Ashes From A Burning Corpse (An American True Crime Reporter in the 20th Century Book 3)

by Noel Hynd

  In so many ways, she and Edward made a perfect couple. The Duke privately fostered a routinely dismissive attitude toward what he referred to as “the non-white” races. He considered people of color as shiftless, untrustworthy and inherently dishonest, well in keeping with the condescending upper class racial toxins of the day. It was but natural then for the Duke of Windsor and his wife to become friendly with Sir Harry when the Duke arrived to take over his dull chores as governor general of the Bahamas.

  Sir Harry saw to it that the Duke’s tenure in the Bahamas would be as merry as possible. There were some big balls at Westbourne during the Duke’s residence there. His Royal Highness had a swell time except on those occasions when the Duchess, focusing a cold glare on her husband’s tenth champagne refill, would say to him, using the boyhood name by which the family still addressed him, “That will be quite enough, David!”

  Then at one of these parties at Westbourne, there appeared a tall, slim fellow in his middle thirties. When things had reached the high decibel level, Sir Harry pointed toward the fellow and inquired of Lady Oakes, “Who the hell’s that?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know,” said Lady Oakes. “I thought perhaps you knew.”

  “Never saw him before in my life,” said Sir Harry. “He’s spending an awful lot of time with Nancy. Find out who he is.”

  Nancy, seventeen now, heiress to more money than she would ever be able to count, and within a year of the age when she could marry without parental consent, had eyes filled with stars. Her friend, she told her mother, was Freddie or, to be more specific, Count Marie Alfred Fouquereaux de Marigny. Freddie was a charmer, no doubt about that. He was staying with friends in Nassau. She had been introduced to Freddie quite properly, she assured her mother, but just hadn’t got around to introducing him to her parents.

  Freddie was handsomely turned out and gave the impression of a lad who had a way with women, and knew it. When Lady Oakes passed this intelligence along to Sir Harry, the baronet was all for throwing the Count out. He would do it himself or he would have his security squad do it. But it would be done. Pronto.

  Lady Oakes restrained him.

  “All right,” said Sir Harry, “but I’m looking the son-of-a-bitch up first thing in the morning.”

  What Sir Harry found out about Count Alfred de Marigny wasn’t at all to his liking. He learned about the Count’s two divorces and the hundred thousand dollars that his second wife had given him at the time her knot with him was untied.

  Lady Oakes told her daughter about this. Nancy was unimpressed. “Your father never wants you to see that man again,” said the mother. Nancy was still unimpressed. Nancy said she thought she would take a trip to New York to visit friends. She didn’t expect to see the Count again, she told her mother. So, she left for New York. De Marigny followed her a couple of days later.

  Sir Harry put detectives on the trail of the two. The dicks sniffed out their quarry too late: Nancy and de Marigny had left for California with a young married couple as chaperons. By the time the gumshoes got to California, the quartet had lit out for Mexico.

  In Mexico City, Nancy ate some food that proved to be tainted. She came down with typhoid fever. She almost died. Upon her recovery, she and de Marigny went to New York. There, in January 1943, two days after Nancy’s eighteenth birthday, she and de Marigny were married by a magistrate.

  Not long after the marriage, Nancy de Marigny discovered that she was pregnant. She was not a robust girl and she was in an especially rundown condition after her siege of illness in Mexico. Several doctors decided that if the pregnancy continued, her life might be endangered.

  An immediate operation was recommended. The Count went to Florida with Nancy. She checked into the Good Samaritan Hospital in West Palm Beach. De Marigny took a room next to his wife’s and decided, if he was in the hospital anyway, that he would have his tonsils removed.

  The day after the Count had his operation, Sir Harry and Lady Oakes came over from Nassau to see their daughter. While Sir Harry was about it, he stopped into the next room to voice his opinion of the Count for knocking up his daughter right after her siege of typhoid.

  It was far from flattering.

  “And if you don’t get out of this room, away from Nancy,” declared Sir Harry in closing, “I’ll pick you up and throw you to hell out, myself!”

  The Count quietly got out. Burning up, he wrote a letter to Sydney Oakes, Sir Harry’s eldest son, then only fifteen, a letter that Lady Oakes was one day to describe as “the most diabolical letter a man could write to a child of fifteen about his parents.”

  While Sir Harry was in West Palm Beach he consulted his attorney. The lawyer quietly drew up a new will which cut off all his children from any inheritance until they reached thirty years of age.

  Somehow or other, de Marigny got wind of the change and figured he and Nancy had been cut out of Harry’s financial picture. It didn’t take a genius to arrive at that conclusion.

  De Marigny stormed into the lawyer’s office and demanded to know precisely what was up. The lawyer wouldn’t tell him, but De Marigny did find out something else. His second wife, upon hearing that de Marigny was interested in Nancy Oakes, had written a letter to Sir Harry and Lady Oakes, putting a hex, a nix and a chilly blast on the Count. Naturally, the letter dwelt on the Count’s habit of squandering large sums of money. All this hardly improved Sir Harry’s feeling toward de Marigny.

  Nancy’s illness, however, somehow changed conditions, at least for a time. In love with her husband, she made her parents promise that they would let bygones be bygones if she regained her health. They promised. Nancy got better. And so, after a time, everybody returned to Nassau together, one big, almost happy highly dysfunctional family.

  One day Sir Harry had a couple of whiskeys in him at a Nassau social event. He asked the Count what he could do except chase girls with money. The Count said he had a chicken farm. It was five miles from Westbourne. Soon thereafter, he and Nancy took up residence there.

  Sydney, the Oakes’ eldest boy, had taken quite a liking to the Count. He often visited the chicken farm and remained overnight with the Count and his sister at the cottage.

  Sir Harry, violently objecting to his eldest son’s attachment to the worldly Count, much less his daughter’s, went to the cottage one night while Sydney was there. He ordered Sydney off the premises.

  “And if you ever set foot in this place again,” Sir Harry roared, “I’ll disinherit you! One in the family’s enough to have anything to do with this character.”

  That wrapped it up, but good, between the Count and the Baronet.

  A few weeks later, Sir Harry would be murdered on a hot stormy night.

  CHAPTER 10

  Raymond Schindler was too clever to stay in a local hotel.

  On arrival, he had checked into luxurious quarters in the home of the Baroness Marie af Trolle and her husband, a Swedish nobleman with business interests on the island. They were socialites and friends of Nancy.

  He began reading the local newspaper accounts of the case. The newspaper stories didn’t make things look any too good for the Count. Schindler called at the offices of a handsome fellow by the name of Godfrey Higgs, a soft-spoken affable chain-smoking thirty-five-year-old lawyer who had handled some commercial paperwork for de Marigny in the past. The son of a local sponge merchant, he had been sent away to private schools in England. He now passed for an old-line British Bahamian. It did him no damage.

  Nancy de Marigny had hired Higgs to defend her husband. He was an odd choice, and also a second choice. De Marigny had wanted to hire a man named Alfred Adderley. Adderley, though black, had cunningly navigated the oppressive and racist system in the colonies. He had become the top legal mind on the island. Naturally, the Crown had gotten to him first and hired him to prosecute de Marigny.

  Schindler liked Higgs and Higgs liked Schindler at their first meeting. Whatever the outcome of the whole business, these two would get along fine.


  “Higgs has a good mind,” Ray said to me about to attorney. “He’s the type of man whom the other side might underestimate.”

  “Think he can pull off a big upset in court?” I asked.

  “I think he can,” Ray said. “Whether or not he will might depend on how rigged the court system is.”

  Higgs was already in possession of most of the background information that the police had picked up before putting the collar on the Count. They disclosed that there were many people on the island who might have had a motive for killing Sir Harry, from disgruntled husbands to people who thought Harry had fleeced them in a business deal. But the way Higgs saw it, and the way Ray Schindler and I were coming to see it, the cops had found a suspect whom they fitted to the evidence rather than finding evidence and then fitting it to a suspect.

  “The Count’s reputation is against him,” Higgs said to Schindler. “The problems start there.”

  Logically, the Count’s reputation should have had no influence on the investigation of the case. But obviously, it had. The Miami cops had gone to work building a case that led to the gallows for the Count, throwing away all the wood that might have been used to build one for somebody else.

  Higgs showed Schindler the ghastly police photographs of the corpse of Sir Harry. The tableau was as gruesome as it was extensive. But the pictures made it doubly clear to the detective that this had not been a murder for profit.

  “When a man kills for money,” Schindler said to me at one of our many seances at Dirty Dick’s, “he commits the crime as quickly and simply as possible and then gets away. This killer had not been in a hurry. He had deliberately taken time to stick around and concentrate an intense flame on Oakes’ eyes and genitals. This suggested hatred, perhaps over a woman. The sprinkling of feathers over the corpse after death suggested a cultish ritual of some kind. The feather sprinkling might have been done by a crazed Bahama native or, more likely, by someone who wanted to make the crime look as if it had been committed by a native.”

  “Either way,” I agreed, “it was plainly no hit-and-run job.”

  Schindler now devoted his attention to the time element in de Marigny’s alibi. If everything de Marigny said was true, it would have been impossible for him to be at Westbourne between two thirty and five o’clock in the morning.

  According to the Count, the only time he would have had to leave his cottage, commit the crime and return, without being observed by anyone or at least heard by the Marquis, would have been during the half hour when the Marquis had taken Betty Roberts home.

  “But more than half an hour would have been needed, Ray,” I said, “for the Count to have done everything the murderer had done.”

  “Exactly,” Ray agreed.

  It had been storming violently during the night of the crime, something right out of Sherlock Holmes or Agatha Christie: torrential rain, thunder and lightning. Fast driving had been out of the question. But even if the Count had needed only ten minutes to cover the five miles between his cottage and Westbourne, the round trip would have eaten up twenty minutes of the half hour. That would have left less than ten minutes to commit the crime. It seemed to Schindler that more than ten minutes and perhaps a good deal more than ten minutes would have been required to do everything that had been done in the Oakes mansion.

  “If de Marigny did it,” Ray said to me as we chewed over the case, “he would have had to have moved around like greased lightning for that half hour. Even at that, his timing would have had to be desperately close.”

  The trouble was that the Marquis’ story of the night’s events differed slightly from that of the Count. De Marigny said Miss Roberts had spent some two hours in the Marquis’ rooms, leaving only after three in the morning. The Marquis said nothing of the kind.

  Schindler figured that the Marquis was chivalrously shielding the good name of the blonde. Schindler put it up to the Marquis in clear terms. Which was more important, a blonde’s good name or a friend’s life?

  The Marquis decided the life was more important. He corroborated everything the Count had stated about his movements the night of the crime, a big break for de Marigny if it stood up.

  It thus seemed increasingly unlikely that the Count could have committed the crime. If he hadn’t committed it while the Marquis was taking the blonde home, he would have run a chance of being detected by the Marquis had he left in a car after the Marquis returned. Schindler also established the fact that the Marquis was a very light sleeper.

  Now Schindler, who wanted to instruct himself in on everything possible before talking to de Marigny, decided it was time to go through Westbourne. Bahama regulations called for him to be accompanied by several cops. Schindler thought as much of that as he would have of a mickey in his drink. But he had no choice. He asked if he could bring an assistant, a second pair of eyes and ears, and someone to take notes, as needed. His request was grudgingly granted. I was officially in the ball game.

  We visited the crime scene on Wednesday morning, July 21. I mostly kept my mouth shut. The flatfeet buzzed around us like native flies and mosquitoes, and almost in matching numbers and aggregate annoyance: another reason to keep my mouth shut.

  The whole area of the crime struck Schindler as having been crudely torched, rather than merely burned. I had seen many arson cases in New York, Boston and Philadelphia and concurred with Ray’s assessment, which he later shared.

  The bed on which the roasted Baronet was found had been subjected to a flame so intense that it could have come only from a torch. There were marks on the rugs, on the floor, and on doors and woodwork between the murder rooms and the first floor. The marks looked as if they had been made by a torch carried by the killer. It was one thing to hear the details of a murder and a murder scene; it was quite something else to see it, smell it and practically taste it, as well as picture the inhumane violence that had transpired.

  I suppressed more than one shudder and more than one urge to vomit. I had seen many venues of mayhem over the course of a quarter century. But this one was in a category by itself.

  Every time Schindler or I turned our heads, we saw bloody finger and handprints—either intact or smudged. Even the French telephone in Sir Harry’s room, the one that Harold Christie had used to summon aid at seven in the morning, was bloodstained. So was a phone book near it. There was also a big bloody fingerprint on a door leading to Christie’s room. This was understandable. According to his own account, Christie had touched his friend’s body to determine whether Oakes was dead and, in his agitation, had naturally picked up some blood.

  There were also bloody hand marks on the wall of the murder room that had not

  been of any interest to the police. The marks were near two windows, as if the killer, after the first phase of the murder, had gone to the windows to look out to see if anyone was around, placing his bloody hands on the wall while he did so.

  “Okay,” Schindler finally said to the cops with us. “I’ve seen enough.”

  Out on the street when we were alone, Ray spoke to me.

  “Did you see those prints on the window?” Ray asked.

  “I saw them.”

  “The prints were made by a short, stubby hand. The Count’s hands are long and thin, like the rest of him, as far as anyone knows.”

  “What about Harold Christie?” I asked.

  “I’m here to keep de Marigny’s neck out of a noose, not to put someone else’s neck in it. Stop asking about anyone else.”

  “I’ll try to remind myself.”

  “You should. And here’s something else to think about. Do you know how much the top man earns in the Nassau police department, Alan? I did some asking around. Top man makes about seven hundred fifty pounds sterling a year. About fifty dollars a week, American. That’s the Commissioner. Imagine what the guy on the street makes. Maybe seven dollars. Think he won’t take the occasional backhander out of someone’s reptile fund, twenty to fifty pounds, to feed his family? I’d say he’d be crazy
not to.”

  “You’re saying they’re all corrupt?” I asked.

  “I’m saying they’re not very good and they’re poorly paid,” he whispered. “And they’re corrupt.”

  The next day, Thursday the twenty-second, was time for Schindler to talk to the man he was to prove either innocent or guilty.

  Schindler had measured many murderers in his career. His first impression of the Count was that he just wasn’t the type to take to murder. The Count may have been a slayer of the ladies, but he didn’t impress Schindler as a killer of men. He was too fond of good living to ever do anything, for whatever reason, that would lay that good life on the line. Moreover, he sounded sincere to a man who had been measuring sincerity for a third of a century.

  Schindler had heard a story that the Count had asked one of the cops guarding him at Westbourne if a man could be hanged on circumstantial evidence. “What about that?” Schindler wanted to know when he spoke to de Marigny.

  The Count just smiled and shrugged. “Wasn’t it, considering my position, a natural question?” he countered.

  “It may have been a natural question, but it wasn’t a smart one,” Schindler answered.

  The singed hairs on his hands, arms, and the beard? What about that, Schindler asked.

  His friend the Marquis would corroborate the Count’s story of hand and arm burns from the hurricane lamps, and the chicken singeing chores.

  “I’m told that no barber in Nassau can remember singeing your beard,” Ray pressed. “What do you say to that?”

  “Well, perhaps not. Maybe I singed it myself and got confused when the police were pummeling me with questions.”

  “What about the fingerprint on the Chinese screen?” Ray asked.

  Here de Marigny was adamant and animated.