Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 07 (29 page)

It was approaching two o’clock a.m. when I returned to Hog Island. I’d gone to Dirty Dick’s to think and drink; I held myself to two rum punches, but didn’t hold back on the thinking. Despite the several hours I’d been gone, Daniel was waiting for me at Prince George Wharf, with the little motor launch. He had seemed nervous bringing me over, muttering about the bad storm, even though by the time we made the trip, the storm was a memory. Heading back to Hog Island, in the wee hours, under a black starless moonless sky, even the sea had settled down. Calm again.

So were my nerves. The rum had done it. And the thinking.

The cottage was dark. I flicked on the light: no sign of Fleming, whose “tidying up” had been limited to removing the two dead bodies. Otherwise, the scattered glass from the broken doors and window, slivers and shards and jagged chunks, the shot-up sheets and blankets and mattress, scattered shell casings, the holes the .45s had punched in the walls, even the glistening pools of blood here and there, not dry yet thanks to the humidity, were testimony to what had happened here, a few short hours ago.

The mansion was not dark—several lights were on, and I hadn’t left them that way. Perhaps Fleming had, when he made his phone call for corpse-disposal assistance. He’d left the keys on the bed, and I walked over to the house down the palm-lined path and went in the kitchen way.

I found her—stumbled onto her, is more like it—in the round living room where two nights ago we’d been celebrating de Marigny’s victory amid the Inca artifacts.

She was pacing, almost prowling, before the blandly benign portrait of Wenner-Gren, her slim, full-breasted figure wrapped in a pink silk peignoir; she was smoking and on the coffee table between the facing curved couches was a bucket of ice with an open bottle of champagne.

“I thought you were going to Mexico City,” I said.

She turned quickly, startled. For an instant her face was frozen with incredulity, then it melted into a smile. Even at two in the morning, those bruised lips were rouged red.

“Nate! God, I’m glad to see you! I was so desperately
worried
!”

She rushed to me; under the sheer robe was a sheer pink nightie and where the pinkness of it ended and the pinkness of her began was a mystery she would no doubt allow me to solve. She hugged me, and made sobbing sounds, though she wasn’t sobbing.

“You’re alive!” she said into my chest.

“And well.” I smiled at her, holding her gently away from me. “What about Mexico City?”

She shook her head as if she had to clear it to answer my mundane question.

“Oh…all the flights were canceled, due to that bloody storm. Wasn’t another Mexico City connection for two days, and that would’ve been too late for the meeting Axel needed me for. I chartered a little boat back from Miami.”

“I see.”

“Let me get you something to drink.” She moved to the liquor cart. “Do you want rum? Or some of this bottle of Dom Pérignon left from the other night?”

“The champagne. Please.”

She went to the coffee table, poured me a bubbling glass and said, “What in hell happened?”

“What do you mean?”

“At the cottage! I got back about an hour ago—Daniel was gone, and the cottage was a shambles! It doesn’t take an expert to know that somebody shot up the place. Nathan, there’s
blood
on the floor—and all that broken glass.”

“Yeah. I saw.”

She narrowed her eyes, studying me over the rim of the glass she was handing me. “You…you weren’t there when what happened happened, were you?”

I took the champagne. “Oh, I was there.”

She frowned. “Well, goddamnit, man! Talk to me! Did someone try to kill you?”

I walked over to the couch and sat; she sat across from me on the opposite couch, sitting on the edge, knees together primly like a schoolgirl, and with a schoolgirl’s wide, round, innocent eyes.

“Two men with guns came in and mistook some sheets and blankets for me. Fortunately I was sleeping on the couch at the time.”

“What did you do?”

“I shot one in the face three times. Or four. The other one has a bullet in the head.”

That knocked her back, just a bit. She blinked the lush lashes, swallowed, and said, “Where are the bodies?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. They were still there when I left to go over to Nassau, to confront Harold Christie.”

Her eyes got even wider. “You confronted Christie? What the hell did he say?”

I shrugged again. “He denied sending ’em.”

“What did you do to him…? You didn’t…”

“Kill him? No. I didn’t do a thing to the slimy little bastard. Say…tell me—when you saw the cottage in a shot-up shambles, did you call the police? Is anyone on the way?”

She made a meaningless gesture with the hand with the cigarette in it. “The phones seem to be out. I was frightened, Nate. Thank God you’re here.”

I nodded sympathetically. “You should get some rest. We should sort this out with Colonel Pemberton and his men after sunup sometime, don’t you think?”

She shuddered. “Oh, I simply
couldn’t
sleep.”

I looked at her for a long time.

Then I said, “You know what would relax you?”

She shook her head no; she sucked on the cigarette, holding in the smoke a long time.

“A bedtime story.”

As she blew the smoke out, her smile turned one-sided and wicked. “A bedtime story?” She shook her head again, her expression wry. “Heller, you
are
bad.”

“No,” I said. I pointed at her. “You’re bad.”

She froze again, momentarily, then laughed it off, blond hair shimmering. She raised an eyebrow and her glass. “What happened to my bedtime story?”

I put my hands on my knees. “Once upon a time there was a grizzled old prospector who spent years and years looking for a fortune in gold. Finally, one day, he found some gold. Quite a lot of it, and it made him enormously wealthy, and so he married his sweetheart and had a wonderful family and moved to a tropical isle. But one day a war broke out in the outside world, and though he and his family were safe on their island, the prospector worried that this war might threaten his fortune. Then a former king and two very wealthy men—one who owned land and another with a great big boat—invited the prospector to start a bank with them, in a foreign land. To storehouse their money until the war was over.”

Di was frowning; the bruised lips were pulled tight and thin, and her blue eyes were cold, peeking out of slits. “I don’t think I much care for this story.”

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s talk about real life, then. Sir Harry was all for ducking wartime currency restrictions; what’s a little money-laundering between friends? But greedy as he was, hypocritical old goat that he was, Harry saw himself as a patriot. How would the man who personally funded five Spitfires for the RAF react if, say, he discovered that Banco Continental’s primary customers were Nazis…hoarding money they looted from Europe, building themselves enormous nest eggs they could look forward to, no matter how the war came out?”

She sipped champagne. “You’re talking nonsense, Nathan.”

“I don’t think so. I think Harry was just patriotic enough—and wealthy enough—to tell Wenner-Gren and Harold Christie and the Duke of Windsor to kiss his big fat rich behind. He’d been making plans to move to Mexico City, and had made several trips there in recent months, and on those trips he got a better picture of what was going on at Banco Continental. And he didn’t like what he saw.” I sat forward. “Sir Harry was going to blow the whistle, wasn’t he? On the whole sordid scheme!”

She threw her head back and shook her hair and laughed her brittle British laugh. “There is no such scheme, you silly man. Banco Continental is a legitimate financial institution, and while the Duke and others may be moving some money around in a questionable, even
unpatriotic
manner, as you might put it, there’s nothing truly sinister going on.”

I had a sip of champagne myself. Smiled at her. “Remember that dark unidentified fluid in Harry’s stomach that the prosecution never managed to identify?”

“Yes. So?”

“You know what I think?”

“What do you think?”

“I think when Christie had dinner at Westbourne that night, he drugged Sir Harry’s drink, or maybe his food.”

She smirked. “Now why would he do that?”

“Not to kill Harry—his dear old friend. Just to subdue him; make him easier, safer, for you to handle.”

“For
me
to handle?”

“You.” I laughed, once, harshly. “You know, every single one of the red herrings you threw my way—Harry chasing women, the stolen gold coins, Lansky’s casinos—had a grain of truth. The gold coins probably
were
stolen the murder night—by you. After all, you’re the one who saw to it that that native had a gold coin to sell us.”

“Me? Are you insane?”

“Don’t knock it—it got me out of the service. And the Lansky/Christie connection obviously is very real, even if the casinos they eventually hope to open together weren’t anything Harry gave a damn about. And I think maybe Harry did have an eye for a pretty face and well-turned ankle, which, added to his grogginess from being drugged, is what made it safe for you to invade his room that night, even if he did have a gun at his bedside.”

She gestured to herself with cigarette-in-hand. “And why would I do that?”

I pointed to the oil painting over the fireplace. “Your boss, Axel Wenner-Gren, may have ordered it…or it may have been your own play, looking after your employer’s interests. I’ll never know the answer to that—unless you care to tell me.”

“I’d rather you continue telling me—sharing these strange, imaginative fantasies of yours. For example, tell me, would you, Nate, how a delicate creature like myself might accomplish such a brutal act as the murder of Sir Harry Oakes?”

I threw my hand out and clutched the air; she flinched.

“By reaching out,” I said, “to the Banco Continental’s own Harold Christie. You had him get you a couple of mob thugs to lean on Harry. To scare him. You had them rough him up, threaten to give him more and worse if he didn’t keep his trap shut; but Harry only spit blood in your eye—swearing he’d go public, taking Wenner-Gren, Christie and all the King’s men down with him.”

“Nonsense.”

“He was on the floor, on his face or on his knees, damn near beaten to death. Your thugs had gone too far—so you finished him off: shot him behind the ear, four times, close-range, with small enough caliber a gun that the bullets didn’t even pass through his head. Maybe you even used his own bedside gun—it’s missing, after all, and a .38 fits the profile.”

Bingo! The Bahama blues flared just a bit when I mentioned Harry’s gun; she
had
used it.

“Then you made a makeshift blowtorch out of the flit gun, using denatured alcohol from the toolshed, setting the bed on fire. After which, you and your mob help flipped the corpse onto the burning bed, and played voodoo. A scorched corpse, a few feathers, and presto—an obeah kill.”

She laughed, shook her head, lighted up a new cigarette. “Really, Heller. You should be writing for radio.
Inner Sanctum
, perhaps.”

“You may have really intended to set a fire and burn Westbourne down, but I doubt it. I think you just mutilated the corpse to muddy the waters. Maybe you stole the gold coins to back up the voodoo angle, or could be you’re like Harry: you just plain like gold.”

She sucked smoke; looked at the ceiling, playing bored and disgusted.

“Anyway, after you’d taken your time doing a thorough, sick job of it, you and Lansky’s boys left. Christie had left long before, after paving the way for you and your thugs by drugging Harry; he’d also picked up your two assistants when they docked at Lyford Cay, getting spotted by the unfortunate Arthur. Then Christie dropped off his unpleasant passengers at Westbourne and went to spend the night with his mistress. But either in the middle of the night, courtesy of a phone call from you, or when he returned in the morning, he found how tragically wrong the attempt to coerce Sir Harry had gone. Christie quickly changed his story, pretending to have been asleep next door all the time. He was too much the gentleman to involve his lady friend, who he prompted to say nothing.”

Now she was shaking her head, smiling patronizingly. “I do so hate to disappoint you, but this is all the most ludicrous pipe dream. Nancy de Marigny is my dearest friend—even if I had done this
dastardly
deed, her husband is the last person I’d have ever framed for it.”

“I never said you framed Freddie. Your half-ass voodoo cover-up was meant to suggest some nameless black boogie man. The frame was courtesy of Barker and Melchen with a nudge from the Duke—whose role in this, I believe, was limited to taking Christie’s advice to call in those two very special Miami cops.”

“Oh, that was
Harold’s
idea?”

“Probably. Could have been yours. At any rate, somebody told the Duke to bring in these two corrupt, mob-connected coppers. Somebody told him that by doing that he could contain the crime. And he did as he was told. After all, he’s involved in Banco Continental up to his royal white Nazi-loving ass.”

Di’s head was back; she was smiling coolly, eyes glittering, apparently amused. “So, then—what is it exactly you imagine I am? Some Nazi dragon lady?”

“No. I think you’re just June Sims from the East End—poor white British trash who fucked and schemed and cheated her greedy little way to the top. How
did
your husband die, anyway?”

Her face went blank. The moral void behind her pretty mask was frighteningly apparent, for an instant; then she managed a part-seductive, part-sarcastic smile.

“Well—I take it that question, which I don’t intend to dignify with a response, is the conclusion of your ‘bedtime story’?”

“Almost, although I’m not sure everybody lives happily ever after. I’m also not sure whether you had poor Arthur killed or not—Christie could just as easily have had that done. So we’re up to the part where you call that two-man goon squad back in to finish the job. That is, finish me.”