Max Collins - Carnal Hours

“You don’t object if we have a look at your hands, do you?” Barker asked, casually snide.

“My hands? No. Go ahead.”

Barker took each of the Count’s hands, one at a time, and examined them carefully under the magnifying glass, like a palm reader with bad eyesight.

Then, without asking, he shifted to de Marigny’s face-specifically, his beard. Melchen turned the table lamp up so it would bathe their subject with light. Conducting a scientific examination in the dark was challenging, you know.

Barker turned and glanced at me, his face smug and tight. Then he looked at de Marigny and said, “The hairs on your hands and beard are singed.”

Even now, the house had a scorched smell. The significance of Barker’s discovery needed no explanation.

“Can you account for that?” Barker asked.

De Marigny shrugged. For once his confidence seemed shaken.

Then he pointed a finger at them and said, “Remember-I told you I was plucking chickens yesterday over a boiling drum.”

The cops said nothing.

“Also,” the Count said, “I smoke cigarettes and cigars…the dampness in Nassau requires frequent relighting. Oh! And I had the barber singe my beard, recently!”

The cops looked at each other skeptically.

“He also burned himself lighting a hurricane lamp,” I said. “Entertaining in his garden last night.”

Barker frowned at me. Melchen just looked confused.

“Yes, that’s right!” de Marigny said. And then he said to me, “How did you know that?”

I didn’t answer. He didn’t know who the hell I was, and I saw no reason to tell him.

“We’re going to clip hairs from your head, beard and arms,” Barker said to his suspect. “Any objection?”

“No,” de Marigny shrugged. “Shall I take off my shirt?”

“Yes,” Barker said. “But speaking of shirts…we want to see the clothes you were wearing last night.”

“I have no idea what clothes I was wearing last night.”

“Come on!” Melchen sneered.

“Really! I have an interchangeable wardrobe of white-and cream-colored silk and linen shirts. I think I remember what sport jacket I wore…and the slacks…but not the shirt. What the hell, gentlemen-go to my house, inspect my laundry if you like!”

“We’ll just take you up on that,” Melchen said nastily.

Barker rose and came over to me. He gave me a foul look. “That’s all, Heller.”

“You’re welcome,” I said, and went out.

I tried to find Marjorie Bristol, to say goodbye, but she didn’t seem to be around. So I looked up Lindop, who was in the hallway, amidst an ever-increasing, milling crowd; what a way to run an investigation.

“Can I go, Colonel? Watching those Keystone Kops play in the dark gives me a migraine.”

He smiled faintly. “You’ll need to give the Attorney General a deposition before you leave Nassau.”

“I figured as much, but I meant, right now….”

He touched the brim of his pith helmet, in a tipping-of-the-hat gesture. “As far as I’m concerned, Mr. Heller, you’re free to go. But frankly, I don’t seem to be in charge.”

He had a point; but I found the Bahamian bobbies who’d brought me here and told them they were supposed to take me back to the hotel.

And they did.

Hell-maybe I was in charge….

Palms rustled gently in the sultry night breeze. The sky was a clear dark blue, aglitter with stars, like handfuls of diamonds carelessly scattered on a taut satin sheet; the sliver of silver moon hung like a sideways, Cheshire-cat smile. Ice clinked in fruit-bedecked cocktail glasses while the wind whispered warm tropical kisses. It might have been an idyllic evening in the Bahamas, only I was in Coral Gables, Florida, seated at a table for two in the outdoor dance patio of the Miami Biltmore, where Ina Mae Hutton and her “all-girl” Melodears were playing a bouncy instrumental version of “Pistol Packin’ Mama.”

Up under the red-and-white stage canopy, Ina Mae, a pretty blonde in a slinky red gown, was swinging a mean baton. She and her musicians were indeed “all-girl,” though many of the formerly all-male bands these days had women sprinkled throughout, particularly in the string sections.

I wondered if Miss Hutton, and tonight’s headline act, might be a little hep for this somewhat over-the-hill crowd. The audience on this perfect Florida Saturday night was mostly middle-aged and older, although a few sailors on leave with their girls were mixed in, so some wild, throw-her-over-the-shoulder jitterbugging was going on here and there, challenging even the pulchritudinous Melodears for public attention.

Maybe it was the man shortage, or maybe it was just money, but there were a number of older men with younger women here this starlit night, and one such couple-seated ringside-particularly caught my eye. The redhead was petite and pretty and twentyish, slimly attractive in a green gown; twice her age, her well-dressed sugar daddy had close-set eyes, a lined face, a weak chin and a tan from God. He was also small, almost as small as she was.

A fairly ordinary businessman type, he wouldn’t have caught my eye, despite the dame, if it hadn’t been for the burly bookends seated on either side of them: bodyguards. Was this nondescript little businessman connected? Probably. This was Florida, after all. No shortage of oranges, bathing beauties or mobsters.

Once the Al Dexter tune had abated, and the applause, Ina Mae spoke over a timpani roll, introducing the featured performer of the evening.

“Ladies and gentlemen, the little lady who made so many fans with her own famous fans, first at the Chicago World’s Fair, and more recently, the San Francisco Golden Gate Exposition on Treasure Island…direct from her command performance before the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in Nassau… Miss Sally Rand!”

To the big-band strains of “Clair de Lune,” she slipped from behind the stage out onto the dance floor, fluttering the enormous pink ostrich plumes, her steps mincing, her smile sweet, blond curls shimmering to bare shoulders, a pink flower in her hair. Applause greeted her, and she acknowledged it with a shy smile, as she began her graceful dance. She moved like the ballerina she was, granting fleeting glimpses of white flesh (no body stocking for Helen, not even at forty) to tommy-gun bursts of enthusiastic clapping. Her pirouettes, as she stood poised on the toes of her high-heeled pumps, saw her caressing the feather fans, like a lover; she seemed lost in a trance, as if unaware anyone was watching.

Of course, they were-many of the men with that agape expression that gets them kicked under the table. Although Sally Rand was, as she’d said, respectable now; a show-business legend, an American institution, her sweet, naughty, only slightly erotic performance pleasing even the ladies.

I’d seen her many times-this, as well as her equally famed bubble dance; she alternated them, doing several shows an evening, although wartime curfew and liquor-sale restrictions had the show closing at midnight, after the required playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” I never tired of watching her, though, and she never seemed to tire of being watched-she had that uncanny star ability to make each audience feel she was performing something unique and just for them, something no one else had ever seen.

The performance lasted a mere eight minutes, but when she lifted her fans high in her famed Winged Victory pose, breasts high and bare, lifting a leg coyly to keep one small secret-one she had, happily, shared with me many a time-the Biltmore crowd, over-the-hill or not, went wild.

She covered herself with her fans and took several bows, giving the delighted audience the sort of warm, intimate smile that would make them remember this evening. Then she fluttered coyly out, making herself the center of a sandwich of the two plumes as she did. Intentionally comical, it got a nice laugh that eased any lingering sexual tension.