A Beautiful Place to Die (17 page)

Emmanuel felt a flash of heat across his chest. Not the familiar surge of adrenaline that accompanied a break in the case but a white-hot bolt of rage. The captain was shot by an able-bodied man with keen eyesight, a steady hand, and two feet planted firmly on the ground. Duma didn’t come close to presenting a match with the killer.

Shabalala held the crippled miner’s hand and led him out of the cell toward the back door. The front door and the front offices were for whites only. Emmanuel’s rage turned to discomfort as he stepped back to allow the black men passage. Shabalala and his charge would spend the next hour dragging themselves across the veldt until they reached the location five miles north of town.

“Stay by the front door to the hospital,” Emmanuel said quickly before sanity returned and he changed his mind. “I will come and pick you up.”

“We will be there,” Shabalala said.

Emmanuel walked through the front office and out onto the veranda, where Dickie and Sarel were watching a line of three cars driving down the main street. The sour-faced lieutenant looked like a ventriloquist’s dummy next to his hefty companion.

“Weekenders coming back into SA from Mozambique.” Sarel Uys indicated the country-style traffic jam. “They’ll make a dash for home before the sun sets.”

Dickie drank his tea with noisy enjoyment. Like pockmarked Piet, he had the look of a man with the wind at his back and the road rising up to meet him. What had Duma said? The Security Branch had released him, so they weren’t looking to hang the captain’s murder on him. What, then? He could try to find out, but Duma wasn’t in a fit state to talk to anyone. The connection between a Communist plot and Captain Pretorius’s murder remained a mystery for the moment.

“Any luck with the pervert?” Dickie called out with great cheer.

“Not yet,” Emmanuel said, and turned in the direction of The Protea Guesthouse, where the Packard sedan was parked. Justice be damned. He’d find the killer first, not to serve justice, but to see the look on Dickie’s face when he shoved the result down his throat.

Duma was slumped in the backseat of the Packard with his eyes rolled back in his head. A low whimpering was the only sound he made. Emmanuel pulled the car to a stop in front of the church and glanced at Shabalala, who was nursing the half-crazed man.

“How was he before this afternoon?” he asked Shabalala.

The black constable shrugged. “Since the rock crushed his leg, he has been bad. Now he is worse.”

A group of older black women approached the car. They were cautious and fearful in their movement, not knowing what to expect once the car doors opened. The women stopped short when Shabalala got out and approached them. There was the quiet murmur of Zulu before a pencil-thin woman in a yellow dress gave a shout and ran for the Packard. Emmanuel stilled as the woman hauled the miner into a sitting position in the backseat and wailed out loud. The sound was an ocean of sorrows.

Shabalala pulled the woman away and lifted Duma from the car. The women followed the black policeman who carried the cripple down the narrow dirt road toward home.

The skinny woman’s cries carried back to him and Emmanuel switched on the engine to drown out the sound. Five years of soldiering and four years picking over the remains of the dead and still the sound of a woman’s grief made his heart ache.

10

H
E CAME UP
to the big white house early the next morning and found Mrs. Pretorius planting seedlings in the garden. A wide straw hat covered her head and her delicate hands were protected from the dirt by sturdy cotton gloves.

“Detective Cooper.” Her blue eyes were hopeful as she greeted him.

“No news yet,” Emmanuel said in response to the look. “I’ve come to ask you if I could see the spare room where Captain Pretorius slept.”

“On Wednesdays,” she told him with the diamond-hard look he’d seen at their first encounter. “Willem only slept there on fishing nights.”

“Forgive me. I know you and the captain were dedicated to each other. Everyone in town commented on it. Even the nonwhites.”

“We tried to set an example. We hoped others would see us and follow the path to a true Christian union.”

“A good marriage is a rare thing,” Emmanuel said. Mrs. Pretorius might believe herself to be half of a Christian partnership, but the sin of pride was heavy on her.

“You’re married, Detective Cooper?”

Emmanuel touched a finger to the spot where his wedding ring had been. Any mention of a divorce was sure to set her against him and get the door to the spare room slammed in his face. Mrs. Pretorius wouldn’t countenance a morally flawed outsider touching her saintly husband’s belongings.

“I lost my wife almost seven months ago.” He told the truth to the degree he could and hoped she’d fill in the blanks.

“God has his reasons,” she said.

She touched his shoulder. Even when cast down into the valley of grief, Mrs. Pretorius had to be the one to shine her light onto the world.

“I’m trying to understand,” Emmanuel said. He was thinking of the captain and the homemade safe cunningly hidden from view. He was starting to see into the dark places in Willem Pretorius that his wife’s goodness failed to illuminate.

“You may go into the room,” she said with a nod. His confusion, which she took for spiritual struggle, branded him worthy of her help. “Come with me.”

Emmanuel followed Mrs. Pretorius across the garden and noticed the imprint of her boots in the freshly turned soil. A work boot with deep straight grooves almost identical to the prints left at the crime scene. He remembered what Shabalala told him: that the Pretorius men and Mrs. Pretorius had won many medals for target shooting.

“You’ll have to get Aggie to open up for you. Willem used the room for work and kept it locked when he wasn’t at home.”

The words nudged something in her and she began to cry with a soft mewling sound. Her face collapsed with grief. If the fragile blond woman had killed her husband, she regretted it now.

She pulled off her gardening gloves and wiped away the tears. “Why would anyone hurt my Willem? He was a good man…a good man…”

Emmanuel waited until the sobs lessened in intensity.

“I’m going to find out who did this to your husband and I am going to find out why.”

“Good.” The widow took a deep breath and got herself under control. “I want to see justice done. I want to see whoever did this hang.”

The diamond-hard look was back and Emmanuel knew Mrs. Pretorius meant every word. She planned to be at the prison when the hatch opened and the killer took the long drop to the other side.

“Aggie—” Mrs. Pretorius called out into the large house. “Aggie. Come.”

They waited in silence while the ancient black woman shuffled across the entrance hall to the front door. Her ample body was bent in on itself after a lifetime of domestic work; her hands were gnarled from years of washing laundry and scrubbing floors for the ideal Afrikaner family. Emmanuel doubted she did much of anything anymore.

“Aggie.” The volume of Mrs. Pretorius’s voice dropped only a fraction. The maid was deaf into the bargain. “You must take Detective Cooper to the spare room the captain used. Open up for him and lock it when he’s finished.”

The ancient maid motioned Emmanuel in without speaking. What was her position in the household? Hansie said the old woman was no good anymore but that the captain wouldn’t let her go. Most Afrikaners and Englishmen had a black servant who was almost part of the family. Almost.

“You must have tea with me after, Detective Cooper,” Mrs. Pretorius said. “Get Aggie to show you to the back veranda.”

“Thank you.”

After tea with Mrs. Pretorius, he was going to see Erich. The doors to the Pretorius family home were going to shut in his face after he questioned the volatile third son about the fire at Anton’s garage and the fight he’d had with his father over compensation. He had to get information while he could.

Aggie stopped in front of a closed door and rummaged in her apron pocket. It took her an age to fit the key into the lock and turn it with her arthritic hands. She pushed the door open and motioned him in without a word. Emmanuel wondered if the black maid was mute as well as deaf.

He viewed the room before he disturbed the contents. It was a large, pleasant space with a neatly made bed, bedside table, dark wooden wardrobe, and writing desk positioned by a window that looked out over the front garden. It was another example of the clean, ordered spaces Captain Pretorius specialized in.

Emmanuel moved to the bedside table and pulled the drawer open. It contained a black calfskin-covered Bible and nothing else. He picked up the Bible and examined the well-thumbed pages. The good book wasn’t just for show. Captain Pretorius read the words of the Lord on a regular basis. There was no Bible at the stone hut, however—just a camera stolen from a sniveling pervert and an envelope with something worth pissing on a man for.

Emmanuel turned the Bible upside down and gave it a shake to see if anything fell out.

“Ayy…” It was the maid, Aggie, scandalized by his rough treatment of The Word. Seems she wasn’t mute or blind, just reluctant to use her dwindling energy stores on talking. Emmanuel gently closed the Bible and turned it the right way up. With the old maid looking on, he flipped through the pages as if he were a preacher seeking pearls of wisdom for an upcoming sermon.

Emmanuel put the Bible back into the drawer. There was nothing in the book but the word of the Almighty. The bed was made up with a plaid blanket over clean yellow sheets. He lifted the pillow. A pair of blue cotton pajamas nestled underneath. The maid gave another soft gasp and Emmanuel replaced the pillow exactly as he’d found it. The room already had the feel of a shrine, with everything in it destined to remain untouched until the captain returned on Judgment Day.

The wardrobe was a handsome piece of furniture with double doors and mother-of-pearl handles. Two ironed police uniforms on wooden hangers hung side by side. Two pairs of shiny brown boots glowed with polish and waited for the captain’s size-13 feet to fill them.

“Patience,” Emmanuel told himself. The room was locked for a reason. He opened the writing desk’s top drawer and his heart began to pound. Inside, a fat police file lay next to a slim hardcover book. He undid the tie and flicked the file open. The first page was an incident report filed in August ’51 in which the luscious Tottie James was subjected to a gasping noise coming from outside her bedroom window. No surprises there. Emmanuel guessed that most men made gasping noises when she was in the immediate vicinity.

He flipped to the end of the reports and failed to find a humorous angle in the description of Della, the pastor’s daughter, who had been grabbed from behind in her own room and held facedown on the floor while the perpetrator ground his hips against her backside. Peeping Tom implied distance, a furtive individual coveting the desired object from afar. Physical assault resulting in bruising and a cracked rib was another matter entirely.

Tonight he’d read the file in detail and try to get some idea of the man who committed the offenses and why the captain and his lieutenant failed to find and apprehend him.

Emmanuel put the police file down and examined the hardcover book in the drawer. Small enough to fit into a jacket pocket, the slim volume was a high-class item. He felt the smooth leather cover. The title intrigued him:
Celestial Pleasures.

He opened the hand-cut pages at random and skimmed a couple of lines:
Plum Blossom stretched out on the plush sedan, her only covering a red and gold tassel that hung from her exquisite neck. Wisps of opium smoke escaped her parted lips and rose up into the air.

Curiosity got the better of him and he skipped to the middle. There was a line drawing of a naked Oriental girl with downcast eyes kneeling on a cushion. Classy, Emmanuel thought, and edging on literary, but a stroke book nonetheless. He slipped it into his pocket.

“Hmmm…” Aggie was alerting him to the fact she’d seen him take the book.

Emmanuel kept his back turned. He was leaving the Pretorius house with the police file and the book no matter how outraged the deaf servant might be.

The rest of the drawers revealed the captain’s love of starched undershirts, plaid pajamas and olive drab socks. He moved back to the bed, checked underneath it, and found not a speck of dust.

Emmanuel approached the generously padded black maid, who was resting her weight against the doorjamb. It was nine-thirty in the morning and she looked ready for a nap.

“What do you do in the house?” he shouted in Zulu. Holding a conversation in English was likely to send the maid into a coma.

“Clean,” she replied in her native language. “And keep the key.”

“What key?”

She rummaged in her apron pocket and pulled out the key to the spare room. She displayed it in the palm of her hand but didn’t say anything.

“You keep the key to this room?”

The maid nodded.

“How did the captain get in?”

“He asked for the key.”

Aggie the trusted servant was the gatekeeper, but how did Willem Pretorius gain access when he came home late from fishing?

“Did he wake you and get the key when he came home after dark?”

“No. He said where I must leave the key.”

“You left the key on a table,” Emmanuel said. “Somewhere like that?”

“He said where I must leave the key,” she repeated, and waved him out of the room impatiently. She was ready to move on.

Emmanuel stepped into the corridor.

“Where did you leave the key?” he asked.

“In the flowerpot, behind the sugar sack, in the teapot. Wherever he said I must put it.”

“Really?” Emmanuel marveled at the captain’s relentless need for secrecy. He acted like an undercover policeman whose real identity was his greatest liability.

“Why do you think he changed the place for the key?” he asked while Aggie pushed the key into the lock with her gnarled hands.

The worn-out old woman gave a shrug that implied she’d long since given up trying to understand the mysterious ways of the white man.

“The baas says, ‘Put it in the teapot,’ I put it in the teapot.”

That was the end of the matter as far as the maid was concerned. A servant didn’t question the master or try to make sense of why the missus needed the shirts hung on the line a certain way.

“Aggie!” Mrs. Pretorius called from the back veranda. “Aggie?”

The black maid didn’t hear the missus. She was busy turning the key in the lock with as much speed as her brittle fingers allowed.

“I will go outside and have tea with the nkosikati,” Emmanuel said, and walked through to the back of the house. If he waited for Aggie it would be lunchtime when they finally made it outside.

He stopped by the display cabinet running along the side of the large sitting room and picked up the picture of Frikkie van Brandenburg and his family. He was used to seeing the dour clergyman, the Afrikaner oracle, as an older man with a furrowed brow and fire in his eyes but even in his youth the unsmiling Frikkie looked ready to set the world to rights.

What would van Brandenburg make of his daughter’s family? Dagga-smoking Louis, Erich the arsonist and Willem the deceiver were all tied to him by blood and marriage. Would Frikkie be proud or would he doubt, for just a moment, that the Afrikaner nation was set on a higher plane than the rest of humanity?

Emmanuel replaced the photograph and continued toward the kitchen, where a younger black maid set up the tea service on a silver tray.

“Sawubona…” He said good morning to the girl and stepped onto the vine-covered veranda. Mrs. Pretorius waved him over to a table overlooking a small vegetable garden. A garden boy, a squat man in his thirties, weeded the rows and turned the earth with a hand fork.

Emmanuel sat down opposite Mrs. Pretorius and placed the police file on the ground. He kept the book in his pocket. The young black maid came out with the tea service and set it down on the table before she disappeared back into the house.

“How do you take your tea, Detective Cooper?” Mrs. Pretorius asked.

“White, no sugar,” he replied, and studied the late Willem Pretorius’s wife. She was beautiful in a refined way. There were no rough edges to her despite the steel he sensed within.

“You have a lovely garden,” Emmanuel said, and accepted his tea. This would be his first and only chance to get a bead on the captain’s home life.

“My father was a gardener. He believed that with God’s help and hard work, it was possible to create Eden here on earth.”

“I thought your father was a minister. An exceptionally well-known one.”

She made a weak attempt to wave off the reference to her famous father. “Pa didn’t pay any attention to the stories written about him. He liked better to work in his orchard than to speak to a hall full of people.”

Like many powerful men, it appeared that Frikkie van Brandenburg had greatness thrust upon him.

“He was a homebody?” Emmanuel asked with a smile. The newly written history books made a point of mentioning van Brandenburg’s zeal in spreading the message of white superiority and redemption. No meeting was too small or insignificant. No town too isolated to escape the gospel according to Frikkie. The great prophet traveled to them all.

“He was home when he could be. We knew how important his work was for our country. Four of my brothers followed in his steps and became ministers of the Dutch Reformed Church. My two sisters are married to ministers.”