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

by Noel Hynd

  There was also another way of going from Christie’s room into Sir Harry’s. A screen door led from Christie’s room onto a veranda that ran the entire width of the house. A similar door in Sir Harry’s room led onto this veranda. It was the habit of the two men, when they alone remained at Westbourne, to go out through the screen doors of their respective rooms and meet on the veranda for breakfast in the morning.

  On the night of July sixth, twenty-four hours before the murder, Sir Harry and Christie sat out on this veranda sipping drinks made of native rum, sugar, and fresh lime juice, a pleasant nightcap. Then the two men retired.

  On the morning of the seventh they had breakfast on the veranda. Then they spent a busy day together, preparing for Sir Harry’s departure the next day on a business trip to South America. They returned to Westbourne around five in the afternoon, played a couple of games of tennis and had some drinks. Then they washed and dressed for Sir Harry’s farewell party that night. The party broke up about midnight. The servants straightened up and left Westbourne for the night.

  Christie and Sir Harry had a couple of more drinks and then went to their respective rooms. All during the night it stormed. In the morning, when Sir Harry did not show up on the veranda for breakfast, Christie walked into his chamber and discovered the body.

  Exactly what had happened between the time Christie and Oakes parted for the night and the time Christie walked from the veranda into the Baronet’s chamber in the morning was the key question.

  Since his arrival in Nassau, Schindler had occasionally run into Christie in the street or at a party. The two men had never spoken to each other, just nodded in a stiff sort of way. After all, they were on opposite sides of the official fence, Christie was to be a witness for the Crown and Schindler was trying to knock down the Crown’s case. They couldn’t have been much more opposed than that. But even had they not been on opposite sides of the fence, they probably wouldn’t have liked one another. It was a case of chemistry: the two men just didn’t click. Now Schindler began to drop a few questions about Christie. Everyone on the island had a good word for the man. Or so it seemed. Or maybe sometimes just a good word and then they would stop talking or flee the conversation.

  No one revealed much about his background. Or at least no one wanted to chat in detail about it. He had, apparently, just materialized in Nassau as an adult and over the years come to be a power in the place.

  Schindler began to catch whispers. So did I. Some residents of the island who had come from faraway places and bought property from Christie weren’t satisfied with it. Some of Christie’s real-estate clients were, in fact, downright dissatisfied with their purchases. But they didn’t complain. For some reason, many people seemed to be afraid of Harold Christie.

  Schindler began getting interested. He had developed some trusting local contacts by this time, particularly among the non-white non-power people of both Paradise Island, Grand Bahama and the nearer inhabited islands. Again, the Bahamas were an insular little collection of islands where everyone knew everyone else’s business. Nassau itself was a small town on a remote coral reef.

  Pretty soon, after talking on the QT to several locals, a more sinister portrait emerged of the local top citizen.

  Christie had been born to an old Bahamian family that dated back to the Tory flight to the islands following the American Revolution. His old man had been a local character who fathered eight children—out of twenty pregnancies—to Harold’s long-suffering mother, who was called Madge. The old man had been a successful merchant when he’d cared to pay attention to life’s economic duties, but like many other whites on the island he was complacent, sometimes to the point of indolence. As young Harold grew to manhood, his father all but abandoned financial support of the family. Madge ran the household, kept the books, and operated her husband’s businesses for him, to the extent that there were any. Meanwhile, dad spent his time in evangelical studies, praising God and Jesus and writing bad uninspired poetry.

  To his credit, young Harold didn’t care much for this. When World War One broke out he found his way to Canada and enlisted in the Royal Air Force. He took well to the big world beyond the Bahamas. Then in 1920 the moralists and puritans in the United States handed Harold Christie a gift on a golden platter: the Volstead Act, which banned the sale of booze in the United States.

  “Ha! I’ll drink to that,” Christie reportedly laughed to friends.

  Apparently, many others would also. Using his newly found knowledge of boats, small aircraft and the geography of North America, Christie became an engaging and friendly conduit between Nassau’s liquor wholesalers and their speakeasy customers in the United States. The business was hugely profitable. Christie was still in his twenties, young and ambitious, and he was starting to make serious money, little of which was being peeled away by Uncle Sam. He was, recall, not subject to American taxes. It was a splendid situation for Christie, cozy and profitable in more ways than any man could count.

  I was intrigued when Ray explained all this background to me one day in mid-September over lunch. But I must have yawned or something because suddenly Ray changed the subject.

  “Alan,” he said in his friendliest most avuncular voice. “I’m going to ask you something as your longtime friend. Why don’t you get to hell out of Nassau?”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Take a break from the overheated murder, mayhem and mystery down here in the damned colonies. Go home for a couple of weeks.”

  “This discussion again?” I asked.

  “Probably for the last time,” he said. “Why are you trying to tough it out? Hell, I’ve left the islands three times since I first arrived. It does a man good to refresh. Explain to me: why are you not taking a break?”

  “Ray, you know how it works. The moment you leave, something big happens.”

  “I’ll cover for you.”

  “I appreciate that, but—”

  “Look,” he answered. “You’re in a miserable state. Your family misses you. Your magazine publisher is hounding you and chaffing at the expenses. Your book publisher wants to see you in person. You told me so yourself. You’re strung out and overextended.”

  I reached for my drink and finished it. I tapped another cigarette out of its pack and lit it. “Leave and come back when the trial’s ready to start,” he advised. “I’ll bring you up to date on everything you miss. I’ll telegraph you some stuff you can use for articles and you can write from your home. You’ll come back refreshed, ready to work. You’ll make everyone happy, including yourself.”

  I thought about it.

  Ray leaned in closer. “Alan, I got a tip today from the courthouse. There’s a nice lady in the register’s office. She feeds me information in exchange for five-pound notes. The trial date has been set for October 18. It won’t be announced till the first day of the month. Today is September 20. You should leave and try to be back by October fifteen to be safe. Make a hotel reservation before you go. The outside press is going to pour into this place. Okay?”

  “Do I seem that miserable?” I asked.

  “You are that miserable. Start packing.”

  “You can get along without your extra man?” I asked.

  “I’ll do fine. I don’t want to see you here in twenty-four hours. But I do want to see you when the trial starts. Now get the hell out of here.”

  After a moment, I asked, “What do you think is going to happen to de Marigny?”

  “He could very possibly hang.”

  “Jesus,” I said softly.

  “It’s the job of my lifetime to make sure he doesn’t,” Schindler said. “It’s your job, too, as a writer, to promote the truth, unlike the various hack journalists who have invaded this island and who are feeding pap to the Hearst papers.”

  “Jesus,” I said again.

  “If anything critical happens I’ll send you a Western Union. Any sane man needs a break from this hot crazy place. Get out of here, Alan,” he said emphatically. �
��Go spend time with your wife and family. You won’t regret it. Go! Now!”

  I went back to the hotel. I sat for a moment on the edge of my bed. I wondered whether to take Ray’s advice—I was stuck in a terrible place, not knowing whether to move forward or back, but knowing I had to move. I felt like I was walking off the story. But the break made sense. The defense was lining up its best artillery. The prosecution had lined up theirs. Ray was right. The first shots wouldn’t be fired until court convened.

  I stood. I packed.

  The next morning, I went downstairs and announced my check-out, booking a new reservation at the same time. I left one bag of clothes at the hotel. The staff would launder everything and hold my possessions for me till I returned, unless of course it got stolen. I booked my return for October fifteenth as Ray had suggested. If the trial began on the eighteenth, a few days of recovery and lead time would be precious.

  I went to the Nassau airport with one suitcase and caught a Bahama Airlines Curtiss C-46 to Miami. It was a nerve-wracking forty-seat transport that offered reasonable comfort. The weather provided no comfort, however, as we flew right into one of those sudden late afternoon tropical thunderstorms. I had been wise enough not to eat before the flight. When we bounced to a rough landing in Miami an hour and a half after take-off, those passengers who still had anything left applauded.

  I couldn’t tolerate another flight. And wartime travel restrictions didn’t make finding one any easier, so I took an overnight train to Washington’s Union Station. I had two hours between rail connections, had lunch, went out to the front steps of the station and gazed at the wartime capital.

  I felt a corny little thrill—I hadn’t realized how much I had missed just being in my own country. And now here I was right in the heart of power, the nerve center of the western anti-Axis world. I bought a Washington Star. The front page was all war news: British midget submarines had attacked and crippled the German battleship Tirpirtz, at anchor in a Norwegian fjord. The Soviet Red Army had retaken Smolensk. Take that, you Nazi bastards.

  I boarded a train for New York. It crept through the mid-Atlantic region, then hit Philadelphia. I got out to stretch my legs; the stop was twenty minutes. Then we were back chugging northward. I saw my old home town of Trenton, and had to turn away from the window. There was too much baggage. Same with northern New Jersey: I had mixed blessings there because on the upside, my wife and her family were from the Bernardsville area, good solid industrious God-fearing Americans, but it was also not far from Hopewell, where I’d worked on the Lindbergh case and lost whatever had ever remained of my innocence in my thirties.

  The train arrived at New York’s Pennsylvania Station around nine p.m. The tracks were two or three stories underground. I climbed the stone steps and came up into the spacious lobby with the huge columns which rose to the ceiling murals. There’s an old newspaper saying: a city gets what it wants, is willing to pay for, and ultimately deserves. Penn Station was one such treasure.

  There was still a florist open. I bought two dozen red roses for my wife and found a taxi on Seventh Avenue. He drove east on Thirty-Fourth Street, then drove up Park Avenue to Sixty-First Street. 530 Park Avenue. Home.

  The door staff greeted me warmly and the elevator man took me up. I knocked on my door and fumbled with a key but the door came open before I could turn the lock.

  I fell into my wife’s arms and she into mine. I fought back tears. I hugged her as I had hugged no other person ever in my life. It was not until I saw her that I realized how much the case had ripped into my soul and torn me apart. I admitted to myself that I found the murder case in the Bahamas, in all its primal violence and aura of corruption and compromised justice, as repugnant as anything I’d ever written about. I dreaded going back. And I was nowhere close to the end of my involvement.

  CHAPTER 17

  In the first days that followed, I spent a lot of time on little things, like straightening my desk, having quiet lunches on Madison Avenue with my wife, answering mail, and taking my daughter to Central Park. The carousel and the zoo were pleasures that I had never fully appreciated. A war was raging far away on many different fronts, but I turned my eyes away from it. For one of the few times in my life, I avoided the news and newspapers.

  Gradually, I got around to business. I had lunch twice with my pal Aaron Fairstein, who had produced the radio show, Wanted: Armed and Dangerous! that I had narrated. Aaron was a small intense gnome-like man in his sixties. He looked and acted like a deranged elf. He always had a dozen or more projects on his drawing board, hoping that one would come to fruition. We talked about some new ideas, but I was non-committal until I could see my way through current assignments. “Just let me get through this Oakes thing and my next book,” I said. “Then we can talk about anything.”

  “Reasonable enough, kiddo” he answered. Aaron was remarkable. His underworld contacts were extensive. He had grown up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and he knew some terrifying people. He used to brag that some of the best episodes that he produced on Wanted and Dangerous! were on guys with whom he had gone to grade school.

  My book publisher, McBride and Company, sent over the galleys of my second work of non-fiction. The title was now Betrayal From the East. It had a nasty cover of an evil-looking Japanese man, or the artist’s version of such, a clumsy caricature which would embarrass me far into the future.

  The advance orders were great. For a forty-year-old writer who had never finished high school, I reminded myself again what a lucky man I was. But there were trade-offs. Sometimes successful book publishing was like prostitution; and on certain occasions, the distinctions were vague. This was one of those times. I could be a stickler about language and facts, and it disturbed me that I found some of my own writing rushed, ragged and—dare I say—from time to time inventive.

  I phoned McBride. I talked to my book editor, a surly no-nonsense guy named Bob Farnsworth, not to ever be confused with my day-to-day magazine editors at Fawcett Publications. “Is there time to fix some of this?” I asked.

  “Why the hell would you want to, Alan?” Farnsworth replied.

  “The book could be a lot better.”

  “So what? It doesn’t matter. What matters is that needs to hit the goddam bookstores by Christmas. Are you finished with that murder case in Cuba?”

  “It’s in the Bahamas, and no, I’m not. I’m just in town for a few days.”

  “Well, come in and say hello to our staff. They always enjoy seeing you. I don’t know why, but they do. We’ll have lunch, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said. Lunch would mean at a little French place called Monsieur Laurent near Union Square. It was right around the corner from the publisher’s office on East Sixteenth Street.

  And that’s how it went. Outwardly, I was calm, walking on air. Inwardly, I was set to explode. I needed to release. When I started to put the events of Nassau in perspective, they began to wake me up at two a.m. and then again at four and six. I couldn’t get them out of my mind. Now that I had pulled myself away from the legal proceedings in Nassau, I could see what a sham they were.

  Sometimes it made me feel ill. Other times I would break a sweat. And it wasn’t even my neck that was going to be in the noose.

  “What’s wrong?” my wife asked, sensing my distress.

  “This is a rough case in Nassau,” I said. “Somebody bashed in the head of one of the world’s richest men. Now they’re planning to hang an innocent man for it.”

  “Oh,” she said softly.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Why do you think he’s innocent?” she asked.

  “That’s what my guts are telling me,” I said. “Plus, there’s no real evidence.”

  I had only known my wife for six years. I didn’t want to go into how many times, covering the vilest forms of human behavior for a quarter century, I’d seen variations on the same event: an innocent man accused. An innocent man jailed. An innocent man convicted. An innocent man execute
d.

  The American justice system was probably better and fairer than any other in the world, but it was far from perfect. Mistakes were made by overzealous prosecutors, overeager or corrupt cops, dumb juries, alcoholic judges and crooked lawyers. The last thing any innocent man or woman wanted to do was get caught up in the system. The system would chew you up and spit you out, battered and broken, ruined or dead.

  On a few evenings, booze helped me shove these thoughts aside. Worse, while I was back in New York, I fell into an old pattern that had cost me my first marriage. I’d hit some bars after business hours and sometimes not managed to get up and head home until after midnight. I’ll confess: sometimes I was too looped to do much more than stagger and hang on a lamppost on Lexington or Third Avenue.

  But I’d be smart enough to tie a load on in my own neighborhood where many of the cops knew me. If I had trouble navigating the streets, the New York City police would pick me up. I’d identify myself and they’d laugh and bring me home.

  “The writer. The true crime guy. He’s had a snootful,” they’d laugh. They’d bring me home and deliver me to my apartment door.

  Whatever private misgivings I had about cops, the New York cops liked me. They were good guys. More than once a green and white squad car would bring me to my door and deliver me to my wife. They were all noble Hibernians, the guys I knew. Mulrooney. Sullivan. O’Casey. Hearn. Ryan. And the occasional son of Italy. Ricci. Tedeschi. Sanpietro. I didn’t deserve favored treatment and I quite profited by getting it. At Christmas, I’d send a case of Jameson to each of the local precincts, and on Columbus Day boxes of pastries from Ferrara’s down on Mulberry Street. The boys in the precincts never declined any of it.

  I was very much a privileged soul. But there were demons tormenting me. I’d seen too much over the years. Nassau was serving only as the icing as a very bad cake. In a way, being distant from it made me see if with a different and more horrifying perspective. I knew I didn’t want to return. I knew I was going to have to. And I knew that my drinking days would have to end.