The sailcloth shroud

  I fired up the cigarette. As I dropped the lighter back in my pocket, I said curiously, “I don’t get this. Why is the FBI interested in Keefer?”

  “Keefer?” Soames had started out; he paused in the doorway. “Oh, that’s a local police matter.”

  I stared blankly after him. If they weren’t interested in Keefer, what did they want to know? Soames returned in moment carrying a Manila folder. He sat down and began emptying it of its contents: the log I had kept of the trip, the signed and notarized statement regarding Baxter’s death and the inventory of his personal effects.

  He glanced up briefly. “I suppose you’re familiar with all this?”

  “Yes, of course,” I said. “But how’d it get over here? And just what is it you want?”

  “We’re interested in Wendell Baxter.” Soames slid the notarized statement out of the pile, and studied it thoughtfully. “I haven’t had much chance to digest this, or your log, so I’d like to check the facts with you just briefly, if you don’t mind.”

  “Not at all,” I replied. “But I thought the whole thing was closed. The marshal’s office—”

  “Oh, yes,” Soames assured me. “It’s just that they’ve run into a little difficulty in locating Baxter’s next of kin, and they’ve asked us to help.”

  “I see.”

  He went on crisply. “You’re owner and captain of the forty-foot ketch Topaz, which you bought in Cristobal, Panama Canal Zone, on May twenty-seven of this year, through Joseph Hillyer, Miami yacht broker who represented the sellers. That’s correct?”

  “Right.”

  “You sailed from Cristobal on June one, at ten-twenty a.m., bound for this port, accompanied by two other men you engaged as deckhands for the trip. One was Francis L. Keefer, a merchant seaman, possessing valid A.B. and Lifeboat certificates as per indicated numbers, American national, born in Buffalo, New York, September twelve, nine-teen-twenty. The other was Wendell Baxter, occupation or profession unspecified but believed to be of a clerical nature, not possessed of seaman’s papers of any kind but obviously familiar with the sea and well versed in the handling of small sailing craft such as yachts, home address San Francisco, California. Four days out of Cristobal, on June five, Baxter collapsed on deck at approximately three-thirty p.m. while trimming a jib sheet, and died about twenty minutes later. There was nothing you could do to help him, of course. You could find no medicine in his suitcase, the boat’s medicine chest contained nothing but the usual first-aid supplies, and you were several hundred miles from the nearest doctor.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “If I never feel that helpless again, it’ll be all right with me.”

  Soames nodded. “Your position at the time was 16.10 North, 81.40 West, some four hundred miles from the Canal, and approximately a hundred miles off the coast of Honduras. It was obvious you were at least another six days from the nearest Stateside port, so you put about immediately to return to the Canal Zone with his body, but in three days you saw you were never going to get there in time. That’s essentially it?”

  “In three days we made eighty-five miles,” I said. “And the temperature down there in the cabin where his body was ran around ninety degrees.”

  You couldn’t have gone into some port in Honduras?”

  I gestured impatiently. “This has all been threshed out with the Coast Guard. I could have tried for some port on the mainland of Honduras or Nicaragua, or gone on to Georgetown, Grand Cayman, which was less than two hundred miles to the north of us—except that I wasn’t cleared for any of those places. Baxter was already dead, so it’s doubtful the port authorities would have considered it a legitimate emergency. And just to come plowing in unauthorized, with no bill of health or anything, carrying the body of a man who’d died at sea of some unspecified ailment—we’d have been slapped in quarantine and tied up in red tape till we had beards down to our knees. Besides being fined. The only thing to do was go back.”

  “And you had nothing but bad luck, right from the beginning?”

  “Look,” I said hotly, “we tried. We tried till we couldn’t stand it any longer. Believe me, I didn’t want the responsibility of burying him at sea. In the first place, it wasn’t going to be pleasant facing his family. And if we couldn’t bring the body ashore for an autopsy, there’d have to be a hearing of some kind to find out what he died of. There’s nothing new about burial at sea, of course, especially in the old days when ships were a lot slower than they are now, but a merchant or naval vessel with thirty to several hundred people aboard is—well, a form of community itself, with somebody in authority and dozens of witnesses. Three men alone in a small boat would be something else. When only two come back, you’re going to have to have a little better explanation than just saying Bill dropped dead and we threw him overboard. That’s the reason for all that detailed report on the symptoms of the attack. I wrote it out as soon as I saw we were probably going to have to do it.”

  Soames nodded. “It’s quite thorough. Apparently the doctor who reviewed it had no difficulty in diagnosing the seizure as definitely some form of heart attack, and probably a coronary thrombosis. I wonder if you’d fill me in just briefly on what happened after you started back?”

  “To begin with,” I said, “we tore the mains’l all to hell. The weather had turned unsettled that morning, even before Baxter had the attack. Just before dusk I could see a squall making up to the eastward. It looked a little dirty, but I didn’t want to shorten down any more than we had to considering the circumstances. So we left everything on and just turned in a couple of reefs in the main and mizzen. Or started to. We were finishing the main when it began to kick up a little and the rain hit us. I ran back to the wheel to keep her into the wind, while Keefer tied in the last few points and started to raise sail again. I suppose it’s my fault for not checking, but I’d glanced off toward the squall line and when I looked back at the mains’l it was too late. He had the halyard taut and was throwing it on the winch. I yelled for him to slack off, but with all the rain he didn’t hear me. What had happened was that he’d mixed up a pair of reef points—tied one from the second row to another on the opposite side in the third set. That pulls the sail out of shape and puts all the strain in one place. It was just a miracle it hadn’t let go already. I screamed at him again, and he finally heard me this time and looked around, but all he did was shake his head that he couldn’t understand what I was saying. Just as I jumped from behind the wheel and started to run forward he slipped the handle into the winch and took a turn, and that was the ball game. It split all the way across.

  We didn’t have another one aboard. The previous owners had pretty well butched up the sail inventory on the way down to the Canal—blew out a mains’l and lost the genoa overboard. I managed to patch up this one after a fashion, using material out of an old stays’l, but it took two days. Maybe it wouldn’t have made much difference anyway, because the weather went completely sour—dead calm about half the time, with occasional light airs that hauled all around the compass. But with just that handkerchief of a mizzen, and stays’l and working jib, we might as well have been trying to row her to the Canal. We ran on the auxiliary till we used up all the gasoline aboard, and then when there was no wind we just drifted. Keefer kept moaning and griping for us to get rid of him; said he couldn’t sleep in the cabin with a dead man. And neither of us could face the thought of trying to prepare any food with him lying there just forward of the galley. We finally moved out on deck altogether.

  “By Sunday morning—June eighth—I knew it had to be done. I sewed him in what was left of the old stays’l, with the sounding lead at his feet. It was probably an all-time low in funerals. I couldn’t think of more than a half dozen words of the sea-burial service, and there was no Bible aboard. We did shave and put on shirts, and that was about it. We buried him at one p.m. The position’s in the log, and I think it’s fairly accurate. The weather improved that night, and we came on here and arrived on the sixteenth. Along with
the report, I turned his personal belongings over to the marshal’s office. But I don’t understand why they couldn’t locate some of his family; his address is right there—1426 Roland Avenue, San Francisco.”

  “Unfortunately,” Soames replied, “there is no Roland Avenue in San Francisco.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “So we hoped you might be able to help us.”

  I frowned, feeling vaguely uneasy. For some reason I was standing at the rail again on that day of oily calm and blistering tropic sun, watching the body in its Orlon shroud as it sank beneath the surface and began its long slide into the abyss. “That’s just great,” I said. “I don’t know anything about him either.”

  “In four days, he must have told you something about himself.”

  “You could repeat it all in forty seconds. He told me he was an American citizen. His home was in California. He’d come down to the Canal Zone on some job that had folded up after a couple of months, and he’d like to save the plane fare back to the States by sailing up with me.”

  “He didn’t mention the name of any firm, or government agency?”

  “Not a word. I gathered it was a clerical or executive job of some kind, because he had the appearance. And his hands were soft.”

  “He never said anything about a wife? Children? Brothers?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Did he say anything at all during the heart attack?”

  “No. He seemed to be trying to, but he couldn’t get his breath. And the pain was pretty terrible until he finally lost consciousness.”

  ‘I see.” Soames’ blue eyes were thoughtful. “Would you describe him?”

  I’d say he was around fifty. About my height, six-one. but very slender; I doubt he weighed over a hundred and seventy. Brown eyes, short brown hair with a good deal of gray in it, especially around the temples, but not thinning or receding to any extent. Thin face, rather high forehead, good nose and bone structure, very quiet, and soft-spoken—when he said anything at all. In a movie you’d cast him as a doctor or lawyer or the head of the English department. That’s the thing, you see; he wasn’t hard-nosed or rude about not talking about himself; he was just reserved. He minded his own business, and seemed to expect you to mind yours. And since he was apparently down on his luck, it seemed a little on the tasteless side to go prying into matters he didn’t want to talk about.”

  “What about his speech?”

  “Well, the outstanding thing about it was that there was damned little of it. But he was obviously well educated. And if there was any trace of a regional accent, I didn’t hear it.”

  “Was there anything foreign about it at all? I don’t mean low comedy or vaudeville, but any hesitancy, or awkwardness of phrasing?”

  “No,” I said. “It was American.”

  “I see.” Soames tapped meditatively on the desk with the eraser end of a pencil. “Now, you say he was an experienced sailor. But he had no papers, and you don’t think he’d ever been a merchant seaman, so you must have wondered about it. Could you make any guess as to where he’d picked up this knowledge of the sea?”

  “Yes. I think definitely he’d owned and sailed boats of his own, probably boats in the offshore cruising and ocean-racing class. Actually, a merchant seaman wouldn’t have known a lot of the things Baxter did, unless he was over seventy and had been to sea under sail. Keefer was a good example. He was a qualified A.B.; he knew routine seamanship and how to splice and handle line, and if you gave him a compass course he could steer it. But if you were going to windward and couldn’t quite lay the course, half the time he’d be lying dead in the water and wouldn’t know it. He had no feel. Baxter did. He was one of the best wind-ship helmsmen I’ve ever run into. Besides native talent, that takes a hell of a lot of experience you don’t pick up on farms or by steering power boats or steamships.”

  “Did he know celestial navigation?”

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s a funny thing, but I think he did. I mean, he never mentioned it, or asked if he could take a sight and work it out for practice, but somehow I got a hunch just from the way he watched me that he knew as much about it as I did. Or maybe more. I’m no whiz; there’s not much occasion to use it in the Bahamas.”

  “Did he ever use a term that might indicate he could have been an ex-Navy officer? Service slang of any kind?”

  “No-o. Not that I can recall at the moment. But now you’ve mentioned it, nearly everything about him would fit. And I’m pretty sure they teach midshipmen to sail at the Academy.”

  “Yes. I think so.”

  “He didn’t have a class ring, though. No rings of any kind.”

  “You didn’t have a camera aboard, I take it?”

  “No,” I said.

  “That’s too bad; a snapshot would have been a great help. What about fingerprints? Can you think of any place aboard we might raise a few? I realize it’s been sixteen days—”

  “No. I doubt there’d be a chance. She’s been in the yard for the past four, and everything’s been washed down.”

  “I see.” Soames stood up. “Well, we’ll just have to try to locate somebody in the Zone who knew him. Thank you for coming in, Mr. Rogers. We may be in touch with you later, and I’d appreciate it if you would think back over those four days when you have time, and make a note of anything else you recall. You’re living aboard, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sometimes association helps. You might be reminded of some chance remark he let fall, the name of a city, or yacht club, or something like that. Call us if you think of anything that could help.”

  “Sure, I’ll be glad to,” I said. “I don’t understand, though, why he would give me a fake address. Do you suppose the name was phony too?”

  Soames’ expression was polite, but it indicated the conversation was over. “We really have no reason to think so, that I can see.”

  * * *

  I walked over and caught a cab in front of the Warwick Hotel. During the ten-minute ride across the city to the eastern end of the waterfront and Harley’s boatyard, I tried to make some sense out of the whole affair. Maybe Willetts was right, after all; Keefer could have stolen that money from Baxter’s suitcase. If you assumed Baxter had lied about where he was from, he could have been lying about everything. And he’d never actually said he didn’t have any money; he’d merely implied it. That was the hell 0f it; he’d never actually said anything. He became more mysterious every time you looked at him, and when you tried to get hold of something concrete he was as insubstantial as mist.

  But what about Keefer? Even if you could bring yourself to accept the premise that he was low enough to steal from a dead man—which was a little hard to swallow—how could he have been that stupid? Maybe he was no mental giant, but still it must have occurred to him that if Baxter was carrying that much money somebody must know about it, some friend or relative, and when the money turned up missing there’d be an investigation and charges of theft. Then a disquieting thought occurred to me. So far, nobody had claimed the money. What did you make of that? Had Keefer known, before he took it? But how could he? Then I shrugged, and gave up. Hell, there wasn’t even any proof that Keefer had stolen anything.

  The taxi bumped across the tracks. I got out at the boatyard entrance and paid off the driver. This end of the waterfront was quiet on Saturday afternoon. To the right was another small shipyard that was closed now, and a half mile beyond that the city yacht basin, and Quarantine, and then the long jetties running out into the open Gulf. To the left were the packing sheds and piers where the shrimp boats clustered in a jungle of masts and suspended nets. These gave way in the next block to the first of the steamship terminals, the big concrete piers and slips that extended along the principal waterfront of the port.

  The old watchman swung back the gate. “Here’s your key,” he said. “They had me come with ‘em while they searched the boat. Didn’t bother anything.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

&n
bsp; “Didn’t say what they was looking for,” he went on tentatively.

  “They didn’t tell me either,” I said. I went aboard the Topaz and changed clothes in the stifling cabin. Nothing was disturbed, as far as I could see. It was only three p.m.; maybe I could still get some work done. I loaded the pockets of my dungarees with sandpaper, went back up the mainmast, and resumed where I’d left off sanding, just below the spreaders. I sat in the bosun’s chair, legs gripping the mast to hold myself in against it while I smoothed the surface of the spar with long strokes of the abrasive. For the moment I forgot Keefer, and Baxter, and the whole puzzling mess. This was more like it. If you couldn’t be at sea, the next best thing was working about a boat, maintaining her, dressing her until she sparkled, and tuning her until she was like something alive. It seemed almost a shame to offer her for sale, the way she was shaping up. Money didn’t mean much, except as it could be used for the maintenance and improvement of the Orion.

  I looked forward and aft below me. Another three or four days should do it. She’d already been hauled, scraped, and painted with anti-fouling. Her topsides were a glistening white. The spars and other brightwork had been taken down to the wood, and when I finished sanding this one and the mizzen I could put on the first coat of varnish. Overhaul the tracks and slides, replace the lines in the outhauls, reeve new main and mizzen halyards, replace that frayed headstay with a piece of stainless steel, give the deck a coat of gray nonskid, and that would about do it The new mains’l should be here by Tuesday, and the yard ought to have the refrigerator overhauled and back aboard by then. Maybe I’d better jack them up about it again on Monday morning.

  Probably start the newspaper ad next Wednesday, I thought. She shouldn’t be around long at $15,000, not the way she was designed and built. If I still hadn’t sold her in ten days, I’d turn her over to a yacht broker at an asking price of twenty, and go back to Miami. The new mains’l had hurt, and I hadn’t counted on having to rebuild the refrigerator, but still I’d be home for less than nine thousand.