hotly, drying the spray on my face and arms, and sparkling on the face of the sea as the long rollers advanced, lifted us, and went on. I started the main sheet a little, decided it had been right before, and trimmed it again. Baxter came on deck just as I finished. He smiled. “No good sailor is ever satisfied, I suppose.”