A Beautiful Place to Die (28 page)

“Reading books, sewing, baking, you name it, she always had an explanation for being there.” Anton worked a lump of ash out of the brick’s surface with his fingernail. “I was sweet on Davida at the time. We went walking and I even got some kisses in but she changed, Davida did. It was like she went into a shell once the talking started. She wasn’t like you see her today, all covered up and quiet. The girl had some spark back then.”

“Really?”

“Oh, yes. Beautiful wavy hair down to the middle of her back; all natural, not straightened. At socials she was the first one up to dance and the last one to sit down. Granny had her hands full with her, I’ll tell you.”

The description didn’t remotely match the cloistered woman hiding under a head scarf. But the fact that the shy brown mouse once had long black hair did make her a possible match for the model in the captain’s photographs. What was her body like under the shapeless clothes that hung from her like sackcloth?

“What happened?” Emmanuel asked.

“I still can’t figure it,” Anton said. “She got through the molester thing okay and then one day the hair is all gone and she won’t walk with me anymore.”

“When did this change take place?”

“April sometime.” Anton threw the damaged brick into a wheelbarrow. “Zweigman and his wife nursed Davida through a sickness and when she came out, well, nothing was the same as it was before.”

April. The same month Captain Pretorius discovered the German shopkeeper was actually a qualified surgeon. Did Zweigman reveal the extent of his medical skills during treatment of Davida’s mysterious illness? And if that were the case, how had Willem Pretorius found that out? The shy brown mouse was the only common link between the two men.

“Thanks for your help, Anton,” Emmanuel said, and held his hand out to end the informal interview. “Good luck with the cleanup.”

He wanted to run through the connections between Willem Pretorius and Davida Ellis with Shabalala so he could clarify the links in his own mind. First, Donny Rooke sighted the captain behind the grid of coloured houses on the night he was murdered. Then Davida appeared at the stone hut. Somehow
Celestial Pleasures
had traveled from Zweigman’s study to Pretorius’s locked room as well. The elements were beginning to connect.

“Detective.” Anton stayed half a step behind him. “I wasn’t joking about Granny Mariah. She’ll never forgive me if I cause trouble for her granddaughter.”

Emmanuel didn’t know how to tell the mechanic that Davida’s troubles were likely to run far deeper and wider than a rumor spread by an ex-boyfriend. If the shy brown mouse proved to be the principal witness in the murder of a white police captain, everyone in South Africa was going to know her name and her face.

16

G
RANNY
M
ARIAH AND
Davida were at work in the garden, planting seeds in a long row of freshly turned earth. The older woman’s green eyes widened at the sight of the white policeman and his black offsider walking across her garden on a spring day.

“What do you want?” She straightened up and put her hands on her hips.

“I need to speak to Davida.” Emmanuel remained calm and pleasant in the face of Granny Mariah’s hostility. There wasn’t much a nonwhite woman could do once the force of the law turned against her.

“What do you want with her?”

“That’s between Davida and myself.”

“Well, I won’t have it. I won’t have you coming in here and making trouble for my granddaughter.”

“It’s too late for that,” Emmanuel said. He felt sorry for the fiery woman and admired the strength she showed in the face of overwhelming odds. This was a battle they both knew he was going to win.

“Granny…” The shy brown mouse stepped forward. “It’s all right. I’ll talk to the detective.”

“No. I won’t have it.”

“He’s right,” Davida said quietly. “It’s too late.”

The brown-skinned matriarch held on to her granddaughter’s hand and squeezed tight. “Use the sitting room, baby girl,” Granny Mariah said. “It’s more comfortable.”

“We’ll talk in her room.” Emmanuel walked to the small white building at the edge of the garden and opened the door. Inside the old servant’s quarters he pulled up a chair from which to survey the interior of the room. The wrought-iron bed and bedside table were instantly familiar from the photographs. On the floor closest to the pillows was a neat stack of leather-covered books taken from Zweigman’s library. All that was missing was a giant slab of white meat lying resplendent on the bed.

Davida entered the room and the images Emmanuel had seen after getting back from Lorenzo Marques flashed through his mind. The fall of long dark hair across her face, the jewel hardness of her erect nipples against the white sheets, the sleek lines of her legs ending in a thatch of dark pubic hair…and Willem Pretorius ready to taste it all.

“Did you know Captain Pretorius?” he asked.

“Everyone knew him.”

“I mean did you know him well enough to, say, have a talk with? That sort of thing?”

She turned to face the window, her fingers toying with the lace edge of the curtains. “Why are you asking me these questions?”

“Why aren’t you answering?”

“Because you already know the answer. That’s why you’re here.” Her breath made an angry sound as it escaped her mouth. “Why must I say it?”

“I need to hear it from you, in your own words.”

“Okay.” The shy brown mouse turned to him and he glimpsed the fighting spirit of Granny Mariah alive and well in her. “I was sleeping with Captain Pretorius in that bed right there. You happy now?”

“Sleeping with as in napping or sleeping with as in fucking?”

“Most nights we did both.” She was defiant, ready to burn all the remnants of herself as a good woman.

He liked the angry Davida a lot better than the milk and water version she peddled to the world.

“I’m wondering why a mixed-race woman would get involved with a married white man whose family lives just a few streets away. Do you like taking risks, Davida?”

“No. It wasn’t like that.”

“How was it?”

“I didn’t want to.” She scraped curls of flaking paint off the windowsill and rubbed the residue between her fingers. “He didn’t want to.”

“He forced himself, did he?” Emmanuel didn’t try to hide his skepticism. How long did it take Willem Pretorius to raise the white flag and surrender to the pleasure of the wrought-iron bed? A day, a week, or possibly a whole month?

“He tried,” Davida insisted. “First with abstinence and then with the photos, but those things didn’t work.”

“Tell me about the photographs,” he said.

She’d volunteered the information without knowing he was in possession of printed copies. Maybe it made her feel better to admit to the things in her life that had been locked in the internal vault. Being a model in pornographic photographs was an illegal activity sure to have her barred from membership in the League for the Advancement of Coloured Women.

“Captain said if he had some photos to look at, then he wouldn’t have to touch me. He said looking at pictures was a lesser sin than committing adultery.”

“I see.”

The differences between the two envelopes of photographs were stark. The first pictures were naive and gentle, the second explicit and untamed. Sometime between shooting roll number one and roll number two, sin had won the battle for Captain Pretorius’s soul.

“But the photographs didn’t work and the two of you ended up committing adultery? Is that right?”

“Yes.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “That’s what happened.”

“What was your relationship like?”

“I already told you.”

“So, Captain Pretorius would have sexual relations with you and leave immediately afterward? There was nothing more to it?”

“No. Captain liked to stay and talk for a while afterward.”

“How would you describe your relationship with him? Good?”

“As good as it could be.” She shrugged her shoulders. “There was never going to be wedding bells.”

“Then why did you do it? Anton or any of the other coloured men in town would have been more suitable choices, wouldn’t they?”

She made a sound of disbelief low in her throat. “Only a white man would ask a question like that and expect an answer.”

Emmanuel felt he was seeing her for the first time. The meek coloured girl he could deal with, even ignore, but this furious sharp-eyed woman was something else altogether.

“What’s the question got to do with my being white?”

“Only white people talk about choice like it’s a box of chocolate that everyone gets to pick from. A Dutch police captain walks into this room and I say what to him? ‘No, thank you, Captain sir, but I do not wish to spoil my chances for a good marriage with a good man from my community, so please ma’ baas take yourself back to your wife and family. I promise not to blackmail you if you promise not to punish my family for turning you away. Thank you for asking me, Mr. Policeman. I am honored.’ Tell me, is that how it works for nonwhite women in Jo’burg, Detective?”

Emmanuel felt the truth of her words. It was as if she’d slapped him hard with an open hand. He sat forward and considered the implications of what she’d said. A secret and illegal affair with an Afrikaner certainly delayed any chance of getting married or of beginning a serious relationship with someone in her own race group. Jacob’s Rest was too small to cover that level of illicit activity. Davida Ellis was stuck in limbo: an unmarried mixed-race woman tied to a married white man.

“When was the last time you saw Captain Pretorius?”

The rush of color brought on by her tirade against the white man ebbed away, leaving her curiously ashen.

“The night he died,” she said.

“Where?”

“He came here to the room. He said for me to get my things because we were going out to the river. I didn’t want to go but he was angry and said we were going.”

“What was he angry about?”

“He caught Donny Rooke spying on him and had to give him a hiding as a warning. I cleaned the captain’s hands with a cloth before we left because he’d split the skin on his knuckles.”

That was one up for Donny and confirmation that Pretorius leaned hard when he had to. It was unlikely that Donny, the outcast, could have organized an assassination and a foray into Mozambique to cover his trail after the beating he’d taken. Donny wasn’t nearly smart enough or strong enough for that.

“You didn’t want to go out that night?”

“No.” She fell back into her old ways and concentrated on her hands while she spoke. “I never liked going outside with the captain. I was scared that someone would see us.”

“Pretorius had no such worries?”

“He said it was okay now that he knew who was spying on him, and the river was his favorite place to…you know…to go.”

Emmanuel remembered his impression of the crime scene and the distinct feeling that the victim might have been smiling when the bullet struck. Not so far off the mark, then.

“Captain Pretorius thought someone was spying on him before he caught Donny that night?”

“He said he knew there was someone out on the veldt and that he was going to catch him.”

“When did he first tell you that someone was spying on him?”

“Three, four weeks or so before he died.”

“He thought that man was Donny?”

“Yes. That’s what the captain told me.”

What on earth would lead Willem Pretorius to believe that Donny Rooke, of all people, was capable of cunning undercover surveillance? The watchful presence was still out there in the dark, and it sure as hell wasn’t Donny.

“What happened then?” He believed everything Davida had said so far and wondered when she’d slip and try to cover up a hole in her story. Everyone had something to hide.

“We went to the police van and I got under the blanket in the back. We drove to Old Voster’s farm. Captain got out and checked to see if everything was okay. He didn’t come back for a long time and…” She took a deep breath. “I got scared but then he came and said it was all clear, so we went down to the river.”

She was breathing harder now, her chest rising and falling in an unsteady rhythm. She was like this in the stone hut. Scared to death.

“Go on.”

“Captain spread the blanket out and then…well…that’s when it happened. Two popping sounds and he fell forward just like that.”

“Captain Pretorius was standing by the blanket and you were sitting down?” Emmanuel asked. Something was missing from her description of the events.

“We were both on the blanket.” She stared out the window like a prisoner watching a flock of birds soar above the barbed wire. “We were…he was…you know…”

“Davida, turn around and look at me,” he said. “Tell me exactly what happened on the blanket. Don’t leave anything out. I won’t be angry or shocked.”

She turned back to him but didn’t lift her gaze from the middle button of his jacket. After what she’d done in the photographs, it was amazing to see a blush work its way up her neck and darken her skin.

“Captain was doing it to me from behind.” Her voice was a reedy whisper of sound. “He finished and was doing up his buttons when I heard the two popping sounds. I didn’t know what it was and then the captain fell forward and I couldn’t move. He was on me, lying on top of me. I tried to move but he was on top of me.”

“What did you do then?”

“My heart was beating so loud that my ears were ringing. I was crying, too. Trying to get out from under the captain. That’s how come I didn’t hear him until he was behind me.”

“Who?”

“The man.”

“What man?”

“The man with the gun. He kicked my leg and said, ‘Run. Look back and I’ll shoot you.’ I pushed myself out from under the captain and I ran. I fell over on the kaffir path and my necklace snapped but I didn’t stop to look for it. I got up again and I ran until I got back home.”

“This man. What language did he use?”

“English. With an accent.”

“Tell me about the man. Did you see any part of him?”

“I was facing away and the captain was behind me. I didn’t see him. I only heard him telling me to run.”

“From his voice,” Emmanuel said, “what would you guess? White, coloured, black, or Indian?”

“A Dutchman,” she answered straight off. “A proper Afrikaner.”

“Why do you say that?”

“His voice. A Boer used to giving orders.”

That description matched ninety percent of the men who’d attended Willem Pretorius’s funeral. It was the same as finding a match for a man wearing khaki work pants or overalls.

He was skeptical about the appearance of “the man.” Wasn’t it a little too improbable, and convenient, to have a phantom Afrikaner descend from the sky to absolve her of involvement in the captain’s murder?

“Did you know the man, Davida?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Was it a coloured man? Someone from town?”

She looked up now, alert to the change in atmosphere. Her eyes were the color of rain clouds.

“It was a white man,” she repeated. “He spoke to me like I was a dog, like he enjoyed giving orders.”

“Did you know the man, Davida?” He hit the question again and waited to see where she went with it.

“I told you. No.” Her voice was pitched high with frustration. “I don’t know who it was.”

Emmanuel studied her face, strikingly pretty now that she’d ditched the novice-nun pose and he could see her clearly. “He did you a favor, didn’t he? The man. No more posing for illegal photos. No more lifting your skirt every time Pretorius came calling.”

“That’s not right. I didn’t want to hurt the captain.”

“Why not?” Emmanuel countered. “Sleeping with you is against the law. Making pornographic photographs is also against the law and yet he forced you to do both those things. That’s right, isn’t it? You couldn’t say no to an Afrikaner police captain.”

“That’s true.” The rain clouds burst and she wiped the tears from her face with a quick hand. Crying for a dead Dutchman in front of an Englishman. Could there be a more ridiculous thing for a mixed-race woman to do?

“You had feelings for him,” Emmanuel said. He’d seen the photograph she’d taken of Pretorius. Davida and the captain shared more than just a mutual physical pleasure.

“I didn’t love him.” She was angry about the tears and the cool way he watched her struggling for control. “But I didn’t hate him, either. He never did anything to hurt me. That’s the truth.”

“There’s plenty of ways to hurt someone without raising a hand to them.” His own anger came in a flash and he let ten percent of it out to breathe. “What will happen when you testify in court and everyone in South Africa hears about the photos and the fact that you were a white policeman’s skelmpie? Will that feel good or will that hurt? No matter. You can always remember how considerate Willem Pretorius was when he led you down the road to nowhere.”