Max Collins - Carnal Hours

I wanted to smack the smug son of a bitch. “Even if that’s true, why the hell would it have anything to do with Sir Harry’s murder?”

“It doesn’t, necessarily. But I find it intriguing that Sir Harry himself made numerous sojourns south of the border, in the past year or so, with serious talk floating about of his relocating from the Bahamas to Mexico.”

“I still don’t see the connection.”

He waved it off, cigarette trail making a lazy S. “Perhaps there isn’t any. Nonetheless, I would very much like to catch Lady Di in some illegal act. It would be a pleasure to shut down the Duke’s activities without having to…embarrass him.”

“Or the Crown. So why the hell are you keeping an eye on me ?”

“I’m not, really. Lady Medcalf is my interest.”

I got out of the booth. “Well, you’re right about one thing: Di’s my friend. And I have no intention of helping you catch her in any act.”

He shrugged with his eyes, exhaled smoke. “I don’t remember asking you to.”

Suddenly the native band’s steel drums seemed deafening.

“Then why tell me all this?”

“Strictly to keep you informed. You see, I’ve already gathered that if anyone might happen to unravel the truth of this case, Mr. Heller-it’s most likely to be you.”

I just looked at him. He smiled his faint smile and raised his glass to me.

“Do stay in touch,” he said.

When I glanced back before I went out, he was chatting smoothly with the waitress, who seemed entranced.

It was enough to make you wonder who was getting fucked tonight.

“Oyez! Oyez!” the dark-robed little man cried, shortly after capturing the packed courtroom’s attention by beating his crown-tipped staff on the hardwood floor. “God save the King!”

And the assemblage was on its feet as a short, rather stout individual in shoulder-length white wig and furtrimmed scarlet gown took the bench. Sir Oscar Bedford Daly, Chief Justice of the Bahamas, was in his mid-sixties, though he didn’t look it: streaks of black eyebrow were the sole harsh element of a face as round and smooth as a child’s.

According to Higgs, Daly was fair-minded and incisive, with a reputation for cutting through red tape and red herrings alike to find the heart of the matter. Right now this pleasant-looking jurist was casting a rather be nign smile on the crowded courtroom.

And crowded it certainly was: cane chairs, camp stools and wooden folding chairs took every spare inch of floor space at the center and side aisles and back of the room. Again, the wealthy had sent servants hours ahead of time to get in line and hold seats for them. Nonetheless, about half of the faces here were black, belonging to native spectators who had no intention of giving up their seats for anybody.

The morning was hot, if not particularly humid, and the buzzing of flies could be heard over the churning ceiling fans. As the principals settled into place, and English justice took care of its formalities, the only major difference between this and the preliminary hearing was the jury box, all male, all white, merchants mostly. The foreman was a grocer.

Otherwise, all else was much the same-from the two teeming press tables, including Western-garbed Gardner, who sat forward like a hungry bulldog, to the robed, wigged lawyers: boyishly handsome Higgs sitting quietly confident, albeit with the addition of his second-chair counsel, W. E. Callender, a handsome mulatto with an ebullient manner and theatrical flair; charcoal-complected Adderley, a hulking presence surveying the courtroom as if he owned it, sitting next to the dour Attorney General, Hallinan, with his long, expressionless face and tiny twitching mustache.

And Freddie? He was sitting in his mahogany cage, chewing idly on his ever-present wooden match, his suit lightweight and blue, his tie bright as a Bahamas sun. The only indications of the toll all this had taken were his paleness and the fact that somehow the lanky Count had managed to lose weight.

For all his cheerful manner-grinning, winking at acquaintances-he looked damn near skeletal.

Adderley opened the Crown’s case with a lengthy and, frankly, powerful address to the court. He arranged the prosecution’s sorry jigsaw puzzle of circumstance into a picture of remarkable clarity, stressing Freddie’s “desperate financial condition,” and his “burning hatred” for Sir Harry.

“The details of this murder,” he said in his commanding, more British than British tones, “surpass by far any misdeed previously recorded in the annals of the history of crime in our fair land.”

Now his voice boomed.

“Murder is murder, and a life is a life,” he said, “but this murder is, as Shakespeare says, ‘as black as hell and as dark as night’ in its foul conception…a deed which could only originate in a depraved, strange and sadistic mind…a mind indeed which is foreign to the usual mind, with a complete disregard for humanity in so vile a murder which besmirched the name and peace of this tranquil land.”

Nice piece of shifty work, I thought, the way he emphasized the word “foreign.”

Adderley, hands clutching the front of his black robe, moved with a kind of lumbering grace, stalking the courtroom, intimidating the jury even as he wooed them. Beneath the eloquence and the so-very-proper accent was a latent brutality that gave the melodrama of his words credibility.

“Return a verdict of guilty,” he told the mesmerized jurors, “without fear or favor, knowing that you will be doing the thing which will satisfy your God…your conscience…and the demands of British justice!”

He sat, heavily, craning his neck, jutting his chin.

This stirring if pompous preamble was followed by a dull recital of familiar testimony from the RAF photographers and draftsman, and from Marjorie Bristol, who looked charming in her floral print dress with pearls, but seemed a little nervous.

On the other hand, she did grant me the briefest smile as she walked away from the witness box and up the aisle.

Over the lunch break, I sat in the B.C. dining room with Di and Nancy de Marigny-again, barred from the courtroom until her testimony-a procedure I would repeat over the coming days, reporting what I’d seen and giving my views.

“Adderley was good?” Nancy asked.

“Better than good. Even Erle Stanley Gardner was spellbound. I think it may have thrown Godfrey, a little.”

“He may have to lean on that boy Callender,” Di said. “I hear before he went into law, he was considering a stage career in London.”

Nancy was nodding. “Ernest was actually a newscaster with the BBC for a while. He’s got a fabulous personality-never at a loss for words….”

I’d spent enough time with Ernest Callender to know Nancy was right; but neither Higgs nor Callender was a match for Adderley’s showmanship.

“Christie should be up next,” I said.

Nancy smirked. “I wonder if he’ll make a better showing, this time around.”

“I wonder, too,” Di said, arching an eyebrow. “As good as Harold is with potential land buyers, you’d think he’d be able to sell a better bill of goods from the witness box….”

But Harold Christie’s showing, second time around, was if anything worse: he looked as if he hadn’t slept for weeks, his voice quavery and weak, requiring frequent requests from the bench for him to speak up as he gripped the rail, shifting in search of balance or comfort that would never come. If his double-breasted white linen suit with pearl buttons and his dark four-in-hand tie made him seem better groomed than usual, his flop sweat and fingering of that tie betrayed him as incredibly ill at ease.

He told his by-now-familiar tale of the murder night; he denied having been invited to de Marigny’s; nothing new.