by Noel Hynd
***
I had a new hardcover book out at the end of 1945. It was called The Giant Killers. It was about the U.S. Treasury agents who brought down Capone and some of the other big shot bad guys of the Prohibition era. I worked with a guy named Elmer Irey, a friend and a legend in law enforcement till he dropped dead suddenly in 1948. The book sold well. At the same time, RKO studios turned my second book, Betrayal From The East, into a quickie Hollywood movie starring Nancy Kelly and Lee Tracy. It was a second feature job, a propaganda piece, with a cast of loyal Chinese American actors playing evil Japanese because American audiences wouldn’t notice. It was best left forgotten.
By 1946, my friend Mike Todd had left New York and moved to Los Angeles, where, so that he could be close to the high stakes gambling he craved, he bought the Del Mar Racetrack in San Diego. I saw Mike occasionally, usually at Romanoff’s or The Brown Derby.
The Todd-Blondell affair was also full speed ahead. For Todd, that meant a permanent split from Bertha, his wife of the most recent nineteen years, would have to be arranged. The first Mrs. Todd, Bertha, wanted no part of said split, Mike’s adulterous behavior notwithstanding.
Mike filed for divorce. A day or two after the filing, Bertha confronted her husband in his rented home in Rancho Santa Fe and lunged at him with a knife. She missed, hit a wall or a door frame, and sliced a tendon between two of her fingers.
Or maybe she sliced her hand cutting a piece of fruit. It depended on whose version of the events were to be believed. Bertha was taken by ambulance to St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica for minor surgery to repair the tendon. And there she died from an allergic reaction to anesthesia, much to the delight of the tabloids and gossip rags which were not-undeservedly all over Mike.
But by the hand of God, or whoever had wielded that knife, Mike was now free to marry Joan Blondell. The couple thus drove from Los Angeles to Las Vegas on a steamy July evening in 1947. They got married in the banquet room of the El Rancho Vegas on the Strip. Pictures in the press show the three kids of the newly blended family looking miserable. Joan wore a tense smile.
Meanwhile, things continued well for me.
My son was born in 1947. I had a book out titled Murder in 1947. No compendium of ordinary situations of those whose chips were forcibly cashed, the focus was on the human heart in its darkest, strangest most violent moments. They were great cases.
It was heady stuff.
It didn’t get too much better than that.
Tenacious and unwavering, however, Thomas Dewey just wouldn’t go away. Governor Dewey was nominated for President again in 1948, this time running against President Harry S. Truman. His aggressive campaign and backing led his supporters to believe that he would be the next President of the United States. The problem with people who have no vices is that generally you can be pretty sure they’re going to have some very annoying virtues.
Over time, he also stopped talking about crime. True, he hadn’t prosecuted for years, but there seemed to be something he was avoiding. Or hiding. A federal investigative committee decided to question him. The investigators wanted to talk about the Luciano pardon. Dewey didn’t want to discuss that or much else. His lack of response to the committee left more people to wonder about the complexity of his relationship to mobsters.
To the surprise of many, but not those of us who knew him, he lost again.
CHAPTER 31
In the last week of 1948, I heard that Bill McCoy, the gentleman smuggler whom I’d written about in the 1930’s, had died of a heart attack. He bit the dust where he was happiest—at sea aboard his private yacht Blue Lagoon. He had made it to the ripe old age of seventy-one. Well, it seemed like ripe and old at the time. Bill was perhaps best remembered by his brother Ben when he simply wrote, “When the country went dry, Bill irrigated it”.
I wrote a punchy hard-hitting book called We Are The Public Enemies. It was an account of the Depression era bandits who swaggered and shot their paths through the sweltering American Midwest before J. Edgar Hoover sent out well-armed Gestapo-style squads under the direction of G-Man Melvin Purvis to assassinate them. A new line of paperback books called Gold Medal was hitting the newsstands and book shops across America. We Are The Public Enemies was Gold Medal’s prominent lead-off title, Numero 101 on a list that started with 101. There was no such thing as a paperback best seller list at the time, but Gold Medal told me that no other non-fiction was selling as fast.
The public enemies in question were: Dillinger. Karpis. Pretty Boy Floyd. Bonnie and Clyde. Ma Barker. The dirty little secret about these bandits was that they had a huge public following. They were more popular than the cops who had tracked them down and killed them. The dirtier secret was that they were, for the most part, vile human beings who had no use for anyone other than themselves. They would murder a cop as easily as other people might change their underwear. But they had their fans. And the book sold well.
And they were all conveniently dead, thanks to J. Edgar’s hit squads.
The magazine stuff flowed, also: the police magazines, The Saturday Evening Post. True. Liberty. Look. Coronet. The American Mercury. In the very top magazines, the A-plus ones, I often had to take second billing to the old pain, Ernie Hemingway and some bull fight bull crap. In the A-Minus mags, I was Numero Uno.
Hemingway’s patrols against German U-boats turned out to be just as unsuccessful as his counter-intelligence operation. As the months passed, and as no U-boat appeared, the Pilar’s patrols turned into fishing trips, and the grenades were thrown into the sea as “drunken sport.” After adding his sons Patrick and Gregory to the crew, Hemingway acknowledged that his U-boat hunting venture had turned into an excuse to go out to sea with friends and booze. But he never admitted it to his adoring public. He had an image to maintain, as we all do, I suppose. Years later, the Cuban naval officer Mario Ramirez Delgado, who sank U-176, said Hemingway was a playboy who hunted submarines off the Cuban coast as a whim.
I was glad to be out of Nassau, to have all that behind me, though I had no reluctance about sharing my thoughts as to what had happened. Why should I have?
Radio was a now a big thing. I developed some friends who had radio shows in New York. My ex-wife even had a radio show, not that she invited me. I’d go on the air and gab about crime. People still wanted to know about, and hear about, the Lindbergh case. And the Ponzi case. And the gangsters. And always the Oakes case, which remained unsolved.
Talk was cheap. I talked.
I kept an ear to the ground. I kept hearing things about the Bahamas.
I knew that down in Nassau there were several theories as to who murdered Sir Harry Oakes. There was a motive to fit each theory, a suspect for everyone’s tastes. But the only theory that was openly discussed in Nassau, even as the years started to glide by is the one that was officially embraced. All other theories were discussed guardedly, if at all. It was not healthy in Nassau to talk too freely.
From what I hoped would be a safe distance, I kept tabs on what was going on. I gabbed on the radio about what I was doing. I wrote another article or two, questioning why the investigation had never continued after de Marigny’s acquittal. No one had a good answer to that question.
The Oakes case wouldn’t go away. And not just for those of us who were under the dark shadow of the case. Occasionally, I’d open the New York Times or the Herald Tribune or see something in the New York Daily News or The New York Mirror. I would always read it.
First there was the outright screwball stuff.
In 1950, a California shoe store clerk named George Boyle confessed to the murder, saying that he had committed it on a fishing trip while drunk.
That same year, a journeyman cook named Edward Majava, who worked on a Nassau-registered tanker, told the Bahamian cops that two women were involved in blackmailing the killer, whom he hinted was Harold Christie. He claimed the name had been passed on to him by a society portrait painter in Florida who was well-acquainted with the Oakes family
’s Palm Beach friends. Majava was vacationing in California at the time of his utterances. The local police took the unusual step of taking him seriously. They phoned Augustus Robinson, then the Nassau police chief, who travelled to California to interview the man. Majava named Harold Christie as the killer. No action followed in the Bahamas.
One would have been tempted to crumple up Majava’s tale and toss it into the surf at Cabal Beach, except a few months later, after a quiet legal process, a local taxi driver named Nicholas Musgrave landed in jail for writing extortion letters to Lady Oakes. He was asking for forty thousand pounds’ sterling.
Musgrave, something less than a master criminal, never saw the free light of day again. He died in jail of unexplained causes.
A few days later, a Canadian woman also told the FBI that Christie was implicated and had plotted Sir Harry’s death with a powerful accomplice, a man who was the trusted family lawyer. The lawyer had also done his best to assist in the destruction of Alfred de Marigny.
While Christie had possible motives for murdering Oakes, the lawyer’s motives were murkier. He was already a well-paid retainer. Unless he had somehow engineered Oakes’ will to include legacies to himself, what was the point? And Oakes’ will revealed no such language. I wasn’t buying it. Yet it was conceivable that he alone outside the family, except for Christie, would know the whereabouts of any cache of bullion or precious coins or metals that Sir Harry might have stashed around the islands. Hence, I thought back to the attractive female snitch who had bent Schindler’s ear in Nassau seven years earlier.
Who knew? Not me.
Then more ominously, there was the case of an American woman named Bettie Renner, a nice-looking lady in her late thirties. I’m told she had a law degree and had worked for the FBI. She flew into Nassau from Washington and began to make inquiries among locals, starting from the ground up, same as I did, same as Ray Schindler did. This was still in 1950.
She played short the feelings aroused by the case in Nassau, where fear and intimidation had now become part of national life. It was even possible that she was working on the misassumption that foreigners were relatively safe from intimidation and reprisal.
Whatever the truth of it was, instead of going undercover and posing as a tourist, Bettie Renner said she was going to “crack” the Oakes mystery.
Such a mission had its merits. Notoriety and stardom beckoned for anyone producing solid evidence leading to Sir Harry’s killer. But Bettie’s mission didn’t turn out so well. Riding a bicycle outside of Nassau two days after her arrival, she was followed by an assailant. She was bludgeoned to death, dragged across some coral and dumped upside-down half-naked in an irrigation well in some limestone rocks by the road, not far from a grove of poisonous manchineel trees. The location was only three miles from Westbourne, where on July 8, 1943, Harry Oakes was found bludgeoned and his body burned. Her body was battered and beaten. Her clothing had been torn off above the waist, her breasts traumatized and exposed. It looked like a sexual assault, but the coroner noted that she hadn’t been raped.
Nonetheless, dead was dead.
The unfortunate lady’s death sent another shock wave through Nassau and encouraged the growing suspicion that the Oakes murder plot was a local affair, and that certain people were intent on keeping the lid on the truth at whatever cost.
Someone else hatched out a local account of the crime: a man of hot blood and dark skin had followed Bettie from where she had been looking to make some contacts. The attacker had followed her to the remote roadside spot near the manchineels and sexually assaulted her.
I wasn’t buying this for an instant, either. I’d seen too many cases where an anonymous man of color was blamed for a crime when there was something bigger and more nefarious going on. The conspiracy of silence made many people uneasy. Nassau took on an even more sinister air. Not that anyone would talk publicly, but the common feeling was that powerful local people were being protected, or protecting themselves, in an extraordinarily brutal take-no-prisoners manner. Since working-class blacks of the day had no power, no equal status and no say over anything, I was guessing that the plot, the ongoing cover-up, the continued chain of strange deaths and disappearances had nothing to do with them. Only the ruling white power structure had the juice to keep things hot for anyone who wanted to kick open the hornets’ nest of Oakes questions.
I frequently used to run into my friends Mike Todd, the Broadway producer, Aaron Fairstein, the radio producer and Ray Schindler at the bar of the Algonquin Hotel in those days. The bar was in the rear of the lobby, not far from the famous Round Table, which was in the Oak Room, formerly the Pergola Room. My magazine publisher was just upstairs on 44th Street and Ray’s office was down the block on the same street. Mike Todd was showing up less often as he’d made his bundle on Broadway but was working more in Hollywood. Anyway, it was an obvious watering hole.
As usual, we would sit and people watch, sip drinks and talk about crime, music, Broadway, business, detective work and literature.
One day I confessed that I had been so busy recently that I hadn’t been reading very much.
“It shows,” said Ray, who could be a scold from time to time. “You should catch up on your reading now that you’re doing well and back in the States,” he said.
“Ray,” I said, “I write so much that I don’t have time to read much.”
“That’s a mistake, Alan. Reading is part of writing. Just like re-writing.”
I laughed. “I need a wealthy detective to tell me that?”
“You need a friend to tell you that.”
“So, what should I read?” I challenged.
“Start at the top. Read some Hemingway. Let’s face it. He’s the author of our age, no offense to true crime guys such as yourself who’ve been on the bestseller lists, also.”
“No offense taken.” Actually, a small one had been. “I’m still a little more partial to Steinbeck. Or Fitzgerald,” I said.
“Ha!” Ray scoffed, curling a lip and waving away my suggestion. “Fitzgerald. Over and out. Fitzgerald was famous at twenty-four, dead and now forgotten at forty-four. He’s an American type, Alan. Don’t become it. The big fireworks display with a couple of jazz age books. Then complacence, followed by decades of indulgence and then silence. Reminds me of Bix Beiderbecke, the jazz trumpeter, remember him?”
“Sure. Played with Paul Whiteman’s Orchestra in the 1920’s.”
“He made sublime music and died at twenty-eight. Stephen Crane wrote one perfect book, The Red Badge of Courage. Orson Welles’ career in Hollywood began with two great movies and we’ll see if he does anything worthwhile again. He’s gaining weight you know. I saw him in Palm Springs last year and he looks like a small blimp. Your man Fitzgerald may have been right about no second acts in American life.”
“I’m not sure that was Fitzgerald’s point,” I said. “The line has lost its original point, which is that there is no room for the graceful intermediate development of themes before the catastrophe arrives. If you’re a writer, second acts are where the hard work is. That’s where the slow stuff happens. That’s where we are in the Oakes case right now.”
“You have an answer for every literary potshot I can throw at you, right?”
“I try to.”
He lifted his glass.
“Second acts exist, Ray,” I said. “So do solid third acts. And epilogues can go on forever.”
“Ah, all right!” he said. “I’ll concede the point. Listen. You’re maybe halfway through your life, I’m more than that far through mine. Let’s be sure we have solid final acts, all right?”
“All right,” I said.
We clicked our glasses.
I took Ray’s advice and read some more Hemingway, the volume I hadn’t yet caught up with, A Farewell to Arms. I still didn’t care much for Ernie the man, but it was mostly table manners and his personal behavior which I found boorish. Or maybe I was just jealous of his enormous financial success. When
we were in the same magazines, he had the top billing, drew the big checks, and his name on the upper right side on the cover. I might have had two or three articles in the same edition but I was always father back in the book.
“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places,” Hemingway wrote toward the end of his novel. “But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure that it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”
It seemed to me that he was speaking of the Oakes case, as well as life in general.
“…it will kill you too but will be in no special hurry.”
Eventually, those words would haunt me.
I ran into Ray at the Algonquin again about a month after Bettie Renner’s death. I mentioned it to him. He knew about it. He only shrugged and shook his head.
“It’s the Bahamas, Alan,” he said, as if that explained everything. “What the hell do you expect?”
“Maybe some semblance of justice?” I asked.
“Ha!” he laughed. “For a working-class kid from New Jersey who covered the Lindbergh case you still have an element of naiveté to you.”
“Maybe,” I said.
“Grow a pair, pal,” he said, punching my arm. “Embrace the real world.”
“I just would have liked to see some justice for poor old Harry,” I said. “I mean, what the hell were we all in Nassau for, if not that?”
“Selling magazines, newspapers and books?” Ray offered, ever the cynic.
“Maybe,” I said again.
CHAPTER 32
By that time, coming close to a decade after the acquittal of Alfred de Marigny in Nassau, the case had taken its place as one of the most baffling mysteries in the annals of crime. Not since the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby had there been a crime that, for its strange and bewildering aspects, compared with the murder of Sir Harry Oakes.