The naked body lay on its back, open eyes staring sightlessly at the ceiling. The single sheet — pale blue Egyptian cotton, befitting the luxurious bed of this luxury suite in this luxury hotel — was drawn up neatly to the man’s waist. As though the man, pre-death, had opted for an appearance of post-death modesty, despite the inherent and ultimate immodesty of suicide.
Assuming, of course, that this was in fact a suicide.
“The angle, you see,” said Murmajee. “There is no telling, oh my no, until we determine the length of the blade. But the angle is just exactly right, you see.”
Murmajee bent forward, peering at the knife. “A pushbutton stiletto. Italian, I should think. A narrow blade, and likely long enough to penetrate the heart very nicely, yes. Not much exterior bleeding, as you see. Death would have been quite sudden. Shock, internal hemorrhage. Poof, eh?”
“The wound could have been self-inflicted?” Andrew asked him.
“Ah,” said Murmajee, pouting again. “Ah. Self-inflicted. Could have been, yes. Possibly. And could have been otherwise.” He shook his head. “Perhaps after the autopsy...?”
Behind the two of them, standing at the long wooden dresser, Constable Kobari called out, “Sergeant?”
Andrew turned. Kobari was holding up — carefully, fingertips dainty along its edges — a worn leather wallet. “It was under the dresser,” he told Andrew.
“Excuse me, doctor,” Andrew said to Murmajee, and left him bending over the body while he crossed the room to Kobari.
Kobari laid the wallet on the dresser top and stepped back. Andrew slipped his pen from his shirt pocket. He said in Swahili to Kobari, “You should’ve left it there until the Technical Unit took their photographs.”
Kobari grinned. “If I had, sergeant, photographs wouldn’t be the only thing they’d have taken. There’s money inside.”
Andrew nodded glumly; wouldn’t be the first time evidence had vanished from a crime scene.
Using the pen, he eased the wallet open. Behind a scuffed transparent plastic screen was a driver’s license made out to Bradford Quentin, who lived, who had lived, on a street in Atlanta, Georgia, in the United States of America. The picture matched the face on the bed. The man’s birthdate was April 7,1936.
Fifty-three years old, then. He looked very fit for fifty-three. Except, of course, for the small matter of being dead.
Gingerly, with the pen and the tip of his index finger, Andrew pried open the money compartment. Three bills in there, each a hundred U.S. dollars. Other than those and the driver’s license, the wallet was empty. No credit cards, no business cards, no photographs of beaming wife and beaming children.
Andrew asked Kobari, “Could the wallet have fallen under the dresser accidentally?”
Kobari shook his head. “It has a backboard, this dresser, that reaches to the floor. I think he put it there deliberately, to hide it.”
Andrew frowned. “If he were about to commit suicide, why would he hide his wallet?”
Kobari shrugged: Who knew why Wazungu did the lunatic things they did?
Andrew said, “His plane ticket.”
Kobari looked puzzled. “Sergeant?”
“In order to get here from this Atlanta, Georgia, he had to take a plane, or possibly a boat. Where is the ticket?”
“I don’t know, sergeant. It’s not under the dresser.”
They found the tickets — two of them — in the interior pocket of a white linen jacket hanging in the closet. Bradford Quentin had flown from the United States to the capital on the fifth of the month, and on the feeder flight from the capital to the Township on the sixth, yesterday. According to the tickets, he was due to return to the capital on the eighth, and to the U.S. on the ninth.
Standing outside the closet door, Andrew tapped the tickets lightly with his finger. “If he were planning suicide, why would he buy a ticket all the way to Africa? And a return ticket at that? He could’ve killed himself more conveniently, and more cheaply, in Atlanta, Georgia.”
“Perhaps he became suddenly depressed when he arrived,” said Kobari. “Culture shock.”
“A suicidal culture shock?”
“But, sergeant, if he arrived only yesterday, how could he have made an enemy who hated him badly enough to kill him?”
Andrew nodded. “We shall have to discover where he went yesterday, and with whom he spent time.”
“Sergeant?”
Dr. Murmajee, approaching from the bed.
“Yes, doctor?” Andrew said.
“I’ve done all I can at the moment. I won’t be able to add anything, I’m very much afraid, until after the autopsy.”
“Your conclusions, doctor?”
“Ah,” said Murmajee sadly. “Conclusions. Well, of course, as I say, everything is tentative until—”
“Can you estimate the time of death?” Andrew asked him.
Blinking, Dr. Murmajee said, “Oh my, certainly, sergeant, if you like. Lividity has progressed very nicely indeed, and rigor too, and the body has cooled down extremely well. Convenient for our purposes, eh, these air conditioners? I should say that death occurred, oh my, perhaps eight or nine hours ago. Roughly speaking, of course.”
Andrew looked at his watch. Ten thirty now. So between one thirty and two thirty this morning. Roughly speaking.
“Anything else, doctor?”
“Well, yes, there is one thing. Rather curious, I think. You might want to take a look, eh?”
Andrew and Kobari followed him over to the bed where the doctor, bending forward, ran his finger along the edge of the dead man’s palm.
“Most curious,” he said. “He seems to have developed a long callus sort of affair, right along this area. On both hands. From the tip of the little finger all the way down to the wrist. Clearly the man was in excellent physical shape, like someone who did manual labor, yes? But there are no calluses on the palms, only along here. Now what could have caused them, I wonder?”
“Karate,” said Constable Kobari.
Andrew and the doctor looked at the constable.
“You practice with sandbags,” Kobari explained to Andrew. “Hitting them.” He made a short chopping gesture. “It’s to toughen the hands. You see, sergeant, I have this callus myself.”
Andrew looked at the outstretched right hand. “Where?”
Kobari turned his hand around, brought it toward his face, and glared at it, frowning. Bringing up his left hand, he ran his fingers along the ridge of his right. Triumphantly, victory snatched from the palms of defeat, he said, “Here, sergeant, it’s there, you can feel it.”
Andrew touched the ridge of Kobari’s hand and located an area that might, with some charity, have been considered an incipient callus.
“You do karate?” he asked the constable.
“Yes,” said Kobari, putting his hands in his pockets before they had an opportunity to betray him again. “With Bwana Draper. He was in the Special Air Services in England.”
“Ah.” Andrew was momentarily entertained by an image of Kobari bounding about the room, hands chopping, feet flailing, a deadly Oriental dervish whirling into a blur.
His entertainment was short lived, however. For just then a hubbub at the door of the hotel suite announced that the Technical Unit had arrived with their cameras and measuring tapes and fingerprint powders.
At five o’clock that afternoon, just as Andrew finished typing up his last report of the day, Cadet Inspector Moi of the C.I.D. sauntered around the partition that separated Andrew’s cubicle from Sergeant Oto’s. Moi’s pastel jumpsuit was today of a hue that Andrew decided was most probably cerise. The jumpsuits were an affectation which, like the plummy B.B.C. accent and the precisely trimmed goatee, Moi had acquired during his exchange year at London’s Scotland Yard. He had also acquired, no one quite knew how, the notion that he was a cunning sleuth.