He snapped it off.
Marais almost strutted as he followed Strydom out of the main building on the way to the car park.
Where they met Gardiner, who immediately asked how come both of them were looking so smug.
“Teamwork,” said Strydom, with a covert wink to convey he was being generous.
“Ja, me and the doctor here have got Stevenson over a barrel. I’ve just put out a call for Kramer to forget his day off.”
Then it had to be good.
“ Ach, come on, you can tell uncle,” coaxed Gardiner, making his brows wag.
“I didn’t sleep at all well last night,” Strydom said. “That sort of a day and then Kloppers having tantrums on top of it. I was being so restless my wife threw me out of bed about six and told me to doze in the study.”
“Then-” Marais tried to say.
“Naturally, sleep was quite impossible by that stage, so I started to write up my notes on yesterday’s little lady. I was filling in the section of external observations when something suddenly struck me.”
“It’d struck me, too,” Marais got in. “But I was waiting to ring at breakfast.”
“Oh, were you?” Strydom murmured, not quite hiding the doubt in his voice, then continuing briskly. “I was describing how the hands were still in position towards the extremes of the reptile-and by the way, I’ve had it on good authority this is the only way to handle constrictors: you have to stop them getting a grip on anything with their tail, and the head end gives a nasty bite. So she was doing the right thing, only-ironically-her panic probably gave the snake the purchase it needed. If you put yourself in her position, then you can under-”
“That’s all beside the point,” Marais objected
“So what, young man? Hey? Anyway, I was describing the state of the body, noting down that rigor mortis had already started to subside, when it struck me what that stupid man kept saying when we got there. Remember? How stiff she’d been to the touch? Her legs, yes, I wouldn’t quarrel-”
“So the doctor phoned to see if I remembered, too, or was he imagining, and I said that’s right, he had. It’s even in his statement.”
“Which you took?” Gardiner asked.
“Hell, you expect people to say that, and I didn’t try her arms myself!” Marais dried up abruptly, having outwitted himself in his claim to have shared the discovery.
“Beside the point,” Strydom said. “The fact is her arms were flaccid and I didn’t have to pull to get them on her chest. So either Mr. Stevenson didn’t touch her at all-or she was stiff when he did so.”
“Meaning?”
“He told a lie under oath whichever way you take it,” Marais proclaimed. “So I’ve got him! No problem!”
Yankee Boy Msomi made his way with grace down a path in the grass behind a short row of shops where his friend ran a record bar. He was particularly anxious not to appear in any sort of hurry.
Only seconds before he had been sunning himself in the road over on the other side, nodding at the humble greetings of passers-by and generally feeling good, when he had taken another casual look at the old red car parked outside his friend’s place. It was then he noticed that its two occupants had made no move to get out. They seemed to be waiting for something.
Perhaps for the inevitable ebb in the number of people about, that short-lived phenomenon which Msomi had frequently observed happening almost anywhere during midmorning.
That was enough for him. Discs, even for old-fashioned wind-ups, were big money.
He found himself breathing heavily as he reached the back door of his friend’s place. Although he knew nobody was following him, he slid the bolt home after slipping inside. Then he tiptoed with great caution to the doorway into the shop, and used the shoplifter mirror to see where his friend was.
Beebop was drinking a Coke and listening to the latest from the Black Mambazo. He had no customers.
Msomi checked the car. The two men were still in the front seat.
So he poked his head around and said, sweet and low, “Beebop, play this cool, brother, but just you close that door of yours, put up the sign, and come on back here a way. There’s bad, bad news outside, I tell you.”
When he let go something like that for free, there were few who would hesitate or argue.
Beebop, graying slightly under his very black skin, shambled over, shut the door, snibbed the lock, flipped the sign to read SORRY FOLKS, GONE GROOVIN ’! and nearly ran all the way to the safety of his storeroom.
It seemed impossible, but in the short time he obscured Mso-mi’s view of the car-which couldn’t have been more than two seconds-one of its occupants had got out and disappeared.
The light was wrong for Msomi to make out the features of the man at the wheel, and the angle made it impossible to get a look at the registration plate-he had been in too much of a hurry to note it before. Might be false anyway.
“What’s the jive?” Beebop whispered. “And how did you get in here, man? That kid of mine leave the door open again? Got some good stuff back here.”
“Your kid, everybody’s kid.” Msomi grinned. “Just you shut that door, son! Oh, yeah!”
And his pointed shoes did a little shuffle.
When he looked up, there were two men in the front seat of the car again. They drove off.
And Beebop, Jr., tried the back door, finding it yanked open in his face and his hide tanned before he could yell.
Msomi waited until the boy had been set back on his feet again and handed his broom, then drifted away, saying, “My deepest and sincerest, brother, or maybe I did a good thing there.”
Indeed, perhaps he had. But in the shop next door, a butcher bled to death. They had used a. 22 this time, which the high-wattage output of Beebop’s speakers had simply swallowed up.
Kramer tried to make a joke of it.
“You can see they’re running short,” he said. “That’s a lot cheaper than firing thirty-eights.”
The idea wasn’t to make Colonel Hans Muller laugh, just to get him to say something.
The colonel went on twisting his plastic ruler in his oddly neat hands, which would have looked like a pianist’s if it hadn’t been for their werewolf trimmings. His pink-cheeked big head had gone blotchy.
“They’re truly making monkeys of us,” he said at last, “and I don’t like it. I don’t like persons getting shot in my district. I don’t like what we both-but, man, what can we do? We haven’t the availability to cover Peacevale, and who says it will be there next time?”
“Uh-huh, especially as they’ve gone and done it again,” Kramer agreed. “Coons are lucky if they eat meat once a week, then they buy it on a Friday when their money’s paid. Through the week, all the butchers keep is maybe sausages, some chicken they’ve cooked up themselves, offal. Their tills are nearly empty.”
“And you say on one side was a record shop?”
“Sells transistors, battery players, all kinds. Number one in the district; the fat cats come in from every direction. But it was shut at the time for stocktaking.”
The colonel dropped his ruler and reached for his paper knife to play with. It still had its exhibit label from a murder case.
“Okay-exactly how much this time?”
“Approximation: fifteen rand.”
“Hell. Is Zondi working on this?”
“His day off, sir.”
“At a time like this?”
“His wife’s away and-”
“Since when has a kaff-”
This aborted beginning to what might have been quite a speech amused Kramer. The colonel had very nearly said “kaffir,” which was now an officially banned word. Only the day before, a traffic officer had made a public apology for saying it to one of his Bantu subordinates.
“What’s so funny now?” asked the colonel. “You’ve got another joke to make?”
“I was just going to say he has been helping me at home with some heavy work.”
“ Ach, that’s okay, then. As long as he respects you. But bring him in and see if any of his customers knows anything about today.”
“And me?”
“Don’t look to me for orders, Kramer! Go on, man, voetsak!”
