Dead at Daybreak

∨ Dead at Daybreak ∧

19

Profiling.

Johannes Jacobus Smit had been bound, tortured, and then murdered because he had to supply the combination to a safe and afterward he was an unnecessary and unwelcome witness. The motive was known. The modus operandi clear. The profile simple. A single-minded thief. Someone who was capable of torture and murder. Psychopath, sociopath, at least some symptoms.

Behavior established personality. They had taught him that at Quantico. His three American months.

But the magical power of profiling lay in pinpointing the evidently motiveless, the serial killers, the rapists, the sex murderers who were driven by the demons of their pasts: the fucked-up family life, the violent father, the whoring mother. Not in exposing the simplicity of torture and murder committed to get at the contents of a safe. Robbery. Murder. With aggravating circumstances.

Planned robbery. The wire had been brought to the murder scene. The blowtorch was part of the murderer’s equipment. Here are your sandwiches, love. And don’t forget the wire, the pliers, and the blowtorch. Is the M16 loaded? Have a nice day.

He, the murderer- robber, was known to Smit. Maybe. Probably. No sign of forced entry into the house. And the fact that Smit was shot execution-style. Another potential sign. No witnesses left behind.

Perhaps. Possibly. Conceivably.

He parked the Corolla under a tree at the bottom end of Moreletta Street and switched off the engine.

The blowtorch.

There was something about that blowtorch. The murderer knew he would have to torture, which meant that he knew Smit wouldn’t talk easily. Which also meant that he knew him. Which meant that he knew Smit possessed something that was worth stealing. Something that was hidden or locked away. But there were many ways to torture that caused pain, inhuman pain. Why use a blowtorch? Why not use the pliers to extract Smit’s nails, one by one? Why not beat Smit with the stock of the rifle until his face was unrecognizable and the pain of a broken nose and smashed mouth and cracked skull made him beg to confess, to tell where the documents or diamonds or dollars or drugs were?

Or whatever the fuck was in the safe.

The blowtorch said something about the murderer.

Arson was a primary warning sign of a serial killer in the making. Together with bed-wetting and torturing animals.

They liked fire. Flames.

He took out his notebook.

Crime Research Bureau. Blowtorch burglaries/crimes

He closed the book, put it into his jacket pocket with the pen.

“You must be able to put yourself in the shoes of the murderer and the victim,” they had said at Quantico.

Smit’s shoes. The perspective of the victim acquired from the crime scene, the forensic and pathology reports. Smit, alone at home, follows his usual routine: there’s a knock at the door – was the door locked, had he always kept it locked, habit of fifteen years, or was the door open and had the murderer simply walked in with his rifle and his blowtorch and his wire and his pliers? Here was something that didn’t make sense. There were too many things for one man to carry. Hold the door for a moment, Johannes Jacobus, I just want to get the torture equipment.

Two attackers?

Or one. With a backpack and an M16.

Smit is startled, fear, recognition: after so many years the existence he had crafted with so much care is suddenly threatened. Great fear, adrenaline. But he’s unarmed. He steps away from the door. What do you want?

Oh, you know, Johannes Jacobus, the goodies you stole from me. Where are they, good buddy?

According to the pathologist there were no wounds to indicate that there had been a fight. Smit had put up no resistance. A lamb led to the slaughter. Sit, Smit, and we’ll see how long you can hang in there before you tell me where my goodies are.

Why hadn’t Smit put up any resistance? Had he known he would achieve nothing because there were two of them? Or was he simply too scared, terrified?

Force him into the kitchen chair, tie him down.

With an M16? How do you hold an M16 to a man’s head with one hand while tying his hands with binding wire and a pair of pliers with your other hand?

There had been more than one “visitor.”

Tell us, Smittie, where are the goodies?

Fuck you.

Ah, so pleasant to have cooperation. Light the blowtorch and strip him.

Torture him. The blue flame on his scrotum, on his chest, on his belly, on his arms. The pain must’ve been inhuman.

Why hadn’t he simply told them? His business was doing well. He didn’t need money, diamonds, drugs, weapons, to make more money. Why didn’t he just say, It’s in the safe, here’s the combination, take the stuff, and leave me alone?

Reason: there was something else in the safe. Of no monetary value. Something else.

Reason: he’d known he was going to die if they found what they had come for.

Van Heerden sighed.

“What the fuck do the shoes of the victim have to do with anything? Except if the murderer’s blood is stuck to them” had been Nagel’s reaction. “The suspect, yes. His shoes. That’s what counts.”

He stared ahead, didn’t see the street, the big trees, the gardens. Didn’t see the clouds moving in from the mountain.

Nagel. Who was now thrusting his thin, sinewy arm from the grave. Nagel, he thought, had rested for long enough. Nagel was coming back.

He didn’t know how he would handle it.

He got out of the car.

Let the footwork begin.

♦

Like crystal, she thought. The sunshine days between the cold fronts. Clear as glass, windless, a beautiful fragility. Shining jewels in the dark dress of winter.

Hope Beneke was jogging next to the sea at Blouberg’s beach, somewhat self-conscious about the stares of passing motorists, a small price to pay for the stunning view of the sea and the mountain, the great towering mass of rock with its strange, world-famous shape that guarded the bay, a sentinel of calm, constancy, peace of mind, resignation. Some things always remained the same.

Even if she was changing.

Rhythmically, one running shoe following the other, she took pleasure in the fitness of her body, her breathing deep and even, her legs blissfully warm. She wasn’t always fit; she hadn’t always been so slender. There had been a time in her last year at university and the clerkship years when she had been ashamed of her legs, when she didn’t like her bottom, didn’t look good in jeans – the combination of university-residence food and long hours of study and a certain aversion to herself.

Not that Richard minded. He said he liked her Rubenesque curves. At the beginning. When everything was new in their relationship, when he ran his hands over her body for the first time, sighed deeply, and said, with a light shining behind his eyes, “Lord, Hope, but you’re sexy.” Richard, with his small bald patch and his laconic accountant’s view of life and his passion for news. Richard, who later, when everything was no longer new, would get up after making love to look at the latest news. Or would pick up Time, switch on the light, and read. Time!

Richard, who wanted to get married. No, who wanted to live like a married man long before she had finished with the romance and the eroticism of the game of love.

“You have a red mark on your cheek,” Richard had said without surprise, one summer’s night in the middle of the act of love, as if he was reporting the news to an audience without prejudice. After they had had sex for months.

“My whole body is glowing like fire,” she had said, filled with passion and empathy.

“Odd mark,” was his thoughtful reaction.

And when their relationship eventually became as dry as dust and died a quiet death, she had to take stock.

Just to realize that she had been equally to blame. Not that Richard possessed the same unbiased capacity for introspection. Some people dare not run the risk of self-criticism. He was different. He was so satisfied with himself that he never saw the need for it.

But she had to examine her life. And one of the conclusions she came to was that she wasn’t comfortable with herself. Not with her body, not with the way she was.

So she did two things. Left Kemp, Smuts, and Breedt. And started jogging. And here she was on Blouberg’s beach, fit and slender and Richard-less – and a forty-year-old dysfunctional ex-policeman (what was his real age?) was a vague interest, an impossible possibility.

Because he was so different from Richard? Because he was so unpredictable and wounded? Because his mother…

She should have her head examined.

The sun suddenly disappeared. She looked up. A dark bank of clouds over the bay, over the mountain. Another front. It was a cold winter. Not like last year’s. Like life. Always changing. Sometimes there wasn’t much sunshine, then rare crystal days in between the rain.

♦

He walked from house to house in Moreletta Street, like a door-to-door salesman, and asked his questions.

No one knew Johannes Jacobus Smit. “You know what it’s like – we all live our own lives.”

The houses on either side of the Smit-Van As house: “We sometimes had a chat across the fence. They were very quiet.”

No one saw or heard anything. “I thought I heard something like a shot, but it might have been something else.”

Everyone at each house, somewhat uncomfortable, their Saturday schedule disturbed, politeness without friendliness, curious. “Have you found anything?” “Have you caught anybody?” “Do you know why he was shot?” Because that was where the threat lay. Someone in their area had been cruelly murdered, too near their personal safety zone, a small breach in the bastion of their white middle-class security. And when he replied in the negative, there was a quick frown of worry, followed by a moment of silence as if they wanted Smit to have earned it in some way or another, because such things simply didn’t happen.

Then, before he was ready, he had finished, and he drove to Philippi to see Willie Theal.

Theal, who had phoned him to say, “Come and work with me.” Theal, who had comforted him when his life had burst open like an overripe, sick bloody pomegranate, and he accepted the comfort because he needed it, but his acceptance was deceit, the big deceit because he had always been trash, from the first time he stole, when he stole with his eyes and his mind through the wooden fence, when he stole from Nagel. The trash in him was always there, just under the surface, like lava, constantly smoldering, bubbling, waiting for a crack in the rock face, ready to break like a volcano through the soft crust of his world.

He braked, suddenly.

Too little time.

He realized it suddenly: five days. Not enough.

Say he spoke to Theal – fuck it, he wasn’t afraid. It wouldn’t make him better or worse. It wasn’t because he was afraid of the ghosts that Theal would call up.

It wouldn’t make any difference. Because there simply wasn’t enough. Too little information, too little time.

And it wasn’t going to change. Theal would tell him how and where you could change dollars in the eighties. Or maybe not. And what then? Who would remember Johannes Jacobus X after fifteen years? He could visit Charles Nieuwoudt in Pollsmoor Prison or Victor Verster or whichever jail he might be in and ask whether he falsified the identity document, and what would he get?

Nothing. Not in five days.

Because Nieuwoudt’s brains had been scrambled by drugs and it had been fifteen years and he wouldn’t remember a thing.

That was the problem. The case wasn’t ten months old. It was fifteen years old. Someone had known there was something in that safe worth killing for. He didn’t know what it was. He might as well admit it. He hadn’t the faintest idea what had been in that safe. He could speculate on the basis of a fucking slip of paper until he was blue in the face. He could formulate his clever theories until he died of boredom. It could have been anything. Krugerrands. Gold. Diamonds. Rand or dollars or fucking Monopoly money. It could have been nude photographs of Bill Clinton or the fucking Spice Girls. It could have been a map of pirate’s treasure and he would never know because the thing was as dead as a doornail and he couldn’t get it breathing with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation or a heart-lung machine.

He knew he was right. More than a thought-through conclusion. Instinct. Everything he had learned told him that it would take time. Weeks. Months of fine-tooth combing, of talking, of asking questions until something unraveled and gave you a thread you could tug, pull, wiggle.

He pulled off at the Kraaifontein interchange, turned right over the bridge and right again back to the city on the N1. Where had she said she lived? Milnerton.

Curious. He would have placed her near the mountain with her yuppie hairdo and her BMW, the fucking mountain that brooded. He hated that mountain, hated this place that had made him think he could stage a comeback overnight: Hi, sweetheart, I’m home, I’m a detective again, isn’t it great!

♦

She was busy digging compost into the oleanders when she heard the cell phone ringing. She pulled off the gloves as she walked, opened the sliding door, and answered the phone.

“Hope Beneke.”

“I want to see you.” His voice dark and abrupt.

“Of course,” she said.

“Now.” He heard the irritating sympathy again, the I-understand-everything-now-and-can-be-patient-with-you tone in her voice.

“Fine.”

“I don’t know where you live.”

“Where are you?”

“Milnerton. At Pick ’n Pay.”

She gave him directions.

“Good,” he said, and put the phone down.

“Good-bye,” she said, “Zatopek.” And smiled to herself. He wasn’t a ray of sunshine. What did he look like when he laughed?

She walked to the bathroom, pulled a comb through her short hair, applied pale pink lipstick. She wasn’t going to change. The tracksuit was fine. She went to the kitchen, put on the kettle, took out the small white tray, put out the mugs, the milk jug, the sugar bowl. She should have bought something at the Home Industry. A tart. It was almost coffee time.

She walked to the mini hi-fi. She didn’t really know much about classical music. Was he very knowledgeable? She had The World’s Greatest Arias. And The Best Classical Album Ever. And Pavarotti and Friends. The rest was a mixture from Sinatra to Laurika Rauch to Céline Dion to Bryan Adams.

She put on the Dion CD. Universally loved. She turned the volume to low. Heard the kettle switching itself off. Stood at her sliding door and surveyed the small patch of garden, a postage-stamp oasis that she had created with her own hands, even down to planting the grass, the shrubs, and the flowers. Now she was preparing for spring.

She felt raindrops and looked up. The clouds were heavy, the drops fine and light. She had finished just in time. She closed the door, sat down on a living-room chair, checked her watch. He should be here any moment now. Her eyes wandered over the pine bookcase that she had bought secondhand and painted herself when she was still a clerk.

Did Van Heerden read? Richard hadn’t. Richard was a news fanatic. Newspapers and television news and Time and the Economist and radio bulletins, six o’clock in the morning. She had indulged him. A relationship was a question of give and take. For him it was a matter of being given to and taking from.

Eventually he knocked on her door. She got up, peered through the spy hole, recognized him, and opened the door. He stood, again slightly damp from the rain, the face reflecting stormy weather. As usual. “Come in,” she said. He walked in, glanced at the open-plan kitchen, dining area, and living room, walked to the breakfast counter, took out his wallet, and removed bank notes. He placed them on the counter.

“I’ve finished,” he said without looking up.

She looked at him. He seemed so defenseless, she thought. How could she have been so intimidated initially? The vague purplish color around his eye accentuated his vulnerability, though the lip was now nearly healed.

He placed the last note on the little pile. “We’re going nowhere. The thing is dead. It’s not ten months old. It started when Smit changed his name and it’s too long ago. You can do nothing about it.” He folded his arms and leaned against the counter.

“Would you like some coffee?” she asked quietly.

“The advance…yes, please.” Somewhat taken aback. She walked around him to the kettle, put it on again, put a teaspoon of instant coffee in each mug.

“I have nothing to serve with the coffee. I’m not good at baking,” she said. “Do you bake?”

“I…no.” Irritated. “The investigation…”

“Won’t you sit down? Then we can discuss it.” Voice gentle. She suddenly wanted to laugh: he was so focused, so predictable, his body language an alarm siren, directed at confrontation. He was lost when it didn’t come.

“Yes,” he said, and sat on the edge of a living-room chair. He was so unbelievably uncomfortable, she thought.

“How do you like your coffee?”

“Black and bitter.” As an afterthought: “Thank you.”

“I appreciate your honesty about the investigation.”

“You’ll simply have to accept that the case is dead.”

“It was worth trying.”

“And there is nothing you can do about it.”

“I know.”

“I just came to tell you.”

“That’s fine,” she said.

“What did Kemp tell you?”

“Kemp knows nothing about the investigation.” She poured boiling water into the mugs.

“About me. What did he tell you about me?”

“He said that if there was someone who would be able to find the will, it would be you.” She carried the coffee on her small white tray, put it down on the glass table. “Help yourself,” she said.

He took a mug, put it back on the tray.

“How could he have said that if he knows nothing about the investigation?”

She bent forward, added milk to her coffee, stirred it. “Of course he knows I have a client who is looking for a will that was lost in a burglary. He knows it’s a sort of criminal investigation. That’s why he recommended you. He said you’re the best.” For a moment she wanted to add, Difficult, but the best, but she left it at that, raised the mug to her lips.

“What else did he say? About me?”

“That’s all. Why do you ask?”

“I just want to tell you, I don’t need your sympathy.”

“Why would you need my sympathy? If you say the investigation is dead, then…” She wanted to provoke him; she knew she was doing it deliberately.

“Not the investigation,” he said, irritated.

“Do have your coffee.”

He nodded, took the mug off the tray.

“What made you realize finally that the case was dead?” Her tone of voice was accepting, acquiescent.

He blew on the coffee, thought for a while. “I was at the Drug Squad this morning. And at the neighbors of Van As. I don’t know. I suddenly realized…There is nothing, Hope. And you’ll have to accept it. There is nothing you can do.”

She nodded.

“I…know Van As will be disappointed. But if they hadn’t had such an odd relationship…”

“I’ll talk to her. Don’t worry about it.”

“I’m not worried. Because there’s nothing…”

“That she can do.”

“That’s right.”

“Where did you learn to cook?”

He suddenly looked penetratingly at her. “What’s going on here, Hope?”

“What do you mean?”

“I come here to tell you that you and Van As can forget it and you talk about food? What’s going on?”

She sank back in the chair, put her running shoes on the table, rested the mug on her knees, spoke amiably. “Do you want me to argue with you about it? You gave your professional opinion and I accept it. I think you did a good job. I also have tremendous respect for the fact that you’ve returned the money. Someone with less integrity would have let the case drag on endlessly.”

He snorted. “I’m trash,” he said.

To which she had no reply.

“I think Kemp told you more.”

“What should he have told me?”

“Nothing.”

He’s like a child, she thought, watching him as he stared at nothing in the distance, drinking his coffee. She could see his mother’s genes, in and around the eyes. She wondered what his father had looked like.

“There was something in the safe. That’s the key.”

“It could have been anything,” she agreed.

“Exactly,” he said. “It would take a year to examine all the possibilities.”

“If you had more time?”

He tried to read her face for sarcasm. Found nothing. “I don’t know. Weeks. Months, perhaps. Luck. We needed luck. If Van As had remembered something. Or had seen something. If the safe had contained something more.”

You make your own luck, Nagel had said.

“Have you anything else you’re working on?” she asked.

“No.”

She so badly wanted to ask him about himself, his mother, about who he was, why he was the way he was. Tell him his front was so unnecessary, that she knew what hid behind it, that she knew he could again become what his mother said he once had been.

“I’m leaving.”

“Perhaps we’ll work together again one day.”

“Perhaps.” He got up.