She laughed again. “Sometime it is best to be discreet.”
Pleasant as she was pretty, this Marjorie Bristol. But where did she get that vocabulary? I knew where she got the Caribbean accent-I’m a detective, after all.
But we had gone on past the hotel.
“We’re not stopping for me to check in?” I asked.
“No. Sir Harry wants you brought straight to him. He’s expectin’ you at Westbourne.”
“Westbourne?”
We were moving past a public beach, little-used at the moment, the surrey clop-clipping onto an open road, heading away from town.
“Westbourne,” she said. “Sir Harry’s beach house.”
I kidded her with a wry smile. “That name’s a little…
She turned and grinned at me, her straw-hat brim grazing my forehead again. “It sure ain’t commonplace….”
3
Following the edge of the sea, past a sprawling, well-preserved stone hillside fortress that guarded the western entrance to the harbor, beyond a budding wealthy residential development, rounding a curve Marjorie Bristol called Brown’s Point, Samuel and his surrey ambled past a lush green golf course which provided a vast lawn for the estate next door.
The house itself wasn’t visible from the road. Rather, it was announced by a black wrought-iron fence with white stone pillars and a black wrought-iron gate whose metal work, in rococo cursive, spelled out
The double gate was shut, but not locked, and Samuel stepped off the surrey, swung open half the gate and returned to shake the reins and get us moving again. He did not get back out to shut the gate behind him before we rolled up and around the crescent-shaped drive across an immaculately landscaped lawn dressed with vivid colorful clusters of gardens, like flowers in a pretty girl’s hair. The ever-present palms leaned lazily, as if gesturing toward the large, low house itself.
New Providence was a long narrow island-twenty-one miles by seven-and the house on the Oakes estate mimicked that shape, as well as paralleled it, wide to the west and east, narrow to the south and north. The elongated front of the haciendalike house-or was it the back? — dwarfed its two stories, making the structure look lower-slung than it was; Sir Harry’s fabled home reminded me, frankly, of a motor hotel.
Westbourne was a surprisingly ungainly, shrubbery-surrounded, white-shuttered gray stucco affair with a reddish tile roof and lots of latticework on which bougainvillea climbed; a balcony ran the length of the building, providing a roof for the first-story walkway below, which ceased to the right of the entry porch where the doors of several garages stood half-open, revealing pricey vehicles within. At either end of the structure, open wooden stairways with latticework balustrades gave access to the balcony and many of the second-floor rooms.
Somebody with money lived here, obviously-this little beach cottage had to run somewhere between fifteen and twenty rooms-but not necessarily somebody with taste. Marjorie Bristol had been wrong: grandiose as its name might be, sprawling and well-tended as its grounds were, Westbourne had a distinctly commonplace air.
Samuel gave me a smile and I tipped my hat to him as he led his horse and surrey back toward the gate.
“He seems like a sweet guy,” I said. I had slipped my coat back on and was lugging the duffel.
“None sweeter,” Miss Bristol said.
As she walked me toward the wide front porch, she pointed off to the right. “Tennis court over there,” she said. “Swimmin’ pool, too.”
The tennis courts peeked through the palms, but you couldn’t see the pool from here.
“Why do you need a swimming pool when the ocean’s in your front yard?”
“I don’t,” she said, with a little shrug.
The main entry was unlocked and she went right on in, and I followed. The interior was lush dark wood and plaster walls with paintings and prints that ran to a nautical theme; the ceiling was higher than I would have guessed from outside. An open staircase curved to bedrooms above. To my left I glimpsed a formal dining room, with rich-looking Victorian furnishings and a vast oriental carpet, large enough for an Arabian village to fly away on. Everywhere I looked was a vase with fresh-cut white flowers.
Miss Bristol noticed me noticing that and said, “Lady Eunice, she loves her lilies. Even when she’s away, like now, I keep her vases brimmin’.”
Our footsteps echoed on a parquet floor where my face looked back up at me when I glanced down. I wondered if this high polish was Miss Bristol’s work, or if she was strictly administrative.
I was led past the open doorway of a gleaming white modern kitchen, out onto a wide whitewashed porch where rattan furniture, potted palms and more cut lilies looked out on the slope of a landscaped backyard that fell to a white beach and blue sea.
Miss Bristol paused on the porch to bestow one of her frequent, but no less prized, smiles upon me. “Time you meet Sir Harry,” she said. “Leave your bag up here on the porch….”
Down wide steps off one side of the porch she took me, and I heard a chugging, whirring, that was not the tide rolling in.
“That’s Sir Harry now,” she said, and she wasn’t smiling but her mahogany eyes had a twinkle. “He’s playin’ with his favorite toy, you know?”
I didn’t know, but I soon did. A palm tree that was between me and the ocean suddenly toppled like a twig.
I hadn’t noticed the heavy chain around the base of the tree, which had been literally uprooted by a weathered red tractor, its wheels casually churning across the golf-course-like grass, pulling along the palm and its roots and random clinging clods of dirt, like a horse dragging its fallen rider.
Only the tractor’s rider, or rather driver, had not fallen; he grabbed the gearshift knob, threw the tractor into a thrumming neutral and hopped off like a frog. Clad in slouch hat, red-and-black lumberjack shirt, khaki jodhpurs and knee boots, he was a small but powerful-looking man with a powerful-looking paunch, which he scratched as he walked toward me.
“Goddamn trees!” he said, working an already harsh, grating voice above the mechanical rumble of the tractor. “What the hell is the use of having an ocean in your backyard if you can’t
My first thought was whether his salty language had offended Miss Bristol, but when I went to glance at her she was gone. Then I caught sight of her, already halfway up the lawn, heading toward the house.
He whipped off his hat and wiped his brow with the back of a work-gloved hand, leaving the flesh smudged. “You’re Heller?”
His hair was brown and wavy and only touched with snow, a younger head of hair than his deeply lined, old man’s face.
“That’s right.”
“I’m Oakes. I’ll shut Bessie off and take a little break and we’ll have a little talk.”
He did, and we soon were walking along the beach.
Sir Harry Oakes had dark, wide-set glaring eyes and a jutting, belligerent jaw that made him seem permanently pissed-off; his nose was a bulbous blob of putty that threatened to touch thin, tight lips.
But he was actually kind of pleasant to me, in an eccentric, assholish sort of way.
Right now his thin lips were doing their tight rendition of a smile. “People think I
“No kidding.”
