Charles Williams - The Sailcloth Shroud

She faced him for a moment, and then nodded, and crossed unsteadily to the desk. He was beside her as she picked up the receiver, and motioned for her to tilt it so he could hear too. Bonner turned and watched me. “Hello,” she said. Then, “Yes. That’s right.”

There was a longer pause. Then she said, “Yes. He was here. But he left. . . . No, he didn’t say. . . .”

So it was Bill. She was listening. She looked helplessly at Slidell. He pulled the receiver down, put his hand over it, and said, “Tell him no. It couldn’t have been. And hang up. She repeated it. “You’re welcome,” she said, and replaced the instrument.

What would he do now? There was no doubt as to what he’d asked. And I’d told him if the Reagan lead proved a dead end I was going to call the FBI. As a reporter he could conceivably find out whether I had or not. How much time would go by before he decided something was wrong? It was only a very slight one, and there was no way he could have known, but Slidell had finally made a mistake.

He motioned for her to go back, and picked up the phone himself. “Southport, Texas,” he said. “The Randall Hotel, and I want to speak to Mr. Shaw.”

He held on. Patricia sat down on the couch, and when I turned toward her she made a helpless, almost apologetic sort of gesture, and tried to smile. I nodded and tried it myself, but it wasn’t much more successful.

“Hello?” Slidell said. “Yes. Some progress here. We ran into an old friend, and we’re having quite a discussion. Anything new there? . . . I see. . . . But they still haven’t been able to talk to her? . . . Good. . . . What about the other one? . . . That’s fine. . . . Sounds just about right. Well, stand by. I’ll call you when we get something.” He hung up.

There were only parts of it I understood. One man was still in Southport, covering that end of it. Paula Stafford was alive, but the police hadn’t been able to question her yet, as far as he knew. But I couldn’t guess what he meant by the “other one.”

He came back and sat down. I wondered what Bill would do, and how much longer we had.

“Let’s consider what Reagan would do,” he said. “He knew he could die before he reached the States. You would turn his suitcase over to the US marshal or the police, and the money would be discovered. At first glance, that would seem to be no great hardship, since he wouldn’t need it any longer, but it’s not quite that simple. I’ve made a rather thorough study of Reagan—anybody who steals a half million dollars from me is almost certain to arouse my interest—and he was quite a complex man. He was a thief, but an uncomfortable thief, if you follow me. It was gambling that always got him into trouble. But all that’s beside the point. What I’m getting at is that he loved his daughter very much. He’d made a mess of his life—that is, from his viewpoint—and while he was willing to take the consequences himself, he’d do almost anything to keep from hurting her again.”

Patricia made a little outcry. Slidell glanced at her indifferently and went on.

“I’m fairly certain the real reason, or at least one reason, he agreed to go along with us is that he’d been dipping into the till at the Drovers National, as he had at the other bank, and he saw a way to put the money back before they caught up with him. But there was risk in this too, so he decided to take it all and fade.

“At any rate, if you’re still following me, he was dead, buried, and honest, as far as his daughter was concerned. But if all that money came to light there’d be an investigation, eventually they’d find out who he really was, and she’d have to bury him all over again, this time as one of the most publicized thieves since Dillinger.

“So he had to do something with it? But what? Throw it overboard? That might seem just a little extreme later on when he arrived in Southport still in good health. Hide it somewhere on the boat? That would be more like it, because then if he arrived all right he merely pulled it out of the hiding place and went on his way. But there are two difficulties; it’d be pretty hard, if not downright impossible, to hide anything permanently on a forty-foot boat, to begin with, and then there was Paula Stafford. She knew he had it, of course, so when it turned up missing she might come out of hiding and jump you about it, which could lead to an investigation, the very thing he was trying to avoid. And there’s no doubt he would much rather she had it anyway. Along with the rest of it . So the chances are he’d try to arrange for her to get it, in case he died, without anyone’s ever knowing he had it aboard. But how? And what went wrong?”

He was approaching it from a different direction, but he was leading me toward it as inevitably as I’d been headed for it myself. I wondered how near we would get before the machine betrayed me, or before the conscious effort of my holding back was written there in its jagged scrawls for Flowers to see. The things it measured were outside voluntary control.

His eyes shifted from the machine to my face like those of a big cat, just waiting. “We don’t know how he tried to do it. But what went wrong, obviously, was Keefer. When he had the big one, how long was it from the time it struck until he died?”

“I guessed it at about twenty minutes,” I said. “Naturally, I wasn’t watching a clock. And it’s not an easy thing to tell, anyway, in spite of the offhand way they do it on television. He could have been dead five or ten minutes before we were sure.” Add all the details possible, I thought, as long as they’re true and don’t really matter.

“Thank you, Doctor,” he said, with a bleak smile. “Approximately how long was he conscious?”

“Just the first few minutes. Five at the most.”

“He didn’t say anything?”

“No.” Nothing coherent, I started to add, but thought better of it. She was having a bad enough time of it as it was without being told the kind of sounds he made.

“Was Keefer alone with him at any time?”

“No,” I said.

“So he was the one who went to look in the suitcase for medicine?”

“Yes.”

Flowers was watching the scrawls with rapt attention, but he had said nothing yet. As long as I concentrated on one question at a time I was all right. But each one was a step, leading up to where the noose was waiting.

“When did you inventory his things?”

“The next morning.”

“And at least half of that time you would have been on deck, at the wheel, while he was below alone?”

“If you mean could he have gone through Reagan’s suitcase,” I said coldly, “of course he could. And he probably did, since he had four thousand dollars when we arrived in Southport. But he couldn’t have carried twenty-three thousand ashore with him unless it was in five hundred-or thousand-dollar bills. He didn’t have it, anyway, or the police would have found it.”

“I know that,” he broke in. “But let’s plug all the holes as we go. You docked in Southport Monday afternoon, the sixteenth. Was that at the boatyard?”

“No,” I said. “We didn’t go alongside a pier at all that day. We anchored at the City Yacht Basin.”

“Did you go ashore?”

“I didn’t. Keefer did. He put the bite on me for another twenty-dollar advance and went uptown.”

“Then he wasn’t entirely stupid. You knew he was broke, so he had sense enough to ask you for money. Could he have been carrying any of it then?”

“Not much,” I said. “I was below when he washed up and dressed, so he didn’t have it tied around his body anywhere. I saw his wallet when he put the twenty in it. It was empty. He couldn’t have carried much just in his pockets.”