“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?”
The Sailcloth Shroud — 107
“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.
The Sailcloth Shroud — 108
“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.
The Sailcloth Shroud — 109
“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 threethirty
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.”
The Sailcloth Shroud — 110
“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
The Sailcloth Shroud — 111
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
The Sailcloth Shroud — 112
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 Sailcloth Shroud — 113
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.
The Sailcloth Shroud — 114
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.
The Sailcloth Shroud — 115
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.”
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?”
The Sailcloth Shroud — 116
“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 shallowdraft
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.
The Sailcloth Shroud — 117
“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
The Sailcloth Shroud — 118
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
The Sailcloth Shroud — 119
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.
The Sailcloth Shroud — 120
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