Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 07 (12 page)

“Very perceptive, Nate. Second, I’m unperturbed because I’m innocent of this crime. It should be easy enough for you good men to prove it.”

“Not with the deck stacked against you
and
us.” Higgs shook his head. “Hallinan and possibly the Duke himself are obviously pulling strings….”

“Four-flushers,” de Marigny said bitterly. He sucked on the cigarette. He laughed at me. “You’re squinting.”

“It’s too goddamn bright in here,” I said.

“All this light does serve a purpose—I can keep track of the rats, spiders and cockroaches more easily. Of course, sleeping is difficult, since they stay on all night. I must apologize for the foul fragrance…I’ve never had to sleep with my own excreta before.”

“What the hell,” I said. “I’ve never heard the word ‘excreta’ used in a sentence before.”

He studied me a second, and laughed. “Charming sense of humor. Your manners are questionable, but then of course, you’re an American.”

“Of course. Why did Harry Oakes hate you?”

I’d thrown him a curve, but he hit it like DiMaggio.

“Because he resented my having sex with his daughter,” he said.

“Oh,” I said. “Before or after you married her?”

His smile was wide and wicked again. “It never came up
before
the marriage.”

That was a straight line if I ever heard one, but I kept quiet; trying to improve my manners.

“A few months after we wed,” he was explaining, “we were in Mexico City, when Nancy fell ill with typhoid fever—she also was in need of extensive dental surgery. Our blood type is the same, and I was able to supply blood for transfusions. A few months later, on the advice of her doctors, due to her continued ill health, a pregnancy was terminated.”

He paused to inhale on the cigarette again; his jauntiness was absent now.

“Apparently Eunice and Harry somehow got the idea that I had raped Nancy in Mexico City—crawled onto her hospital bed between transfusions, perhaps, and ‘violated’ my wife. Oakes raved and ranted—called me a sex maniac. Nothing Nancy could say would dissuade him. He was a very uncouth man, you know—rudely eccentric.”

“I see,” I said, thinking all that was pretty fucking bizarre.

“That’s only the beginning,” de Marigny said, bleakly amused. “Before long, Nancy went to New York for some further dental surgery; at the same time, I was in need of a tonsil operation. So we checked in simultaneously, took adjacent rooms. Sir Harry discovered the arrangement, charged in like a bull, expecting an orgy no doubt, threatening to kick me out of the room. I told him to get the hell out, or I’d bash his head in.”

“A poor choice of words, considering,” I said.

That hadn’t occurred to him; he sighed and continued: “That was when relations between the Oakes family and myself deteriorated into what was at best a chilly truce. Last March Sir Harry charged into my house to remove his teenage son, Sydney, who is quite fond of both his sister and me, and whose affections Harry felt I was stealing.” He shrugged. “That was the last time I saw Sir Harry.”

“You know those Miami cops say they have fingerprint evidence,” I said.

“Nonsense,” he said, with a wave that was like a fly swat. “I hadn’t been in Westbourne in over two years. If they found any prints, I left them there during my questioning.”

Higgs frowned. “This fellow Barker is being represented as a fingerprint expert…”

“That guy isn’t an expert on anything but rubber hoses,” I said.

“You think the Americans are dishonest?” de Marigny asked.

“Probably. Thick as a plank? Certainly. They’ve got you pegged as the killer—anything they can’t make fit that scenario, they’re tossing out.”

“With Hallinan’s help, no doubt,” de Marigny said bitterly. For a moment his cocky mask dropped. “Back home in Mauritius we were brought up to take such little people for what they are—professional civil servants. Lacking the ability to make a success of their life, not good enough for the diplomatic service, eking out an existence on some miserable coral reef. Doing their best to convince themselves and everyone around them that they’re so
ve-ree
important.”

“Forgive my ignorance,” I said, “but what’s Mauritius?”

De Marigny looked at me with pity. That so ignorant a boob could walk the planet must have seemed a reverse miracle to him.

“Mauritius is my home—an island in the Indian Ocean, a British possession but French in language, customs, population and tradition.”

“Oh,” I said. It was hell being a dumb goddamn American.

The prisoner stood again. He asked Higgs for another cigarette, and as Higgs lighted it, de Marigny asked a question I would have thought he’d have asked sooner.

“Have you heard from my wife? Is Nancy in Nassau yet?”

Higgs nodded. “She arrived yesterday, late afternoon. I expect you’ll see her today.”

“Good. Good. She’s standing behind me, you know.”

“I know.”

“A rare woman—particularly for an American girl. She has a…serious quality. Most American girls, they just giggle…so easy to please. None of the inborn reserve of the European woman. None of the cultural maturity. That’s why one tires of them so easily, of course.”

“Of course,” I said.

He turned to me, and his smile was as patronizing as it was wide. “You don’t like me much, do you, Nate?”

“Fred, I don’t have to like you to take your wife’s money.”

The smile went away and he just stood there, as if he were waiting for the trapdoor to let loose. Which one of these days it might: murder was a capital crime here, and you swung for it.

The sound of the key working in the metal door alerted us our time was up.

“Mr. de Marigny,” Captain Miller said, “your wife is here to see you. I thought you might prefer to meet with her in my office.”

De Marigny’s delight was obvious. “You’re very kind, Captain.”

We followed the prisoner and the warden to his office, just outside of which waited a wide-eyed Nancy, who beamed at the sight of her husband. She looked lovely in a white suit trimmed in blue, her dark hair held back by a white ribbon.

I’d thought of her as tall till she embraced the six-three de Marigny; he held her tenderly and she held back her tears. Then they stood staring at each other.

“What do you think of my beard?” he said, stroking it devilishly, smiling the same way.

“It makes you look evil,” she said.

That knocked his legs out from under him.

“Should I shave it off?”

She turned to me. Higgs and I had stopped a ways down, to give them some room, but she called, “What do you think, Mr. Heller?”

I was leaning against the stone corridor wall. “Absolutely. Get rid of it. The cops are destroying evidence—why shouldn’t you?”

“What do you think of our American private eye?” she asked him.

“He’s everything I imagined an American private eye might be,” he said suavely.

Her eyes sparkled. “I
knew
you’d like him! He needs a car, Freddie…what about the Chevrolet?”

“Certainly…uh, Nate—come here a moment….”

I went to him.

He whispered, “You’ll need petrol. My man Curtis Thompson will see that you get whatever you need, whenever you need it, out at my chicken farm. Nancy will tell you how to get in touch with him.”

“Black-market gas, Freddie?”

“Nate—would you expect less from a disreputable character like me?”

De Marigny and Nancy disappeared into Captain Miller’s office; the good captain closed the door to give them some privacy.

“Good thing Sir Harry isn’t here,” I said.

“Why’s that?” Higgs asked, confused.

“He’d have to go in there and break that up….”

Forty-seven minutes,” Gardner said.

He was watching his wristwatch as we stood on the balcony of my room at the British Colonial, while two squares of cloth burned in a large glass hotel ashtray at our feet. It was as if we were performing some arcane ritual. Smoke curled blackly, the acrid fragrance little diminished by the mild morning breeze. The fragments of unburned Westbourne bedding, which we’d doused in lighter fluid, were charred black.

“So it would have taken around that long, at least, for Sir Harry’s bed to have been similarly burned,” I said.

“Well,” Gardner said, eyes wide behind the gold wire-frames, “I’d suggest we douse those other samples in various other flammable materials—kerosene, gasoline—and see if there’s any difference in rate of burning.”

Lindop had been generous in the scraps of bedding he’d provided us; they had come, as I requested, from the unburned, unslept-in twin bed next to Sir Harry’s.

“I may bring an expert in to do that,” I said, “or send the rest of the scraps back to Chicago for testing. But for our purposes, this establishes that the killer or killers spent a longer period of time than forty-seven minutes murdering Sir Harry.”

“Not necessarily,” Gardner said, shaking his head. “The murderers probably left when the fire was still going.”

“But the feathers weren’t sprinkled on Sir Harry’s body until he was on the bed, with his pajamas burned off him. And the bedding was already burned to a crisp when Harry was placed there!”

“True,” he admitted. He gestured with an open hand. “So we’re talking more like fifty minutes to an hour, minimum.”

“Exactly. This killer—killers—were in no hurry.”

“Agreed,” Gardner said, nodding.

He still looked out of place in the Bahamas, in his green-and-brown Western shirt with bolero tie, and his chinos, against the incongruous backdrop of the white beach and vast blue-green sea.

“But I don’t think it was gas or kerosene, anyway,” I said, picking up the ashtray, moving back inside. “Maybe something with an alcohol base…”

“Why, Nate?”

In the bathroom, I ran water over the smoldering embers, which sizzled and smoked. “Ever see a gas fire, Erle? If that bed had been splashed with gasoline, the flames would’ve been eight or nine feet high.”

Gardner snapped his fingers. “And that ceiling would’ve been scorched as hell!”

I rinsed out the ashtray. “Or the goddamn house would’ve burned to the ground. Okay. Whose car shall we take? De Marigny’s or Hearst’s?”

He grinned. “Let the Third Estate take you for a ride.”

“I don’t know if I like the sound of that,” I said, but I let Gardner drive and this time I would man the wristwatch. But first we had to get to our starting point—de Marigny’s house on Victoria Street; I played navigator, pointing the way for Gardner.

The Lincoln was in the driveway.

“Looks like Nancy’s home,” I said.

“Shall we go in and say hello?”

“You wish,” I said, knowing how Gardner would relish an interview. “Drive on, Macduff.”

As Gardner guided Mr. Hearst’s rental Ford back down Victoria Street onto busy Bay Street, I kept track of the time.

“De Marigny left his house, with the RAF wives in tow,” I said, “around one o’clock. After he dropped them off at Hubbard’s Cottages, he claims he came back home the same route, via Bay Street. He says when he got home, he moved his spare car, the Chevrolet, from the driveway onto the lawn, so he could put the Lincoln away in the garage, which he did. Then he went up the outside stairs to the apartment over the garage, knocked on the door and spoke to his friend Georges de Visdelou, offering to drive Miss Betty Roberts, de Visdelou’s sixteen-year-old date, home.”

“Sixteen?”

“Yeah—and honey-blond and more curves than Miss America.”

Gardner frowned over at me. We were moving slow, caught behind a surrey on Bay Street, its horse clopping, bell jangling. “Who
is
this de Visdelou?”

“Another Mauritian…de Marigny’s cousin, a matinee-idol-type gigolo with no visible means of support, although his family is supposedly wealthy—a sugar plantation or something. Uses the title ‘marquis,’ and isn’t as shy about taking advantage of it as Freddie is. According to Higgs, the Marquis and the Count and the first Mrs. de Marigny had a notorious
ménage à trois
that ultimately split up the marriage, but not the friendship between the two men.

“How continental,” Gardner said; his expression was that of spitting out a seed. A sour-tasting one.

“Anyway, de Marigny went back down the outside stairs to the driveway, went up the porch steps and in the front way and hit the sack.”

“Were his servants still there?”

“Yes,” I said. “And they back up his story.”

“Are they live-in?”

“No—they were just still there, cleaning up after the party. They were gone by two o’clock. At three o’clock Freddie’s dog and de Visdelou’s cat were chasing each other around, and when the cat jumped on Freddie’s bed, it woke him up. Shortly after that he heard de Visdelou taking the Chevy out, finally taking his date home.”

“You should always try to get sixteen-year-old honey blondes home before dawn,” Gardner said archly.

“Right—or their folks might worry. Anyway, de Visdelou was back in fifteen minutes, parked his car in the driveway, and Freddie told him to come get his goddamn cat.”

We picked up speed, the surrey having turned off at Rawson Square. Gardner was lost in thought. “What’s the approximate time of Oakes’ death?”

“According to Barker and Melchen, between one-thirty and three-thirty a.m.”

We both mulled that over. At one-thirty or one-forty at the latest, Freddie had been seen by his servants on Victoria Street; also, de Visdelou spoke to him at one-thirty or so.

Soon the big black gates inscribed
Westbourne
loomed ahead. No guard on the gate, today; the crime scene was apparently completely scrubbed down—no need to preserve what’s been destroyed.

“Thirteen minutes,” I said.

“Double that,” Gardner said, pulling in and stopping before the gate, “and it’s a twenty-six-minute round trip.”

“And the weather is perfect. That night, it was coming down in sheets.”

“Yes, but there wouldn’t have been surreys and sponge wagons to slow him down,” Gardner said, while the engine hummed. “Hell, man, you drove it, same damn night, same damn time—how long did it take
you
?”

“I wasn’t paying attention,” I said, “but I would guess half an hour easy, round trip.”

“So Freddie simply didn’t have
time
to murder Oakes, set the fire, do the voodoo routine, before he got home.”

“Not even close. We’re talking, at best, ten unaccounted-for minutes. I don’t even think those are there.”

Gardner backed out, pulled onto West Bay Street, and we headed into the city. “But he had between two a.m., when the servants left, and three a.m., when his buddy took Shirley Temple home.”

I was shaking my head. “De Visdelou and his date were awake, up over the garage, playing house or whatever. Could Freddie really take the chance that de Visdelou would hear him coming and going?”

“Maybe so,” Gardner said, looking over with a raised eyebrow, “if he figured de Visdelou was ‘coming.’”

I laughed a little. “Yeah, but he also might be
going
—Freddie had no way of knowing when Georges would finally tire of the blonde and take her home.”

“I see what you mean, Nate—cousin Georgie would surely notice the Lincoln was gone. Of course, Freddie could’ve just lied, if de Visdelou brought that up, and said the Lincoln was in the garage.”

“True. But it’s still risky as hell. How could Freddie chance de Visdelou running into him in the driveway, either coming
or
going?”

Gardner was nodding. “Besides which, the drive to and from Westbourne took half an hour, and the killing took a minimum of fifty minutes.”

“A bare minimum. Even at that, it totals eighty minutes—and there just aren’t eighty minutes available to Freddie to do the deed.”

“What if the time of death is off? What if our boy did it
after
de Visdelou got back from taking his date home?”

I thought that over, then said, “That was around three-fifteen. With the Lincoln in the garage, Freddie would’ve had to move, or use, the Chevy. The question is, did de Visdelou leave the keys in the Chevy, or somewhere else Freddie could have got access to ’em? Or did he hang on to them?”

“Whatever the case,” Gardner said, “I would say a lot hinges on this cousin of de Marigny’s. I hope this gigolo makes a good witness.”

Gardner had a point. I needed to talk to the Marquis, who after the arrest had moved out of the Victoria Avenue house, where he’d been living over Freddie’s garage, to an apartment over a bar on Bay Street, Dirty Dick’s, a place where locals and tourists mingled. Access to the Marquis’ apartment was by a wooden stairway in the narrow, sewage-smelling alleyway next to the popular Nassau watering hole.

I knocked on the white weathered paint-peeling wooden door; Gardner stood behind me on the small landing. He had promised that anything he heard on this fishing expedition would stay off the record. I believed him.

“Somebody’s in there,” the writer said. “I can hear ’em talking.”

I could, too, faintly. I knocked again, harder—knocked some paint flakes off.

The sound of speech within stopped, but there was still no response.

Finally on my third assault on the door, it opened. The pretty, puffy, pasty-white face of the Marquis de Visdelou stared at me with indignation, and dark, darting eyes. His brow was wide, his chin weak, his hair black and marcelled; he wore a white silk shirt open at the neck and dark slacks. In one soft hand was a large double-shot glass; it appeared to contain whiskey and ice.

His perfect little Clark Gable mustache twitched as he spoke in a French accent not as thick as de Marigny’s, but just as distinct. “I don’t wish to be disturbed. Please go away.”

“I’m sorry, but it’s important,” I said. “My name is Heller and I’m working for your cousin Freddie, trying to help his attorney clear him.”

For some reason this news made him cringe; he blinked nervously, long feminine lashes fluttering. He looked past me, at Gardner. “And who is this?”

“He’s assisting me.”

“Oh.” He pursed his lips. “
Bien.
Anything I can do to help Freddie.” He raised his voice; it did not seem to be for our benefit. “Please step in, gentlemen!”

We did, into a living room that was attractively furnished—matching burgundy-mohair-and-walnut sofa and easy chair, another chair with floral tapestry, coffee table, shaded standing lamp, oriental carpet. A Bahama seascape watercolor was framed over a well-stocked portable bar. A breeze and the noise of Bay Street ruffled the curtains of windows behind the sofa.

“Forgive the drab surroundings,” he said, gesturing dismissively. “I was forced to rent a furnished apartment, and the establishment downstairs caters to gauche tourist tastes.”

“How sad for you,” I said.

My sarcasm was lost on him. “Sit anywhere. Can I get you gentlemen something to drink?”

“Sure,” I said. “Rum and Coke, if you’ve got it. Erle?”

“When in Rome,” he said.

De Visdelou smiled condescendingly, went to his liquor cart, freshened his own whiskey, and poured us some Bacardi and Coke on the rocks. We had each taken a chair.

He served us, raised his glass and said something in French, and had a sip. So did we, except for the saying something in French part. He sat on the sofa, where he could lounge against the armrest; he seemed blasé, but he wasn’t: a small tic played at the corner of one soulful eye.

“I would so very much like to help Freddie,” he said.

I glanced at Gardner, then looked hard at the Marquis. “You say that like there’s some doubt.”

His prissy mouth pursed, and he sipped the drink again. “Mr. Higgs called. We haven’t spoken yet—but I intend to ask him not to call me as a witness.”

“Why is that?”

“I gave a statement to the police…. It, what is the word? Corroborates Freddie’s story, to every detail. But in open court, on the witness stand…What I would rather do is leave this island, quietly, and not testify at all.”

I sat forward. Gardner’s eyes glittered behind the wire-frames; I knew he was kicking himself that this was all off the record.

“What’s wrong, de Visdelou? Were you
lying
for Freddie? To cover for him?”

He looked away from me. He seemed about to weep!

“What the hell is going on, de Visdelou!”

He swallowed thickly; he looked toward me, but the darting eyes wouldn’t land. “I’m afraid there are elements of Freddie’s story that will not…coincide…with what I would have to say.”

“Such as?”

He reached forward to the coffee table and popped open the lid of a silver box; he removed a cigarette, inserted it into a holder and lighted himself up with a silver lighter shaped like a horse’s head. The horse’s ass.

He gestured with the cigarette-in-holder. “My…companion for the evening…a young lady…I took her home much earlier than Freddie indicates.”

Gardner and I exchanged sharp glances.

“How much earlier?” I asked.

He shrugged; the breeze was riffling his silk shirt. “Immediately after the party.”

“Before or after the Count took those RAF dames home?” I asked, hoping to catch him.

“After…right after. We were gone probably at about the same time. But I returned sooner, because…my companion…lives only a few minutes from the Victoria Street cottage.”

“Fifteen minutes round trip,” I said.

“That’s right.”

“So you didn’t leave around three a.m. to take her home? And, earlier, Freddie didn’t knock on your door to offer to take her home for you?”

He smiled, as if happy to back up at least part of his friend’s account. “Oh, he did knock on my door around one-thirty…but merely to say good night.”