The sailcloth shroud - By Charles Williams Page 0,44

R. Bonner?” The name would be phony, of course. I described him.

She shook her head. “No. I’m sorry.”

“I hate to drag you into this,” I said, “but I’ll have to tell them. There’ll probably be an investigation of your father.”

“It can’t be helped,” she said.

I lighted a cigarette. “You’re the only one so far who hasn’t accused me of killing him, stealing his money, or putting him ashore and lying about his death. Don’t you think I did, or are you just being polite?”

She gave me a brief smile. “I don’t believe you did. It’s just occurred to me that I know you—at least by reputation. Some friends of mine in Lynn speak very highly of you.”

“Who?” I asked.

“Ted and Frances Holt. They’ve sailed with you two or three times.”

“For the past three years,” I said. “They’ve shot some terrific under-water movies around the Exumas.”

“I suppose one of us really ought to say it’s a small world,” she mused. “Mr. Rogers—”

“Stuart,” I said.

“Stuart. Why doesn’t anybody seem to think this man Keefer could have taken all that money—assuming it was even aboard? He seems to have had a sizable amount nobody can explain.”

“They’d have found it,” I said. “When they add up what was in the hotel safe and what he conceivably spent, it still comes out to less than four thousand, and not even a drunk could throw away nineteen thousand dollars in three days. But the big factor is that he couldn’t have had it with him when he left the boat. I was right there. He didn’t have any luggage, you see, because all his gear was still on that ship he’d missed in Panama. He’d bought a couple of pairs of dungarees for the trip, but I was standing right beside him when he rolled those up, and he didn’t put anything in them. And he didn’t have a coat. He might have stowed four thousand dollars in his wallet and in the pockets of his slacks, but not twenty-three thousand, unless it was in very large bills. Which I doubt. A man running and trying to hide out would attract a lot of attention trying to break anything larger than hundreds.”

“Maybe he took it ashore when you first docked.”

“No. I was with him then too.”

She frowned. “Then it must still be aboard the Topaz.”

“No,” I said. “It’s been searched twice. By experts.”

“Then that seems to leave only one other possibility,” she said. She paused, and then went on unhappily. “This “isn’t easy to say, under the circumstances, but do you suppose he could have been—unbalanced?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I did when I first read the letter, of course. I mean, he said he had twenty-three thousand with him, but nobody else ever saw it. He said he was going to ask me to put him ashore, but he never did. And the fact that he was going to wait and put a wild proposition like that to me after we got to sea didn’t sound very logical, either. A rational man would have realized how slim the chances were that anybody would go for it, and would have sounded me out before we sailed. But if you look at all these things again, you’re not so sure.

“He apparently did have some money with him. Four thousand, anyway. So if he had that much, maybe he had it all. And waiting till we got to sea to proposition me makes sense if you look at it correctly. If he brought it up before we sailed, I might refuse to take him at all. Getting out of the Canal Zone before this Slidell caught up with him was the number-one item. If he brought up the other thing later and I turned him down, at least he was out of Panama and safe for the moment.”

“So we wind up right where we started.”

“That’s right,” I said. “With the same two questions. What became of the rest of the money? And why did he change his mind?”

The doorbell chimed.

We exchanged a quick glance, and got to our feet. There’d been no sound of a car outside, nor of footsteps on the walk. She motioned me toward the hallway and started to the door, but before she got there it swung open and a tall man in a gray suit and dark green glasses stepped inside and curtly motioned her back. At the same instant I heard the back door open. I whirled. Standing in the arched