Freddie wore a conservative, double-breasted brown suit and stood clean-shaven and somber, his colorful yellow-brown-and-red-patterned tie the only faint thumbing of his nose at authority.
“What is your full name?” the magistrate asked from behind the bench.
“Marie Alfred Fouquereaux de Marigny,” Freddie said, and then spelled out each word for the magistrate, who was taking his own notes in longhand. There seemed to be no court stenographer.
“I appear on behalf of the prosecution,” a resonant voice intoned.
The man who rose to speak at a table shared by both prosecution and defense was a giant of a bewigged, berobed black man, whose clear diction and cultivated English accent seemed at odds with his African features and ebony skin. This was the Honorable A. F. Adderley, Nassau’s foremost trial attorney, who had never lost a murder case, and who had, until now, been de Marigny’s attorney of record.
“I appear on behalf of the accused,” Godfrey Higgs said, standing, his athletic frame holding its own with the massive prosecutor’s. He too was wigged and robed; his smile was confident, eager.
Now two statuesque black officers-to whose already ostentatious uniforms had been added the touch of sheathed bayonets hanging from black leather belts-escorted the prisoner to a wooden box, six feet long, five feet high, inside which was a narrow wooden bench, where Freddie sat, as a door of widely spaced iron bars clanged shut on him. This slightly elevated cage was on the left, as you faced the magistrate behind his bench, with the jury box (empty, for this hearing) directly opposite.
The 150-seat courthouse was packed with mostly white faces, black servants for the wealthy having arrived before sunup to be first in line for their bosses. Nancy was not present, as she would later be called as a witness; I would be her eyes and ears, from the front row.
In addition to the lawyers’ table-where Attorney General Hallinan and the two Miami police captains also sat-two other tables had been squeezed in, in front of the gallery, to accommodate the press. Mere war news took a backseat to a juicy case like this. Newshounds from New York, London and Toronto sat with the local Nassau press, and reps from UPI and the Associated Press were on hand, too. Jimmy Kilgallen was there for INS, sitting next to Erle Gardner, with whom I’d chatted briefly before the proceedings started.
“Have you been ducking me, Heller?” the feisty little mystery writer had asked.
“Yes,” I said.
He laughed harshly. “Is this fellow Higgs going to cross-examine the prosecution witnesses?”
“I don’t really know. Why wouldn’t he?”
A smile twitched in his round face, his eyes glittered behind the gold wire-frames. “Well, burden of proof’s on the prosecution. Usually, in a preliminary hearing, these limey defenders don’t like to tip their hand by asking many questions.”
“Personally,” I said, “I hope Higgs goes after Christie with a hatchet-or maybe a blowtorch.”
That made him laugh again, before we each scurried to our seats as the doors had opened letting in the surge of spectators at nine-thirty.
Now all was quiet, but for the booming voices of the lawyers and magistrate, and the more halting ones of an array of prosecution witnesses, in the slow, steady campaign to place a rope around de Marigny’s neck. That, and the buzzing of flies and the occasional flap of a bird that would find its way through the open windows of the stiflingly hot courtroom.
The poised, mannered Adderley spent most of the morning laying routine groundwork. The first witnesses were the RAF draftsman who’d drawn a floor plan for Lindop, and the RAF photographers who’d taken the death photos-large blowups of which were briefly displayed on an easel, like ghoulish works of art, making the gallery gasp.
Dr. Quackenbush, a bland, trim little man in his mid-forties who (as it turned out) did not resemble Groucho Marx in the least, described the crime scene as he’d found it on the morning of July 8, in clinical but grisly detail; described the four wounds grouped behind Sir Harry’s head as “punctures,” the diameter of a pencil, penetrating the skull.
He neglected to mention that his first instinct had been that these were gunshot wounds.
In discussing the autopsy, the doctor mentioned that “on removing the skullcap, a quantity of blood was seen inside the brain capsule,” and that “there appeared to be a slight contusion of the brain, but no hemorrhages.”
Which to me meant the bullets, having lost momentum on their journey through the skull, could still have been in Sir Harry’s brain-which had not been cut open for examination-which, with the rest of Harry, was currently in a coffin six feet under in Bar Harbor, Maine.
Quackenbush also spoke of “approximately four ounces” of an as yet unidentified “thick, viscid, darkish fluid” in Sir Harry’s stomach. Had Sir Harry been poisoned, or maybe drugged?
I jotted a reminder to myself in my pocket notebook to nudge Higgs about it.
Meanwhile, another of Nassau’s wartime parade of lovely women was taking the stand: the elusive Dulcibel Henneage, who described herself as “an English evacuee with two children.” I would describe her as a pretty blonde in her late twenties, looking shapely despite her conservative suit and hat; if this was Harold Christie’s mistress, he was a lucky man.
But her story of playing afternoon tennis with Charles Hubbard, Harold Christie and Sir Harry Oakes, and later having dinner at Westbourne, shed no particular light on the case. She seemed to have been called simply to help establish a chronology.
The local beauty pageant continued with blond Dorothy Clark and brunette Jean Ainslie, the RAF wives Freddie had escorted home in the rain; like Mrs. Henneage, they looked very proper in their new suits and hats and with nervous precision established Freddie’s presence in the neighborhood of Westbourne on the murder night.
I had not been subpoenaed by the prosecution; now that I was in Freddie’s camp, it began to seem unlikely I’d be asked to back up the girls’ story at the trial. More likely, I’d testify for the defense, showing that de Marigny’s activities on July 7 didn’t seem to be those of a man preparing to end his day with a premeditated murder.
The RAF girls really hadn’t done Freddie any damage; after all, everything they said tallied with his own story. More troubling was the testimony of Constable Wendell Parker, who told of de Marigny stopping at the police station to register a new truck purchased for his chicken farm, at seven-thirty a.m. on July 8.
“He appeared excited,” the constable said. “His eyes were…bulging.”
Over in his cage, de Marigny’s eyes were bulging now, at the apparent stupidity of this testimony, but I knew a jury could well interpret his dropping by the police station the morning after the murder as anxiety over whether or not Sir Harry’s body had been discovered yet.
The next witness was all too familiar: Marjorie Bristol, looking crisp and beautiful in a red-and-white floral dress as she stood (as all the witnesses did, in the British style) in the witness box, without leaning on the rail. She told her story simply and welclass="underline" of setting out Sir Harry’s nightclothes, arranging his mosquito netting; of answering Christie’s cries for help, the next morning.
Higgs rose to cross-examine, briefly, breaking Gardner’s rule for limey lawyers.
“Miss Bristol,” he asked, smiling affably, “I believe you said you ‘flitted’ the room with the insecticide spray gun?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What did you do with it then?”
“I left the spray gun in the room, because Sir Harry, he always told me to leave it there.”
“How much insecticide was left in the spray gun, would you say?”
“Well, sir…I filled it the night before.”
“So you had used it once?”