Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 07 (24 page)

“That is an interesting coincidence.”

“Other fantastic coincidences were to follow—the
Southern Cross
was also conveniently on hand when Allied pilots, training in the Bahamas, crashed into the sea. He rescued these pilots—but had he been watching them train? Before he was banished from these waters, Wenner-Gren liked to keep aboard his ship samples—in depth—of the various armaments manufactured by his company, the Bofors Munition Works. He also kept unusually large fuel tanks aboard the
Southern Cross,
which led to the nasty rumor that he’d been refueling U-boats.”

I sat forward in the booth. “And this is the same ship that the Duke and Duchess would take little outings to America on?”

“Oh yes. Wenner-Gren would ferry the Duchess to Miami so she could see her dentist. The Windsors’ favorite dessert? An immense sherbet replica of the
Southern Cross.”

“Charming.”

“Isn’t it? Still, there are those of us in Naval Intelligence who are just cynical enough to consider Axel a…bad influence on our boy.”

The native band was still clanging away at their steel drums, but I barely heard them.

“Well, Wenner-Gren’s in Cuernavaca or someplace, isn’t he? What harm can he do now, where your Duke is concerned?”

“The harm, Mr. Heller, if indeed there is any, has to do with that business relationship I mentioned—the one the Duke shares with Christie and Wenner-Gren, and the late Sir Harry Oakes. That mutual business venture, you see, is a bank. Specifically, Banco Continental in Mexico City.”

I shrugged and sat back. “So what? International finances are what you’d expect of people on that level.”

Fleming drew on his cigarette. Blew out smoke, smiled mysteriously. “Mr. Heller, I am being frank with you, but there are limits on just how much I can explain. Let me see if I can put this succinctly for you. During war time, certain practices are…discouraged. Such as sending money illegally from a struggling Empire to invest alongside blacklisted neutrals in a country ripe for sabotage.”

“Oh.”

“The Duke’s involvement with Banco Continental is unfortunate—it’s a rather well-kept secret, however, and I doubt the Duke even knows that Naval Intelligence is aware of it. But we are. And now, so are you.”

“Why me, for God’s sake?”

The waitress was back, bringing another round, exchanging smiles with Fleming.

“You mind if I duck your question? Just for a moment?”

“Do I have a choice?”

He sipped his second bourbon and branch water. “When I was nine, vacationing with my family at St. Ives, Cornwall, I was searching the caves off the beach for amethyst quartz when I stumbled onto a lump of ambergris as big as a child’s football.”

I wasn’t sure what ambergris was, but I knew it was valuable. I should have been irritated, but this aloof son of a bitch was a good storyteller.

“Now, I knew at once I would be
rich
—I would live on milk chocolate, and I wouldn’t have to go back to my private school, or indeed do any work at all—I’d found the short cut to success and happiness. But on my way home it began to melt, and soon I was a bit of a mess. My mother asked me what I was carrying, and I told her, It’s ambergris! It’s worth a thousand pounds an ounce, and I’m never going back to school!’”

He paused to sip his drink again. Then resumed.

“But my ambergris, as it turned out, was actually a lump of very rancid butter, which a supply ship had dumped off the coast. My mother was not amused.”

“Neither am I. What’s the point?”

“The point, Mr. Heller, is merely that sometimes ambergris turns out to be rancid butter.” He smiled again, mostly to himself; blew smoke through his nose. “Wenner-Gren is your host right now, so to speak.”

“I’ve never even met the man. Never seen him, outside of an oil painting.”

“But you’re spending time with the charming Lady Medcalf, are you not?”

“Yeah. She’s been helpful, too.”

“Has she? I wonder. What do you know about her?”

His perpetual mild amusement was starting to irritate me. I said, “She’s the widow of some pal of the Duke’s; she’s very high up in royal society or whatever the hell you call it.”

He smiled and showed his teeth now; it turned his handsome face horsey. “Diane Medcalf is the former June Diane Sims of the Blackfriars settlement in the East End of London. Strictly lowerclass.”

I blinked; swallowed thickly. “How is it possible she could wind up married to a lord?”

He shrugged one shoulder, gestured mildly with his cigarette-in-hand. “David Windsor gave up the throne for a twice-divorced American said to have done a stint in a Hong Kong brothel.” He put out the cigarette and flipped open his gold case to get another. “Hell, man—you’ve seen ‘Lady Diane’…a damn sight closer up than I have. She’s a smart woman and a beautiful one.”

“I still don’t see how…”

He lighted up his new cigarette and said, almost impatiently, “She was a lowly clerk with the Royal International Horse Show, an annual event held at the Olympia in London—home of the Windsor Cup, till the abdication. At any rate, it’s a year-round organizing job, and Miss Sims worked her way up to assistant manager—where she came in contact with the poshest toffs in town.”

“All right,” I said defensively. “So she wasn’t born with a silver spoon.”

“I just thought you should know who exactly it was you were…seeing.”

I laughed. “You don’t look like the kind of ‘bloke’ who checks a girl’s pedigree before climbing in the sack with her, yourself.”

He nodded agreement. “Women do have their uses…for release of male tension. Although Englishwomen have little appeal for me. They so seldom bathe. Or is Lady Diane an exception?”

“What exactly is your objection to Diane? Other than maybe she doesn’t take enough baths to suit you?”

He waved that off with the cigarette-in-hand, making smoke trails in the already smoky air. “Oh, I have no particular objection. But you may find it of interest that your lovely friend is…how would your Raymond Chandler put it? Wenner-Gren’s bag woman…and the Duke’s, for that matter. Making frequent trips to Mexico City, to Banco Continental, freighting currency and such. By the way, isn’t that where she is now?”

I wanted to smack the smug son of a bitch. “Even if that’s true, why the hell would it have anything to do with Sir Harry’s murder?”

“It doesn’t, necessarily. But I find it intriguing that Sir Harry himself made numerous sojourns south of the border, in the past year or so, with serious talk floating about of his relocating from the Bahamas to Mexico.”

“I still don’t see the connection.”

He waved it off, cigarette trail making a lazy S. “Perhaps there isn’t any. Nonetheless, I would very much like to catch Lady Di in some illegal act. It would be a pleasure to shut down the Duke’s activities without having to…embarrass him.”

“Or the Crown. So why the hell are you keeping an eye on
me
?”

“I’m not, really. Lady Medcalf is my interest.”

I got out of the booth. “Well, you’re right about one thing: Di’s my friend. And I have no intention of helping you catch her in
any
act.”

He shrugged with his eyes, exhaled smoke. “I don’t remember asking you to.”

Suddenly the native band’s steel drums seemed deafening.

“Then why tell me all this?”

“Strictly to keep you informed. You see, I’ve already gathered that if anyone might happen to unravel the truth of this case, Mr. Heller—it’s most likely to be you.”

I just looked at him. He smiled his faint smile and raised his glass to me.

“Do stay in touch,” he said.

When I glanced back before I went out, he was chatting smoothly with the waitress, who seemed entranced.

It was enough to make you wonder who was getting fucked tonight.

“Oyez! Oyez!” the dark-robed little man cried, shortly after capturing the packed courtroom’s attention by beating his crown-tipped staff on the hardwood floor. “God save the King!”

And the assemblage was on its feet as a short, rather stout individual in shoulder-length white wig and furtrimmed scarlet gown took the bench. Sir Oscar Bedford Daly, Chief Justice of the Bahamas, was in his mid-sixties, though he didn’t look it: streaks of black eyebrow were the sole harsh element of a face as round and smooth as a child’s.

According to Higgs, Daly was fair-minded and incisive, with a reputation for cutting through red tape and red herrings alike to find the heart of the matter. Right now this pleasant-looking jurist was casting a rather be nign smile on the crowded courtroom.

And crowded it certainly was: cane chairs, camp stools and wooden folding chairs took every spare inch of floor space at the center and side aisles and back of the room. Again, the wealthy had sent servants hours ahead of time to get in line and hold seats for them. Nonetheless, about half of the faces here were black, belonging to native spectators who had no intention of giving up their seats for anybody.

The morning was hot, if not particularly humid, and the buzzing of flies could be heard over the churning ceiling fans. As the principals settled into place, and English justice took care of its formalities, the only major difference between this and the preliminary hearing was the jury box, all male, all white, merchants mostly. The foreman was a grocer.

Otherwise, all else was much the same—from the two teeming press tables, including Western-garbed Gardner, who sat forward like a hungry bulldog, to the robed, wigged lawyers: boyishly handsome Higgs sitting quietly confident, albeit with the addition of his second-chair counsel, W. E. Callender, a handsome mulatto with an ebullient manner and theatrical flair; charcoal-complected Adderley, a hulking presence surveying the courtroom as if he owned it, sitting next to the dour Attorney General, Hallinan, with his long, expressionless face and tiny twitching mustache.

And Freddie? He was sitting in his mahogany cage, chewing idly on his ever-present wooden match, his suit lightweight and blue, his tie bright as a Bahamas sun. The only indications of the toll all this had taken were his paleness and the fact that somehow the lanky Count had managed to lose weight.

For all his cheerful manner—grinning, winking at acquaintances—he looked damn near skeletal.

Adderley opened the Crown’s case with a lengthy and, frankly, powerful address to the court. He arranged the prosecution’s sorry jigsaw puzzle of circumstance into a picture of remarkable clarity, stressing Freddie’s “desperate financial condition,” and his “burning hatred” for Sir Harry.

“The details of this murder,” he said in his commanding, more British than British tones, “surpass by far any misdeed previously recorded in the annals of the history of crime in our fair land.”

Now his voice boomed.

“Murder is murder, and a life is a life,” he said, “but this murder is, as Shakespeare says, ‘as black as hell and as dark as night’ in its foul conception…a deed which could only originate in a depraved, strange and sadistic mind…a mind indeed which is
foreign
to the usual mind, with a complete disregard for humanity in so vile a murder which besmirched the name and peace of this tranquil land.”

Nice piece of shifty work, I thought, the way he emphasized the word “foreign.”

Adderley, hands clutching the front of his black robe, moved with a kind of lumbering grace, stalking the courtroom, intimidating the jury even as he wooed them. Beneath the eloquence and the so-very-proper accent was a latent brutality that gave the melodrama of his words credibility.

“Return a verdict of guilty,” he told the mesmerized jurors, “without fear or favor, knowing that you will be doing the thing which will satisfy your God…your conscience…and the demands of British justice!”

He sat, heavily, craning his neck, jutting his chin.

This stirring if pompous preamble was followed by a dull recital of familiar testimony from the RAF photographers and draftsman, and from Marjorie Bristol, who looked charming in her floral print dress with pearls, but seemed a little nervous.

On the other hand, she did grant me the briefest smile as she walked away from the witness box and up the aisle.

Over the lunch break, I sat in the B.C. dining room with Di and Nancy de Marigny—again, barred from the courtroom until her testimony—a procedure I would repeat over the coming days, reporting what I’d seen and giving my views.

“Adderley was good?” Nancy asked.

“Better than good. Even Erle Stanley Gardner was spellbound. I think it may have thrown Godfrey, a little.”

“He may have to lean on that boy Callender,” Di said. “I hear before he went into law, he was considering a stage career in London.”

Nancy was nodding. “Ernest was actually a newscaster with the BBC for a while. He’s got a fabulous personality—never at a loss for words….”

I’d spent enough time with Ernest Callender to know Nancy was right; but neither Higgs nor Callender was a match for Adderley’s showmanship.

“Christie should be up next,” I said.

Nancy smirked. “I wonder if he’ll make a better showing, this time around.”

“I wonder, too,” Di said, arching an eyebrow. “As good as Harold is with potential land buyers, you’d think he’d be able to sell a better bill of goods from the witness box….”

But Harold Christie’s showing, second time around, was if anything worse: he looked as if he hadn’t slept for weeks, his voice quavery and weak, requiring frequent requests from the bench for him to speak up as he gripped the rail, shifting in search of balance or comfort that would never come. If his double-breasted white linen suit with pearl buttons and his dark four-in-hand tie made him seem better groomed than usual, his flop sweat and fingering of that tie betrayed him as incredibly ill at ease.

He told his by-now-familiar tale of the murder night; he denied having been invited to de Marigny’s; nothing new.

But Adderley, knowing that Captain Sears would be testifying, did his best to deny the defense one of its bombshells.

“What would you say,” the prosecutor asked his witness, “if Captain Sears said he saw you out on the night of the murder?”

Christie’s knuckles were white at the railing as he summoned righteous indignation. “I would say he was seriously mistaken, and should in future be more careful of his observations.”

Adderley’s smile was wide and dazzlingly white; he nodded sagely, turned to the jury and played to them as he spoke to the bench: “My lord, that is all!”

This tactic from Adderley may have thrown Higgs somewhat, because at first his cross-examination of this uneasy witness seemed unsure. For example, he wasted five or ten minutes exploring which end of a towel Christie had used to wipe Sir Harry’s face, until Christie finally exploded with, “For heaven’s sake, Higgs, be reasonable!”

Yet Higgs pressed on, in an apparent attempt to convince the jury that Christie’s memory was unreliable. Fishing expeditions about why Christie had parked his station wagon in the country club lot that night, as well as whether or not the decision to stay at Westbourne was a spontaneous one, brought forth nothing. Nor did Higgs’ efforts pay off to underscore the absurdity of Christie’s claim that the stench of burning wasn’t present until he stepped into the murder room itself.

It was frustrating to see a sharp lawyer like Higgs do so little with an already off-balance witness.

Finally Higgs found his own footing.

“Mr. Christie, did you leave Westbourne at any time that night?”

“I did not.”

“Do you know Captain Sears, Superintendent of Police?”

“I do.”

“You are friendly with him?”

Christie shrugged. “I’m not friendly or unfriendly. I see very little of him.”

“Isn’t it true you’ve known each other since boyhood?”

Now he swallowed. “Yes.”

“He has no ill will against you, that you know of?”

“No.”

“I put it to you that Captain Sears saw you at about midnight in a station wagon in George Street!”

Christie swabbed his endless forehead with a soggy handkerchief. “Captain Sears is mistaken. I did not leave Westbourne after retiring, and any statement to the effect that I was in town that night is a very grave mistake.”

Higgs was pacing before the jury, now. “Would you say Captain Sears is a reputable person?”

“I would say so.” He swallowed again. “Nevertheless, reputable people can make mistakes.”

Higgs allowed the jury—in fact, the entire court room—to chew on the possible meanings of Christie’s last statement before saying, “I’ve finished with this witness, my lord.”

Over the rest of that day and extending throughout the next morning, Adderley continued to lay the foundation of his case. First came medical evidence from Dr. Quackenbush, much of which was centered on an unresolved discussion of whether or not Oakes was set afire alive or dead, based upon blister evidence. A little time—just a little—was given to the unsuccessful laboratory efforts to identify the “four ounces of thick and viscid” black liquid found in Sir Harry’s stomach.

The best moment came when the Chief Justice solemnly asked Dr. Quackenbush, “How long would it take for a normal, healthy person to die?”

And Quackenbush replied, “A normal, healthy person wouldn’t die, my lord.”

The tension in the courtroom disintegrated into much-needed laughter, over the cries of “Order! Order!” I found it a relief that the bland Quackenbush was finally living up to the Groucho Marx persona his name promised.

The afternoon of the second day found the pretty blond Dorothy Clark repeating the story of Freddie taking her, and the other RAF wife, Jean Ainslie, home in the rain; this innocent tale gave the Crown the element of opportunity it needed.

This testimony was hardly a surprise—and, had they called me, the prosecution could have got one Nathan Heller to back that up as well—but Higgs on cross took the opportunity to punch a major hole in the other side’s boat.

After establishing that Mrs. Clark had seen de Marigny burn himself lighting candles, helping explain the notorious singed hairs Barker and Melchen claimed to have found, Higgs asked, “Did you see the accused, Alfred de Marigny, taken upstairs at Westbourne for questioning the morning of July nine?”

“Yes I did.”

“I put it to you—was it between eleven a.m. and twelve noon?”

“Yes, I’m certain it was.”

The murmur that swept the courtroom was an indication of how damaging this testimony was. One of the prosecution’s own witnesses had now established that Freddie could have left his fingerprint on that Chinese screen by touching it on the 9th of July. At the same time, this witness called into doubt the reliability of sworn police testimony.

This moment of victory was followed by hours of attack, as a succession of prosecution witnesses painted a grimly unflattering portrait of Freddie.

Dr. William Sayad of Palm Beach told of the quarrel between Sir Harry and Freddie, in which Freddie had threatened to “bash Sir Harry’s head.” The smooth Southerner who had gotten me into this—Walter Foskett, the Oakes family attorney—detailed various family squabbles, making Freddie look as bad as possible.

Appearing as the absent Colonel Lindop’s surrogate, Major Pemberton—a proper, mustached figure with an air of authority—presented the police version of the investigation leading to de Marigny’s arrest—backing up the unavailable Lindop’s own deposition, which incidentally mentioned nothing about what time Freddie may or may not have been taken upstairs for questioning by Melchen on the 9th.

Lieutenant Johnny Douglas—a jaunty Scotsman with a hawklike profile, impeccable in his khaki uniform—had been assigned to stay with de Marigny, keeping him under informal guard, prior to the Count’s arrest. As he and Freddie were friends, the accused had apparently let his guard down, asking Douglas if a man could be convicted in a British court solely on circumstantial evidence, particularly if the murder weapon was not found.

In his rolling burr, Douglas also claimed Freddie had said of Oakes, “That old bastard should have been killed anyhow.”

Higgs handed the cross to his young second chair, Callender, oval-faced, handsome, slightly overweight but light on his feet as he asked Douglas, “You do understand the accused is a Frenchman, and that the French have different laws than the British?”

“I understand so.”

The Chief Justice sat forward and posed his own question. “Were you aware the accused came from Mauritius?”

“Yes, my lord.”

Callender smiled tightly. “And didn’t the accused ask whether the murder weapon had been found?”

“I believe he did.”

“Now, under the circumstances, wasn’t it a perfectly normal question for him to ask? If a man could be convicted without the weapon?”

“Not an unusual question, no, sir.”

“And did you not say to the accused, ‘They are making a fuss about Sir Harry because he has dough. If it had been some poor colored bastard in Grant’s Town, I would not have to work so hard’?”

“I don’t recall saying any such thing.”

“Don’t you frequently use the expression ‘bastard’?”

“I seldom ever use that word.”

Callender’s smile was gone; he thrust a finger at the dapper little Scotsman. “I put it to you, Lieutenant Douglas, that ‘bastard’ is a favorite term of yours!”

“I deny it.”

“And I further put it to you that
you
were the one who said, ‘That old bastard should have been killed anyway.’”

“I deny it. Those are the accused’s words.”

“That is all, my lord,” Callender said.

An effective piece of cross-examination—but Douglas was a solid witness. Freddie looked glum in his cage, his cockiness knocked out of him.

The following day began melodramatically, even for the Oakes case: Lady Oakes, allowed to sit in the witness box, in black silk dress with black veiled hat and black gloves, spoke softly, convincingly, of the strain placed upon their family by her daughter’s marriage to Count de Marigny.