Snake Read online

  Her indignation was quite real.

  Marais put his cup down and reached for a list.

  “Twenty minutes from town to here in traffic,” Kramer said impatiently.

  Mrs. Stevenson was waving to someone through the window.

  “Oh, look,” she said. “There’s Bess outside and I want a word with her about taking Jeremy to riding lessons. Are you…?”

  “I’d appreciate if we could just use your phone for a moment,” Kramer said, courteously rising with her. “Then maybe we best be going.”

  “It’s in the hall, Mr. Kramer. Well, toodle-oo, if I don’t see you again.”

  She rushed out through the French windows, making hi-there noises.

  “Sir, this means his only chance of feeling the deceased was stiff—or even knowing about it—was between when she left the stage and when the snake got her or a few minutes afterwards. She couldn’t have been cold either—and that’s something else in his sworn statement.”

  “Do I look like your grandmother?” asked Kramer. “You sit tight while I ring the Chocolate Fairy.”

  The python was going off. Perhaps, without the bulk of a human body, a few minutes out of the fridge was enough for the putrefactive processes to continue. Snakes were strange things at the best of times, and certainly had a metabolism all their own.

  This distressed Strydom under the circumstances: the largest glass bottle he had been able to find was not big enough to contain it.

  Nxumalo, who was standing ready to pour in the formalin to preserve it, clucked his tongue sympathetically.

  “Why doesn’t the doctor-boss just skin it?” he suggested.

  “Because the boss wants a better permanent record of it than that,” Strydom explained. “You see, I’m hoping to deliver a paper about this case at our annual conference in Cape Town, and it would be so much more effective if a three-dimensional concept could be arranged. Understand?”

  Nxumalo nodded. The boss did not want to skin it.

  “Well, perhaps the museum will lend me one of their bottles,” Strydom said. “I never thought of that.”

  “Very clever, my boss.”

  “Or at least they’ll tell me where they got theirs from. And I want their views on its strength.”

  “Yes, boss.”

  “Pop it away for me again, then, but be extremely careful like before,” Strydom ordered, and then went into the office.

  Kloppers was away at lunch.

  The reptile man at the museum was very quiet-spoken but showed a practical interest in the problem. He said there were no spare bottles, as that method of preservation had been abandoned years ago, and any specimens outstanding were therefore kept in a deep-freeze. However, if the district surgeon would care to drop in that afternoon, bringing his snake with him, he was sure something could be done. A break in routine would be most welcome.

  Kramer replaced the receiver very quietly and stood gazing down the passage. A pair of polished black shoes waited outside the third door down. “Okay, man, let’s go,” he called to Marais, adding in a whisper when the sergeant reached him, “We’re not really going, hey?”

  Then Kramer opened the front door, counted three, stepped back inside, and closed it.

  They waited. Not a murmur.

  “We try plan B,” he said into Marais’s ear, knowing he would like it put that way.

  Kramer took hold of a carpet sweeper, which the maid had left handy to clear away their crumbs, and wheeled it down the passage. It made very good squeaks when scrubbed back and forward. He began to bump its rubber trim against the wainscoting, and to hum one of the Zulu love chants he had heard Zondi hum so often at the steering wheel. The sweeper collided with the shoes and Kramer paused, keeping the sound in the back of his throat as high-pitched as possible.

  “Oil Gladys!” roared a wide-awake voice behind the door “Bloody bitch, think you’re back in your kraal, do—”

  “Hello again,” said Kramer as the door was jerked open.

  “You!”

  “And you. Come in the front room for a moment—don’t bother to change.”

  Years of calling on homes early in the morning had taught Kramer that unless a man went in for boxing or wrestling, he generally felt most vulnerable in his dressing gown. And it certainly saved everyone time.

  Presently, seated in a black silk kimono, with Japanese egg stains, Monty Stevenson told them everything he knew. It was the same old story, with the alibi of the sweet machine tacked on the end.

  “Have to have a finger in a lot of pies in my game,” he explained. “There’s the club and my traveling disco for house parties, then my catering course for Indians, and I’m negotiating rights for—”

  “Uh-huh. But according to a bus inspector I know, your chocolate machine at the depot is empty.”

  “Wonderful news—knew it would catch on.”

  “Because it’s broken.”

  “What?”

  “Smashed by vandals on Saturday.”

  “The bastards!”

  “All bluff,” Kramer admitted, adding for Marais’s benefit, “Remember, that bus inspector needs a kick up the arse sometime—said he’d got better things to do than doing stupid inquiries for CID.”

  “Then it’s not bro—”

  And that was it. The quick flip-flop of conflicting fact caught up with Monty Stevenson and laid him low. Then he told them the true story of what had happened at the Wigwam that weekend.

  He’d met this very old friend and they’d taken a bottle of the best into his office to enjoy it in private and then he’d suddenly noticed the time and had to rush home and lie because she didn’t like this particular old friend very much. Who had, unfortunately, left town for a job opportunity in Australia.

  “That’s what I wanted to hear,” said Kramer.

  “Thank God.”

  “So get dressed. You’re under arrest.”

  There was an obvious place to look. For all his healthy cynicism, Yankee Boy Msomi was a hypochondriac. And the private surgery of Dr. Arthur Pentecost Thlengwa, which took in hundreds of rand a day, welcomed his drop in the ocean. It was Msomi’s kidneys that primarily concerned him.

  But he was not in the long queue of people who preferred to pay for their suffering.

  So Zondi half-heartedly tried the pandemonium of the overcrowded outpatients at Peacevale Hospital, and drew another blank.

  He was third-time lucky back in the lower end of Trekkersburg, where the herbalists and witch doctors had their shops in a modern block with prosperous Indian families living above them. Msomi was studying a rack of desiccated baboons and other specialist items outside the entrance to Ntagati and Son. He had already made several purchases, which stuck out of his overcoat pocket.

  Zondi parked on the other side of the street and was quickly camouflaged by idlers too idle to notice who he was, and who chose his car to lean against.

  The problem was making discreet contact with Msomi in daylight. But now that he knew where Msomi was, he knew he could always follow him until the right moment came. One thing was for sure: Zondi was not going to be given the slip.

  He began the wait by lighting a cigarette.

  Msomi must have seen something in the reflection of the shopwindow, because he turned and, to Zondi’s great surprise, gave him the nod.

  “Sta-tion,” he mouthed, and then went back into the store. To anyone else watching, it would have looked like nothing more than a man fighting off a sneeze.

  They met on platform 2 behind a pile of mailbags, screened by rough rustics wearing blankets and sitting on wooden suitcases.

  “Where are you going?” Zondi demanded.

  “To the tribal homelands, you dig? Way, way away. Things is hottin’ up here and it’s time I went see where my roots come from.”

  Then he told Zondi hastily about what had occurred in Beebop’s shop, and about the slaughtered butcher, who was a stranger to them both. And rounded off by agreeing that the robberies were somethin
g else.

  “Brother, it’s this way. A guy here, a guy there, they know how I make a bit of bread on the side, see? Now just say I do pick up somethin’ that spins you by the tail—what then? What if I don’t, but word gets out anyway? And they think it’s me? Can I convince them? Let’s say the big heat is really on and—”

  “They kill you to shut you up?”

  “There you have it, little bird. Yeah, man. But if I’m outa town when it happens—well, groovy, baby.”

  “You’ve hung six hard men on the rope,” Zondi reminded him. “What scares you so much this time?”

  “What I’ve done seen today with my own two eyes! Guys comin’ and goin’ and nothin’ in between.”

  “Huh!”

  Zondi thought it over. Msomi had a ticket and a bag which must have been standing in Ntagati’s. He plainly meant to be on that train north. Therefore he had arranged this meeting because he knew that Zondi would follow him and he wanted his departure to be unimpeded by misunderstanding. That all made sense. But not his degree of apprehension.

  “Aikona, those two eyes saw more,” said Zondi. “You’ve got papers to travel?”

  “Cool it, Mickey. Since when did Yankee—”

  “Sergeant! Sergeant to you! And it’ll be a sergeant who arrests you, here right now, if you don’t speak the rest!”

  There was a great hiss of steam and the enormous locomotive, pushing its water tender, slid in on platform 2, bringing the rustics to their feet. It was Msomi’s train, too.

  Zondi caught him by the hair on his coat.

  “Okay, okay,” Msomi said despairingly.

  “Then what?”

  “Chainpuller! Now can I blow?”

  Zondi let go. Watching Msomi run for a place on the benches, and feeling a clawed fist grab the walls of his stomach.

  Chainpuller.

  The walls were pale lime with scuff marks. A map of Trekkersburg almost covered one of them. There was a gray filing cabinet to which a calendar had once been glued. A small table with a stool, and a large desk with pigeonholes and a chair. Two wire wastepaper baskets and a pair of telephones. Two ashtrays: one an inverted piston head, the other an empty paper-clip tin. A wooden pole with a leather loop at one end. Daubs of white paint saying CID on anything worth stealing. In other words, the office was not much to look at, but it had atmosphere.

  Monty Stevenson apparently thought so. He stood on the scarred linoleum flooring as if expecting matter-of-fact violence to be done to his person at any moment. He shivered.

  And the walls went on whispering.

  “Still here?” inquired Kramer, just back from the same old story in Peacevale, yet with calculated suddenness behind his back.

  Stevenson went rigid, which had its comic side.

  Kramer picked up the pole, slipped the thong over his wrist, and let it swing to and fro.

  “Getting stuffy,” he remarked, and used the pole to open both fanlights. Then he hung it up on its hook.

  Marais came in, dusting the sugar from his teatime doughnut off his chin, and burping with selfish satisfaction. He picked up his notebook.

  “Where had you got to?” Kramer asked. “How many more stories is he going to tell?”

  “Swears it’s the truth now, sir.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “But it is! I’m prepared to—”

  “You shut up.”

  “Can’t I even sit down, please?”

  “Seen Zondi?” asked Kramer, seating himself at his desk. Marais was already back on the stool.

  “Er—no, sir. Well, now it goes like this. After seeing the last customer out of his club at twelve-twenty on the night in question, he then—”

  “Got his name?”

  “It was one of my members, so I’ve—”

  “Carry on, Marais; the time was twelve-twenty.”

  “He went to close his office, remembering there he had business matters to discuss with Miss Bergstroom, the dancer. It was her last night of the booking and he would not be seeing her again. So he went to the dressing room and found she had been, quote, the victim of a tragic mishap, unquote. The snake was still moving slightly, but he could see it, too, was dead. His first reaction was to ring for the ambulance—and us— then he admits realizing the situation could, as you suggested, be turned to his advantage. He knew that by then the Sunday papers were already being printed and that on a Saturday night the daily papers usually had only a junior poopsqueak on call. By the way, the prisoner once worked on the advertising part of a paper, so that’s how he knows all this.”

  “Births or deaths?” asked Kramer.

  “So the point is, sir, he knew that raising the alarm then wouldn’t bring him the kind of attention he wanted, but he denies that he arranged matters so the press would be there before we. In all other respects, it’s much the same as we worked out together. He’s prepared to give another full statement, although I have informed him of his rights.”

  “Yes, Officer. I thought that if I left everything just as it was, and had the boy go in there on Monday, then I wasn’t really doing any wrong. I mean, what harm could possibly come of it?”

  “Now you know,” said Kramer.

  Marais, the clown, wrote that down.

  “By the way, Stevenson, did Miss Bergstroom have an agent?” Kramer continued after a pause.

  “Of course! I don’t hire any old act for—”

  “Then how come you had to talk business with her?”

  “I’m sorry? What was that?”

  Kramer laughed and stretched, lifting an imaginary pair of barbells, and arching his back.

  “I look at it this way, Stevenson,” he said. “I know a bit about papers, too, you see. A morning one like the Gazette or the Durban Herald has a hell of a hard time filling its front page on a Monday with only the weekend to pick from. Man, the times I’ve been in a charge office on a Sunday morning and the reporters have practically begged me to take my gun and make some news. I agree with you about the early hours, but that doesn’t apply to around eleven—then you can’t hope to get better service. Everybody gets so sick of car crashes and sailing regattas and all that rubbish, and they miss the good juicy court stories. You could have gone in on Sunday, hey? Why not?”

  Stevenson began to tremble properly.

  “Ja, I thought so,” said Kramer. “If you’d said you’d just popped along to see how Miss Bergstroom was doing, your wife would have been suspicious, hey? And with good reason? Even so, you could have invented some excuse if you weren’t all tangled up by your guilty secret.”

  “Hey?” said Marais.

  “The actual reason Mr. Stevenson wanted to see Miss Sexy Snake Seventy-voetsak—and the actual nature of the business. Am I right?”

  The prisoner sat down just where he was on the floor.

  Marais looked almost sorry for him.

  But Kramer had just had another thought, and picked up the statement made by the cleaner. There was still the matter of the rigor mortis to tidy up.

  “According to the boy Joseph, you dismissed him before entering the dressing room a second time. Did you in fact enter it?”

  Stevenson took all the breath he could hold and said, “Only for a moment. I couldn’t stomach the smell then—nor the sight. It haunted me all Sunday in nightmares, quite different if you—I mean, I’d had too long to think about it. And that’s the honest reason why I was turned up when I telephoned and—”

  “If you want to know, that was your big mistake.”

  “Saying she was stiff,” added Marais.

  “But she was dead and don’t all…?”

  “Ach, these laymen,” sighed Marais, getting him to his feet.

  “So you never even touched her the first time,” Kramer said, finding that a more interesting comment.

  “I—I could see all I wanted to. Her breasts weren’t moving— and she did look stiff! Like sticks, those arms were.”

  “And how did you know her heart had stopped? Or would you g
et lipstick on you doing the kiss of life?”

  “What? Oh, dear God, is that what all this has been about? You mean she might still have been alive? Like a drowned person? That I could have—y’know?”

  Kramer, who had only just had the idea, shrugged.

  “The post-mortem report will be here in a few minutes if you’d like to wait,” he said matter-of-factly.

  Emmerentia, who was Strydom’s lovely and gifted small granddaughter, called Trekkersburg Natural History Museum the “dead zoo.”

  He was thinking of this with a fond smile as he walked up the steps into its entrance hall and stopped at the reptile cases, which were new.

  And yet, Strydom discovered, not everything in this section was as dead as it looked. By waiting patiently, and watching for a flicker of tongue, it was possible to distinguish between exhibits that were inanimate and those that were lifeless, so to speak.

  The excellence of the preserved specimens was such that he was sure he had come to the right place. In fact, he would have returned for a second look, had not a Zulu attendant—with immense wooden plugs in his earlobes—pounced suddenly to polish his breath marks from the glass.

  Strydom continued down a short passage and into the large mammals hall. It was huge and vaulted, with a gallery for insects and anthropology, and echoed so readily that he went up on tiptoe to skirt a charging bull elephant. A pair of giggling children—which reminded him it was the Michaelmas holidays—were comparing the back ends of the black and the white rhino.

  And there were more children, only Bantu this time, and in their best bib and tucker, in a solemn line outside the door he had been told to make for. There a harassed museum official was trying to explain something to the black teacher in charge. Strydom hoped it would not take all day.

  “Then if you only read the poster about the wildlife film show for the kiddies from a bus, you can hardly blame us for the disappointment,” the official was saying. “There’s plenty else to look at.”