Carnal Hours

Police Department-a grand-sounding title for this pudgy, crooked cop. His hook nose was swollen into something resembling a sweet potato, but otherwise no signs of the recent beating he’d taken from me were obvious.

Adderley treated his client with smarmy respect, eliciting an accurate, detailed description of the crime scene, as well as a vivid and ridiculous reconstruction of the crime, delivered in Melchen’s thick-tongued Southern drawl.

“The pattern of burned areas indicates Sir Harry momentarily escaped his killer,” Melchen told the court, “and staggered into the hall, his pajamas flamin’…”

Over at the press table, Gardner was rolling his eyes.

“Then Sir Harry gripped the railin’ and tottered against the wall before his killer overtook him, and dragged him back to his room.”

Higgs didn’t object to this nonsense, possibly because later it might be helpful for Melchen to have gone on the record with such a cockeyed, unsupported theory.

Adderley questioned Melchen in detail about his interrogation of Freddie, during which the cop claimed the accused had shared such thoughts with him as his hatred of “that stupid old fool,” meaning Sir Harry; and his similar hatred of the Oakes family attorney, my old friend Foskett, who had supposedly shown a “filthy” letter from Freddie’s ex-wife Ruth to Lady Oakes in an effort to further cause a breach in the family.

De Marigny, still chewing his matchstick, seemed almost amused; and it did seem unlikely he’d say any such things to an interrogator.

After describing Freddie as “uncooperative” in making an effort to find the clothes he’d worn the murder night, Melchen established the time of the July 9 interrogation as three-thirty p.m.

Just like the canned testimony of the two colored cops.

Smelling a rat, Higgs, on cross, asked, “Are you certain of the time you led Mr. de Marigny upstairs?”

“I recorded it,” Melchen said, matter-of-factly. He looked to the magistrate. “May I refer to my notebook, your honor?”

The magistrate nodded solemnly.

He withdrew a small black notebook from his suitcoat pocket, thumbed its pages. “Yes-it’s right here: three- thirty p.m., afternoon of July nine.”

Soon the final witness of the day strode to the box-tall, Hollywood-handsome Captain James Barker, Supervisor of the Criminal Laboratories of the Miami PD-looking none the worse for wear from our recent difference of opinion. On his heels were two grandly uniformed colored cops who carried in the scorched cream-color Chinese screen, which they placed to the right of the magistrate’s bench.

Even from this angle, I could see that behind the passive mask of his face, Higgs knew that the Chinese screen was an ominous intruder upon these proceedings.

And I knew immediately why it was a silent, dual witness as Adderley led Barker through an endless, and, frankly, impressive recital of the detective’s credentials as a fingerprint expert: FBI Academy training, a director of the International Association of Identification, expert fingerprint witness in hundreds of other cases.

Barker was smooth; he had the magistrate entranced as he gave a lecture on the characteristics of fingerprints.

“With the millions of fingerprints that have been examined throughout the world by experts and scientists,” he said with casual authority, “there have never been any two found alike-and from the viewpoint of an expert, I feel justified in saying, none even remotely alike.”

He referred to the fifty million sets of prints on file with the FBI; he explained how fingerprints themselves were formed (“When an individual presses his finger against a surface, small deposits of fatty substances or oil remain on the surface”); he explained the function of fingerprint powder, and the use of tape to lift a print.

On the same easel that had earlier displayed the grisly death-scene blowups, a card with a giant enlargement of a single fingerprint was placed by one of the colored constables. It looked like something out of a modern art museum.

Adderley said, “And whose fingerprint is this, Detective Barker?”

“It’s the little finger of Alfred de Marigny’s right hand-taken from a rolled impression after his arrest. May I step down, sir?”

“By all means.”

Using a crayon and a pointer, Barker identified “the thirteen characteristics of de Marigny’s fingerprints.” The magistrate, the press, the gallery, even de Marigny himself, were caught up by this bravura performance.

When he had marked up the blowup entirely, each of the thirteen points indicated by lines and numbers, he removed the blowup and an almost identical blowup, already so marked, was revealed.

“And what is this, Captain?” Adderley asked.

“This is an enlargement of a latent impression of the little finger of de Marigny’s right hand…taken from the surface of that Chinese screen.”

As murmuring filled the room, with the magistrate too caught up in Barker’s spell even to call order, the lanky detective moved to the screen and pointed to the extreme top of an end panel.

“It was lifted from here,” he said, volunteering the information, not waiting for Adderley’s prompting but seizing instead the correct theatrical moment.

“I marked the place previously,” he continued. “You see, on the morning of the ninth, I raised several dozen impressions of various prints from this screen, nearly all illegible. But there was one print raised which after examination proved conclusively to be the latent impression originating on the number five digit of Alfred de Marigny.”

De Marigny was no longer chewing his matchstick cockily; it hung limp in his lips as he sat forward, his face flushed.

“At what time did you raise this latent impression?”

“Between eleven a.m. and one p.m.”

I glanced over at de Marigny, caught his eye and smiled; he seemed confused momentarily, then his eyes tightened and he smiled back. The matchstick went erect.

We had them. With a little luck-we had them.

Higgs hadn’t made the connection that Freddie and I had. When we met in a small room in the courthouse, before Freddie was to be taken back to jail, the attorney confronted his client.

“You told me you hadn’t been inside Westbourne for months!” Higgs raged, still wearing his black robe, but with his white wig off.

De Marigny sat in a chair, legs crossed nonchalantly; he was chewing his matchstick again. “I hadn’t been. If I did touch that screen, it was in the morning.”

Higgs frowned. “What morning?”

“The morning of the ninth,” Freddie said. “That’s when I was taken upstairs by Melchen for questioning. Around eleven-thirty. I walked right past that screen in the hallway.”

“Could you have touched it?”

“Certainly.”

“But the testimony of not only Barker and Melchen, but those two Nassau police officers, places that time at three-thirty p.m.”

“Yes,” I said, “doesn’t it?”

Higgs looked at me with narrowed eyes. I was sitting on the edge of a desk. “What’s your point, Heller? That all four of these police officers are lying?”

“Yes. Back in Chicago we call it a frame, counselor. Actually, a fucking frame.”

“Mr. Heller is right, Godfrey,” de Marigny said, his prominent lips curled into a self-satisfied smile. “But remember: there were others present when I was taken upstairs-Mrs. Clark and Mrs. Ainslie, to name two. And Colonel Lindop himself! He wouldn’t lie.”

“No he wouldn’t,” I agreed.

Now Higgs’ irritation was gone and the boyish smile was back. “Now isn’t that interesting.”

I held my hand out to Higgs. “Let me see that copy of the fingerprint Adderley provided you.”

He dug it out of his briefcase.

I studied the photo. “I thought so.”