“You both have a boarding-house reach,” Lorraine said.
“Where I’m sitting, I need one,” I replied. “How was the
letter worded? Any indication at all that she knew him?”
“No. Polite, but completely impersonal. Apparently he’d
written her, praising the book and sending a copy to be
autographed. She signed it and sent it back. Thank you, over,
and out. The only possibility is that she might have known
him by some other name.”
“You don’t remember the address?”
He looked pained. “That’s a hell of a question to ask a
reporter. Here.” He fished in his wallet and handed me a slip
of paper. On it was scrawled, “Patricia Reagan, 16 Belvedere
Pl., Sta. Brba., Calif.”
I looked at my watch and saw that even with the time
difference it would be almost one a.m. in California. “Hell,
call her now,” Bill said. I went out in the living room, dialed
the operator, gave her the name and address, and held on.
While she was getting Information in Santa Barbara I
wondered what I’d do if somebody woke me up out of a
sound sleep from three thousand miles away to ask me if I’d
ever heard of Joe Blow the Third. Well, the worst she could
do was hang up.
The phone rang three times. Then a girl said sleepily,
“Hello?”
The Sailcloth Shroud — 81
“Miss Patricia Reagan?” the operator asked. “Miami is
calling.”
“Pat, is that you?” the girl said. “What on earth—”
“No,” the operator explained. “The call is for Miss—”
I broke in. “Never mind, Operator. I’ll talk to anyone
there.”
“Thank you. Go ahead, please.”
“Hello,” I said. “I’m trying to locate Miss Reagan.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” the girl replied. “She’s not here; I’m her
roommate. The operator said Miami, so I thought it was Pat
that was calling.”
“You mean she’s in Miami?”
“Yes. That is, Florida. Near Miami.”
“Do you know the address?”
“Yes. I had a letter from her yesterday. Just a moment.”
I waited. Then she said, “Hello? Here it is. The nearest
town seems to be a place called Marathon. Do you know
where that is?”
“Yes,” I said. “It’s down the Keys.”
“She’s on Spanish Key, and the mailing address is care of
W. R. Holland, RFD One.”
“Does she have a telephone?”
“I think so. But I don’t know the number.”
“Is she a guest there?” I didn’t like the idea of waking up
an entire household with a stupid question.
“She’s staying in the house while the owners are in
Europe. While she works on some magazine articles. I don’t
know how well you know her, but I wouldn’t advise
interrupting her when she’s working.”
“No,” I said. “Only while she’s sleeping. And thanks a
million.”
I hung up. Bill and Lorraine had come into the living room.
I told them, and put in the call to the Marathon exchange.
The phone rang, and went on ringing. Five. Six. Seven. It was
a very big house, or she was a sound sleeper.
“Hello.” She had a nice voice, but she sounded cross. Well,
I thought, who wouldn’t?
“Miss Reagan?” I asked.
The Sailcloth Shroud — 82
“Yes. What is it?”
“I want to apologize for waking you up this time of
morning, but this is vitally important. It’s about a man named
Brian Hardy. Did you ever know him?”
“No. I’ve never heard of him.”
“Please think carefully. He used to live in Miami, and he
asked you to autograph a copy of Music in the Wind. Which,
incidentally, is a very beautiful book. I have a copy of it
myself.”
“Thank you,” she said, a little more pleasantly. “Now that
you mention it, I do seem to have a hazy recollection of the
name. Frankly, I’m not flooded with requests for autographs,
and as I recall he mailed the book to me.”
“That’s right. But as far as you know, you’ve never met
him?”
“No. I’m positive of that. And his letter said nothing about
knowing me.”
“Was the letter handwritten or typed?”
“Typed, I think. Yes, I’m sure of that.”
“I see. Well, did you ever know a man named Wendell
Baxter?”
“No. And would you mind telling me just who you are and
what this is all about? Are you drunk?”
“I’m not drunk,” I said. “I’m in trouble up to my neck, and
I’m trying to find somebody who knew this man. I’ve got a
wild hunch that he knew you. Let me describe him.”
“All right,” she said wearily. “Which shall we take first?
Mr. Hardy, or the other one?”
“They’re the same man,” I said. “He would be about fifty
years old, slender, maybe a little over six feet tall, brown
eyes, graying brown hair, distinguished looking, and well
educated. Have you ever known anybody who would fit
that?”
“No.” I thought I detected just the slightest hesitancy, but
decided I was reaching for it. “Not that I recall. Though it’s
rather general.”
“Try!” I urged her. “Listen. He was a quiet man, very
reserved, and courteous. He didn’t use glasses, even for
reading. He was a heavy smoker. Chesterfields, two or three
The Sailcloth Shroud — 83
packs a day. Not particularly dark-complexioned, but he took
a good tan. He was a superb small-boat sailor, a natural
helmsman, and I would guess he’d done quite a bit of ocean
racing. Does any of that remind you of anyone you’ve ever
known?”
“No,” she said coldly. “It doesn’t.”
“Are you sure? No one at all?”
“Well, it does happen to be an excellent description of my
father. But if this is a joke of some kind, I must say it’s in
very poor taste.”
“What?”
“My father is dead.” The receiver banged in my ear as she
hung up.
I dropped the instrument back on the cradle and reached
dejectedly for a cigarette. Then I stopped, and stared at Bill.
How stupid could I get? Of course he was. That was the one
thing in common in all the successive manifestations of
Wendell Baxter; each time you finally ran him down, he was
certain to be dead.
I grabbed up the phone and put in the call again. After it
had rung for three minutes with no answer I gave up.
* * *
“Here’s your ticket,” Bill said. “But I still think you ought to
take the car. Or let me drive you down there.”
“If they picked me up, you’d be in a jam too. I’ll be safe
enough on the bus, this far from the Miami terminal.”
It was after sunrise now, and we were parked near the bus
station in Homestead, about thirty miles south of Miami. I’d
shaved and changed into a pair of Bill’s slacks and a sport
shirt, and was wearing sun glasses.
“Don’t get your hopes too high,” Bill cautioned. He was
worried about me. “It’s flimsy as hell. She’d know whether
her own father was dead or not.”
“I know,” I said. “But I’ve got to talk to her.”
“Suppose it’s nothing, then what? Call me, and let me come
after you.”
The Sailcloth Shroud — 84
“No,” I said. “I’ll call the FBI. I’m not doing myself any
good, running like this, and if I keep it up too long Bonner
and those other goons may catch up with me.”
The bus pulled in. Bill made a gesture with his thumb and
forefinger. “Luck, pal.”
“Thanks,” I said. I slid out of the car, and climbed aboard.
The bus was about two-thirds filled, and several passengers
were reading copies of the Herald with my description on the
front page, but no one paid any attention to me. There was
no picture, thank God. I found a seat in the rear beside a
sailor who’d fallen asleep, and watched Bill drive away.
In a little over an hour we were on Key Largo and
beginning the long run down the Overseas Highway. It was a
hot June morning with brilliant sunlight and a gentle breeze
out of the southeast. I stared out at the water with its
hundred gradations of color from bottle green to indigo and
wished I could wake up from this dream to find myself back
aboard the Orion somewhere in the out islands of the
Bahamas. How long had it been going on now? This was—
what? Monday? Only forty-eight hours. It seemed a month.
And all it ever did was get worse. I’d started out with one
dead Baxter, and now I had three.
And what would I prove, actually, if I did find out who he
was? That wouldn’t change anything. It would still be my
unsupported word against the rest of the world as to what
had become of him and that money he’d said he had. I was
beating my brains out for nothing. No matter how you sliced
it, there was only one living witness, I was it, and there’d
never be any more.
We passed Islamorada and Marathon. It was shortly after
eleven when we rolled onto Spanish Key and pulled to a stop
in front of the filling station and general store. I got down,
feeling the sudden impact of the heat after the airconditioning,
and the bus went on. I could see the secondary
road where it emerged from the pines about a quarter of a
mile ahead, but I didn’t know which branch I wanted. A
gaunt, leathery-faced man in overalls and a railroad cap was
cleaning the windshield of a car in the station driveway. I
called over to him.
“Holland?” He pointed. “Take the road to the left. It’s
about a mile and a half.”
The Sailcloth Shroud — 85
“Thanks,” I said.
For the first half mile there were no houses at all. The
unsurfaced marl road wound through low pine and palmetto
slash that was more like the interior of Florida than the Keys.
From time to time I caught glimpses of water off to my right.
Then the road swung in that direction and I passed near
some beach houses and could see out across the half-mile
channel separating Spanish Key from the next one to the
westward. The houses were boarded up with hurricane
shutters as if their owners were gone for the summer. I
stopped to light a cigarette and mop the sweat from my face.
All sound of cars passing on the Overseas Highway had died
out behind me now. If she wanted an isolated place to work, I
thought, she’d found it.
The pine began to thin out a little and the road swung
eastward now, paralleling the beach along the south side of
the Key. The next mailbox was Holland’s. The house was on
the beach, about a hundred yards back from the road, with a
curving drive and a patch of green lawn in front. It was large
for a beach house, solidly constructed of concrete block and
stucco, and dazzling white in the sun, with a red tile roof and
bright aluminum awnings over the windows and the door. In
the carport on the right was an MG with California license
plates. She was home.
I went up the short concrete walk and rang the bell.
Nothing happened. I pushed the button again, and waited.
There was no sound except the lapping of water on the beach
around in back, and somewhere farther offshore an outboard
motor. About two hundred yards up the beach was another
house somewhat similar to this one, but there was no car in
evidence and it appeared to be unoccupied. There was still
no sound from inside. The drapes were drawn behind the
jalousie windows on either side of the door. The outboard
motor sounded nearer. I stepped around the corner and saw
it. It was coming this way, a twelve- or fourteen-foot
runabout planing along at a good clip. At the wheel was a girl
in a brief splash of yellow bathing suit.
There was a long low porch back here, another narrow
strip of lawn, a few coconut palms leaning seaward, and a
glaring expanse of white coral sand along the shore. There
were several pieces of brightly colored lawn furniture on the
porch and under the palms, and a striped umbrella and some
The Sailcloth Shroud — 86
beach pads out on the sand. The water was very shoal, and
there was no surf because of the reefs offshore and the fact
that the breeze had almost died out now. Far out I could see
a westbound tanker skirting the inshore edge of the Stream.
A wooden pier ran out into the water about fifty feet, and the
girl was coming alongside it now.
I started out to take a line for her, but she beat me there.
She lifted out a mask and snorkel and an under-water
camera in a clear plastic housing, and stepped onto the pier.
She was slender and rather tall, a girl with a deep tan and
dark wine-red hair. Her back was toward me momentarily as
she made the painter fast. She straightened and turned then,
and I saw her eyes were brown. The face was slender, with a
very nice mouth and a stubborn chin, and was as smoothly
tanned as the rest of her. There was no really striking
resemblance to Baxter, but she could very well be his
daughter.
“Good morning,” I said. “Miss Reagan?”
She nodded coolly. “Yes. What is it?”
“My name is Stuart Rogers. I’d like to talk to you for a
minute.”
“You’re the man who called me this morning.” It was a
statement, rather than a question.
“Yes,” I said, just as bluntly. “I want to ask you about your
father.”
“Why?”
“Why don’t we go over in the shade and sit down?” I
suggested.
“All right.” She reached for the camera. I picked it up and
followed her. She was about five feet eight inches tall, I
thought. Her hair was wet at the ends, as if the bathing cap
hadn’t covered it completely, and tendrils of it stuck to the
nape of her neck. It was a little cooler on the porch. She sat
down on a chaise with one long smooth leg doubled under
her, and looked up questioningly at me. I held out cigarettes,
and she thanked me and took one. I lighted it for her.
I sat down across from her. “This won’t take long. I’m not
prying into your personal affairs just because I haven’t got
anything better to do. You said your father was dead. Could
you tell me when he died?”
The Sailcloth Shroud — 87
“In nineteen-fifty-six,” she replied.
Hardy had showed up in Miami in February of 1956. That
didn’t allow much leeway. “What month?” I asked.
“January,” she said.
I sighed. We were over that one.
The brown eyes began to burn. “Unless you have some
good explanation for this, Mr. Rogers—”
“I do. I have a very good one. However, you can get rid of
me once and for all by answering just one more question.
Were you present at his funeral?”
She gasped. “Why did you ask that?”
“I think you know by now,” I said. “There wasn’t any
funeral, was there?”
“No.” She leaned forward tensely. “What are you trying to
say? That you think he’s still alive?”
“No,” I said. “I’m sorry. He is dead now. He died of a heart
attack on the fifth of this month aboard my boat in the
Caribbean.”
Her face was pale under the tan, and I was afraid she was
going to faint. She didn’t, however. She shook her head. “No.
It’s impossible. It was somebody else—”
“What happened in nineteen-fifty-six?” I asked. “And
where?”
“It was in Arizona. He went off into the desert on a hunting
trip, and got lost.”
“Arizona? What was he doing there?’.’
“He lived there,” she replied. “In Phoenix.”
I wondered if I’d missed, after all, when I’d been so near.
That couldn’t be Baxter. He was a yachtsman, a seaman; you
couldn’t even imagine him in a desert environment. Then I
remembered Music in the Wind. She hadn’t acquired that
intense feeling for the beauty of sail by watching somebody’s
colored slides. “He wasn’t a native?” I said.
“No. We’re from Massachusetts. He moved to Phoenix in
nineteen-fifty.”
Now we were getting somewhere. “Look, Miss Reagan,” I
said, “you admitted the description I gave you over the phone
could be that of your father. You also admit you have no
The Sailcloth Shroud — 88
definite proof he’s dead; he merely disappeared. Then why
do you refuse to believe he could be the man I’m talking
about?”
“I should think it would be obvious,” she replied curtly.
“My father’s name was Clifford Reagan. Not Hardy—or
whatever it was you said.”
“He could have changed it.”
“And why would he?” The brown eyes blazed again, but I
had a feeling there was something defensive about her
anger.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“There are several other reasons,” she went on. “He
couldn’t have lived in that desert more than two days without
water. The search wasn’t called off until long after everybody
had given up all hope he could still be alive. It’s been two
and a half years. If he’d found his way out, don’t you consider
it at least a possibility he might have let me know? Or do you
think the man who died on your boat was suffering from
amnesia and didn’t know who he was?”
“No,” I said. “He knew who he was, all right.”
“Then I believe we’ve settled the matter,” she said, starting
to get up. “It wasn’t my father. So if you’ll excuse me—”
“Not so fast,” I snapped. “I’m already in about all the
trouble one man can get in, and you can’t make it any worse
by calling the police and having me thrown in jail. So don’t
try to brush me off till we’re finished, because that’s the only
way you’re going to do it. I think you’d better tell me how he
got lost.”
For a moment I wouldn’t have offered much in the way of
odds that she wasn’t going to slap me across the face. She
was a very proud girl with a lot of spirit. Then she appeared
to get her temper in hand. “All right,” she said.
“He was hunting quail,” she went on. “In some very hilly
and inaccessible desert country ninety or a hundred miles
southwest of Tucson. He’d gone alone. That was Saturday
morning, and he wasn’t really missed until he failed to show
up at the bank on Monday.”
“Didn’t you or your mother know where he was?” I asked.
“He and my mother were divorced in nineteen-fifty,” she
replied. “At the same time he moved to Phoenix. We were
The Sailcloth Shroud — 89
living in Massachusetts. He had remarried, but was
separated from his second wife.”
“Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry. Go on.”
“The bank called his apartment, thinking he might be ill.
When they could get no answer, they called the apartmenthouse
manager. He said he’d seen my father leave on
Saturday with his gun and hunting clothes, but he wasn’t
sure where he’d planned to hunt or how long he intended to
stay. The sheriff’s office was notified, and they located the
sporting-goods store where he’d bought some shells Friday
afternoon. He’d told the clerk the general locality he was
going to hunt in. They organized a search party, but it was
such an immense area and so rough and remote that it was
Wednesday before they even found the car. It was near an
old trace of a road at least twenty miles from the nearest
ranch house. He’d apparently got lost while he was hunting
and couldn’t find his way back to it. They went on searching
with jeeps and horses and even planes until the following
Sunday, but they never did find him. Almost a year later
some uranium prospectors found his hunting coat; it was six
or seven miles from where the car had been. Are you
satisfied now?”
“Yes,” I said. “But not quite the way you think. Have you
read the paper this morning?”
She shook her head. “It’s still in the mailbox. I haven’t
gone after it yet.”
“I’ll bring it,” I said. “I want you to read something.”
I went and got it. “I’m the Captain Rogers referred to,” I
said as I handed it to her. “The man who signed himself
Brian in the letter is the same one who told me his name was
Wendell Baxter.”
She read it through. Then she folded the paper and put it
aside defiantly. “It’s absurd,” she said. “It’s been two and a
half years. And my father never had twenty-three thousand
dollars. Nor any reason for calling himself Brian.”
“Listen,” I told her. “One month after your father
disappeared in that desert a man who could be his double
arrived in Miami, rented a big home on an island in Biscayne
Bay, bought a forty-thousand-dollar sport fisherman he
renamed the Princess Pat—”
The Sailcloth Shroud — 90
She gasped.
I went on relentlessly. “—and lived there like an Indian
prince with no apparent source of income until the night of
April seventh of this year, when he disappeared. He was lost
at sea when the Princess Pat exploded, burned to the
waterline, and sank, twenty miles off the Florida coast at
port Lauderdale. And again, no body was ever found. His
name was Brian Hardy, and he was the one who sent you
that book to be autographed. Slightly less than two months
later, on May thirty-first, Brian Hardy came aboard my ketch
in Cristobal, using the name of Wendell Baxter. I’m not
guessing here, or using descriptions, because I saw a
photograph of Hardy, and this was the same man. And I say
Hardy was your father. Do you have any kind of photograph
or snapshot?”
She gave a dazed shake of the head. “Not here. I have
some in the apartment in Santa Barbara.”
“Do you agree now it was your father?”
“I don’t know. The whole thing is so utterly pointless. Why
would he do it?”
“He was running from somebody,” I said. “In Arizona, and
then in Miami, and again in Panama.”
“But from whom?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I was hoping you might. But the
thing I really want to know is this—did your father ever have
a heart attack?”
“No,” she said. “Not that I ever heard.”
“Is there any history of heart or coronary disease in the
family at all?”
She shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
I lighted a cigarette and stared out across the sundrenched
blues and greens over the reefs. I was doing just
beautifully. Apparently all I’d accomplished so far was to
establish that aboard the Topaz Baxter had died for the third
time with great finality and dramatic effect without leaving a
body around to prove it. So all I had to do was convince
everybody that this time it was for real. If he died of bubonic
plague on the speaker’s platform at an AMA convention, I
thought bitterly, and was cremated in Macy’s window,
The Sailcloth Shroud — 91
nobody would take it seriously. He’ll turn up fellas; just you
wait.
“Does the name Slidell mean anything to you?” I asked
“No,” she said. I was convinced she was telling the truth.
“I’ve never heard it before.”
“Do you know where he could have got that money?”
She ran despairing hands through her hair, and stood up.
“No. Mr. Rogers, none of this makes the slightest sense to
me. It couldn’t have been my father.”
“But you know it was, don’t you?” I said.
She nodded. “I’m afraid so.”
“Did you say he worked for a bank?”
“Yes. In the Trust Department of the Drovers National.”
“There was no shortage in his accounts?”
For an instant I thought the anger was going to flare again.
Then she said wearily, “No. Not this time.”
“This time?”
She made a little gesture of resignation. “Since he may be
the one who got you into this trouble, I suppose you have a
right to know. He did take some money once, from another
bank. I don’t see how it could have any bearing on this, but
maybe it has. If you’ll wait while I shower and change, I’ll tell
you about it.”
The Sailcloth Shroud — 92
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