A Beautiful Place to Die Page 25

  “What happened that night on the riverbank? I’m not going to tell the Pretorius family or the other policemen. So go ahead and just say it.”

  Shabalala paused as if he couldn’t bear to put into words the things he’d kept bottled up for so long.

  “The captain and the little wife were together on the blanket. Captain was shot and fell forward. The little wife, she struggled from under him and ran on the sand to the path and then the man pulled the captain to the water. This is all I know.”

  “Christ above, man. Why didn’t you tell me straightaway?”

  “The captain’s sons. They would not like to hear these things. None of the Afrikaners would like to hear this story.”

  The Pretorius boys were the unofficial lawmakers in Jacob’s Rest. Anton and his burned garage were an example of the rough justice they meted out to offenders. What chance did a black policeman stand against the mighty hand of the Pretorius family?

  “I understand,” Emmanuel said.

  Shabalala had to live in Jacob’s Rest. Writing unsigned notes was the simplest way for him to help the investigation and stay out of harm’s way. It was better and safer for everyone involved if a white out-of-town detective was the one to uncover the truth about the captain.

  “Detective Sergeant.” The Zulu constable motioned to the back of the house. “Please.”

  Emmanuel followed Shabalala through the neat sitting room into the kitchen. A black woman stood near a table. She looked up with a concerned expression but did not make a sound.

  Shabalala led Emmanuel through the back door. They took seats on either side of a small card table. In the yard behind Shabalala’s house there was a chicken coop and a traditional kraal for keeping animals overnight. Behind the kraal the property fell away to the banks of a meandering stream.

  Both men looked toward the distant hills as they talked. The serious business of undressing Captain Pretorius could not be done face-to-face.

  “Do you know who the woman is?”

  “No,” Shabalala said. “Captain told me of the little wife but not who she was.”

  Emmanuel sank back in his chair. He’d had about enough of Willem Pretorius’s fire walls. Why didn’t he boast about his conquests like a normal man?

  “What did he tell you about the girlfriend?”

  “He said he had taken a little wife from among the coloured people and that the little wife had given him…um…” The pause lengthened as Shabalala sought the most polite way to translate the captain’s words.

  “Pleasure? Power?” Emmanuel prompted.

  “Strength. The little wife gave him new strength.”

  “Why do you call her ‘little wife’?” He’d seen the photographs and there wasn’t one thing in them that his own ex-wife, Angela, would have agreed to do.

  “She was a proper little wife,” Shabalala stated. “The captain paid lobola for her, as is the custom.”

  “Whom did he pay the bride-price to?”

  “Her father.”

  “You’re telling me a man, a coloured man, agreed to exchange his daughter for cattle?” He leaned toward Shabalala. Did the Zulu policeman really believe such a far-fetched story?

  “Captain told me this is what he did. He had respect for the old ways. He would not take a second wife without first paying lobola. This I believe.”

  “Yes, well. I’m sure the white Mrs. Pretorius will be delighted to hear her husband was such a stickler for the rules.”

  “No. The missus would not like to hear this.” Shabalala was deadly serious.

  The sound of a woman’s voice singing in a far-off field carried back on the breeze. Spread out before them, a great span of grassland ran toward distant hills. This was one Africa, inhabited by black men and women who still understood and accepted the old ways. Five miles south in Jacob’s Rest another Africa existed on parallel lines. What made Willem Pretorius think he could live in both places at the same time?

  “We have to find this woman.” Emmanuel pulled the Mozambican calendar from his pocket and laid it on the small table between them. The time for secrets was over. “She was the last person to see Pretorius alive and maybe she can tell us what he was doing on these particular days.”

  Shabalala studied the calendar. “The captain was in Mooihoek on the Monday and Tuesday before he died but he did not leave the town on the other days.”

  “What do you think those red markings mean? Did he go somewhere for a few days each month?”

  “No. He went to Mooihoek to buy station supplies and sometimes to Mozambique and Natal with his family but not every month.”

  “These markings mean something.” Emmanuel sensed another dead end coming up. “If Pretorius was doing something illegal…smuggling goods or meeting up with an associate…would you have known?”

  “I think so, yes.”

  “And was he doing anything like that?”

  Shabalala shook his head. “Captain did not do anything against the law.”

  “You don’t think the Immorality Act counts?” Emmanuel was amazed by the tenacious respect Shabalala still held for his dead friend. Of all the people in Jacob’s Rest, Shabalala had earned the right to be cynical about Willem Pretorius, the lying, adulterous white man.

  “He paid lobola. A man may take many wives if he pays the bride-price. That is the law of the Zulu.”

  “Pretorius wasn’t a Zulu. He was an Afrikaner.”

  Shabalala pointed to his chest just above the heart. “Here. Inside. He was as a Zulu.”

  “Then I’m surprised he wasn’t killed sooner.”

  There was a shuffle at the back door and the round-faced, round-bottomed woman from the kitchen carried a tea tray onto the stoep and set it down on the table.

  “Detective Sergeant Cooper, this is my wife, Lizzie.”

  “Unjani, mama.”

  Emmanuel shook hands with the woman in the traditional Zulu way, by holding his right wrist with his left hand as a sign of his respect. The woman’s smile lit up the stoep and half the location with its warmth. She was a fraction of her husband’s height but in every way his equal.

  “You have good manners.” Her graying hair gave her the authority to speak where a younger woman would have stayed silent. She gave the calendar a thorough look-over.

  “My wife is a schoolteacher.” Shabalala tried to find an excuse for his wife’s inquisitive behavior. “She teaches all the subjects.”

  Lizzie touched her husband’s broad shoulder. “Nkosana, may I see you in the other room for just a moment, please?”

  There was an awkward silence before the Zulu policeman stood up and followed his wife into the house. It didn’t do well for a woman to interrupt men’s business. The murmur of their voices spilled out from the kitchen. Emmanuel sipped his tea. How Captain Pretorius arranged the purchase of a second wife was not as important as finding the woman herself. She was the key to everything.

  Shabalala came back out onto the stoep but remained standing. He tugged on an earlobe.

  “What is it?”

  “My wife she says this calendar is a woman’s calendar.”

  “It was the captain’s. I found it at the stone hut on King’s farm.”

  “No.” Shabalala fidgeted like an awkward schoolboy. “It is a calendar used by women to…um…”

  Shabalala’s wife stepped out from the kitchen and picked up the calendar.

  “How silly can a grown man be?” she asked Shabalala with a click of her tongue. She pointed to the red-ringed days. “For one week a month a woman flows like a river. You understand? This is what this calendar is saying.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I am a woman and I know such things.”

  Emmanuel was stunned by the simplicity of the explanation. It never would have occurred to him in a hundred years of looking. The calendar was about the woman and her cycle, not an elaborate puzzle of illegal pickup dates and activities. The camera, the calendar and the photos were all linked to the shadowy
little wife, whoever she was.

  “Thank you,” he said, then turned to Shabalala. “We have to find the woman before the Security Branch beats a confession from the man in the cells and then throws all the other evidence out the window.”

  “The old Jew,” Shabalala suggested. “He and his wife also know many of the coloured people.”

  “He won’t speak,” Emmanuel said. “But I know someone who might.”

  Emmanuel crossed the street to the burned-out shell of Anton’s garage and Shabalala set up watch in the vacant lot next to Poppies General Store. If Zweigman took flight during Emmanuel’s talk with Anton, the black policeman had orders to follow and observe from a distance.

  Emmanuel entered the work site and the coloured mechanic looked up from the wheelbarrow of blackened bricks he was cleaning with a wire brush. Slowly, a sense of order was being imposed on the charred ruins of the once-flourishing business.

  “Detective.” Anton wiped his sooty fingers clean with a rag before shaking hands. “What brings you to these parts?”

  “You know most of the coloured women around here?” Emmanuel didn’t waste time with preliminaries. If he didn’t get anything from the mechanic, then he’d move on to the old Jew.

  “Most. This got to do with the molester case?”

  “Yes,” Emmanuel lied. “I want to find out what set the victims apart from the other coloured women in town.”

  “Well…” Anton continued moving bricks to the wheelbarrow. “They were all young and single and respectable. There are one or two women, I won’t mention names, who are free and easy with their favors. Molester didn’t go after them.”

  “What about Tottie? You know anything about her private life?”

  “She hasn’t got one. Her father and brothers have her locked down so tight a man’s lucky to get even a minute alone with her.”

  “No rumors about her taking up with a man from outside the coloured community?”

  The mechanic stopped his work and wiped drops of sweat from his top lip. His green eyes narrowed.

  “What you really asking me, Detective?”

  Emmanuel went with the flow. There was nothing to gain now from being shy or subtle.

  “You know any coloured man who practices the old ways? A man who might take a bride-price for his daughter?”

  Anton laughed with relief. “No dice. Even Harry with the mustard gas would never swap his daughters for a couple of cows.”

  It was highly likely that the deal, any deal with native overtones, was done in secret to avoid the scorn of a mixed-race community that worked tirelessly to bury all connection to the black part of the family tree.

  “Has any coloured man come into money that can’t be explained?”

  “Just me.” Anton grinned and the gold filling in his front tooth glinted. “Got my last payment a couple of days ago, but I don’t have a piece of paper to prove where it came from.”

  The secretive Afrikaner captain and the coloured man who’d bargained for sexual access to his daughter were not likely to advertise their venture in any way. Only a traditional black man, steeped in the old ways, would talk openly about the bride-price paid for his daughter.

  “Okay.” Emmanuel abandoned the line of questioning and backtracked. “Have there been rumors about any of the women in town or out on the farms taking up with a man from outside the community?”

  Anton carefully selected a charred brick and began scrubbing in earnest. “We love rumors and whispers,” he said. “Sometimes it feels like the only thing that keeps us together.”

  “Tell me.”

  “If Granny Mariah hears I repeated this, she will hang my testicles out to dry on her back fence. I’m not exaggerating. That woman is fierce.”

  “I promise she won’t get that information from me.”

  “Couple of months back…” Anton chose to talk to the brick in his hand. “Tottie let slip to some other women that she thought the old Jew and Davida were close. Too close.”

  “Any truth in it?”

  “Well, Davida was over at the Zweigmans’ house all hours of the day and night. She walked in and out whenever she pleased and it didn’t seem right, one of us being so comfortable with whites.”

  “Did anyone ask her what she was doing there?” He couldn’t connect the heated exchange of bodily fluids with the shy brown mouse and the protective old Jew. His relationship with her seemed paternal, not sexual.

  “Reading books, sewing, baking, you name it, she always had an explanation for being there.” Anton worked a lump of ash out of the brick’s surface with his fingernail. “I was sweet on Davida at the time. We went walking and I even got some kisses in but she changed, Davida did. It was like she went into a shell once the talking started. She wasn’t like you see her today, all covered up and quiet. The girl had some spark back then.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh, yes. Beautiful wavy hair down to the middle of her back; all natural, not straightened. At socials she was the first one up to dance and the last one to sit down. Granny had her hands full with her, I’ll tell you.”

  The description didn’t remotely match the cloistered woman hiding under a head scarf. But the fact that the shy brown mouse once had long black hair did make her a possible match for the model in the captain’s photographs. What was her body like under the shapeless clothes that hung from her like sackcloth?

  “What happened?” Emmanuel asked.

  “I still can’t figure it,” Anton said. “She got through the molester thing okay and then one day the hair is all gone and she won’t walk with me anymore.”

  “When did this change take place?”

  “April sometime.” Anton threw the damaged brick into a wheelbarrow. “Zweigman and his wife nursed Davida through a sickness and when she came out, well, nothing was the same as it was before.”

  April. The same month Captain Pretorius discovered the German shopkeeper was actually a qualified surgeon. Did Zweigman reveal the extent of his medical skills during treatment of Davida’s mysterious illness? And if that were the case, how had Willem Pretorius found that out? The shy brown mouse was the only common link between the two men.

  “Thanks for your help, Anton,” Emmanuel said, and held his hand out to end the informal interview. “Good luck with the cleanup.”

  He wanted to run through the connections between Willem Pretorius and Davida Ellis with Shabalala so he could clarify the links in his own mind. First, Donny Rooke sighted the captain behind the grid of coloured houses on the night he was murdered. Then Davida appeared at the stone hut. Somehow Celestial Pleasures had traveled from Zweigman’s study to Pretorius’s locked room as well. The elements were beginning to connect.

  “Detective.” Anton stayed half a step behind him. “I wasn’t joking about Granny Mariah. She’ll never forgive me if I cause trouble for her granddaughter.”

  Emmanuel didn’t know how to tell the mechanic that Davida’s troubles were likely to run far deeper and wider than a rumor spread by an ex-boyfriend. If the shy brown mouse proved to be the principal witness in the murder of a white police captain, everyone in South Africa was going to know her name and her face.

  16

  GRANNY MARIAH AND Davida were at work in the garden, planting seeds in a long row of freshly turned earth. The older woman’s green eyes widened at the sight of the white policeman and his black offsider walking across her garden on a spring day.

  “What do you want?” She straightened up and put her hands on her hips.

  “I need to speak to Davida.” Emmanuel remained calm and pleasant in the face of Granny Mariah’s hostility. There wasn’t much a nonwhite woman could do once the force of the law turned against her.

  “What do you want with her?”

  “That’s between Davida and myself.”

  “Well, I won’t have it. I won’t have you coming in here and making trouble for my granddaughter.”

  “It’s too late for that,” Emmanuel said. He felt
sorry for the fiery woman and admired the strength she showed in the face of overwhelming odds. This was a battle they both knew he was going to win.

  “Granny…” The shy brown mouse stepped forward. “It’s all right. I’ll talk to the detective.”

  “No. I won’t have it.”

  “He’s right,” Davida said quietly. “It’s too late.”

  The brown-skinned matriarch held on to her granddaughter’s hand and squeezed tight. “Use the sitting room, baby girl,” Granny Mariah said. “It’s more comfortable.”

  “We’ll talk in her room.” Emmanuel walked to the small white building at the edge of the garden and opened the door. Inside the old servant’s quarters he pulled up a chair from which to survey the interior of the room. The wrought-iron bed and bedside table were instantly familiar from the photographs. On the floor closest to the pillows was a neat stack of leather-covered books taken from Zweigman’s library. All that was missing was a giant slab of white meat lying resplendent on the bed.

  Davida entered the room and the images Emmanuel had seen after getting back from Lorenzo Marques flashed through his mind. The fall of long dark hair across her face, the jewel hardness of her erect nipples against the white sheets, the sleek lines of her legs ending in a thatch of dark pubic hair…and Willem Pretorius ready to taste it all.

  “Did you know Captain Pretorius?” he asked.

  “Everyone knew him.”

  “I mean did you know him well enough to, say, have a talk with? That sort of thing?”

  She turned to face the window, her fingers toying with the lace edge of the curtains. “Why are you asking me these questions?”

  “Why aren’t you answering?”

  “Because you already know the answer. That’s why you’re here.” Her breath made an angry sound as it escaped her mouth. “Why must I say it?”

  “I need to hear it from you, in your own words.”

  “Okay.” The shy brown mouse turned to him and he glimpsed the fighting spirit of Granny Mariah alive and well in her. “I was sleeping with Captain Pretorius in that bed right there. You happy now?”