The sailcloth shroud

  I grinned. “I expect not. But I thought you’d turned in. Couldn’t you sleep?”

  “A day like this is too beautiful to waste,” he replied. “And I thought I’d get a little sun.”

  He was wearing a white bathrobe with his cigarettes and lighter in one of the pockets. He lighted a cigarette, slipped off the robe, rolled it into a pillow, and stretched out in the sun along the cushions in the starboard side of the cockpit, wearing only a pair of boxer shorts. He lay feet forward, with his head about even with the wheel. He closed his eyes.

  “I was just looking at the chart,” he said. “If we keep on logging four to five knots we should be up in the Yucatan Channel by Sunday.”

  “There’s a chance,” I said idly. Sunday or Monday, it didn’t really matter. I was in no hurry. You trimmed and started the sheets and steered and kept one eye forever on the wind as if that last fraction of a knot were a matter of life or death, but it had nothing to do with saving time. It was simply a matter of craftsmanship, of sailing a boat rather than merely riding on it.

  He was silent for a few minutes. Then he asked, “What kind of boat is the Orion?”

  “Fifty-foot schooner. Gaff-rigged on the fore and jib-headed on the main, and carries a fore-tops’l, stays’l, and working jib. She accommodates a party of six besides the two of us in the crew.”

  “Is she very old?”

  “Yes. Over twenty years now. But sound.”

  “Upkeep gets to be a problem, though,” he said thoughtfully. “I mean, as they get progressively older. What is your basic charter price?”

  “Five hundred a week, plus expenses.”

  “I see,” he said. “It seems to me, though, you could do better with something a little larger. Say a good shallow-draft ketch or yawl, about sixty feet. With the right interior layout, it would probably handle more people, so you could raise your charter price. Wouldn’t take any larger crew, and if it were still fairly new your maintenance costs might be less.”

  “Yes, I know,” I said. “I’ve been on the lookout for something like that for a long time, but I’ve never been able to swing it. It’d take fifteen thousand to twenty thousand more than I could get for the Orion.”

  “Yes,” he agreed, “it would be pretty expensive.”

  We fell silent. He sat up to get another cigarette from the pocket of his robe. I thought I heard him say something, and glanced up from the compass card. “I beg your pardon?”

  He made no reply. He was turned slightly away from me, facing forward, so I saw only the back of his head. He had the lighter in his hand as if he’d started to light the cigarette and then had forgotten it. He tilted his head back, stretching his neck, and put a hand up to the base of his throat.

  “Something wrong?” I asked.

  It was almost a full minute before he answered. I glanced at the compass card, and brought the wheel up a spoke. “Oh,” he said quietly. “No. Just a touch of indigestion.”

  I grinned. “That’s not much of a recommendation for Blackie’s sandwiches.” Then I thought uneasily of the refrigerator; food poisoning could be a very dangerous thing at sea. But the corned beef was canned; it couldn’t have been spoiled. And the milk had tasted all right.

  “It was the onions,” he said. “I should never eat them.”

  “There’s some bicarbonate in one of the lockers above the sink,” I told him.

  “I have something here,” he said. He carefully dropped the lighter back in the pocket of his robe and took out a small bottle of pills. He shook one out and put it in his mouth.

  “Hold the wheel,” I said, “and I’ll get you some water.”

  “Thanks,” he said. “I don’t need it.”

  He lay back with his head pillowed on the robe and his eyes closed. Once or twice he shifted a little and drew his knees up as if he were uncomfortable, but he said nothing further about it except to reply with a brief “Yes” when I asked if he felt better. After a while he groped for the bottle and took another of the pills, and then lay quietly for a half hour, apparently asleep. His face and body were shiny with sweat as the sun beat down on him, and I began to be afraid he’d get a bad burn. I touched him on the shoulder to wake him up.

  “Don’t overdo it the first day,” I said.

  He wasn’t asleep, however. “Yes, I expect you’re right,” he replied. “I think I’ll turn in.” He got up a little unsteadily and made his way down the companion ladder. After he was gone I noticed he’d forgotten to take the robe. I rolled it tightly and wedged it in back of a cushion so it wouldn’t blow overboard.

  A school of porpoises picked us up and escorted us for a while, leaping playfully about the bow. I watched them, enjoying their company as I always did at sea. In about a half hour Keefer came up from below carrying a mug of coffee. He sat down in the cockpit.

  “You want a cup?” he asked.

  I looked at my watch. It was three now. “No, thanks. I’ll get one after Baxter takes over.”

  “We ought to have our tails kicked,” he said, “for not thinking to buy a fish line. At this speed we could pick up a dolphin or barracuda.”

  “I intended to,” I said, “but forgot it.”

  We talked for a while about trolling. Nowadays, when practically all ships made sixteen knots or better, it was out of the question, but when he’d first started going to sea just before the Second World War he’d been on a few of the old eight- and ten-knot tankers on the coastwise run from Texas to the East Coast, and sometimes in the Stream they’d rig a trolling line of heavy sashcord with an inner tube for a snubber. Usually the fish tore off or straightened the hook, but occasionally they’d manage to land one.

  He stood up and stretched. “Well, I think I’ll flake out again.”

  He started below. Just as his shoulders were disappearing down the companion hatch my eyes fell on Baxter’s robe, which was getting wet with spray. “Here,” I called out, “take this down, will you?”

  I rolled it tightly and tossed it. The distance wasn’t more than eight feet, but just before it reached his outstretched hand a freakish gust of wind found an opening and it ballooned suddenly and was snatched to leeward. I sprang from the wheel and lunged for it, but it sailed under the mizzen boom, landed in the water a good ten feet away, and began to fall astern. I looked out at it and cursed myself for an idiot.

  “Stand by the backstay!” I called out to Keefer. “We’ll go about and pick it up.”

  Then I remembered we hadn’t tacked once since our departure from Cristobal. By the time I’d explained to him about casting off the weather backstay and setting it up on the other side as we came about, the robe was a good hundred and fifty yards astern. “Hard a-lee!” I shouted, and put the helm down. We came up into the wind with the sails slatting. I cast off the port jib sheet and trimmed the starboard one. They ran aft through fairleads to winches at the forward end of the cockpit. Blackie set up the runner. We filled away, and I put the wheel hard over to bring her back across our wake. I steadied her up just to leeward of it.

  “Can you see it?” I yelled to Keefer.

  “Dead ahead, about a hundred yards,” he called back. “But it’s beginning to sink.”

  “Take the wheel!” I ordered. I slid a boathook from under its lashing atop the doghouse and ran forward. I could see it. It was about fifty yards ahead, but only a small part of it still showed above the surface. “Left just a little!” I sang out. “Steady, right there!”

  It disappeared. I marked the spot, and as we bore down on it I knelt at the rail just forward of the mainmast and peered down with the boathook poised. We came over the spot. Then I saw it directly below me, three or four feet under the surface now, a white shape drifting slowly downward through the translucent blue of the water. . . .

  * * *

  “Look!” Flowers cried out.

  12

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

  I gr
ipped 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 o
f 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.