Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 07 (22 page)

He was pushing the plunger in and I held a burning match to the mist of alcohol and it caught, burning a dull blue.

“Watch this,” he said, grinning like a kid.

The harder he pumped the thing, the bigger, the longer, the blue flame; it was like a homemade acetylene torch!

“You can direct this anywhere you like,” he said, “as long as you keeping pumping.”

When he finally stopped pumping, tiny puddles of the still-burning alcohol fell from the nose of the thing and landed on the table and made circular scorches, the flames burning briefly, then winking out.

“I’ll be damned,” I said.

“There’s your blowtorch,” Keeler said, placing the spray gun on the table.

I took a look at it. The tip was a little blackened; I took out a handkerchief and wiped it off, clean. You’d never know it had been spitting fire moments before.

“Just screw the alcohol jar off,” Keeler said, “and screw the bug spray can back on, and you have a seemingly unused flit gun.”

I hefted the spray gun. “Weren’t you lucky that the threads of both were the same?”

“Maybe. But if they don’t fit, you can just hold on to the glass jar with one hand and work the plunger with the other. It’s a little awkward, but a child could do it.”

Gardner was watching with amazement.

“Erle,” I said, “not a word of this in your column, now….”

He nodded. Then he lifted a cautionary finger and said, “Keep this one in your pocket, too.”

Keeler looked at me and nodded. We’d tell Higgs, but Gardner was right: the more the prosecution got wrong about the details of the murder, the easier Higgs could land an appeal, if he ended up needing one. On the other hand, straightening out those details in this trial wouldn’t help de Marigny at all….

“I have to go, gentlemen,” I said. “Len, when Di and Nancy get back from Paradise Beach, tell them I should be back around seven-thirty. Erle, you want to take the launch over with me?”

“I wouldn’t mind staying and chatting with Professor Keeler awhile, Heller. You mind?”

“Not at all.”

Gardner turned to Keeler. “Is that okay with you, Professor?”

“As long as I get to ask some of the questions,” he said. “You see, I’m a big Perry Mason fan. Nate, where are you off to, anyway?”

I was already leaving. Over my shoulder, I said, “I need to drop by Colonel Lindop’s office before his shift ends at six. Even with the doubt you can cast on their fingerprint evidence, Len, I think we need Lindop’s statement about seeing Freddie questioned in the morning, not the afternoon….”

Within the hour I was on the second floor of the police station, where at the door of Lindop’s office, I found a native painter in cap and coveralls applying the finishing touches to the name major herbert pemberton on the pebbled glass.

“Excuse me,” I said, “isn’t this Colonel Lindop’s office?”

“Not anymore, mon,” he said. “He been transfer.”

“What?”

The guy shrugged, and went back to finishing the final N.

I stopped by Captain Sears’ office, but he wasn’t in, either. I asked the captain’s male secretary about Lindop, and his answer was chilling.

“Colonel Lindop has been transferred to Trinidad,” the man said, a skinny white guy with a skinny black mustache and insolent eyes.

“Trinidad? When?”

“As of the first of this week.”

“Well…what in hell for?”

“For now and forever,” he said with quiet sarcasm, “as far as I know.”

Minutes later I was at the top of George Street, bolting up the long stone stairs, above which Government House sat like a big stale pink-and-white wedding cake; halfway up the stairs was a landing where the statue of Christopher Columbus, one hand on his sword, one hand on his hip, kept swishy watch. At the top of the stairs, across a cement drive, a black sentinel in white standing before the front door’s archway asked me my business. I said I had an appointment with the Colonial Secretary, and was allowed to pass.

When I opened the door with its elaborate E and royal crest inset in the heavy glass, I practically fell over a pile of suitcases, bags and trunks.

I heard footsteps echoing in the high-ceilinged foyer with its marbled wallpaper and pastel drapes (the Duchess’ touch, no doubt), and the man I’d lied about having an appointment with—Colonial Secretary Leslie Heape—was striding over to me, dragging one leg as he did. A First World War injury, I’d been told.

“How did you get past the sentry, Heller?” Heape demanded loudly, frowning.

“He asked me who Babe Ruth is,” I said, “and I knew.”

This humor was lost on Heape, a colorless career soldier in his mid-forties whose white uniform was far sharper than its wearer.

“If you still have the deluded notion that you’ll be granted an interview with His Royal Highness,” Heape said, “you’re wasting my time, and yours.”

“I’ll talk to you, then. What the hell happened to Colonel Lindop?”

“Nothing happened to Colonel Lindop. He’s had a request in for a transfer for some time; the Governor put it through.”

“But he’ll be back for the de Marigny trial, surely.”

“I sincerely doubt it—what with wartime transport difficulties, and the extent of Erskine Lindop’s new duties as Commissioner of Police in Trinidad.”

I sneered. “That’s convenient—right before the trial opens, a key defense witness is suddenly transferred off the island onto the moon.”

Heape’s jaw was as stiff as his leg. “Colonel Lindop was a
prosecution
witness, and my understanding is that he’s given a signed deposition detailing his knowledge of the case. His replacement, Major Pemberton, will be available for testimony.”

I didn’t know Pemberton, whose name I’d just seen wetly on Lindop’s door; if he’d been in on the investigation, it could only have been on the fringes.

“Who’s leaving?” I asked, jerking a thumb toward the pile of luggage.

He smiled faintly. “Other than yourself? His Royal Highness and Her Grace.”

“What? Don’t tell me
they’ve
been transferred to Trinidad!”

“It’s their American tour.”

Then I remembered the Duchess making a seemingly offhand comment at the dance at Shangri La:
New York will be a relief…
.

Feeling a little dazed, I said, “So, then, His Royal Highness won’t be around for the de Marigny dog-and-pony show?”

“No,” Heape said. “Why should he be?”

And he escorted me to the door.

Under a nighttime sky that seemed a deeper blue than usual, with few stars and no moon, on an otherwise lonely stretch of beach, around a sparking, crackling bonfire glowing orange and yellow and red, swayed forty or fifty natives, arms and legs pumping as they danced around the blazing driftwood, to the beat of crude congalike drums and plaintive tuneless tunes blown on twisted conch-shell horns. Though the women wore white sarongs and white bandannas, and the men wore colorless tattered shirts and trousers, the reflected shades of flame mingling with the shadows of night made of them a living, colorful design.

From a respectful distance on the sidelines, where the coconut palms began, Lady Diane Medcalf and I watched. Like the native women, she wore white—a man’s shirt and ladies’ trousers; I was in white too, a linen suit under which the bulge of my nine-millimeter Browning was both uncomfortable and obvious.

This excursion to one of the out islands, Eleuthera—where at night, white men were seldom seen outside the large settlements—represented the first time I’d dug my automatic and shoulder harness out of my suitcase on either of my Bahamas trips. Maybe it meant I was a coward, or a bigot, or maybe a bigoted coward.

But whatever I was, I preferred to be a live one.

After all, some of the black men dancing around that bonfire were cutting the air with machetes about four feet long. They would dance close to the fire and seize driftwood branches from its edge and then hold them in closer, getting them burning good, after which, bearing them as torches, trouser legs rolled up, the men waded into the shallow water.

And then their machetes began to slice the air, and more significantly, slice the sea. It was as if the machete-wielding men were attacking the water itself.

“What the hell are they up to?” I asked, working my voice up and over the pounding native drums. “What the hell sort of voodoo ritual
is
this?”

Di’s brittle British laughter found its way over the “music.” “It’s not voodoo, Heller—not exactly. This is a fish chop.”

“Fish chop?”

“Those men aren’t trying to cut the water, they’re fishing.”

And I’ll be damned if they weren’t: now the men were reaching in the water and coming back with silvery objects that were then tossed up on the sand. Fish, attracted by the driftwood flares held over the water’s surface, were swimming up to the men and getting a slash from a machete for their trouble.

“Later the whole gang’ll eat their catch,” Di said.

But right now men and women alike were gyrating, twirling, leaping, in an abandoned frenzy, even as the slain silvery fish were tossed onto the beach by the flailing fishermen.

An old woman was wailing,
“Come down, Mary! Come down!”

“They sure know how to have a good time,” I said.

“I wish the guests at my affairs would loosen up like that,” she said.

“I bet you do.”

We had come here by motor yacht, a gleaming white vessel called the
Lady Diane,
a gift to her from the absent but ubiquitous Wenner-Gren. While no
Southern Cross,
it had a large white cabin with a bar and modern white-leather furnishings. The three-hour journey from Hog Island had been painless—cocktails and conversation and cuddling—and her colored “boy” Daniel had tied us up at a ramshackle little dock by a native village near this beach.

We were supposed to meet someone named Edmund, but he—and everyone else, apparently—had gone to the fish chop. We had followed the drums here….

What brought us to this island was a story Di had told me several days ago, in my bed in the guest cottage at Shangri La.

“Have you given any thought,” she asked casually, sitting up nude to the waist with a silk sheet covering her lap and a gin and tonic in hand, “to the motive for Harry’s murder being those fucking gold coins of his?”

Now I sat up; I was also nude to the waist, but that was considerably lesser a deal. “What fucking gold coins?”

She had made an astounded, but cute, face. “Surely you know about those! I can understand the police discarding that possibility, considering they were busy fitting Freddie a frame, but you…”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“His gold coin collection! Everybody on the island, black or white, knows that Sir Harry Oakes was hoarding a fortune in gold coins somewhere.”

“Not everybody. I never heard a word about it. How about Nancy? Has she ever seen any of this coin collection?”

She shook her head, blond hair shimmering. “No, but she’s never had any interest in anything related to her father’s wealth. Remember, a girl like Nancy grows up in the schools she’s been sent away to—for most of her life, she only spent summers with her family.”

I gave her a doubting sneer. “A hoard of gold coins—that sounds like the sort of fairy tale poor people dream up about rich people.”

“I think this may be more than a fairy tale.”

Patiently, she explained. She was completely oblivious to the nudity of her large, round, tiny-nippled breasts, jiggling gently as she spoke. I wasn’t.

It seemed the hoard—sovereigns, napoleons and other gold coins—was believed to be kept at Westbourne; Di herself had heard Sir Harry speak of his disdain of paper money, which could lose value overnight. At the beginning of the war, British citizens were ordered to turn in any gold, whether coins or bullion, a request Oakes largely ignored.

“Daniel carried some interesting rumors to me,” she said, referring to the young man who piloted the launch that carried me, and other guests at Shangri La, back and forth from Hog Island to Nassau.

“Such as?”

“Some gold coins are turning up on the out islands. Eleuthera—Abaco.”

“Isn’t there…pirate treasure around here? I mean, wouldn’t doubloons and such just naturally turn up from time to time?”

“Yes…but these are said to be newer coins than that.”

“Would Daniel talk to me about this?”

“Perhaps. But he doesn’t trust outsiders. He trusts me, though. Why?”

“I’d like to get ahold of one of those coins. Talk to somebody who has one.”

“I don’t know, Nate…that could be a little dicey.”

“See what you can do, Di. But you said ‘rumors’—plural.”

She sighed, folded her arms, covering her breasts, somewhat; there was a lot to cover. “I kind of hate to get into this…it seems disrespectful of Nancy’s late father….”

“Force yourself.”

She rolled her eyes; smirked. “Okay. Old Harry had something of a…reputation.”

“A reputation.”

“Yes. I never witnessed it myself—he was never anything but a gentleman around me…but there are those who swear Sir Harry was a horny old goat.”

“What?”

She nodded, smirking again. “There may a large group of suspects you haven’t even touched upon yet: cuckolds.”

The notion of an army of betrayed husbands converging in Sir Harry’s bedchamber with torches seemed more than a little absurd.

“Your two rumors,” I said, smirking back at her, “seem somewhat at odds, don’t they? Is it voodoo, or some cheating wife’s hubby?”

“Maybe both.”

“Oh, come on, Di…”

She gave me a hard, no-kidding look. “There were rumors that when Eunice was out of town, Harry would go down to the straw market and find some native wench who’d like to make a year’s wages in an evening. In which case, the voodoo-like killing begins to make sense.”

“You mean, sprinkling feathers on the burning body was ritualistic repayment by some native for Sir Harry’s committing adultery with his woman?”

“That is one rumor going around Nassau, yes. If indeed that’s true, then that native—poor, deluded, crazed, vengeance-seeking soul or not—might have remembered the stories about gold coins, searched the house, found them, and made off with them.”

“There were no signs of ransacking….”

Her wicked little smile settled on one side of her face. “Does that preclude burglary, Detective Heller? And who was there to stop such a leisurely search? If you’re correct about Harold Christie, he was sleeping…or something…with Effie Henneage at the time.”

There could have been something to what Di was saying.

So I did some follow-up of my own. A conversation with Daniel—a shy kid barely twenty—confirmed everything she’d told me, but in a halting, mumbling manner that brought nothing new to the table.

De Marigny, in his cell, paced nervously, smoking a Gauloise, deriding the notion that Sir Harry was a ladies’ man.

“The idea of that old prude chasing women is almost blasphemous,” Freddie said. “In matters of sex, the old boy was positively puritanical. That’s the very thing we were always scrapping about! My loose morals, and the notion that I might be ‘raping’ his daughter, who happened to be my wife.”

“A lot of people talk puritan,” I said, “and behave heathen.”

“True,” Freddie admitted. “But Sir Harry? Positively unthinkable.”

On the other hand, de Marigny had indeed heard about the gold coin collection, though he’d never seen it.

“Neither has Nancy,” he said. “It never occurred to me that this might have been the motive. Hell—I should have said something before….”

“Well, there were no signs of robbery. It was a natural omission.”

I could only think of one person who could help me confirm or rebut these rumors. But I didn’t dare call in advance. I took a chance….

The beach didn’t have the ivory cast I remembered; it was more a washed-out gray under a sickle moon. I knocked at the cottage door and she seemed stunned to see me. The lustily lashed dark eyes were a little hurt.

“Nathan…I asked you not to come here.”

My straw fedora was in hand. “I know, Marjorie. I apologize. But you’re the only person I can think of who can help me….”

She began to close the door. “I told you before, I can’t be helpin’ you.”

Like the Fuller Brush man, I put my foot in the door. “Please. I’ll only stay a little while.”

“If Lady Eunice sees you…”

“She and her daughter are having dinner this evening, at the British Colonial. A sort of meeting of truce.”

She looked doubtful. “How do you know?”

I risked a smile. “I arranged it.”

Her smile seemed both wary and weary. She shook her head. “All right, Nathan. Come in. But don’t sit down.”

I stood in the neat-as-a-pin cottage, taking in the familiar sight of fresh flowers in a bowl at the round table, where a paper-covered book was open, facedown:
Lost Horizon.

“I
need to ask you a couple of things.”

She stood with arms folded, chin up, slightly; she wore the blue maid’s uniform. “All right.”

“Do you know anything about Sir Harry having a gold coin collection?”

She blinked, cocked her head. “Sir Harry had some gold coins, yes.”

“A lot of them?”

“Well…he had a little strongbox.”

“Like a pirate’s chest?”

She nodded. “But smaller.”

“Did he keep it locked away? In a…wall safe or something?”

She shook her head no. “He had a padlock on the chest, but Sir Harry, he kept it right out in the open; it was in his study, sittin’ on a bookshelf.”

“How do you know there were gold coins in that chest?”

She shrugged, almost casually. “I saw him once, counting them in his study.”

“Counting them?”

“Yes…he’d been drinkin’. Drinkin’ too much. Gold coins, they was scattered all over his desk. He was makin’ little stacks of them. Little strongbox open at his feet.”

“That’s the only time you ever saw any coins.”

“Yes.”

It was possible other servants had, from time to time, seen that chest of gold, open; or that Harry, in his cups, had opened it to show, to friends. So word about his cache of coins could easily have spread….

“Has Lady Oakes said anything about the chest being missing?”

“No. Come to think, I…I don’t remember seein’ it on the bookshelf, though.”

“I don’t suppose you could ask her….”

“No.”

Well—I could have Nancy check on that.

“Marjorie—do you think that Sir Harry could have been the victim of voodoo? Or…what is the other term?”

“Obeah,” she said.

“Right. Or a victim of that.”

She motioned me to the table, where I sat. She went to the stove and got me a cup of tea.

“Obeah is not voodoo,” she said. “It’s the practice of Bahamian magic.”

“That sounds like voodoo to me.”

She put the cup before me, then got herself one. “Obeah is part African, part Christian—a mixture.”

“That also sounds like voodoo.”

“But it’s not a religion, Nathan.” She sat across from me. “It’s a way to cure sickness, or for a farmer to protect his crop from theft or the bad weather, a way to get success in business, or love…”

“I could use some of this stuff.”

She smiled faintly and looked into her own cup of tea. “It’s
not
a religion…obeah is somethin’ one person, a shaman, sells to another.”

“Like somebody who wants somebody else dead, you mean?”

She frowned thoughtfully. “I don’t think so. Obeah doesn’t kill by hittin’ a man in the head and settin’ him on fire. Obeah kills from a distance.”

“Like with a spell, or potion, you mean.”

She nodded gravely. “And what motive would any black man have for killin’ Sir Harry? Sir Harry, he was good to us. And only a black man would think to use obeah.”

“What if Sir Harry had been fooling around with a black man’s woman?”

“Foolin’ around?”

“Sexually, I mean.”

She looked puzzled. “Sir Harry? He loved my Lady Eunice.”

“He never had other women at Westbourne? When your Lady was away, perhaps?”

“Never!”

I sipped my tea. “This is good. How’d you sweeten it?”

“Honey.”

I smiled. “I wish you were calling me that.”

That embarrassed her. “You should go now.”

“All right.” I stood. “Thank you, Marjorie. I won’t bother you again—you have my word.”

She nodded her thanks. “Has Curtis Thompson had any luck findin’ Samuel or that other boy?”

“No. You were right, Marjorie. They’re long gone.”