Higgs frowned. “This fellow Barker is being represented as a fingerprint expert…”
“That guy isn’t an expert on anything but rubber hoses,” I said.
“You think the Americans are dishonest?” de Marigny asked.
“Probably. Thick as a plank? Certainly. They’ve got you pegged as the killer-anything they can’t make fit that scenario, they’re tossing out.”
“With Hallinan’s help, no doubt,” de Marigny said bitterly. For a moment his cocky mask dropped. “Back home in Mauritius we were brought up to take such little people for what they are-professional civil servants. Lacking the ability to make a success of their life, not good enough for the diplomatic service, eking out an existence on some miserable coral reef. Doing their best to convince themselves and everyone around them that they’re so ve-ree important.”
“Forgive my ignorance,” I said, “but what’s Mauritius?”
De Marigny looked at me with pity. That so ignorant a boob could walk the planet must have seemed a reverse miracle to him.
“Mauritius is my home-an island in the Indian Ocean, a British possession but French in language, customs, population and tradition.”
“Oh,” I said. It was hell being a dumb goddamn American.
The prisoner stood again. He asked Higgs for another cigarette, and as Higgs lighted it, de Marigny asked a question I would have thought he’d have asked sooner.
“Have you heard from my wife? Is Nancy in Nassau yet?”
Higgs nodded. “She arrived yesterday, late afternoon. I expect you’ll see her today.”
“Good. Good. She’s standing behind me, you know.”
“I know.”
“A rare woman-particularly for an American girl. She has a…serious quality. Most American girls, they just giggle…so easy to please. None of the inborn reserve of the European woman. None of the cultural maturity. That’s why one tires of them so easily, of course.”
“Of course,” I said.
He turned to me, and his smile was as patronizing as it was wide. “You don’t like me much, do you, Nate?”
“Fred, I don’t have to like you to take your wife’s money.”
The smile went away and he just stood there, as if he were waiting for the trapdoor to let loose. Which one of these days it might: murder was a capital crime here, and you swung for it.
The sound of the key working in the metal door alerted us our time was up.
“Mr. de Marigny,” Captain Miller said, “your wife is here to see you. I thought you might prefer to meet with her in my office.”
De Marigny’s delight was obvious. “You’re very kind, Captain.”
We followed the prisoner and the warden to his office, just outside of which waited a wide-eyed Nancy, who beamed at the sight of her husband. She looked lovely in a white suit trimmed in blue, her dark hair held back by a white ribbon.
I’d thought of her as tall till she embraced the six-three de Marigny; he held her tenderly and she held back her tears. Then they stood staring at each other.
“What do you think of my beard?” he said, stroking it devilishly, smiling the same way.
“It makes you look evil,” she said.
That knocked his legs out from under him.
“Should I shave it off?”
She turned to me. Higgs and I had stopped a ways down, to give them some room, but she called, “What do you think, Mr. Heller?”
I was leaning against the stone corridor wall. “Absolutely. Get rid of it. The cops are destroying evidence-why shouldn’t you?”
“What do you think of our American private eye?” she asked him.
“He’s everything I imagined an American private eye might be,” he said suavely.
Her eyes sparkled. “I knew you’d like him! He needs a car, Freddie…what about the Chevrolet?”
“Certainly…uh, Nate-come here a moment….”
I went to him.
He whispered, “You’ll need petrol. My man Curtis Thompson will see that you get whatever you need, whenever you need it, out at my chicken farm. Nancy will tell you how to get in touch with him.”
“Black-market gas, Freddie?”
“Nate-would you expect less from a disreputable character like me?”
De Marigny and Nancy disappeared into Captain Miller’s office; the good captain closed the door to give them some privacy.
“Good thing Sir Harry isn’t here,” I said.
“Why’s that?” Higgs asked, confused.
“He’d have to go in there and break that up….”
12
Forty-seven minutes,” Gardner said.
He was watching his wristwatch as we stood on the balcony of my room at the British Colonial, while two squares of cloth burned in a large glass hotel ashtray at our feet. It was as if we were performing some arcane ritual. Smoke curled blackly, the acrid fragrance little diminished by the mild morning breeze. The fragments of unburned Westbourne bedding, which we’d doused in lighter fluid, were charred black.
“So it would have taken around that long, at least, for Sir Harry’s bed to have been similarly burned,” I said.
“Well,” Gardner said, eyes wide behind the gold wire-frames, “I’d suggest we douse those other samples in various other flammable materials-kerosene, gasoline-and see if there’s any difference in rate of burning.”
Lindop had been generous in the scraps of bedding he’d provided us; they had come, as I requested, from the unburned, unslept-in twin bed next to Sir Harry’s.
“I may bring an expert in to do that,” I said, “or send the rest of the scraps back to Chicago for testing. But for our purposes, this establishes that the killer or killers spent a longer period of time than forty-seven minutes murdering Sir Harry.”
“Not necessarily,” Gardner said, shaking his head. “The murderers probably left when the fire was still going.”
“But the feathers weren’t sprinkled on Sir Harry’s body until he was on the bed, with his pajamas burned off him. And the bedding was already burned to a crisp when Harry was placed there!”
“True,” he admitted. He gestured with an open hand. “So we’re talking more like fifty minutes to an hour, minimum.”
“Exactly. This killer-killers-were in no hurry.”
“Agreed,” Gardner said, nodding.
He still looked out of place in the Bahamas, in his green-and-brown Western shirt with bolero tie, and his chinos, against the incongruous backdrop of the white beach and vast blue-green sea.
“But I don’t think it was gas or kerosene, anyway,” I said, picking up the ashtray, moving back inside. “Maybe something with an alcohol base…”
“Why, Nate?”
In the bathroom, I ran water over the smoldering embers, which sizzled and smoked. “Ever see a gas fire, Erle? If that bed had been splashed with gasoline, the flames would’ve been eight or nine feet high.”
Gardner snapped his fingers. “And that ceiling would’ve been scorched as hell!”
I rinsed out the ashtray. “Or the goddamn house would’ve burned to the ground. Okay. Whose car shall we take? De Marigny’s or Hearst’s?”
He grinned. “Let the Third Estate take you for a ride.”
“I don’t know if I like the sound of that,” I said, but I let Gardner drive and this time I would man the wristwatch. But first we had to get to our starting point-de Marigny’s house on Victoria Street; I played navigator, pointing the way for Gardner.
The Lincoln was in the driveway.
“Looks like Nancy’s home,” I said.
“Shall we go in and say hello?”
“You wish,” I said, knowing how Gardner would relish an interview. “Drive on, Macduff.”
As Gardner guided Mr. Hearst’s rental Ford back down Victoria Street onto busy Bay Street, I kept track of the time.
“De Marigny left his house, with the RAF wives in tow,” I said, “around one o’clock. After he dropped them off at Hubbard’s Cottages, he claims he came back home the same route, via Bay Street. He says when he got home, he moved his spare car, the Chevrolet, from the driveway onto the lawn, so he could put the Lincoln away in the garage, which he did. Then he went up the outside stairs to the apartment over the garage, knocked on the door and spoke to his friend Georges de Visdelou, offering to drive Miss Betty Roberts, de Visdelou’s sixteen-year-old date, home.”