The sailcloth shroud - By Charles Williams Page 0,57

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.”

“You didn’t leave the boat at all?”

“Only when I rowed him over to the pier in the dinghy. I went over to the phone in the yacht club and called the estimators in a couple of boatyards to have them come look the job over.”

“What time did Keefer come back?”

“The next morning, around eight. About half drunk.”

“He must have had some of the money, then, unless he set a world’s record for milking a twenty. What about that morning?”

“He shaved and had a cup of coffee, and we went up to the US marshal’s office. He couldn’t have picked up anything aboard the boat because it was only about ten minutes and I was right there all the time. We spent the morning with the marshal and the Coast Guard, and went back to the Yacht Basin about two-thirty p.m. I paid him the rest of his money, he rolled up the two pairs of dungarees, the only clothes he had to carry, and I rowed him over to the pier. He couldn’t have put anything in the dungarees. I wasn’t watching him deliberately, of course; I just happened to be standing there talking to him. He rode off with the truck from Harley’s boatyard. They’d brought me some gasoline so I could get over to the yard; the tanks were dry because we’d used it all trying to get back to Cristobal when we were becalmed. The police say he definitely had three to four thousand with him a half hour later when he checked in at the hotel, so he must have had it in his wallet.”

“You moved the boat to Harley’s boatyard that afternoon, then? Did you go ashore that night?”

“No.”

“Wednesday night?”

“No,” I said. “Both nights I went up to that Domino place for a bite to eat and was gone a half hour or forty-five minutes at the most, and that was before dark. I