Snake

5

Stevenson had to be in. A station wagon stood in the drive, and the curtains of the bay window round the side were closed. Yet Kramer looked disappointed.

“Not the smart place I thought it would be,” he said, in no hurry to get out.

The Chev Commando was parked under a flame tree on the opposite side of the street.

“Well, like I say, he’s up against something with the other club,” Marais explained. “Got style and class.”

Kramer, who had entered it on one occasion, in the hope of buying cigarettes after midnight, made a face. If a black ceiling and black walls and a black stage were considered stylish, so be it. And if Trekkersburg’s high society was class, he was no one to argue. But his own response to both had been one of acute depression, so instantaneous that he had gone a mile to get his Lucky Strikes off an obliging refugee near the station. Those buggers worked all hours under very bright lights.

“Do we?” Marais ventured.

“Uh-huh. Let’s go and drag him out,” Kramer said, turning off the engine. “This is only one of three places I’m supposed to be.”

As they went up the flagstones to the front door, past an old gymkhana poster on the gate, he wondered how things were progressing in Peacevale. His senior sergeant was in charge there, but he wished Ludwig hadn’t sodded off on leave, because that was his territory. Same as Lawrence of Arabia, without the camels.

He was still not concentrating when the door opened to Marais’s knock and a black housemaid peered round it. It would have seemed more natural to see the Widow Fourie.

“ Yer-ba-baw! ” the maid exclaimed in fright, at once recognizing them for what they represented, probably from their haircuts.

“Is your master in?” Marais asked. “You fetch him for us, che-che. ”

“Gladys? What are you up to? Oh, I see-you Mormons have been here pestering before!”

“Never,” said Kramer, tugging Marais into the hall behind him and closing the door.

“Police, CID,” the youngster got in hurriedly.

“But what is this about?”

Kramer did the stare that implied heavily his dislike of rhetoric.

She was man enough to stare right back. Her hair color was amazing-perhaps a poodle parlor did it.

Then the crimson lipstick-which claimed more lip than she owned-twisted into a mean streak.

“You must be the uncouth one,” she said. “I’m sorry, but my husband’s sleeping. He does conduct his affairs at night, you know.”

“Uh-huh?”

“And he has taken two tablets today because one hasn’t been enough lately.”

“Since when? Sunday?”

That pitted her poise. She moved back a little and folded her arms.

“ Am I entitled to know what this is about?”

“You’d better ask hubby,” said Kramer. “He’s the man with all the answers.”

The children attended the first shift at Kwela Village School and so returned home while Miriam was still trying to find enough space to put everything and to complete her account of the funeral. They were given their new clothes to try on, and told to stay in the other room. It was raining.

“Yes, very sad,” Zondi agreed, “but it will mean a little more money for us.”

Like most workingmen, he did his best to help others in the family who couldn’t get passes to leave the homeland and find employment.

“There, you see? You are not listening me properly. Now that there is room for another at the kraal, the aunt of my sister’s brother’s wife will be coming to live there. Her sons all died in that mine accident.”

“Were they bastards?”

“Her husband has TB. They’ve locked him up with the lepers in the Transkei.”

“I forgot. Hey, you know? Now Lucky is dead-shot down.”

“No!”

“The lieutenant is very angry with them. It was the same ones as before.”

“ Hau! They were stupid to shoot Lucky!”

“That’s why I must go now,” said Zondi, slipping on the harness of his shoulder holster. “There is a man I must see. Is this all right with you?”

Miriam nodded, holding a wasp-waist corset against the light and wondering at its potential.

“You go, you go-since when does the man ask? And I need you out of the way; this house is so dirty I must do a big clean.” Zondi left in just the right frame of mind to jolt Yankee Boy Msomi out of his lethargy.

After taking coffee with Mrs. Stevenson, Kramer knew they had a possible ally. She did not like Monty much more than they did. She almost implied the existence of their child was evidence enough to support a charge of indecent assault.

How such partnerships began Kramer would never know, but this one seemed very near its end.

“I met an American airman in England during the war,” she said, “and he used to talk about ‘slarbs.’ That’s what he is-a slob.”

“Mind if I take more sugar?” asked Marais, having trouble with his cup.

“Help yourself, dear. I’ll just pop out again and see if I can get him up.”

Marais went purple as Kramer made a shocked grimace behind her back.

“Jesus, have a heart, sir!” He winced.

“Notice?” said Kramer. “She smells something-and she’s liking it. But she told us the story about Monday morning and everything as if she’d read about it in the papers. I don’t think she knows even as much as we do. If she hasn’t fetched him, then we’ll check out his movements on Sunday with her-okay?”

Marais raised a thumb.

Mrs. Stevenson came back in and half filled the settee.

“Not as much as a moan,” she said. “Oh, yes, slobs. That slob in there must have done what he did on Sunday.”

“Oh, ja?”

“Took four of his blinking tablets and decided not to get up at all.”

“What?”

“It’s the truth. On Sunday, he came in after checking our sweet machine near the bus depot-we’ve got the concession, and if you don’t keep emptying it the vandals try their luck-and, calm as you please, went out like a light. Must have been about one. Twelve hours later, he’s still like that. And I’ve had a proper Sunday dinner cooked and everything. No good trying to wake him. He’s still in his pit at six and- would you believe it-he didn’t get up at all until Monday, when his lordship managed his usual time.”

Her indignation was quite real.

Marais put his cup down and reached for a list.

“Twenty minutes from town to here in traffic,” Kramer said impatiently.

Mrs. Stevenson was waving to someone through the window.

“Oh, look,” she said. “There’s Bess outside and I want a word with her about taking Jeremy to riding lessons. Are you…?”

“I’d appreciate if we could just use your phone for a moment,” Kramer said, courteously rising with her. “Then maybe we best be going.”

“It’s in the hall, Mr. Kramer. Well, toodle-oo, if I don’t see you again.”

She rushed out through the French windows, making hi-there noises.

“Sir, this means his only chance of feeling the deceased was stiff-or even knowing about it-was between when she left the stage and when the snake got her or a few minutes afterwards. She couldn’t have been cold either-and that’s something else in his sworn statement.”

“Do I look like your grandmother?” asked Kramer. “You sit tight while I ring the Chocolate Fairy.”

The python was going off. Perhaps, without the bulk of a human body, a few minutes out of the fridge was enough for the putrefactive processes to continue. Snakes were strange things at the best of times, and certainly had a metabolism all their own.

This distressed Strydom under the circumstances: the largest glass bottle he had been able to find was not big enough to contain it.

Nxumalo, who was standing ready to pour in the formalin to preserve it, clucked his tongue sympathetically.

“Why doesn’t the doctor-boss just skin it?” he suggested.

“Because the boss wants a better permanent record of it than that,” Strydom explained. “You see, I’m hoping to deliver a paper about this case at our annual conference in Cape Town, and it would be so much more effective if a three-dimensional concept could be arranged. Understand?”

Nxumalo nodded. The boss did not want to skin it.

“Well, perhaps the museum will lend me one of their bottles,” Strydom said. “I never thought of that.”

“Very clever, my boss.”

“Or at least they’ll tell me where they got theirs from. And I want their views on its strength.”

“Yes, boss.”

“Pop it away for me again, then, but be extremely careful like before,” Strydom ordered, and then went into the office.

Kloppers was away at lunch.

The reptile man at the museum was very quiet-spoken but showed a practical interest in the problem. He said there were no spare bottles, as that method of preservation had been abandoned years ago, and any specimens outstanding were therefore kept in a deep-freeze. However, if the district surgeon would care to drop in that afternoon, bringing his snake with him, he was sure something could be done. A break in routine would be most welcome.

Kramer replaced the receiver very quietly and stood gazing down the passage. A pair of polished black shoes waited outside the third door down. “Okay, man, let’s go,” he called to Marais, adding in a whisper when the sergeant reached him, “We’re not really going, hey?”

Then Kramer opened the front door, counted three, stepped back inside, and closed it.

They waited. Not a murmur.

“We try plan B,” he said into Marais’s ear, knowing he would like it put that way.

Kramer took hold of a carpet sweeper, which the maid had left handy to clear away their crumbs, and wheeled it down the passage. It made very good squeaks when scrubbed back and forward. He began to bump its rubber trim against the wainscoting, and to hum one of the Zulu love chants he had heard Zondi hum so often at the steering wheel. The sweeper collided with the shoes and Kramer paused, keeping the sound in the back of his throat as high-pitched as possible.

“Oil Gladys!” roared a wide-awake voice behind the door “Bloody bitch, think you’re back in your kraal, do-”

“Hello again,” said Kramer as the door was jerked open.

“You!”

“And you. Come in the front room for a moment-don’t bother to change.”

Years of calling on homes early in the morning had taught Kramer that unless a man went in for boxing or wrestling, he generally felt most vulnerable in his dressing gown. And it certainly saved everyone time.

Presently, seated in a black silk kimono, with Japanese egg stains, Monty Stevenson told them everything he knew. It was the same old story, with the alibi of the sweet machine tacked on the end.

“Have to have a finger in a lot of pies in my game,” he explained. “There’s the club and my traveling disco for house parties, then my catering course for Indians, and I’m negotiating rights for-”

“Uh-huh. But according to a bus inspector I know, your chocolate machine at the depot is empty.”

“Wonderful news-knew it would catch on.”

“Because it’s broken.”

“What?”

“Smashed by vandals on Saturday.”

“The bastards!”

“All bluff,” Kramer admitted, adding for Marais’s benefit, “Remember, that bus inspector needs a kick up the arse sometime-said he’d got better things to do than doing stupid inquiries for CID.”

“Then it’s not bro-”

And that was it. The quick flip-flop of conflicting fact caught up with Monty Stevenson and laid him low. Then he told them the true story of what had happened at the Wigwam that weekend.

He’d met this very old friend and they’d taken a bottle of the best into his office to enjoy it in private and then he’d suddenly noticed the time and had to rush home and lie because she didn’t like this particular old friend very much. Who had, unfortunately, left town for a job opportunity in Australia.

“That’s what I wanted to hear,” said Kramer.

“Thank God.”

“So get dressed. You’re under arrest.”

There was an obvious place to look. For all his healthy cynicism, Yankee Boy Msomi was a hypochondriac. And the private surgery of Dr. Arthur Pentecost Thlengwa, which took in hundreds of rand a day, welcomed his drop in the ocean. It was Msomi’s kidneys that primarily concerned him.

But he was not in the long queue of people who preferred to pay for their suffering.

So Zondi half-heartedly tried the pandemonium of the overcrowded outpatients at Peacevale Hospital, and drew another blank.

He was third-time lucky back in the lower end of Trekkersburg, where the herbalists and witch doctors had their shops in a modern block with prosperous Indian families living above them. Msomi was studying a rack of desiccated baboons and other specialist items outside the entrance to Ntagati and Son. He had already made several purchases, which stuck out of his overcoat pocket.

Zondi parked on the other side of the street and was quickly camouflaged by idlers too idle to notice who he was, and who chose his car to lean against.

The problem was making discreet contact with Msomi in daylight. But now that he knew where Msomi was, he knew he could always follow him until the right moment came. One thing was for sure: Zondi was not going to be given the slip.

He began the wait by lighting a cigarette.

Msomi must have seen something in the reflection of the shopwindow, because he turned and, to Zondi’s great surprise, gave him the nod.

“Sta-tion,” he mouthed, and then went back into the store. To anyone else watching, it would have looked like nothing more than a man fighting off a sneeze.

They met on platform 2 behind a pile of mailbags, screened by rough rustics wearing blankets and sitting on wooden suitcases.

“Where are you going?” Zondi demanded.

“To the tribal homelands, you dig? Way, way away. Things is hottin’ up here and it’s time I went see where my roots come from.”

Then he told Zondi hastily about what had occurred in Beebop’s shop, and about the slaughtered butcher, who was a stranger to them both. And rounded off by agreeing that the robberies were something else.

“Brother, it’s this way. A guy here, a guy there, they know how I make a bit of bread on the side, see? Now just say I do pick up somethin’ that spins you by the tail-what then? What if I don’t, but word gets out anyway? And they think it’s me? Can I convince them? Let’s say the big heat is really on and-”

“They kill you to shut you up?”

“There you have it, little bird. Yeah, man. But if I’m outa town when it happens-well, groovy, baby.”

“You’ve hung six hard men on the rope,” Zondi reminded him. “What scares you so much this time?”

“What I’ve done seen today with my own two eyes! Guys comin’ and goin’ and nothin’ in between.”

“Huh!”

Zondi thought it over. Msomi had a ticket and a bag which must have been standing in Ntagati’s. He plainly meant to be on that train north. Therefore he had arranged this meeting because he knew that Zondi would follow him and he wanted his departure to be unimpeded by misunderstanding. That all made sense. But not his degree of apprehension.

“ Aikona, those two eyes saw more,” said Zondi. “You’ve got papers to travel?”

“Cool it, Mickey. Since when did Yankee-”

“Sergeant! Sergeant to you! And it’ll be a sergeant who arrests you, here right now, if you don’t speak the rest!”

There was a great hiss of steam and the enormous locomotive, pushing its water tender, slid in on platform 2, bringing the rustics to their feet. It was Msomi’s train, too.

Zondi caught him by the hair on his coat.

“Okay, okay,” Msomi said despairingly.

“Then what?”

“Chainpuller! Now can I blow?”

Zondi let go. Watching Msomi run for a place on the benches, and feeling a clawed fist grab the walls of his stomach.

Chainpuller.

The walls were pale lime with scuff marks. A map of Trekkersburg almost covered one of them. There was a gray filing cabinet to which a calendar had once been glued. A small table with a stool, and a large desk with pigeonholes and a chair. Two wire wastepaper baskets and a pair of telephones. Two ashtrays: one an inverted piston head, the other an empty paper-clip tin. A wooden pole with a leather loop at one end. Daubs of white paint saying CID on anything worth stealing. In other words, the office was not much to look at, but it had atmosphere.

Monty Stevenson apparently thought so. He stood on the scarred linoleum flooring as if expecting matter-of-fact violence to be done to his person at any moment. He shivered.

And the walls went on whispering.

“Still here?” inquired Kramer, just back from the same old story in Peacevale, yet with calculated suddenness behind his back.

Stevenson went rigid, which had its comic side.

Kramer picked up the pole, slipped the thong over his wrist, and let it swing to and fro.

“Getting stuffy,” he remarked, and used the pole to open both fanlights. Then he hung it up on its hook.

Marais came in, dusting the sugar from his teatime doughnut off his chin, and burping with selfish satisfaction. He picked up his notebook.

“Where had you got to?” Kramer asked. “How many more stories is he going to tell?”

“Swears it’s the truth now, sir.”

“Uh-huh.”

“But it is! I’m prepared to-”

“You shut up.”

“Can’t I even sit down, please?”

“Seen Zondi?” asked Kramer, seating himself at his desk. Marais was already back on the stool.

“Er-no, sir. Well, now it goes like this. After seeing the last customer out of his club at twelve-twenty on the night in question, he then-”

“Got his name?”

“It was one of my members, so I’ve-”

“Carry on, Marais; the time was twelve-twenty.”

“He went to close his office, remembering there he had business matters to discuss with Miss Bergstroom, the dancer. It was her last night of the booking and he would not be seeing her again. So he went to the dressing room and found she had been, quote, the victim of a tragic mishap, unquote. The snake was still moving slightly, but he could see it, too, was dead. His first reaction was to ring for the ambulance-and us- then he admits realizing the situation could, as you suggested, be turned to his advantage. He knew that by then the Sunday papers were already being printed and that on a Saturday night the daily papers usually had only a junior poopsqueak on call. By the way, the prisoner once worked on the advertising part of a paper, so that’s how he knows all this.”

“Births or deaths?” asked Kramer.

“So the point is, sir, he knew that raising the alarm then wouldn’t bring him the kind of attention he wanted, but he denies that he arranged matters so the press would be there before we. In all other respects, it’s much the same as we worked out together. He’s prepared to give another full statement, although I have informed him of his rights.”

“Yes, Officer. I thought that if I left everything just as it was, and had the boy go in there on Monday, then I wasn’t really doing any wrong. I mean, what harm could possibly come of it?”

“Now you know,” said Kramer.

Marais, the clown, wrote that down.

“By the way, Stevenson, did Miss Bergstroom have an agent?” Kramer continued after a pause.

“Of course! I don’t hire any old act for-”

“Then how come you had to talk business with her?”

“I’m sorry? What was that?”

Kramer laughed and stretched, lifting an imaginary pair of barbells, and arching his back.

“I look at it this way, Stevenson,” he said. “I know a bit about papers, too, you see. A morning one like the Gazette or the Durban Herald has a hell of a hard time filling its front page on a Monday with only the weekend to pick from. Man, the times I’ve been in a charge office on a Sunday morning and the reporters have practically begged me to take my gun and make some news. I agree with you about the early hours, but that doesn’t apply to around eleven-then you can’t hope to get better service. Everybody gets so sick of car crashes and sailing regattas and all that rubbish, and they miss the good juicy court stories. You could have gone in on Sunday, hey? Why not?”

Stevenson began to tremble properly.

“Ja, I thought so,” said Kramer. “If you’d said you’d just popped along to see how Miss Bergstroom was doing, your wife would have been suspicious, hey? And with good reason? Even so, you could have invented some excuse if you weren’t all tangled up by your guilty secret.”

“Hey?” said Marais.

“The actual reason Mr. Stevenson wanted to see Miss Sexy Snake Seventy- voetsak -and the actual nature of the business. Am I right?”

The prisoner sat down just where he was on the floor.

Marais looked almost sorry for him.

But Kramer had just had another thought, and picked up the statement made by the cleaner. There was still the matter of the rigor mortis to tidy up.

“According to the boy Joseph, you dismissed him before entering the dressing room a second time. Did you in fact enter it?”

Stevenson took all the breath he could hold and said, “Only for a moment. I couldn’t stomach the smell then-nor the sight. It haunted me all Sunday in nightmares, quite different if you-I mean, I’d had too long to think about it. And that’s the honest reason why I was turned up when I telephoned and-”

“If you want to know, that was your big mistake.”

“Saying she was stiff,” added Marais.

“But she was dead and don’t all…?”

“ Ach, these laymen,” sighed Marais, getting him to his feet.

“So you never even touched her the first time,” Kramer said, finding that a more interesting comment.

“I-I could see all I wanted to. Her breasts weren’t moving- and she did look stiff! Like sticks, those arms were.”

“And how did you know her heart had stopped? Or would you get lipstick on you doing the kiss of life?”

“ What? Oh, dear God, is that what all this has been about? You mean she might still have been alive? Like a drowned person? That I could have-y’know?”

Kramer, who had only just had the idea, shrugged.

“The post-mortem report will be here in a few minutes if you’d like to wait,” he said matter-of-factly.

Emmerentia, who was Strydom’s lovely and gifted small granddaughter, called Trekkersburg Natural History Museum the “dead zoo.”

He was thinking of this with a fond smile as he walked up the steps into its entrance hall and stopped at the reptile cases, which were new.

And yet, Strydom discovered, not everything in this section was as dead as it looked. By waiting patiently, and watching for a flicker of tongue, it was possible to distinguish between exhibits that were inanimate and those that were lifeless, so to speak.

The excellence of the preserved specimens was such that he was sure he had come to the right place. In fact, he would have returned for a second look, had not a Zulu attendant-with immense wooden plugs in his earlobes-pounced suddenly to polish his breath marks from the glass.

Strydom continued down a short passage and into the large mammals hall. It was huge and vaulted, with a gallery for insects and anthropology, and echoed so readily that he went up on tiptoe to skirt a charging bull elephant. A pair of giggling children-which reminded him it was the Michaelmas holidays-were comparing the back ends of the black and the white rhino.

And there were more children, only Bantu this time, and in their best bib and tucker, in a solemn line outside the door he had been told to make for. There a harassed museum official was trying to explain something to the black teacher in charge. Strydom hoped it would not take all day.

“Then if you only read the poster about the wildlife film show for the kiddies from a bus, you can hardly blame us for the disappointment,” the official was saying. “There’s plenty else to look at.”

“‘For Whites Only’ was in very small writing,” the teacher replied, showing not anger but a certain stubbornness. “To tell you the truth, when I brought my pupils in just now, I again failed to notice the restriction concerning the film theater.”

“Well, I’m glad you’re prepared to tell the truth!” said the official, trying to laugh it off.

“I simply thought, sir, as the theater is not even a quarter occupied, that under the circumstances we may be allowed to stand at the back.”

“Not my ruling. Sorry. Don’t make the rules. And I’ve got a boss waiting, so that’s the end of it.”

The teacher turned away and told the children it was time to go and buy their cold drinks. He would pay.

“I’m Smith,” the official said, shaking Strydom’s free hand. “I was sent down to meet you and-oh, never mind. It’s this way. That’s quite a size. Bose as in rose.”

Smith opened a door for Strydom at the top of three flights of stairs and excused himself.

The room had a very high ceiling and enormous windows which filled it with the cold light of the rain clouds. The furnishings were awesomely Victorian, and Strydom felt as though he had stepped back through time to his medical school. Some of the smells were familiar, too.

“Good afternoon. I’m Strydom, the DS,” he said to a large man with white hair working at a table. “You’re Mr. Bose?”

The expert turned round and stared vaguely, as if he wasn’t prepared to say anything until this vision had fully materialized. Then his manner changed.

“The python?” he asked softly.

“That’s right. Here-you take it and tell me what you can do for me, what the chances are.”

Strydom drifted over to the table and saw that Bose had been engaged in painting a perfect plaster cast of a puff adder, applying his colors a scale at a time. So that was how it was done.

“Not what I expected,” said Bose.

Strydom looked round. The python had been laid out along the edge of a bench and Bose was gently feeling its middle.

“Well, I did describe the circumstances.”

“That’s just it. Or did you break its back?”