We Are Not Such Things (44 page)

Ndumi also showed up at the house, threatening to fight Tiny. Tiny called the cops and charged Ndumi with harassment. Ndumi charged Tiny with harassment right back. The two women ended up at an “open air” community court held in a trailer.

Ndumi arrived alone, wearing high-heeled boots and a trench coat. Tiny wore her wife outfit and was accompanied by Easy, Easy’s aunt Princess, Easy’s sister-in-law, and me. Ndumi shot me a look of betrayal, then approached me and embraced me in a tight, wordless hug before pushing me away.

“She gonna key your car,” one of Easy’s relatives whispered.

The two women were then called into a social worker’s office. Easy’s aunt put her ear to the wall as the women raised their voices. She offered a running commentary: “Ndumi is yelling ‘I made this baby with Easy, not you!’ to Tiny,” she reported with delight.

Then the social worker called Easy in, and the fight unfurled for two hours. Everyone else waiting by the trailers was told to return the next day. The social worker, a tall man, recommended additional counseling. When the door opened, we all peeked in.

“Who is that?” the social worker asked, pointing to me, the only white person around.

“She’s his friend,” Tiny said, gesturing to Easy.

“She used to be my friend, but not anymore,” Ndumi said. She walked off alone.

Later, in the car, Easy shook his head. “For Ndumi, this is just the beginning,” he said.

But Tiny and Easy thought they would be able to work out all the frustrations with time. Tiny thought she might be able to talk Easy into couples counseling, an idea he rejected.

“Too Western,” he said.

“But it could help,” Tiny said.

Easy shook his head. “I never went to counseling for Amy,” he said. In a split second, his eyes turned cold. “How do I know this counselor person? Can a person change? My father, he is nice now but he used to be very aggressive. He was beating my mom and we sleep in the streets because we can’t go in the house. But today they are too close, so people can change.”

“You don’t trust the counselor?” Tiny asked.

“No, I don’t trust nobody.” His face was tightening, his mouth pursed. I had so rarely seen him break from his cheerful demeanor. “What if you look at the past and it create problems? We must just go forward, forward.”

Since the 1993 murder trial had spanned eleven months, its records were stored in dozens of cardboard boxes that could be obtained by request at the High Court. I had flipped through thousands of pages, but they were usually repetitive hard copy transcripts of the day-to-day testimony, and were largely out of order. What I needed, I felt, was some shred of evidence about the day itself—and evidence was missing from the boxes, as was the police file. At my first meeting with Nollie Niehaus, the prosecutor, he had asked his assistant to request the old file, but it was missing from the central archives—Niehaus guessed that was probably because old records were destroyed to make room for new ones.

One morning, I drove my regular way to Gugulethu, taking a road high above the ocean that led to the thoroughfare that fed onto the N2. The traffic was stopped, bumper-to-bumper, and a distance that usually took me five minutes to cover suddenly took an hour. At the main intersection, police had set up crime scene tape around a crushed white car. In the near-dawn hours, it came to light, two men had hijacked a minivan in Nyanga and then hit the highway and headed toward the city—an unorthodox choice, since any reasonable thief would head in the opposite direction. When the police began to chase them, the criminals took on speed, barreled through a red light, and plowed, at 60 miles an hour, into an oblivious hatchback ambling by. The driver of the hatchback, a woman headed to work, was killed instantly. The hijackers walked away, shackled but unharmed.

I continued on to the Gugulethu Police Department, hoping that they might have a copy of the elusive case file. On the way, I passed two separate dead dogs, lying stiff, mouths and eyes open, on two separate trash heaps. The station was filled with people waiting to report minor crimes or getting various affidavits certified. I was the only white person in line, and the black policeman at the counter called me ahead of everyone else and asked me what I needed.

The officer ordered somebody to help me find the case file. He spoke in Xhosa, but I could work out one English word nestled in the sentence:
priority
. I, in my whiteness, was a priority, no matter who I was—and the cop had no idea who I was, as he had neither asked my name nor inquired as to my purpose. A man whisked me into a back room, where another officer began searching an archaic, plodding database on a dying desktop. The background was black, the letters in white.

Amy’s name never came up on the system, so I asked to scroll through the reports from August 25, 1993, one by one. Assaults, “non-white on non-white,” were mentioned, one after another, followed by a robbery, an arson, a domestic complaint. At 5
P
.
M
., a murder had been reported.

“That one,” I said.

The policeman clicked on the case, and there was Officer Leon Rhodes, listed as the complainant. Amy’s name was nowhere. The arrested suspects were the original eight: Easy, Ntobeko, Mongezi Manqina, and Vusumzi Ntamo, as well as the APLA trio that had been set free and the teenager who disappeared. I wrote down the case number: 447/08/93, and the police officer advised me that I could find the folder in the police archives, which were stored just down the street in the old army barracks.

“Is there anyone here that would remember anything about the day?” I asked.

“I don’t think so,” he said, leading me behind the booking desk. “But ask him. He knows everything.”

A hulking white officer with a gelled yellow buzz cut sat at a computer in the main reception area. The officer turned toward me.

“Is it true? Do you know about the Amy Biehl case?” I asked.

“I do, but I’ll never talk,” he said gravely.

“Talk to her!” a secretary cajoled. He shook his head, resolute, stood up, and disappeared down the hallway. After canvassing other employees, I made my way to a series of trailers in the back of the station. I poked my head in each, looking for Officer Buzz Cut, until I came upon him.

“There you are!”

“I’ll never talk,” he said dramatically.

A white officer in a suit stopped in. I asked him if he knew anything about Amy Biehl, and he shook his head. “Not a thing.”

On my way out of the station, I convinced a secretary to give me Officer Buzz Cut’s phone number and I sent him an SMS, asking that he let me know if he ever wanted to chat. Then I drove over to the Gugulethu barracks, where the old police files were kept. They were enclosed behind a chain link fence, a sagging three-story municipal building that had once housed defense force members. It had been converted into a variety of warehouses and offices connected with the police. An elderly colored man was listening to a radio outside a room of folders. He wore a faded checked shirt and looked as though he had been running this closet for his entire life.

“I’m looking for 447/08/93,” I said.

The man nodded and wandered back into a long, thin room lined with teeming shelves. After a few minutes he emerged with a parcel of folders, tied with a string. Together, we opened it up and flipped through: folder 444/08/93, followed by 445/08/93, 446/08/93, and then 448/08/93. Folder 447 was nowhere to be found. The man shrugged. Sometimes cops took folders from their cases like totems, he observed. Sometimes downtown ordered up a file and never returned it. Sometimes old papers got incinerated.

I drove to Easy’s house and sat down on a roughshod bench by Wowo’s Nissan. Kiki and her obese friend, dressed in an orange and green African shift, were gossiping in two chairs by the door. A herd of goats wandered by, munching on trash. The Ford was parked out on the sidewalk in the sun, with Monks inside as always, his face moist with sweat. I was trying to figure out how to approach Monks for an interview, considering Mzi’s contention that Monks had in fact been involved in Amy’s murder, but a neighbor was hanging out with Monks, shooting the shit in the passenger seat. The neighbor had a daughter he couldn’t support, a rotten front tooth, and not an inch of fat on his body. He had been unemployed for years, “just sitting around the location,” and he spent much of his time with Monks. The two had been together in the accident that paralyzed Monks, but the neighbor had walked away without a scratch.

My phone beeped. It was a message from Officer Buzz Cut.

Hey I’m not sure if I can help you. I suggest that u compile a list of questions and I may see if I can assist.

I stared at the message, got in my car, and headed home. Until I had met Mzi, I hadn’t had an inkling that the case was anything other than what it seemed. My phone, sitting in my lap, buzzed again.

Back in pre 1994 the person in question were involved with organizations / people which may have made her a person of interest as she were an activist. There may have been a file on her. I don’t suppose you can expect to much assistance with regards to finding and answers. Even after all this time.

As I turned off my exit, the phone rang.

“I am doing my daily exercise,” Officer Buzz Cut said. “So I thought I’d call.”

“Listen, I’d love to hear what you have to say,” I said, holding the wheel with one hand. “Maybe we could meet for a coffee.”

“A meeting is hard but maybe you have questions.”

I pulled off the main drag, flustered but aware that this might be my only chance to talk to this curious cop. “Um, do you think somebody else committed the murder, somebody not convicted?” I asked.

“Yes.”

I stopped the car. A parking guard in a neon vest tapped on my window, asking for money, and I waved him off.

“Do you think ANC knows who?” I asked.

“Let’s hold on to that.”

“Do you think the story at TRC was accurate?”

“No.”

“Do you think the people arrested were involved?”

“Some of them may have been.”

“What are you saying?”

I could hear his labored breath—I supposed he was jogging, or at least walking fast. “She wasn’t very popular with the government of the day. She was an activist. That docket is gone, isn’t it?”

“It wasn’t at the barracks,” I said. “Maybe the guy at the archives will eventually find it.”

“You won’t find the docket, you know the answer.”

“But I
don’t
know the answer. I hardly know what we’re talking about.”

“The problem is, you’re talking to too many people. Do you think it was a coincidence that the white guy in a suit was there in my office?”

“Sure. It wasn’t?” The guy had seemed like any other civil servant, just popping by.

“People want to protect their pensions.”

“But what about the TRC? Isn’t everything out in the open now?”

“The TRC was people getting off the hook for things. The parents did a nice thing—forgiveness, et cetera. They have that nice memorial on NY1, and that’s all anyone wants to deal with from now on.”

I begged the officer to meet with me, and he said he’d consider it, but I never saw him again and he never answered my calls. Many months later, he wrote:
I have been instructed to refer you to the communications officer and not to talk to you with regards to that matter. I think it is clear that you can draw your own conclusions on this.

The next day, I went to Mzi’s house and we sat outside and went over the interaction with the mystery cop. Having witnessed firsthand the evil and twisted ploys of the apartheid state as well as the dirty workings of the new ANC, Mzi was enthusiastic about any and all schemes allegedly conducted by governments, military and extra-military forces, cabals, brotherhoods, and underground fringe groups. His email tagline was “Educate the people liberate Azania!!!!” As I detailed my interaction with Officer Buzz Cut, Mzi listened intently, nodding.

“The problem with conspiracy theories,” Mzi mused, “is that you can always find a reason not to believe.”

In fact, the insinuations of Officer Buzz Cut never added up to me. And months later, in the basement of the High Court, I was sorting through Ntobeko’s court case file, which had its own designation, since he had been tried a year after the original three. It was a compact file box, containing documents along with two copies of the baby blue evidence folder, number 447/08/93, full of glossy crime scene pictures. Most likely, the junior prosecutor working on Ntobeko’s case had plucked them from the original case files in Gugulethu and downtown, and then simply forgotten to return them.