They crowded around the table, staring down at the
instrument and the sudden, spasmodic jerking of its styli.
I gripped 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.
The Sailcloth Shroud — 121
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
The Sailcloth Shroud — 122
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
The Sailcloth Shroud — 123
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
The Sailcloth Shroud — 124
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 of 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
The Sailcloth Shroud — 125
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.
There were only parts of it I understood. One man was still
in Southport, covering that end of it. Paula Stafford was
alive, but the police hadn’t been able to question her yet, as
far as he knew. But I couldn’t guess what he meant by the
“other one.”
He came back and sat down. I wondered what Bill would
do, and how much longer we had.
“Let’s consider what Reagan would do,” he said. “He knew
he could die before he reached the States. You would turn
his suitcase over to the US marshal or the police, and the
money would be discovered. At first glance, that would seem
to be no great hardship, since he wouldn’t need it any longer,
but it’s not quite that simple. I’ve made a rather thorough
study of Reagan—anybody who steals a half million dollars
from me is almost certain to arouse my interest—and he was
quite a complex man. He was a thief, but an uncomfortable
thief, if you follow me. It was gambling that always got him
into trouble. But all that’s beside the point. What I’m getting
at is that he loved his daughter very much. He’d made a
mess of his life—that is, from his viewpoint—and while he
was willing to take the consequences himself, he’d do almost
anything to keep from hurting her again.”
Patricia made a little outcry. Slidell glanced at her
indifferently and went on.
“I’m fairly certain the real reason, or at least one reason,
he agreed to go along with us is that he’d been dipping into
The Sailcloth Shroud — 126
the till at the Drovers National, as he had at the other bank,
and he saw a way to put the money back before they caught
up with him. But there was risk in this too, so he decided to
take it all and fade.
“At any rate, if you’re still following me, he was dead,
buried, and honest, as far as his daughter was concerned.
But if all that money came to light there’d be an
investigation, eventually they’d find out who he really was,
and she’d have to bury him all over again, this time as one of
the most publicized thieves since Dillinger.
“So he had to do something with it? But what? Throw it
overboard? That might seem just a little extreme later on
when he arrived in Southport still in good health. Hide it
somewhere on the boat? That would be more like it, because
then if he arrived all right he merely pulled it out of the
hiding place and went on his way. But there are two
difficulties; it’d be pretty hard, if not downright impossible,
to hide anything permanently on a forty-foot boat, to begin
with, and then there was Paula Stafford. She knew he had it,
of course, so when it turned up missing she might come out
of hiding and jump you about it, which could lead to an
investigation, the very thing he was trying to avoid. And
there’s no doubt he would much rather she had it anyway.
Along with the rest of it. So the chances are he’d try to
arrange for her to get it, in case he died, without anyone’s
ever knowing he had it aboard. But how? And what went
wrong?”
He was approaching it from a different direction, but he
was leading me toward it as inevitably as I’d been headed for
it myself. I wondered how near we would get before the
machine betrayed me, or before the conscious effort of my
holding back was written there in its jagged scrawls for
Flowers to see. The things it measured were outside
voluntary control.
His eyes shifted from the machine to my face like those of
a big cat, just waiting. “We don’t know how he tried to do it.
But what went wrong, obviously, was Keefer. When he had
the big one, how long was it from the time it struck until he
died?”
“I guessed it at about twenty minutes,” I said. “Naturally, I
wasn’t watching a clock. And it’s not an easy thing to tell,
The Sailcloth Shroud — 127
anyway, in spite of the offhand way they do it on television.
He could have been dead five or ten minutes before we were
sure.” Add all the details possible, I thought, as long as
they’re true and don’t really matter.
“Thank you, Doctor,” he said, with a bleak smile.
“Approximately how long was he conscious?”
“Just the first few minutes. Five at the most.”
“He didn’t say anything?”
“No.” Nothing coherent, I started to add, but thought
better of it. She was having a bad enough time of it as it was
without being told the kind of sounds he made.
“Was Keefer alone with him at any time?”
“No,” I said.
“So he was the one who went to look in the suitcase for
medicine?”
“Yes.”
Flowers was watching the scrawls with rapt attention, but
he had said nothing yet. As long as I concentrated on one
question at a time I was all right. But each one was a step,
leading up to where the noose was waiting.
“When did you inventory his things?”
“The next morning.”
“And at least half of that time you would have been on
deck, at the wheel, while he was below alone?”
“If you mean could he have gone through Reagan’s
suitcase,” I said coldly, “of course he could. And he probably
did, since he had four thousand dollars when we arrived in
Southport. But he couldn’t have carried twenty-three
thousand ashore with him unless it was in five hundred-or
thousand-dollar bills. He didn’t have it, anyway, or the police
would have found it.”
“I know that,” he broke in. “But let’s plug all the holes as
we go. You docked in Southport Monday afternoon, the
sixteenth. Was that at the boatyard?”
“No,” I said. “We didn’t go alongside a pier at all that day.
We anchored at the City Yacht Basin.”
“Did you go ashore?”
The Sailcloth Shroud — 128
“I didn’t. Keefer did. He put the bite on me for another
twenty-dollar advance and went uptown.”
“Then he wasn’t entirely stupid. You knew he was broke, so
he had sense enough to ask you for money. Could he have
been carrying any of it then?”
“Not much,” I said. “I was below when he washed up and
dressed, so he didn’t have it tied around his body anywhere. I
saw his wallet when he put the twenty in it. It was empty. He
couldn’t have carried much just in his pockets.”
“You didn’t leave the boat at all?”
“Only when I rowed him over to the pier in the dinghy. I
went over to the phone in the yacht club and called the
estimators in a couple of boatyards to have them come look
the job over.”
“What time did Keefer come back?”
“The next morning, around eight. About half drunk.”
“He must have had some of the money, then, unless he set
a world’s record for milking a twenty. What about that
morning?”
“He shaved and had a cup of coffee, and we went up to the
US marshal’s office. He couldn’t have picked up anything
aboard the boat because it was only about ten minutes and I
was right there all the time. We spent the morning with the
marshal and the Coast Guard, and went back to the Yacht
Basin about two-thirty p.m. I paid him the rest of his money,
he rolled up the two pairs of dungarees, the only clothes he
had to carry, and I rowed him over to the pier. He couldn’t
have put anything in the dungarees. I wasn’t watching him
deliberately, of course; I just happened to be standing there
talking to him. He rode off with the truck from Harley’s
boatyard. They’d brought me some gasoline so I could get
over to the yard; the tanks were dry because we’d used it all
trying to get back to Cristobal when we were becalmed. The
police say he definitely had three to four thousand with him a
half hour later when he checked in at the hotel, so he must
have had it in his wallet.”
“You moved the boat to Harley’s boatyard that afternoon,
then? Did you go ashore that night?”
“No.”
“Wednesday night?”
The Sailcloth Shroud — 129
“No,” I said. “Both nights I went up to that Domino place
for a bite to eat and was gone a half hour or forty-five
minutes at the most, and that was before dark. I had too
much work to do for any night life.”
“You didn’t see Keefer at all during that time?”
“No,” I said.
“But you did go ashore Thursday night, and didn’t get back
till twelve. Keefer could have gone aboard then.”
“Past the watchman at the gate?” I said, wondering if
would get by with it. “The cabin of the boat was locked,
anyway.”
“With a padlock anybody could open with one rap of stale
doughnut.”
“Not without making enough noise to be heard out at he
gate,” I said. “That’s the reason your man used bolt-cutters
on the hasp.”
We were skirting dangerously close now, and I had to
decide in the next minute or so what I was going to do.
Sweat it out, and hope they would hold off until that man in
Southport could go check? It would be another seven or
eight hours before he’d be able to, because he’d have to wait
at least until after it was dark, and even as isolated as this
place was they couldn’t hang around forever. And as he had
said, we were closing the holes as we went; when we got to
the last one, what was left?
“How many keys were there to that padlock?” he asked.
“Only one,” I said, “as far as I know.”
“But there could have been another one around. Padlocks
always come with two, and the lock must have been aboard
when you bought the boat. Where was the key kept when you
were at sea?”
“In a drawer in the galley. Along with the lock.”
“So if Keefer wanted to be sure of getting back in later on,
he had ten days to practice picking that lock. Or to make an
impression of the key so he could have a duplicate made. It
wouldn’t take much more than a hundred-and-forty IQ to
work that out, would it?”
“No,” I said.
The Sailcloth Shroud — 130
“All right. He had the rest of that money hidden
somewhere in the cabin so he could pick it up when you
weren’t around. You and the yard people were working on
the boat during the day, and you didn’t go ashore at night, so
he was out of luck for the next two days. Then Thursday
night you went uptown to a movie. You’d hardly got out of
sight when he showed up at the gate and tried to con the
watchman into letting him go aboard. The watchman
wouldn’t let him in. So he did the same thing we did, picked
up a skiff over at that next dock where all the fishing boats
were, and went in the back way.”
“It’s possible,” I said. “But you’re only guessing.”
“No. Shaw talked to that girl he was with in the Domino.
She said Keefer was supposed to pick her up at eight-thirty.
He called and said he might be a little late, and it was almost
ten when he finally showed. Now guess where he’d been.”
“Okay,” I said. “But if he came aboard and got it, what
became of it? He picked the girl up at ten, he was with her
until I ran into them a little before midnight, and you know
what happened to him after that.”
He smiled coldly. “Those were the last two holes. He didn’t
give it to the girl, and we know he didn’t throw it out of the
car when Bonner and Shaw ran him to the curb about twenty
minutes later and picked him up to ask him about Reagan.
Therefore, he never did get it. When he got aboard, it was
gone.”
“Gone?” I asked. “You mean you think I found it?”
He shook his head. “What equipment was removed from
that boat for repairs?”
“The refrigerator,” I said, and dived for him.
He’d been watching Flowers, and was already reaching for
the gun.
The Sailcloth Shroud — 131
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