Snake (7 page)

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.”