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.
6
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.