Snake

11

Wessels stood awkwardly in his new beige safari jacket and shorts, white at the knees, pink about the neck where the clippers had been, looking like something out of a Lucky Strike packet.

“Come on, son,” said Kloppers, wanting to get his van loaded and back to town before sunset-he’d been complaining about the state of its headlights for ten minutes.

“Ja, I’m pretty sure it’s him,” Wessels murmured.

The head of the body at his feet had ears that stuck out slightly and, when held up properly by Nxumalo, something of a flatness to the back of its skull.

Kramer touched the jacket with his toe.

“And that looks the same color, only I thought it was a bit darker.”

“Right. Now again at the other one.”

Wessels went over to the metal tray already in its catches on the floor of the van and fiddled with his new fringe.

“The shirt, but the head-well, it could be anyone.”

“Thanks,” said Kramer, and he went back to rejoin Zondi, who was leaning against the Chev. “He’s pretty sure about the driver, less about the other. They’d not been boozing.”

Zondi looked up at the high bank down which the old De Soto had plunged from one stretch of hairpin road to another, crashing on its nose and then rolling.

“Not so difficult,” he said.

“Ja, we all know you’re something of an expert in these matters, only you were lucky not to break your bloody neck.”

“Dr. Strydom has come?”

“Never! He’ll see them later in the morgue, but that’s what it looks like. They must have been going full tonk, thinking there was no other traffic around here.”

Zondi sighed contentedly. He’d been promised the dead sheep, and it was already in the trunk.

Kramer picked up the passbooks and driver’s license that lay on the hood and looked at the names again. Mpeta and Dubulamanzi. These two were going to have had all the answers and correct papers for a spot check.

“This ‘Dubulamanzi’ crops up all over the place, hey? You even see it on sailing boats up at the dam.”

“It means Parter of the Waters, boss. Also the name of the chief who gave the English their big hiding at Isandhlwana and Rorke’s Drift.”

“Uh-huh. Makes a come-down to a small-time crook. Did you ever think it was him?”

“Good driver. I remember from when he had a pirate taxi, six times the uniformed chased him. Mpeta is just a mad dog; many will be very happy when they hear he is dead.”

“If he’d used guns before, we should have had him on file.”

“No proof. You remember at the beer hall? When that old man was shot in a fight and everyone ran away? That time the informers said it was him, but Sithole and me can’t get one person to talk.”

“Why do you think they didn’t pick up anything about these two? I mean, they’re right in Peacevale.”

“Maybe they are cleverer than we think. They don’t spend their money; they just wait a bit.”

“The switch to the De Soto wasn’t bad; last thing I’d try and make a bloody getaway in. It’s this mixture of clever and stupid I just don’t get about these two, but I suppose that’s exactly what we always rely on.”

“He is ready now, boss,” Zondi said, pointing to Tomlinson of Fingerprints, who had just completed his scene-of-accident pictures.

They walked across to the wreckage as Kloppers drove off, taking Wessels back with him. The kid’s cockiness got a lot on Kramer’s nerves.

“Sorry to mess around, sir, but the light’s getting bad,” Tom-linson said. “You can chuck it around now if you want to.”

Kramer did not want to. A strange reluctance to learn more, to confirm what was already much more than a mere suspicion, held him back. For once the truth was totally without any appeal, and he wondered why.

“You look,” he said to Zondi.

“Ja, I wouldn’t like to put my hands in there,” agreed Tom-linson, offering Kramer a cigarette. “Blood doesn’t worry me the same way.”

Then he supplied a light and they stood in silence for a while, looking out over the hills and listening to the night insects finding the right key.

“You’ve still got the sketch plan to do?” asked Kramer.

“A real waste of time that will be. Luckily the sergeant from the station down there has already done the measurements. You know, we had a member of the public in the other day to look at some shots, and he was surprised that even a coon killed in a back yard gets the full treatment. Nice bloke, came from Germany, but only been here six months. We showed him the docket on that butcher and he was amazed-all the plans, pics, and so forth. Said he could help us out with our reticulation problem maybe. Leicas come from there, don’t they?”

Zondi had just lifted something out of the car and laid it on the grass.

“Hey? Ja, so I believe.”

“Is there something the matter, sir? Your guts or-y’know?”

“Tired,” said Kramer.

Zondi had just laid something else on the grass; it looked like a small toffee tin. He seemed as happy as a kid playing mud pies.

“You can say that again,” sighed Tomlinson. “I’m for home as soon as this lot is finished.”

Then Kramer had to know.

He walked down the slope, jumped a small aloe, and stopped beside Zondi’s crouching figure. On the grass lay a long-barreled. 22 pistol, its cracked butt wrapped with adhesive tape, and a wad of notes that was being carefully counted.

“How much?” he asked, as Zondi replaced them in the tin.

“Eighty-six rand, some change, and a coin I do not know.”

He handed it up for inspection.

“Centavos? That’s Portuguese.”

“ Hau! ”

“Probably kept in the till for good luck or something. I’ll ask sometime. Where was all this stuff?”

“Up underneath the front seat on the passenger’s side. It was not easy to find, but it came loose in the crash so when I pressed hard on top I hear it knocking. There is also this.”

And Zondi produced a small box of. 22 rounds, high velocity, which he placed beside the pistol.

“I wonder where they thought they were going with this lot?” Kramer murmured, realizing that his reluctance to face the truth lay in its having solved a problem without supplying any real answers.

His mood must have been catching. Zondi dropped the tin and rose wearily, dusting grass and chips of shattered windshield from his trousers. And together they stood there, making a last check over a scene so mundane and familiar, from their separate years in uniform, that its recurrence then as something important to them seemed like a dirty trick. The glass, the twisted chrome trimmings, the hubcaps and discarded shoes, rags and an air filter, the smell of oil and petrol and battery acid, the subtle reek of accidental death… Suddenly Kramer grabbed Zondi’s arm and pointed.

Gardiner saw what the lieutenant meant the moment he swung open the double doors of the main refrigerator. The pair of feet, from which a label bearing the name Mpeta stuck out at a jaunty angle, were uncommonly small.

“It’s after seven,” Kloppers nagged at his elbow. “I forgot to tell Nxumalo to stay, so if you need any help I suppose I’ll have to.”

“No sweat,” said Gardiner, feeling the sole of each foot to test its moistness, “I can do it from here.”

Then laughed at his inadvertent pun.

“The wife is getting bloody sick of this, I tell you.”

“Pass me that roller, please. Ta.”

“What has yours got to say?”

“Plenty.”

“Exactly how long will this take?”

“ Ach, just a minute or two, Sarge, and then I’ve got to go back to the office and use the glass.”

Gardiner spoiled the first pull, and reached for another form.

“Any progress on the little girlie on the right?”

“Coming along, I hear. Marais was in the canteen tonight and he told me that he’s cleared the first list of obvious suspects, none of the club members or guests involved, all cast-iron alibis. Seen them all except one who wasn’t available, but he’s covered by others. So now I suppose they’ll have to start delving back into her lurid past.”

Kloppers touched the label marked “Stevenson” and actually took a lively interest for an instant. “Things are never so simple,” he said.

Kramer thought otherwise. Anger was gradually filling the vacuum left by Zondi’s departure for Peacevale, carrying with him the curious knowledge that Mpeta had been on Lucky’s back doorstep, and in his bare feet. A vacuum because nothing, no new ideas or conjecture, could exist in it before fresh information was introduced. Gardiner’s phone call had quite numbed him as well.

So it was good to have some feeling back, and he let it grow greedily on the rows of neatly typed words before him. Marais was outstandingly efficient in some respects, but in others a total bloody fool.

“Christ almighty,” Kramer said softly.

“Sir?” answered Marais, who had hung on patiently for his pat on the back.

“This part of Shirley’s statement beginning: ‘I’m in that note perhaps because of…’”

“Ja? Stevenson wanted to corroborate that his personal attitude to the deceased was…”

And there he paused, aware of something wrong.

“You don’t state your question, but that reply looks to me as if Shirley was allowed to know we had nothing up our sleeve-and, in fact, the exact context of our inquiry. Were you conspiring to assist a suspect, by any chance?”

Marais reddened and said, “I wasn’t trying to help him, sir!”

“Oh, no? It didn’t give him a chance to make up any rubbish he liked? Knowing we couldn’t verify the hearsay of a dead man?”

“I thought… that it would make him tell the truth, sir, honest. As if we already knew and were pretending so we could check-”

“Marais! You didn’t think at all, did you?”

Kramer had time to light a Lucky before the painful admission was made. Marais had not thought.

“Did it really matter, though, sir?”

“You ask me that?”

“But it isn’t as though I knew nothing. I’d already got the first statements and his alibi was right there, in my book. His mother says he made her very angry by waking her at twenty-five past twelve to say he’d had a lousy night and was therefore going to join his friends who were staying in the mountains, leaving early.”

“The time is very exact.”

“I’ve got it all there, sir. She says she was angry, so she took her watch from the bedside table to see what the time was. She sleeps with pills, she said, and doesn’t like being wakened.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Then the Bantu female Martha said she was awakened in her kia by the young master knocking on her door. He wanted her to make him an early breakfast, so he asked for her clock to adjust it, set the alarm for six, and went inside again. As she was closing her kia door, she saw in the light from the yard that it was one minute or so after twelve-thirty. She got up at six, ran his bath at quarter past, gave him his food at seven, and saw him leave the property at seven-thirty.”

“Haven’t they got a cook boy?”

“She is the cook, sir; used to be the nanny. Why?”

“Surely she would be up at six anyway.”

“On Sunday in a lot of those houses, the people don’t get up until after the Jo’burg papers come, so the servants have it easy, too. The Dragon, for example-”

“Hey?”

“Mrs. Shirley, I mean-she was fast asleep until just before lunchtime. She doesn’t eat breakfast on Sunday but ‘keeps herself,’ so she puts it, for dinners with friends or at the club.”

“Where’s the husband all this time?”

“The ex-judge is away at Umfolozi Game Reserve.”

“Ex-judge, hey?”

“Late of the Appellate Division,” Marais said glibly.

Kramer glared.

It was a toss-up between kicking the bastard hard in the arse, or trying to get something into his thick skull. Less satisfyingly, better judgment had the coin land heads and not tails.

“Sergeant, pull over Zondi’s stool and sit down. You and me are going to have a bit of a little talk. I want you to forget about the note for a moment. If Shirley is clean, it won’t have mattered; if he isn’t, then it can be an advantage to seem halfwitted while the other guy thinks he’s smart.”

“Er-ta, sir.”

“Good. Go on, sit. You seem impressed by this man.”

“He is polite and friendly, even. Really listens when you talk.”

“Have you met a coolie who don’t try to grease you like that?”

“Hey?” said Marais, shocked.

“And this part where you say he went out to the cook girl’s kia to get the clock and tell her about the morning-why didn’t he shout for her? Is he a liberal?”

“Progressive party maybe-in his position he couldn’t be anything banned.”

“ Ach, we’re not talking political parties now! This isn’t Security! I asked you a straightforward question. Yes or no?”

“He treats the girl-well, perhaps he is a bit liberal, not in the suspicious sense, though.”

“Since when is liberalism not suspicious until proven otherwise?” Kramer asked, missing the ashtray. “Nine times out of ten you’ll find it’s a university poop who can’t make it with his own, so he uses liberalism to bring himself into the company of females who are automatically flattered by his interest. Ja?”

Marais nodded, and then said with a hopeful smile, “It can’t be like that with the cook girl, Lieutenant. She’s built like a bloody postbox and old enough to-”

“Look! We haven’t time for jokes! This is a murder investigation, man! We are looking for motivation and all that crap. Are you with me now?”

“Sorry, sir.”

“And in all this socializing you’ve been doing, have you met up with any young ladies that know this Shirley?”

“Only the one. The others had already checked out. She said Shirley wasn’t her cup of tea; too like a cat, actually-only does what you want if it pleases him. She said she’d not even glanced his way more than once.”

“Interesting this was a blind date he was waiting for.”

“I was surprised, he talks like a ladies’ man but it seems he puts them off.”

“And didn’t this Eve-Sonja Bergstroom-have a dark skin?”

“It was-ja, a proper tan. But her identity-”

“(Or is this too subtle for you?) We’re talking about how she seemed in his mind.”

Kramer watched the dawn of insight spread pinkly up from Marais’s collar. The man was not such a bloody fool after all. Nor was that too bad on his part, given the facts.

According to custom, the body of the butcher had been placed across one corner of the living room, screened off by a sheet. A saucer lay on the floor before it, already fairly well off for cash offerings toward the family’s welfare and the funeral.

Zondi, who had called in not entirely out of respect, nonetheless placed a rand note with the rest and backed away.

“That is not all of it,” the widow said bitterly, her face hidden by a black cloth.

The white priest from England, who had shown Zondi his permit to enter Peacevale, as if he cared, led her into another room, where the beds had been pushed aside to give the mourners standing space. There were many men there, mostly small traders with waistcoats and black armbands, each holding his hat to his chest and speaking in very low tones.

They avoided Zondi’s direct look, and he felt angry-but whether at them or with himself he couldn’t be sure.

“Stay well, my brothers,” he said.

“Go well,” they answered in a mumble.

This was no place for questions.

Outside, by the light of the streetlamp on the corner, children were playing in the yard. He paused to watch them.

“Ee-search, ee-search!” they shouted out, and ran off shrieking into the shadows, banging into tin fences and knocking over buckets and setting the fowls asquawk. Their panic had the full-bloodedness of make-believe. For some years yet he’d just be a bogeyman, and with such were the best night games played.

Zondi growled and flapped his arms, sending them shrilling delightedly across five properties or more.

Then he trudged up the smooth, worn bank to the gate where his car was parked, wondering where next to turn in his search for the identity of the third man, the one who had come from the car, the real killer. Because that was what his arithmetic made of the sole-print puzzle-and besides, Mpeta had not been a very convincing choice as a gunman.

He saw two youths peering in through his driver’s window, and was about to send them packing with a boost of genuine fright when he recognized the taller of the two as Jerry, eldest son of Beebop Williams. He had been looking for him.

“You like cars?” Zondi asked.

“Very much, Sergeant!”

“Who is this one, Jerry?”

“His father is the dead man inside-his name is Thomas.”

“You worked in your father’s shop, too?”

“I am standard six,” Thomas replied proudly.

“But these are school holidays, are they not? Or are you so educated that shopwork is not for you?”

“He works for another man, by the deposit-down bazaar, doing all his sums for him.”

“Once I did work for my father,” Thomas added, drawing numbers in the dust on the fender. “But he said I was not a white child who goes to school for free, and that I must earn the money for the fees and the books; he can use a stupid boy instead to ride the bicycle. I must go now. My greetings to your family, Jerry, and my thanks that you will walk with me tomorrow.”

He meant at the funeral, and this caught his throat in a way that made him duck and run.

“If you are not ashamed of being thought arrested,” Zondi said to Jerry, unlocking his door, “then you can ride with me-I will pass your house.”

With a chortle of pleasure, Jerry slid across the seat, bounced on it to test its springs, and began fingering every knob and lever. He pulled at a steel ring on the underside of the dashboard and was bewildered to find it welded fast.

“For cuffs,” explained Zondi, taking off slowly in case younger enthusiasts were underneath examining the substructure.

And the uneven road, rutted by bus tracks during the recent rains, kept their speed down for the rest of the hill. The right moment was chosen carefully.

“Tell me, Jerry, but where were you when Yankee Boy was with your father?” he said, dodging three daredevils naked up to their belly buttons, and giving no hint of having heard of the beating. “I suppose it was with the girls across at the dress house. Or was it with the others who wash clothes in the stream?”

“ Hau! ” the youth gasped.

“Which?”

“The dress house.”

“Would you like me to drive round the top side?”

“Please-that would be special!”

“And on your way back, can you remember what you saw?”

Jerry flopped an arm over to hang down behind the seat, crossed his bare legs, put a foot against the dashboard, and began to whistle between his teeth.

“He cannot remember,” Zondi chided gently, not wanting to drive a dream away. “He who looks so smart and so clever, as if I was his chauffeur man and he Dr. Pentecost.”

His passenger chortled again. “When the one Sithole asks me, he says I have a very clear sight of things but I talk too much.”

“You try to escape me. The truth is your memory is very, very bad.”

“Huh!”

“What color was the car?”

“Red, Sergeant. I remember when it stopped there because I thought there would be trouble if they entered my father’s shop and he wanted me to find a seventy-eight-the car was not so smart, you see? Then the stupid boy from next door, who works for Thomas, he comes up on his bike and says my father was shouting at the back for me.”

“And so?”

Zondi handed over one of two cigarettes he had just lit in his mouth, and Jerry lay back, taking quick sucks at it, and closing his eyes.

“I cross the road and see one man in the car and I go sideways so my father can’t see me. There are two old women talking over there, and there is an old man with a donkey cart the other side. The bus has just been to take away people by the stop, and there is a woman with a baby on her back, packing her suitcase again because it broke open when dropped from the top of the bus.”

“Hmmm. Your memory is not so wonderful, after all.”

“Let me finish,” Jerry said indignantly, settling back again. “I am in the road. Then I go down the path very carefully, because maybe my father is again looking for me. So I am crouching low, just like a dog, through the weeds, round by the broken car. I take a peep. Hau! I see white shining and I know it is my father’s shirt. But next time I look, I see it is only one of those men who come from the hospital when the doctors are finished with them and throw them out. He is looking for food in the rubbish box, and I hide in case my father comes out to chase him away. Then, when he has gone to look in another place, I again go like a dog and I get right to the door, and I put my hand on the knob, turning it so quiet nobody can hear, and then in I go. Yankee Boy Msomi is there and I greet him and we talk together a little. He is a big friend of mine.”

Zondi accelerated onto the divided highway and brought the needle up to the legal limit, then beyond, winding down his window to make the most of the rush of air. The arm swung around from behind the seat, and Jerry gripped the handle on the dashboard, pressed his forehead right against the windshield, and started clicking his tongue, urging them on even faster.

He was half a kilometer late in noticing they had passed his turnoff.

“Do we go somewhere else first?” he shouted hopefully.

“If you are not afraid.”

“Me? I am a man!”

Someone else drove him home again from the mortuary, very subdued, if materially richer for his experience.

Marais was still trying to justify his technique when Kramer left the building in response to Zondi’s honk from the street.

“Look, man-first thing tomorrow we’ll make another start,” Kramer said. “I’m getting a lift from that bloke over there.”

“All the best,” replied Marais, stopping to put on his bicycle clips.

Kramer knew exactly who Zondi meant. “Uh-huh. You don’t get so many, but I’ve seen them,” he said as they started for home; both needed sleep badly. “The boys from the reserves and to-hell-and-gone who get discharged but haven’t the moola to get home again. Live off charity and bugger around in dirt bins until uniformed picks them up on vagrancy and pass charges.”

“The same. Many with no shoes when they come, many without shoes when they go-they sell them to buy sweets and cold drinks in the hospital, and there are the black-bitch nurses who make men pay for their lavatory basins.”

“Zondi, I like this.”

“Where are these persons most commonly seen, boss? At the back of the stores where the rubbish is. How close does anyone look at them? Not close. It can make you feel ashamed inside, but you have not the money for the whole world. What if I tell you a young man tonight identified Mpeta as such a scavenger outside the butcher shop?”

“Man, man, man!”

“There is more; you wait. To double-check, I went first to the station commandant, and he says they have had no prisoner answering the same description in regard to height and so on. In truth, I think they are giving these men an easy time these days. To double-double-check, I saw three people at the scenes of other incidents, who now remember such a man, wearing big bandages on his arms, who they have not seen again. One said he didn’t notice dogs, so why ask such a strange question?”

Zondi stifled a yawn and squeezed his eyes shut once to clear them. The tar ahead widened, forked, narrowed, swept in through the gates of the township and ended abruptly behind the superintendent’s office in a judder of potholed dirt. Then the trees gave out, too; there were just the endless rows of two-roomed Monopoly houses to show by their juxtaposition where the tracks lay. Kramer found he still counted each passing row carefully. A door opened and closed quickly across the way as they stopped outside 2137.

“There are sixteen in that place,” Zondi said, smiling. “They think old Mr. Tchor-tchor is paying them a visit.”

Kramer winced at the evocative name for the bustling superintendent, and muttered, “But what are your thoughts?”

“Exactly that, boss-a lookout. These stores are not white stores with a padlock on the back, but places where the children run in and out, boys forget to close doors, men go and stand in them for the sun. So there is this danger, if you do a raid, that someone will come in the back entrance and see you. But if you put a lookout there, who can beg from those that may wish to enter, then it is safe. That man can just run away by himself.”

“Huh! Half-baked, man.”

“Maybe, boss, but the yeast is blood.”

Candlelight came to warm the window of 2137, drawing Zondi’s hand to the door handle. His stomach rumbled.

“Bloody cannibal,” said Kramer.

And drove away confident that the whole thing could be reshaped in the morning-along with a few destinies, if need be. Fatigue has its own euphoria.