The Sailcloth Shroud by Charles Williams Page B

and fired him, and was taking the Princess Pat across to Bimini himself. He’d told somebody he planned to hire a native skipper and mate for a couple of weeks’ marlin fishing. It was good weather with hardly any wind, and the Stream was as flat as Biscayne Bay. He left around noon, and should have been over there in three or four hours. Afterward, there were two boats that reported seeing him drifting around, but he didn’t ask for help so they didn’t go over. Some time after dark he called the Coast Guard—”
    “Sure,” I broke in. “That was it. I remember now. He was talking to them right at the moment she blew up.”
    Bill nodded. “It was easy enough to figure out what happened. When he got hold of them, he said he’d been having engine trouble all afternoon. Dirt or rust in the fuel tanks. He’d been blowing out fuel lines and cleaning strainers and settling bowls and probably had the bilges full of gasoline by that time. He’d know enough not to smoke, of course, so it must have been the radio itself that set it off. Maybe a sparking brush on the converter, or a relay contact. That was the Coast Guard theory. Anyway, he went dead right in the middle of a sentence. Then about fifteen minutes later a northbound tanker pretty well out in the Stream off Fort Lauderdale reported what looked like a boat afire over to the eastward of them. They changed course and went over, and got there before the Coast Guard, but there wasn’t anything they could do. She was a mass of flame by then and in a matter of minutes she burned to the waterline and sank. The Coast Guard cruised around 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