Barker said, very quietly, “You don’t know who you’re dealing with, Heller.”
“Sure I do. A couple of crooked cops in Meyer Lansky’s pocket.”
Barker reacted as if I’d slapped him again.
Then I smiled and put a friendly hand on his shoulder. “Look-we should be pals. After all, we have so much in common: you don’t play by the rules and neither do I.”
“Don’t fuck with us, Heller.”
“Fuck with me, girls, and you’ll wake up as dead as Arthur. You do remember Arthur, don’t you? The native night watchman who drowned accidentally at Lyford Cay?”
Barker and Melchen exchanged worried glances, then glared at me, to preserve what little dignity they had left, and limped off to their police car. They departed in a cloud of gravel dust, and to more native applause and derisive howls.
“You go in and clean yourself up, Curtis. Then I need some gas for the Chevy-the Count said you could help me out.”
“Sure t’ing,” Curtis said. “You wanna go get de gas cans yourself, and fill ’er up, while I’m inside?”
“All right. Where are they?”
Curtis grinned whitely. “In de toolshed-back of de feed bags.”
No smells of cooking beckoned me through the open windows of Marjorie Bristol’s cottage. Otherwise, the evening was its usual beautifully Bahamian self: perfect sky, scattered stars, a full moon making the ivory sand and gray-blue ocean seem as unreal and lovely as an artist’s vision. All this and a cool, soothing breeze-and the humidity had taken the night off.
I knocked and she greeted me with a smile; but it was a smile I’d never seen from her before: sad and reserved and…careful.
Then I noticed: she was wearing the blue maid’s uniform I’d first seen her in.
“I’m sorry,” she said, showing me in. She gestured to the round table, which lacked even its usual bowl of cut flowers. “I know I told you I’d cook for you tonight, but I’m afraid I…got busy.”
“Hey, that’s fine. You’ve been too generous with your culinary skills already. Why don’t we go out somewhere?”
She sat across the table from me, and smiled again, that same sad smile; she shook her head. “A white man and a colored gal? I don’t think so, Nathan.”
“I hear there’s a Chinese joint on the corner of Market Street where blacks and whites can mix and mingle to their heart’s content. What do you say?”
She smiled again, tightly; her eyes hadn’t met mine since I got here.
“Marjorie-what’s wrong? What’s the matter?”
She sat staring at her own folded hands for what seemed an eternity; finally she spoke.
“Lady Eunice asked me to open Westbourne today,” she said. “That’s why I’ve been busy.”
“Oh,” I said.
I should have anticipated this; Nancy had told me that her mother was staying at another of their Nassau residences, Maxwellton, but with de Marigny’s preliminary hearing coming up, friends and relatives-witnesses, in many instances-were beginning to arrive on the island. The larger facilities at Westbourne would be needed.
She stood and began to pace, hands folded in front of her, brow creased.
I got up, went to her, stopped her aimless moving, put one hand on her waist, and lifted her chin and made her look at me. Her eyes were moist.
“Lady Oakes doesn’t approve of you helping me, does she?” I asked.
She swallowed, and shook her head, no.
She said, softly, weakly, “Somebody told her about my bein’ with you when Arthur’s body was found. Somebody else told her they saw us drivin’ in your car together.”
“And, what? She’s forbidden you to help me?”
She nodded. “Or her daughter.”
I winced in confusion. “But I understood Nancy and her mother were getting along pretty well, considering.”
“Lady Eunice, she just doesn’t want her family pulled apart any more than it already is.”
“And she’s convinced Freddie’s the man who murdered her husband.”
“She’s…adamant about it. She says hangin’ is too good for that philanderin’ so-and-so.”
I smirked mirthlessly. “Does she want him hanged for killing Sir Harry? Or for running around on her daughter?”
She shook her head vigorously, as if she not only didn’t want to talk about it further, she didn’t want to think about it, either. She pulled away from me, turned her back; she was slumped, her posture caving in on itself.
“I can’t be helpin’ you anymore, Nathan.”
I came up behind her, put a hand on her shoulder; she flinched, but then she touched my hand briefly with hers.
“Nathan-my family and me, we depend on Lady Eunice for our livin’. I cannot go against my Lady. Do you understand?”
“Well, sure…but that’s okay. I didn’t want you involved anymore, anyway, what with Arthur’s murder and all. I talked to Curtis Thompson this afternoon, and he’s going to check around for Samuel and that other missing boy.”
She laughed once, hollowly, turned and faced me, but stepped back a little, to put some distance between us. “Do you really think either of those boys is still in the islands? They’ve flown like birds, Nathan. They be long gone.”
“You’re probably right. Is it a problem meeting here? You know, now that Lady Oakes will be around. Maybe there’s some…neutral place we can meet….”
She swallowed hard and her eyes were welling with tears. “You don’t understand, do you? I can’t be seein’ you no more. For any reason. Not anymore.”
I stepped forward, and she moved back.
“Don’t be silly, Marjorie. We mean something to each other….”
She laughed bitterly. “You can’t be serious. I’m just a summer romance to you, Nathan Heller. Just a…shipboard romance, without the ship.”
“Don’t say that-”
Her jaw went firm and yet trembled. “Can you ask me back to Chicago, to live with you? Can I ask you to stay here with me in Nassau? Would your family, would your friends, accept a girl like me? Would my family, my friends, want a white boy like you around?”
I shook my head; I felt thunderstruck. “I admit I haven’t thought any of that through…but Marjorie, what we have is special, very special…on the beach…”
“The beach was very nice.” A tear rolled down her cream-in-the-coffee-brown cheek. “I won’t say it wasn’t. I won’t make a lie of the sweet truth of that. But Nathan…I got a brother! I got a brother who wants to make something of himself. He’s going to go to college. But he needs my help to do it. And I need Lady Eunice to help him.”
Now I swallowed. “So we’re quits then?”
She nodded, once.
“I’m just a…summer fling to you, Marjorie? Is that it? Something that just…happened? During carnal hours?”
“Yes.”
She brushed the tear from her cheek with a thumb; then she brushed the tear from my cheek, and kissed me there, and showed me to the door.
For maybe five minutes, maybe half an hour, I stood on the beach and watched the ocean; looked at the moon. Looked at the moon reflect on the ocean. Watched a land crab scuttle by; and all I did was smile at the goddamn thing.
Then I headed for the Chevy in the country club lot and drove to the B.C., where the man at the front desk told me I had till tomorrow noon to get out.
“The owner of the hotel has requested that you leave,” the white clerk said.
“Lady Oakes, you mean.”
“Lady Oakes,” he said.
18
For days I’d been hearing that jail; but on this hot Tuesday morning in late July, in the square outside, local displeasure with de Marigny, particularly among Nassau’s native population, was threatening to erupt in a lynch-mob assault on the the yellow colonial Supreme Court building, the racially mixed, overflow crowd-straw market vendors and Bay Street big shots alike-seemed almost festive. They might well have been waiting outside a theater, not a courtroom.
Inside, the play that was de Marigny’s preliminary hearing began with the accused standing at the rail, before a dour, black-robed, powdered-wigged magistrate, who read the charge against the accused: that he had “intentionally and unlawfully” caused the death of Sir Harry Oakes.