Snake

4

So Tuesday began with the prospect of a certain good and a particular evil being done in Trekkersburg.

While it also began as the day that Mickey Zondi and the lieutenant had mutually agreed to take off so that they would be free to help the Widow Fourie with her move.

No changes of plan were made, however, despite the threat of a clash of interests later, and all was to proceed as arranged.

Which meant a very early start at 2137 Kwela Village on the outskirts of the city. Or two starts, really, as Zondi rose before his family to tidy the living room. This was completed eventually with about a dozen sweeps of the broom across the rammed earth floor. Then he put six handfuls of maize porridge in a pot on the Primus stove, found the bowls, and hunted for the golden syrup. He discovered it in a tin inside another tin that had water in the bottom to keep the ants off. Miriam was a resourceful wife, as her lacy tablecloth of cleverly scissored newspaper showed. And, having domestic details now forced upon him by circumstance, Zondi also admired how she had fashioned a new handle for her flatiron from cotton reels. Miriam, who took in washing and mending, hoped one day-when the electricity was put in-to have saved enough for a steam presser.

The porridge popped and bubbled, breaking his reverie.

Zondi lowered the flame and went into the other room, clapping his hands loudly to wake the five children. He regretted this as he did so, because it would have been good to study their faces in repose. They saw little of each other.

But hungry offspring rouse quickly. The twins were up in an instant, and had not even rolled away their mattress before the others, in the big parental bed, started fighting.

“ Hau, hau, hau! What nonsense is this?” Zondi scolded. “Put on the rest of your clothes and I will feed you some breakfast. You! Not so fast!”

He grabbed the cheekier twin by his ear.

“But I am dressed already!”

“Slow down.”

“But I want my porridge! Last night you didn’t-”

“Your porridge you will eat here.”

All the children looked at him rather shocked, right down to the youngest one struggling with her hand-me-down bloomers. This feeling for propriety surprised him.

“In here?” queried the quieter twin, who was more like his mother.

“You are not going into the other room now. I’ve cleaned it for when Mama comes home-none of you.”

“Even to go to school, my father?”

“No. You will all go out by this window! I have seen what a mess you can make quick as quick! You see? Then I will have only one more room to clean.”

“That is a good idea,” said the eldest girl, who was now helping with the housework and hating it. “Our father is clever!”

“Lick his toes, lick his toes!” the others chorused.

“Stop the noise,” Zondi boomed, “or I take off my belt!”

“Then your pants will-”

The cheekier twin took his painful ear into a corner, complaining that his homework had been too hard to understand without help.

He went unheeded. Zondi was standing very still, trying to recapture an idea which seemed like the key to the lightning robberies. It had been suggested to him only moments before- by either something said, or something done.

No good; it was gone.

Klip Marais was also up at that hour, not having been to bed. This wasn’t the fault of his stomach-for he was actually in excellent health, having rushed from the dressing room merely to be sick-but because his mind kept on racing like a mad thing.

His attitude to Kramer had undergone quite a change once he had realized he was being given a chance to vindicate himself, only he was very unsure of how to go about it.

Especially as, during the small hours in the dispassionate solitude of his single-man’s quarters, he had been forced to admit the evidence was flimsy. He looked again at his list. It was a new one-he relied a lot on setting down his problems in an orderly manner. This attempt read: 1. Clothing-too good for occasion 2. Calls-too soon after CID notified 3. Character-too flustered (W/O Gardiner says) 4. Comprehension-too quick to understand boy

Marais was also partial to alliteration, having passed his exams largely by the help of mnemonics, which only he found less difficult to memorize than the original material.

Points 1 and 2 had lost their impact; they were too much a matter of opinion, and could be simply part of the man’s normal drive to boost his image and business. Point 3 was also opinion, if you set friendship aside, and different deaths affected people different ways-he had never vomited after a road accident. Point 4 was based on the word of a native, and a particularly slow-witted one at that, with a hint of the vindictive about him. And yet…

Marais thought a moment and added “Clock” to the others, as this was as close as he could get to “Time factor.” That was the vital issue.

He had a list of times already prepared, and was mulling them over when a sleepy constable stumbled into his room without knocking to say he was wanted on the phone.

His mind raced even faster.

The subject, Kramer remembered, had first come up in a roundabout way when the Widow Fourie suddenly asked him if he knew anything about psychology. He had answered in the affirmative, explaining that psychology was a plastic duck. And when that had not been properly understood, he said that psychology was also aiming a kick at the suspect’s goolies but stopping your boot a millimeter short.

It had been about the time metrication was introduced in South Africa.

She had not mentioned psychology again for about a week after that. Then he found her reading a library book about it and questioned her interest.

Without a word, she had dug into her handbag and handed him the letter from her eldest son’s headmaster. It suggested, in a very kindly way, that she should make an appointment to see the school’s psychologist. Piet, it appeared from their observations, was a very unhappy boy whose work was now being affected.

The Widow Fourie had gone to the education department and seen the psychologist, only to return home with her head whirling with the names of things she had never known existed. Like displacement and Oedipus and trauma and God knows what else.

That was why she had asked Kramer what he knew, and why she had been trying to find out from library books what it was all about. He had spent the rest of the evening reading some of the books himself-even chunks of them aloud, when they revolted him, such as: “The Oedipus complex may be defined as ideas which are largely unconscious and are based on the wish to possess the opposite-sex parent and eliminate the father.”

At midnight he had thrown the books aside and told her that Piet was simply a growing boy who needed the room to grow in. Living cooped up in a top-floor flat would have driven him mad as a kid.

She had then started an unpleasant scene in which she revealed that her relationship with Kramer had been mooted as the possible cause of Piet’s trouble. And that had gone on until daybreak, when they made love twice and he said, “We’ll see.”

All of which was still very fresh in his mind that morning as he stood waiting impatiently on the pavement for Zondi to turn up with the hired lorry. It was to have been picked up from an Indian car dealer at eight, and with a mountain of stuff to shift, a delay wasn’t funny. The two of them would be hard at it until sunset.

The time was after a quarter to nine Then the lorry appeared, driven at Zondi’s incurably frantic pace, with four black men in overalls clinging to the back of the cabin roof. Kramer knew it would be impolitic to ask who they were.

“Right, boss-which is first?” Zondi asked, springing down from the driver’s perch.

“Better make it the breakables.”

“Hey! Three of you! Come on, jump!” Zondi ordered the men, and then set about organizing everything.

The Widow Fourie came down to watch-she had sent the children to the park for the day. Her yellow hair was hidden by a scarf against the dust of moving, and she wore a shapeless uniform borrowed off the nanny, so there was only her face left for him to enjoy-which he did, very much, as he had never seen her so happy and excited.

“Careful, Mickey!” she cautioned with a gasp.

But Zondi, who had begun tossing up cartons of carefully packed crockery to be caught like bricks from a scaffold, just laughed politely.

“Why don’t we leave him to it?” Kramer suggested, taking her arm. “Let’s go over and open up.”

“Well…” she said, watching over her shoulder as he led her to his car.

They drove in silence all the way out to the far western side of town, passing the airfield and shooting range, and traveling into an area of gentle hills where some of the earliest settlers had built their homes. The grass was yellow, like her hair, and the dark green of the blue gum leaves and wattles came close to the uncommon color of her eyes.

He could sense she was crying quietly when they stopped.

There it was. The big house. With a veranda all the way round, and a rain-water tank at one corner to catch the flow off its low, corrugated-iron roof. And the big garden. Three acres of weeds and lawn and vegetable plots and trees with branches just right for platforms or monkey ropes. A messy, homely place. A dump.

She was now smiling as she did when he came down on her.

Kramer, who had been saving his salary over the years for the want of something better to do with it, had simply bought Blue Haze on sight and left it to her in his will. In the meantime, the Widow Fourie would continue to pay the same rent for it as the flat had cost her.

“Control to Lieutenant Kramer, Control to Kramer,” the radio intruded suddenly. “Please come immediately to HQ. We repeat, please-”

He snapped it off.

Marais almost strutted as he followed Strydom out of the main building on the way to the car park.

Where they met Gardiner, who immediately asked how come both of them were looking so smug.

“Teamwork,” said Strydom, with a covert wink to convey he was being generous.

“Ja, me and the doctor here have got Stevenson over a barrel. I’ve just put out a call for Kramer to forget his day off.”

Then it had to be good.

“ Ach, come on, you can tell uncle,” coaxed Gardiner, making his brows wag.

“I didn’t sleep at all well last night,” Strydom said. “That sort of a day and then Kloppers having tantrums on top of it. I was being so restless my wife threw me out of bed about six and told me to doze in the study.”

“Then-” Marais tried to say.

“Naturally, sleep was quite impossible by that stage, so I started to write up my notes on yesterday’s little lady. I was filling in the section of external observations when something suddenly struck me.”

“It’d struck me, too,” Marais got in. “But I was waiting to ring at breakfast.”

“Oh, were you?” Strydom murmured, not quite hiding the doubt in his voice, then continuing briskly. “I was describing how the hands were still in position towards the extremes of the reptile-and by the way, I’ve had it on good authority this is the only way to handle constrictors: you have to stop them getting a grip on anything with their tail, and the head end gives a nasty bite. So she was doing the right thing, only-ironically-her panic probably gave the snake the purchase it needed. If you put yourself in her position, then you can under-”

“That’s all beside the point,” Marais objected

“So what, young man? Hey? Anyway, I was describing the state of the body, noting down that rigor mortis had already started to subside, when it struck me what that stupid man kept saying when we got there. Remember? How stiff she’d been to the touch? Her legs, yes, I wouldn’t quarrel-”

“So the doctor phoned to see if I remembered, too, or was he imagining, and I said that’s right, he had. It’s even in his statement.”

“Which you took?” Gardiner asked.

“Hell, you expect people to say that, and I didn’t try her arms myself!” Marais dried up abruptly, having outwitted himself in his claim to have shared the discovery.

“Beside the point,” Strydom said. “The fact is her arms were flaccid and I didn’t have to pull to get them on her chest. So either Mr. Stevenson didn’t touch her at all-or she was stiff when he did so.”

“Meaning?”

“He told a lie under oath whichever way you take it,” Marais proclaimed. “So I’ve got him! No problem!”

Yankee Boy Msomi made his way with grace down a path in the grass behind a short row of shops where his friend ran a record bar. He was particularly anxious not to appear in any sort of hurry.

Only seconds before he had been sunning himself in the road over on the other side, nodding at the humble greetings of passers-by and generally feeling good, when he had taken another casual look at the old red car parked outside his friend’s place. It was then he noticed that its two occupants had made no move to get out. They seemed to be waiting for something.

Perhaps for the inevitable ebb in the number of people about, that short-lived phenomenon which Msomi had frequently observed happening almost anywhere during midmorning.

That was enough for him. Discs, even for old-fashioned wind-ups, were big money.

He found himself breathing heavily as he reached the back door of his friend’s place. Although he knew nobody was following him, he slid the bolt home after slipping inside. Then he tiptoed with great caution to the doorway into the shop, and used the shoplifter mirror to see where his friend was.

Beebop was drinking a Coke and listening to the latest from the Black Mambazo. He had no customers.

Msomi checked the car. The two men were still in the front seat.

So he poked his head around and said, sweet and low, “Beebop, play this cool, brother, but just you close that door of yours, put up the sign, and come on back here a way. There’s bad, bad news outside, I tell you.”

When he let go something like that for free, there were few who would hesitate or argue.

Beebop, graying slightly under his very black skin, shambled over, shut the door, snibbed the lock, flipped the sign to read SORRY FOLKS, GONE GROOVIN ’! and nearly ran all the way to the safety of his storeroom.

It seemed impossible, but in the short time he obscured Mso-mi’s view of the car-which couldn’t have been more than two seconds-one of its occupants had got out and disappeared.

The light was wrong for Msomi to make out the features of the man at the wheel, and the angle made it impossible to get a look at the registration plate-he had been in too much of a hurry to note it before. Might be false anyway.

“What’s the jive?” Beebop whispered. “And how did you get in here, man? That kid of mine leave the door open again? Got some good stuff back here.”

“Your kid, everybody’s kid.” Msomi grinned. “Just you shut that door, son! Oh, yeah!”

And his pointed shoes did a little shuffle.

When he looked up, there were two men in the front seat of the car again. They drove off.

And Beebop, Jr., tried the back door, finding it yanked open in his face and his hide tanned before he could yell.

Msomi waited until the boy had been set back on his feet again and handed his broom, then drifted away, saying, “My deepest and sincerest, brother, or maybe I did a good thing there.”

Indeed, perhaps he had. But in the shop next door, a butcher bled to death. They had used a. 22 this time, which the high-wattage output of Beebop’s speakers had simply swallowed up.

Kramer tried to make a joke of it.

“You can see they’re running short,” he said. “That’s a lot cheaper than firing thirty-eights.”

The idea wasn’t to make Colonel Hans Muller laugh, just to get him to say something.

The colonel went on twisting his plastic ruler in his oddly neat hands, which would have looked like a pianist’s if it hadn’t been for their werewolf trimmings. His pink-cheeked big head had gone blotchy.

“They’re truly making monkeys of us,” he said at last, “and I don’t like it. I don’t like persons getting shot in my district. I don’t like what we both-but, man, what can we do? We haven’t the availability to cover Peacevale, and who says it will be there next time?”

“Uh-huh, especially as they’ve gone and done it again,” Kramer agreed. “Coons are lucky if they eat meat once a week, then they buy it on a Friday when their money’s paid. Through the week, all the butchers keep is maybe sausages, some chicken they’ve cooked up themselves, offal. Their tills are nearly empty.”

“And you say on one side was a record shop?”

“Sells transistors, battery players, all kinds. Number one in the district; the fat cats come in from every direction. But it was shut at the time for stocktaking.”

The colonel dropped his ruler and reached for his paper knife to play with. It still had its exhibit label from a murder case.

“Okay-exactly how much this time?”

“Approximation: fifteen rand.”

“Hell. Is Zondi working on this?”

“His day off, sir.”

“At a time like this?”

“His wife’s away and-”

“Since when has a kaff-”

This aborted beginning to what might have been quite a speech amused Kramer. The colonel had very nearly said “kaffir,” which was now an officially banned word. Only the day before, a traffic officer had made a public apology for saying it to one of his Bantu subordinates.

“What’s so funny now?” asked the colonel. “You’ve got another joke to make?”

“I was just going to say he has been helping me at home with some heavy work.”

“ Ach, that’s okay, then. As long as he respects you. But bring him in and see if any of his customers knows anything about today.”

“And me?”

“Don’t look to me for orders, Kramer! Go on, man, voetsak!”

Which summed up what Kramer found best in the man. He would have walked away very happily, if it had not been for the weight of trust this also placed upon him.

Zondi returned the lorry to the Indian car dealer and transferred the four men back into his police vehicle. Then he paid them each the two rand he had told the lieutenant was the going rate for express furniture removers.

This done, he drove round the corner and onto the building site.

The white foreman, stiff-jointed from sitting on piles of bricks all day, came across to him.

Zondi showed his identity card again.

“Oh, ja, and what have these skelms been up to, hey? Are you going to take them all away? That’s no worry.”

“ Hau, no, master! These are very good boys, master. You must trust them! They give us help too too much.”

“Never.”

“Most difficult case, master, but their eyes are witnessing all known facts. If you do not believe me, then you must tring-a-ling Lieutenant Kramer. Hau, this one tells us where the skabenga puts the knife in his wife’s seating arrangements, and this man here-”

“Work to be done,” the foreman said, turning away. “Come on, you good-for-nothing ntombi shaggers, get up those ladders, checha wena!”

Zondi, who knew he had been dismissed, from the mind as well as the vicinity, picked his way back to the car, calculating the best way to make the U-turn.

“And now, Mickey,” he said in his best English to the rear-view mirror, “let us adjourn for lunch.”

His car had no radio, nor had Blue Haze a telephone.

The atmosphere in the post-mortem room could have been cut with a knife.

Then it became apparent that the debate had put a stop to the actual work in progress, and so Kloppers retired to sulk in his office. Leaving an aggrieved Marais facing an agitated Kramer over the legs of the dead snake dancer, while Strydom mumbled to himself as he laid down the scalp saw at the other end.

“Look, Doc, all I want to do is get this straight,” Kramer said. “I’m too bloody busy to waste time on a poop. But if you’re sure, then we’ll have him in and get it over with.”

“But, Lieutenant, sir-”

“I’ve heard you, Marais; now I want the expert’s view.”

“Then I quote to you Professor K. Simpson, pathologist to the Queen of England: ‘It is unfortunate, but rigor is uncertain in its timing.’ All right?”

“So it’s only on average that it sets in after six hours and lasts thirty-six? She was allegedly found after thirty-four, remember, not forty-two.”

“It can begin immediately. And the circumstances were exactly right for that-violent exertion prior to death, a warm room. I’d say it must have done, as it goes away again in the order it comes-head, arms, trunk, then the legs. Her legs were stiff.”

“So you can be certain Stevenson didn’t just break the tension by trying to lift her?”

“I see your point-stretching muscle does destroy its rigidity, Tromp-but I was obviously paying particular attention to the head, and I know it had already passed away there. And I also know it had reached the torso. The arms had to be included in that sweep; they could not have been stiff when he says they were.”

“Just had to be sure,” Kramer said, starting for the door. “And thanks, Doc. Coming, Marais?”

“Hell, I’m sorry, Lieutenant. I was transferred from House-breaking down here. I didn’t know all that about breaking tensions. I’ve always thought a stiff was just a stiff.”

“Most people do,” Kramer replied, his spirits restored. “But you just watch it, or you’ll be landing yourself in trouble with a smart lawyer one of these days.”

And they went to find Monty.

When Zondi had finally managed to arrange the living room as the Widow Fourie wanted it, she went out with him onto the stoep.

“What do you think of it?” she asked.

“ Hau, it is beautiful,” he said. “The madam’s children will be very happy here. You can even buy them a donkey perhaps.”

“That is an idea!”

He picked up his jacket.

“Yes, I’ll ask Trompie-or do you know about donkeys?” she asked.

“No, madam, nothing.” He lied without malice. As a herdboy, he had seen all he wanted of donkeys before he was seven.

“I thought all…”

She let that tail away as her eye was caught by a white butterfly dipping by.

“I’m so happy,” she said. “Does it show?”

Zondi felt embarrassed and looked round for his hat. It had been dropped in the tea chest with the lampshades.

“Are you going?” she asked.

“Is there something…?”

“Oh, no, Mickey, you’ve been a marvelous help. Just I feel lonely all of a sudden. It’s so private here, isn’t it? When is the lieutenant getting back?”

“That I don’t know, madam. Shame.”

“Of course-who ever knows that?”

She walked to the edge of the veranda and shaded her eyes to look into the trees. Grasshoppers were doing their erratic dance in the slanted rays between the trunks.

“Could I-could I possibly ask you one more favor? To fetch the kids from the park now for me, instead of the nanny sending them in a taxi at four? It’s really your fault I’m at such a loose end!”

“Victoria Park? With the swings? I’ll go straight away now.”

“Hey, you know what? You must bring your kids here to play in July when we’re at the beach. Do you think they’d like that?”

He knew they would. But that he would never have enough explanations for them afterward.

“Maybe, maybe.” He laughed. “I’ll go now. See you by and by.”

“Oh, where are the presents for Miriam?”

“In the boot, madam-thank you, madam. Sala gahle.”

He drove off, thankful to escape a woman who asked so many questions, many of which left him looking tongue-tied. But he was indebted to the Widow Fourie for all the unwanted household effects, including an iron that had lost its cord, and for the children’s clothing she decided to get rid of as well. She knew how to give so it didn’t hurt to take from her. She seemed to do it without thinking. As she had dumped, without thinking, that very serviceable old paraffin heater, which was only a little rusty, on her new rubbish heap. He had not thought it wrong to stow that in the trunk also.

A day that began like this could only get better.