The Sunday Hangman (9 page)

Kramer could only grunt to that.

“You mean the big irony involved, Lieutenant?”

“Which one?” said Kramer, surprised by an abstract.

“The irony that in the end those bloody black Commies got Tommy,” sighed Jonkers. “Oh, ja, it certainly makes a man think.”

Which was as fine a red herring as ever there was, and in Kramer’s opinion, his complete vindication.

The hotel was positioned on a wooden shelf in a steep-sided valley, all of one kilometer down a rutted track that expanded into a nothing designated
FREE CAR PARK
. Some black children squatted there, hoping to pit their strength against any incoming suitcases. A four-wheel-drive vehicle could continue on around the corner, go through an assault course, and end up near the kitchen entrance, trailing oddments of vegetation behind it. The hotelier’s own Land-Rover had a good-sized branch wilting on its roof rack, and a flat front tire.

Kramer followed Frikkie Jonkers along a crazy-paving path and out onto the scrubby lawn, further designated
THE TERRACE
. He was fast learning that if you found it difficult to believe your eyes at Spa-kling Waters, then a reassuring notice was bound to pop up. A deep verandah ran the full width of the farmhouse—it could never have been anything else—with access to both private and public rooms being provided by narrow French windows. The concrete pillars that held up the verandah’s molting thatch had been painted various fairground colors, and the rafters had been strung with colored electric light bulbs—which weren’t
working, because at least one in the series had fallen out. On the verandah itself was an assortment of cane furniture, repainted so often the weave had almost been obscured, and in this cane furniture sat an assortment of guests.

Kramer felt pity prick his hide; plainly, for many of them, the place could be safely renamed the last resort. They were the not-so-rich sick, making do with frayed collars and goiters, crudely-made hospital boots and clubfeet, and daring him, with their eyes, to insult them with a stranger’s compassion.

“Good afternoon,” said an old duck with her legs in bandages. “Hasn’t it been nice today?”

“Good afternoon,” they all said.

“Hell,” said Kramer, looking hard at her legs, “you seem okay to me, lady—but what did you do to the poor bloody horse?”

How she laughed—they all did—and he was able to escape gratefully into the reception hall. There he barged straight into Piet Ferreira, the manager, and Jonkers made the introductions. Ferreira was, surprisingly, only a little over thirty, and meatily plump; he wore sunglasses in his overlong hair, a bleached shirt, dirty white shorts, slip-slop sandals, and carried a huge jangle of keys, mostly for small padlocks.

“Bar doesn’t open till six,” he said, “but if you’d—”

“No, hang on a tick—we’re here on business about Tommy,” Jonkers interrupted, very importantly. “This officer has informed me that his body has been found murdered.”

“Christ!”

“And so you see I was right and you were wrong, hey? But we’ll consider the matter dropped.”

“What’s this?” asked Kramer, all innocence.

“Nothing, sir. Now, if you’d like to see that register and the—”

“Later, Sarge; once me and Mr. Ferreira have had a little talk. Here, you take his keys. I’m sure you know which one it is. It’s on me.”

There was not much Frikkie Jonkers could do, except go off to the bar, and the swiftness of the transfer of the key ring had left Ferreira looking quite amenable himself. They went into his office, which was prettier with unpaid bills than the pillars outside, and Kramer invited him to sit down. A short, thoughtful pause followed, and then the man was about ready.

“I detected a conflict of opinion over Tommy, Mr. Ferreira.”

“Oh? Well, not exactly.”

“That he perhaps had tried to bilk you? And you had grounds for suspicions of this nature?”

“I—I wasn’t too sure.”

“Uh huh?”

“Just a casual check was a question of favors, really. I do Frikkie quite a few off and on, and when the occasion arises—”

“Forget that side of it. How long did Tommy McKenzie stay here?”

Ferreira relaxed a little, and took up a rubber band to play with. “He came just under three months ago. He’d been told by a Jo’burg specialist to rest up and find a hot spring for his leg—someone recommended us. He had this leg trouble; did Frikkie tell you? Got hammered when a land mine blew up his jeep in Biafra or Angola or some such place. I was never much interested.”

“Did he limp all the time?” Kramer asked.

“Most of the time,” Ferreira replied, with a faint smile just hinted. “Obviously, some days his leg was a lot better.”

“Come on, man! You didn’t say that like you meant it.”

“Well, I wasn’t too worried, put it that way. Frikkie said he was okay, and I’d had a mercenary here before, back in the days when the spa wasn’t developed. One of those organizers hiding from the others because the kaffirs hadn’t paid up what they’d promised.”

“And you thought Tommy might be one himself?”

“Sort of. The organizers never leave themselves short, and—well—I wasn’t really worried, like I say. He paid monthly in advance.”

“So what did worry you, finally?”

“The way he vanished, to begin with. But if you say he’s—”

“No; please explain your side first,” Kramer interrupted. “All of a sudden he was gone?”

“Ja, gone. Normally he never went out much, and when he did, he’d always have something to say about it. Then I looked in his room and found just a few cheap clothes and a case not worth taking. That’s when I began to wonder. He’d been putting a lot on tick in the bar recently, plus he’d been making long-distance calls from my office here, also on account.”

“Which he’d have to settle when paying his next month in advance? Due this coming Monday?”

“Exactly. It was nearly triple the amount before. Frikkie argued with me, said I was being too suspicious, but I said he’d left the clothes to make me—”

“These calls—do you have the numbers?”

“No, but it’s a farm line, so the exchange in Brandspruit—”

“I’ll contact them. Did he get any mail?”

“Never. Said he had no family, and that all his friends were either dead or in England and the States.”

Kramer offered Ferreira a Lucky Strike while thinking that little lot over. It vexed him to realize that he’d never know whether Erasmus had consciously exploited the acceptable shadiness of a soldier of fortune; whatever the intention, it had been a stroke of genius. The hotel manager had been able to quash his own doubts quite happily, much encouraged, of course, by a half-witted policeman and the demands of assorted creditors. Yet this perfect plan had obviously come unstuck somewhere down the line.

“Do you think the other mercs could have got him?” Ferreira asked, supplying their light. “From the stories he told us,
they sounded a real bunch of madmen. He even admitted once shooting up a school of kaffir kids to teach them a lesson—he thought they were helping the rebels, but it was a mistake. Killed forty of them, he said. If he was holding out on his mates, they might not show much mercy. What do you think?”

Just for an instant, Kramer almost fell for Erasmus’s cover story himself. “Ach, no; I’m not sure this is connected,” he said. “But talking of other people, did he ever have visitors?”

“None I know of, and—like I told you—he hardly ever left the place, except to go to the bank. Our terms are strictly cash, of course.”

“Uh huh. What about guests?”

“Always kept clear of them. You could see he didn’t much like getting in the same pool as the cripples.”

“And the locals? Was there anyone he was particularly friendly with?”

“Apart from Frikkie?”

Kramer nodded.

“No, nobody special. The farmers all knew him from the bar, naturally, and a few of them liked his stories. They sort of respected Tommy, but they didn’t invite him out or anything, if that’s what you mean. He wasn’t all that social himself. We hold a barbecue here every Saturday night; he came to the first one, but didn’t really show for the rest. I can’t remember seeing him, anyway. Everybody around here comes, sort of a tradition, and—”

“What about women?” Kramer cut in. “From our knowledge of this man, he had to have it twice a day, practically.”

Ferreira shot the rubber band at his calendar. “Unless he was taking his chances with black velvet, not a hope—not around here.”

“Sure?”

“I should know! If it isn’t a bloody granny, then it isn’t white. Period. You must have been in this kind of country before?

The young ones can’t wait to get out of it, get themselves off to varsity or training college and stay there.”

“Best take a weekend off and come to Trekkersburg to collect yourself a wife,” Kramer half joked, having sensed something false in the man’s locker-room bravado.

“I was married,” replied Ferreira, his face a blank, “but she died.”

That could have led to an awkward pause, to all sorts of imaginings about what had led to this poor sod’s burying himself alive in the backveld, yet Kramer handled it smoothly, he thought, by saying; “Register.”

“It’s by your elbow. His address is ‘care of’ the YMCA, Hillbrow, Johannesburg.”

“Then I’ll not bother to look. Just a couple more questions.”

“Ja?” said Ferreira, trying to find his rubber band again among all the papers. “Keep talking.”

“I need to know if anyone contacted Tommy here on Monday. You say he didn’t get any mail, but what about phone calls?”

“None I know of, and I was working here in the office almost all day. He vanished while I was still in here, doing the bar receipts.”

“Any strangers in the bar that night?”

“No; I’ve already asked to see if they knew where he went. Just the usual crowd.”

“And has anyone been here since Monday? Any new guests?”

“Nobody.”

Kramer took a look at the register after all, noted the number of Erasmus’s room, and got to his feet.

“I’d like to see 14,” he said.

“Seems a bit pointless,” objected Ferreira, scratching under his sunglasses. “If you want his things, the boy will put them in your Land-Rover. Frikkie and I were in there this morning.”

“All the same, I’d better.”

It was true that Kramer hadn’t any idea of what he might be looking for. But then again, it was equally true that Ferreira and Jonkers had been expecting to find very little—and that men who found what they expected seldom looked further.

T
HERE WAS A
decided contrast between the weekly tariff pinned behind the door of Room 14 and the standard of amenities to be found therein. The floor was red concrete, softened and warmed over one square yard by locally made grass matting, and the four unevenly plastered walls were sloshed over with lime that came off on your hand. The plumbing to and from the cracked washbasin was the gray plastic stuff trained baboons can screw together, and both taps said cold on the top. The wardrobe and dressing table were so flimsy they moved bodily toward you at the tug of a knob, and the bed, a knee-high divan, seemed to have prolapse problems. Without question, the only furniture worth a second glance—not excluding the two blotchy mirrors—was an armchair of vast proportions in front of the French windows.

These windows, Kramer discovered, opened into an enclosed courtyard once used as a
KIDDIES KORNER
. He turned away with a slight shudder and applied himself to searching the room very thoroughly, scoring a great big fat zero. So he began on the armchair again, and Ferreira lost interest, mumbled something, and went off to have the leper’s bell rung for tea, leaving him alone.

Zondi slunk in then, raised an eyebrow, and said, “The very object of my intentions, boss.”

“This chair? Why? Have you picked up something?”

“Maybe. The bedroom boy has been telling me what a strange boss this was. He says that every morning, when he came to do the room, Boss McKenzie would be sitting in the big chair and wouldn’t move. This made his task very difficult, and so he reported it to Boss Ferreira, but he said it didn’t matter.”

“How about that?” Kramer said, tipping the chair back.

“There was another strange thing about him as well—he would wash his underwear instead of leaving it for the girls to do.”

“Uh huh? Or are you pulling my leg?”

Grinning, Zondi went on: “Honest to God, boss. He would leave it in the basin to soak, then hang it up in that courtyard out there. The bedroom boy was very cross about this because it meant he had to go into the next room to damp his cleaning cloth.”

Kramer laughed and tried the chair for comfort. “He just sat like this? How? Like a dummy?”

“Reading a book or a newspaper, the bedroom boy says. Never has he known another person in this place to behave in such a fashion.”

Back went the chair again. “Come on, you’ve got the skinny arms,” Kramer ordered. “Let’s see what you can bloody find.”

They spent twenty minutes on the stuffed armchair in Room 14, littered the floor with tufts of horsehair, and found nothing but a mouse’s nest, long vacated.

“Bugger,” said Kramer. “I’m damned sure he must have been up to something—agreed? But if he wasn’t sitting tight on it, what was he doing?”

“Perhaps just watching the boy, boss.”

“Do what?”

Zondi opened the French windows. “When the boy had gone, he would come out here to hang up his washing.”

“Hmmm. Doesn’t grab me. How many other doors open onto it?”

“Three.”

“We’ll take a look, anyway,” Kramer suggested, following him out. “You have a go at that sandpit, while I poke around the toys.”

What was left of the toys, to be pedantic, because the hotel must once have catered to a particularly destructive bunch of little bastards—just the sort, in fact, who’d have parents capable of breaking in wild mustangs. The rocking horse was legless, rockerless, and eyeless, the pedal car was a write-off, and the playhouse had been trampled flat; only a few items in stout plastic and a scattering of big wooden blocks had survived intact, or almost.

“Nothing buried here,” Zondi said presently, dusting off his hands.