Boyd nodded. “And you think Keefer had the Thunderbird parked outside the joint then?”
“Looks that way,” Willetts conceded.
“It would make sense, so Rogers must be leveling about the money. Keefer didn’t want him to see the car and start getting curious. Anything on the boat?”
“No. Joe says it’s clean. No gun, no money, nothing. Doesn’t prove anything, necessarily.”
“No. But we’ve got nothing to hold Rogers for.”
“How about till we can check him out with Miami? And get a report back from the Bureau on Keefer’s prints?”
“No,” Boyd said crisply.
Willitts savagely stubbed out his cigarette. “But, damn it, Jim, something stinks in this whole deal—”
“Save it! You can’t book a smell.”
“Take a look at it!” Willetts protested. “Three men leave Panama in a boat with about eight hundred dollars between ‘em. One disappears in the middle of the ocean, and another one comes ashore with four thousand dollars, and four days later he’s dead—”
“Hold it!” I said. “If you’re accusing me of something, let’s hear what it is. Nobody’s ‘disappeared,’ as you call it. Baxter died of a heart attack. There was a hearing, with a doctor present, and it’s been settled—”
“On your evidence. And one witness, who’s just been murdered.”
“Cut it out!” the lieutenant barked. He jerked an impatient hand at Willetts. “For Christ’s sake, we’ve got no jurisdiction in the Caribbean Sea. Baxter’s death was investigated by the proper authorities, and if they’re satisfied, I am. And when I am, you are. Now get somebody to run Rogers back to his boat. If we need him again, we can pick him up.”
I stood up. “Thanks,” I said. “I’ll be around for another week, at least. Maybe two.”
“Right,” Boyd said. The telephone rang on his desk, and he cut short the gesture of dismissal to reach for it. We went out, and started across the outer office. Just before we reached the corridor, we were halted by the lieutenant’s voice behind us. “Wait a minute! Hold everything!”
We turned. Boyd had his head out the door of his office. “Bring Rogers back here a minute.” We went back. Boyd was on the telephone. “Yeah. . . . He’s still here. ... In the office. . . . Right.”
He replaced the instrument, and nodded to me. “You might as well park it again. That was the FBI.”
I looked at him, puzzled. “What do they want?”
“You mean they ever tell anybody? They just said to hold you till they could get a man over here.”
3
At least, I thought morosely as we stepped from the elevator, the Federal Building was air-conditioned. If you were going to spend the rest of your life being questioned about Keefer by all the law-enforcement agencies in the country, it helped a little if you were comfortable. Not that I had anything against heat as such; I liked hot countries, provided they were far enough away from civilization to do away with the wearing of shirts that did nothing but stick to you like some sort of soggy film. The whole day was shot to hell now, but this was an improvement over the police station.
I glanced sidewise in grudging admiration at Special Agent Soames—cool, efficient, and faultlessly pressed. Sweat would never be any problem to this guy; if it bothered him he’d turn it off. In the ten minutes since I’d met him in Lieutenant Boyd’s office, I’d learned exactly nothing about why they wanted to talk to me. I’d asked, when we were out on the street, and had been issued a friendly smile and one politely affable assurance that it was merely routine. We’d discuss it over in the office. Soames was thirty-ish and crew-cut, but anything boyish and ingenuous about him was strictly superficial; he had a cool and very deadly eye. We went down the corridor, with my crepe soles squeaking on waxed tile. Soames opened a frosted glass door and stood aside for me to enter. Inside was a small anteroom. A trim gray-haired woman in a linen suit was typing energetically at a desk 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?”