Charles Williams - The Sailcloth Shroud

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.”

“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—”

“I wasn’t even present,” I said. “It happened in his office in Norfolk, Virginia.”

“I know. But you were present when he had a previous attack. About a year before, when you and he and your father were fishing on a charter boat off Miami Beach. And he wasn’t fighting a fish when it happened. He was just sitting in the fishing chair drinking a bottle of beer. It all adds up, Rogers. It all adds up.”

It was the first time I’d even thought of it for years. I started to say so, but I happened to turn then and glance at Patricia Reagan. Her eyes were on my face, and there was doubt in them, and something else that was very close to horror. Under the circumstances, I thought, who could blame her? Then the front door opened. Bonner came in, followed by a popeyed little man carrying a black metal case about the size of a portable tape recorder.

11

“Both of you stay where you are,” Slidell ordered. He stood up and turned to Bonner. “Bring Flowers a table and a chair.”

Bonner went down the hall and came back with a small night table. He set it and one of the dining chairs near the chair I was in, and swung me around so I was facing the front window with the table on my right. Then he lighted a cigarette and leaned against the front door, boredly watching.

“This jazz is a waste of time, if you ask me,” he remarked.

“I didn’t,” Slidell said shortly.

Bonner shrugged. I glanced around at Patricia Reagan, but she avoided my eyes and was staring past me at Flowers, as mystified as I was. He was a slightly built little man in his thirties with a bald spot and a sour, pinched face that was made almost grotesque by the slightly bulging eyes. He set the black case on the table and removed the lid. The top panel held a number of controls and switches, but a good part of it was taken up by a window under which was a sheet of graph paper and three styli mounted on little arms.

I glanced up to find Slidell’s eyes on me in chill amusement. “We are about to arrive at that universal goal of all the great philosophers, Rogers. Truth.”

“What do you mean?”

“That’s a lie-detector.”

“Cut it out. Where the hell would you get one?”

“There is nothing esoteric about a lie-detector. Almost anybody could make one. Operating it, however, is something else, and that’s where we’re very fortunate. Flowers is a genius. It talks to him.”

Flowers paid no attention. He ran a long cord over to an electrical outlet, and turned the machine on. Then he began connecting it to me as calmly and methodically as if this were a police station. If it occurred to him at all that there was any quality of madness in the situation, he apparently dismissed it as irrelevant. The whole thing was merely a technical problem. He wrapped a blood-pressure cuff about my right arm above the elbow and pumped it up. Then a tube went about my chest. He threw another switch, and the paper began to move. The styli made little jagged lines as they registered my pulse, blood pressure, and respiration. The room became very quiet. He made minor adjustments to the controls, pulled up the chair and sat down, hunched over the thing with the dedicated expression of a priest. He nodded to Slidell.

“All right, Rogers,” Slidell said. “All you have to do is answer the questions I put to you. Answer any way you like, but answer. Refuse, and you get the gun barrel across your face.”

“Go ahead,” I said. It did no good now to think how stupid I’d been not to think of this myself. I could have asked the FBI to give me a lie-detector test.