Snake (22 page)

Mrs. Shirley deliberated this for a moment.

“Well? Look at what?”

“It’s routine elimination—shirts—and we’re going to do it to everyone eventually.”

“Show me the search warrant.”

She moved to stand across the foot of the stairs; he had seen this done in westerns. It made him feel suddenly taller and more certain of himself.

“Search warrants, Mrs. Shirley, are only signed by a magistrate if there is positive evidence, or if we are hindered in carrying out a normal process of elimination for reasons that appear suspicious.”

Or something like that; but it worked. He could almost see her come down a peg or two.

“What sort of shirts? Surely not all of them?”

“No, the tuxedo kind.”

“Dress shirts, I suppose you mean?”

“Those. So I’ll just—”

“You, young man, are not setting a foot farther into this house. I am perfectly capable of bringing them to you.”

And she swept soundlessly up the stairs.

Leaving Marais flushed and confused, with a sinking feeling that sank even deeper when he shoved both hands into his pockets and found his left one close on the button.

“Oh,
yirra
,” he said, realizing then that Zondi must have dutifully slipped it into the jacket as it lay bunched on the car seat beside him—and that any hope of blaming the bastard for the boob he’d made had gone.

Which gave him the impetus he needed to race after Shirley’s mother and make sure she didn’t try anything.

Zondi and the dog regarded each other with a mixture of deep loathing and some respect.

They had been sitting like that, eye to eye, water dish to plastic cup, ever since Mrs. Shirley had come down to see they both stayed in the yard. She had handed Zondi the water without a word before disappearing again. It was a strange place.

Then Martha Mabile came back to join him.

“
Pooma!
” she said to the dog, and it slunk over to lie under a granadilla vine that screened the yard from the garage.

“So life goes,” said Zondi, recognizing in her all the signs of a good churchwoman.

“Is the young master in big trouble?” she asked.

“You think they tell me?” Zondi asked, laughing sourly. “Huh! I am that sergeant’s driver, that is all. Maybe he stole something.”

“Don’t you speak of the young master like that! What are you? A lazy donkey that carries other men on his back. I have been with the master since he was so high, like a small boy, and he is a kind man.”

“What is his name?”

“Master Peter. But he has been the young master many years now.”

Again Zondi smiled, amused by the convention that required nannies to cease calling a child by name once he had become a boy no longer to be ordered about.

Martha softened, and handed over half an orange.

“
Hau
,
hau
,
hau
, but he was a real
skabenga
when he was small, that one. I am very glad that now he has grown up. Then he takes his pellet gun or the catapult and shoot, shoot everywhere. He climbs trees so he falls down and hurts himself, he is always hungry, a lot of work and trouble. And he is cruel with other children that come here to play and I have to smack him hard!”

“The madam let you hit him?”

“Shhhhh! She would go mad if she heard I touch him! But you know how I did it? I hit him underneath the foot so she would see no marks.”

Zondi applauded her cunning with a guffaw. “Did he never tell his mother you did this?”

“Of course, many times. But I would say, ‘Me, madam? You want to give me my notice?’ And she would say, ‘That’s another fib, Peter—get out of my sight.’ Fib is her word for an untruth.”

“And this child is now truly a good man?”

Martha giggled and spat out a pit.

“He is always with the young women,” she said. “Now it is peaceful.”

Then Marais shouted from the driveway, “Mickey! Come on, man, where the hell are you?”

“You should smack under his feet,” Martha confided in a whisper.

The memo lay on the colonel’s blotter, pinned down by the point of his paper knife like a venomous flatfish.

“The brigadier has gone so far as to put it in writing, Kramer.”

“Oh, ja?”

“I thought just a friendly phone call this morning would be enough for you to take a personal interest in the case.”

“In what way wasn’t it, Colonel?”

“In here the brigadier says he has just had a very unpleasant little conversation with a friend of the attorney general’s.”

“Uh-huh?”

“Mr. Justice Shirley, late of the Supreme Court, and the husband of a very upset lady, he says. The judge is driving down from Zululand now for an appointment with the brigadier at four-thirty. It seems one of your men has been to his house and made a real nuisance of himself.”

“Can you tell me how?”

“Yes. He forced his way in and used threats on Mrs. Shirley to make her show him some shirts he wanted to compare with a button.”

“
Hey?
”

“You know what I think is going to happen next, Kramer? We’re going to have our little black friend Zondi arresting white suspects. It is coming to that.”

The knife pressed right through the paper.

“I resent that, Colonel!”

“Not as much as I resent the fact that one of my senior officers saw fit to send an inexperienced subordinate in his place to conduct a most delicate inquiry. Resent? That’s hardly the bloody word for it!”

Without asking leave, Kramer jerked away the memo.

“I see what the brigadier wants is a complete justification for our actions before the judge gets here,” he said.

“That is almost irrelevant. You claim Shirley sticks out like a sore thumb, but from what else you tell me, you’ve still got a very long way to go—if you’re traveling in the right direction in the first place. What inquiries, for instance, have been made at the deceased’s boardinghouse regarding possible men friends in her life?”

“Wait—I’ll go and see the lady myself.”

“God in heaven!” bellowed the colonel. “Can’t you even read now? Nobody goes near her, Shirley, or the house until the brigadier—”

Then he, too, saw what lay between the lines.

And Kramer murmured, “Maybe Marais was the right man for the job after all, sir. He should be back soon.”

13

T
HE OUTBURST IN
the office seemed to startle Wessels as much as it did Zondi.

“You sneaky black bastard!” stormed Marais, spinning around with his fist raised.

“Hold it right there, Sergeant,” Kramer said quietly. “The girl mentioned nothing to him about the button. You can see from his face this is news to him.”

“Then how—”

“From the horse’s mouth—Mrs. Shirley. She’s been bitching to the brigadier.”

Zondi began a discreet withdrawal.

“You come back,” Kramer ordered.

Marais took breath to protest, but had it knocked out of him by the next remark.

“Man, I think you did well there, even if she is screaming her panties blue.”

“Sir?”

Kramer motioned for him to take his chair again, and then said, “Let’s hear it all from the beginning.”

“Her manner was very aggressive when I entered the premises,” Marais began, after a long pause to collect himself. “She wanted to see my search warrant, but backed down when I said they were issued only in suspicious circumstances.… It was the girl to blame for telling her about the button actually.”

“Uh-huh?”

“First Zondi put it in my wrong pocket and then—”

“
Ach
, no. What did Ma Shirley do next?”

Marais dithered and said, “You want it step by step? But I told you even with the button error I’m convinced—”

“Every detail,” snapped Kramer.

“Okay. So she went up the stairs to call the girl and get the shirts for me. She was still under suspicion at that stage, so I deliberately allowed her to think she could be giving me the slip. But I then followed right on her tail and found her in the suspect’s bedroom in a state of agitation, saying she did not know where the dress shirts were kept.”

“What interval did you follow at?”

“Only seconds, sir. Then she called the girl, Martha, to show her where to find them. I examined the shirts and found they were all in order, with no new buttons or signs of every button being changed. There were five shirts in all, and the girl verified this was the correct number. I felt therefore satisfied that the button did not belong to any of the suspect’s shirts.”

“What was her manner?”

“Aggressive, sir.”

“Not nervous in any way?”

“I didn’t see any reason to think so. It’s just I think she has some kind of grudge against me—I don’t know why.”

“And you are positively certain she did not have time to conceal a shirt and to tip off the girl there were then only five?”

“The girl was working at the other end of the wing. It would have been impossible to reach her in the time I allowed her.”

“But the girl, seeing there were five shirts, could simply agree this was the correct number—not wishing to cross swords with her employer or, as you say, have her bum removed from the butter?”

“There’s no love lost between those two, sir; I can tell you that for a fact.”

“Zondi?”

“She shows no respect, Lieutenant.”

Marais lifted an upturned thumb at him and winked.

“Where were these shirts, Sergeant?”

“On a shelf in the wardrobe.”

“Not difficult to see?”

“You know that sort of woman, sir. She wouldn’t know where to find herself without—”

“So this could all be camouflage,” Kramer said. “The shirt had already been taken care of, and this act with the servant was just to make you think she wouldn’t know where to start, et cetera. Her attitude to the girl could be an act, too, aimed at making us think it impossible she could have conspired with her over the times.”

“Then I’d still have expected
some
reaction when the button first came up, but she seemed hardly to hear what the girl said.”

“Like a twitch, you mean?”

Marais nodded his thick head.

“I think you see too many films,” said Kramer, getting up to pace the floor. “Let’s stick to basics that are with us in real life. We have a killer, and protecting a killer is a woman’s job— wife, mother, girlfriend. Men do it, but only for money. Ma Shirley was the first member of the household interviewed.”

“Ja.”

“When that interview was over, did she have any opportunity of instructing the girl as to what she should say to you?”

“Um, I suppose she did. She went to fetch her from the kitchen.”

“When she could have rung?”

“I didn’t see a—”

“And was Shirley out of your hearing, and possibly in her company, before he made his statement to you?”

“He went to get some fresh tea.”

“Sir, can I say something?” Wessels asked. “All this suggests the alibi was concocted on the spur of the moment. Why wouldn’t Shirley and her have got it fixed up from the start?”

Kramer swung around and said with a smile, “Would you tell your ma you’d done a thing like that?”

“Christ, never!”

“But she’s your ma, remember—wouldn’t she guess you were in some kind of trouble?”

“A mother always knows,” said Zondi.

And every man in the room showed he agreed with that.

Then Marais scratched his head to show his uncertainty implied no criticism and said, “Except she calls her son all those names and makes out she doesn’t give a bugger for him.”

“That’s something Martha said,” Zondi piped up. “How the madam was so quick to call the young master a liar and send him away from her—that was when he was a small boy and did mischief.”

“What mother doesn’t do that at some time?”

“She seemed a hard woman, Lieutenant.”

“They’re all hard, up there. But can’t you see? If she plays this up with us, doesn’t that help her case even more?”

“True,” said Wessels.

Kramer sat down again, drumming his fingers on the desktop, making everyone else stir restlessly.

“What else did you other two pick up?” he asked, pointing at Zondi to finish his turn first.

“Nothing special. She just talks of when the man was young and would do foolish things with his catapult.”

Wessels laughed and said, “I bet she didn’t tell you he once lobbed some bloody rocks at her in her
kia
when she was in bed with a bloke! That’s all I got—from an old Bantu constable at the local cop shop. Does that count as a background of violence, sir?”

“There were actual injuries?” Kramer asked, smiling but interested.

“Oh, ja, and a hell of a shindig, but when uniformed got there the guy had buggered off with his war wounds. The usual old thing: he was on the premises illicitly without a permit. They say—What’s up, sir?”

“Marais, you remember that car park where Stevenson had his own slot? Wouldn’t a swanky-puss like Shirley—”

“Hell, that’s a hell of an idea, sir! They’ve got a boy guarding it down at the entrance and sports cars are always something people notice! The time he left there?”

“You’ve got it. Find me that boy.”

Kramer would have sent Zondi around with Marais, but the sensitive little sod had disappeared before anyone noticed— which wasn’t at all strange in the circumstances.

Marais tried again. The wog was really giving him trouble. And people using the car park were watching.

“Were you, or were you not, on duty on Saturday night?”

“
Aikona.
”

“But your boss says you were!”

“The manager says that? But he knows the shift is changing Sunday.”

“Then who was on duty at half-past twelve—you understand that?”

Marais pointed out the exact position of the hands on his navigator’s wrist watch, which the attendant much admired and offered three rand for.

“You answer me!”

“At that time, sir, it was me here on duty.”

“Jesus H. Christ!”

“Amen, hallelujah,” murmured the attendant, rolling his eyes.

Marais grabbed him by the lapels. “Look!”

“That is Sunday—not Saturday, sir.”

“So you’re a clever dick, hey? Think you’re smart? Then I’ll tell you something—you’re under bloody arrest.” “
Hau!
” The lieutenant’s pet monkey could deal with him.