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!”
Which summed up what Kramer found best in the man. He would have walked away very happily, if it had not been for the weight of trust this also placed upon him.
Zondi returned the lorry to the Indian car dealer and transferred the four men back into his police vehicle. Then he paid them each the two rand he had told the lieutenant was the going rate for express furniture removers.
This done, he drove round the corner and onto the building site.
The white foreman, stiff-jointed from sitting on piles of bricks all day, came across to him.
Zondi showed his identity card again.
“Oh, ja, and what have these skelms been up to, hey? Are you going to take them all away? That’s no worry.”
“ Hau, no, master! These are very good boys, master. You must trust them! They give us help too too much.”
“Never.”
“Most difficult case, master, but their eyes are witnessing all known facts. If you do not believe me, then you must tring-a-ling Lieutenant Kramer. Hau, this one tells us where the skabenga puts the knife in his wife’s seating arrangements, and this man here-”
“Work to be done,” the foreman said, turning away. “Come on, you good-for-nothing ntombi shaggers, get up those ladders, checha wena!”
Zondi, who knew he had been dismissed, from the mind as well as the vicinity, picked his way back to the car, calculating the best way to make the U-turn.
“And now, Mickey,” he said in his best English to the rear-view mirror, “let us adjourn for lunch.”
His car had no radio, nor had Blue Haze a telephone.
The atmosphere in the post-mortem room could have been cut with a knife.
Then it became apparent that the debate had put a stop to the actual work in progress, and so Kloppers retired to sulk in his office. Leaving an aggrieved Marais facing an agitated Kramer over the legs of the dead snake dancer, while Strydom mumbled to himself as he laid down the scalp saw at the other end.
“Look, Doc, all I want to do is get this straight,” Kramer said. “I’m too bloody busy to waste time on a poop. But if you’re sure, then we’ll have him in and get it over with.”
“But, Lieutenant, sir-”
“I’ve heard you, Marais; now I want the expert’s view.”
“Then I quote to you Professor K. Simpson, pathologist to the Queen of England: ‘It is unfortunate, but rigor is uncertain in its timing.’ All right?”
“So it’s only on average that it sets in after six hours and lasts thirty-six? She was allegedly found after thirty-four, remember, not forty-two.”
“It can begin immediately. And the circumstances were exactly right for that-violent exertion prior to death, a warm room. I’d say it must have done, as it goes away again in the order it comes-head, arms, trunk, then the legs. Her legs were stiff.”