Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 07 (31 page)

He laughed. “Nobody, really. Just writers.”

It had been a week and a half and I was, for the most part, healed. Certain wounds never heal, but I was getting used to that. I walked on the ivory beach under a poker-chip moon with my arm around Marjorie Bristol’s waist; she wore a white scoop-neck blouse with coral jewelry and the full blue-and-white-checked skirt with petticoats that swished.

“You saved my life,” I said.

“That British man, he saved your life.”

“He saved my body. You saved my life.”

“Not your soul, Nathan?”

“A little late for that.”

“Not your body?”

“That’s yours anytime you like.”

We walked some more; Westbourne was silhouetted against the clear night sky. The sand under our feet was warm, the breeze cool.

“Not mine anytime, anymore,” she said.

We turned back and walked until we were near the cottage. She removed the skirt, stepped out of the petticoats; she was naked beneath, the dark triangle drawing me. I put my hand there while she pulled the blouse over her head.

She stood, naked but for the coral necklace, washed with moonlight, unbuttoning my shirt, unzipping my trousers, pulling them around my ankles. I stepped out, barefoot; took off my shorts. I was wearing only the fresh bandage she’d applied about an hour ago.

We waded in, not so deep that I got my bandage wet. We stood with the water brushing our legs and embraced and kissed, kissed deeply, in every sense of the word. She lay in the sand half in the water and I eased on top of her and kissed her mouth and her eyes and her face and her neck and her breasts and her stomach and my lips brushed downward across the harsh curls stopping at wet warmth where I kissed her some more.

Her lovely face, ivory in the moonlight, lost in passion, was a vision I would never forget; I knew, as I was impressing that image forever in my mind, even as I pressed myself within her, that we would never do this again.

We lay together, nuzzling, kissing, saying nothing at all; then we sat and watched the shimmer of the ocean and the moon reflected there, breaking and reforming, breaking and reforming.

“Just a summer romance, Marjorie?”

“Not ‘just,’ a summer romance, Nathan…but a summer romance.”

“Summer’s over.”

“I know,” she said.

Hand in hand, we walked back inside.

I wrote my letter, although I mailed it directly to the Duke of Windsor with carbon copies to Attorney General Hallinan and Major Pemberton. In it I spoke of recognizing the Duke’s “deep concern for the welfare of the citizens of the Bahamas,” as I addressed him on a matter of “great importance.”

“During the incarceration and trial of Alfred de Marigny,” I wrote, “no adequate investigation was possible. Statements and evidence which failed to point toward the defendant were ignored.”

I closed by saying that “I, and my associate, Leonard Keeler, would welcome an opportunity to work on the Oakes murder case. We would willingly offer our services without compensation.”

I received a curt letter from Leslie Heape saying, thank you, no; and I heard nothing from Hallinan or Pemberton. Eliot later told me that at around the same time, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had written the estimable Governor of the Bahamas to offer the services of the FBI in the case. FDR’s offer was declined, too.

I wrote Nancy, stepping aside from the case and enclosing copies of both my letter and the one from the Duke’s flunky, and my bill with itemized expenses. She wrote a brief note of thanks and enclosed full payment.

Fleming had been right about her: Nancy had other, more pressing problems. Within a week of the end of the murder trial, de Marigny and his pal the Marquis de Visdelou were convicted and fined one hundred pounds each for illegal possession of gasoline. Within three weeks, Freddie—appealing neither the gasoline conviction nor the deportation order—hired a small fishing boat and a crew and, with Nancy at his side, sailed to Cuba.

She didn’t stay at his side long, however—after only a few months she moved to Maine for dance lessons and sinus surgery. De Marigny had been denied a visa to the United States, and within a year his marriage to Nancy was over.

Nancy returned to the Oakes family fold, although she remained just as convinced of her ex-husband’s innocence as her mother was of his guilt. In fact, Lady Oakes was from time to time the victim of extortion schemes in which she traded money for evidence of Freddie’s guilt.

The entire Oakes family had a rough go of it. Two of Nancy’s brothers died young—Sydney (who I never met but over whose affections Sir Harry and Freddie had clashed), killed in an automobile accident; and William, of acute alcoholism before he reached thirty.

Only Nancy’s younger sister, Shirley, seemed to have a charmed life: a law degree at Yale; classmate and bridesmaid of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy; marriage to a banker who shared her liberal philosophies and worked in support of black businessmen and politicians in Nassau. But after her husband went into business with Robert Vesco, their fortune was lost, their marriage over, and Shirley herself was crippled in a car crash.

There were family squabbles, too, among the Oakes clan—over money and possessions. Sir Harry left a considerable estate, but nothing like the two hundred million he’d been said to be worth.

Apparently the other investors of Banco Continental enjoyed a windfall when Sir Harry was silenced, as much of his fortune had seemingly already been moved south. Now it had simply gone south, and the Oakes trustees couldn’t find it, and the family just had to make do on the odd ten million or so.

The former Mrs. de Marigny remained unlucky in love—she was all set to marry a dashing Danish Royal Air Force officer, but the prospective groom was killed in a plane crash in 1946. A long love affair with an English matinee idol ended when he decided marriage might upset his female fans. In 1950 she married Baron Ernest von Hoynigen-Huene, whose title turned out to be more impressive than his financial status, but the union lasted long enough for Nancy to give birth to two children, a boy and girl, who were to fill her life with joy and frustration. Nothing unusual about that.

Her society-page romances between marriages included the heir of a famous French wine family; Queen Elizabeth’s male secretary; and a central figure in the Christine Keeler-John Profumo scandal. Nancy did get around. She married again in 1962, and divorced a decade or so later. Perhaps the oddest footnote in her story is that, last time I heard, she was living in Mexico, in Cuernavaca—the country of her father’s downfall, the city of her father’s sinister associate Axel Wenner-Gren’s wartime exile.

Nancy—despite countless operations and continued ill health—remains to this day a handsome woman; I haven’t seen her in years, but photographs attest to her enduring beauty. Apparently she’s remained relatively cordial with Freddie, who has in the intervening years led the sort of checkered yet storybook existence you might expect.

De Marigny became a man without a country, shunned by not only the United States and Great Britain, but his homeland Mauritius. In Cuba, palling around with Ernest Hemingway, Freddie was the target of an apparent murder attempt, shots ringing through his bedroom window; he decided to leave the tropics. He went from being a seaman with the Canadian merchant marine to a private with the Canadian army, but his application to become a citizen of that country was denied, anyway. He bounced around the Caribbean—steering clear of the British possessions he was barred from—and spent some time in the Dominican Republic. Finally in 1947 he was granted a U.S. visa, only to discover that funds being held for him in New York were lost in the estate of a dead broker.

He walked dogs for rich old ladies, sold shoes and peddled his own blood on his road to a Salvation Army soup kitchen. But his luck was better than Nancy’s: in 1952, having worked his way up from selling aluminum storm doors to operating a Los Angeles marriage agency, he wed Mary Taylor, an American girl, a union which has sustained to this day, I understand. They had three sons and have lived in Florida, Cuba and Mexico but mostly in Texas, where I’m told they still reside. Supposedly Freddie has been moderately successful in several businesses, including lithographing. He still sails.

The friendship between the Marquis Georges de Visdelou and Count Alfred de Marigny apparently did not survive the Oakes trial. De Visdelou is said to have asked young Betty Roberts to marry him, only to be rejected; forlorn, he went to England and joined the British army. Apparently the French Foreign Legion didn’t have any openings.

Betty Roberts, on the other hand, was said to have gone to New York, where the newspaper columns announced her impending marriage to a Russian count.

Immediately after the war, five months short of a governor’s usual term, the Duke of Windsor and his Duchess left the Bahamas. Never again did Great Britain entrust its former King with a position of even the remotest responsibility, despite constant applications from His Royal Highness; he and Wallis spent their remaining years golfing, gardening and attending fancy dress balls, making the New York-to-Palm Beach, Paris-to-the-Riviera circuit. Windsor died of cancer in 1972, and Wallis lived to the age of ninety. At her burial in 1986, she was granted the concession of being buried next to her husband in a royal plot.

I didn’t keep track of everybody. Occasionally I bumped into somebody who shared a piece of information; sometimes an obituary caught my eye. My friends—like Sally Rand and Eliot Ness—I stayed in contact with over the years. I did keep in touch with Godfrey Higgs, who kept me up to date, before he passed away.

Of the attorneys, only Ernest Callender, retired and respected in Nassau, remains alive at this writing; but they all had remarkable careers. Hallinan was knighted and was appointed Chief Justice of Cyprus, dying in 1988. Adderley flourished in both his law practice and in politics, but died of a heart attack on an airplane after representing the Bahamas at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.

The Nassau police officers have retired, Colonel Lindop to suburban Wimbledon, Captain Sears and Major Pemberton in Nassau, with Pemberton working as secretary of the Bahamian Chamber of Commerce, last I heard. Whether any of them are still alive at this point, I don’t know; but they were all decent enough men.

The same, of course, can’t be said about Captains Barker and Melchen. Barker was brought before the International Association of Identification, which condemned his work on the Oakes case; under a cloud of accusations of mob links, Barker was allowed to leave the force on permanent sick leave. In the wake of the Oakes debacle, Barker—who had upon his return sustained an injury in a motorcycle crack-up—turned to illegal drugs for relief from pains real and psychological. As he spiraled into complete addiction, he abandoned his wife and grown son, also a Miami police officer.

Meanwhile, his partner Melchen was suffering under similar clouds of censure and suspicion, and quietly retired from the force, dying of a heart attack in 1948.

Barker promised his wife and son he would reform and begged to be allowed back in the home, which he was. But one night in 1952, Barker’s son found his father brutally beating his mother, and the son interceded, leaving his father a bloody unconscious heap on the floor. In the wee hours of the morning, Barker came to, and went after his son with a .38. There was a struggle and the Duke of Windsor’s fingerprint expert was dead.

After the war, many British citizens fled their new socialist government and confiscatory taxation for the nearly tax-free Bahamas, and in so doing, sent property values soaring and made Harold Christie an even richer man. Lyford Cay was developed into a haven for the very wealthy; high fences, sophisticated security measures and their own police station protect the rich and the famous, whose life-styles include a marina littered with motor cruisers and yachts, where once a native caretaker named Arthur, his murder not only unsolved but long forgotten, stood watch.

Harold Christie not only lived to see his tropical dream come true—his Bahamas were now both home to the rich and tourist magnet second to none—he saw himself rewarded with knighthood “for services to the Crown.” Sir Harold Christie finally married—a Palm Beach divorcée—but, for all his position and prosperity, lived out his remaining days in the shadow of suspicion.

I suppose I didn’t make Christie’s life any easier when, in postwar years, I boasted in newspaper and magazine articles, as well as on radio and TV broadcasts, that I could still, even at this late date, solve the Oakes case. Evidence had been suppressed, I would say, and a prominent Nassau citizen was being protected….

After all, over the years there had been odd, unexplained occurrences seemingly related to the case: shortly after the war, various out-island natives turn in over twenty-five thousand dollars’ worth of gold coins to the government, which terms them “pirate treasure” despite the oldest dated coin being 1853 and other coins dating as recent as 1907; in 1950, a female reporter from Washington, asking around about the Oakes murder, winds up stripped, raped and dead at the bottom of a well; that same year, a stevedore drunk in a bar in California boasts of knowing who killed Sir Harry Oakes, is questioned by the FBI and held for questioning by the Nassau chief of police, who flies in and tells the press that the stevedore has correctly identified the killer, yet neither the FBI, Scotland Yard nor the Nassau police reopen the investigation; later, Harold Christie’s own secretary is mysteriously murdered.

Finally, in 1959, with the political power of the Bay Street Pirates foundering, a prominent figure in the Bahamian government, Cyril St. John Stevenson, introduced a resolution to reopen the Oakes investigation.

“I could point my finger at the man responsible,” Stevenson said.

Seated not ten feet away, in the House of Assembly, was a glowering Harold Christie, who nonetheless lamely tried to save face by voting along with the resolution.

When the resolution passed, the Governor of the Bahamas, Sir Raynor Arthur, referred the matter to Scotland Yard, which declined to get involved.

Nonetheless, Christie felt haunted by the case. “It gets tiresome,” he told the press bitterly, “being pointed out on the street, wherever you go—‘There he is, that’s the man who did it!’”

Today, in Nassau, his legacy is just that: ask about Harold Christie and you’re more likely to hear him described as a murderer than as the man who brought prosperity to those tropical shores.

He died in 1973 of a heart attack.

Erle Stanley Gardner continued writing his best-selling mysteries, of course, although he later got some competition from Ian Fleming. After the war, Fleming left Naval Intelligence and turned to a career in journalism; he wrote his first spy novel on a lark, vacationing in Jamaica, which is where he’d been stationed when I knew him. Fleming’s thrillers invariably focused on mastermind villains who met well-deserved fates, often in their tropical-island strongholds. When asked by friends and journalists if he’d ever killed a man during his own spy days, Fleming always said he had—once.

As for Gardner, his observations of the many injustices that surrounded the Oakes case led to the eventual formation of the Court of Last Resort, an organization designed to “improve the administration of justice.” Specifically, a board of experts was gathered to look into cases where gross miscarriages of justice may have been done. Leonard Keeler was the member in charge of polygraph, and Gardner invited me to head up detection. Many “underdogs” were aided in this effort, and someday, in another forum, I may discuss some of those cases.

Casinos finally did come to the Bahamas, but not until Castro’s coming to power in Cuba made it necessary for Meyer Lansky and his business associates to seek new venues. In 1963, after generous “consultant’s fees” were paid to various prominent Bahamian politicians, a casino opened on Lucayan Beach on Grand Bahama island. The FBI tracked the deliveries of the large amounts of cash from this first Bahamian casino to a man in Florida. That man was Meyer Lansky.

But the American press got hold of mob involvement in Bahamian casinos, and the scandal that followed finally ended white-minority, Bay Street Pirate rule in Nassau; the black-dominated Progressive Liberal Party came into power in 1967 and has been there ever since.

Of course, gambling has been there, too. A casino was even built on the former site of Westbourne, and Hog Island—sold by Axel Wenner-Gren to Huntington Hartford in 1961 in a twenty-million-dollar deal arranged by Harold Christie—became Paradise Island, home to high-rise hotels and glittering casinos.