A Beautiful Place to Die (27 page)

Hansie chewed on his thumbnail and gave the question his best efforts. It was an excruciating exercise to watch. “Well…A woman’s necklace has nothing to do with the captain dying. I mean…it would be like a woman was there with him…and…there wasn’t a woman with him, so…because…Captain wasn’t like that.”

“Hepple.” Emmanuel dropped his hand from the young man’s shoulder and rifled in his jacket pocket for the car keys. “That necklace is evidence. You have until this afternoon to get it back from your girlfriend and give it to me. You understand?”

“But…she…she really likes it.”

“This afternoon,” Emmanuel said, and made for the Packard. He had an idea now of what Shabalala was hiding and why the Zulu policeman was covering up for his boyhood friend, Willem Pretorius.

He ran through the unplanned maze of dilapidated dwellings, on the lookout for the pink door that he was told marked the Zulu constable’s house. He found it and pounded twice. The door swung open and Shabalala stepped back in surprise.

“A woman was with him,” Emmanuel said. “There was a woman with Captain Pretorius at the riverbank on the night he was shot.”

“It rained and many of the marks—”

“Don’t give me that rubbish, I’m not buying it today. You’re a tracker. You knew Pretorius wasn’t alone that night.”

The Zulu-Shangaan made an effort to speak and when that failed, he reached into the pocket of his overalls and pulled out a blank-faced envelope, which he handed over without saying a word.

“What’s this?”

“Read it, please, nkosana.”

Emmanuel tore the envelope open and extracted a folded piece of paper with two lines of text written on the lined face. He read the words out loud. “‘The captain had a little wife. This wife was with him at the river when he died.’”

“You were the one who sent me to King’s farm,” Emmanuel said. He recognized the hand. It made sense now. The person who’d left the note ran like no one he’d ever seen, ran with a relentless stride that had left him gasping for breath out on the veldt. Captain Pretorius and Shabalala stirred the hearts of the old people as they crossed the length and breadth of the Pretorius farm without stopping, without drinking. Like so many white men, Emmanuel thought, I was beaten by a warrior of the Zulu impi.

“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.