Nairobi Heat (2 page)

‘Ishmael, welcome to Africa,’ O said as soon as our beers arrived. He raised his Tusker for a toast, sipped and leaned back in his chair. ‘So, tell me, what can I do you for?’

I told him my story.

A young blonde woman found murdered on the doorstep of a black man – an African. Of course it was going to be the story of the year.

If I was to give advice to black criminals, I would tell them this: do not commit crimes against white people because the state will not rest until you are caught. I mean, if a crime is not solved within the first forty-eight hours it has all but officially gone cold. But a black-on-white crime does not go cold. A beautiful blonde girl is dead and a week later I’m chasing after ghosts in Africa. Had it been a black victim I certainly wouldn’t have been racking up overtime in Nairobi.

The call came at two in the morning. I jumped out of bed, surprised only by the address – 2010 Spaight Avenue, Maple Bluff – and five minutes later, dressed in black pants, a white dress shirt and a smart black jacket, I was on the road. I
combed my hair on my way there – siren blaring, doing ninety miles an hour. You don’t show up in Maple Bluff looking as if you have just woken up.

By the time I got to the scene the paramedics and cops from the Maple Bluff Police Department had already arrived. The residents of this little tax haven even had their own police and fire departments. No detectives though, and that’s why I’d been called in, most probably on loan. My department makes thousands – and, if lucky, I get paid overtime.

The uniforms were just standing around, watching as the paramedics – who had just given up trying to revive the girl – returned their equipment to the ambulance. Neighbours, extremely white and dressed in those expensive shiny pyjamas, were looking on too. I asked them to go back into their homes – we would be knocking on their doors soon enough.

The girl was lying on the stairs; her long blonde hair strewn around her, the bright porch light beaming down as if she was on a theatre stage. She looked to be somewhere between eighteen and twenty. Her white shirt had been ripped open – by the paramedics, I later learned – exposing a full, braless chest. She was wearing a short pleated skirt, like a cheerleader’s, knee-length white socks and white tennis shoes.

The first thought that came to mind was how beautiful she was – the red polish on her nails was flawless; her hair, though messy from the paramedics trying to shock her back to life, was still a glittery blonde; her eyes were closed and her face calm. She didn’t even look lifeless, and I expected her to get up at any moment for the final curtain call.

Stepping back, I asked the uniforms where the owner of
the house was and they pointed inside. I would have expected him or her to be tripping all over the place, trying to help, or be hovering at the door, beside themselves with worry, but whoever owned the house obviously felt differently.

Walking around the girl, I stepped up onto the porch from the side.
Home Is Where The Heart Is
I read as I wiped my shoes on the mat and knocked on the door. There was no answer, but the door wasn’t locked and so I let myself in.

Inside, the hallway was lit only by the flashing lights of the ambulances and police cars standing outside. All my instincts told me to draw my gun, so I did, steadying my flashlight in my left hand as I walked down a long passageway and into the sitting room.

‘I tell them girl is dead,’ a deep voice said in the dark.

I whirled around, pointing the flashlight in the direction of the voice.

‘Why they mistreat her body?’

There was a man sitting in a leather lovers’ seat, absently twirling an empty wine glass by its stem, and as I watched he reached over and turned on a table lamp by his side. In the sudden brightness I saw that he was immaculately dressed – a black-and-white pinstriped suit and a thin red tie, expensive brown patent leather shoes without socks.

‘You found her?’ I asked him, but it was more of a statement.

‘Yes, I find her like that. I was out with friends for cocktails … Sammy’s Lounge.’

As I put my gun away the man stood up – he was black, very tall, much taller than me, and so thin that his head seemed to be growing from his shoulders. He stretched out
a bony hand that seemed to grow from the suit and grasped mine firmly.

‘Their names?’

He gave me four names – I could look them up at the university, he said. They would vouch for him. He was very composed, no bulging carotid, shifty eyes or sweaty palms. None of the telltales that we are trained to look for.

‘And what time did you leave Sammy’s Lounge?’

‘About twelve thirty. I walk. I like walk … to wash whiskey out of my blood. Half an hour. Maybe more, maybe less, I get here. I call nine one one when I find her.’

‘Did you use your cellphone?’

He handed it over to me. He had called the police at one thirty-three am. I pointed it out to him but he just shrugged.

‘Your accent … Where are you from?’ I asked.

‘My friend, everyone has accent … mine just mean I speak two languages, French and Kinyarwanda. I am from Rwanda … and Kenya. My name is Joshua Hakizimana. And yours, Detective?’

‘You can call me Ishmael … born and bred here in Madison, Wisconsin,’ I replied, feeling very much like the village idiot in the face of his class and poise.

‘Very, very sorry to hear that,’ he said with a short laugh and pointed to a chair for me to sit. ‘I teach at university. I am teacher of Genocide and also Testimony. You know what happen in …?’

‘Was she one of your students?’ I interrupted. I didn’t need a history lesson

‘No, never seen her. Not type that take my class.’ He sounded dismissive.

‘What type is that?’

‘Bohemians and Peace Corps types … What you Americans call trust fund babies, no?’ He broke into a short laugh.

Except for his unsettling calmness there was nothing to arouse suspicion. Whatever clues there were would be with the girl. Only an autopsy would tell us about her last hours. After that we would have to interview the neighbours, trawl the local bars for someone who might remember her, go through the last six or so years of university enrolments and missing persons files and hope we got a lucky break.

I asked Joshua if I could look around and he agreed. I left him and wandered off by myself, switching on the lights as I went. The place was huge but it was the bedroom that interested me. Perhaps this whole mess was just a lover’s quarrel gone too far – sometimes things are that simple. She was a student of his and wanted to break it off. Or he wanted to break it off and she had threatened to expose him to the university authorities.

I finally found it. There was only a huge bed, immaculately made up, and a nightstand with nothing on it except a lamp. I opened the closet and found rows and rows of suits, each ready with a black shirt and matching shoes beneath it. In the adjoining bathroom there was a single toothbrush on the sink next to a tube of organic toothpaste. The medicine cabinet was empty. It didn’t look like I was going to find anything useful, so I went back downstairs to find him sitting in the same position, with his wine glass now half full.

I pointed to his shoes and asked about the socks.

‘Sometimes I forget myself. Absent-minded professor,
no?’ he said with mock sadness as he stood up to walk me to the door.

‘How did you know the girl was dead?’ I asked as I gave him my card.

‘Detective, where I come from death is a companion, like lover or good friend. Always there,’ he said as I stepped outside.

‘We found this over there,’ one of the MBPD cops said to me, pointing to the fence as I made my way off the porch. It was a needle, half full of what I knew to be heroin.

I looked closely at the girl’s arms and easily found the single needle mark, slightly bloody. On the face of it, it looked like an overdose or a suicide but not a murder. This was Maple Bluff after all – a cat up the tree, stolen stop signs, an occasional drunk and unruly grandmother visiting from up-country perhaps, but not murder.

There was nothing more for me to do that night, so I went home to write up my report. Thank God for technology – I could do it all online with a cold beer and slice of pizza. Back in the day, I would’ve been up to my neck in paperwork.

But as I was typing little details began to bother me. The walls of the house, for example, had been empty – no paintings, no photographs. It had been like being in one huge hotel room, impersonal yet inhabited. How could he live in that house without leaving a trace of himself? But that wasn’t a crime, I told myself. And perhaps the house wasn’t home for him; perhaps somewhere in Africa was a house full of photos of a smiling wife, kids and a little dog called Simba that only ate crocodile meat. But even if that was the case, how could a college professor afford a home in Maple Bluff? The taxes
themselves were enough to feed and clothe a family of six. Something didn’t add up – a beautiful blonde girl dead on the doorstep of an African professor. A suicide or an accidental overdose on a stranger’s front porch? No, it was too random to be random. And I’ve seen some fucked up shit. Like this guy who killed a man as he fetched his morning
Wisconsin State Journal
and left a note on him:
A STRANGER KILLS A STRANGER. ONCE. YOU WILL NEVER CATCH ME. SIGNED, RANDOM
. With today’s forensics as long as the victim has even the slightest connection to the killer, sooner or later we get the fucker. But the Random Killer case was different – the victim and the killer were strangers connected only by a theory we barely understood.

To cut a long story short, the killer made one fatal mistake – he had left a partial thumbprint on the note. Five years later there was a fire in a hotel basement that was put out without much damage, but because we suspected arson we fingerprinted all the hotel guests and employees and crosschecked the fingerprints against our database. We didn’t catch the arsonist but it turned out that our Random Killer had been holed up in the hotel doing all sorts of things with a hooker. Nothing much to him in the end; just a local pharmacist with a loving wife and kids.

When he was brought in I looked him straight in the eye and told him that he had fucked up. A perfect crime has no motive. And if there is no motive, then there’s no crime? But he just looked up at me with pity in his eyes. ‘You are a fool,’ he said. ‘Did it not occur to you, Detective, that I was trying to prove that chance is not random?’

I don’t know what the hell he meant by that, and he
refused to say another word – to me, to his lawyers, to his kids and wife – but this much I did know: there had to be a connection between the white girl and the African professor. If I found it, I would be closer to understanding what had happened. There had to be a connection, but what was it? I was tired as hell but I woke up early that morning to go see the coroner – one strange dude.

‘Always stuck with the real pretty ones, ain’t we, Ishmael?’ Bill Quella – BQ for short – said as he pulled the girl out of storage, his Southern twang, sing-songy and a little high-pitched for a man, echoing off the tiles.

‘Unlucky in life, lucky in death I guess,’ I answered.

BQ laughed a nervous squeal of a laugh. He, like everybody else I worked with, knew my wife had left me. What they didn’t know was that she had left me because I was a black cop. At least that is what she’d said. I didn’t understand. How could I be a traitor to my race when I was protecting it? But then there were lots of things I didn’t understand around that time, like how you could ask a man to choose between his life’s work and love?

‘Do you want to know what she chowed down before she met her untimely death?’ BQ asked, pulling back the sheet to reveal the girl.

The glow she had had in death was gone. With cross-stitched sutures running along her chest, across her belly and below her hairline – where BQ had cracked her open – she looked like a white leather mannequin. By the time BQ had finished with them the dead always looked like the dead.

‘Spare me the details …’ I grumbled, ‘just get to it.’

‘Well, Detective Ishmael, you sure gonna love this. It was
murder made to look like an overdose.’

BQ paused for dramatic effect, but I wasn’t biting. ‘How do you know?’ I asked, careful to keep the surprise out of my voice.

‘Real easy … For a start the heroin was injected into her arm after she was long gone. Exhibit A: no trace of it in her blood. And B: see this …’ He pointed to her arm. ‘This is the only needle mark on her whole precious body. She was no addict.’

More questions than answers. ‘How did she die then?’

‘She was asphyxiated. A pillow over her head I would guess …’ he said. ‘She died from oxygen deprivation. Poor thing was murdered.’

‘What time?’

‘My guess? Somewhere between eleven pm and one am.’ BQ paused. ‘Look here, Detective, I might be going off half-cocked, but whoever killed her didn’t want to destroy her. My guess is it was someone who knew her well, someone who might even have loved her …’

I made it to the Madison Police Station around nine am to find it in chaos. Someone had called the press – someone always calls the press – and they had set up camp on the steps, pulling in dozens of civilians, all of them struggling to see what was going on. We should have been better prepared. We should have had some kind of media strategy. But instead, as I pushed through the crowd, I saw the Police Chief, Jackson Jordan, standing in the eye of the storm, trying to calm everyone down. He would hold a press conference with the
Mayor as soon as they had more information, he was telling the assembled throng as calmly as he could.