But whatever I was, I preferred to be a live one.
After all, some of the black men dancing around that bonfire were cutting the air with machetes about four feet long. They would dance close to the fire and seize driftwood branches from its edge and then hold them in closer, getting them burning good, after which, bearing them as torches, trouser legs rolled up, the men waded into the shallow water.
And then their machetes began to slice the air, and more significantly, slice the sea. It was as if the machete-wielding men were attacking the water itself.
“What the hell are they up to?” I asked, working my voice up and over the pounding native drums. “What the hell sort of voodoo ritual is this?”
Di’s brittle British laughter found its way over the “music.” “It’s not voodoo, Heller-not exactly. This is a fish chop.”
“Fish chop?”
“Those men aren’t trying to cut the water, they’re fishing.”
And I’ll be damned if they weren’t: now the men were reaching in the water and coming back with silvery objects that were then tossed up on the sand. Fish, attracted by the driftwood flares held over the water’s surface, were swimming up to the men and getting a slash from a machete for their trouble.
“Later the whole gang’ll eat their catch,” Di said.
But right now men and women alike were gyrating, twirling, leaping, in an abandoned frenzy, even as the slain silvery fish were tossed onto the beach by the flailing fishermen.
An old woman was wailing, “Come down, Mary! Come down!”
“They sure know how to have a good time,” I said.
“I wish the guests at my affairs would loosen up like that,” she said.
“I bet you do.”
We had come here by motor yacht, a gleaming white vessel called the Lady Diane, a gift to her from the absent but ubiquitous Wenner-Gren. While no Southern Cross, it had a large white cabin with a bar and modern white-leather furnishings. The three-hour journey from Hog Island had been painless-cocktails and conversation and cuddling-and her colored “boy” Daniel had tied us up at a ramshackle little dock by a native village near this beach.
We were supposed to meet someone named Edmund, but he-and everyone else, apparently-had gone to the fish chop. We had followed the drums here….
What brought us to this island was a story Di had told me several days ago, in my bed in the guest cottage at Shangri La.
“Have you given any thought,” she asked casually, sitting up nude to the waist with a silk sheet covering her lap and a gin and tonic in hand, “to the motive for Harry’s murder being those fucking gold coins of his?”
Now I sat up; I was also nude to the waist, but that was considerably lesser a deal. “What fucking gold coins?”
She had made an astounded, but cute, face. “Surely you know about those! I can understand the police discarding that possibility, considering they were busy fitting Freddie a frame, but you…”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“His gold coin collection! Everybody on the island, black or white, knows that Sir Harry Oakes was hoarding a fortune in gold coins somewhere.”
“Not everybody. I never heard a word about it. How about Nancy? Has she ever seen any of this coin collection?”
She shook her head, blond hair shimmering. “No, but she’s never had any interest in anything related to her father’s wealth. Remember, a girl like Nancy grows up in the schools she’s been sent away to-for most of her life, she only spent summers with her family.”
I gave her a doubting sneer. “A hoard of gold coins-that sounds like the sort of fairy tale poor people dream up about rich people.”
“I think this may be more than a fairy tale.”
Patiently, she explained. She was completely oblivious to the nudity of her large, round, tiny-nippled breasts, jiggling gently as she spoke. I wasn’t.
It seemed the hoard-sovereigns, napoleons and other gold coins-was believed to be kept at Westbourne; Di herself had heard Sir Harry speak of his disdain of paper money, which could lose value overnight. At the beginning of the war, British citizens were ordered to turn in any gold, whether coins or bullion, a request Oakes largely ignored.
“Daniel carried some interesting rumors to me,” she said, referring to the young man who piloted the launch that carried me, and other guests at Shangri La, back and forth from Hog Island to Nassau.
“Such as?”
“Some gold coins are turning up on the out islands. Eleuthera-Abaco.”
“Isn’t there…pirate treasure around here? I mean, wouldn’t doubloons and such just naturally turn up from time to time?”
“Yes…but these are said to be newer coins than that.”
“Would Daniel talk to me about this?”
“Perhaps. But he doesn’t trust outsiders. He trusts me, though. Why?”
“I’d like to get ahold of one of those coins. Talk to somebody who has one.”
“I don’t know, Nate…that could be a little dicey.”
“See what you can do, Di. But you said ‘rumors’-plural.”
She sighed, folded her arms, covering her breasts, somewhat; there was a lot to cover. “I kind of hate to get into this…it seems disrespectful of Nancy’s late father….”
“Force yourself.”
She rolled her eyes; smirked. “Okay. Old Harry had something of a…reputation.”
“A reputation.”
“Yes. I never witnessed it myself-he was never anything but a gentleman around me…but there are those who swear Sir Harry was a horny old goat.”
“What?”
She nodded, smirking again. “There may a large group of suspects you haven’t even touched upon yet: cuckolds.”
The notion of an army of betrayed husbands converging in Sir Harry’s bedchamber with torches seemed more than a little absurd.
“Your two rumors,” I said, smirking back at her, “seem somewhat at odds, don’t they? Is it voodoo, or some cheating wife’s hubby?”
“Maybe both.”
“Oh, come on, Di…”
She gave me a hard, no-kidding look. “There were rumors that when Eunice was out of town, Harry would go down to the straw market and find some native wench who’d like to make a year’s wages in an evening. In which case, the voodoo-like killing begins to make sense.”
“You mean, sprinkling feathers on the burning body was ritualistic repayment by some native for Sir Harry’s committing adultery with his woman?”
“That is one rumor going around Nassau, yes. If indeed that’s true, then that native-poor, deluded, crazed, vengeance-seeking soul or not-might have remembered the stories about gold coins, searched the house, found them, and made off with them.”
“There were no signs of ransacking….”
Her wicked little smile settled on one side of her face. “Does that preclude burglary, Detective Heller? And who was there to stop such a leisurely search? If you’re correct about Harold Christie, he was sleeping…or something…with Effie Henneage at the time.”
There could have been something to what Di was saying.
So I did some follow-up of my own. A conversation with Daniel-a shy kid barely twenty-confirmed everything she’d told me, but in a halting, mumbling manner that brought nothing new to the table.
De Marigny, in his cell, paced nervously, smoking a Gauloise, deriding the notion that Sir Harry was a ladies’ man.
“The idea of that old prude chasing women is almost blasphemous,” Freddie said. “In matters of sex, the old boy was positively puritanical. That’s the very thing we were always scrapping about! My loose morals, and the notion that I might be ‘raping’ his daughter, who happened to be my wife.”
“A lot of people talk puritan,” I said, “and behave heathen.”
“True,” Freddie admitted. “But Sir Harry? Positively unthinkable.”
On the other hand, de Marigny had indeed heard about the gold coin collection, though he’d never seen it.
“Neither has Nancy,” he said. “It never occurred to me that this might have been the motive. Hell-I should have said something before….”