Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 07 (18 page)

“You’re probably right. Is it a problem meeting here? You know, now that Lady Oakes will be around. Maybe there’s some…neutral place we can meet….”

She swallowed hard and her eyes were welling with tears. “You don’t understand, do you? I can’t be seein’ you no more. For any reason. Not anymore.”

I stepped forward, and she moved back.

“Don’t be silly, Marjorie. We mean something to each other….”

She laughed bitterly. “You can’t be serious. I’m just a summer romance to you, Nathan Heller. Just a…shipboard romance, without the ship.”

“Don’t say that—”

Her jaw went firm and yet trembled. “Can you ask me back to Chicago, to live with you? Can I ask you to stay here with me in Nassau? Would your family, would your friends, accept a girl like me? Would my family, my friends, want a white boy like you around?”

I shook my head; I felt thunderstruck. “I admit I haven’t thought any of that through…but Marjorie, what we have is special, very special…on the beach…”

“The beach was very nice.” A tear rolled down her cream-in-the-coffee-brown cheek. “I won’t say it wasn’t. I won’t make a lie of the sweet truth of that. But Nathan…I got a brother! I got a brother who wants to make something of himself. He’s going to go to college. But he needs my help to do it. And I need Lady Eunice to help him.”

Now I swallowed. “So we’re quits then?”

She nodded, once.

“I’m just a…summer fling to you, Marjorie? Is that it? Something that just…happened? During carnal hours?”

“Yes.”

She brushed the tear from her cheek with a thumb; then she brushed the tear from my cheek, and kissed me there, and showed me to the door.

For maybe five minutes, maybe half an hour, I stood on the beach and watched the ocean; looked at the moon. Looked at the moon reflect on the ocean. Watched a land crab scuttle by; and all I did was smile at the goddamn thing.

Then I headed for the Chevy in the country club lot and drove to the B.C., where the man at the front desk told me I had till tomorrow noon to get out.

“The owner of the hotel has requested that you leave,” the white clerk said.

“Lady Oakes, you mean.”

“Lady Oakes,” he said.

For days I’d been hearing that jail; but on this hot Tuesday morning in late July, in the square outside, local displeasure with de Marigny, particularly among Nassau’s native population, was threatening to erupt in a lynch-mob assault on the the yellow colonial Supreme Court building, the racially mixed, overflow crowd—straw market vendors and Bay Street big shots alike—seemed almost festive. They might well have been waiting outside a theater, not a courtroom.

Inside, the play that was de Marigny’s preliminary hearing began with the accused standing at the rail, before a dour, black-robed, powdered-wigged magistrate, who read the charge against the accused: that he had “intentionally and unlawfully” caused the death of Sir Harry Oakes.

Freddie wore a conservative, double-breasted brown suit and stood clean-shaven and somber, his colorful yellow-brown-and-red-patterned tie the only faint thumbing of his nose at authority.

“What is your full name?” the magistrate asked from behind the bench.

“Marie Alfred Fouquereaux de Marigny,” Freddie said, and then spelled out each word for the magistrate, who was taking his own notes in longhand. There seemed to be no court stenographer.

“I appear on behalf of the prosecution,” a resonant voice intoned.

The man who rose to speak at a table shared by both prosecution and defense was a giant of a bewigged, berobed black man, whose clear diction and cultivated English accent seemed at odds with his African features and ebony skin. This was the Honorable A. F. Adderley, Nassau’s foremost trial attorney, who had never lost a murder case, and who had, until now, been de Marigny’s attorney of record.

“I appear on behalf of the accused,” Godfrey Higgs said, standing, his athletic frame holding its own with the massive prosecutor’s. He too was wigged and robed; his smile was confident, eager.

Now two statuesque black officers—to whose already ostentatious uniforms had been added the touch of sheathed bayonets hanging from black leather belts—escorted the prisoner to a wooden box, six feet long, five feet high, inside which was a narrow wooden bench, where Freddie sat, as a door of widely spaced iron bars clanged shut on him. This slightly elevated cage was on the left, as you faced the magistrate behind his bench, with the jury box (empty, for this hearing) directly opposite.

The 150-seat courthouse was packed with mostly white faces, black servants for the wealthy having arrived before sunup to be first in line for their bosses. Nancy was not present, as she would later be called as a witness; I would be her eyes and ears, from the front row.

In addition to the lawyers’ table—where Attorney General Hallinan and the two Miami police captains also sat—two other tables had been squeezed in, in front of the gallery, to accommodate the press. Mere war news took a backseat to a juicy case like this. Newshounds from New York, London and Toronto sat with the local Nassau press, and reps from UPI and the Associated Press were on hand, too. Jimmy Kilgallen was there for INS, sitting next to Erle Gardner, with whom I’d chatted briefly before the proceedings started.

“Have you been ducking me, Heller?” the feisty little mystery writer had asked.

“Yes,” I said.

He laughed harshly. “Is this fellow Higgs going to cross-examine the prosecution witnesses?”

“I don’t really know. Why wouldn’t he?”

A smile twitched in his round face, his eyes glittered behind the gold wire-frames. “Well, burden of proof’s on the prosecution. Usually, in a preliminary hearing, these limey defenders don’t like to tip their hand by asking many questions.”

“Personally,” I said, “I hope Higgs goes after Christie with a hatchet—or maybe a blowtorch.”

That made him laugh again, before we each scurried to our seats as the doors had opened letting in the surge of spectators at nine-thirty.

Now all was quiet, but for the booming voices of the lawyers and magistrate, and the more halting ones of an array of prosecution witnesses, in the slow, steady campaign to place a rope around de Marigny’s neck. That, and the buzzing of flies and the occasional flap of a bird that would find its way through the open windows of the stiflingly hot courtroom.

The poised, mannered Adderley spent most of the morning laying routine groundwork. The first witnesses were the RAF draftsman who’d drawn a floor plan for Lindop, and the RAF photographers who’d taken the death photos—large blowups of which were briefly displayed on an easel, like ghoulish works of art, making the gallery gasp.

Dr. Quackenbush, a bland, trim little man in his mid-forties who (as it turned out) did not resemble Groucho Marx in the least, described the crime scene as he’d found it on the morning of July 8, in clinical but grisly detail; described the four wounds grouped behind Sir Harry’s head as “punctures,” the diameter of a pencil, penetrating the skull.

He neglected to mention that his first instinct had been that these were gunshot wounds.

In discussing the autopsy, the doctor mentioned that “on removing the skullcap, a quantity of blood was seen inside the brain capsule,” and that “there appeared to be a slight contusion of the brain, but no hemorrhages.”

Which to me meant the bullets, having lost momentum on their journey through the skull, could still have been in Sir Harry’s brain—which had not been cut open for examination—which, with the rest of Harry, was currently in a coffin six feet under in Bar Harbor, Maine.

Quackenbush also spoke of “approximately four ounces” of an as yet unidentified “thick, viscid, darkish fluid” in Sir Harry’s stomach. Had Sir Harry been poisoned, or maybe drugged?

I jotted a reminder to myself in my pocket notebook to nudge Higgs about it.

Meanwhile, another of Nassau’s wartime parade of lovely women was taking the stand: the elusive Dulcibel Henneage, who described herself as “an English evacuee with two children.” I would describe her as a pretty blonde in her late twenties, looking shapely despite her conservative suit and hat; if this was Harold Christie’s mistress, he was a lucky man.

But her story of playing afternoon tennis with Charles Hubbard, Harold Christie and Sir Harry Oakes, and later having dinner at Westbourne, shed no particular light on the case. She seemed to have been called simply to help establish a chronology.

The local beauty pageant continued with blond Dorothy Clark and brunette Jean Ainslie, the RAF wives Freddie had escorted home in the rain; like Mrs. Henneage, they looked very proper in their new suits and hats and with nervous precision established Freddie’s presence in the neighborhood of Westbourne on the murder night.

I had not been subpoenaed by the prosecution; now that I was in Freddie’s camp, it began to seem unlikely I’d be asked to back up the girls’ story at the trial. More likely, I’d testify for the defense, showing that de Marigny’s activities on July 7 didn’t seem to be those of a man preparing to end his day with a premeditated murder.

The RAF girls really hadn’t done Freddie any damage; after all, everything they said tallied with his own story. More troubling was the testimony of Constable Wendell Parker, who told of de Marigny stopping at the police station to register a new truck purchased for his chicken farm, at seven-thirty a.m. on July 8.

“He appeared excited,” the constable said. “His eyes were…
bulging.
”

Over in his cage, de Marigny’s eyes were bulging now, at the apparent stupidity of this testimony, but I knew a jury could well interpret his dropping by the police station the morning after the murder as anxiety over whether or not Sir Harry’s body had been discovered yet.

The next witness was all too familiar: Marjorie Bristol, looking crisp and beautiful in a red-and-white floral dress as she stood (as all the witnesses did, in the British style) in the witness box, without leaning on the rail. She told her story simply and well: of setting out Sir Harry’s nightclothes, arranging his mosquito netting; of answering Christie’s cries for help, the next morning.

Higgs rose to cross-examine, briefly, breaking Gardner’s rule for limey lawyers.

“Miss Bristol,” he asked, smiling affably, “I believe you said you ‘flitted’ the room with the insecticide spray gun?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What did you do with it then?”

“I left the spray gun in the room, because Sir Harry, he always told me to leave it there.”

“How much insecticide was left in the spray gun, would you say?”

“Well, sir…I filled it the night before.”

“So you had used it once?”

“That’s right. I would say, it felt about half full.”

“Thank you. No further questions.”

She walked right by me, and we made the briefest eye contact. I smiled, but she looked away, raising her chin.

Two ceiling fans were slicing the stale air; smaller electrical fans sat here and there, whirring futilely. My shirt under my suitcoat was sticking to me like flypaper. But the next two witnesses—native police officers in full regalia, except for the bayonets—took the stand looking cooler than a milk shake.

Both men told painfully similar stories of their various duties at Westbourne the morning and afternoon of the body’s discovery. They spoke in a curious mixture of Caribbean and British inflection; neither man seemed nervous, but their stony demeanor underscored the coached nature of their testimony.

“I saw de Marigny upstairs with Captain Melchen at three-thirty p.m.,” they both said.

This was on July 9; that morning, the scorched Chinese screen had been moved from Sir Harry’s bedchamber out into the hall, where Miami’s finest had done some fingerprint work.

“Captain Barker had finished his fingerprint processing by that time,” they both said.

Over at the press table, Gardner glanced at me and frowned; I did the same to him. We both knew something was up. So did Freddie: behind the bars of his cage, he was frowning, shaking his head slowly.

Nancy de Marigny shook her head the same way, hearing my account of the Tweedledum and Tweedledee testimony of the officers. We were meeting over the lunch break in the dining room of the British Colonial, sharing a table with her friend Lady Diane Medcalf.

“What are they up to?” Nancy wondered aloud. She looked as charming as a lovely child in her plain white sports dress and widebrimmed straw hat tied in place by a white silk scarf.

“No good,” Di said needlessly, arching a brow as she lifted a gin and tonic to her bruised red lips. She did not look like a lovely child, in her vivid-blue clingy crepe dress, big silver medallion buttons like a row of medals in a vertical ribbon between her full breasts. She wore white gloves and a white turban, which hid most of her blondness.

Between steaming spoonfuls of conch chowder, I said, “My guess is that the fingerprint evidence we’ve been hearing about comes from that screen.”

“So what if it does?” Nancy asked, almost petulantly.

“So,” I said, “they have to establish that Freddie couldn’t have touched that screen while he was in the house being questioned.”

Di frowned with interest. “What time does Freddie say he was taken upstairs for questioning?”

I got my notebook out and checked it. “More like eleven-thirty that morning.”

Nancy sat forward. “Can we trip them up?”

I nodded. “If Freddie’s story is backed up by some of these other witnesses who were also at Westbourne being questioned at the time—like those RAF dames, for instance—we can trip ’em up Duke of Windsor style.”

“Duke of Windsor style?” Nancy asked, puzzled.

“Royally,” I grinned.

Di was still frowning. “Why were those women taken to Westbourne for questioning, instead of the police station?”

I shrugged. “That was the Miami boys’ doing. Sometimes it comes in handy when the bad guys are idiots.” I looked at Di and smiled. “And that party you’re throwing this weekend is going to be very helpful, too—
if
the guest list shows.”

“They’ll show,” she said with a wicked little smile. She curled a gloved finger at a black waiter, summoning another gin and tonic.

“You know,” I said, smirking at Nancy, “I feel kind of funny coming back to the B.C., having been so recently banished and all.”

“Is the guest room at Higgs’ suiting you?” she asked, with earnest concern.

“It’s okay. I’m afraid I’m getting on the nerves of his wife and kids.”

Under the table, I felt a hand on my leg.

“I have a guest cottage,” Lady Diane said, ever so casually, “at Shangri La…if you don’t mind the inconvenience of having to take a five-minute ride by launch every time you’re coming and going.

With her hand on my leg like that, I’d be coming before I was going.

“That’s very gracious,” I said, “but I’m afraid you’d be the one who’d be inconvenienced….”

She squeezed my thigh; it was more friendly than sexy, but it was sexy enough.

“Nonsense,” she said, in her brittle British way. “You’d be welcome company.”

“Well…”

“I think it’s a simply fabulous idea,” Nancy said, eyes sparkling. “I spend half my time over there with Di, anyway. So we could have planning sessions and talk strategy.”

The hand beneath the table slipped away.

“All right,” I said, and looked at Lady Diane, narrowing my eyes and sending a signal. “I’ll be glad to come.”

“How delightful,” Di said, and those Bahama-blue eyes locked onto mine and sent their own signal.

“Besides,” I said, “I know all about how no one in Nassau can dare refuse your invitation.”

She laughed a little, then stopped cold to pluck her latest gin and tonic from the hands of the waiter, who seemed a little startled to have his cargo snatched so rudely away.

Nancy leaned in. “Who else do you think will testify today, Nate?”

“To keep the chronology at all coherent,” I said, “there’s only one man Adderley can call….”

Harold Christie clutched the rail around the witness box till his knuckles went as white as his double-breasted linen suit. As he gave his testimony, the little balding lizard of a man swayed from side to side, as if his balance were constantly at risk.

After establishing that Christie had been a real-estate agent in Nassau for about twenty years, Adderley asked him to describe his relationship with the deceased.