“That’s right. I would say, it felt about half full.”
“Thank you. No further questions.”
She walked right by me, and we made the briefest eye contact. I smiled, but she looked away, raising her chin.
Two ceiling fans were slicing the stale air; smaller electrical fans sat here and there, whirring futilely. My shirt under my suitcoat was sticking to me like flypaper. But the next two witnesses-native police officers in full regalia, except for the bayonets-took the stand looking cooler than a milk shake.
Both men told painfully similar stories of their various duties at Westbourne the morning and afternoon of the body’s discovery. They spoke in a curious mixture of Caribbean and British inflection; neither man seemed nervous, but their stony demeanor underscored the coached nature of their testimony.
“I saw de Marigny upstairs with Captain Melchen at three-thirty p.m.,” they both said.
This was on July 9; that morning, the scorched Chinese screen had been moved from Sir Harry’s bedchamber out into the hall, where Miami’s finest had done some fingerprint work.
“Captain Barker had finished his fingerprint processing by that time,” they both said.
Over at the press table, Gardner glanced at me and frowned; I did the same to him. We both knew something was up. So did Freddie: behind the bars of his cage, he was frowning, shaking his head slowly.
Nancy de Marigny shook her head the same way, hearing my account of the Tweedledum and Tweedledee testimony of the officers. We were meeting over the lunch break in the dining room of the British Colonial, sharing a table with her friend Lady Diane Medcalf.
“What are they up to?” Nancy wondered aloud. She looked as charming as a lovely child in her plain white sports dress and widebrimmed straw hat tied in place by a white silk scarf.
“No good,” Di said needlessly, arching a brow as she lifted a gin and tonic to her bruised red lips. She did not look like a lovely child, in her vivid-blue clingy crepe dress, big silver medallion buttons like a row of medals in a vertical ribbon between her full breasts. She wore white gloves and a white turban, which hid most of her blondness.
Between steaming spoonfuls of conch chowder, I said, “My guess is that the fingerprint evidence we’ve been hearing about comes from that screen.”
“So what if it does?” Nancy asked, almost petulantly.
“So,” I said, “they have to establish that Freddie couldn’t have touched that screen while he was in the house being questioned.”
Di frowned with interest. “What time does Freddie say he was taken upstairs for questioning?”
I got my notebook out and checked it. “More like eleven-thirty that morning.”
Nancy sat forward. “Can we trip them up?”
I nodded. “If Freddie’s story is backed up by some of these other witnesses who were also at Westbourne being questioned at the time-like those RAF dames, for instance-we can trip ’em up Duke of Windsor style.”
“Duke of Windsor style?” Nancy asked, puzzled.
“Royally,” I grinned.
Di was still frowning. “Why were those women taken to Westbourne for questioning, instead of the police station?”
I shrugged. “That was the Miami boys’ doing. Sometimes it comes in handy when the bad guys are idiots.” I looked at Di and smiled. “And that party you’re throwing this weekend is going to be very helpful, too-if the guest list shows.”
“They’ll show,” she said with a wicked little smile. She curled a gloved finger at a black waiter, summoning another gin and tonic.
“You know,” I said, smirking at Nancy, “I feel kind of funny coming back to the B.C., having been so recently banished and all.”
“Is the guest room at Higgs’ suiting you?” she asked, with earnest concern.
“It’s okay. I’m afraid I’m getting on the nerves of his wife and kids.”
Under the table, I felt a hand on my leg.
“I have a guest cottage,” Lady Diane said, ever so casually, “at Shangri La…if you don’t mind the inconvenience of having to take a five-minute ride by launch every time you’re coming and going.
With her hand on my leg like that, I’d be coming before I was going.
“That’s very gracious,” I said, “but I’m afraid you’d be the one who’d be inconvenienced….”
She squeezed my thigh; it was more friendly than sexy, but it was sexy enough.
“Nonsense,” she said, in her brittle British way. “You’d be welcome company.”
“Well…”
“I think it’s a simply fabulous idea,” Nancy said, eyes sparkling. “I spend half my time over there with Di, anyway. So we could have planning sessions and talk strategy.”
The hand beneath the table slipped away.
“All right,” I said, and looked at Lady Diane, narrowing my eyes and sending a signal. “I’ll be glad to come.”
“How delightful,” Di said, and those Bahama-blue eyes locked onto mine and sent their own signal.
“Besides,” I said, “I know all about how no one in Nassau can dare refuse your invitation.”
She laughed a little, then stopped cold to pluck her latest gin and tonic from the hands of the waiter, who seemed a little startled to have his cargo snatched so rudely away.
Nancy leaned in. “Who else do you think will testify today, Nate?”
“To keep the chronology at all coherent,” I said, “there’s only one man Adderley can call….”
Harold Christie clutched the rail around the witness box till his knuckles went as white as his double-breasted linen suit. As he gave his testimony, the little balding lizard of a man swayed from side to side, as if his balance were constantly at risk.
After establishing that Christie had been a real-estate agent in Nassau for about twenty years, Adderley asked him to describe his relationship with the deceased.
“I considered Sir Harry one of my closest personal friends,” Christie said, but prosecution witness or not, his tone was defensive.
Nonetheless, his story of the day-and night-of the murder was a dull, rambling recap of his previous statements: tennis at the country club in the afternoon, dinner at Westbourne with a few guests, Chinese checkers until eleven o’clock when Mr. Hubbard and Mrs. Henneage departed, after which he and Sir Harry went up to bed.
He’d chatted with Sir Harry in the latter’s bedroom, and Oakes was in bed, in his pajamas, reading a newspaper, when Christie went to his own bedroom, to read for half an hour or so himself.
Under Adderley’s respectful, even fawning questioning, Christie gradually calmed down. In a firm, natural voice, he told of waking up twice in the night-once to swat some mosquitoes that had gotten under his netting, another time because of the “strong wind and heavy rain.” But he’d heard nothing from Harry’s room, nor had he smelled smoke.
The next morning, when Sir Harry wasn’t waiting on the porch, where they usually breakfasted, Christie claimed to have called out, “Hi, Harry,” as he went into the bedroom, only to find his friend-scorched and sooty-on the still smoldering bed.
“I lifted his head, shook him, poured some water into the glass on the night table, and put the glass to his mouth.” He reached in his back pocket and began swabbing the sweat beading on the shiny dome of his head. “I took a pillow from the other twin bed, propped his head up, got a towel, wet it and wiped his face, hoping to revive him.”
Behind the iron bars, de Marigny’s expression was incredulous; he looked over at me, for the first time, and I shrugged at him. I’d been at the crime scene, and de Marigny-like everyone here-had seen the large blowups of the charred body.
The notion that anyone could have mistaken the corpse of Sir Harry Oakes for a living person seemed like something out of Lewis Carroll.
But something else was gnawing at me, as welclass="underline" why in the hell would Christie-why in the hell would anybody-go to such great lengths to insist he was within eighteen feet of the scene of the crime, during the crime?