Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 07 (19 page)

“I considered Sir Harry one of my closest personal friends,” Christie said, but prosecution witness or not, his tone was defensive.

Nonetheless, his story of the day—and night—of the murder was a dull, rambling recap of his previous statements: tennis at the country club in the afternoon, dinner at Westbourne with a few guests, Chinese checkers until eleven o’clock when Mr. Hubbard and Mrs. Henneage departed, after which he and Sir Harry went up to bed.

He’d chatted with Sir Harry in the latter’s bedroom, and Oakes was in bed, in his pajamas, reading a newspaper, when Christie went to his own bedroom, to read for half an hour or so himself.

Under Adderley’s respectful, even fawning questioning, Christie gradually calmed down. In a firm, natural voice, he told of waking up twice in the night—once to swat some mosquitoes that had gotten under his netting, another time because of the “strong wind and heavy rain.” But he’d heard nothing from Harry’s room, nor had he smelled smoke.

The next morning, when Sir Harry wasn’t waiting on the porch, where they usually breakfasted, Christie claimed to have called out, “Hi, Harry,” as he went into the bedroom, only to find his friend—scorched and sooty—on the still smoldering bed.

“I lifted his head, shook him, poured some water into the glass on the night table, and put the glass to his mouth.” He reached in his back pocket and began swabbing the sweat beading on the shiny dome of his head. “I took a pillow from the other twin bed, propped his head up, got a towel, wet it and wiped his face, hoping to revive him.”

Behind the iron bars, de Marigny’s expression was incredulous; he looked over at me, for the first time, and I shrugged at him. I’d been at the crime scene, and de Marigny—like everyone here—had seen the large blowups of the charred body.

The notion that anyone could have mistaken the corpse of Sir Harry Oakes for a living person seemed like something out of Lewis Carroll.

But something else was gnawing at me, as well: why in the hell would Christie—why in the hell would
anybody
—go to such great lengths to insist he was within eighteen feet of the scene of the crime,
during
the crime?

Before long, the preening Adderley, enjoying the booming British sound of his own voice as it filled the little courtroom, asked Christie, “And are you acquainted, sir, with the accused, de Marigny?”

Christie, shifting yet again in the witness box, one foot to the other, nodded. “I am. I think I’ve known him since he first came here.”

“What was your most recent encounter with the accused?”

“About two weeks ago, he enlisted my services in connection with selling property of his on Eleuthera. He said he had considerable expenses to meet.”

“Did Sir Harry Oakes’ name come up in your conversation, sir?”

“It did. He stated that he and Sir Harry were not on friendly terms.”

“Did he state a reason?”

“No, but I think perhaps there were a number of reasons. I think Sir Harry felt de Marigny had treated his former wife, Ruth Fahnestock de Marigny, unfairly—”

“Objection, my lord,” Higgs said, rising, his tone one of weary patience.

“Withdrawn,” Adderley said, and smiled condescendingly at Higgs, then turned back to his witness. “Could you limit yourself, sir, not to your own opinions, but those expressed to you by the accused, on that occasion?”

Christie nodded again. “At the time, he told me that Sir Harry had not treated him fairly, since his marriage to Miss Nancy Oakes. That Harry had been unduly severe.”

“I see. And this was the last time you spoke to de Marigny, before the murder of Sir Harry Oakes?”

“No. That was the last time I
saw
de Marigny. I spoke to him on the phone, the morning of the seventh.”

“The day of the night of the murder?” Adderley asked, with pompous melodrama.

“Yes,” he said. “De Marigny called me about helping him obtain a permit for his poultry business.”

“Did the accused, at that time, invite you to have dinner at his home on Victoria Avenue on the night of the seventh?”

“No, he did not.”

“Could he have asked you…casually? Is it possible you may simply not recall an offhand invitation of his?”

“If de Marigny had invited me, I would have remembered it.”

De Marigny’s face was almost pressed into the iron bars; his frown was pressed just as deeply into his flesh. Christie was directly contradicting de Marigny’s statement to the police.

What followed was a description of Christie calling out to Marjorie Bristol from the balcony, telephoning Dr. Quackenbush and Colonel Lindop, and the subsequent arrival of the Nassau, and then Miami, police; there was no mention of communications with the Duke of Windsor, much less of the personal appearance His Royal Highness put in.

Soon it was Higgs’ turn, and I was pleased to see he intended to break Gardner’s first rule of English law.

“Mr. Christie…Were Sir Harry’s eyes open, or closed, when you wiped his face?”

Christie was dabbing his own face with the sopping hanky. “I don’t recall.”

“We’ve all seen the photos of the deceased. What made you think Sir Harry might still be alive?”

“I thought he still had some hope. His body was warm.”

“I should think. It had been set afire, after all.”

“Objection!” boomed Adderley.

“Withdrawn,” Higgs said, flashing his boyish smile at his colleague. “Mr. Christie, could you explain the blood smeared on your bedroom and bathroom doors?”

“I may have gotten blood on my hands, wiping Sir Harry’s face.”

“And the blood on your sheets, in your bedroom?”

He swallowed thickly, braced himself against the railing. “As I stated earlier, I awoke in the night and killed a few mosquitoes with a magazine.”

“The blood on your sheets, then, came from the little mosquito corpses.”

De Marigny was leaning back in the cage, smiling; he seemed more relaxed now, picking his teeth with a wooden match.

“I would presume so, yes,” Christie said, fingering his black four-in-hand tie nervously. Another fine mess.

Higgs was smiling again, but there was nothing boyish about it, now. Relentlessly, he took Christie on an excursion of the upstairs in the aftermath of the murder, showing that the little real-estate giant had no grasp of which doors had been open or closed before, or shut by him after, his discovery of his beloved friend’s warm body.

“I put it to you,” Higgs said, “that Count de Marigny did in fact invite you to dinner at his Victoria Avenue address on the seventh of July.”

“No, sir, he did not,” Christie almost shouted.

“No further questions, my lord,” Higgs said, faintly sarcastic, and returned to his table.

Christie, his suit soggy with sweat, stepped down from the witness box and shambled out of the courtroom, a wreck of a witness. Nothing in his testimony had really incriminated Freddie, or anybody else for that matter—except perhaps H. G. Christie.

I smiled to myself.
If you think
that
was rough, Harold, wait till the trial, when we hit you with Captain Sears’ tale of your midnight ride around Nassau.
…

The next witness was Detective Captain Edward Walter Melchen, Chief of the Homicide Bureau of the Miami Police Department—a grand-sounding title for this pudgy, crooked cop. His hook nose was swollen into something resembling a sweet potato, but otherwise no signs of the recent beating he’d taken from me were obvious.

Adderley treated his client with smarmy respect, eliciting an accurate, detailed description of the crime scene, as well as a vivid and ridiculous reconstruction of the crime, delivered in Melchen’s thick-tongued Southern drawl.

“The pattern of burned areas indicates Sir Harry momentarily escaped his killer,” Melchen told the court, “and staggered into the hall, his pajamas flamin’…”

Over at the press table, Gardner was rolling his eyes.

“Then Sir Harry gripped the railin’ and tottered against the wall before his killer overtook him, and dragged him back to his room.”

Higgs didn’t object to this nonsense, possibly because later it might be helpful for Melchen to have gone on the record with such a cockeyed, unsupported theory.

Adderley questioned Melchen in detail about his interrogation of Freddie, during which the cop claimed the accused had shared such thoughts with him as his hatred of “that stupid old fool,” meaning Sir Harry; and his similar hatred of the Oakes family attorney, my old friend Foskett, who had supposedly shown a “filthy” letter from Freddie’s ex-wife Ruth to Lady Oakes in an effort to further cause a breach in the family.

De Marigny, still chewing his matchstick, seemed almost amused; and it did seem unlikely he’d say any such things to an interrogator.

After describing Freddie as “uncooperative” in making an effort to find the clothes he’d worn the murder night, Melchen established the time of the July 9 interrogation as three-thirty p.m.

Just like the canned testimony of the two colored cops.

Smelling a rat, Higgs, on cross, asked, “Are you certain of the time you led Mr. de Marigny upstairs?”

“I recorded it,” Melchen said, matter-of-factly. He looked to the magistrate. “May I refer to my notebook, your honor?”

The magistrate nodded solemnly.

He withdrew a small black notebook from his suitcoat pocket, thumbed its pages. “Yes—it’s right here: three-thirty p.m., afternoon of July nine.”

Soon the final witness of the day strode to the box—tall, Hollywood-handsome Captain James Barker, Supervisor of the Criminal Laboratories of the Miami PD—looking none the worse for wear from our recent difference of opinion. On his heels were two grandly uniformed colored cops who carried in the scorched cream-color Chinese screen, which they placed to the right of the magistrate’s bench.

Even from this angle, I could see that behind the passive mask of his face, Higgs knew that the Chinese screen was an ominous intruder upon these proceedings.

And I knew immediately why it was a silent, dual witness as Adderley led Barker through an endless, and, frankly, impressive recital of the detective’s credentials as a fingerprint expert: FBI Academy training, a director of the International Association of Identification, expert fingerprint witness in hundreds of other cases.

Barker was smooth; he had the magistrate entranced as he gave a lecture on the characteristics of fingerprints.

“With the millions of fingerprints that have been examined throughout the world by experts and scientists,” he said with casual authority, “there have never been any two found alike—and from the viewpoint of an expert, I feel justified in saying, none even remotely alike.”

He referred to the fifty million sets of prints on file with the FBI; he explained how fingerprints themselves were formed (“When an individual presses his finger against a surface, small deposits of fatty substances or oil remain on the surface”); he explained the function of fingerprint powder, and the use of tape to lift a print.

On the same easel that had earlier displayed the grisly death-scene blowups, a card with a giant enlargement of a single fingerprint was placed by one of the colored constables. It looked like something out of a modern art museum.

Adderley said, “And whose fingerprint is this, Detective Barker?”

“It’s the little finger of Alfred de Marigny’s right hand—taken from a rolled impression after his arrest. May I step down, sir?”

“By all means.”

Using a crayon and a pointer, Barker identified “the thirteen characteristics of de Marigny’s fingerprints.” The magistrate, the press, the gallery, even de Marigny himself, were caught up by this bravura performance.

When he had marked up the blowup entirely, each of the thirteen points indicated by lines and numbers, he removed the blowup and an almost identical blowup, already so marked, was revealed.

“And what is this, Captain?” Adderley asked.

“This is an enlargement of a latent impression of the little finger of de Marigny’s right hand…taken from the surface of that Chinese screen.”

As murmuring filled the room, with the magistrate too caught up in Barker’s spell even to call order, the lanky detective moved to the screen and pointed to the extreme top of an end panel.

“It was lifted from here,” he said, volunteering the information, not waiting for Adderley’s prompting but seizing instead the correct theatrical moment.

“I marked the place previously,” he continued. “You see, on the morning of the ninth, I raised several dozen impressions of various prints from this screen, nearly all illegible. But there was one print raised which after examination proved conclusively to be the latent impression originating on the number five digit of Alfred de Marigny.”

De Marigny was no longer chewing his matchstick cockily; it hung limp in his lips as he sat forward, his face flushed.

“At what time did you raise this latent impression?”

“Between eleven a.m. and one p.m.”

I glanced over at de Marigny, caught his eye and smiled; he seemed confused momentarily, then his eyes tightened and he smiled back. The matchstick went erect.

We had them. With a little luck—we had them.

Higgs hadn’t made the connection that Freddie and I had. When we met in a small room in the courthouse, before Freddie was to be taken back to jail, the attorney confronted his client.

“You told me you hadn’t been inside Westbourne for months!” Higgs raged, still wearing his black robe, but with his white wig off.

De Marigny sat in a chair, legs crossed nonchalantly; he was chewing his matchstick again. “I hadn’t been. If I did touch that screen, it was in the morning.”

Higgs frowned. “What morning?”

“The morning of the ninth,” Freddie said. “That’s when I was taken upstairs by Melchen for questioning. Around eleven-thirty. I walked right past that screen in the hallway.”

“Could you have touched it?”

“Certainly.”

“But the testimony of not only Barker and Melchen, but those two Nassau police officers, places that time at three-thirty p.m.”