I drove past Westbourne and doubled back before pulling into the country club parking lot, just to make sure I’d shaken my tail. Apparently I had, but I got out of the Chevy and ducked behind a palm, anyway, and waited to see if anybody else pulled in. Nobody did.
As I watched, however, I had one of those stupid moments that I assume others must occasionally have, of which I have more than my share: I wondered why it had gotten so dark out so early, before remembering I was still wearing my sunglasses. I slipped them into my sport-shirt pocket-I wore no coat with my slacks, and was hatless, wearing sandals with no socks, looking more like a tourist than a detective, I supposed. Maybe I should have been doing the shadowing.
Only a few cars were in the graveled lot, and I walked toward the tennis courts and the subtle thunder of the ocean beyond, a cooler, less humid breeze ruffling the trees and the grass and my hair. At dusk, the palms positioned against a gray sky, the beds of colorful flowers muted now, had an otherworldly beauty; I felt alone, but it was a nice feeling, solitary not lonely.
Even in twilight, the beach looked ivory; the gun-metal sea looked peaceful, tide rolling lazily in. I stood staring for a moment, hands in my pockets, thinking about the invasion that was under way somewhere across these vast waters-the Allies were moving across Sicily, and in the paper today the Pope was bitching about us bombing Rome-but I couldn’t make it anything but abstract.
Then a land crab scuttled across my path, and I jumped back, and shivered. Closed my eyes. Breathed slowly.
The little bastard had made it real for me again.
Through Marjorie’s open windows the smells of cooking drew me toward her cottage like I was Hansel and she was a wickedly delicious witch and as for Gretel, well, to hell with Gretel.
I knocked once and waited, to give my hostess a chance to put lids on the steaming pots I pictured her tending. When the door opened, she looked a little harried, her brow pearled with sweat under a white bandanna; she grinned, though, and motioned me in. She wore a white blouse with an inadequately aproned wide blue-and-white-checked skirt that swirled over petticoats as she moved back to the stove.
“Smells wonderful,” I said, and it did, the spicy fragrances a virtual culinary aphrodisiac. I sat at the round table, where two woven sisal place mats waited, along with the usual bowl of cut flowers.
“I hope you like this,” she said. “I been workin’ on it all afternoon. The main course isn’t so hard, but dessert is gonna be real special.”
Watching her slim graceful form, as she moved from this pot to that, I could think of something that would make a real special dessert, myself.
That lecherous thought aside-and despite the lingering memory of last night’s sweet kiss-I was determined to be a gentleman this evening. Marjorie Bristol was as intelligent as she was lovely, and as vulnerable as she was ladylike; hurdling the racial barrier between us, not to mention the cultural one, was a peril I didn’t wish to subject her to.
Or me either, for that matter. Friendship, possibly mild flirtation, was the limit, here.
“You said you weren’t sick of conch,” she said, serving me a small bowl of chowder, “and I took you at your word.”
“Out of this world,” I said, savoring a spoonful. The spicy soup was thick and the chunks of conch mingled with diced potatoes, tomatoes and various other vegetables. I didn’t even dip into the oyster crackers she provided.
She seemed to spend more time watching me eat than eating herself, and her childlike smile at my enjoyment was infectious. Halfway through the soup, she added an appetizer to the table, crunch-battered, mild-tasting fish fingers.
“Grouper,” she said.
They didn’t serve this at Billy Ireland’s back in Chicago; but they should have.
The main course was a plate of well-spiced rice with onions and tomatoes and big white tender chunks of meat.
“Crab?” I said, and smiled a little.
“Your enemy,” she said. “I thought you might like to triumph over him.”
I had a bite and said, “He tastes a hell of a lot better than he looks.”
She ate a bite herself, then studied me, those huge long-lashed brown eyes turning soulful. “You don’t look like a man who’s much afraid of anythin’. Why does a little animal give a big man like you such a start?”
I shrugged; sipped my iced tea. “Not while we’re eating, Marjorie. I’ll tell you later.”
She nodded solemnly, looked down at her food; she had a chastised expression, and I didn’t want her to.
“Hey-Marjorie. It’s no big deal. It’s just not polite supper conversation…okay?”
She smiled again, a little. “Okay.”
I asked her about herself, her family. Both her mother and her father had for many years worked for various wealthy white households in domestic positions.
“My father…really isn’t my father,” she said. “He is my father to me, and I love him, but…he married my mother when she was expectin’ me. Some rich man was my blood daddy. I don’t know who he is, and I never look into it. But that’s why I look like this. Mama’s kind of light-skinned, too. Papa, too, a little. That’s why we live on the other side of the wall.”
“Other side of the wall?”
“In Grant’s Town, a concrete wall separates us light brown ones from the darker.”
“And you folks are higher up the social ladder, I take it?”
She nodded. “We have a nice house. Two stories. No electricity, no indoor plumbin’…not as nice as livin’ here by Westbourne. But nice enough.”
“You mentioned you had a brother you want to put through college….”
“I have two sisters, one older, one younger. Mabel’s married and works at the straw market; Millie’s a maid at the B.C.”
“I’d like to meet them.”
She smiled and ate her food. Somehow, despite her openness, I knew that me meeting her kin wasn’t high on her list.
I was finished with my main course; my stomach glowed with it. I looked at her as she nibbled at her food, and thought about how she’d leveled with me about who she was; how personal she’d been with me.
“Last year about this time,” I told her, “I was on an island called Guadalcanal.”
Her head tilted. “I read about that place in the papers. You were a soldier?”
“A Marine. I was on a patrol that got cut off from the rest of our company. We fought back the Japanese for a day and a night, out of a hole in the sandy ground a shell made. Some of us died. Some of us lived. All the ones who lived were…wounded. Not necessarily physically. Do you understand?”
She nodded gravely. “It was a place like this, Guadalcanal. A tropical island.”
“Yes.”
She smiled ever so gently. “And the land crabs were there.”
I laughed, tapped my empty plate with a fork. “Skittering around like ugly baseball gloves with legs. Lots of legs.”
“Well, you ate you him, now. Your enemy.”
I touched her hand. “Thanks to you.”
Her hand was warm; so was her smile. “Now, dessert.”
She went to the oven and put on a kitchen mitt to pull out a cookie sheet on which were two steaming, oversize custard cups. Soon the cup with its orangeish-white, crusted-brown contents sat before me, its rising, swaying steam beckoning me like an Arab dancing girl.
When I broke the skin with my spoon, a rich orange-white liquid ran through the custard.
“Coconut souffle,” she said, beaming, obviously proud of herself. “Be careful…it’s hot….”
It was, but goddamn it was good; I can taste that stuff this minute: sweet with shreds of coconut and hints of banana and orange and rum….
“I make it with Yellow Bird,” she said, taking a little taste herself.
“There’s a bird in this?”
She laughed musically. “No! Yellow Bird is a drink that mixes banana liqueur, orange juice, Triple Sec, and rum. I put the same things in my souffle.”
“Are you sure you’re not the cook up at Westbourne?”
“I’m sure. She’s so much better than me-but not as good as my mama.”
After supper, we sat out on her front stoop and watched the tide roll in; both the look and sound were shimmering. We sat close, but didn’t touch. The moon in the dark clear blue sky looked unreal, like a poker chip you could reach out and pluck. There were very few stars to wink at us tonight. The horizon was endless, though I knew the countless islands of the Bahamas were scattered out there; that hundreds of beaches, just this lovely, were ivory under the moonlight, just like this one. But somehow this was the only one. Anywhere.
“You know, Nathan…there’s something that’s been botherin’ me….”
“Oh? Something I’ve done or said?”
“No! No. Something about Sir Harry.”
She looked into her lap; she must’ve slipped out of the petticoats when she went into the bathroom after supper, because the blue-and-white dress was spread out before her now, flat, like a tablecloth.
“Sir Harry seemed kinda…funny, a month or so before he died.”
“Funny? How?”
“He was always takin’ precautions. Like he was scared about somethin’.”
I laughed a little. “Some precautions: he left every door in the house unlocked and every window open.”
“I know, I know. But still…he was takin’ precautions like I never see him take before.”
“Such as?”
She sighed, shaking her head slowly, thinking about it. The beads of her wooden necklace made brittle music. “One night, he would sleep in one room. The next night, another room, next night, another. Always a different room.”
“Well…that’s a little odd, but I don’t know that it means he was necessarily taking precautions….”
“Maybe, but he took to always sleepin’ with his gun next to his bed-that’s a precaution, isn’t it?”
I sat up a little. “That’s a precaution, all right. That’s definitely a precaution. What became of that gun?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. I see it on his nightstand, when I put his clothes out, night of the murder. That’s the last I saw of it.”
“Jesus. This could be important, Marjorie. What sort of gun was it?”
“Oh…I don’t know much about guns. I don’t know anything about guns….”
“Was it a revolver or an automatic?”
“What’s the difference?”
I explained, briefly.
“Revolver,” she said.
“How big?”
She thought about it, then held her hands apart about six inches.
“A.38, maybe. You’ll have to tell Colonel Lindop about this.”
“I already did.”
“Oh. Well. Thanks for telling me about it. The prosecution sure as hell isn’t likely to.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t mention it sooner….”
“That’s okay. There’s a lot to keep track of in this crazy case.” I checked my watch. “It’s almost ten. We’ll have to leave in forty-five minutes or so, to meet Arthur.”
“Okay. You want to take a swim?”
“Well…sure. You got any spare trunks in your place?”
She looked at me with what might be irritation. “Do I look like the sort of girl who keeps a man’s swimmin’ things in her house?”
“No-not at all, I just…”
She rose, and undid something, and the dress fell to the sand.
I was looking, dumbfounded, directly at a dark triangle between her legs when the white of her blouse fluttered past me. Then I looked up and her body rose like the perfect statue of a woman, modeled in milk chocolate by some lascivious confectioner. Her breasts were round and high, not large, not small, the sort of overflowing handfuls that would outsmart gravity for decades; the waist seemed impossibly small, legs muscular and endless, a dancer’s legs, spread apart boldly, unashamed; this modest girl had her hands on her hips and was laughing down at me.
“Why is your mouth open like that, Nathan?” She wore nothing but the wooden beaded necklace. “Are you still hungry?”
Then she ran into the surf, laughing, legs kicking, globes of her behind perhaps too large for some tastes, but not mine; I was scrambling out of my clothes and scampering into the surf like a horny land crab.
She splashed at me, giggling like a young girl, and I splashed her back; the moon was playing on the water, washing her with ivory, the water’s surface a ripply mosaic of white and blue and black and gray. She dove and splashed me and swam out a ways and I followed her. Treading water, I looked back at the shore. We weren’t incredibly far out but we could see the country club and her cottage and Westbourne and palm trees silhouetted against the sky.
“It doesn’t look real,” she said. “The world looks like a toy world.”
“It doesn’t seem real to me, either,” I said. “But you seem real.”
She smiled, arms and legs moving, keeping her afloat. But it was a bittersweet smile. “Oh, Nathan…we shouldn’t. We’re from different worlds.”
“There’s only one world,” I said. “Just different places and different people. Sometimes they make war on each other. Sometimes they think of something better to do….”
That took the bitter out of her smile, leaving the sweet, and she dove back in and swam to shore and sat half in the water, half on the wet sand, looking up at the moon, basking in it, as if sunning herself.
I sat next to her. I was a little out of breath. She was in better shape.
“You have scars,” she said, and touched one.
“I been shot a few times.”
“The war?”
“Some of it’s the war. Some isn’t.”
“Your life is dangerous, isn’t it?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes it’s more dangerous than others….”
And I took her in my arms and kissed her, I kissed her hard, and she returned it, our tongues finding each other, my body on hers, the surf crashing over us, her skin wet and hot and cold and willing under me; I slid down, and was about to bury my face between her legs when I said, nastily, “If I can eat my enemy, the least I can do is…”
But then I was doing it, kissing her there, licking her, tasting the coarse hair, sucking the inside of the pink sweet bitter fruit and she cried out, as if in pain, but she wasn’t, and then the tip of me was in her mouth, and then more than the tip of me, and when I couldn’t endure the ecstasy any longer, I pulled her up on me, and rolled back on top of her, put my hands on her breasts, hard soft cold wet warm breasts, tips of them hard and sweet and salty when I suckled them, and then I was inside her, the mouth between her legs suckling me, and she moaned and I moaned and we moaned, and we churned gently together and then not so gently, and when I pulled out of her, whimpering with pleasure, her hand gripped me as I spilled into the sea….
We collapsed together on the wet bed of sand, clutching each other with a mingled urgency and tenderness, staring up at the moon. There were a few wisps of cloud drifting in front of it, now; it didn’t look like a poker chip anymore: it looked alive; it seemed to glow, almost burning, the clouds like white smoke. And we basked in its glow as the tide lapped over us.
I’d almost fallen asleep when she tugged my arm, saying, “Nathan! Time to see Arthur.”
She ran to her clothes and I watched with a smile.
Then I hauled my sorry ass over to my own clothes and shook the sand off and put them on.
Some gentleman.
On the way to Lyford Cay I filled Marjorie in on my experience this afternoon with the obvious police tail.
“Do you think they were following us last night?” she asked, sounding worried.
“When we drove over to Grant’s Town? Naw. I would’ve noticed.”
She glanced behind her, into the blackness. The sheltering palms made a tunnel of the narrow, unlighted road into the Lyford Cay development area. “What about now?”
“No. I gave ’em something to study in that alley. They’re probably still standing there, watching that chalk circle, waiting for something to jump out at them.”
The wharf at the tip of Lyford Cay wasn’t much of one: a finger of wood extending into the sea with a few rowboats tied there, a couple posts with life buoys draped on nails, a kerosene lantern on another post, giving the scene a jaundiced cast. The road stopped and opened into a small graveled area near the mouth of the dock; we got out of the Chevy and walked over to Arthur’s shed, which resembled an oversize outhouse-a four-seater, maybe. His bike was propped up against the side.
“No light on,” I said.
“Maybe Arthur has rounds he makes,” she said. “He’s caretaker, you know.”
“Right. Let’s peek in, anyway.”
We did. There was a chair, a table, a water jug, and no Arthur.
“What time is it, Nathan?”
“About five after eleven. We’re late, but not much. I’m going to have a look around.”
“I’m stayin’ right with you. This place doesn’t feel good.”
“Don’t be silly,” I said, but she was right. I wished I’d brought my nine-millimeter along, but it was still packed away in my suitcase. Without official permission to carry it here, I hadn’t been risking it-nor had I seen any reason to.
At least, not until I felt the skin on the back of my neck start to crawl, about two minutes ago….
We walked out on the spongy dock; walked clear out to the end. I glanced in the moored skiffs, thinking Arthur might be taking a nap in one-no room to stretch out in that shed-but Arthur wasn’t loafing on the job, at least not in one of the boats. We reached the end of the dock, and turned, simultaneously, and looked back toward land.
I think we both saw him at the same time; we each grabbed the other, and were lucky we didn’t tumble into the drink.
But we caught our balance, if not our breath.
Because we could see Arthur clearly, in the moonlight, in the kerosene glow: spread-eagled on his back, half in the water, half on the sand. Sort of like Marjorie and I had been, not so long ago.
Only we’d been alive.
We had to drive back to Marjorie’s cottage, to use the phone, and I tried to talk her into staying behind, but she insisted on coming along on the return trip.
We beat the police there, but stayed in the car, waiting, until the siren announced their arrival, loudly, pointlessly, the black police car throwing gravel as it ground to a stop. Arthur was dead, and unlikely to get either alive or, for that matter, any deader. What exactly was the rush?
Another two cars arrived shortly, but in the lead car were Lindop, Captains Melchen and Barker, and a uniformed driver.
I went over to Lindop, who wore a black-and-khaki cap in place of his daytime pith helmet; I filled him in, going out of my way to pay no attention to Barker and Melchen, who were standing around, rocking on their heels, like little kids who had to go wee-wee.
We walked over to where Arthur lay on his back, eyes wide and empty and staring up at the moon.
“I gave him a quick once-over,” I said. “I don’t see any marks, but his clothes are torn around the shoulders.”
“He’s a native,” Barker said. “His clothes are ratty. So what?”
I acknowledged him for the first time, saying, “I thought you were in New York.”
His upper lip curled. “I got back this afternoon. Is that all right with you, Heller?”
“I didn’t know I had a say in it. Next time check with me and I’ll let you know.”
Kneeling over the dead caretaker, standing half in the water, Lindop said, “He’s apparently drowned. Perhaps he fell off the dock, in the course of his duties.”
“Perhaps his clothes are torn because he was held under the water till his eyes popped out. Colonel, he was meeting me here to give me key defense evidence. I hardly think this is an accidental death.”
“What sort of evidence?” Melchen drawled. His eyes were like cuts behind his wire-frames; the sneer on his pudgy face indicated his opinion of any “evidence” I might come up with.
I told them that Arthur was to have given me the registration number, and name, of the suspicious boat he’d seen; that we were to have met here tonight, at eleven o’clock.
“So somebody tied up here the night of the murder,” Barker said. “So what? Nassau’s a big place. Boats come and go all the time.”
“In the middle of the worst fucking storm since Noah? Are you on dope or something?”
Barker’s face twisted and he raised a fist. “I don’t have to take your shit…”
“I don’t have to take yours, either, Barker. You guys aren’t cops here-you’re advisers. So think carefully before you start in with me.”
He laughed harshly at that; but his hand dropped and his fist turned into fingers.
“Why don’t you drop by headquarters tomorrow, Mr. Heller,” Lindop said blandly, “and we’ll take an official statement. In the meantime, you’re free to go. We’ll handle things here.”
Marjorie had drifted up behind me. “Nathan…excuse me. I wanted to say something.”
Barker and Melchen turned and looked at her wolfishly. They looked from her to me and back, and exchanged knowing glances.
Colonel Lindop said, “Please feel free to speak, Miss Bristol. We understand you were with Mr. Heller when he found the body.”
“I was. I didn’t mean to be eavesdroppin’…but I heard you say Arthur drowned. Well, Arthur, he was an experienced sponge fisherman. I don’t think it’s likely he’d drown in shallow water like this.”
“He might have hit his head, Miss Bristol,” Lindop said reasonably, “if he fell from the dock.”
“Does he have a bump on his head?” she asked.
“We haven’t turned it up yet, but the coroner will make an examination….”
“He was probably drunk,” Melchen said, and laughed.
“Is there any liquor on his breath?” she asked, standing right up to the squat detective.
Barker sighed dramatically, and said, “Colonel Lindop, we only came along because Heller told you this death related somehow to the Oakes case. It clearly doesn’t. Do we have to listen to both his cockeyed theories and this native girl’s?”
“Heller,” Melchen said, dragging it out into two molasses-soaked syllables, looking past her, “why don’t you gather your little nigger baby and go on home?”
I brushed past Lindop and looked right in the fat cop’s fat face. His smile was curdling by the time I said, “Apologize to the lady.”
“For what?”
“Apologize or I’ll feed you your fucking spleen.”
“You don’t scare me…”
“Then don’t apologize. Please don’t.”
He took a step back. In the moonlight his face looked flourwhite, but I had a hunch it would have looked white, anyway.
“Sorry, miss,” he said tightly, softly, without looking at her; without looking at anybody. “I was out of line.”
She nodded and walked back toward the car.
“Oops,” I said, and shoved Melchen.
His feet went out from under him and he landed, splat, in the water. Right next to Arthur.
“You son of a bitch!”
Barker took me by the shirt and said, “You think you’re so goddamn tough. War hero. Silver Star. Am I supposed to be impressed?”
I batted his hand away. “Say, Barker…where were you girls this evening?” I looked at Melchen, who was back on his feet, scowling as he brushed the soggy sand off his soggier suit. “You two got an alibi for Arthur’s murder?”
Both Barker and Melchen were looking at me with burning fury, their posture about to explode into an attack when Colonel Lindop stepped between us.
“Mr. Heller,” he said calmly, “before this gets further out of hand, perhaps you should go. We have a dead body to process.”
“Whatever you say, Colonel.”
“I’ll walk you to your car.”
He did. And as we walked, he said softly, “Mr. Heller, there is every likelihood that this death will be deemed accidental.”
“But…”
He stopped me with a raised hand. “But if you choose to investigate this man’s death-on the q.t., as they say-I want you to know that if you turn up any linkage between this and the de Marigny/Oakes case, I will be most interested.”
“Colonel-like I said before, you’re okay.”
“Mr. Heller, you won’t be ‘okay’ much longer if you continue to treat my American colleagues with such disrespect.”
“I’m just treating ’em the way they deserve.”
“I didn’t say they didn’t deserve it,” he said, smiled briefly, and saluted with a fingertip to his cap, turned and went.
I drove Marjorie back to her cottage in silence. I went in and sat with her, on the edge of her bed which she folded out from its little metal cabinet. I didn’t stay the night, and we certainly didn’t repeat our earlier carnal activities. I just held her in my arms and she shivered, though it wasn’t very cold at all.
Finally as I was about to leave, she said, “You know something, Nathan?”
“Yes?”
“Maybe they were shadowin’ us, last night, after all.”
She closed the door and I was out on the beach, alone.