The sailcloth shroud - By Charles Williams Page 0,34

for several hours, hoping he’d been able to jump, but if he had he’d already drowned. They never found any trace of him. There wasn’t any doubt, of course, as to what boat it was. That was just about the position he’d reported. He’d been drifting north in the Stream all the time his engines were conked out.”

“Did they ever recover his body?” I asked.

“No.”

“Did his life-insurance companies pay off?”

“As far as anybody could ever find out, he didn’t carry any life insurance.”

We looked at each other in silence. We both nodded.

“When they come after you,” Lorraine said, “tell them to wait for me. I think so too.”

“Sure,” I said excitedly. “Look—that’s the very thing that’s been puzzling me all the time. I mean, why those three goons were so sure I’d put him ashore somewhere, without even knowing about the letter. It’s simply because he’d done it to ‘em once before.”

“Not so fast,” Bill cautioned. “Remember, this happened at least twenty miles offshore. And on his way out that day he stopped at a marine service station in Government Cut and gassed up. They were positive he didn’t have a dinghy. Sport fishermen seldom or never do, of course, so they’d have noticed if he had.”

“That doesn’t prove a thing,” I said, “except that we’re right. He wanted it known he didn’t have another boat with him. Somebody else took him off, and five will get you ten it was a girl named Paula Stafford. The Stream was flat; she could have come out from Fort Lauderdale in any kind of power cruiser, or even one of those big, fast outboard jobs. Finding him in the dark might be a tough job for a landlubber, unless he gave her a portable RDF and a signal from the Princess Pat to home on, but actually she wouldn’t have to do it in the dark. She could have been already out there before sundown, lying a mile or so away where she wouldn’t have any trouble picking up his lights. Or if there were no other boats around, she could have gone alongside before it got dark.”

“But neither the tanker nor the Coast Guard saw any other boat when they got there.”

“They wouldn’t,” I said. “Look. They took it for granted the explosion occurred while he was talking to them, because his radio went dead. Well, his radio went dead simply because he turned it off. Then he threw several gallons of gasoline around the cabin and cockpit, rigged a fuse of some kind that would take a few minutes to set it off, got in the other boat, and shoved. It would have taken the tanker possibly ten minutes to get there, even after they spotted the fire. So with a fast boat, Baxter was probably five to seven miles away and running without lights when it showed up, and by the time the Coast Guard arrived he was ashore having a drink in some cocktail lounge in Fort Lauderdale. It would be easy. That’s the reason I asked about the insurance. It would be so simple to fake that if he had a really big policy they probably wouldn’t pay off until after seven years, or whatever it is.”

“Well, he didn’t have any,” Bill replied, “so that was no strain. He also had no heirs that anybody has been able to locate, and the only estate besides the other boats seems to be a checking account with about eleven thousand in it.”

“What else did you find out?” I asked.

“I pulled his package in the morgue, but there wasn’t a great deal in it after the clippings for those first few days. So I started calling people. The police are still trying to locate some of his family. The house is sitting there vacant; he had a lease, and paid the rent on a yearly basis, so it has until next February to run. Nobody can understand his financial setup. The way he lived was geared to a hell of a big income, but they don’t know where it came from. They couldn’t find any investments of any kind, no stocks, bonds, real estate, savings, or anything. Just the checking account.”

“Well, the bank must know how the checking account was maintained.”

“Yes. Mostly by big cashiers’ checks, ten thousand or more at a time, from out-of-town banks. He could have bought them himself.”

“That sounds as if he were on the run, and hiding from somebody, even then. If he had a