Charles Williams - The Sailcloth Shroud

Slidell waved him off. “Get away!” Bonner stepped back, and Slidell spoke to me. “You didn’t get the bathrobe?”

“No,” I said. All the rage went out of me suddenly, and I leaned back in the chair with my eyes closed. “I touched it with the end of the boathook, but I couldn’t get hold of it.”

That was what I’d seen, but hadn’t wanted to see, the afternoon we buried him. It wasn’t his body, sewn in white Orlon, that was fading away below me, disappearing forever into two miles of water; it was that damned white bathrobe. And all the time I was trying to bury it in my subconscious, the other thing—already buried there—was trying to dig it up.

“And they were the only ones he had?” Slidell asked.

“I guess so,” I said dully. I could hear Patricia Reagan crying softly over to my left.

Bonner’s rasping voice cut in. “What the hell are you talking about?”

Slidell paid no attention. Or maybe he gestured for him to shut up. My eyes were still closed.

“And he still didn’t tell you what they were?” Slidell went on. “You didn’t realize it until he had the second one, the one that killed him—”

“Look!” I cried out angrily. “I didn’t even realize it then! Why should I? He said it was indigestion, and he took a pill for it, and then he took another one, and he lay there resting and getting a suntan for about a half hour and then went below and turned in. He didn’t groan, or cry out. It wasn’t anything like the other one; the pain probably wasn’t anywhere near as bad, or he wouldn’t have been able to cover it up that way.

“I had no reason to connect the two. I understand now why he didn’t say anything about it, even when I told him about the bathrobe. He knew I’d take him back to Panama, and he’d rather risk another ten days at sea without the medicine than do that. But why would I have any reason to suspect it? All I knew about him was what he’d told me. His name was Wendell Baxter, and he got indigestion when he ate onions.”

No, I thought; that wasn’t completely true. Then, before I could correct myself, Flowers’ voice broke in. “Wait a minute—”

He’d never even looked up, I thought; people as such didn’t really exist for him; they were just some sort of stimulating devices or power supplies he hooked onto his damned machine so he could sit there and stare enraptured into its changing expressions. Maybe this was what they meant about the one-sided development of genius.

“All right,” I said. “I’m lying. Or I was. I was lying to myself. There was a reason I should have known it was a heart attack, but I didn’t understand what it was until today, when I thought about the one my uncle had.”

“What was that?” Slidell asked.

“He didn’t swallow those pills,” I said.

“Why?” Bonner asked. “What’s that got to do with it?”

“They were nitroglycerin,” Slidell told him impatiently. I straightened up in the chair and groped mechanically for a cigarette.

“I think it must have stuck in my mind all those years,” I went on. “I mean, it was the first time I’d ever heard of pills you took but didn’t swallow. You dissolved them under your tongue. Reagan was doing the same thing, but it didn’t quite click until just now. I merely thought he was swallowing them without water.”

Slidell sat down again, lighted a cigarette, and regarded me with a bleak smile. “It’s regrettable your medical knowledge isn’t as comprehensive as that stupid conscience of yours and its defense mechanisms, Rogers. It would have saved us a lot of time.”

I frowned. “What do you mean?”

“That it probably wouldn’t have made the slightest difference if he’d had a tubful of those nitroglycerin pills. They’re a treatment for angina, which is essentially just the warning. The danger signal. Reagan, from your report, was killed by a really massive coronary, and you could just as well have given him aspirin or a Bromo-Seltzer.”

“How do you know so much about it?” I asked.

“I went to a doctor and asked,” he said. “When you’re dealing with sums in the order of a half million dollars you cover all bases. But never mind. Let’s get on with it.”

I wondered what he hoped to find out now, but I didn’t say it aloud. With Reagan admittedly dead and lying on the bottom of the Caribbean with his secret the show was over, but as long as he refused to accept it and kept me tied to this machine answering questions Patricia Reagan and I would stay alive. When he gave up, Bonner would get rid of us. It was as simple as that.

“We can assume,” he went on, “that we know now why Reagan didn’t ask you to put him ashore. That first heart attack—and losing his medicine—scared him off. There’s no doubt he’d already been suffering from angina, or he wouldn’t have had the nitroglycerin, but this was more than that—or he thought it was, which amounts to the same thing. Of course, he still might die before he reached Southport, but even at that he’d have a better chance staying with the boat than he would landing on a deserted stretch of beach and having to fight his way through a bunch of jungle alone. So he played the percentages.”

“Yes,” I said. That seemed more or less obvious now.

“What was he wearing when he died?”

“Dungarees,” I said, “and a pair of sneakers.”

“If he’d had a money belt around him, you would have seen it?”

“Yes. But he didn’t have one.”

Flowers and Bonner were silently watching the machine. I turned and shot a glance at Patricia Reagan. Her face was pale, but she didn’t avoid my eyes now. That was something, anyway. Maybe she didn’t blame me for his death.

“Did you put any more clothes on him when you buried him?”

“No,” I said.

“And everything he owned was turned over to the US marshal?”

“That’s right.”

He exhaled smoke and stared up at the ceiling. “Now I think we’re getting somewhere, wouldn’t you say? Somewhere around nineteen thousand dollars of that money is still missing. It didn’t go ashore with his things, it wasn’t buried with him, Keefer didn’t have it, you haven’t got it, and I don’t think there’s a chance it’s on your boat. What does that leave?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Unless he just didn’t have it with him.”

He smiled coldly. “But I think he did.”

I began to get it then. You had to remember two things. The first was that he wasn’t even remotely interested in $19,000 worth of chicken-feed; from his point of view the fact that it was missing was the only good news he had left. And the other thing you had to keep in mind was that Reagan had been warned. He knew there was at least a chance he wouldn’t reach the States alive.

Excitement quickened along my nerves. All the pieces were beginning to make sense now, and I should know where that money was. And not only the money. The same thing he was looking for—a letter. I could have done it long ago, I thought, if I hadn’t subconsciously tried to reject the idea that I was to blame for Reagan’s death.

“Here’s something,” Flowers called out softly.

I glanced up then, and finally realized the real beauty of the trap they had me in. Even thinking of the answer would get me killed. Bonner’s hard eyes were on my face, and Slidell was watching me with the poised deadliness of a stalking cat.

“Have you thought of something?” he asked.

The telephone rang.

The unexpected sound of it seemed to explode in the silence, and everybody turned to look at it except Slidell. He stood up and nodded curtly to Patricia Reagan. “Answer it, and get rid of whoever it is. If it’s somebody looking for Rogers, he left. You don’t know where he went. Understand?”