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

by Noel Hynd

  But it didn’t always work out that way.

  In terms of my own professional success, it had taken me damned close to a quarter of a century, from scrounging a job in Boston in 1919 looking at corpses in tenement apartments to being a best-selling author living on Park Avenue in 1943 to being sent to cover a high-profile murder case in Nassau.

  There were many reasons that my editors in New York chose me to cover the Sir Harry Oakes case. I was no stranger to crime, even the most brutal ones. I had been working crime beats for twenty-five years. I was also no stranger to some nasty people. I’d been roughed up and threatened. Loaded guns had been pointed at me by people who were ready to pull the trigger. It was part of the job.

  I also had dealt with people of wealth and influence, some of whom had been born to it and others who had earned it. Added into the equation, I was also very skeptical about people who had been born with money. And I wasn’t easily intimated. Not by anyone.

  In terms of my being sent to Nassau on the Sir Harry Oakes case, let’s face it: it was a perfect fit.

  CHAPTER 7

  The arrest of Alfred de Marigny did nothing to calm the island. To the contrary, it turned Nassau onto a sharper edge than it had already been on. One could feel a change on the streets. There was a new tension and it was heavily racial, even though de Marigny was white. There was also an additional presence of soldiers and police.

  I asked questions and began to hear several accounts of the events that had marked 1942. Several white Bahamians told me that the black people had “gotten out of hand” and “had to be put back in their place.” From the accounts that I was getting, the ungrateful black population had risen for no reason to bite the hands of the kindly wealthy people who fed them.

  I wasn’t any Marxist, but I wasn’t buying that explanation. I went over to the local newspaper, The Nassau Tribune. I reviewed the front pages of the previous summer. There had been some “labor disturbances” involving work at the local airport. There were pictures of angry black crowds in the main streets being confronted by white policeman and white soldiers. Nowhere could I find an explanation of what had started the trouble.

  I put the newspapers away. When I was alone with the front desk librarian, a white woman, I asked about the disturbances. She looked at me as if I had just arrived from outer space. “You’re American?” she asked.

  “I’m American,” I said.

  “Then don’t come here and cause trouble,” she said.

  She got up and left. I knew better than to ask the man who replaced her at the desk.

  I wandered back to the British Colonial Hotel, using my pocket handkerchief to mop the sweat from my forehead. It was already ninety-five degrees, judging by a thermometer on the front of a grocery store. The humidity matched.

  I found my new best friend Felix, the taxi driver, at the hack stand near the hotel. “Busy?” I asked.

  “Not for you, sir,” he said.

  I asked him to show me around the island.

  “What do you want to see, sir?” he asked.

  “How about you just drive me around?” I said. “We can chat.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He held the door open to the rear seat of his richly dented ’36 Hudson. I climbed in. He stepped around to the driver’s side and started his engine.

  “Where would you like to go?” he asked.

  “Oh, show me the town. Then maybe some shoreline. Beaches. Ocean air, know what I mean? We can both cool off a little.”

  “Yes, sir. Very good, sir,” he said.

  He drove me around Nassau. He gave me the official tourist showcase. I listened patiently and quietly. He fed me the official lines for the tourists.

  Finally, “May I ask you something, Felix?” I asked.

  “Of course, sir.”

  “How does everyone feel about having the former King of England here as your Crown Governor?”

  There was a pause.

  “We are very proud of having the Duke and Duchess here, sir,” he said.

  His eyes were upon me via the rearview mirror. He turned off Bay Street and onto West Street.

  I smiled. “Oh, come on,” I finally said.

  “We are deeply honored by the Duke’s presence and leadership, sir,” he said.

  “Sure,” I answered.

  He looked back to the road and continued farther.

  “Let’s find some cooler air, Felix,” I said. “Maybe the shoreline.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Maybe the heat was pushing me forward, but there was a small protocol here that was uncomfortable for me. In my book, one man was as good as another.

  “You don’t need to call me, ‘sir,’ Felix,” I said. “I’m an ordinary man, same as you. You might think I’m a wealthy American, and I’ve done okay. But my parents were immigrants from Scotland. My father was a potter and my first job was at age eleven bringing buckets of water to a bunch of nasty Italian laborers on a construction site in Trenton, New Jersey. I’d appreciate it if you’d call me by my first name. It’s ‘Alan.’”

  He tried to suppress a smile, but wasn’t able. I reached across the back of the front seat and offered a handshake. He accepted it.

  “Thank you, Mr. Alan,” he said, taking my suggestion halfway.

  We passed the Fort Montagu Hotel. I noted an unusual presence of British soldiers in front of and around the building. A few minutes later we were on a sparsely populated beach road. Out of nowhere, a convoy of British army vehicles passed us, heading in the opposite direction. I counted seven vehicles, including a command Jeep at the front.

  I grabbed the moment.

  “What happened here last summer, Felix?” I asked. “Tell me. I’ll keep it between us.”

  “What do you mean, Mr. Alan?”

  “The demonstrations. The labor problems,” I said. I pulled an American twenty-dollar bill from my wallet and passed it across to the front seat. He accepted it.

  There was a long pause, then he unloaded.

  “All right. I will tell you,” he said.

  There had been a construction project at the local airfield, the same one as where I had landed, the previous summer. Non-white Bahamian laborers had been employed at a stingy four shillings a day to fulfill a government contract to enlarge the landing strip. This way, newly minted warplanes from American factories could land. Some troublemaker leaked to the workers the information that dozens of white Americans working on the same job were being paid eighty shillings a day, twenty times the wage for a non-white worker.

  For some reason, the exploited blacks took violent offence at being paid five percent of what white Americans were paid. They rioted.

  “And,” said Felix with a deep laugh, “it was a hell of a great riot, man.”

  The demonstrators overturned buses and threw rocks through windows on Bay Street. They set fire to cars. They smashed open the private liquor shops near the expensive whites-only hotels and they angrily drank themselves into an even greater and more uncontrolled fury.

  A rambling seething mob closed in the seat of the government. White residents fled. Others, who couldn’t get out of the Bay Street shopping district fast enough, pulled up the steps and stood nervously on their second-floor promenades with shotguns.

  The rioters cleaned out the shops. They were armed with sharpened machetes, their onetime tools for clearing the underbrush at the expanded airfields.

  They pillaged everything in sight. The rioting continued into a second day. The Duke of Windsor, making a rare decision, mobilized a garrison of British troops stationed at the Fort Montagu Hotel. These troops were ostensibly Windsor’s private security detail, but they arrived in town in battle gear and with fixed bayonets. The white soldiers formed fighting squares and confronted the rampaging black mobs. The soldiers showed every intention of being anxious to spill some blood.

  For several long hours, a stand-off existed on the streets. Then, toward evening, cooler heads prevailed. The demonstration
ebbed and the rioters dispersed.

  The disturbances had caused close to a million dollars of damage and financial losses for the merchants of Bay Street. But something even more valuable was lost also by the white power structure.

  For generations, Bahamian blacks had apparently accepted a subservience based in part on their background as the descendants of freed slaves. But now, for the first time since the islands had first been settled, the social structure had been challenged. The British Army had restored surface order, but the island had not forgotten.

  The Duke had put the arm on the Exchequer back in London and decreed that the laborers would now receive a whopping five shillings a day, plus a free lunch each day. Snarling, still at bayonet point, the airport laborers returned to work, hacking at stubborn underbrush all day in the blazing sun. They also got to keep everything that they had ripped out of the posh stores.

  They had scored a victory—a lawless one, but a victory. The white power structure shuddered at the thought of the black mobs ever getting out of control again. It was common currency that one more good reason to riot, real or imagined, would set off the mobs once again.

  Hence now when Count Alfred de Marigny was arrested, the Duke took what he felt was a wise precaution. He again had called out his garrison of soldiers and stationed them in town as peacekeepers. Nassau was essentially under martial law. The convoy of soldiers and armaments that had passed Felix and me on its way into the capital had been part of that armed reinforcement.

  The afternoon was waning, but it was still plenty hot. I asked Felix if there was a place where we could get some ocean breeze and wait for the day to cool down.

  “I know a place, Mr. Alan.”

  Felix drove me to a strip of beach which I guessed was ten miles west of Nassau. There were native kids playing on it and a few people swimming, some spear fishing, presumably for dinner. There was a small refreshment stand. Its owner knew Felix and waved to him. Felix returned the wave.

  “Does your friend have cold drinks?” I asked.

  “He does, Mr. Alan.”

  “Let’s have some Cokes,” I said. “I’m buying.”

  “How long do you plan to be in Nassau?” he asked as we walked toward the small wooden stand. It was shaded by a canvas awning and there were battered metal chairs.

  “A few weeks,” I said.

  “And you’ll be traveling around the island? Different places?”

  “Probably.”

  “Then I wish to show you something, Mr. Alan,” he said. “May I?”

  “Of course.”

  Felix tapped my arm and pointed. We changed directions. “Come look,” he said. “But do not touch. Or stand too close. Breathe lightly, Mr. Alan.”

  He beckoned me to a nearby grove of trees. I thought he was going to confide something to me about the case I was there to investigate. I was wrong. It started out as what seemed to be a horticultural tip, but turned into more.

  Several of the trees were marked with red X’s. Someone had come along and slashed them with crisscrossed strokes of paint. Felix led me to within fifty feet then held out his sturdy brown arm and halted my progress. Before us stood a row of trees, each maybe twenty to forty feet high. The shrubbery was pleasant enough to look at, a vibrant green, beachy in its way. Some were laden with tempting looking small greenish-yellow fruits that looked not unlike apples. The larger trees had reddish-greyish bark, small greenish-yellow flowers, and shiny green leaves. The leaves were finely serrated or toothed. The grove swept down to the shore.

  “Manchineel trees,” he said.

  “So?”

  “The fruit might tempt you,” he said. “The red X’s are your only warning. Do not eat the fruit. Do not touch it. You might want to rest your hand on the trunk, or touch a branch. Do not touch the tree trunk or any branches. Please, my good friend, do not stand under or even near the tree for any length of time whatsoever. Do not touch your eyes while near the tree. If you want to slowly but firmly back away from this tree, you would not find any argument from any botanist who has studied it.”

  “Poisonous?” I asked.

  “Very. After all, it is rumored to have killed the famed explorer, Juan Ponce de Leon.”

  Others tress were marked with a painted red band a few feet above the ground. A few of the younger trees were unmarked.

  “In the old days, Bahamians were known to poison the water supply of their enemies with Manchineel leaves. Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León was struck by an arrow that had been poisoned with manchineel sap during battle with the Calusa in Florida, He died thereafter. Ever since, the Spanish speaking people on the islands call it la manzanilla de la muerte,” Felix said. “The apple of death. Or the arbol de la muerte. The tree of death.”

  “I guess what was bad for Ponce de Leon would be equally bad for me,” I said.

  “Very so, Mr. Alan,” he said.

  “Thank you for showing me, Felix,” I said. “You’re a smart young man. How do you know so much?”

  “I read a lot.”

  “It shows. Good for you.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  He led me back to the refreshment stand. Felix introduced me to his friend, whose name was Andrew, a trim agile black man in his thirties. We sat indoors. There was a big lazy ceiling fan that circulated the air. It wasn’t cool, but it was tolerable, a relief. There was a big red Coca-Cola cooler packed with ice where Andrew kept his stock. We drank iced soft drinks. We each ate a cold homemade chicken patty, which Andrew sold to us.

  Felix and I chatted. He seemed to relax more. I edged to things I had already seen about which I wanted to know more.

  “All those soldiers that we saw,” I asked. “Are they all billeted at the Hotel Montagu?”

  “No, Mr. Alan. There’s a British fort out of town. It’s off limits to people of color. I can’t show you.”

  “I don’t need to see the fort,” I said. “I’m curious about all the troops at the hotel.”

  “Those are guards.”

  “What are they guarding?” I asked.

  “The guards are for the Duke of Windsor. They’re billeted at the Fort Montagu, Mr. Alan.”

  “But the Duke has his own official residence, doesn’t he?” I asked.

  “The Duke fears that the Germans will come to Nassau to kidnap him.”

  “Huh? They’re just going to march right in and grab him?” I scoffed.

  “That’s what His Highness thinks,” Felix said.

  “I think his Highness might be flattering himself,” I said.

  Felix laughed. “U-boats, Mr. Alan,” he said, adding some seriousness. He indicated the water beyond the refreshment stand. “Our fishermen see periscopes all the time. My brother was on a skiff the other Tuesday. Saw a hefty sixteen feet of pipe watching from half a knot, about a mile off-shore. Dangerous out there, Mr. Alan. Never know.”

  “Ah,” I said. “I see.”

  Everyone knew about the Duchess of Windsor’s extreme terror over airplanes. In April 1916, the Duchess had met her first husband, Earl Winfield Spencer, Jr., a U.S. Navy aviator, at Pensacola, Florida, while visiting a cousin. It was at this time that Wallis Simpson, the future Duchess, witnessed two airplane crashes two weeks apart, resulting in a lifelong fear of flying. According to current island lore, the Duke had a similarly visceral dislike of submerging in a submarine.

  Further scuttlebutt that was all over the smarter circles but which never appeared in any newspaper had it that the one-time king of England and his twice-divorced wife may have been guilty of collaborating with the Nazis in the summer of 1940. This would have been as a prelude to Hitler returning him to the throne as a “puppet king” in the wake of the expected German victory over the British in 1940 or 1941. Like many other sure bets of history, this one had never happened, either.

  “Why would they kidnap the Duke?” I asked.

  “Hess, Mr. Alan. That’s what the Duke thinks. The Duke thinks the Germans would abduct him, take him t
o Germany and ransom him for Rudolf Hess.”

  I was quiet as I listened.

  Hess, Hitler’s batty Deputy Fuhrer, had swiped a Messerschmitt and landed in Scotland in May of 1941. Hess was still in the United Kingdom, still locked up in the tower of London, if rumors could be believed.

  I angled. “That’s an actual piece of intelligence or it’s what Windsor thinks?” I asked.

  “It’s what we hear,” Felix said. He made a gesture with his hand imitating idle chatter and loose talk, loose jaws. His brown eyes danced. Then he raised a finger and put it to his lips in the best I-never-said-it-and-don’t-repeat-it gesture.

  “So, it’s what your friends who work in good places overhear?” I said.

  A pause, then, “Very correct, Mr. Alan,” he said. “That could be so.”

  I smiled in response. “Well, I can see how a former king might not take too kindly to the prospect of being captured,” I said, “much less the rigors of a long submarine trip. It would make all those cockroaches and termites in the governor’s mansion look good in comparison, wouldn’t it?”

  Felix gave me a long chuckle. “Yes, Mr. Alan. Very good and very correct, my friend.”

  When the Duke and Duchess of Windsor had first arrived in Nassau, their first concern had been the state of their own would-be residence, named Government House. The building dated back at least a hundred years, was rickety and infested with termites, mice and roaches the size of small birds. The furnishings were faded and shabby, dating from the Victorian era. Windows were cracked, broken and grimy. After a week of swatting insects, The Duke and Duchess hired exterminators, carpenters, and painters. Then they fled.

  The Duke wished to take an extended vacation to a cattle ranch he owned in Alberta, Canada. But the British government in London, busy ducking Hitler’s bombs and preparing for a possible land invasion, was chilly to the Duke’s wishes. Departure for Canada would create the appearance that the royal couple were abandoning the Bahamas within weeks of accepting the post. The Duke and Duchess ultimately accepted the hospitality of Harry Oakes, who hosted the royal couple at his mansion, Westbourne, in Nassau.