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walked over to the washroom, showered, shaved, and dressed in clean slacks and a fresh sport shirt. Back in the cabin, as I was putting away my shaving gear, I thought of Keefer. Odd, with all that money he had, that he would come clear back out here just to pick up the cheap shaving kit he’d bought in Panama. I paused. Now that I thought about it, I hadn’t even seen it since Keefer had left. Was it just an excuse to get aboard? Maybe the man was a thief. I pulled open the drawer under the bunk Keefer had occupied. There was no razor in it. Why, the dirty . . . Well, don’t go off half-cocked, I thought; make sure it’s not aboard. I stepped into the head and pulled open the tiny medicine cabinet above the basin. There it was, the styrene case containing a safety razor and a pack of blades. My apologies, Blackie.
    I went up the companion ladder. The deck now lay in the lengthening shadows of the buildings ashore, and with a slight breeze blowing up bay from the Gulf it was a little cooler. I sat down in the cockpit, took out a cigarette, and then paused just as I started to flip the lighter.
    Paula.
    Paula Stafford.
    Was there something familiar about the name? Hadn’t I heard it before, somewhere? Oh, it was probably just imagination. I dropped the lighter back in my pocket, and inhaled deeply of the smoke, but the nagging idea persisted. Maybe Keefer had mentioned her sometime during the trip. Or Baxter.
    Baxter . . . For some reason I was conscious again of that strange sensation of unease I had felt there in the office of the FBI. Merely by turning my head I could look along the port side of the deck, between mizzen and main, where I had stood that day with head bared to the brazen heat of the sun and watched the body as it faded slowly and disappeared, falling silently into the depths and the crushing pressures and eternal darkness two miles below. It was the awful finality of it—the fact that if the FBI couldn’t find out something about him, pick up his trail somewhere, they might never know who he was. There’d never be a second chance. No fingerprints, no photograph, no possibility of a better description, nothing. He was gone, forever, without leaving a trace. Was that it? Was it going to bother me the rest of my life—the fact that I had failed to bring the body ashore where it might have been identified?
    Oh, hell, I thought angrily, you’re just being morbid. You did everything humanly possible. Except remove the stomach; that would have helped, but you chickened out. So you did like the man; that’s no excuse. It’s done. But it wouldn’t have changed anything in the long run. You were still three hundred miles from the Canal. And in that heat, trying to stretch it any longer would have been more than just unpleasant; it could have become dangerous. Burial was a practical necessity long before it became a ritual.
    But there must be some clue. We’d been together for four days, and in that length of time even a man as uncommunicative as Baxter would have said something that would provide a lead as to where he was from. Think back. What was it Soames had said about association? Right here within this span of forty feet was where it had all taken place. Start at the beginning, with the first time you ever saw Baxter, and go over every minute.
    I stopped. Just why was it necessary? Or rather, why did I feel it was? Why this subconscious fear that they weren’t going to find anybody in Panama who knew Baxter? The man said he’d worked there. If he had, the FBI would run him down in a day. Was it merely because the San Francisco address had proved a dead end? No, there must be more. . . .
    * * *
    It had rained during the afternoon, a slashing tropical downpour that drummed along the deck and pocked the surface of the water like hail, but it was clear now, and the hot stars of the southern latitudes were ablaze across the sky. The Topaz was moored stern-to at a low wooden wharf with her anchor out