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

by Noel Hynd

  Ray lit a cigarette. I joined him.

  “You know,” I continued, “I’m not a college guy. I didn’t finish eighth grade. Did you know that? My father told me to quit school and work. He was an ignorant man who had no use for education. What I know is what I’ve learned. I’ve read books. I have a huge library back in Manhattan. I’d like to show it to you someday. To some degree I think a man’s profession finds him. Ray, yours found you in San Francisco. The quake opened the opportunity. Investigation suited you. You excel at it. But there’s something to me that’s fascinating about the mind of a criminal. I’m a bit like the bookish little man who lives in an attic, never travels, but writes adventures about the South Sea Islands. Or the old lady spinster who writes great romances. Murder, it’s something I would never do. But it fascinates me: the mindset, the commission of the crime. The attempt to get away with it, frequently successful, sometimes not.”

  “A parallel reality. A fantasy world,” Ray suggested as he sipped.

  “You could call it that,” I said.

  “The study of murder is the study of the human heart at its coldest strangest moments,” Keeler said. “That’s what Edmond Pearson wrote in The New Yorker twenty years ago. Almost every major writer has investigated homicide. Shakespeare. Balzac. Fitzgerald. Tolstoy. Dostoyevsky. Dickens. I think what we’re all looking for is a way to throw some light on the darkest places of the human soul.”

  “Did you know an Englishman wrote the first critical essay on the subject?” Schindler volunteered. “Thomas de Quincey. It was called, On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts. Eighteen twenties, I believe.”

  “De Quincey was also an opium eater, if I recall, Ray,” I said.

  “I have no doubts that he was. Me. I’ll stick to whiskey,” O’Neil said.

  “Cheers,” Keeler said. He lifted his shot glass. I lifted mine. We clicked them.

  Dinner concluded shortly before ten p.m. Schindler paid for all of us, or maybe Nancy de Marigny did. It was vague.

  “Thank you, Mr. Schindler,” Juanita said, as we stood and assembled ourselves.

  “You’re welcome,” he answered.

  She cleared the table and left us. We started toward the door.

  “Aren’t you afraid that you’re getting a little too well known in Nassau?” I asked.

  “Too well known? Oh, hell, no! That’s just the way I want it,” Ray said, speaking softly.

  There was a big console radio near the bar. It was tuned to a live radio show from Mexico City. It was enough to cover our conversation.

  “Many people quietly hate the government and the power structure in Nassau,” Ray said. “De Marigny also has friends. A lot of the colored like him a hell of a lot more than the Crown. Somebody in this place is going to resent the way the deck is being stacked against the Frenchman. I’m hoping that person will eventually contact me on the sly. So, I stay accessible. Visible.”

  I nodded.

  “We both work the same way,” I said. “From the ground up.”

  CHAPTER 12

  In the days that followed, Schindler studied a copy of the Crown’s picture of de Marigny’s fingerprint that had been developed by Barker, the Miami cop. Ray noticed that the print had been developed against a background of small circles. The circles looked to Schindler as if they had come from a glass surface rather than a paper one. According to the official investigation, the print had been taken from the dislodged and scorched Chinese screen in the murder room. The screen was made from a light Asian wood like bamboo, and decorated with paper.

  Schindler showed the fingerprint photograph to Professor Keeler and Captain O’Neil.

  “There’s not one chance in ten million,” said Keeler, “that this print came from that screen.”

  O’Neil agreed.

  Just to make sure, Keeler took a photograph of that part of the screen where Barker, the Miami cop, said he had developed the Count’s print. Sometimes a photo would reveal something not visible to the naked eye. But not in this case.

  “Bring me a pile of Bibles,” Keeler said to Schindler, “and I’ll swear on them that that print did not come from this screen.”

  So far as Schindler could learn, that fingerprint remained the most important piece of physical evidence that the Crown had against the Count. Schindler had a couple of Scotches on that. “What about other fingerprints?” asked Captain O’Neil.

  “Good question,” Schindler answered.

  Captain O’Neil’s jaw dropped when Schindler explained how the Nassau police had conducted their forensic inquiries.

  The day the murder was discovered, and the following day, Ray explained, some busybody had washed the walls of the murder room, thus removing fingerprints and hand prints. The phone directory in Sir Harry’s bed chamber had not been removed, and it still had blood splotches all over it. But prior to Schindler’s arrival to begin his probe, dozens of persons had picked up the phonebook, so it was not possible to get a fingerprint that meant anything.

  Schindler, who had been gathering information via casual throwaway questions as he went along, had learned that when the Nassau police had first arrived on the murder scene they had found a loaded revolver lying on top of a pile of bills on a dresser. The weapon had since vanished. From all Schindler could learn, Sir Harry had not until recently owned a revolver. This begged the question: from whom had Harry obtained the weapon? And why? Handguns were not easy to come by in the British colonies. Schindler asked if he could see the gun so that he could trace its origin. But an official in the police department informed him that the weapon had been destroyed.

  “Keeping it would only have confused the whole investigation. After all,” the official explained, “Sir Harry was not shot.”

  “Confused the whole investigation, indeed!” snarled Schindler.

  “And ‘not shot’?” I said.

  Ray shrugged. So far, the Crown had not offered an official explanation as to exactly how Oakes had been murdered. Barker and Melchen had spun a sordid tale in private to Nancy Oakes, but nothing official had been forthcoming.

  Schindler figured Oakes might have carried the gun as part of his personal equipment. If that were so, it might indicate that the Baronet had had some potent reason to fear for his personal safety, since he had still been a good man with his fists. Had Oakes feared somebody—man or woman—enough to think that his life was in immediate danger?

  If so, who? Schindler would have paid a high price for that gun. He could have run down its origin from its serial number. He could have established where and when and under what conditions Oakes had come into possession of it. If Oakes had acquired it recently, that would suggest a specific threat of recent origin.

  It would have been very easy for anyone to reach Sir Harry’s bed the night he was murdered. The violent rain and windstorm with lightning and thunder blasted away most of the night. Outside stairs led to the upper porches that practically surrounded the house. All one had to do was walk upstairs and open the door. No one could have heard an approach and the doors were not usually locked. There were also several other furnished bedrooms nearby, but curiously the mattresses and covers were not on the beds.

  Like the professional detective that he was, Schindler had a burning curiosity about what was going on in Westbourne in the days and hours leading up to the murder. It was his notion, and one I shared, that the mood and events that played out in the mansion could foreshadow the crime.

  To this end, Schindler used a local intermediary to set up secret meetings in the homes of two of the servants who had worked for Sir Harry. He plied them with Jamaican rum and a small stack of British five-pound notes. He got them talking and picked up some gems of information.

  For example, apparently on two or three occasions during the week before he was murdered, Sir Harry walked along the upper porch to go into one of these other bedrooms, pulled off the beddings and slept on a mattress on the floor. Sometimes, the servants found his bedcovers in these other rooms
. Sir Harry would move them without anyone’s knowledge. It was obvious to Schindler that the man had been in fear, hiding out in case someone came to his bedroom.

  “He probably had his pistol tucked into the waistband of his pajamas,” I suggested.

  “There’s a good chance,” Ray answered.

  Moreover, Ray speculated to me one morning, it was within the realm of possibility that Sir Harry could have been drugged before going to bed. If Oakes had not been drugged, and had been awakened by his attacker, Sir Harry would have put up one hell of a fight. He could have yelled for his friend and business associate in the other bedroom. Christie was a strong and capable man as well.

  “But I don’t think it worked that way,” Ray said, and I agreed.

  Despite the tale that the Miami cops had spun to Oakes’ daughter and widow, we believed that the intruder had reached the bed without waking Oakes and killed him, then stayed to torch him and sprinkle him with feathers.

  Schindler would have given a year of his life to have had a good look at the corpse of Sir Harry Oakes right after the murder. He could have followed through, by way of an autopsy and a scientific examination of the vital organs, on the possibility that Oakes had been drugged before death. He could have had a good look at the Baronet’s head, particularly at those four wounds. But the body had been whisked away quickly before anyone could ask any nosy or inconvenient questions. The body had even been sent beyond Bahamian jurisdiction.

  Yet oddly enough, the Bahamian police, not known for their exacting competence, had done one thing well. They had taken excellent photographs of that part of the victim’s head containing the wounds. Schindler got hold of copies of the photographs and the medical reports. The pattern of the four wounds was rectangular about two inches wide and a little longer. The police hadn’t the slightest idea what sort of instrument had been used by the murderer.

  Neither did Schindler. Neither did I.

  Although the wound pattern formed a sort of rectangle, it was not possible to determine whether the four wounds had been made by four separate blows, each blow making one mark, or by two blows with a two-pronged instrument.

  One end of the cradle of a European telephone, if brought down four times on a man’s head, could have produced the murder wounds. Although there had been such a telephone in the murder bedroom, it was too far from the Baronet’s bed to have been used for such a purpose and it was anchored to the wall the morning the murder was reported.

  No one had ever accounted for another inexplicable detail of the murder. The wounds to Sir Harry were behind his ear and theoretically had been made while he slept. Yet pictures showed that blood covered his face. Why had the blood flowed upwards in defiance of gravity? Why, unless the murder had happened elsewhere and the body had been moved?

  One afternoon in mid-August, Ray and I went over to Westbourne to see if we could manage an extra walk-around. There was a lone guard whom Ray had previously befriended who gave us a big smile. Ray slipped him two of those ever-useful five-pound notes.

  Schindler and I searched through Westbourne for the possibility that any other French phone had been yanked from a wall. Nothing doing. Nor did we seriously entertain the idea that someone intending to commit a murder would show up without a weapon and then improvise.

  In the garage behind Westbourne, we came across something interesting. There was a stack of short wooden railings, two inches by two inches in thickness. Ray had previously learned from an Oakes servant that such a railing had been found, the morning after the murder, leaning against one of Sir Harry’s cars, which he had left parked in a driveway behind the house.

  Out of curiosity, the servant had kept the railing. Schindler examined it. There were no indications of blood on the wood. Schindler questioned the servant as to just how the railing had been leaning against the car when it was found, and he learned that had been leaning against one of the wheels.

  Schindler figured the railing business as this possibility: The murderer, going into the garage in search of some kind of weapon that could not be traced to him, had picked up a couple of railings. On his way to the house itself, the murderer had decided that one railing would be enough for his purpose. So, he had discarded the second railing. In landing on the ground, it had struck the wheel of the car while still in an upright position, and it had stayed that way until the servant came across it the next morning.

  Although in one respect the railing—one point of the end of it used four times—sounded good to Schindler, in another way it didn’t. The superior investigator has a singular digestive apparatus; he can’t, somehow, stomach a piece of evidence that just doesn’t seem appetizing.

  “A murderer armed with a piece of railing would be likely to use it as a club,” Ray explained. “The weapon that was used was used to poke his victim like a sword.” Schindler was not discarding the railing, but he wasn’t swallowing it, either.

  We left Westbourne with nothing new.

  Meanwhile, Leonarde Keeler, the Chicago criminologist, was devoting himself to the development of scientific clues. He took pieces of the rug in the murder room, and pieces of the burned woodwork at the head of the bed, and began to conduct experiments in the home of the Baroness af Trolle.

  He concluded that the killer had used a torch while going about his grisly business. De Marigny didn’t own a torch and had never had reason to use one on the chicken farm. The Baroness af Trolle, eager to see Schindler and Keeler develop any evidence favorable to the Count, nonetheless must have looked on the discoveries of the two dicks with mixed feelings. Keeler, experimenting with different kinds of flame produced by different kinds of fuel, stank up her lovely home on a regular basis. To top things off, one shaft of flame got out of control and ruined a chunk of priceless furniture.

  Since a blowtorch had been used in the crime, Schindler wanted to check the entire island to find out who owned blowtorches. Such equipment was rare on the island except in one place where wartime building operations were going on. Schindler wanted permission to question the workmen on such projects. Permission was denied.

  Every person arriving at or leaving Nassau had his name and address recorded in official records, along with his reason for coming or going, and the dates of his arrival and departure. Schindler wanted a look at those records. Permission was denied.

  Ray and I began to bite our nails and sprinkle a little more profanity than usual into our speech. We were getting a message, loud and clear.

  With the revised testimony of the Marquis and the evidence he and O’Neil had developed regarding the fingerprint, Schindler was confident that the case against de Marigny could be smashed to splinters when it came to trial. As that was what he had been hired for, he had already earned his fee. But he wanted to do more. Having satisfied himself based on provable facts that de Marigny did not commit the murder, Schindler at this point was more than a little curious to know who did.

  We learned that Oakes had another home in another part of Nassau that was not as large or pretentious as Westbourne. Sir Harry had sometimes entertained married women at this other home since it was more private. Arrival and departure could be more discreet. We visited. Incredibly, the place was unlocked and had no watchman.

  Sir Harry, the one-time gold prospector, liked to tinker with tools, and in the rear of this second residence was a tool house. Schindler found a detailed list of the equipment supposed to be in the tool house, and checked the tools in the shed against the list. Everything was there except one thing: a prospector’s pick, a heavy, short handled piece of hardware with an odd triangular point. Prospectors use it to take samples from veins of ore, but a prospector’s pick could have been just the thing to do in Sir Harry. Its triangular point would have produced just the kind of wounds that had been found in Sir Harry’s noggin.

  Sir Harry didn’t occupy this second home very often. When he wasn’t there, it was deserted. A watchman kept an eye on it at night, but it would have been possible for anybody, studying the w
atchman’s routine, to go into the tool house and come out with the pick.

  “I think,” Ray said to me when we left this second home, “that we now know what the murder weapon was. The remaining question,” he said, “is—?”

  “—who used it?” I continued.

  Ray winked. “Let’s go for drinks,” he said. “We’ve earned it.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Two afternoons later, a thick storm rolled in from the Caribbean and pounded Nassau with hard fat raindrops. I was on Bay Street a block from my hotel when the deluge began. I took immediate refuge under the covered arcade outside a row of merchants. The humidity made my knee ache, however, as did all the pavement pounding I was doing. I reckoned I’d make a run for it and head to the hotel. Then I realized that I was half again closer to Dirty Dick’s and would only get half-soaked if I jogged in that direction.

  The place was full. I had not been the only person to react this way to the storm. The tobacco smoke was thick and the conversations were loud. Getting a drink would be a challenge and finding a seat impossible. I approached it the way I might approach a questionable Turkish bath on a hot August afternoon. I entered, pushing my way through a crowd in the general direction of the bar and cigarette case. Halfway there, I felt a felt a sharp tug on my sleeve.

  “Alan!” came a voice that travelled up from a table. “Hey! Right here!”

  I gave in to the tug, turned, and should have known.

  Schindler, as usual, was there at a narrow table. This time he was with an older gentleman. Ray had spotted me, turned, and reached out with his unavoidable long arm and tight grasp.

  “Join us,” Schindler said. By chance or by choice, he had held open a third wooden chair. “You must meet my local friend.” I settled into the free chair, happy to take a load off my feet, happier still that I’d avoided getting completely soaked.