Carnal Hours nh-6

by Max Allan Collins

  I undid the wire from Curtis’ wrists and ankles. “Sorry about the door.”

  “Dat’s easy fixed, boss. Dey work over dis face of mine much longer, it be too broke to fix.”

  “Well, let’s get you inside and cleaned up, too.”

  “Wait till dey go, mon.”

  “Okay.”

  We stood near the house and waited for Barker and Melchen to come down the back porch stairs from the kitchen. The two had washed the blood and dirt from themselves, but their clothes, beneath their perfect suitcoats, were mussed and torn. Melchen was holding a bloody handkerchief to his broken nose.

  The natives were milling, but no longer laughing; the sight of the two burning-with-anger cops returned them to a more servile mode.

  Barker stepped close. “You’re not going to get away with this, Heller. This is assault.”

  “What you did to Curtis is assault. What I did is a public service.”

  “We’re officially sanctioned investigators here,” Melchen said, petulantly, nasally, bloody hanky still pressed to his face.

  “Maybe so,” I said. “And if you want to go public with this, swell. I witnessed you attempting to beat and bribe this witness into giving false testimony. If any of this gets out, you’ll both be on the next banana boat back to Miami.”

  Barker said, very quietly, “You don’t know who you’re dealing with, Heller.”

  “Sure I do. A couple of crooked cops in Meyer Lansky’s pocket.”

  Barker reacted as if I’d slapped him again.

  Then I smiled and put a friendly hand on his shoulder. “Look-we should be pals. After all, we have so much in common: you don’t play by the rules and neither do I.”

  “Don’t fuck with us, Heller.”

  “Fuck with me, girls, and you’ll wake up as dead as Arthur. You do remember Arthur, don’t you? The native night watchman who drowned accidentally at Lyford Cay?”

  Barker and Melchen exchanged worried glances, then glared at me, to preserve what little dignity they had left, and limped off to their police car. They departed in a cloud of gravel dust, and to more native applause and derisive howls.

  “You go in and clean yourself up, Curtis. Then I need some gas for the Chevy-the Count said you could help me out.”

  “Sure t’ing,” Curtis said. “You wanna go get de gas cans yourself, and fill ’er up, while I’m inside?”

  “All right. Where are they?”

  Curtis grinned whitely. “In de toolshed-back of de feed bags.”

  No smells of cooking beckoned me through the open windows of Marjorie Bristol’s cottage. Otherwise, the evening was its usual beautifully Bahamian self: perfect sky, scattered stars, a full moon making the ivory sand and gray-blue ocean seem as unreal and lovely as an artist’s vision. All this and a cool, soothing breeze-and the humidity had taken the night off.

  I knocked and she greeted me with a smile; but it was a smile I’d never seen from her before: sad and reserved and…careful.

  Then I noticed: she was wearing the blue maid’s uniform I’d first seen her in.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, showing me in. She gestured to the round table, which lacked even its usual bowl of cut flowers. “I know I told you I’d cook for you tonight, but I’m afraid I…got busy.”

  “Hey, that’s fine. You’ve been too generous with your culinary skills already. Why don’t we go out somewhere?”

  She sat across the table from me, and smiled again, that same sad smile; she shook her head. “A white man and a colored gal? I don’t think so, Nathan.”

  “I hear there’s a Chinese joint on the corner of Market Street where blacks and whites can mix and mingle to their heart’s content. What do you say?”

  She smiled again, tightly; her eyes hadn’t met mine since I got here.

  “Marjorie-what’s wrong? What’s the matter?”

  She sat staring at her own folded hands for what seemed an eternity; finally she spoke.

  “Lady Eunice asked me to open Westbourne today,” she said. “That’s why I’ve been busy.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  I should have anticipated this; Nancy had told me that her mother was staying at another of their Nassau residences, Maxwellton, but with de Marigny’s preliminary hearing coming up, friends and relatives-witnesses, in many instances-were beginning to arrive on the island. The larger facilities at Westbourne would be needed.

  She stood and began to pace, hands folded in front of her, brow creased.

  I got up, went to her, stopped her aimless moving, put one hand on her waist, and lifted her chin and made her look at me. Her eyes were moist.

  “Lady Oakes doesn’t approve of you helping me, does she?” I asked.

  She swallowed, and shook her head, no.

  She said, softly, weakly, “Somebody told her about my bein’ with you when Arthur’s body was found. Somebody else told her they saw us drivin’ in your car together.”

  “And, what? She’s forbidden you to help me?”

  She nodded. “Or her daughter.”

  I winced in confusion. “But I understood Nancy and her mother were getting along pretty well, considering.”

  “Lady Eunice, she just doesn’t want her family pulled apart any more than it already is.”

  “And she’s convinced Freddie’s the man who murdered her husband.”

  “She’s…adamant about it. She says hangin’ is too good for that philanderin’ so-and-so.”

  I smirked mirthlessly. “Does she want him hanged for killing Sir Harry? Or for running around on her daughter?”

  She shook her head vigorously, as if she not only didn’t want to talk about it further, she didn’t want to think about it, either. She pulled away from me, turned her back; she was slumped, her posture caving in on itself.

  “I can’t be helpin’ you anymore, Nathan.”

  I came up behind her, put a hand on her shoulder; she flinched, but then she touched my hand briefly with hers.

  “Nathan-my family and me, we depend on Lady Eunice for our livin’. I cannot go against my Lady. Do you understand?”

  “Well, sure…but that’s okay. I didn’t want you involved anymore, anyway, what with Arthur’s murder and all. I talked to Curtis Thompson this afternoon, and he’s going to check around for Samuel and that other missing boy.”

  She laughed once, hollowly, turned and faced me, but stepped back a little, to put some distance between us. “Do you really think either of those boys is still in the islands? They’ve flown like birds, Nathan. They be long gone.”

  “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.

  18

  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.