The Sailcloth Shroud (3 page)

“The whole thing’s a matter of record,” I said wearily. “There was a hearing—” I broke off as the phone rang on an adjoining desk. Willetts reached for it.

“Homicide, Willetts. . . . Yeah. . . . Nothing at all? . . . Yeah. . . . Yeah. . . .” The conversation went on for two or three minutes. Then Willetts said, “Okay, Joe. You might as well come on in.”

He replaced the instrument, and swung back to me. “Before I forget it, the yard watchman’s got your key. Let’s go in and see Lieutenant Boyd.”

The room beyond the frosted glass door was smaller, and contained a single desk. The shirtsleeved man behind it was in his middle thirties, with massive shoulders, an air 0f tough assurance, and probing gray eyes that were neither friendly nor unfriendly.

“This is Rogers,” Willetts said.

Boyd stood up and held out his hand. “I’ve read about you,” he said briefly.

We sat down. Boyd lighted a cigarette and spoke to Willetts. “You come up with anything yet?”

“Positive identification by Rogers and the manager of the car-rental place. Also that bellhop from the Warwick. So Keefer’s all one man. But nobody’s got any idea where he found all that money. Rogers swears he couldn’t have had it when he left Panama.” He went on, repeating all I’d told him.

When he had finished, Boyd asked, “How does his story check out?”

“Seems to be okay. We haven’t located the girl yet, but the night bartender in that joint knows her, and remembers the three of ‘em. He’s certain Keefer left there about the time Rogers gave us; says Keefer got pretty foul-mouthed about not wanting the taxi Rogers was going to call, so he told him to shut up or get out. The watchman at the boatyard says Rogers was back there at five minutes past twelve, and didn’t go out again. That piece of hamburger jibes with the autopsy report, and puts the time he was killed between two and three in the morning.”

Boyd nodded. “And you think Keefer had the Thunderbird parked outside the joint then?”

“Looks that way,” Willetts conceded.

“It would make sense, so Rogers must be leveling about the money. Keefer didn’t want him to see the car and start getting curious. Anything on the boat?”

“No. Joe says it’s clean. No gun, no money, nothing. Doesn’t prove anything, necessarily.”

“No. But we’ve got nothing to hold Rogers for.”

“How about till we can check him out with Miami? And get a report back from the Bureau on Keefer’s prints?”

“No,” Boyd said crisply.

Willitts savagely stubbed out his cigarette. “But, damn it, Jim, something stinks in this whole deal—”

“Save it! You can’t book a smell.”

“Take a look at it!” Willetts protested. “Three men leave Panama in a boat with about eight hundred dollars between ‘em. One disappears in the middle of the ocean, and another one comes ashore with four thousand dollars, and four days later
he’s
dead—”

“Hold it!” I said. “If you’re accusing me of something, let’s hear what it is. Nobody’s ‘disappeared,’ as you call it. Baxter died of a heart attack. There was a hearing, with a doctor present, and it’s been settled—”

“On your evidence. And one witness, who’s just been murdered.”

“Cut it out!” the lieutenant barked. He jerked an impatient hand at Willetts. “For Christ’s sake, we’ve got no jurisdiction in the Caribbean Sea. Baxter’s death was investigated by the proper authorities, and if they’re satisfied, I am. And when I am, you are. Now get somebody to run Rogers back to his boat. If we need him again, we can pick him up.”

I stood up. “Thanks,” I said. “I’ll be around for another week, at least. Maybe two.”

“Right,” Boyd said. The telephone rang on his desk, and he cut short the gesture of dismissal to reach for it. We went out, and started across the outer office. Just before we reached the corridor, we were halted by the lieutenant’s voice behind us. “Wait a minute! Hold everything!”

We turned. Boyd had his head out the door of his office. “Bring Rogers back here a minute.” We went back. Boyd was on the telephone. “Yeah. . . . He’s still here. ... In the office. . . . Right.”

He replaced the instrument, and nodded to me. “You might as well park it again. That was the FBI.”

I looked at him, puzzled. “What do they want?”

“You mean they ever tell anybody? They just said to hold you till they could get a man over here.”

At least, I thought morosely as we stepped from the elevator, the Federal Building was air-conditioned. If you were going to spend the rest of your life being questioned about Keefer by all the law-enforcement agencies in the country, it helped a little if you were comfortable. Not that I had anything against heat as such; I liked hot countries, provided they were far enough away from civilization to do away with the wearing of shirts that did nothing but stick to you like some sort of soggy film. The whole day was shot to hell now, but this was an improvement over the police station.

I glanced sidewise in grudging admiration at Special Agent Soames—cool, efficient, and faultlessly pressed. Sweat would never be any problem to this guy; if it bothered him he’d turn it off. In the ten minutes since I’d met him in Lieutenant Boyd’s office, I’d learned exactly nothing about why they wanted to talk to me. I’d asked, when we were out on the street, and had been issued a friendly smile and one politely affable assurance that it was merely routine. We’d discuss it over in the office. Soames was thirty-ish and crew-cut, but anything boyish and ingenuous about him was strictly superficial; he had a cool and very deadly eye. We went down the corridor, with my crepe soles squeaking on waxed tile. Soames opened a frosted glass door and stood aside for me to enter. Inside was a small anteroom. A trim gray-haired woman in a linen suit was typing energetically at a desk that held a telephone and a switchbox for routing calls. Behind her was the closed door to an inner office, and to the left I could see down a hallway past a number of other doors. Soames looked at his watch and wrote something in the book that was on a small desk near the door. Then he nodded politely, and said, “This way, please.”

I followed him down the hallway to the last door. The office inside was small, spotlessly neat, and cool, with light green walls, marbled gray linoleum, and one window, across which were tilted the white slats of a Venetian blind. There was a single desk, with a swivel chair in back of it. An armchair stood before it, near one corner, facing the light from the window. Soames nodded toward it, and held out cigarettes. “Sit down, please. I’ll be right back.”

I fired up the cigarette. As I dropped the lighter back in my pocket, I said curiously, “I don’t get this. Why is the FBI interested in Keefer?”

“Keefer?” Soames had started out; he paused in the doorway. “Oh, that’s a local police matter.”

I stared blankly after him. If they weren’t interested in Keefer, what did they want to know? Soames returned in moment carrying a Manila folder. He sat down and began emptying it of its contents: the log I had kept of the trip, the signed and notarized statement regarding Baxter’s death and the inventory of his personal effects.

He glanced up briefly. “I suppose you’re familiar with all this?”

“Yes, of course,” I said. “But how’d it get over here? And just what is it you want?”

“We’re interested in Wendell Baxter.” Soames slid the notarized statement out of the pile, and studied it thoughtfully. “I haven’t had much chance to digest this, or your log, so I’d like to check the facts with you just briefly, if you don’t mind.”

“Not at all,” I replied. “But I thought the whole thing was closed. The marshal’s office—”

“Oh, yes,” Soames assured me. “It’s just that they’ve run into a little difficulty in locating Baxter’s next of kin, and they’ve asked us to help.”

“I see.”

He went on crisply. “You’re owner and captain of the forty-foot ketch
Topaz,
which you bought in Cristobal, Panama Canal Zone, on May twenty-seven of this year, through Joseph Hillyer, Miami yacht broker who represented the sellers. That’s correct?”

“Right.”

“You sailed from Cristobal on June one, at ten-twenty a.m., bound for this port, accompanied by two other men you engaged as deckhands for the trip. One was Francis L. Keefer, a merchant seaman, possessing valid A.B. and Lifeboat certificates as per indicated numbers, American national, born in Buffalo, New York, September twelve, nine-teen-twenty. The other was Wendell Baxter, occupation or profession unspecified but believed to be of a clerical nature, not possessed of seaman’s papers of any kind but obviously familiar with the sea and well versed in the handling of small sailing craft such as yachts, home address San Francisco, California. Four days out of Cristobal, on June five, Baxter collapsed on deck at approximately three-thirty p.m. while trimming a jib sheet, and died about twenty minutes later. There was nothing you could do to help him, of course. You could find no medicine in his suitcase, the boat’s medicine chest contained nothing but the usual first-aid supplies, and you were several hundred miles from the nearest doctor.”

“That’s right,” I said. “If I never feel that helpless again, it’ll be all right with me.”

Soames nodded. “Your position at the time was 16.10 North, 81.40 West, some four hundred miles from the Canal, and approximately a hundred miles off the coast of Honduras. It was obvious you were at least another six days from the nearest Stateside port, so you put about immediately to return to the Canal Zone with his body, but in three days you saw you were never going to get there in time. That’s essentially it?”

“In three days we made eighty-five miles,” I said. “And the temperature down there in the cabin where his body was ran around ninety degrees.”

You couldn’t have gone into some port in Honduras?”

I gestured impatiently. “This has all been threshed out with the Coast Guard. I could have tried for some port on the mainland of Honduras or Nicaragua, or gone on to Georgetown, Grand Cayman, which was less than two hundred miles to the north of us—except that I wasn’t cleared for any of those places. Baxter was already dead, so it’s doubtful the port authorities would have considered it a legitimate emergency. And just to come plowing in unauthorized, with no bill of health or anything, carrying the body of a man who’d died at sea of some unspecified ailment—we’d have been slapped in quarantine and tied up in red tape till we had beards down to our knees. Besides being fined. The only thing to do was go back.”

“And you had nothing but bad luck, right from the beginning?”

“Look,” I said hotly, “we tried. We tried till we couldn’t stand it any longer. Believe me, I didn’t want the responsibility of burying him at sea. In the first place, it wasn’t going to be pleasant facing his family. And if we couldn’t bring the body ashore for an autopsy, there’d have to be a hearing of some kind to find out what he died of. There’s nothing new about burial at sea, of course, especially in the old days when ships were a lot slower than they are now, but a merchant or naval vessel with thirty to several hundred people aboard is—well, a form of community itself, with somebody in authority and dozens of witnesses. Three men alone in a small boat would be something else. When only two come back, you’re going to have to have a little better explanation than just saying Bill dropped dead and we threw him overboard. That’s the reason for all that detailed report on the symptoms of the attack. I wrote it out as soon as I saw we were probably going to have to do it.”

Soames nodded. “It’s quite thorough. Apparently the doctor who reviewed it had no difficulty in diagnosing the seizure as definitely some form of heart attack, and probably a coronary thrombosis. I wonder if you’d fill me in just briefly on what happened after you started back?”

“To begin with,” I said, “we tore the mains’l all to hell. The weather had turned unsettled that morning, even before Baxter had the attack. Just before dusk I could see a squall making up to the eastward. It looked a little dirty, but I didn’t want to shorten down any more than we had to considering the circumstances. So we left everything on and just turned in a couple of reefs in the main and mizzen. Or started to. We were finishing the main when it began to kick up a little and the rain hit us. I ran back to the wheel to keep her into the wind, while Keefer tied in the last few points and started to raise sail again. I suppose it’s my fault for not checking, but I’d glanced off toward the squall line and when I looked back at the mains’l it was too late. He had the halyard taut and was throwing it on the winch. I yelled for him to slack off, but with all the rain he didn’t hear me. What had happened was that he’d mixed up a pair of reef points—tied one from the second row to another on the opposite side in the third set. That pulls the sail out of shape and puts all the strain in one place. It was just a miracle it hadn’t let go already. I screamed at him again, and he finally heard me this time and looked around, but all he did was shake his head that he couldn’t understand what I was saying. Just as I jumped from behind the wheel and started to run forward he slipped the handle into the winch and took a turn, and that was the ball game. It split all the way across.

We didn’t have another one aboard. The previous owners had pretty well butched up the sail inventory on the way down to the Canal—blew out a mains’l and lost the genoa overboard. I managed to patch up this one after a fashion, using material out of an old stays’l, but it took two days. Maybe it wouldn’t have made much difference anyway, because the weather went completely sour—dead calm about half the time, with occasional light airs that hauled all around the compass. But with just that handkerchief of a mizzen, and stays’l and working jib, we might as well have been trying to row her to the Canal. We ran on the auxiliary till we used up all the gasoline aboard, and then when there was no wind we just drifted. Keefer kept moaning and griping for us to get rid of him; said he couldn’t sleep in the cabin with a dead man. And neither of us could face the thought of trying to prepare any food with him lying there just forward of the galley. We finally moved out on deck altogether.

“By Sunday morning—June eighth—I knew it had to be done. I sewed him in what was left of the old stays’l, with the sounding lead at his feet. It was probably an all-time low in funerals. I couldn’t think of more than a half dozen words of the sea-burial service, and there was no Bible aboard. We did shave and put on shirts, and that was about it. We buried him at one p.m. The position’s in the log, and I think it’s fairly accurate. The weather improved that night, and we came on here and arrived on the sixteenth. Along with the report, I turned his personal belongings over to the marshal’s office. But I don’t understand why they couldn’t locate some of his family; his address is right there—1426 Roland Avenue, San Francisco.”

“Unfortunately,” Soames replied, “there is no Roland Avenue in San Francisco.”

“Oh,” I said.

“So we hoped you might be able to help us.”

I frowned, feeling vaguely uneasy. For some reason I was standing at the rail again on that day of oily calm and blistering tropic sun, watching the body in its Orlon shroud as it sank beneath the surface and began its long slide into the abyss. “That’s just great,” I said. “I don’t know anything about him either.”

“In four days, he must have told you something about himself.”

“You could repeat it all in forty seconds. He told me he was an American citizen. His home was in California. He’d come down to the Canal Zone on some job that had folded up after a couple of months, and he’d like to save the plane fare back to the States by sailing up with me.”

“He didn’t mention the name of any firm, or government agency?”

“Not a word. I gathered it was a clerical or executive job of some kind, because he had the appearance. And his hands were soft.”

“He never said anything about a wife? Children? Brothers?”

“Nothing.”

“Did he say anything at all during the heart attack?”

“No. He seemed to be trying to, but he couldn’t get his breath. And the pain was pretty terrible until he finally lost consciousness.”

‘I see.” Soames’ blue eyes were thoughtful. “Would you describe him?”

I’d say he was around fifty. About my height, six-one. but very slender; I doubt he weighed over a hundred and seventy. Brown eyes, short brown hair with a good deal of gray in it, especially around the temples, but not thinning or receding to any extent. Thin face, rather high forehead, good nose and bone structure, very quiet, and soft-spoken—when he said anything at all. In a movie you’d cast him as a doctor or lawyer or the head of the English department. That’s the thing, you see; he wasn’t hard-nosed or rude about not talking about himself; he was just reserved. He minded his own business, and seemed to expect you to mind yours. And since he was apparently down on his luck, it seemed a little on the tasteless side to go prying into matters he didn’t want to talk about.”

“What about his speech?”

“Well, the outstanding thing about it was that there was damned little of it. But he was obviously well educated. And if there was any trace of a regional accent, I didn’t hear it.”

“Was there anything foreign about it at all? I don’t mean low comedy or vaudeville, but any hesitancy, or awkwardness of phrasing?”

“No,” I said. “It was American.”

“I see.” Soames tapped meditatively on the desk with the eraser end of a pencil. “Now, you say he was an experienced sailor. But he had no papers, and you don’t think he’d ever been a merchant seaman, so you must have wondered about it. Could you make any guess as to where he’d picked up this knowledge of the sea?”

“Yes. I think definitely he’d owned and sailed boats of his own, probably boats in the offshore cruising and ocean-racing class. Actually, a merchant seaman wouldn’t have known a lot of the things Baxter did, unless he was over seventy and had been to sea under sail. Keefer was a good example. He was a qualified A.B.; he knew routine seamanship and how to splice and handle line, and if you gave him a compass course he could steer it. But if you were going to windward and couldn’t quite lay the course, half the time he’d be lying dead in the water and wouldn’t know it. He had no feel. Baxter did. He was one of the best wind-ship helmsmen I’ve ever run into. Besides native talent, that takes a hell of a lot of experience you don’t pick up on farms or by steering power boats or steamships.”

“Did he know celestial navigation?”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s a funny thing, but I think he did. I mean, he never mentioned it, or asked if he could take a sight and work it out for practice, but somehow I got a hunch just from the way he watched me that he knew as much about it as I did. Or maybe more. I’m no whiz; there’s not much occasion to use it in the Bahamas.”