Presently, he fell asleep.
The face above him was black. His right fist heaved up, missed, flopped back. Somebody laughed. He knew that laugh; he had heard it where children played, where women wept, where men died, always the same depth of detached amusement. Kramer closed his eyes without troubling to focus them and felt curiously content.
Bantu Detective Sergeant Mickey Zondi sat himself primly at the dressing table. Then he opened the large manila envelope he had brought with him and shook out its contents-a batch of photographs and two laboratory reports. As a child at a mission school in Zululand, he had adapted to making do without his own text books. He read fast, read once and remembered. He studied the pictures last of all, aware that Kramer was now watching him through barely parted lids.
An uncanny thing, that laugh of Zondi’s-it never seemed to come from him, it was too big a sound. But it fitted. The first time he had seen Zondi was outside the magistrate’s court on a Monday when it was thronged so solid with worried wives and families you had to force your way through them. Then the mob suddenly parted of its own volition and through it had come a kaffir version of Frank Sinatra making with the jaunty walk. The snapbrim hat, padded shoulders and zoot suit larded with glinting thread were all secondhand ideas from a secondhand shop. The walk was pure Chicago, yet no black was permitted to see a gangster film. No, here was an original, even if someone, somewhere else, had thought of it all before. Zondi walked that way because he thought that way. And if this was fantasy, reality was only one layer down: the Walther PPK in its shoulder holster, the two eight-inch knives held by the elastic trouser tabs on either side.
“Cheeky black bastard,” Kramer grunted.
Zondi tucked in the corners of a smile and went on with his illicit scrutiny of Miss Le Roux’s bromide image. Even dead a white woman had laws to protect her from primitive lust.
“You want to get me into trouble, hey?”
Zondi ignored him. The photographs were sharp and expertly printed, but the lighting had been too oblique and Miss Le Roux seemed to have ended up with a lot of her curves in the wrong places. Nevertheless, Zondi nodded his approval before tossing the envelope across.
“A good woman,” he said. “She could have given many sons.”
“Is that all you ever think about?” asked Kramer, and they both laughed. Zondi was an incorrigible pelvis man.
The laboratory reports were long, laborious and uninspiring. Contrary to popular belief, there was not a great deal you could say about a corpse which would circumvent the ordinary processes of investigation. That Miss Le Roux’s blood belonged to a rare group seemed wholly irrelevant now it had gone to waste. On top of which the technician concerned was a new man, fresh from the realms of pure science and given to being scrupulously vague in the face of variables. So Kramer ignored everything except the analysis of stomach contents.
“Digestion halted after approximately four hours,” Zondi quoted, noting where Kramer’s finger had stopped in the margin.
“Uhuh. Which makes the time of death somewhere between eleven and midnight.”
“Hard boiled egg-see any shells, boss?”
“There’s one in the kitchen. Lucky she didn’t like them soft or we wouldn’t have any pointers. This is interesting about the traces of drugs.”
“The heart ones?”
“No, the sleeping. They had this little dolly all sorted out-and her doctor, too. The bastards.”
Zondi demanded to have the whole story and he got it, right up to the poser of the panchromatic panties.
4
“So you see,” Kramer added, “there are things which just don’t add up in this place. Come through and have a look yourself.”
Before Zondi joined the force, he had spent a year as a houseboy. This had given him an eye for the details of a white man’s abode which was as fresh and perceptive as that of an anthropologist making much of what the natives themselves never noticed. Kramer had found it invaluable more than once.
They started in the kitchen; an unremarkable room barely big enough to turn about it, which had presumably been a store-room once.
There was a collection of invoices stuck on a nail.
“She ordered by phone, boss. Groceries, chemists, clothes from John Orr’s. But mostly food.”
“She didn’t pay by cheque, you know, settled in cash,” Kramer told him. “She kept her money in the post office, just over R200.”
Zondi had the top off the rubbish bin. Understandably enough Rebecca had overlooked her chore in the excitement and it was still full. An inquiring eyebrow was raised at Kramer who grinned back.
“You’ve got a bloody hope,” he said. “That’s kaffir work.”
The grin was returned.
“Besides, there’s the egg shell on the top. Now don’t tell me somebody’s going to hide something in there and not break the pieces putting it all back.”
Zondi went on poking into the soggy mess with the handle of a feather duster.
“Well?”
“That’s a new lot of washing-up powder on the window sill, boss. When women throw away a box they never squash it down like a man would to make more room for the rest. They put it in just like that with all the air inside.”
“And you can’t feel one?”
“No.”
“Come on, Zondi, the one over there is not all that new, you know.”
“But it must be in here, boss.”
Zondi picked up the pair of rubber gloves hanging over the sink and slipped them on. Then he spread a newspaper and began emptying the bin.
Miss Le Roux had certainly been a young lady of regular habits. Levels of the daily round in reverse order- supper, tea, lunch, tea, house-cleaning, breakfast, tea-appeared without variation, although they did become less distinct the deeper Zondi delved.
“No one’s been into that lot, I can tell you for a fact,” Kramer remarked, vaguely irritated.
“Quite right, boss.”
Zondi rocked back on his heels and held up a crumpled cardboard container covered in tea leaves.
“Squashed flat,” Kramer said.
“Folded over,” Zondi said, choosing a clean sheet of newspaper to deposit it on. The carton was slippery and he had to try twice before tearing it open. Out rolled a reel of recording tape, badly damaged by flames.
“Jesus.”
“Monday a week ago, I think,” Zondi said. “After this missus’s supper.”
Kramer spilled some bread coupons from their box and placed the reel in it. As he did so, a number of small pieces of tape fluttered to the floor. He salvaged them. The whole thing was in bits. He sealed the box with some adhesive tape from the table drawer.
“Sergeant Prinsloo can come and take some pretty pictures of this,” Zondi said with satisfaction, pointing to the mess he had made and shedding his gloves. “That is now white man’s work.”
For the moment Kramer was totally preoccupied with the find. He took it through into the living-room and put it on the mantelpiece. He regarded it from three separate angles. He decided that he would know what it contained before the night was out. The hell with official channels.
There was a loud hiss behind him. Zondi was in the doorway, spraying himself all over with an aerosol can of air-freshener.
“Finished in the kitchen, boss?” he asked blandly. He smelt pungently wholesome, like a Swedish brothel.
