A Beautiful Place to Die Page 18

  Erich kept his temper in check. “You’re clever,” he stated. “But not clever enough to make me confess to a murder I didn’t commit. I never in my life raised a hand to my father.”

  “You were angry with him, weren’t you?”

  “Of course,” Erich said. “Ask the boys out there. They’ll tell you we fought about the payments. If the old Jew stuck to his story, I’d have to hire a lawyer to defend me. Then I’d have to close up shop for the trial, which could last weeks and weeks. In the end it was a hell of a lot cheaper to pay the money and be done.”

  Interesting that the captain hadn’t argued the right and wrong of his son’s actions with him. He’d gotten to Erich through the hip pocket. It was about the money. Mrs. Pretorius lived in a world governed by a moral code, but her departed husband had been a pragmatist.

  “Does your ma know about the fire?” Emmanuel asked. He was curious to see the degree to which Willem Pretorius kept his wife’s fantasy world intact.

  “No.” Erich blushed, an odd sight in a man so big. “Pa thought it was best if we didn’t bother her with…um, details.”

  “I see.”

  Willem Pretorius had succeeded at concealing many of the, um, details, but somewhere along the line he failed to safeguard all his secrets. Someone knew about the stone hut. Someone knew about the stash of goods in the safe. The theft of the evidence was not random. The wooden club proved that the perpetrator was prepared to commit violence to keep one step ahead of the law.

  While Captain Pretorius had kept watch on the people of Jacob’s Rest, someone had watched him as well.

  “Is that all?” Erich crammed the money back into the bag, an activity that clearly incensed him.

  Emmanuel decided to take a run at his “white man gone to black” lead. He had to follow every avenue in the hope that one of them led him back to the stolen evidence.

  “Your father was tight with the nonwhites, wasn’t he?”

  “Pa grew up with the kaffirs but he wasn’t a kaffirboetie if that’s what you’re getting at.”

  Kaffirboetie, brother to the kaffir, was one of the most potent insults to sling at a white man who wasn’t a native welfare worker.

  “Do you think any of the whites believed he was too close to the natives?”

  “Maybe some of the English. You people have a hard time understanding that we don’t hate the blacks: we love them. They’re in and out of our homes, with our children and our old people. Blacks are family to us.”

  “Like Aggie?”

  “Exactly. She’s useless, but Pa kept her on because she’s been with us since I was in nappies. Aggie was a second mother to me and my brothers.”

  Emmanuel didn’t dispute Erich’s sentiments. His feeling for the old black woman with the gnarled hands was genuine. The wheels fell off the Afrikaner love cart, though, the moment nonwhites wanted to be more than honorary members of the blessed white tribe.

  “So.” Emmanuel slipped his notepad into his pocket. “No problems among the whites that you can think of?”

  “None,” Erich said.

  That brought him back to Sarel Uys. He was the one white person to exhibit real animosity toward the captain’s ties to Shabalala. How much bitterness did the jealous policeman have stored in his gut?

  “Thanks for your time.” Emmanuel finished with the standard sign-off to an interview. “I’ll call in at Moira’s Hairstyles on my way back to the station.”

  “Do that,” Erich said, and dumped the money back into the drawer.

  Emmanuel closed the office door behind him. The sound of the telephone receiver lifting off the cradle filtered through. Erich was calling his commando brother at the police station to report on the questioning. The Security Branch would have an ear to the phone as well.

  The police station was a no-go area for the rest of the day. He had to find another place to conduct his business, somewhere across the color line.

  11

  EMMANUEL STEPPED OUT of Moira’s Hairstyles and headed straight onto the kaffir path. Everything had checked out. Little Willem was up with croup at eleven PM and again at two AM. The black maid, Dora, was willing to swear on the life of her own sons to that effect. Erich Pretorius might be a human flamethrower, but he was safe at home on the night of the murder.

  The captain’s third son was a long shot, so it was no surprise to learn that he’d had no direct physical involvement in the homicide. Evidence at the crime scene pointed to the killer’s lack of physical strength. Erich was capable of pulling a loaded freight train to Durban in an afternoon. The killer had a cool head. Erich was seventy percent muscle and thirty percent combustible fuel.

  Emmanuel crossed a vacant lot thick with weeds and untidy clumps of grass. It was close on lunchtime and the street was quiet when he turned a sharp right in the direction of Poppies General Store. The old Jew sat behind the long wooden counter, reading a book. The hum of sewing machines filtered out from the back room. Zweigman glanced up as he entered.

  “Detective.”

  Emmanuel had come to ask for use of the shop telephone but he’d remembered something else.

  “How did Captain Pretorius know you were a qualified doctor?” he asked. Zweigman the surgeon and Zweigman the storekeeper still seemed at odds to him. If Sister Angelina and Sister Bernadette had kept their promise, Zweigman would have remained just another Jew trading his wares in the marketplace, practically invisible.

  “Knowing things was the captain’s speciality,” Zweigman replied drily.

  There was more. Emmanuel could see it in the German’s face, in the peculiar way he held his head tilted slightly to the side when he spoke. When Shabalala withheld information, Emmanuel suspected it was to protect the memory and reputation of his childhood friend. Who was Dr. Zweigman protecting?

  Emmanuel wrote “time of doctor recommendation from Shabalala” onto a clean page in his notebook. When did the captain tell his black right-hand man to see Zweigman instead of Dr. Kruger if he needed help? Was it before or after the little boy was run over in front of the store? If it was before, then the captain had advance knowledge of Zweigman’s true status.

  “I’ve come to ask you for the use of your phone,” Emmanuel said.

  “There is a telephone at the police station for just such business.” Zweigman’s brown eyes burned with enough curiosity to kill six cats.

  “The homicide case and the police station have been taken over by the Security Branch.” Emmanuel told the truth. “I need another place to carry out my investigation.”

  “You are reopening the case involving the molester?”

  “That and a few other things,” Emmanuel said, thinking of the files lying in their safe hiding place, waiting to be read. He’d report to van Niekerk and send out feelers for new information first, though.

  “If that is so…” Zweigman reached below the countertop and retrieved a weighty black telephone connected to miles of fraying cord. “I am happy to do you this favor, Detective Cooper. You may call from the back room.”

  The women sitting at the sewing machines looked up when they entered, this time with less trepidation. He nodded at each of the seamstresses and made sure to give Hot Tottie an extra-long pass as he followed Zweigman through to the sitting room. Focusing on the show pony was a sure way to cover up his connection with the shy brown mouse at the captain’s hut.

  Tottie’s emerald green eyes sparkled with amusement. She was a queen and he was yet another supplicant come to lay his desire at her door.

  Davida was laying out a paper pattern onto a cutting table under Lilliana Zweigman’s guidance. Her head, covered by a green scarf, remained bowed. She gave no indication he’d talked to her and touched her and asked her to keep his secrets safe.

  “Here.” Zweigman placed the black Bakelite phone on the tea table and indicated a chair. “My wife and the ladies will come through this room to go out to the backyard in twenty minutes. Lunch break.”

  “I won’t be that long
.” Emmanuel sat down and pulled the phone toward him. Zweigman left the room and Emmanuel waited until the busy hum of the sewing machines started up again. The fragile Lilliana had stopped all activity until her husband emerged unharmed from the back room. Something in the past still cast a shadow over the Jewish couple. How many people in towns and villages and cities lived with the firsthand knowledge that nothing is safe? History, written with the help of bullets and firebombs, swept away everything in its path.

  He rang through to the operator and waited to be connected to district headquarters. The line was clear.

  “Cooper?” Van Niekerk’s voice was clipped hard. Something was going on at the office.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Call me back on this number in ten minutes. Local area code.” The major gave the number, then cut the line without explanation. The familiar beep, beep, beep came down the line, followed by the operator’s voice.

  “You’ve been disconnected, sir. Shall I try again?”

  “No. Thank you.” Emmanuel hung up and checked his watch. Ten minutes gave van Niekerk just long enough to walk the two city blocks from headquarters to a public telephone box. The Security Branch had flushed the major out of his private office and onto the streets.

  The white noise of the sewing machines contrasted with the jagged beat of his heart. He read over the notes he’d made at the crime scene. Was Captain Pretorius’s murder the corner piece of a bigger puzzle the Security Branch was working on?

  Emmanuel acknowledged his surroundings. He was in a small tearoom annexed to the back of a sweatshop operating on the dark side of the color line. The Security Branch and their heavyweight political backers occupied the power seat while he trawled through the grubby entrails of the victim’s private life. A feeling of doubt came over him and he closed his eyes to think. A needle of pain pricked his eye socket.

  “Jesus…” the sergeant major’s voice whispered. “What if those fuckers are right and the murder was a political assassination?”

  Emmanuel pushed the voice away and revisited the basic laws of homicide investigation. Most murders are the result of banal and human impulses: a robber kills for money, a husband kills for revenge, and a misfit kills for sexual release. Ordinary, sad, and confused human need lifted the hands of killers.

  “The Security Branch doesn’t operate in your ordinary world, laddie,” the abrasive Scotsman said. “While you’re sifting through underwear drawers and skiving on kaffir paths, they’re shaping the map of South Africa and every country around it. You are a foot soldier and they are the general’s personal aides.”

  Emmanuel tried to ignore the sergeant major’s comments, but couldn’t. There was too much truth in what he said. Why would the Security Branch go after this murder so fast and so hard if they didn’t already have evidence to back up their political revolution theory?

  The words “neat” and “sniper-like” in his notes caught his attention as never before. Professional assassins targeted the head and the spine. Professional assassins left no traces behind. Had he misread the crime scene by looking for personal elements where none existed?

  He dialed the number van Niekerk had given him.

  “Cooper?” The major was out of breath and out of sorts when he answered on the second ring.

  “It’s me. Why the change in telephones?”

  “The Security Branch has big ears and I’m not about to give them information for free,” van Niekerk replied. “Are you calling from the police station?”

  “I’m using a private telephone.”

  “Good. What’s your news?”

  “The Security Branch is going hard after the Communist link. They have a confidential file with lists of Party members and their affiliates. It seems Captain Pretorius’s murder is tied in to an existing investigation.”

  “Operation Spearhead,” van Niekerk said with the casual superiority that set half the detectives who worked homicide or robbery against him. “The National Party plans to break the back of the Communist movement by arresting agents crossing into South Africa with banned writings and pamphlets. They conduct raids at illegal border crossings and hope they net a Red fish to fry up on treason charges.”

  “Captain Pretorius was shot along a stretch of river used by smugglers,” Emmanuel said. “The Security Branch may have been watching.”

  “This coming Thursday they were due to hit the Watchman’s Ford crossing where Captain Pretorius was found, acting on a tip-off. The Security Branch wants to salvage that operation by finding a link between the murder and a specific Communist agent they’ve had under surveillance.”

  The depth of van Niekerk’s political and social connections impressed Emmanuel and gave him pause. Was there any piece of information beyond the grasp of the ambitious Dutchman?

  “Is the suspected agent a black graduate of Fort Bennington College?”

  “Now it’s my turn to be impressed,” van Niekerk replied with a trace of humor. “That fact is known to less than a hundred people in the whole of South Africa. Are you sure you don’t want to join the Security Branch? They’re looking for bright young men.”

  “I’m not interested in redrawing the map of the world with a thumbscrew and a steel pipe.”

  “Have they gone that far?”

  “Yes.” The crippled miner’s bruised arms and wild eyes came to mind.

  “Has any of it come your way?”

  “Not yet,” Emmanuel said. “But it’s just a matter of time.”

  “What have you got on Captain Pretorius?” Van Niekerk’s voice took on a new urgency.

  “Nothing conclusive. I’m chasing something now that could knock the captain off his pedestal, though.”

  He didn’t mention the stolen evidence. That wound was too fresh to open in front of van Niekerk.

  “Find it,” the major said. “Information on Frikkie van Brandenburg’s son-in-law is the only ammunition that will stop the Security Branch in their tracks if they come after you.”

  “You think I’ll need to fight my way out of a corner here?”

  “I’m talking to you from a filthy call box on a side street. You’re calling from God knows where. We’re already in a corner, Cooper.”

  “What do I do with the dirt when I find it?” The security arrangements he’d rigged up in Jacob’s Rest weren’t enough to stop a Security Branch raid. He needed a second net to catch him if he fell.

  “Go to the local post office. I’ll telegraph through what you need in half an hour.”

  The hum of the sewing machines began to wind down. It was almost lunch break for Lilliana Zweigman and the seamstresses.

  “I have to go,” he told the major as the sound of chairs pushing back filtered into the tearoom.

  “Emmanuel…”

  The use of his first name held him on the line.

  “Sir?”

  “There’s an information satchel being sent by courier to the Security Branch tomorrow morning. One of the things in it is a personal dossier on you. I can’t stop it. I’m sorry.”

  “What does it have?” He couldn’t stop himself asking the question. He needed to know.

  “Everything. That’s all the more reason to collect whatever dirt you can on the Pretorius family. You’re going to need it regardless of who catches the killer first.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  He hung up the phone and reached into his pocket for a handful of magic white pills. Fear joined his feeling of doubt and he wondered how his life was going to keep from flying off the narrow rails he’d painstakingly built since returning to South Africa. He swallowed the pills with a glass of water from the tearoom tap. It was too late to stop the folder and too late to withdraw from the investigation.

  “Stop feeling sorry for yourself, for Christ’s sake,” the sergeant major said. “Get off your arse and get to work. You still have a murder to solve.”

  The women filed out into the back courtyard and Emmanuel made his way onto the kaffir path running tow
ard the post office. A squadron of yellow-winged grasshoppers flew into the air at his approach and settled on curved stalks of field grass. He didn’t want to think about the personal dossier but it was on his mind.

  “Dark, isn’t she?” the sergeant major mused aloud. “What does it say about you, Emmanuel…the fact that Davida stirs you?”

  “It means nothing,” he said quietly.

  “Really?” The sergeant major was amused. “Because it makes me wonder if what the jury said about your mother was true after all. What do you think about that, laddie?”

  Emmanuel didn’t answer. The pills he had swallowed at Zweigman’s would kick in soon. He shut the sergeant major out and locked the gate. Under no circumstances was he going to think about what the mad Scotsman had said.

  Harry the shell-shocked soldier was sitting on the post office steps when Emmanuel emerged from the one-room building with van Niekerk’s telegram safe in his pocket. It was early afternoon and the main street was bathed in shimmering springtime light. Down the road, a barrel-chested white farmer whistled a tune while his farm boys loaded his pickup truck with hessian sacks of fertilizer and seed.

  “Little Captain”—Harry’s voice was a rough whisper—“Little Captain…”

  The jangle of medals and an insistent tugging at his sleeve let Emmanuel know that the veteran was talking to him and not a mustard gas phantom.

  “I’m Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper from Jo’burg,” he reminded the old soldier. “You met me at Tiny’s shop. Remember?”

  “Little Captain.” Harry paid no attention to what he said. “Little Captain.”

  Emmanuel didn’t correct Harry a second time. He had to get off the main street before the Security Branch got wind of his whereabouts and decided to convey their displeasure at his questioning of Erich Pretorius.

  “How can I help you, Harry?” he asked.

  “Tonight?” Harry’s bony hand curled around his wrist and held on. “Tonight, Little Captain?”

  Emmanuel looked around to gauge how much attention was coming his way. None of the people walking along the street paid any mind to the unusual sight of an addled coloured man holding on to a white man’s wrist. Harry was the village madman: no one expected him to behave like a normal resident of Jacob’s Rest.