The sailcloth shroud - By Charles Williams Page 0,8

that held a telephone and a switchbox for routing calls. Behind her was the closed door to an inner office, and to the left I could see down a hallway past a number of other doors. Soames looked at his watch and wrote something in the book that was on a small desk near the door. Then he nodded politely, and said, “This way, please.”

I followed him down the hallway to the last door. The office inside was small, spotlessly neat, and cool, with light green walls, marbled gray linoleum, and one window, across which were tilted the white slats of a Venetian blind. There was a single desk, with a swivel chair in back of it. An armchair stood before it, near one corner, facing the light from the window. Soames nodded toward it, and held out cigarettes. “Sit down, please. I’ll be right back.”

I fired up the cigarette. As I dropped the lighter back in my pocket, I said curiously, “I don’t get this. Why is the FBI interested in Keefer?”

“Keefer?” Soames had started out; he paused in the doorway. “Oh, that’s a local police matter.”

I stared blankly after him. If they weren’t interested in Keefer, what did they want to know? Soames returned in moment carrying a Manila folder. He sat down and began emptying it of its contents: the log I had kept of the trip, the signed and notarized statement regarding Baxter’s death and the inventory of his personal effects.

He glanced up briefly. “I suppose you’re familiar with all this?”

“Yes, of course,” I said. “But how’d it get over here? And just what is it you want?”

“We’re interested in Wendell Baxter.” Soames slid the notarized statement out of the pile, and studied it thoughtfully. “I haven’t had much chance to digest this, or your log, so I’d like to check the facts with you just briefly, if you don’t mind.”

“Not at all,” I replied. “But I thought the whole thing was closed. The marshal’s office—”

“Oh, yes,” Soames assured me. “It’s just that they’ve run into a little difficulty in locating Baxter’s next of kin, and they’ve asked us to help.”

“I see.”

He went on crisply. “You’re owner and captain of the forty-foot ketch Topaz, which you bought in Cristobal, Panama Canal Zone, on May twenty-seven of this year, through Joseph Hillyer, Miami yacht broker who represented the sellers. That’s correct?”

“Right.”

“You sailed from Cristobal on June one, at ten-twenty a.m., bound for this port, accompanied by two other men you engaged as deckhands for the trip. One was Francis L. Keefer, a merchant seaman, possessing valid A.B. and Lifeboat certificates as per indicated numbers, American national, born in Buffalo, New York, September twelve, nine-teen-twenty. The other was Wendell Baxter, occupation or profession unspecified but believed to be of a clerical nature, not possessed of seaman’s papers of any kind but obviously familiar with the sea and well versed in the handling of small sailing craft such as yachts, home address San Francisco, California. Four days out of Cristobal, on June five, Baxter collapsed on deck at approximately three-thirty p.m. while trimming a jib sheet, and died about twenty minutes later. There was nothing you could do to help him, of course. You could find no medicine in his suitcase, the boat’s medicine chest contained nothing but the usual first-aid supplies, and you were several hundred miles from the nearest doctor.”

“That’s right,” I said. “If I never feel that helpless again, it’ll be all right with me.”

Soames nodded. “Your position at the time was 16.10 North, 81.40 West, some four hundred miles from the Canal, and approximately a hundred miles off the coast of Honduras. It was obvious you were at least another six days from the nearest Stateside port, so you put about immediately to return to the Canal Zone with his body, but in three days you saw you were never going to get there in time. That’s essentially it?”

“In three days we made eighty-five miles,” I said. “And the temperature down there in the cabin where his body was ran around ninety degrees.”

You couldn’t have gone into some port in Honduras?”

I gestured impatiently. “This has all been threshed out with the Coast Guard. I could have tried for some port on the mainland of Honduras or Nicaragua, or gone on to Georgetown, Grand Cayman, which was less than two hundred miles to the north of us—except that I wasn’t cleared for any of those places. Baxter was already dead, so it’s doubtful the port authorities