The sailcloth shroud - By Charles Williams Page 0,48

I thought, who could blame her? Then the front door opened. Bonner came in, followed by a popeyed little man carrying a black metal case about the size of a portable tape recorder.

11

“Both of you stay where you are,” Slidell ordered. He stood up and turned to Bonner. “Bring Flowers a table and a chair.”

Bonner went down the hall and came back with a small night table. He set it and one of the dining chairs near the chair I was in, and swung me around so I was facing the front window with the table on my right. Then he lighted a cigarette and leaned against the front door, boredly watching.

“This jazz is a waste of time, if you ask me,” he remarked.

“I didn’t,” Slidell said shortly.

Bonner shrugged. I glanced around at Patricia Reagan, but she avoided my eyes and was staring past me at Flowers, as mystified as I was. He was a slightly built little man in his thirties with a bald spot and a sour, pinched face that was made almost grotesque by the slightly bulging eyes. He set the black case on the table and removed the lid. The top panel held a number of controls and switches, but a good part of it was taken up by a window under which was a sheet of graph paper and three styli mounted on little arms.

I glanced up to find Slidell’s eyes on me in chill amusement. “We are about to arrive at that universal goal of all the great philosophers, Rogers. Truth.”

“What do you mean?”

“That’s a lie-detector.”

“Cut it out. Where the hell would you get one?”

“There is nothing esoteric about a lie-detector. Almost anybody could make one. Operating it, however, is something else, and that’s where we’re very fortunate. Flowers is a genius. It talks to him.”

Flowers paid no attention. He ran a long cord over to an electrical outlet, and turned the machine on. Then he began connecting it to me as calmly and methodically as if this were a police station. If it occurred to him at all that there was any quality of madness in the situation, he apparently dismissed it as irrelevant. The whole thing was merely a technical problem. He wrapped a blood-pressure cuff about my right arm above the elbow and pumped it up. Then a tube went about my chest. He threw another switch, and the paper began to move. The styli made little jagged lines as they registered my pulse, blood pressure, and respiration. The room became very quiet. He made minor adjustments to the controls, pulled up the chair and sat down, hunched over the thing with the dedicated expression of a priest. He nodded to Slidell.

“All right, Rogers,” Slidell said. “All you have to do is answer the questions I put to you. Answer any way you like, but answer. Refuse, and you get the gun barrel across your face.”

“Go ahead,” I said. It did no good now to think how stupid I’d been not to think of this myself. I could have asked the FBI to give me a lie-detector test.

“It won’t work,” Bonner said disgustedly. “Everybody knows how they operate. The blood pressure and pulse change when you’re upset or scared. So how’re you going to tell anything with a meatball that’s scared stiff to begin with?”

“There will still be a deviation from the norm,” Flowers said contemptuously.

“To translate,” Slidell said, “what Flowers means is that if Rogers is scared stiff as a normal condition, the instrument will tell us when he’s scared rigid. Now shut up.”

Bonner subsided.

“What is your name?” Slidell asked.

“Stuart Rogers.”

“Where were you born?”

“Coral Gables, Florida.”

“Where did you go to school?”

“The University of Miami.”

“What business is your father in?”

“He was an attorney.”

“You mean he’s dead?”

“Yes,” I said.

“What did he die of?”

“He was killed in an automobile accident.”

There were fifteen or twenty more of these establishing questions while Flowers intently studied his graphs. Then Slidell said, “Did you know a man who told you his name was Wendell Baxter?”

“Yes,” I said.

“And he sailed with you from Cristobal on June first aboard your boat?”

“Yes.”

“And you put him ashore somewhere in Central America or Mexico?”

“No,” I said.

Slidell was leaning over Flowers’ shoulder, watching the styli. Flowers gave a faint shake of the head. Slidell frowned at me.

“Where did you put him ashore?”

“I didn’t,” I said.

“Where is he?”

“He’s dead.”

Flowers looked up at Slidell and spread his hands.

“You don’t see any change in pattern at all?” Slidell asked.

“No. Of course, it’s impossible to tell much