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

by Noel Hynd

  After a moment, I finished my drink. “I’ll try to,” I said. I was finished with the booze for the evening. So was Ray, after a final gulp.

  “You would be wise to,” he advised. He leaned back. He glanced at his watch. His eyes checked the door. He side-glanced the other tables. “Let’s stop fooling ourselves,” he said. “Under current conditions there’s no possibility of anyone being convicted other than de Marigny. Either he swings from that lovely new noose they ordered or no one swings. Those are the ground rules. That’s where it’s going. It’s insanity to think otherwise.”

  “May I quote you?” I asked.

  “Of course not,” he laughed. “You think I’m crazy?”

  “In some ways, you’re the sanest man I know.”

  “Ha! Not always,” he said. He slapped my arm. “And by the way, yes, you can quote me. Years from now. When we’re safely off this island. Okay?”

  A lovely vision intruded. Madame af Tolle appeared at the door, resplendent in a blue gown. Nancy Oakes was right behind her, and behind them both loomed their bodyguard: a handsome native man of about six feet three inches of muscle, threat and presumably under his jacket, a major firearm.

  “Ah!” he said. “There’s my ride. Can I give you a lift to your hotel?”

  “It’s just up the street,” I said. “Maybe a block.”

  “A lot can happen in a block after dark in Nassau,” Ray said.

  “I don’t mind stretching my legs,” I said.

  “Poor old Harry couldn’t even get a safe final night’s sleep in his own bed.”

  We stood and paid.

  “You walk ahead to the British Colonial,” Schindler said. “We’ll follow slowly in the car and depart after you’re safely in the lobby. How’s that?”

  “That sounds good,” I said.

  He slapped my arm.

  “See you tomorrow,” he said.

  We left together and followed our plan. It was twelve past ten when I returned to my room at the British Colonial Hotel. I carefully locked the door. Just for the hell of it, I also wedged the back of the chair under the doorknob. I left the key in the inside slot for security.

  I slept fitfully.

  CHAPTER 21

  I hadn’t picked up on any continuing surveillance on me since my return to the islands. I attributed that to two factors, though I was mostly guessing.

  First, with more writers and reporters pouring into Nassau with the approach of the trial, I figured that powers that were out there had more interesting people to follow. Second, they might have become a bit self-satisfied. How much damage could I really do them if the result in court was predetermined?

  Not much. We both knew it.

  Thus, I turned up at the New Providence Hotel the next day at 2:55 p.m. and moved quickly through the hotel to a narrow hot alley just behind it. There was a panel truck there as expected. The driver was a black man. He gave me a nod. I went to his window.

  “I’m Alan,” I said.

  “Get in,” he answered. He indicated the rear of his truck. “Sit low.”

  I obeyed.

  There was no one else in the truck. The back was like an oven. I said nothing. We bounced over some side roads in eastern Nassau and he made two more deliveries of bread. Then, from what I could see and sense, we were on open but bumpy road that led out of the town proper. I timed the trip. It took seventeen minutes. I noted the direction of the sun. We were driving east.

  Finally, we turned off the main road and were on dirt. We pulled up in front of a thatched hut. The truck stopped. The engine kept running.

  The driver motioned with his head. I was to climb forward and get out. I did. My clothes were soaked with sweat.

  From within the hut, Schindler appeared with a smaller darker man. The bread truck took off. Ray approached me, grinning.

  “This is my friend, Kayo,” Ray said to me, introducing me to his contact.

  Kayo was a Bahamian with dark skin. He had a slightly Creole look and surprising blue eyes. His smile was nervous. I offered my hand, but Kayo ignored it. He either didn’t see it or didn’t want it.

  “Kayo has something to show us,” Ray said. “We’re his guests. We do things his way.”

  Kayo nodded. His eyes zipped over the landscape behind us, making sure there were no followers. Quickly satisfied, he nodded in the direction in which we were to follow. We were going behind his hut.

  As he walked, Kayo turned toward us and made a gesture to Ray of rubbing his fingers together. On the fly, Ray quickly produced and counted out five five-pound notes. Kayo took them, checked the sum, pocketed the cash, smiled and never missed a stride. Ray gave him a pat on the arm.

  Kayo was not a man of few words. At this juncture, he was a man of no words. He motioned us along. He led us across a rocky pathway through a clump of twisted palms. I saw a small inlet of water with a small fishing skiff tied up and pulled up onto a strip of sand no more than twenty feet wide. The skiff itself was maybe twelve feet long.

  Kayo held his small skiff steady on the beach and gestured for us to step in. Ray, older and less agile, stepped in first. I followed, careful not to unbalance the small craft. We settled onto a small board that ran across the midway of the boat. It’s what passed for seating.

  There were some bulky fisherman’s hats and slickers on the floor of the boat. Native stuff, rugged, bulky and—I knew in advance—hot as hell.

  Ray reached for one for each of us. “We’re to put these on and sit low,” Ray said. “Precautions. Don’t wish to be recognized, right?”

  “Right,” I said.

  Kayo pushed the boat into the water, guiding it while knee deep in the salt water. Then he gracefully lifted himself into the craft. He took the tiller at the square stern of the skiff. He sculled for a moment. He had a small Evinrude, maybe one of those new little five horsepower jobs, attached to rear. For whatever reason—noise, fuel economy—he chose not to use it here.

  There was a sail that he could hoist but it was tied down. There were two oars. Kayo grabbed one and used it to pull toward the opening to the inlet. He managed a slow but steady pace, then broke out of the inlet into the surf, which was gentle. There was a current and Kayo let it take us. I knew from the sun that we were facing west. He turned the tiller sharply and we headed south. When we were about a hundred yards off shore, Kayo started his engine with a rope cord.

  I glanced at my watch. I wanted to keep track of time. It was four-fifty.

  The sun was lower in the sky but had lost none of its intensity. I opened my slicker but was still sweating like a pig. Fortunately, a slight breeze picked up. We continued south for fifteen minutes.

  “Pleasant ride, don’t you think, Alan?” Ray asked amiably. “Too far out for alligators, too far in for German U-boats.”

  “Peachy,” I answered.

  Ray laughed.

  “You’ll remember this trip, I promise you,” he said. He patted my shoulder. “You can swim, right?” he asked.

  “Only when my life depends on it,” I answered.

  “It won’t,” he said. “Or it shouldn’t.”

  We followed the shoreline for fifteen minutes. I counted. Then Kayo passed a large coral stone that protruded from the water. He gave it a wide cautious turn and then steered around it toward a small cove. He looked in all directions, but mostly to see if there were any other boats within view on the water. There were not. In another three minutes, we were well within the cove.

  Further before us lay an inlet into a sandy coral beach. There was nothing significant within my sight. As we neared, I saw some native kids playing with a half-flat soccer ball. Several small fishing boats had been pulled up onto the sand. A noisy pack of gulls patrolled low over the surf. There was a cluster of lean-to shacks with tin roofs, plus one hut which was straw and had a doorway covered by a ragged yellow sheet. The sheet fluttered in a sharp inbound breeze. As we drew closer, a cluster of poorly dressed or naked black children stopped what they were doing t
o stare at us, unspeaking and wide-eyed as we neared the shoreline, then travelled parallel to it.

  The children scattered as if they had heard something. After a half-moment, a tall broad man with ebony skin and no shirt emerged swiftly from the hut. He marched toward the shoreline.

  “It’s all right,” Kayo said. “Just be still.”

  The man on the beach glared at us, shielding his eyes against the setting sun. He kept his other hand in his pants pocket. I assumed he had a weapon.

  Kayo rose and half-stood on bow of our boat and waved to the man on the beach. The shirtless man recognized our skipper and relaxed. He waved back, assessed us, turned slowly and went back to his hut. I noticed that the children kept as far out of the man’s way as possible.

  “Almost there,” Kayo said.

  He cut his engine to a crawl. We were within fifty feet of the shoreline. The heat intensified. The flies from the land began to find us and swarm.

  After a moment, Kayo revved his engine.

  We travelled another few hundred yards. Then Kayo cut the boat sharply and followed a narrow inlet. The foliage grew thicker around the waterway until there was nothing but a green wall on each side of us, alive with insects and fauna. Then we were in the clear again and Kayo cut a small circle in the water.

  He rose from his seat and in a somber voice said, “There!”

  My eyes fastened on the horror within the space of his single word. I heard Ray let out a gasp. There was a gibbet standing over the water fifty feet in front of us. Beneath it, a pair of alligators, or maybe there were three, were splashing and occasionally leaping, their jaws extended. Above them were suspended the bodies of two black men, their clothing partly worn away. They had been hanged by the neck and left to swing and rot. The left foot of one of the dead men was missing. There was a pool of dark crimson on the remaining bone. It looked as if one of the gators had snacked.

  I heard Kayo change positions. He leaned down and withdrew a bolt action rifle from under his bench.

  “All right?” he asked Ray. “We go?”

  Ray was holding a handkerchief to his mouth. Schindler didn’t say anything. He gestured that he had seen enough. Certainly, I had also.

  Kayo turned the boat. We left faster than we had arrived.

  “Jesus,” I muttered to myself. We broke into the clearing and were back on the salt water.

  “Okay. What was that all about?” I asked.

  “Remember the story about the two native men who worked on the Oakes estate?” Schindler asked. “The watchman and his friend who might have been witnesses for de Marigny?”

  I did. “That’s them?” I asked.

  “That’s what the people around here are saying,” Ray said.

  We rode in silence. It was finally getting dark. The water was getting choppy and I held on.

  “A trail of tombstones,” Ray Schindler said to me. “Or, more likely, unmarked graves. That’s what this case will turn into.”

  We travelled the rest of the way back to Nassau in silence.

  The start of the trial was thirty-six hours away.

  CHAPTER 22

  The next night, on the eve of the judicial proceedings, Ray and I wandered into Dirty Dick’s at a few minutes past eight p.m. We stood at the crowded bar and took the temperature of the room and the town. There was more press interest in the Oakes murder case than in any since the trial of Bruno Hauptmann for kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby a decade earlier. Maybe it was because of the war and the public need to have a story other than the war. I didn’t know. I did know that as I scanned the room I saw many people I knew from New York, both crime and general interest writers.

  I saw many other writers in the room, good ones.

  There was Elizabeth Townsend for the York Post, and my friend Ruth Reynolds from the New York Daily News, a classy lady writer who was a kindred soul: she covered murders. I also knew Jeanne Bellamy for the Miami Herald. Henry Luce’s Time Magazine, which we in the business called “the weekly fiction magazine.” Time printed Henry’s opinion more than straight news. Time was running regular features on the case. They had a team there. I was told that a special table had to be constructed just to accommodate the number of journalists in the courtroom. The hotels of Nassau jacked up their prices, something not popular with my editors back in New York. What did I care? I wasn’t paying. But it wasn’t lost on me that the trial was great for the local economy. Conspicuously absent from the room were the brothers Dupuch, Etienne and Eugene, who were covering the story not just for their own paper, the Nassau Daily Tribune, but also for the New York Times, Reuters, the Daily Telegraph, the racing and theatrical journal.

  “Hey, there’s a familiar local face,” Ray said suddenly, tapping my arm. He indicated our windy friend Colonel Chalmers, drinking alone, halfway down the bar. We went over and joined him.

  Chalmers, a fount of local gossip, seemed anxious to have an audience. We were happy to oblige and listen. I was honored to irrigate the colonel with another drink.

  Finally, “So tell us, Colonel,” I said, “what’s going to happen tomorrow?”

  “The wrong man is on trial, I’ll tell that,” he said. “That’s how a lot of us feel here. I have friends. Police. They know the system here. The Frenchman is the patsy. The sacrificial lamb.”

  “Who should be on trial?” I asked.

  “Harold Christie,” he said.

  “So Christie did it?” I asked.

  “No, no. Not saying that,” the colonel said. “No one will come out and say that. But he was sleeping in the next room? He didn’t hear anything? Balderdash!”

  “Christie was one of Sir Harry’s best friends,” I said. “Where’s the motive?”

  Chalmers’ eyes slid in my direction. “There’s talk of unpaid debts. There’s gossip about gambling interests coming to the island. Sir Harry may have been moving to Mexico which, if true, would seriously have undermined Christie’s ambitions as a realtor. When money, ambition and greed combine, the mixture proves combustible, right? Especially in Nassau. Here money is everything.”

  Chalmers drained his glass. He rattled some ice cubes in his mouth, then spit them back into his glass.

  “Damn!” he finally said. “I’m not saying Harold shot Sir Harry or smashed his head or did it himself. No one’s saying that. But people are keeping quiet. Self-interest, don’t you know? Bay Street Boys. Power. But Christie must have known more. He must have at least smelled smoke. Or heard something.”

  “Oh, I can think of one reason why he didn’t hear or smell something,” I said.

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “He wasn’t in the next room.”

  “Well, that’s his alibi. That’s where he says he was.”

  “I know,” I said.

  Chalmers looked critically at me. “Hrrmp,” he said. “You’ve been reading too many of your own stories, perhaps.”

  “Perhaps,” I said.

  “Well, one thing’s certain,” Chalmers said. “The Frenchman’s going to swing from the end of a rope. Do that little dance of death that men do on the gallows. Ever seen a man hang, Alan?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Well, it happens around here. You’ll see.”

  CHAPTER 23

  The trial of Alfred de Marigny for the murder of Sir Harry Oakes, began on October 18, 1943, a cloudy day in the Bahamas. The summer’s heat and humidity had broken. The day was at least tolerable.

  Shortly before nine a.m., local constables escorted Alfred de Margigny on a walk from the Central Police Station to the courthouse. Nobody would have given much of a bet for his chances of surviving his trial. So much seemed efficiently rigged against him.

  Crowds gathered around the impressive white marble portico of the courthouse. Spectators pushed in on the tight corridor of police escorting de Marigny. In another building not too far away, the rope that had been ordered to hang him sat under lock and key, waiting for its macabre moment.

  Several
people were notably absent. Thomas Lavelle, who had offered the most recent testimony against de Marigny had been allowed to travel, but his testimony had been taken. Erskine-Lindop, perhaps one of the only honest men in sight, had assumed his post in Trinidad and had been advised by counsel that any reappearance in Nassau would not be appreciated by the Crown.

  And then there were the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Or more accurately, there weren’t the Duke and Duchess. Wallis Simpson had let it be known being that something as sordid as a murder trial was beneath her dignity. As for her husband, David, Duke of Windsor, he again proved that there was no important obligation from which he could not flee. The case in Nassau and the unseemly cast of characters that populated it was largely because of the Duke’s incompetence, starting with his ersatz reporting of Oakes’ “suicide” and his hiring of the two American cops who passed themselves off as able Miami detectives.

  So naturally, the Windsors planned to visit friends in the United States for the duration of the trial, far from view, far from legal obligation, and far from responsibility. Never mind that an innocent man might have been accused. Never mind that the feeling on the streets of the Bahamian capital was that de Marigny was not guilty

  Equally absent was the information that Schindler had requested in New York. He kept inquiring, yet somehow the dispatch had been held up in Bahamian customs and censors, considerably weakening the hand of the defense team

  “Surprising?” I asked Ray the night before the trial started.

  “Here?” he snorted. “Nothing is surprising.”

  Thus convened the tribunal that first morning. When de Marigny was seated, when the public gallery was packed to standing room, a legal spectacle began that reminded me of something out of Charles Dickens, with some Pirandello and Kafka sprinkled in.