Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 07 Read online

  Following the edge of the sea, past a sprawling, well-preserved stone hillside fortress that guarded the western entrance to the harbor, beyond a budding wealthy residential development, rounding a curve Marjorie Bristol called Brown’s Point, Samuel and his surrey ambled past a lush green golf course which provided a vast lawn for the estate next door.

  The house itself wasn’t visible from the road. Rather, it was announced by a black wrought-iron fence with white stone pillars and a black wrought-iron gate whose metal work, in rococo cursive, spelled out Westbourne.

  The double gate was shut, but not locked, and Samuel stepped off the surrey, swung open half the gate and returned to shake the reins and get us moving again. He did not get back out to shut the gate behind him before we rolled up and around the crescent-shaped drive across an immaculately landscaped lawn dressed with vivid colorful clusters of gardens, like flowers in a pretty girl’s hair. The ever-present palms leaned lazily, as if gesturing toward the large, low house itself.

  New Providence was a long narrow island—twenty-one miles by seven—and the house on the Oakes estate mimicked that shape, as well as paralleled it, wide to the west and east, narrow to the south and north. The elongated front of the haciendalike house—or was it the back?—dwarfed its two stories, making the structure look lower-slung than it was; Sir Harry’s fabled home reminded me, frankly, of a motor hotel.

  Westbourne was a surprisingly ungainly, shrubbery-surrounded, white-shuttered gray stucco affair with a reddish tile roof and lots of latticework on which bougainvillea climbed; a balcony ran the length of the building, providing a roof for the first-story walkway below, which ceased to the right of the entry porch where the doors of several garages stood half-open, revealing pricey vehicles within. At either end of the structure, open wooden stairways with latticework balustrades gave access to the balcony and many of the second-floor rooms.

  Somebody with money lived here, obviously—this little beach cottage had to run somewhere between fifteen and twenty rooms—but not necessarily somebody with taste. Marjorie Bristol had been wrong: grandiose as its name might be, sprawling and well-tended as its grounds were, Westbourne had a distinctly commonplace air.

  Samuel gave me a smile and I tipped my hat to him as he led his horse and surrey back toward the gate.

  “He seems like a sweet guy,” I said. I had slipped my coat back on and was lugging the duffel.

  “None sweeter,” Miss Bristol said.

  As she walked me toward the wide front porch, she pointed off to the right. “Tennis court over there,” she said. “Swimmin’ pool, too.”

  The tennis courts peeked through the palms, but you couldn’t see the pool from here.

  “Why do you need a swimming pool when the ocean’s in your front yard?”

  “I don’t,” she said, with a little shrug.

  The main entry was unlocked and she went right on in, and I followed. The interior was lush dark wood and plaster walls with paintings and prints that ran to a nautical theme; the ceiling was higher than I would have guessed from outside. An open staircase curved to bedrooms above. To my left I glimpsed a formal dining room, with rich-looking Victorian furnishings and a vast oriental carpet, large enough for an Arabian village to fly away on. Everywhere I looked was a vase with fresh-cut white flowers.

  Miss Bristol noticed me noticing that and said, “Lady Eunice, she loves her lilies. Even when she’s away, like now, I keep her vases brimmin’.”

  Our footsteps echoed on a parquet floor where my face looked back up at me when I glanced down. I wondered if this high polish was Miss Bristol’s work, or if she was strictly administrative.

  I was led past the open doorway of a gleaming white modern kitchen, out onto a wide whitewashed porch where rattan furniture, potted palms and more cut lilies looked out on the slope of a landscaped backyard that fell to a white beach and blue sea.

  Miss Bristol paused on the porch to bestow one of her frequent, but no less prized, smiles upon me. “Time you meet Sir Harry,” she said. “Leave your bag up here on the porch….”

  Down wide steps off one side of the porch she took me, and I heard a chugging, whirring, that was not the tide rolling in.

  “That’s Sir Harry now,” she said, and she wasn’t smiling but her mahogany eyes had a twinkle. “He’s playin’ with his favorite toy, you know?”

  I didn’t know, but I soon did. A palm tree that was between me and the ocean suddenly toppled like a twig.

  I hadn’t noticed the heavy chain around the base of the tree, which had been literally uprooted by a weathered red tractor, its wheels casually churning across the golf-course-like grass, pulling along the palm and its roots and random clinging clods of dirt, like a horse dragging its fallen rider.

  Only the tractor’s rider, or rather driver, had not fallen; he grabbed the gearshift knob, threw the tractor into a thrumming neutral and hopped off like a frog. Clad in slouch hat, red-and-black lumberjack shirt, khaki jodhpurs and knee boots, he was a small but powerful-looking man with a powerful-looking paunch, which he scratched as he walked toward me.

  “Goddamn trees!” he said, working an already harsh, grating voice above the mechanical rumble of the tractor. “What the hell is the use of having an ocean in your backyard if you can’t see the fucking thing?”

  My first thought was whether his salty language had offended Miss Bristol, but when I went to glance at her she was gone. Then I caught sight of her, already halfway up the lawn, heading toward the house.

  He whipped off his hat and wiped his brow with the back of a work-gloved hand, leaving the flesh smudged. “You’re Heller?”

  His hair was brown and wavy and only touched with snow, a younger head of hair than his deeply lined, old man’s face.

  “That’s right.”

  “I’m Oakes. I’ll shut Bessie off and take a little break and we’ll have a little talk.”

  He did, and we soon were walking along the beach.

  Sir Harry Oakes had dark, wide-set glaring eyes and a jutting, belligerent jaw that made him seem permanently pissed-off; his nose was a bulbous blob of putty that threatened to touch thin, tight lips.

  But he was actually kind of pleasant to me, in an eccentric, assholish sort of way.

  Right now his thin lips were doing their tight rendition of a smile. “People think I hate trees, ’cause I’m always bulldozing ’em the hell down.” He stopped and thumped my chest with a thick finger; he had taken the work gloves off. “I’ve got a bigger ’dozer I use, when I really want to tear up the bastards.”

  “No kidding.”

  We began walking again; the surf was gently rolling in, and we were walking past a scenic postcard come to life, but some nasty little winged sons of bitches kept trying to make lunch out of me.

  “Sandflies,” Sir Harry said, slapping one to death on his cheek. It was a stinging slap, as if he were repaying some self-insult. “They’re harmless if you kill ’em.”

  That was a truism if I ever heard one.

  But he was back to trees.

  “I’m going to plant some palms this afternoon,” he said, waving dismissively. “But I like my trees where I want ’em. I don’t want ’em in my fucking way. I don’t want ’em blocking my goddamn view. Right?”

  “Right,” I said.

  “So what do you think of my island?”

  He was at least one-third right: Miss Bristol had mentioned that Oakes owned a third of New Providence Island.

  “Very lovely,” I said, aiming for a sandfly and slapping myself in the face.

  He stopped to point at the ocean, as if it were another of his possessions. “This is Cable Beach—where the phone line comes in and connects us with civilization. Sometimes I think that’s one hell of a mistake.”

  “You have a point.”

  Sir Harry took his hat off to wave the flies away. He smiled again in his stingy way. “What do you think of my little Miss Bristol?”

  “A very efficient, attractive youn
g lady.”

  “She is at that. And a nice little darkie ass on her, too, wouldn’t you say?”

  I swallowed. Much as I might mentally admire Miss Bristol’s posterior, it didn’t strike me as a subject for discussion.

  “Don’t get me wrong, lad.”

  We’d stopped again, and he had placed a fatherly hand on one of my shoulders; his mean, tiny eyes narrowed into slits and his breath was hot, like a small blast furnace. My trained detective’s observation as to this morning’s breakfast would be a cheese and onion omelet.

  “I have never laid a hand on that sweet child,” he said somberly, “and I never will. She’s smart and she’s loyal and she does her job and then some. That is one thing you must always remember, son.”

  “What is?”

  “Never diddle the hired help!”

  “I’ll try to keep that in mind.”

  I’d kept my voice flat, but his prospector’s eyes searched my face for any irony to be mined. I was glad he wasn’t using a pick.

  “You’re a Jewish fella, aren’t you?”

  “I don’t practice the faith, but that’s my heritage, on my father’s side. You have a problem with that, Sir Harry?”

  His laugh was explosive. “Hell no! But there are some narrow-minded bigots on this island. Whenever you have this many niggers and so few white folks crammed together in one little place, bigotry is always going to rear its ugly head.”

  Coming from a head that ugly, that struck me as a sound observation.

  “The thing is, Nate…can I call you Nate?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, and you call me Harry. Fuck this ‘sir’ shit. We’re going to be great friends.”

  “Great.”

  We were walking again. Sandflies nipped me while the surf rolled inexorably in—and out.

  “The thing is, Nate, there are places you may need to go on this island that are…exclusive.”

  “No Jews allowed, you mean.”

  “That’s right. To me a man’s a man, and the only religion I acknowledge is gold…but Jesus! Don’t tell my wife I said so. Eunice believes in all that heavenly hereafter horseshit.”

  “Harry, how can I do a job for you in Nassau if this island’s restricted?”

  “Because I own fucking Nassau, Nate. I’ve got a card for you up at the house; it identifies you as my guest. There isn’t a club or restaurant or hotel in town it won’t get you in.”

  “Well…that should do it.”

  “Besides—you don’t look Jewish.”

  “Gee, thanks, Harry.”

  “You look like a goddamn mick, with that reddish hair.” He slipped an arm around my shoulder as our feet padded along the white sand. “You’re a good man, Nate. Now, let me tell you about this no-good bastard son-in-law of mine.”

  Son-in-law? Was that what this about? Some family squabble?

  “You’re not married, are you, Nate?”

  “No.”

  “So you don’t have any kids—not that you know of, anyway.” He laughed harshly. “Well, if you ever do have, let me guarantee you something: they will break your fucking heart.”

  I didn’t say anything. He took his arm out from around me; he didn’t even want a surrogate offspring at that moment. The flinty eyes seemed suddenly moist.

  “You give them everything…what do they give you back? A broken fucking heart….”

  It seemed Nancy, his “goddamned favorite,” had—less than a year ago—shown her appreciation for her father’s boundless generosity by marrying a “goddamn gigolo fortune-hunting Frenchman.”

  “Do you know how old she was when he started…” He could barely say it, but then it burst out of him. “…fucking her? Seventeen. Seventeen! And him, the slimy bastard, twice her age….”

  I said nothing; slapped a sandfly, successfully this time, on my suitcoat sleeve. It burst and left a tiny bloody splotch.

  “He claims to be a ‘count,’ this de Marigny.” As he spoke, I had no idea how that name was spelled: he pronounced it dee mahreeny. “Goddamn playboy yachtsman…married two other times, lived off his damn wives.”

  He stopped; sat in the sand. Stared out at several brown pelicans who were swooping in toward the sea, looking for lunch. It was late morning, now, and lunch didn’t sound like a bad idea to me, either. I sat next to him.

  “We were always close, Nancy and me…she liked my stories about prospecting days…said she wanted to write my biography when she grew up.” He laughed, almost wistfully; odd coming from such an old roughneck. “She always did like the boys. Maybe we shouldn’t have let her go to those frolics at so young an age.”

  “Frolics?”

  “That’s Brit for dances. She was going to school in London, then—Torrington Park. She had special tutors for art and dance…anything she wanted. On her fourteenth birthday, I gave her a year off from schooling, and took her and her mama on a tour of South America. Then I gave her something very special….”

  He seemed to want me to ask, so I did.

  “What was that, Harry?”

  He looked at me and smiled wider than those thin lips should have been able to; I thought his parchment skin might crack.

  “I took her to Death Valley, Nate.”

  What teenage girl could dream of more?

  He stared at the sand, drew lines in it with a finger. “We retraced my wanderings, when I was searching for gold and damn near died of the effort. It was my way of teaching her…showing her…just what it had taken to have all this. And I think…I thought…some mutual respect had come of it.”

  The pelicans cawed, seeming to mock him.

  “But then she threw me over for that fucking frog.”

  He sounded more like a spurned suitor than a father, but I kept that thought to myself.

  His face had settled back into a bitter mask. “I sent her to California on a vacation, to get her away from that slimy son of a bitch. But he flew there and met her…she was barely two days legal, two little days eighteen, when he married her in New York City.”

  “That’s a rough one, Harry.”

  He gazed hollowly at the ocean. “I tried to make the best of it. Offered ’em money. Offered him land. Offered him a job. He turned me down! Got on his high horse! Like the money didn’t matter…like he wasn’t in it for me to die and Nancy to inherit millions….”

  He grabbed at a handful of sand, like he wanted to strangle it, but it only slipped through his thick fingers.

  “Now, the son of a bitch has even tried to come between Sydney and me!”

  “Sydney?”

  “My son! He’s an impressionable boy, and this Frenchie is smooth…so fucking charming...”—the word was drenched in sarcasm—“…with his yachting and stories of Europe and his phony title…”

  Sir Harry ought to know all about phony titles.

  He was shaking a fist at the sea. “He’s turned Sydney against me! Fuck him. Fuck him.”

  Sir Harry’s weather-beaten face was suffused with red.

  “Then, this most recent outrage…he pressured Nancy into writing a vicious letter to her mother, cutting herself off from us ‘until or unless’ we welcome her beloved husband into the family fold….”

  I risked touching his plaid sleeve. “Harry—there isn’t much to be done about unfortunate sons-in-law.”

  His nostrils flared. “This one there is!” His eyes narrowed and his thin mouth curled in a sneer as he leaned near me, conspiratorially. “My daughter is spending the summer with her mother in Bar Harbor, studying dance or some damn fool thing. And do you know what that fucking alley-cat frog is doing every night, while his wife is away?”

  “No.”

  He reared his head back and bellowed, “Chasing pussy!”

  As I removed one shoe and poured sand out of it, I wondered if all baronets of the British Empire were so eloquent.

  He clutched my arm; his grip was a vise. “I want you to get the goods on the smooth-talking bastard!”

  �
�The goods?”

  He spoke through a tight smile, vicious little teeth clenched. “I want you to give me a stack of pornographic photos, starring that phony count, that I can spread out in front of my daughter and make her faint dead away.”

  Oakes cackled at his own brilliant plan, while I silently nominated him Father of the Year.

  “Mr. Oakes…Sir Harry…I don’t normally do this kind of work….”

  He scowled at me—although with his mug, it wasn’t that easy to tell. “Don’t go all high-minded on me, Heller. I checked up on you. I know your reputation.” He thumped my chest with a thick finger again. “Why in hell do you think I called you in?”

  I pushed the air with two open palms. “That’s not it—my agency thrives on divorce work. I just don’t do it myself.” I thumped my own chest. “I’m the president of my agency, Mr. Oakes….”

  He snorted a laugh. “Well, hell, man—Sir Harry Oakes doesn’t want some low-level assistant—I want the top man! Would you send Henry fucking Ford your office boy?”

  “Of course not, Sir Harry….”

  He put a hand on my shoulder. “Just Harry, Nate.”

  “Fine. But why didn’t you just use somebody local? Why go all the way to Chicago for—”

  “There are only two private investigators in Nassau, Nate—both well known by ‘Count’ Alfred de Marigny. You, on the other hand, ought to be able to blend in with the tourists and military personnel and American airfield engineers…the soldiers and sailors lots of times don’t wear their uniforms off duty, you know.”

  “Well…”

  He stood, planted his feet in the sand like a statue. “What will it take to get you to do the job, Heller?”

  I got up, brushing the sand off my ass. “Frankly, I assumed this would be corporate work, or I’d have sent one of my operatives….”

  “How much, sir?”

  I shrugged; pulled a figure out of the air. A high one. “Three hundred a day and expenses.”

  Sir Harry shrugged back, and gestured toward his house. “How does a ten-thousand-dollar, nonrefundable retainer sound? Payable right now?”

  “Fine,” I said quickly, astounded. “It sounds just fine….”