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
The Sailcloth Shroud — 93
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 Sailcloth Shroud — 94
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
The Sailcloth Shroud — 95
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
for 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,
The Sailcloth Shroud — 96
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.
“No,” she said. “Naturally, it would have been discovered if
he had. He even had several hundred dollars in his own
account, and almost a month’s salary due him.”
There you are, I thought; it was an absolutely blank wall.
He hadn’t stolen from the bank, but he’d deliberately
disappeared. And when he showed up a month later as Brian
Hardy he was rich.
She had fallen silent. I lighted a cigarette. Well, this must
be the end of the line; I might as well call the FBI. Then she
said quietly, “Would you tell me about it?”
I told her, playing down the pain of the heart attack and
making it as easy for her as I could. I explained about the
split mains’l and being becalmed, and the fact that I had no
choice but to bury him at sea. Without actually lying about it
I managed to gloss over the sketchy aspect of the funeral and
the fact that I hadn’t known all the sea-burial service. I told
her it was Sunday, and gave the position, and tried to tell her
what kind of day it was. She gave a little choked cry and
turned her face away, and I looked down at my cigarette
when she got up abruptly and went out in the kitchen. I sat
there feeling rotten. Even with all the trouble he’d got me
into, I’d liked him, and I was beginning to like her.
Well, I’d known all along it wasn’t going to be easy when I
had to face his family and tell them about it. And it was even
worse now because, while she knew in her heart that it was
her father, there could never be any final proof. That little
residue of doubt would always remain, along with all the
unanswerable questions. Was he lying somewhere out in the
desert, or under two miles of water in the Caribbean Sea?
And wherever he was, why was he there? What had
happened? What was he running from?
The Sailcloth Shroud — 97
Then suddenly it was back again, that strange feeling of
uneasiness that always came over me when I remembered
the moment of his burial, that exact instant in which I’d
stood at the rail and watched his body slide into the depths.
There was no explanation for it. I didn’t even know what it
was. When I reached for it, it was gone, like a bad dream
only partly remembered, and all that was left was this
formless dread that something terrible was going to happen,
or already had. I tried to shrug it off. Maybe it had been a
premonition. Why keep worrying about it now? I’d already
got all the bad news.
She came back in a minute, and if she’d been crying she
had carefully erased the evidence. She was carrying two
bottles of Coke from the refrigerator. “What are you going to
do now?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Call the FBI, I suppose. I’d rather
try convincing them than those gorillas. Oh. I suppose this is
pretty hopeless, but did you ever hear of a man called
Bonner? J. R. Bonner?” The name would be phony, of course.
I described him.
She shook her head. “No. I’m sorry.”
“I hate to drag you into this,” I said, “but I’ll have to tell
them. There’ll probably be an investigation of your father.”
“It can’t be helped,” she said.
I lighted a cigarette. “You’re the only one so far who hasn’t
accused me of killing him, stealing his money, or putting him
ashore and lying about his death. Don’t you think I did, or
are you just being polite?”
She gave me a brief smile. “I don’t believe you did. It’s just
occurred to me that I know you—at least by reputation. Some
friends of mine in Lynn speak very highly of you.”
“Who?” I asked.
“Ted and Frances Holt. They’ve sailed with you two or
three times.”
“For the past three years,” I said. “They’ve shot some
terrific under-water movies around the Exumas.”
“I suppose one of us really ought to say it’s a small world,”
she mused. “Mr. Rogers—”
“Stuart,” I said.
The Sailcloth Shroud — 98
“Stuart. Why doesn’t anybody seem to think this man
Keefer could have taken all that money—assuming it was
even aboard? He seems to have had a sizable amount nobody
can explain.”
“They’d have found it,” I said. “When they add up what was
in the hotel safe and what he conceivably spent, it still comes
out to less than four thousand, and not even a drunk could
throw away nineteen thousand dollars in three days. But the
big factor is that he couldn’t have had it with him when he
left the boat. I was right there. He didn’t have any luggage,
you see, because all his gear was still on that ship he’d
missed in Panama. He’d bought a couple of pairs of
dungarees for the trip, but I was standing right beside him
when he rolled those up, and he didn’t put anything in them.
And he didn’t have a coat. He might have stowed four
thousand dollars in his wallet and in the pockets of his
slacks, but not twenty-three thousand, unless it was in very
large bills. Which I doubt. A man running and trying to hide
out would attract a lot of attention trying to break anything
larger than hundreds.”
“Maybe he took it ashore when you first docked.”
“No. I was with him then too.”
She frowned. “Then it must still be aboard the Topaz.”
“No,” I said. “It’s been searched twice. By experts.”
“Then that seems to leave only one other possibility,” she
said. She paused, and then went on unhappily. “This “isn’t
easy to say, under the circumstances, but do you suppose he
could have been—unbalanced?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I did when I first read the letter,
of course. I mean, he said he had twenty-three thousand with
him, but nobody else ever saw it. He said he was going to ask
me to put him ashore, but he never did. And the fact that he
was going to wait and put a wild proposition like that to me
after we got to sea didn’t sound very logical, either. A
rational man would have realized how slim the chances were
that anybody would go for it, and would have sounded me out
before we sailed. But if you look at all these things again,
you’re not so sure.
“He apparently did have some money with him. Four
thousand, anyway. So if he had that much, maybe he had it
all. And waiting till we got to sea to proposition me makes
The Sailcloth Shroud — 99
sense if you look at it correctly. If he brought it up before we
sailed, I might refuse to take him at all. Getting out of the
Canal Zone before this Slidell caught up with him was the
number-one item. If he brought up the other thing later and I
turned him down, at least he was out of Panama and safe for
the moment.”
“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 drymouthed
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.
The Sailcloth Shroud — 100
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
The Sailcloth Shroud — 101
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
The Sailcloth Shroud — 102
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 airconditioner.
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.
The Sailcloth Shroud — 103
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
The Sailcloth Shroud — 104
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.”
The Sailcloth Shroud — 105
“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.
The Sailcloth Shroud — 106
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