Snake (4 page)

Kramer felt a prejudice forming.

“Get this straight: I’m Mr. Monty Stevenson and I’m the manager of this club. These are
my
premises! And if I’ve told you once, the Sunday
News
has the exclu—”

“Kramer, Murder and Robbery Squad.”

Gulp, went the silk cravat.

“The lieutenant?”

“Uh-huh.”

Stevenson advanced hesitantly across the boards, his built-up shoes clicking loudly.

“I do apologize, but I thought they were going to tell you not to bother after all. I let them use my phone in the office.”

“Why’s that? Is this a hoax?”

“Heavens, no! But your doctor said—”

“The DS? Is he here?”

“Er, yes. In the dressing room, the scene of the tragedy. Would you like me to show you the way?”

“You’d better!” growled Kramer.

He followed after him past a notice warning
NO ADMITTANCE TO MEMBERS
—
STRICTLY PRIVATE
and soon saw the reason why. The dim passage beyond the velvet hangings was a disgrace of squashed cockroaches and splintered floorboards. They clattered up a short flight of steps, took a left turn, and halted at a closed door with a paper star stuck to it.

Stevenson raised a hand to knock, but Kramer pushed him aside.

“That’s fine,” he said. “Now you get back to your office and see that if there’s a call for me from Peacevale, I get to hear about it.”

“Gladly,” the manager said, and tip-tapped off.

Then the door was opened from the inside and Dirk Gardiner, a warrant officer from Fingerprints, stuck his crew cut out to see what the noise was about.

“Oh, sh—sugar,” he said.

“So this is where you’ve been hiding, you bastard!”

“Look, Lieutenant, I was on my way when I got called here. Haven’t even been to the mortuary yet.”

“You’re boasting, or what?”

“Be with you in a tick,” replied Gardiner, as good-naturedly as ever. He had enough muscle under his blue safari suit to treat the world in the way he expected it to treat him. And somehow it worked.

“Guess who’s arrived?” chuckled Strydom from within. “But don’t start yelling at us, hey? We got a message for you not to come out to the duty officer soon as we could. You see him about it.”

Kramer’s brow creased.

“Ja, it’s just a fatal,” Gardiner explained, winding on another frame in his Pentax. “Stevenson, the stupid bastard, reported he’d found a girlie strangled. Didn’t explain properly, says he was in a hell of a state. All shocked and—”

He stepped placidly aside to avoid being trampled underfoot.

Strydom, as gnomelike as ever, was kneeling in his new plastic apron—from which his wife had cut the frilly bits— beside a python with its head bashed in, making careful use of his tape measure. At his elbow was a corpse with red eyeballs, speckled skin, and arms folded demurely on its chest under a dressing gown.

“Oh, her,” said Kramer.

“Sonja Bergstroom, alias Eve. Got careless and had an accident. Put up a hell of a fight, though. Should see the grazes she got from the concrete.”

“Who’s in charge here?”

“Sergeant Marais,” said Gardiner. “Gone to the bog a moment.”

“And he’s happy?”

“Should be by now.”

“Hey?”

“Sorry, sir. Yes, quite satisfied.”

“Fascinating,” murmured Strydom, taking another prod at the broad marks on the corpse’s neck. “I must see if I can’t put a little paper together. Get the snake park in Durban to help me.”

“Ja, must be a moral in it, too, Doc.”

“Wam-bam,” suggested Kramer. The novelty had worn off.

“What’s that, Trompie?”

“Mr. Gardiner here has urgent business in Peacevale. Tell Marais I’ll see him later. Okay?”

“Sounds ominous,” Strydom said, smiling somewhere in his Santa Claus beard, and beginning to coil the snake into a white plastic bag. “What a shambles today has been.”

Which proved an understatement once Kramer got back to Lucky’s store. There two very distressed Bantu constables were obliged to inform him that while they had been keeping the onlookers at bay round the front, two youths had sneaked into the premises from the back.

“It was I who observed these
tsotsis
making off with their ill-gotten gains,” chipped in the minister from the tin church next door. “Naturally I gave chase.”

“And?”

“They dropped everything in their wake, so effecting their escape.”

“The building was in the way for us to see this,” explained one constable.

“But Christ, man, didn’t you see them in the shop?”

“My back was like this to look at the people.”

“Didn’t they say anything?”

Kramer glared round at the crowd, which was now standing much farther back but still maintaining a lively interest. No, they wouldn’t have said anything. In fact, some of the sods were smiling from ear to ear and nudging one another.

“Stuff looks like it was taken from storage,” murmured Gardiner, tapping the corner of a cornflakes carton with his fingerprint case. “Maybe they stayed in the back. Let’s take a look.”

The minister, whose white collar and black bib were all that he was wearing under his sagging tweed jacket, made a self-important bid to accompany them, but was motioned back.

Gardiner scored half a mark. Just inside the rear door, a relatively clean rectangle in the dust on a packing case indicated where the carton had stood. The other half went to Kramer when they discovered that the till was now quite empty.

“Can you remember which divisions the coins were in?” asked Gardiner helpfully.

“Hell, no. They’d been scattered about by the first lot. Worth trying still?”

“Even though the others must have worn gloves, I don’t see why not.”

“Hey, just a minute—why’s there no mud? Lucky’s tracked it all over the place. Come, I’ll show you.”

Kramer led Gardiner back to the rear door and pointed out the big puddle immediately outside it, which had been caused by the constant dripping of a tap standing nearby. The storekeeper’s teapot and chipped cup were inverted on a half brick beneath it.

Gardiner dusted his brush over the wooden doorstep coated in green enamel.

“Thought so,” he said. “Got a sole print for you—and another. Didn’t want to get their feet wet so they jumped it. I’ll lift them in case they come in useful.”

Of course, they had only been youngsters. Kramer felt he was beginning to lose his grip. And petty theft wasn’t his job anyway. Jesus.

No, his first instinctive reaction had been right. “Ja, you do that. Could help us nail the buggers if we need them for elimination on the till. A big hope—and a lot of bloody extra work. Look, I’m just going across to see if Zondi has had any joy.”

Gardiner nodded and got on with the job, suddenly absorbed in what he was doing. Should have been an artist.

Kramer was trailed across to the tin church by a raggle-taggle of big eyes and round potbellies who were hoping for a glimpse of his gun. One was rescued by its mother, who pounced with a squawk like a brown hen.

The windows were the proper pointed shape, but had been glazed with ordinary glass, some of it now broken and all of it so dusty it was difficult to see through. Kramer found a convenient hole and peered in.

Bantu Detective Sergeant Mickey Zondi was holding court, with his snap-brim hat set very straight on his head. He sat at the minister’s table on the low, shaky platform, cool and dapper in his silver-thread suit despite the heat, and listened solemnly as a weeping woman, on a bench placed below him, gave her statement.

He was a terrible man for dramatic effects.

Yet Kramer could see that his improvisation was being received with due respect and, more importantly, might even be getting some real results at last. So he decided to have a smoke until there was a break in the proceedings.

Zondi stepped out of the building only a few seconds later. His eyes had always been quick.

“Well?”

“Same as before, boss. They hide when they hear the gun go off. When they look up, all they see is a red car driving away.”

“Was a blue one last time.”

Zondi shrugged. “The shop was empty—at least, nobody was inside when they came. They all say it was very quick.”

“Uh-huh. Not just a bit frightened, you think? Don’t want to get in trouble with the gang?”

“
Aikona
, these are very simple people, and the minister is a good man, much respected. You heard he chased those boys?”

“Where were you, man? Hey?”

“Busy,” said Zondi, his flip manner subsiding. “Lucky’s wife is very, very sad that this happened. She came in a taxi and I talked with her over the other side.”

“Oh, I thought maybe she was the—”

“Boss, she says that Lucky cashed up last Friday.”

“Uh-huh?”

“She is educated, so she helped him with the books. She swears to God there was at most five rand in the shop, mostly very small change because the people here have very little money anyway. Perhaps one note.”

“
Five rand?
Christ, would Lucky put up a fight for that? Why the hell shoot him?”

Zondi shrugged and suggested, “To keep their faces unknown?”

“Huh! Would he have informed on them for five rand either? Never, man—that’s crazy. It’s crap.”

They stared at each other for what seemed a very long time.

Before Kramer said, “Are we sure these
are
robberies? Not murder?”

Because ever since going into town, he had felt very strongly that somehow he had got hold of the wrong end of a stick.

3

G
ARDINER PAID THE
sergeant behind the canteen bar for his two drinks and edged back through the tiny, crowded room, lethal with flying darts, to a corner table. The place was always packed, being open for only two hours from 4:30
P.M.
, but the booze was the cheapest in town and the company congenial. On most evenings, that was.

His companion, Klip Marais, sat hunched and glowering sourly at the wall, looking more than ever like a rough-hewn wrath of God. He had drawn in his upper lip, and was nibbling on his blond mustache, clearly not caring for the taste much.

Gardiner put down the rum and Coke at Marais’s elbow and squeezed into his own seat.

“Cheers,” he said, mixing his Coke with vodka.

“Huh.”

“
Ach
, come on, Klip—what’s got your Tampax in a twist?” Gardiner demanded.

“It’s nothing,” he muttered, poking at the ice in his glass. “I’m just pissed off, that’s all.”

“Because of what Kramer did at the Wigwam?”

“That and other things. I mean, he did put me in a bloody spot, didn’t he? Left me holding the can? Chucking all those reporters out when he had no right. No crime had been committed—it was up to Monty to say whether they could be there or not. Private property. Then there was the duty officer not telling him. Oh, ja, bloody old typical Trekkersburg.…”

Marais was a new man. With his recent promotion, he had had to accept a transfer down from Johannesburg. After life in the metropolis, he seemed to regard a city of even 100,000 as hardly bigger than a
dorp
where not a soul dared missed church more than once on Sundays.

“Lieut’s got a lot on his plate,” Gardiner said.

“It doesn’t stay there for long! All afternoon me and Zondi have been going through the Peacevale dockets trying to find some connection between the coons that got shot.”

“While…?”

“He runs around as usual, like a buffalo with its bum on fire.”

They had their first laugh then. Gardiner found it an apt description of Kramer’s short visit to the nightclub.

“How’s the guts?” he asked

“So-so … But he was pleased with the prints you got him off the inside of the till. Seems if we nail these
tsotsis,
then the other must belong to one of them.”

“Zondi looking yet?”

Marais consulted his fancy navigator’s watch.

“Ja, been out since four.”

“The sex-mad fool,” quipped Gardiner, imitating a catch phrase from
The Goon Show.

But Marais, who did not go for this twenty-year-old BBC radio show, still popular in South Africa, gave him no encouragement.

Instead he tried some humor of his own: “I bet you’ll never guess where the Big White Chief is tonight!”

Zondi parked his vehicle, then checked his PPK automatic before getting out. It was dark and he might have a long way to walk.

He cut across the open ground that served Peacevale for a football pitch and then into long grass running beside a stream. His pace slowed as he took care not to rip his shins on the rusty tins and other rubbish hidden there.

But before the moon was out, he had arrived at a dwelling no higher than his waist and constructed haphazardly out of empty cement bags wired to the tube frame off the back of some old truck. A small fire was burning in front of the entrance, heating up whatever was in the jam tins.

“Mama Thembu,” he said quietly. “Where do I find your son tonight? It is a friend who asks.”

A bundle of rags slithered far enough out of the interior for the flames to catch the rheumy eyes of a raddled old crone. One winked at him.

He handed over a ten-cent piece and felt the scratch of her talons on his palm. Then waited patiently while she knotted the coin in the corner of a filthy head cloth.

“In Plymouth,” she said, and disappeared again, like something under its rock.

Zondi was relieved. His wife, Miriam, had gone back to KwaZulu for a funeral and the children were waiting at home to be fed. He hadn’t, as he had feared, far to go.

He continued along the bank of the stream until coming to an improvised bridge, where he crossed over. There were bushes, too, on the far side, thistles and stinkweed, fences that had become barbed-wire snares, and a lot of strange little noises. Rats, for the most part.

The moon—which was at only half strength—rose in time for the huddle of forgotten tin lavatories, each marked
NATAL ROADS DEPARTMENT,
to confirm he was on course. Way up at the top of the ridge he could see candlelight in the windows of the houses, and hear children shrieking their night games. He wondered what his own were doing.