Ashes From A Burning Corpse (An American True Crime Reporter in the 20th Century Book 3)

by Noel Hynd

  At the time of his murder, the rumors insisted, Oakes had been concentrating on some way to see that de Marigny would never lay hands on any of his two hundred million dollars. This project, naturally, did nothing to inspire the Count with affection for his father-in-law. The Count and Oakes had not been on speaking terms for several months, according to local gossip. At the time of the murder, de Marigny was living in a cottage about five miles from Westbourne. In another part of the island, he had a profitable farm where he raised chickens.

  I asked some questions. I had learned long ago to never believe the official version of anything, so I wanted to know what people were saying on the street. I got an earful pretty fast.

  De Marigny, despite his dubious title, was more a man of the people than most other white residents. At his chicken farm, he employed many black laborers. He had the reputation for treating them fairly. The non-white population also viewed him as a fellow outsider because it was obvious he was not as English as much of the other ruling class.

  Equally, he was not a favorite of the white power structure. He was, in fact, a thorn in the side of the staid white power structure. He had from time to time chided the wealthy white Bahamians on their “pirate mentality,” alluding to the fact that very few of them had ever made any significant money on their own, and that most of them were indeed descended from wealthy pirates. Captain Morgan and Blackbeard had all been successful local pirates, as had a couple of notorious females named Mary Read and the Irishwoman, Anne Bonney, who made Nassau their home port in the early Seventeen Hundreds when the Bahamas were known as The Republic of Pirates.

  While de Marigny had a point, he was only partially correct. The white residents of the Bahamas were mostly descendants of the British settlers in North America who had been loyal to the Crown during the Revolutionary War. After Washington’s victory at Yorktown in 1781, these settlers had moved south to the Bahamas, bringing slaves or other non-white household retainers with them. These old-line Bahamians had also been joined by freed or runaway slaves fleeing the American south after the civil war. And here in the Bahamas, the two groups, whites and non-whites, re-established themselves in much the same social relationship: servant and master.

  De Marigny seemed at odds with the island. He was too slick, “too French,” the Anglo-white people said in their braying colonial accents, and only became an English subject when Great Britain took over the partial administration rule of Mauritius from France in the 1930’s. He drove around New Providence, the eighty-square mile island where Nassau was located, in a flashy new Lincoln imported from the United States. Nobody did malaise and nonchalance like a Frenchman, and most of the Anglo locals didn’t care for it.

  In stores, at the yacht clubs, at the bars of the Hotel George or the British Colonial he was always the most debonair man in the room. Often, before marrying Nancy Oakes, he had been found in the company of beautiful females imported from America or France.

  De Marigny had also made a powerful enemy on the island: The Duke of Windsor. Exactly when the two men developed bad blood between them was unclear, but there was plenty of it. It probably began when they had first laid eyes on each other, shortly after Windsor’s arrival in 1940. It continued with some perceived snubs by de Marigny aimed at the Duchess, followed by retaliatory snubs in which the royal couple avoided any social events planned by the Count. Then there was some ongoing petty stuff, one episode involving treatment of some Frenchmen in the Bahamas who were escapees from Devil’s Island, another involving de Marigny refusing to sell a prized bottle of cognac to Windsor, and another involving de Marigny’s desire to get a travel visa for a German friend, the application for which Windsor personally nixed. Eventually, the ex-King—or the “moth-eaten prince,” as the New York Mirror now called him—had described de Marigny as, “an unscrupulous adventurer with an evil reputation for immoral conduct with young girls.” Heaven forbid!

  Thus, was it any surprise when the two American detectives, brought in specially by the Governor, took a meeting on arrival with the Duke and then quickly focused on de Marigny as their chief suspect, as if instructed to do so?

  De Marigny’s guilt thus agreed on, the next question centered on his motive.

  The two Miami cops, pondering what they were hearing about de Marigny from the Duke, became excited. But not nearly so excited as when they heard about a remark the Count had made the morning the news of the murder spread through Nassau. “It’s about time that somebody killed the old bastard,” the Count had muttered to a local man who had informed him that Sir Harry had been murdered.

  From that moment forward, Count Alfred de Marigny’s goose was in the oven.

  CHAPTER 5

  If de Marigny’s goose was cooking, it didn’t take Melchen and Barker long to turn up the heat, pulling the lapdog local cops along with them. That next afternoon, my fourth in Nassau, Melchen and Barker and a couple of Nassau cops leaned on the Count.

  “Why don’t you come clean and tell us what you know about the murder?” Melchen asked.

  “That won’t take long. I don’t know anything,” de Marigny answered. “Why would I?”

  “Where were you between two thirty and five that morning?” Barker asked.

  “Same as you,” said de Marigny. “Home. Asleep.”

  One of the cops noticed that the hair on the Count’s hands looked singed. De Marigny was asked to roll up his shirt sleeves. When he did, it was apparent that the hair on his arms was singed, too. The Count had a little pointed beard of the type that some local dolls considered cute. That, too, was singed at the point. Considering the bonfire that had taken place in the deceased’s bedroom, this discovery was not good news for Monsieur de Marigny.

  Barker pressed on. Would de Marigny be kind enough to explain how he had come to get his hands, arms, and beard singed? And while he was at it, Barker pressed, would he oblige with an alibi that could be corroborated for his whereabouts during the vital time span?

  De Marigny favored the cops with what one of them later described as a sneer. But he would be glad to explain everything so long as they were so damned insistent.

  This, then, was how De Marigny explained:

  Early on the evening before the murder, de Marigny, not having been invited to Sir Harry’s going-away party, was busy preparing to throw a small party of his own. He and a house guest of his, a thirtyish French marquis by the name of Maxim Louis Georges de VisdelouGuimbeau, a friend from their native island in the Indian Ocean, were going to have a quiet dinner for a few friends. Two of the guests were ladies who were married to Englishmen training in Nassau for the Royal Air Force.

  De Marigny’s bride, the former Nancy Oakes, was conveniently in the United States with her mother and the other Oakes children.

  The party was to be held on the lawn behind the de Marigny cottage. The Count went out and lit four hurricane lamps, and in the process, he singed the point of his beard and the hair on the backs of both hands and both forearms, since he was ambidextrous. But after de Marigny lit the lamps, he noticed the mosquitoes were particularly bad, and decided to entertain indoors.

  Three guests remained after midnight: the two wives of the R.A.F. pilots and a gorgeous young blonde usherette at the local Savoy movie theater, Betty Roberts. The Count’s friend, the Marquis, was attentive to Miss Roberts who, any way one looked at her, was well worth attention.

  The five of them sat around talking and drinking until ten minutes after one. The fliers’ wives said they must be going. De Marigny offered to drive them home. The Count had three cars: a Lincoln, a Packard, and a Chevrolet. He pulled the rumbling Chevy out of a garage behind the cottage and drove off with the fliers’ wives, conveniently leaving Miss Roberts and the Marquis alone in the cottage. The aviators’ wives were staying a ten-minute drive from de Marigny’s cottage and not far from Westbourne.

  The Count had to pass Westbourne to take them to where they were staying. As they passed the Oakes property, de Marigny recalled to the
Miami police, that the two ladies noticed that the estate was in total darkness.

  De Marigny dropped the women at their door, then returned to his cottage, getting back around one thirty or a little later, some twenty or twenty-five minutes after he had left.

  The Marquis and the blonde were nowhere in sight.

  The Marquis owned a black male Persian cat, a very intelligent animal that the Count had given him. The cat was roaming around, having left the Marquis’ rooms, where it usually stayed either of its own accord or by request. The Count retired to his own apartment, but the cat followed him in and began to annoy him. It continued to annoy him, and at three in the morning Count knocked on the door of the Marquis’ apartment and asked him to keep the cat.

  Miss Roberts was still there. Marquis explained that he had been taking a little nap and that he was now going to drive the girl back to the hotel where she was staying.

  De Marigny didn’t bat a Gallic eyelash. “Use the Chevrolet,” said the Count. “It’s in the driveway.”

  That was about three thirty, de Marigny recounted. The Marquis returned shortly after four o’clock, He left the Chevy at the cottage, alongside a door leading to a flight of stairs to the second floor.

  “That’s what happened. That’s where I was when Sir Harry was murdered,” de Marigny concluded to the police. “And the Marquis will back me up.”

  But the Marquis didn’t back him up. Not entirely, anyway.

  The Marquis didn’t mention the blonde at all in accounting for the previous night. He said that Miss Roberts had departed by herself. He added that de Marigny had come in around one thirty, after taking the two ladies home, and that such had been the last he had seen of him until he saw him driving away in the Chevrolet around seven in the morning. Since the murder had been committed between two thirty and five o’clock, that left de Marigny with no alibi whatever for the important window of time during which Sir Harry was snuffed.

  That, plus the fact that his hands, forearms, and beard were singed, looked very bad.

  There are four different kinds or degrees of burned hair. In the first stage, the hair becomes more brilliant than usual. This is caused by the natural oils coming to the surface. The second stage causes the hair to curl. In the third stage, the tip of the hair, thinner than the base, crusts while the part near the base becomes either curly or brilliant. The fourth stage, caused by intense heat, causes the hair to burn, leaving only a carbon ash.

  The Count had all four degrees on his beard, hands, and forearms. By way of buttressing his claim that his singed hair had come about under noncriminal circumstances, de Marigny said he could have acquired some of the burns while working in scalding water at his chicken farm.

  The cops pointed out that that would hardly account for the burned hair on his beard. The Count seemed stumped, but only for a moment. Brightening up, he said he had had the Van Dyke singed by a barber. Just what barber? And when had the singeing been done to the beard?

  De Marigny couldn’t recall. He was a busy man, he said immodestly, what with one thing and another, and he didn’t keep an account of visits to barbers.

  A local cop, a Lieutenant John Douglas, was assigned to keep an eye on the Count, twenty-four hours a day, from this point on.

  The Miami cops came right back at de Marigny. They had talked with every barber in Nassau and none of the tonsorial artists recalled putting fire to the Count’s cute beard.

  “This begins to look pretty bad for you,” said Captain Melchen, with a heavy gift of understatement. The Count was in no position to argue.

  In the meantime, Westbourne was crawling with police. The place had dried out from the storm and the July humidity that came with it. Captain Barker got busy dusting for fingerprints in and around the murder chamber on the second floor.

  De Marigny was told to sit in a drawing room on the first floor to await the attention of the cops. Lieutenant Douglas, the man assigned to keep an eye on the Count, was sticking with it except, of course, to make an occasional trip to a bathroom and get the Count an occasional glass of water in deference to the heat. The Count had to go to the bathroom occasionally, too. Aside from that, the two men chatted amiably.

  There was a large five-paneled folding Chinese screen in the murder chamber, the kind used occasionally as a room divider. Sir Harry had frequently used this screen close to his bed to protect himself from drafts. It had been put to such use the night of the murder. The screen, made of paper with a floral design, was smudged with smoke from the fire in the room.

  In the afternoon, Captain Barker escorted de Marigny to a different room on the second floor and fingerprinted him. Soon thereafter, the Captain announced that a print of the little finger of de Marigny’s right hand had been found on the screen in Sir Harry’s room.

  The Captain explained that he had removed the print from the screen by means of applying a strip of Scotch tape to it and then transferring the print from the Scotch tape to a piece of portable surface. After removing the print from the screen, the Captain further explained, he circled with a pencil the approximate spot from which he had removed the print. Things were beginning to heat up for de Marigny, who was now a lot less talkative.

  The two Miami detectives openly put forth the notion that de Marigny had murdered his father-in-law. He could have done it, they decided, out of sheer hatred for Sir Harry, or he could have done it to protect his interests in the Oakes estate before Sir Harry completed legal steps to make sure that his son-in-law would never get a pound of his money.

  The Miami cops could not find the murder weapon, a somewhat important piece of evidence in a homicide. They were not even certain what kind of lethal instrument had been used. But it didn’t matter. The Miami boys went before Police Superintendent Colonel Erskine-Lindop and quickly placed their findings before him.

  Colonel Erskine-Lindop ordered Count Marie Alfred Fouquereaux de Marigny arrested for the murder of Sir Harry Oakes in the name of His Majesty, the King, the Duke of Windsor’s stammering younger brother. Confronted with the accumulated evidence against him, de Marigny made a simple statement to the police.

  “I didn’t do it,” he said.

  Nonetheless, de Marigny was locked up tight in Nassau’s rickety and fetid old jail. His cell was something out of the Middle Ages: narrow and low-ceilinged, it barely contained him. There was a heavy door, an overhead light that remained on at all hours, a camp cot with a short mattress, and a dented aluminum bucket to serve as a toilet. At this moment, the Count finally understood the gravity of his situation.

  There were only two ways out of his current predicament: the charges against him could be dismissed, or he could be led to the gallows to be executed for murdering his father-in-law.

  Nancy Oakes returned to Nassau. The police permitted her to talk with her husband in the jailhouse. He convinced her of his innocence. It was a good thing, for she was the last person of influence who could help him.

  CHAPTER 6

  There was no way in the world that I could ever have stayed away from the Oakes case.

  My career as a writer began as a reporter. In 1920 I was hired by The Boston Post at the age of seventeen. On a Monday, they gave me a note pad, the phone numbers of the city editors, and sent me out on the street. They told me to make my own luck or I’d be fired by Friday. I started out on police beats. On my first week, I covered four crimes. All four got into print. So, I could stay for a second week. I kept getting in print so The Boston Post gave me a regular job. It was official: I was a crime reporter, the youngest one in the city. At the time, The Boston Post was a big deal, the largest selling paper in New England.

  I dealt with the lowest of the low in a metropolis which in the 1920’s had no limits to the depth if its depravity. I covered rapes and stabbings, bank robberies and street stick-ups. Bootlegging. Domestic assaults. Arsons. Bank frauds. Gambling dens. Prostitution. Opium deaths in Chinatown. Mob stuff. Shootings. Strangulations. There was no shortage of horrible stuff that p
eople wanted to read about. Somedays I hit a half dozen or more crime scenes. Almost everyone I talked to had a weapon. Almost everywhere I went there was blood.

  The homicides were a category by themselves. I wasn’t a young man prone to violence, as many were, particularly in the years after the Great War. But I had no trouble writing about violence. My editors and I discovered I even had a certain flare for it. My bosses started to give me the most horrifying murders in the tenements and on the streets of Boston and I gave them juicy reports. It worked out just fine. I was happy to have a job. I was sending money home to help my parents, who lived in Trenton, New Jersey. They were immigrants from Dunfermline, Scotland, an old gray town perched on the high ground three miles above the northern shore of the Firth of Forth.

  In the late summer of 1920, The Boston Post bumped me up a few notches and threw me and an army of other writers on a major case: a then-unknown North End swindler named Carlo Pietro Giovanni Guglielmo Tebaldo Ponzi, better known locally as Charles Ponzi. The Ponzi case was bigger than any one reporter or any team of reporters. But I was on it. I did good work. I got some interviews, including with the swindler himself. I kept getting promoted and kept getting my by-line in print. I covered Charlie Ponzi through his trial and conviction.