The sailcloth shroud

by Charles Williams

  “We don’t want your wallet. I said get in!” The muzzle of the gun moved almost imperceptibly, and the rear door opened. I stepped toward it. As I leaned down, hands reached out of the darkness inside and yanked. I fell inward. Something slashed down on my left shoulder. My arm went numb to the fingertips. I tried to get up. Light exploded just back of my eyes.

  * * *

  My head was filled with a running groundswell of pain. It rose and fell, and rose again, pressing against my skull in hot waves of orange, and when I opened my eyes the orange gave way to a searing white that made me shudder and close them again. Muscles tightened spasmodically across my abdomen as nausea uncoiled inside me. I was conscious of a retching sound and of the sensation of strangling.

  “Prop him up,” a bored voice said. “You want him to drown in it?”

  I felt myself hauled upward and pushed against something behind me. I retched and heaved again. “Throw some water on him,” the voice commanded. “He stinks.”

  Footsteps went away and came back. Water caught me in the face, forcing my head back and running up my nostrils. I choked. The rest of it splashed onto the front of my shirt. I opened my eyes again. The light burned into them. I reached for it to push it away, but found it was apparently glaring at me from some incalculable distance, because my fingertips could not reach it. Maybe it was the sun. Maybe, on the other hand, I was in hell.

  Somewhere in the darkness beyond my own little cosmos of light and pain and the smell of vomit, a voice asked, “Can you hear me, Rogers?”

  I tried to say something, but only retched again. More water slapped me in the face. When it had run out of my nose and mouth I tried again. This time I was able to form words. They were short words, and very old ones.

  “Rogers, I’m talking to you,” the voice said. “Where did you put him ashore?”

  I groped numbly around in my mind for some meaning to that, but gave up. “Who? What are you talking about?”

  “Wendell Baxter. Where did you put him ashore?”

  5

  “Baxter?” I put a hand up over my eyes to shield them I from the light. “Ashore?”

  “He couldn’t be that stupid.” This seemed to be a different voice. Tough, with a rasping inflection. “Let me belt him one.”

  “Not yet.” This was the first one again—incisive, commanding, a voice with four stripes.

  A random phrase, torn from some lost context, boiled up through the pain and the jumbled confusion of my thoughts. . . . Professional muscle . . . That policeman had said it. Willard? Willetts? That was it. Sounds like professional muscle to me. . . .

  “We’re going to have to soften him up a little.”

  “Shut up. Rogers, where did you land him? Mexico? Honduras? Cuba?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

  “We’re talking about Wendell Baxter.”

  “Baxter is dead,” I said. “He died of a heart attack—”

  “And you buried him at sea. Save it, Rogers; we read the papers. Where is he?”

  My head was clearing a little now. I had no idea where I was but I could make out that I was sitting on a rough wooden floor with my back propped against a wall and that the light glaring in my face was a powerful flashlight held by someone just in front of and above me. Now that I looked under it I could see gray-trousered legs and a pair of expensive-looking brogues. To my right was another pair of shoes, enormous ones, size twelve at least. I looked to the left and saw one more pair. These were black, and almost as large, and the right one had a slit along the welt about where the little toe would be, as if the wearer had a corn. In my groggy state I fastened onto details like that like a baby seeing the world for the first time. Water ran out of my clothing; I was sitting in a puddle of it. My hair and face were still dripping, and when I licked my lips I realized it was salt. We must be on a pier, or aboard a boat.

  “Where was Baxter headed?”

  Maybe they were insane. “He’s dead,” I repeated patiently. “We buried him at sea. For God’s sake, why would I lie about it?”

  “Because he paid you.”

  I opened my mouth to say something, but closed it. A little chill ran down my spine as I began to understand.

  ‘Let me work him over.”

  “Not yet, I tell you. You want to scramble his brains again and have to wait another hour? He’ll talk. All right, Rogers, do you want me to spell it out for you?”

  “I don’t care what you spell out. Baxter is dead.”

  “Listen. Baxter came aboard the Topaz on the night of May thirty-first in Cristobal. The three of you sailed the next morning, June first, and you and Keefer arrived here on the sixteenth. Baxter paid you ten thousand dollars to land him somewhere on the coast of Central America Mexico, or Cuba, and cook up that story about the heart attack and having to bury him at sea—”

  “I tell you he died!”

  “Shut up till I’m finished. Baxter should have had better sense than to trust a stupid meathead like Keefer. We know all about him. The night before you sailed from Panama he was down to his last dollar, mooching drinks in a waterfront bar. When you arrived here sixteen days later he moved into the most expensive hotel in town and started throwing money around like a drunk with an expense account. They’re holding twenty-eight hundred for him in the hotel safe, and he had over six hundred in his wallet when his luck ran out. That figures out to somewhere around four grand altogether, so you must have got more. It was your boat. Where’s Baxter now?”

  “Lying on the bottom, in about two thousand fathoms,” I said hopelessly. What was the use? They’d never believe me; Keefer had fixed that, for all time. I thought of the pulpy mess the gun barrels had made of his face, and shuddered. These were the men who’d done it, and they’d do the same thing to me.

  “Okay,” the voice said in the darkness beyond the flashlight. “Maybe you’d better prime him a little.”

  A big arm swung down and the open hand rocked my face around. I tried to climb to my feet; another hand grabbed the front of my shirt and hauled. I swayed weakly, trying to swing at the shadowy bulk in front of me. My s were caught from behind. A fist like a concrete block slugged me in the stomach. I bent forward and fell, writhing in agony, when the man behind turned me loose.

  “Where’s Baxter?”

  I was unable to speak. One of them hauled me to a sitting position again and slammed me against the wall. I sobbed for breath while the light fixed me like some huge and malevolent eye.

  “Why be stupid?” the voice asked. “All we want to know is where you put him ashore. You don’t owe him anything; you carried out your end of the bargain. He’s making a sucker of you, anyway; he knew he was letting you in for this, but he didn’t tell you that, did he?”

  “Then why would I lie about it?” I gasped. “If I’d put him ashore, I’d tell you. But I didn’t.”

  “He promised you more money later? Is that it?”

  “He didn’t promise me anything, or give me anything. I don’t know where Keefer got that money, unless he stole it out of Baxter’s suitcase. But I do know Baxter’s dead. I sewed him in canvas myself, and buried him.”

  The rasping voice broke in. “Cut out the crap, Rogers! We’re not asking if you put him ashore. We know that already, from Keefer. But he didn’t know where, because you did all the navigation. It was the mouth of some river, but he didn’t know which one, or what country it was in.”

  “Was this after you’d broken all the bones in his face?” I asked. “Or while you were still breaking them? Look, you knew Baxter, presumably. Didn’t he ever have a heart attack before?”

  “No.”

  “Is Baxter his right name?”

  “Never mind what his name is.”

  “I take it that it’s not. Then why are you so sure the man who was with me is the one you’re looking for?”

  “He was seen in Panama.”

  “It could still be a mistake.”

  “Take a lo
ok.” A hand extended into the cone of light, holding out a photograph.

  I took it. It was a four-by-five snapshot of a man at the topside controls of a sport fisherman, a tall and very slender man wearing khaki shorts and a long-visored fishing cap. It was Baxter; there was no doubt of it. But it was the rest of the photo that caught my attention—the boat itself, and the background. There was something very familiar about the latter.

  “Well?” the voice asked coldly.

  I held it out. “It’s Baxter.” Lying was futile.

  “Smart boy. Of course it is. You ready to tell us now?”

  “I’ve already told you. He’s dead.”

  “I don’t get you, Rogers. I know you couldn’t be stupid enough to think we’re bluffing. You saw Keefer.”

  “Yes, I saw him. And what did it buy you? A poor devil out of his mind with pain trying to figure out what you wanted him to say so he could say it. Is that what you want? I’m no braver with a broken face than the next guy, so I’ll probably do the same thing.”

  “We’ve wasted enough time with him!” This was the tough voice again. “Grab his arms!”

  I tried to estimate the distance to the flashlight, and gathered myself. It was hopeless, but I had to do something. I came up with a rush just before the hands reached me pushing myself off the wall and lunging toward the light. A hand caught my shirt. It tore. The light swung back, but I was on it; it fell to the floor and rolled, but didn’t go out. The beam sprayed along the opposite wall. There was an open doorway, and beyond it a pair of mooring bitts, and the dark outline of a barge. A blow knocked me off balance; a hand groped, trying to hold me. I spun away from it, driving toward the door. Shoes scraped behind me, and I heard a grunt and curses as two of them collided in the darkness. Something smashed against the side of my head, and I started to fall. I hit the door frame, pushed off it, and wheeled, somehow still on my feet, and I was in the open. Stars shone overhead, and I could see the dark gleam of water beyond the end of the barge.

  I tried to turn, to run along the pier. One of them crashed into me from behind, and tackled me around the waist. Our momentum carried us outward toward the edge. My legs struck one of the mooring lines of the barge, and I shot outward and down, falling between it and the pier.

  Water closed over me. I tried to swim laterally before I surfaced, and came up against solid steel. I was against the side of the barge. I kicked off it and brushed against barnacles that sliced into my arm. It was one of the pilings. I grabbed it, pulled around to the other side, and came up.

  “Bring the light! Somebody bring the light!” a man was yelling just above me. Apparently he’d caught the mooring line and saved himself from falling. I heard footsteps pounding on the wooden planking overhead. They’d be able to see me, unless I got back farther under the pier, but the tide was pushing me out, against the barge. I tried to hold onto the piling and see if there was another one farther in that I could reach, but the darkness in that direction was impenetrable. The current was too strong to swim against.

  Light burst on the water around me. “There he is! There’s the creep!” somebody yelled. “There’s his hand!” I took a deep breath and went under, and immediately I was against the side of the barge again. I might swim alongside it for some distance, but when I surfaced I’d still be within range of that light. I did the only thing left. I swam straight down against the side of the barge. My ears began to hurt a little, so I knew I was below twelve feet when the plates bent inward around the turn of the bilge and there was only emptiness below me. It was frightening there in the pitch darkness, not knowing how wide she was or how much water there was under the flat bottom, but it wasn’t half as deadly as the three goons back there on the wharf. There was no turning back, anyway; the current was already carrying me under. I kicked hard, and felt the back of my head scrape along the bottom plates.

  Then there was mud under my hands. For a moment I almost panicked; then I regained presence of mind enough to know that the only chance I had was to keep on going straight ahead. If I turned now I’d never get out. Even if I didn’t lose all sense of direction and get lost completely, I’d never be able to swim back up against the current. I kicked ahead. The water shoaled a little more; my knees were in mud now, with my back scraping along the bottom of the barge.

  Suddenly there was only water below me and I was going faster. My lungs began to hurt. I passed the turn of the bilge and shot upward. My head broke surface at last, and I inhaled deeply—once, twice, and then I went under again just as the light burst across the water not ten feet 0ff to my left. They had run across the barge and were searching this side. I stayed under, kicking hard and letting the tide carry me. When I surfaced again I was some fifty yards away. They were still throwing the light around and cursing. I began swimming across the current toward the dark line of the beach. In a little while I felt bottom beneath my hands and stood up. I turned and looked back.

  I was a good two hundred yards from the pier and the barge now. The flashlight was coming along the shore in my direction. I eased back out until just my head was above water, and waited. I could hear them talking. When they were almost opposite me, they turned and went back. A few minutes later a car started up, near the landward end of the pier. The twin beams swung in an arc, and I watched the red taillights fade and disappear. I waded ashore in the dark. The reaction hit me all of a sudden, and I was weak and very shaky in the knees, and I had to sit down.

  After a while I took off my clothes and squeezed some of the water out of them. I still had my wallet and watch and cigarette lighter. I pressed as much water as I could out of the soggy papers and the money in the wallet and threw away the mushy cigarettes. It was hard getting the wet clothes back on in the darkness. There was no wind, and mosquitoes made thin whining sounds around my ears. Far off to my right I could see the glow of Southport’s lights reflected against the sky. I stood up, located Solaris to orient myself, and started walking.

  * * *

  “Where is it?” Willetts asked. “Can you describe the place?”

  “Yes,” I said. “It must be eight or ten miles west of town. I walked about three before I could flag a patrol car. It’s a single wooden pier with a shed on it. There’s a steel barge moored to the west side of it. The buildings ashore apparently burned down a long time ago; there’s nothing left but foundations and rubble.”

  He exchanged a glance with Ramirez, and they nodded. “Sounds like the old Bowen sugar mill. It’s outside the city limits, but we can go take a look. You better come along and see if you can identify it. You sure you’re all right now?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  It was after ten p.m. We were in Emergency Receiving at County Hospital, where the men in the patrol car had brought me. They had radioed in as soon as I gave them the story, and received word back to hold me until it could be investigated. A bored intern checked me over, said I had a bad bruise on the back of my head but no fracture, cleaned the barnacle cuts on my arms, stuck on a few Band-Aids, and gave me a cigarette and two aspirins.

  “You’ll live,” he said, with the medic’s vast non-interest in the healthy.

  I wondered how long. They’d given up for the moment, but when they found out I hadn’t drowned they’d be back. What should I do? Ask for police protection for the rest of my life? That would be a laugh. A grown man asking protection from three pairs of shoes.

  Who was Baxter? Why did they want him? And what in the name of God had given them the idea we had put him ashore? I was still butting my head against the same blank wall twenty minutes later when Willetts and Ramirez showed up. They’d been off duty, of course, but were called in because Keefer was their case. I repeated the story.

  “All right, let’s go,” Willetts said.

  We went out and got in the cruiser. Ramirez drove—quite fast, but without using the siren. My clothes were merely damp now, and the cool air was pleasant; the headache had subsided to a dull throbbing. We rode a freeway for a good par
t of the distance, and the trip took less than fifteen minutes. As soon as we came out to the end of the bumpy and neglected shell-surfaced road and stopped, I recognized it. Willetts and Ramirez took out flashlights and we walked down through the blackened rubble to the pier.

  We found the doorway into the shed, opposite the barge. Inside it was black and empty. The floor against the opposite wall was still wet where I’d vomited and they’d thrown water on me, and nearby was the fire bucket they’d used. It had a piece of line made fast to the handle. Willetts took it along to be checked for fingerprints. There was nothing else, no trace of blood or anything to indicate Keefer had been killed there. We went out on the pier. Ramirez shot his light down into the water between the piling and the side of the barge. “And you swam under it? Brother.”

  “There wasn’t much choice at the time,” I said.

  We went back to the police station, to the office I’d been in that morning. They took down my statement.

  “You never did see their faces?” Willetts asked.

  “No. They kept that light in my eyes all the time. But there were three of them, and at least two were big and plenty rough.”

  “And they admitted they killed Keefer?”

  “You’ve got their exact words,” I said. “I wouldn’t say there was much doubt of it.”

  “Have you got any idea at all why they’re after Baxter?”

  “No.”

  “Or who Baxter really is?”

  “Who Baxter really was,” I said. “And the answer is no.”

  “But you think now he might be from Miami?”

  “At some time in his life, anyway. I don’t know how long ago it was, but that picture they showed me was taken on Biscayne Bay. I’m almost positive of it.”

  “And they didn’t give any reason for that idea you’d put him ashore? I mean, except that Keefer turned up with all that money?”

  “No.”

  He lighted a cigarette and leaned across the desk. “Look, Rogers. This is just a piece of advice from somebody who’s in the business. Whatever happened in Panama, or out in the middle of the ocean, is out of our jurisdiction and no skin off our tail, but you’re in trouble. If you know anything about this you’re not telling, you’d better start spilling it before you wind up in an alley with the cats looking at you.”