The sailcloth shroud

by Charles Williams

  “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?

  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.

  “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 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 dry-mouthed 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.

  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 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 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 air-conditioner. 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.

  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.�
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  “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 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—”