“That’s true,” Jonkers confirmed with unconcealed pride, while studying the back of his bear’s paw. “Said I would qualify for a top rank, maybe even colonel, at my age and with all my experience behind me. You know, the military training we get at college, and the attitudes I have formed. Could see I knew how to handle myself. Oh, ja, he really pestered me, Tommy did. You never know, it’s possible if.…”
How astute Erasmus had been in making the silly fat sod see himself as a gun-slinging glamor boy, and not as the plodding police sergeant he was paid to be. And of course, Jonkers had known all along that when it came to the crunch, he was going to say the wife wouldn’t wear it.
“Do you think his experiences could have led to his death?” Kramer suggested, preparing to begin on another tack. “There was no farewell note.”
“That’s Tommy’s style, all right. A hard man. You would have liked him.”
“But I was really querying the reason for-”
“Ach, I see, sir; sorry. You know, I’ve been wondering about that myself. It comes so sudden. Difficult, too, when a bloke has only talked in a bar, where others can listen. What I mean is, Tommy was never actually
How right the good woman was; bigamy had also been one of Tollie’s little failings.
“There’s something that doesn’t add up here,” Kramer observed with polite curiosity. “How come he was thinking of joining up again, but had allowed himself to get so fat?”
“His leg,” Jonkers said, as if this were self-evident.
“Hey?”
“He’d taken a hell of a fracturing of the thighbone-not quite a compound, he explained, but the muscles got all ripped up. That was the reason he came to Spa-kling Waters-for the treatment. He’d been advised by a specialist in Jo’burg, apparently, and wasn’t to put too much weight on it till the insides had mended. There was nothing you could see on the outside, of course, even when he was in his swimming cozzy, and he didn’t always limp.”
The irony stunned Kramer. Then he rationalized, and saw that a fractured thigh would have been, after the story in the papers, the first injury to come to Erasmus’s mind. A thinking mind that might also have gauged that a coincidence is the first thing most people dismiss.
Something in his expression must have cued Jonkers for a divergent response of his own: “Hey, that’s it, isn’t it, sir? The leg made him do it! I’d noticed he wasn’t talking about it anymore-but it
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?”
