Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 07 (6 page)

“Inside, everyone!” de Marigny called, as his black servants quickly removed the table settings.

The guests, pelted with raindrops, were scattering, fleeing for shelter.

In my spot in the bushes, I was drenched already.

“Merde,”
I said to myself, and headed back to the Buick.

And there I sat for a very long time. Machine-gun rain battering the car, drumming on the roof, palm trees swaying, fronds rustling, scratching like sandpaper rubbing together, wind whistling disgustedly through its teeth, carrying sickly sweet floral scents. With my windows up, I was hot in the car, windows fogging up. Heat and rain. Yet I was chilled….

When the rains came, we covered the shell hole with camouflage tenting; when the tenting had collected water, we drank from its edge, guzzling it greedily, draining some of it into our empty canteens. The rain seemed to rouse even the wounded among us, and we huddled together, wondering when the Japs would come again, with their machine guns, bayonets, mortar shells….

A
crack of thunder snapped me awake, though I at first thought a mortar shell
had
hit. I was in a cold sweat, only there was nothing cold about it. I craved a cigarette.

Not a good sign: the only time in my life I ever smoked was those months I was in the Corps, on the Island—Guadalcanal. The nicotine craving came only rarely, since I got back—like the malaria flare-ups, one of which seemed to have hold of me now.

I cracked the window to unfog the windshield. The rain hammered down. I checked my wristwatch: almost midnight. How long had I slept? Had I missed anything? Maybe I ought to take my camera and go wading across the streaming street and crawl through the soaked shrubbery and see if some sort of Caribbean white-folks-only orgy was in progress.

But about that time the party began to break up; couples found their way to their cars—with the exception of the puffy Clark Gable and his underage Betty Grable. Oh, the happy couple exited, all right, snuggled under an umbrella; but they quickly took the side staircase up to what was apparently an apartment over the garage.

Lightning flared as the American Freddie left in the company of one of the male guests, an older, distinguished-looking man. That meant the Count was alone with the two RAF wives.

Maybe de Marigny was going to live up to his reputation.

Maybe I ought to reach for my camera….

But then de Marigny, his jacket collar up, made a run for his Lincoln on the lawn. He got it running, backed it closer to the steps which led from the side of the porch. Then one of the servants—Curtis, I think—escorted the blond RAF wife, under an umbrella, to the waiting car.

I smiled. Looked like I was in business.

Except that then Curtis went back and returned with the
brunette
under his umbrella, as well. She joined de Marigny and their blond mutual friend in the front seat.

Cozy. I thought of some of the other French words I knew:
ménage à trois.

I trailed the Lincoln down to Bay Street, the Buick’s windshield wipers working furiously. His car swayed in the wind; so did mine. Neither vehicle was exactly a featherweight, either. The rain was unremitting. The street was half flooded, completely flooded around blocked drains; the shops were shuttered and shining with rain, turned silver-blue now and then by lightning. A pharmacy’s neon stood out in the night like a modern apparition.

We went past my hotel—alive with occasional lights, a bed waiting there for me—and headed west. This was the way Samuel had taken Miss Bristol and me, earlier today, a century ago. A little ways beyond Westbourne, which was barely visible as I went by, lights ablaze on the upper floor, the Lincoln pulled in past a post with a hanging wooden sign that said hubbard’s cottages.

It seemed to be a small development of rental properties. I went on by, but I could glimpse the Lincoln, stopped, and the two young women making a mad dash for the front door of a cottage. De Marigny was sitting with the motor running….

When I had found a place to turn around and coasted by the cottage again, the Lincoln was gone.

I could only sigh. Tonight would definitely not be the night to get the goods on the Count. De Marigny, like a proper host, had merely driven his two female guests home. There were red taillights way up ahead of me—probably his—but I didn’t bother trying to catch up.

It was after one a.m. and this long, long day—and night—was over; even at a thousand bucks, I’d earned my pay.

Thunder shook the sky like barrages of artillery and made my night a fitful hell of delirious combat dreams. I awoke half a dozen times, prowling the hotel room, looking out at the roiling sea and the turbulent sky, wishing I had a smoke. Below, palms bent impossibly, black silhouettes that became blue in the lightning. The goddamn storm kept turning itself up and down, like some ungodly radio tuned to station HADES, a squall followed by gentler wind and pattering rain and then
another
squall, with pealing thunder….

I was finally dreaming about something else, something peaceful, something sweet, swaying in a hammock while a native girl wearing nothing but a grass skirt held a coconut out for me to drink from. She looked like Marjorie Bristol, but darker, and when I’d finished sipping the coconut milk, she soothed my brow with a hand soft as a pillow and,
boom boom boom boom,
an artillery barrage rocked me awake.

Sitting up in bed, breathing hard, sweat-soaked, I heard the sound again and realized it was just somebody at the door. Somebody insistent and knocking in an obnoxious manner, yes: but not artillery fire.

I threw off the sheet and went to answer it, pulling my pants on over the underwear I’d slept in. If this was the maid wanting to make up my room, I was prepared to be indignant—at least, until I glanced at my watch and realized how late I’d slept in: it was after ten o’clock.

Cracking the door, I said, “Yes, what is it?” before seeing who was out there.

It was a black face in a white helmet with a gold spike.

“Nathan Heller?” a Caribbean voice asked.

I opened the door wider. There were two of them, two black Nassau cops in their sun helmets, white jackets, red-striped trousers and polished boots. They might have stepped out of a light operetta.

“I’m Heller,” I said. “You fellas want to step in? I just woke up.”

They marched in, shoulders straight. Why did
I
feel silly?

“You’re to accompany us to Westbourne, sir,” one of them said, standing at attention.

“Westbourne? Why?”

“There has been a difficulty involving your employer.”

“My employer?”

“Sir Harry Oakes.”

“What sort of difficulty?”

“That’s all we’re at liberty to say, sir. Will you come?” The lilting Bahamian accent, added to the formality of what he was saying, gave the officer’s words a stilted poetry.

“Well, sure. Give me five minutes to brush my teeth and get dressed?”

The spokesman nodded.

“I can meet you in the lobby,” I suggested.

“We’ll wait outside the door, sir.”

“Up to you.” I shrugged, but it was obvious something serious was afoot.

My police escorts rode in front and I had the backseat to myself as we traveled a West Bay Street slick with rain, sandy with mud. Gutters were clogged with palm leaves. The sky was overcast, making midmorning more like dusk, and the winds were humid and high, blowing an occasional branch across the police car’s path.

I leaned forward. “Come on, fellas—what’s this all about?”

They didn’t seem to hear me.

I repeated my question and the one who hadn’t spoken yet still didn’t, just glanced at me and shook his head no. They might be native Bahamians, but these two had as much stiff-upper-lip reserve as any British bobbie.

The Westbourne gate was closed, but a white-helmeted black copper was there to open it for us. The crescent-shaped driveway was choked with cars, most of them black with police in gold letters on the doors—like the one I was in.

“Come with us, Mr. Heller,” the spokesman said, opening the car door for me politely, and I followed him up the steps onto the porch and inside, where I was greeted by an acrid, scorched smell that seemed to permeate the place. Had there been a fire?

Glancing about, I noticed the carpeting and wood on the stairway to the second floor were scorched; the banisters, too. But intermittently, as if a flaming man had casually walked up or down these stairs, marking his path….

“Mr. Heller?” This was a crisp, male, no-nonsense voice I’d not heard before. British.

I turned away from studying the stairs to see a military-looking figure approach, white, dimple-jawed, jug-eared, fiftyish, wearing a khaki uniform cut by the black leather strap of a gun belt, and a pith helmet with a royal insignia where a badge should be.

He looked like a very efficient, and expensive, safari guide.

“I’m Colonel Erskine Lindop, Superintendent of Police,” he said, extending a hand which I took, and shook.

“What crime has been committed here, that would bring brass like you around, Colonel?”

His hound-dog face twitched a smile, and he responded with a question. “I understand you’re a private investigator—from Chicago?”

“That’s right.”

He cocked his head back so he could look down at me, even though I had a couple inches on him. “Might I ask you to detail your business meeting with Sir Harry Oakes yesterday afternoon?”

“Not without my client’s permission.”

Lifting his eyebrows in a facial shrug, Lindop strode toward the stairs, saying, “Best come with me, then, Mr. Heller.”

He paused to curl a finger as if summoning a child.

And I followed him, like a good little boy.

“How did these stairs get scorched?” I asked.

“That’s one of the things I’m here to try to determine.”

There was mud and some sand on the steps, as well. I said, “If this is a crime scene, we’re walking right over somebody’s footprints, you know.”

He just kept climbing; our footsteps were echoing. “Unfortunately, these stairs were already well traversed by the time I got here.” He smiled back at me politely. “But your conscientiousness is appreciated.”

Was that sarcasm? With British “blokes,” I can never tell.

At the top of the stairs, there was a closed door to the right, a window straight ahead, and a short hallway to the left. The lower walls were scorched here and there. Smoke tainted the air, even more pungent than below. Lindop glanced back, nodding at me to follow him into a room down the hall. Right before you entered, fairly low on the white-painted plaster walls, were more sooty smudges. The inside of the open door had its lower white surface burn-blotched as well, and the carpet just inside the door was baked black, a welcome mat to hell.

Once inside, a six-foot, six-paneled cream-color dressing screen with an elaborate, hand-painted oriental design blocked us from seeing the rest of the large room. The Chinese screen had a large scorched area on the lower right, like a dragon’s shadow; a wardrobe next to the screen, at left, was similarly scorched. So was the plush carpeting, but oddly—circular blobs of black, some large, some small, as if black paint had been slopped there.

In here, the smell of smoke was stronger; but another odor overpowered it: the sickly-sweet smell of cooked human flesh.

It made me double over, and I fell into the soft armchair where wind was rustling lacy curtains nearby; a writing table next to me had a phone and a phone book on it—both had reddish smears.

I leaned toward the open window and gulped fresh air; muggy though it was, it helped.

“Are you all right, Mr. Heller?”

Lindop looked genuinely concerned.

I stood. Thank God I hadn’t eaten any breakfast.

“Sorry,” I said. “It’s just that I know what that smell is. I recognize it from overseas.”

Charred grinning Jap corpses by a wrecked tank on the Matanikau, a foul sweet wind blowing through the kunai grass.
…

“Where did you serve?”

I told him.

“I see,” he said.

“Colonel, I’m an ex-Chicago cop—I’m not squeamish about much of anything. But…being back in the tropics is proving a real stroll down memory lane.”

He nodded toward the doorway. “We can leave.”

“No.” I swallowed thickly. “Show me what’s beyond the Chinese screen….”

Colonel Lindop nodded curtly and stepped around it, following the scorched path, leading me to my final audience with Sir Harry Oakes, who was not at all his usual lively self this morning.

He was on the twin bed nearer the dressing screen, which apparently had been positioned to protect the sleeper from the open window’s Bahamas breeze, though it had not protected him otherwise.

His squat, heavyset body lay face up, one arm dangling over the bedside, his skin blackened from flame, interrupted by occasional raw red wounds, head and neck caked with dried blood. He was naked, but shreds of blue-striped pajamas indicated his nightwear had been burned off him. His eyes and groin seemed to have taken extra heat; those areas were blistered and charred.

Over the bed was an umbrellalike wooden framework that had held mosquito netting, most of which was burned away. Strangely, this side of the nearby dressing screen was unblemished by smoke or fire. The most bizarre touch in this ghastly tableau was the feathers from a pillow which had been scattered over the blackened corpse, where they clung to the burned blistery flesh.

“Jesus,” I said. It was almost a prayer.

“His friend Harold Christie found him, this morning,” Lindop said. “About seven.”

“Poor old bastard.” I shook my head and said it again. I tried to breathe only through my mouth, so the smell wouldn’t get to me.

Then I said, “Cantankerous old rich guy like him couldn’t have been short on enemies.”

“Apparently not.”

It was one messy murder scene. Red palm prints, like a child’s finger-painting, stood out on the wall by the window across from the other, unslept-in twin bed; somebody with wet hands had looked out. I didn’t imagine they’d been wet with catsup. More red prints were visible on the wall kitty-corner from the bed.

All of these prints looked damp—the humidity had kept them from drying.

Blood glistened on both knobs of the open, connecting door between this and another, smaller bedroom, opposite the unoccupied bed. I peeked in—that bedroom, which looked unused, was about sixteen feet across. Sir Harry’s was twice that, and the other way ran the full width of the house, looking out on porches on both the south and north sides.

“Well,” I said, “there’s not exactly a shortage of clues. The trail of fire…bloody fingerprints…”

He pointed. “That fan by the foot of his bed seems to be what blew the feathers all over him.”

“What do you
make
of the feathers, Colonel? Some sort of voodoo ritual?”

“Obeah,” the Colonel said.

“Pardon?”

“That’s what the practice of native magic is called here: obeah.”

“And the feathers could mean that—or anyway, somebody wanted it to
seem
to mean that…”

“Indeed.” Lindop’s features tightened in thought; hands locked behind him. “After all, Sir Harry was quite popular with the native population, here.”

There was a spray gun on the floor near the door to the adjacent bedroom. “Bug spray?”

Lindop nodded. “Insecticide. Highly flammable….”

“Was he doused with that?” I laughed glumly. “Quick, Sir Harry, the Flit.”

I was looking out the ajar door to the northside porch—which gave access to an outside stairwell—when Lindop commented, “That door was unlocked.”

“So was the front door yesterday, when I showed up. Security here was pretty damn loose. Have you talked to the night watchmen?”

“I wasn’t aware there were any.”

“There are two. One’s named Samuel. Sir Harry’s household head, Marjorie Bristol, can fill you in.”

He nodded again, eyes on the corpse. “She’s downstairs. Taking it hard, I’m afraid. Haven’t been able to properly question her.”

I went over to have a better look at Sir Harry. I was well past the nausea; cop instincts had long since kicked in. I leaned close. Something behind Sir Harry’s left ear explained a lot.

“I didn’t figure he was burned to death,” I said. “Not with all this blood around.

Lindop said nothing.

Four small wounds, fingertip-size, roundish but slightly triangular, were punched in the man’s head, closely grouped; if you were to connect the dots, you’d have a square.

“Bullet wounds?” I asked. I wasn’t sure: there were no powder burns.

“That’s the doctor’s initial opinion. And Christie called it in that way, too. I would tend to agree.”

“The body was moved,” I said. “At the very least, turned over.” I indicated lines of dried blood running from the ear wounds across the bridge of Sir Harry’s nose. “Gravity only works one way, you know.”

Lindop grunted noncommittally.

A nightstand between the beds had a lamp whose celluloid shade was unblistered by heat, thermos jug, drinking glass, set of false teeth and a pair of reading glasses—undisturbed, as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred in this bedchamber the night before.

“It’s wet under his hips,” I said, pointing. “Bladder released on death, probably. Has your photographer been here yet? There’s a newspaper Sir Harry’s lying on you might want to note.”

“We have no departmental photographer. I sent for two RAF photographers, who are developing their photos now, and a draftsman, who drew a floor plan.”

“Jolly good.” I moved away from the bed, gestured around us. “But you’d better seal off this crime scene before you compromise all this evidence.”

Lindop moved his mouth as if tasting something—something unpleasant. “Mr. Heller—much as I might appreciate your insights…I did not ask you to Westbourne as a police consultant.”

“What, then? A suspect? I hardly knew the guy!”

He cocked his head back again. “You were one of the last persons to see Sir Harry alive. I wish to know the nature of your business with him.”

I glanced over at my employer; he was staring at the ceiling with his eyes burned out. He seemed to have no objection.

“His business with me was to have me shadow his son-in-law, which I did yesterday afternoon and evening.”

That perked up the Colonel; he took a step forward. “For what reason?”

I shrugged. “Suspected marital infidelity on the part of the Count. Sir Harry wasn’t fond of him, you know.”

“Damnit, man—give me the details!”