I stepped forward, and she moved back.
“Don’t be silly, Marjorie. We mean something to each other….”
She laughed bitterly. “You can’t be serious. I’m just a summer romance to you, Nathan Heller. Just a… shipboard romance, without the ship.”
“Don’t say that-”
Her jaw went firm and yet trembled. “Can you ask me back to Chicago, to live with you? Can I ask you to stay here with me in Nassau? Would your family, would your friends, accept a girl like me? Would my family, my friends, want a white boy like you around?”
I shook my head; I felt thunderstruck. “I admit I haven’t thought any of that through…but Marjorie, what we have is special, very special…on the beach…”
“The beach was very nice.” A tear rolled down her cream-in-the-coffee-brown cheek. “I won’t say it wasn’t. I won’t make a lie of the sweet truth of that. But Nathan…I got a brother! I got a brother who wants to make something of himself. He’s going to go to college. But he needs my help to do it. And I need Lady Eunice to help him.”
Now I swallowed. “So we’re quits then?”
She nodded, once.
“I’m just a…summer fling to you, Marjorie? Is that it? Something that just…happened? During carnal hours?”
“Yes.”
She brushed the tear from her cheek with a thumb; then she brushed the tear from my cheek, and kissed me there, and showed me to the door.
For maybe five minutes, maybe half an hour, I stood on the beach and watched the ocean; looked at the moon. Looked at the moon reflect on the ocean. Watched a land crab scuttle by; and all I did was smile at the goddamn thing.
Then I headed for the Chevy in the country club lot and drove to the B.C., where the man at the front desk told me I had till tomorrow noon to get out.
“The owner of the hotel has requested that you leave,” the white clerk said.
“Lady Oakes, you mean.”
“Lady Oakes,” he said.
18
For days I’d been hearing that jail; but on this hot Tuesday morning in late July, in the square outside, local displeasure with de Marigny, particularly among Nassau’s native population, was threatening to erupt in a lynch- mob assault on the the yellow colonial Supreme Court building, the racially mixed, overflow crowd-straw market vendors and Bay Street big shots alike-seemed almost festive. They might well have been waiting outside a theater, not a courtroom.
Inside, the play that was de Marigny’s preliminary hearing began with the accused standing at the rail, before a dour, black-robed, powdered-wigged magistrate, who read the charge against the accused: that he had “intentionally and unlawfully” caused the death of Sir Harry Oakes.
Freddie wore a conservative, double-breasted brown suit and stood clean-shaven and somber, his colorful yellow-brown-and-red-patterned tie the only faint thumbing of his nose at authority.
“What is your full name?” the magistrate asked from behind the bench.
“Marie Alfred Fouquereaux de Marigny,” Freddie said, and then spelled out each word for the magistrate, who was taking his own notes in longhand. There seemed to be no court stenographer.
“I appear on behalf of the prosecution,” a resonant voice intoned.
The man who rose to speak at a table shared by both prosecution and defense was a giant of a bewigged, berobed black man, whose clear diction and cultivated English accent seemed at odds with his African features and ebony skin. This was the Honorable A. F. Adderley, Nassau’s foremost trial attorney, who had never lost a murder case, and who had, until now, been de Marigny’s attorney of record.
“I appear on behalf of the accused,” Godfrey Higgs said, standing, his athletic frame holding its own with the massive prosecutor’s. He too was wigged and robed; his smile was confident, eager.
Now two statuesque black officers-to whose already ostentatious uniforms had been added the touch of sheathed bayonets hanging from black leather belts-escorted the prisoner to a wooden box, six feet long, five feet high, inside which was a narrow wooden bench, where Freddie sat, as a door of widely spaced iron bars clanged shut on him. This slightly elevated cage was on the left, as you faced the magistrate behind his bench, with the jury box (empty, for this hearing) directly opposite.
The 150-seat courthouse was packed with mostly white faces, black servants for the wealthy having arrived before sunup to be first in line for their bosses. Nancy was not present, as she would later be called as a witness; I would be her eyes and ears, from the front row.
In addition to the lawyers’ table-where Attorney General Hallinan and the two Miami police captains also sat-two other tables had been squeezed in, in front of the gallery, to accommodate the press. Mere war news took a backseat to a juicy case like this. Newshounds from New York, London and Toronto sat with the local Nassau press, and reps from UPI and the Associated Press were on hand, too. Jimmy Kilgallen was there for INS, sitting next to Erle Gardner, with whom I’d chatted briefly before the proceedings started.
“Have you been ducking me, Heller?” the feisty little mystery writer had asked.
“Yes,” I said.
He laughed harshly. “Is this fellow Higgs going to cross-examine the prosecution witnesses?”
“I don’t really know. Why wouldn’t he?”
A smile twitched in his round face, his eyes glittered behind the gold wire-frames. “Well, burden of proof’s on the prosecution. Usually, in a preliminary hearing, these limey defenders don’t like to tip their hand by asking many questions.”
“Personally,” I said, “I hope Higgs goes after Christie with a hatchet-or maybe a blowtorch.”
That made him laugh again, before we each scurried to our seats as the doors had opened letting in the surge of spectators at nine-thirty.
Now all was quiet, but for the booming voices of the lawyers and magistrate, and the more halting ones of an array of prosecution witnesses, in the slow, steady campaign to place a rope around de Marigny’s neck. That, and the buzzing of flies and the occasional flap of a bird that would find its way through the open windows of the stiflingly hot courtroom.
The poised, mannered Adderley spent most of the morning laying routine groundwork. The first witnesses were the RAF draftsman who’d drawn a floor plan for Lindop, and the RAF photographers who’d taken the death photos-large blowups of which were briefly displayed on an easel, like ghoulish works of art, making the gallery gasp.
Dr. Quackenbush, a bland, trim little man in his mid-forties who (as it turned out) did not resemble Groucho Marx in the least, described the crime scene as he’d found it on the morning of July 8, in clinical but grisly detail; described the four wounds grouped behind Sir Harry’s head as “punctures,” the diameter of a pencil, penetrating the skull.
He neglected to mention that his first instinct had been that these were gunshot wounds.
In discussing the autopsy, the doctor mentioned that “on removing the skullcap, a quantity of blood was seen inside the brain capsule,” and that “there appeared to be a slight contusion of the brain, but no hemorrhages.”
Which to me meant the bullets, having lost momentum on their journey through the skull, could still have been in Sir Harry’s brain-which had not been cut open for examination-which, with the rest of Harry, was currently in a coffin six feet under in Bar Harbor, Maine.
Quackenbush also spoke of “approximately four ounces” of an as yet unidentified “thick, viscid, darkish fluid” in Sir Harry’s stomach. Had Sir Harry been poisoned, or maybe drugged?
I jotted a reminder to myself in my pocket notebook to nudge Higgs about it.
Meanwhile, another of Nassau’s wartime parade of lovely women was taking the stand: the elusive Dulcibel
