Dead at Daybreak

∨ Dead at Daybreak ∧

5

“I returned from Windhoek and Jan was supposed to fetch me at the airport. But he wasn’t there. I phoned home. There was no reply. So I took a taxi after waiting for about two hours. It was late, probably ten o’clock in the evening. The house was in darkness. I was worried because he always came home early. And the kitchen light was always burning. So I opened the front door and walked in and I saw him, there, in the kitchen. Immediately. It was the first thing I saw. And I knew he was dead. There was so much blood. His head hung low on his chest. They had fastened him to the chair, one of the kitchen chairs. I sold the set. I couldn’t keep them. His arms were tied behind him with wire, the police told me. I couldn’t go any closer, I simply stood there in the doorway, and then I ran to the neighbors. They telephoned the police. I was in shock. They called the doctor as well.”

From the sound of her voice he knew that she had repeated the story more than once: the lack of intonation that repetition and suppressed trauma brings.

“Later the police asked you to look through the house.”

“Yes. They wanted to know lots of things. How the murderer had entered the house, everything that was stolen…”

“Could you help them?”

“We don’t know how they got in. The police think they were lying in wait for him when he got home. But the neighbors didn’t notice anything.”

“What was gone, out of the house?”

“Only the contents of the safe.”

“His wallet? Television set? Hi-fi?”

“Nothing except the contents of the safe.”

“How long were you in Windhoek?”

“I spent the entire week in Namibia. In the countryside, mostly. I only flew to and from Windhoek.”

“How long had he been dead when you got back?”

“They told me it had happened the previous evening. Before I came back.”

“You didn’t telephone here on that day?”

“No. I’d phoned two days before from Gobabis, just to tell him what I’d found.”

“What did he sound like?”

“The same as always. He didn’t like telephones. I did most of the talking. I made sure that the prices I’d offered were correct, gave the addresses for the truck.”

“He said nothing strange? Different?”

“No.”

“The truck. Which truck?”

“It’s not our truck. Manie Meiring Transport, of Kuils River, fetched the stuff once a month. We let them have the addresses and the checks that had to be given to the sellers. Then he sent someone with a truck.”

“How many people knew you were out of town that week?”

“I don’t know…Only Jan, really.”

“Do you have a char? Gardener?”

“No. I…we did everything.”

“Cleaner at the office?”

“The police also asked me. Perhaps there was someone who knew I was away, but we had no other employees. They also wanted to know if I went out of town on a regular basis. But it was never precisely the same time in any given month. Sometimes I was away for only a night or two, sometimes for two weeks.”

“And then Jan Smit did his own laundry and cleaned the house.”

“There wasn’t much to clean, and there’s a laundry that does ironing as well on Wellington Street.”

“Who knew about the safe?”

“Only Jan and I.”

“No friends? No family?”

“No.”

“Mrs. van As, have you any idea of who could possibly have waited for him and murdered him, anyone who could possibly have known about the contents of the safe?”

She shook her head, and then, without any warning, the tears ran soundlessly down her cheeks.

♦

“But I know you,” said Mavis Petersen when Van Heerden walked into Murder and Robbery’s unattractive brick building on Kasselsvlei Road, Bellville.

He hadn’t looked forward to his return. He didn’t want to count how many years had passed since he’d walked out through these same doors. Virtually nothing had changed. The same musty, wintry smell, the same tiled floors, the same civil service furniture. The same Mavis. Older. But as welcoming.

“Hallo, Mavis.”

“But it’s the captain,” said Mavis, and clapped her hands.

“Not anymore, Mavis.”

“And look at that eye. What did you do? How many years has it been? What is the captain doing these days?”

“As little as possible,” he said, uncomfortable, unprepared for the reception, unwilling to contaminate this woman with the sourness of his existence. “Is Tony O’Grady in?”

“I can’t believe it, Captain. You’ve lost weight. Yes, the inspector is here. He’s on the second floor now. Do you want me to buzz him?”

“No, thank you, Mavis. I’ll just walk up.”

He walked past her desk into the body of the building, recollections hammering at the door of his memory. He shouldn’t have come, he thought. He should have met O’Grady somewhere else. Detectives sat in offices, walked past him, strange faces he had never known. He climbed the stairs to the top floor, passed the tearoom, saw someone there, asked directions. Then he arrived at O’Grady’s office.

The fat man behind the desk looked up when he heard the knock against the door frame.

“Hi, Nougat.”

O’Grady’s eyes narrowed. “Jesus.”

“No, but thanks…”

He walked to the desk, extended a hand. O’Grady hoisted himself halfway up in his chair, shook hands, and sat down again, his mouth still half-open. Van Heerden took a slab of imported nougat out of his jacket pocket. “You still eat this?”

O’Grady didn’t even glance at it. “I don’t believe it.”

He put the nougat on the desk.

“Jesus, Van Heerden, it’s been years. It’s like seeing a ghost.”

He sat down on one of the gray steel chairs.

“But I suppose ghosts don’t get black eyes,” O’Grady said, and picked up the nougat. “What’s this? A bribe?”

“You could call it that.”

The fat man fiddled with the cellophane cover of the nougat. “Where have you been? We’ve even stopped talking about you, you know.”

“I was in Gauteng for a while,” he fabricated.

“In the Force?”

“No.”

“Jesus, wait till I tell the others. So what happened to the eye?”

He gestured. “Small accident. I need your help, Tony.” He wanted to keep the conversation short.

O’Grady took a bite of the nougat. “You sure know how to get it.”

“You handled the Smit case. Last September. Johannes Jacobus Smit. Murdered in his home. Walk-in safe…”

“So you’re a private eye now.”

“Something like that.”

“Jesus, Van Heerden, that’s not a fucking living. Why don’t you come back?”

He breathed deeply. He had to suppress all the fear and the anger.

“Do you remember the case?”

O’Grady stared at him for a long time, his jaws moving as he masticated the nougat, eyes narrowed. He looks exactly the same, Van Heerden thought. No fatter, no thinner. The same plump policeman who hid the sharp mind behind the flamboyant personality and the heavy body.

“So what’s your interest?”

“His mistress is looking for a will that was in the safe.”

“And you must find it?”

“Yes.”

He shook his head. “Private dick. Shit. You used to be good.”

Van Heerden took a deep breath. “The will,” he said.

O’Grady peered at him over the slab of nougat. “Ah. The will.” He put down the confectionery, pushed it aside. “You know, that was the one thing that never really figured.” He leaned back, folded his arms over his stomach. “That fucking will. Because at first I was sure she did him. Or hired somebody. It fitted the whole damn case. Smit had no friends, no business associates, no other staff. But they got in, tortured him until he gave them the combination, cleaned out the safe, and killed him. Took nothing else. It was an inside job. And she was the only one on the inside. Or so she says.”

“Tortured him?”

“Burned him with a fucking blowtorch. Arms, shoulders, chest, balls. It must have been murder, if you’ll pardon the expression.”

“Did she know that?”

“We didn’t tell her or the press. I played it close to the chest, tried to see if I could trick her.”

“She says she knew the combination, Nougat.”

“The blowtorch could have been for effect. To take suspicion away from her.”

“Murder weapon?”

“Now there’s another strange thing. Ballistics said it was an M16. The Yank army model. Not too many of those around, are there?”

Slowly Van Heerden shook his head. “Just one shot?”

“Yep. Execution style, back of the head.”

“Because he’d seen them? Or knew them?”

“Who knows these days? Maybe they shot him just for the fun of it.”

“How many were there, do you think?”

“We don’t know. No fingerprints inside, no footprints outside, no neighborhood witnesses. But Smit was a big man, in reasonable shape. There must have been more than one perp.”

“Forensics?”

O’Grady leaned forward, pulled the nougat toward him again. “Sweet Fanny Adams. No prints, no hair, no fibers. Just a fucking piece of paper. In the safe. Found a piece of paper, about the size of two matchboxes. Clever guys in Pretoria say it was part of a wrapping. For wrapping little stacks of money. You know, ten thousand in fifties, that sort of thing…”

Van Heerden raised his eyebrows.

“But the funny thing is, according to the type and all that shit, that they’re pretty sure it was dollars. U.S. dollars.”

“Fuck,” said Van Heerden.

“My sentiments exactly. But the plot thickens. It was the only thing I had to go on, so I put a lot of pressure on Pretoria through the colonel. Forensics has a money expert. Claassen, or something. He went back to his books and his microscope and came back and said the paper indicated that it was old money. The Americans don’t wrap their money like that anymore. But they used to. In the seventies and early eighties.”

Van Heerden digested the information for a moment. “And you asked Wilna van As about that?”

“Yep. And got the usual answer. She doesn’t know anything. She never took dollars as payment for that old-fart furniture, never paid with it. Doesn’t even know what a fucking dollar bill looks like. I mean, shit, this woman lived with the deceased for a fucking decade or more, but she’s like the three little monkeys – hear, see, speak no evil. And that little sexpot lawyer of hers is all over me like a sumo wrestler every time I want to ask some straight questions.” O’Grady took a frustrated bite of nougat and sank back in his chair again.

“No American clients or friends she knew about.” It was a statement. He already knew the answer.

The fat detective spoke with his mouth full but managed to utter each word clearly. “Not one. I mean, with the rifle and the dollars, it just makes sense that there is some kind of Yank involvement.”

“Her attorney says she’s innocent.”

“Is she your new employer?”

“Temporarily.”

“At least get her into bed. Because that’s all you’re going to get from this one. It’s a dead end. I mean, where’s the fucking motive for Wilna van As? Without the will she apparently gets nothing.”

“Unless there was a deal that she would get half of the haul. In a year or two when things had cooled down.”

“Maybe…”

“And without her there were no other suspects?”

“Zilch. Nothing.”

Time to eat humble pie: “I would like to see the dossier very much, Nougat.”

O’Grady stared fixedly at him.

“I know you’re a good policeman, Nougat. I have to go through the motions.”

“You can’t take it with you. You’ll have to read it here.”