Ashes From A Burning Corpse

by Noel Hynd

  “How do you know?”

  “I saw it. I taught him how to use it. We went out to one of his orchards a month before he died. Harry didn’t say why he wanted it. I asked twice. He only said, ‘Chalmie, it’s wartime, old chap. What if the God damn Huns come up out of the ocean to steal my coins?’ making a joke of it, sort of.”

  I exchanged a glance with Ray. Then the Colonel read our minds and posed the same question that we were thinking.

  “Why he didn’t use it the night he was murdered,” Colonel Chalmers said. “That’s what I don’t understand. Something to think about, isn’t it?”

  Ray leaned back. It was a body language gesture between us that we had used before. It was my turn to push my nose into the questioning if I cared to.

  “Know what happened to it?” I asked.

  “I suppose the constables took it,” Chalmers said. “Can’t say. Don’t want a weapon flying around loose, you know. Someone could get hurt.”

  The colonel, it seemed, was starting to feel his distilled spirits.

  “It’s difficult to get a firearm in the Bahamas, isn’t it?” I asked.

  “Too bloody right,” Chalmers said.

  “So, who was Sir Harry’s armorer?” I asked.

  Chalmers laughed.

  “He probably bought it from one of the Devil’s Island boys,” he said.

  “Who?” I asked.

  Schindler leaned forward with interest.

  “Right,” said Chalmers. “There are four escapees from Devil’s Island hiding on one of the out islands,” Chalmers said. “They deal in contraband, so I hear. Maybe Harry bought a gun from one of them. Who knows?”

  “Where would we find these men?” Schindler asked.

  “Ha!” Chalmers said. “Not too bloody hard to arrange! Should I inquire?”

  Schindler reached to his wallet and peeled off two twenty-pound notes and handed them over.

  “Yes,” he said. “Discreetly. And right away.”

  CHAPTER 14

  For years Schindler had been an exponent of the clever professional diversion. So Schindler decided to use a trick from comedian Joe Cook’s playbook and have some fun one evening with the not-so-sharp Nassau cops. He stopped his car in the center of town, ran into an alleyway, studied a blank wall with a magnifying glass, placed a chalk circle around a small spot, ran out of the alley, jumped into his car, and drove away. One member of the Nassau cops spent a week in the alley trying to figure out what the circle on the wall indicated.

  His high visibility remained. Sure enough, I was walking with Ray one night and a white woman walking behind us drew abreast of him and, in appearing to brush against him, slipped a note into his hand. She hastened on her way.

  Schindler had known that we were being followed by local security but did not know whether our tails had seen the woman slipping him the note. It happened so quickly that I didn’t even realize what had happened until he spoke.

  “Keep walking,” he said. “I just got a special delivery.”

  We played it smart. We sauntered around town for fully an hour. Then we got into his car. He dropped me at my hotel, then drove back to the villa of the Baroness. It was only then that he read the note that had been slipped to him.

  The note was from a prominent woman in Nassau whose name Schindler had come to know. He was to come to her home the following night at ten o’clock. He asked me if I would go with him. I said I would. He referred to her as Lady Estelle and it was understood between us that it was not her real name

  The next night Schindler gave his tails the slip. He hired a different car and picked me up in the alley behind my own hotel where I’d given my own watchers the slip. His driver then took us through a maze of back streets and then a dark country road. I assumed it was as much to deter pursuers as it was to keep me from knowing where we were going or had been. Ray had obviously promised to protect his source. I understood.

  We arrived at his destination undetected. A large residential building lay at the end of a gravel driveway that looked to be part of an estate. From what I could see in the light of a half moon, the main structure may have been a farmhouse and the estate was part of a working farm. I saw a corral but no livestock.

  We were met at the front door by a butler. I was not admitted to the meeting with Ray’s contact. Nor did I ever see her. Rather, I sat in the front foyer, watching for any unexpected visitors. I was to notify Ray with a sharp knock if I saw trouble. Fortunately, we had no additional company.

  As I sat and waited, Ray cleverly left the door slightly ajar to the salon where he was meeting his newest best friend. I could hear the whole conversation. At one point the butler brought me a glass of ice water and a sandwich.

  Ray found the note passer a conservative person, very intelligent, and not, he judged, given to going off halfcocked.

  “Did you know,” she asked Schindler over Remy Martin and American cigarettes, “that Sir Harry Oakes had a cache of gold coins on the island of Eleuthera?”

  Schindler had heard about such a gold cache, but had not learned the detail of the precise island where the stuff was reputedly stashed. Gold was hot stuff, as always. The British government had asked all citizens to turn in their privately held gold to finance the war effort. Many people had been dumb enough to do so.

  “Yes,” the woman continued, “Sir Harry had several million pounds sterling hidden on Eleuthera.”

  “In a bank? In a vault?” Ray asked.

  “No. Hidden. Just hidden.”

  Eleuthera was one of the largest of the Bahamian islands, some seventy miles east of Nassau. Schindler asked how his informant had come into possession of the information.

  “Why,” she laughed, drawing suggestively on a Lucky Strike, “practically everybody in Nassau knows it.”

  Schindler was hardly able to check that statement. Suddenly Schindler became conscious of the fact that the woman was telling him that Oakes had had gold cached on Eleuthera.

  “You’re speaking of it in the past,” he noted. “It’s not there anymore?”

  “No.”

  I could hear a bottle hitting the rim of a glass. Another drink was being poured. “Could you explain?” Ray asked.

  “Draw your own conclusions, Mr. Schindler,” she said in a throaty voice. “But I think if you go over there you will find colored natives selling gold coins at about half their face value.”

  Schindler had already learned that Sir Harry Oakes, shortly before his death, had made several trips to Eleuthera, both by boat and by small aircraft. Such trips by a man of Sir Harry’s prominence would have aroused suspicion both in Nassau and on Eleuthera itself, an island that remained remote and primitive in its interior and along the more remote sections of its shoreline. It would have been entirely possible for some of the rougher elements on the island—and there were some very rough ones—to have become curious about the Baronet’s visits and followed him. Discovering the gold cache, if it were unprotected—buried or stashed in a cave—they could have taken it into their heads to help themselves to it.

  Then, being discovered and possibly confronted by Sir Harry, they might have feared he would use his influence to have them imprisoned.

  “Never mind the fact that Harry had violated the law by not declaring the gold when the British government asked their subjects to turn in privately held gold to finance the war effort,” Ray said to me as we were walking back to the car and out of earshot of our driver. “A man like Harry would have bought his way out of any legal trouble for stashing the gold. But the colored men who had stolen it, they would have gone to prison.”

  “So,” I said, “just speculating, hypothesizing, fearing Oakes’ reprisals, the thieves could have crossed to Nassau by boat in the night, crept into Westbourne, and done Sir Harry in?”

  “The savagery of the crime, the burning of the eyes and the sex organs, did have distinct overtones of primitive ritual,” Ray conceded. “I believe Harry had hidden an amount of gold somewhere. It
’s what he would have done. I’m not sure I’m buying gold thieves as murderers but we can’t dismiss it.”

  “The circle of possible suspects is getting bigger all the time, isn’t it?” I said.

  “Don’t you wonder why the police aren’t thinking the same way?”

  It was a question that hung unresolved in the air between us. Quickly, however, we were on to other things.

  Major Chalmers had left a message for Ray with the trustworthy Marie af Trolle. He had contacted a certain French citizen who was vacationing nearby, and arrangements would be made to meet. It would cost another hundred pounds sterling, but Ray barely flinched.

  He could afford to grin. It was Nancy’s money he was spending, after all, not his own. And Nancy didn’t care how he spread it around if eventually he got an acquittal.

  Back in New York, however, my editors were not as copacetic. My book editor had galleys of my next book which I needed to read and edit. My magazine editors had more pressing issues: the expenses in Nassau were adding up and his boss was getting cranky. The pre-trial stage of the Oakes murder case had hit a dry period and there wasn’t much new to write about. I kept filing reports, they kept printing them, but with a lull in the events, it was hard to maintain the heat and sex appeal of the murder case, much as I was doing my best.

  Both editors were starting to suggest that it might be beneficial that I came back to New York until the trial started. I was not unreceptive to the idea. But I continued to resist the trip back. I knew from experience that when you left was just when the big news broke and others would scoop it.

  I didn’t want anyone else to own that scoop.

  So, for the time being, I stayed where I was.

  CHAPTER 15

  No one was quite sure whether three or five recent escapees from Devil’s Island had made it to the Bahamas. What was apparent was that a small band of them were holding up at a remote residence on Grand Bahama, about a hundred thirty miles north of Nassau. The British government had no interest in returning them to the penal colony in French Guiana. The penal colony was now under the control of the Vichy French, who were collaborating with Hitler’s Germany. So why help the Vichy French in any way large or small, much less potentially provide for them a few more soldiers?

  “Want to come along to meet these cutthroats?” Schindler asked me. They would cautiously meet with the right people, and Schindler had secured a meeting.

  “I’d be crazy,” I answered.

  “That means you’re coming, right?”

  “I’d be nuts,” I emphasized.

  Ray hired a small airplane. The pilot was a stocky mocha-skinned man with wild unkept hair that fell beyond his collar. It was not dissimilar to a mane. Hence, I assumed, his nom de vol. Ray introduced him as “Lion,” which was the only name Ray knew him by. I gathered that he worked within the gray area of the law and did odd jobs therein, such as this one. If he had a pilot’s license I never saw it, but things could be casual in this part of the world.

  We flew to Grand Bahama on Lion’s rickety old aircraft, probably never more than five hundred feet above the water. We met three escapees—they were all Frenchmen—in a waterfront bar. Neither Ray nor I spoke French and the ex-prisoners spoke no English. Conveniently, however, the Frenchman who seemed to be the leader had brought along a local Haitian émigré named Henri-Claude to serve as an interpreter.

  Ray sat at a table with the man whose name was Francois. The two others watched the door. I assumed they were armed. I sat several feet behind Ray and listened. Francois was a rough unshaven man in a dark blue shirt and soiled khakis. He had a powerful body, like a wild animal. A deep scar marked his left temple.

  Ray inquired about the gun. Through the interpreter, Francois said he knew nothing about selling any weapons. Ray asked if any of the escapees had ever met Oakes. Francois said they hadn’t, then added that none of them had tempted fate enough to go to Paradise Island which was the seat of the government.

  No, Francois said, none of them had any idea who might have murdered Harry and no, they were not inclined to do much other than sit out the war in peace and maybe move along to the United States or Canada once the war ended. They sure as hell were not returning to France, Francois said; they were still wanted there for murder and other violent crimes and had no desire to be sent back to Guiana.

  Francois talked a good ball game. We knew that men like this could lie in your face and then stab you in the back two seconds later. We also knew it remained possible that this group of convicts had discovered the gold cached in Eleuthera, helped themselves to it, and then learned that Sir Harry was after them. Knowing of the man’s power on the Bahamas, they would have had ample reason to do him in.

  Schindler put the question right up to them a second time as he was concluding the meeting: Did any of them know anything about the murder of Sir Harry Oakes? Through long experience, Schindler had solid instincts about when a man or potential witness was lying or spinning. He decided that the Devil’s Island alumni had nothing to do with a murder in Nassau and didn’t have any knowledge of it.

  Then Ray turned the tables on the Frenchmen. As he was moving to conclude the meeting, he dropped a casual question. “As someone who had nothing to do with the crime,” Schindler asked, “what’s your theory? Why was Sir Harry killed?”

  Ray waited as the interpreter phrased the question in French. We expected a shrug and a non-answer. But Francois was more forthcoming.

  “Money,” he said. “Someone stood to gain a lot of money.”

  “Like who?” Ray asked.

  “American Mafia, maybe?” the Frenchman said through Henri-Claude, the interpreter. “Business here after the war? Casinos? Hotels? I don’t know. I only guess.”

  “What about a sexual angle?” Ray asked.

  “A jealous husband?”

  All three Frenchmen laughed. A crime of this much violence just didn’t fit that motive, they all agreed. There was more laughter. They suggested that any man’s wife would enjoy getting naked and getting a little frisky if she was ignored long enough. Women were like that, the Frenchmen maintained.

  We thanked our new acquaintances for the life lesson about females. We boarded the sea plane back to Nassau.

  “I’ve been hearing this more than a few times,” Ray mused in the small plane as we flew back to Nassau. Ray produced a small flask of Scotch and we shared it. “Gambling interests. Mob guys from Cuba and southern Florida,” he said. “They’ve got an eye on the Bahamas after Germany and Japan are defeated.”

  “Is there credibility to that?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Who knows? I suppose it makes some sense. It’s the type of thing that Christie would have been for and Sir Harry against,” he said with a moment’s thought. He shrugged again and fastened his seatbelt as we hit some bumps over the dark and turbulent high waves of water between Grand Bahama and New Providence. “But I’m playing Devil’s advocate. I have no evidence.” He paused then concluded. “Plus, remember: I’m here to acquit de Marigny. One man’s life is enough of a responsibility. The Bahamian authorities will have to live with whatever comes next. We don’t. It’s not our circus and these people we are dealing with aren’t our monkeys.”

  “Right,” I said, without too much conviction.

  In the dark plane, Ray’s eyes narrowed. “How are you bearing up?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re starting to look beaten up,” he said. “These cases, these long assignments, they wear you down, don’t they?”

  “I’m all right,” he said.

  “No, you’re not. You’d like to go home.”

  “I’m a writer. I have an assignment here,” I said.

  Ray was about to answer when the pilot turned to us. “Seat belts tight, gentlemen,” he said. “Starting descent to land.”

  “I’ll say this about this flight,” I said. “At least it was short.”

  The pilot, Lion, laughed. He knocked back a gu
lp of booze and gave us a thumbs-up. Then we took a few bounces through some low wind shear and found our final approach for Nassau, accompanied all around by a final swig of Scotch.

  CHAPTER 16

  By the fifth of September, Ray and I began to recapitulate what we had discovered.

  We were convinced de Marigny had not committed the crime. We were further satisfied that the murder could have been committed by any of several enemies Sir Harry had acquired before or since his arrival in Nassau. And it could have been done by robbers from the outer islands.

  But we had also been hearing a lot of local gossip. We had learned the identities of the husbands of women at whom Sir Harry had successfully and unsuccessfully made passes. Schindler had, in fact, met some of these men at parties he had been invited to because of his connection with the Baron and Baroness af Trolle. Here was a valid angle. Yet none of the wronged husbands seemed to fill the bill as a suspect.

  Schindler decided to go back to the beginning, or to a few days before the beginning. If he took things step by step, he figured he might come across something he had not previously considered. Investigations are that way.

  What we knew for certain was that week before the murder, Sir Harry’s pal Harold Christie had moved into Westbourne, ostensibly to keep him company, but also, according to what people told us, to work on many pressing business situations in which they were jointly involved. The two men were alone in the big place at night, as the servants slept out. Christie occupied a room on the second floor, about eighteen feet from the nearest wall to Sir Harry’s room. In that immediate section of the mansion, there were two other rooms: a small dressing room and a bathroom. It was thus possible for someone to walk from Christie’s room into Sir Harry’s by passing through a door that led from Christie’s room into the small adjoining room. From there one would continue through a door leading into the bathroom, then out another bathroom door into Sir Harry’s room.

  There was also another way of going from Christie’s room into Sir Harry’s. A screen door led from Christie’s room onto a veranda that ran the entire width of the house. A similar door in Sir Harry’s room led onto this veranda. It was the habit of the two men, when they alone remained at Westbourne, to go out through the screen doors of their respective rooms and meet on the veranda for breakfast in the morning.