Carnal Hours nh-6

by Max Allan Collins

  “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.

  “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 subst
ances 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.