“Did you notice anything else distinctive about him?”
“What?”
“Anything special or odd about his appearance. Him, or the other man?”
His eyes narrowed. “That rain, mon, was really comin’ down, you know. But dey walk right past my shed, you know. I was peekin’ through de window. The fella dat lost his hair, he had a skinny mustache, his nose was all pushed in. The other fella…he was fat, with a scar on his face.”
The back of my neck was tingling.
“What sort of scar, Arthur?”
He drew a jagged line in the air with one finger. “Like de lightning in the sky, mon-it flash across his cheek.”
Jesus Christ-were the men Arthur was describing the two bodyguards at Meyer Lansky’s table back at the Miami Biltmore?
“A car was waitin’ for dem-dey come back an hour later. Maybe longer. Got back on dat boat and go back out in de storm. Crazy, doin’ that-the sea was real ugly.”
“What sort of car was it? Did you see the driver?”
“Driver I didn’t see. What do you call dat long square car, with de extra seats?”
“A station wagon?” Marjorie asked.
He nodded confidently. “Dat’s it. It was a station wagon.”
“You didn’t happen to catch the license number did you?” I asked.
“No.”
I didn’t figure I’d be that lucky.
“Could it have been Mr. Christie’s station wagon?” Marjorie asked. Then to me, she said, “Mr. Christie, he has a car like that.”
“Maybe,” Arthur said. “It was dat kin’ of car. But I didn’t see de driver. See, I wasn’t thinkin’ about dat car so much as dat boat dat docked at Lyford Cay. I’m thinkin’, maybe dis boat don’t have no business here. So I got de registration nomber, and name on de side.”
I grinned. “Arthur, you’re a good man. You remember that name and number, by any chance? Or maybe have it with you?”
“No. But I write it down.”
“Good. That’s very good…. Did you show it to anybody? Or tell anybody-like Mr. Christie, say-what you saw that night?”
He smeared the moisture on his beer bottle with his thumb, then shook his head. “No-I got to thinkin’, if dat was Mr. Christie in dat car, he might not like me askin’ him about it.”
“You told your sister,” Marjorie reminded him.
“Oh, well, I tell a few friends. Guess that’s how the story got around.”
“But nobody you work for,” I said.
“No. More I thought about it, less I want to make a fuss. Still…knowin’ dat Sir Harry, he was killed dat same night. It makes you think.”
Yes it did.
I reached in my pants pocket and fished out a fin. I handed it to Arthur, who took it gratefully. “I work with a lawyer named Higgs,” I told him. “He’s going to want to get your deposition.”
Now he frowned. “What’s dat?”
“Your statement about what you saw.”
“I don’t know, mon….”
“Look-there’s more dough in it for you. What would you say to a hundred bucks, Arthur?”
Arthur grinned. “I say, hello.”
I laughed a little. “All right. But you got to keep quiet about this till you hear from me.”
“As a mouse, mon.”
“I’d like to see this Lyford Cay…get the layout. Why don’t I give you a ride to work, right now, and have a look around?”
He waved that off. “No-no thanks, mister. I got my bicycle. Anyway, I got to try and find dat piece of paper I wrote dat nomber and name on.”
“Okay, then-how about I meet you at the dock tomorrow night. You go on at ten, right? Is eleven okay? You could have that information ready for me, and I’ll have a time set up for you to meet with Higgs at his office, day after tomorrow.”
“Okay. Make dat an afternoon time. I sleep mornin’s.”
“Not a problem. Now, Arthur-keep all this under your hat….”
“I buy a hat and put it dere,” he promised, and grinned again, and this time he offered his hand. I shook it and Marjorie and I found our way out. By now we barely rated a glance from the native clientele. The fat bartender I tipped even waved.
Going back up and over the hill, Marjorie asked, “What do you think it means, Nathan?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe nothing. Maybe everything.”
“Could those men Arthur saw be the killers?”
“Yes. But I have to give you the same advice I gave Arthur: not a word to anybody.”
I left the car in the country club parking lot and walked her to her cottage. Occasionally our arms would brush, and we’d move away, then eventually drift back together. We weren’t saying anything much; suddenly, with business out of the way, things had gotten awkward.
Just as I was about to say good night to her on her doorstep, feeling as shy as a teenager at the end of a first date, something scuttled across the sand, and scared the hell out of me.
She laughed. “It’s just a sand crab.”
I raised a hand to my forehead. “I know….”
Concern tightened her eyes; she touched my face with gentle fingertips, as if inspecting a burn. “You’re upset. You look sick…what is it….”
“Nothing.”
“It’s something! Tell me.”
“I have to walk a second. I need to breathe….”
She walked with me along the beach, our footsteps slowed by the sand; the rush of the tide, the beauty of the moonlight, calmed me.
“I’m all right, now,” I said.
I didn’t know how to tell her that the last time land crabs had skittered across my path, I’d been in a shell hole on another tropical island, waiting for the Japs to come and finish the job they’d started on me and the rest of the patrol….
She looped her arm in mine; she was close to me, gazing up at me. Those huge eyes were something a man could get lost in. Right now, I felt like getting lost.
I stopped in my sandy steps and she stopped, too, and I searched her eyes for permission before I took her in my arms and kissed her. Gently, but not too gently.
Oh, those lips; soft and sweet and they told me how she felt without a word.
Still in my arms, she looked past me. “We’re to Westbourne.”
The rectangular shape of the place where Sir Harry died was outlined against the sky, haloed by moonlight. We stood where Oakes and I had strolled that first day.
“We should turn back,” she said.
I agreed, and walked her home, and gave her one, brief, final kiss before she slipped inside, wearing a haunting little smile.
But somehow I think we both knew there was no turning back.
14
Off Rawson Square, behind the sullen statue of Queen Victoria and the white-pillared, pink-walled, green-shuttered buildings she guarded, was an open square of administrative buildings that included the post office, fire brigade HQ, and Supreme Court. At the square’s center a plot of grass was home to a sprawling, ancient silk-cotton tree, a beautiful, grotesque thing whose trunk extended in buttresslike waves of wood, branches spreading forever, a wonderful monstrosity that would have been at home in the forest Disney drew for Snow White. In the shelter of its shade stood the courthouse overflow: lawyers in wigs and robes, policemen, and citizens black and white (litigants and witnesses, no doubt), discussing their cases, rehearsing their statements, escaping the afternoon sun.
Next to the yellow courthouse, over which the Union Jack flapped, vivid against the blue Bahamas sky, stood a pink building with a green wooden veranda, white shutters and a blue-glass, Victorian-looking lamp on a post: the police station.
Colonel Lindop’s office was up on the second floor, and his white, male, khaki-wearing secretary sent me right in. From behind a tidy desk, the long-faced Police Superintendent acknowledged me with a nod, not rising, gesturing to a chair that waited across from him.
This little office-with its couple of wall maps and several wooden file cabinets-being that of the city’s top cop indicated just what a small-time operation this was. Not that it justified the Duke inviting those two Miami clods in to fuck up the case.