The sailcloth shroud - By Charles Williams Page 0,33
table and sat down across from me, rested her elbows on the counter, and grinned.
“Let’s face it, Rogers. Civilization just isn’t your environment. I mean land-based civilization. Any time you come above high tide you ought to carry a tag, the way sandhogs do. Something like “This man is not completely amphibious, and may get into trouble ashore. Rush to nearest salt water and immerse.’“
“I’ll buy it,” I said. “Only the whole thing started at sea. That can scare you.”
“Have you told him yet?” she asked Bill.
“I’m going to right now.” He pushed the untouched eggs off his plate onto mine and lighted a cigarette. “Try this on for size—your man was forty-eight to fifty, six feet, a hundred and seventy pounds, brown hair with a little gray in it, brown eyes, mustache, quiet, gentlemanly, close-mouthed, and boat-crazy.”
“Right,” I said. “Except for the mustache.”
Somebody may have told him about razors. He came here about two and a half years ago—February of nineteen-fifty-six, to be exact—and he seemed to have plenty of money. He rented a house on one of the islands—a big, elaborate one with private dock—and bought that sport fisherman, a thirty-foot sloop, and a smaller sailboat of some kind. He was a bachelor, widower, or divorced. He had a Cuban couple who took care of the house and garden, and a man named Charley Grimes to skipper the fishing boat. Apparently didn’t work at anything, and spent nearly all his time fishing and sailing. Had several girl friends around town, most of whom would have probably married him if he’d ever asked them, but it appears he never told them any more about himself than he told anybody else. His name was Brian Hardy, and the name of the fishing boat was the Princess Pat. You begin to get it now?”
“It’s all fits,” I said excitedly. “Every bit of it. That was Baxter, beyond a doubt.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Bill replied. “Brian Hardy’s been dead for over two months. And this is the part you’re going to love. He was lost at sea.”
It began to come back then. “No!” I said. “No—”
Lorraine patted my hand. “Poor old Rogers. Why don’t you get married, so you can stay out of trouble? Or be in it all the time and get used to it.”
“Understand,” I said, “I’m not prejudiced. Some of my best friends are married. It’s just that I wouldn’t want my sister to marry a married couple.”
“It happened in April, and I think you were somewhere in the out islands,” Bill went on. “But you probably heard about it.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Explosion and fire, wasn’t it? Somewhere in the Stream.”
“That’s right. He was alone. He’d had a fight with Grimes that morning and fired him, and was taking the Princess Pat across to Bimini himself. He’d told somebody he planned to hire a native skipper and mate for a couple of weeks’ marlin fishing. It was good weather with hardly any wind, and the Stream was as flat as Biscayne Bay. He left around noon, and should have been over there in three or four hours. Afterward, there were two boats that reported seeing him drifting around, but he didn’t ask for help so they didn’t go over. Some time after dark he called the Coast Guard—”
“Sure,” I broke in. “That was it. I remember now. He was talking to them right at the moment she blew up.”
Bill nodded. “It was easy enough to figure out what happened. When he got hold of them, he said he’d been having engine trouble all afternoon. Dirt or rust in the fuel tanks. He’d been blowing out fuel lines and cleaning strainers and settling bowls and probably had the bilges full of gasoline by that time. He’d know enough not to smoke, of course, so it must have been the radio itself that set it off. Maybe a sparking brush on the converter, or a relay contact. That was the Coast Guard theory. Anyway, he went dead right in the middle of a sentence. Then about fifteen minutes later a northbound tanker pretty well out in the Stream off Fort Lauderdale reported what looked like a boat afire over to the eastward of them. They changed course and went over, and got there before the Coast Guard, but there wasn’t anything they could do. She was a mass of flame by then and in a matter of minutes she burned to the waterline and sank. The Coast Guard cruised around