Nairobi Heat (21 page)

What Samuel had discovered, Joshua claimed, was that he could do two things at the same time – get rid of Joshua, who was costing the Foundation quite a bit of money, and get rid of Macy Jane by killing her and tying the murder to Joshua.
Of course this would mean the end of the Foundation, but it wouldn’t take Samuel long to find another golden boy and set up a new foundation as long as he still had control of the Refugee Centre. Joshua only figured this out later. He had no idea his world was about to collapse until he came home and found Macy Jane dead on his porch. I knew Samuel had been scheming money from his partners and that the Refugee Centre and the Foundation were in financial trouble, two more reasons for getting rid of Joshua and starting over.

Why had Samuel Alexander committed suicide?

He was a weak man, Joshua replied with contempt. He didn’t have the stomach for what he had created, especially after he had ordered Macy Jane Admanzah’s murder and instead of Joshua taking the fall I had flown to Nairobi to look for answers. Again this made sense to me. The suicide note was addressed to Joshua – something Joshua could not have known. Samuel was apologising to Joshua for destroying what they had created together.

Why couldn’t Joshua, once incriminated, become a whistle-blower?

I knew the answers even before he gave them. His life. He would not have lived to tell his story. And his past. He had thought he could still protect his secret.

‘But why not get rid of the body? Why leave it where you found it?’ I asked him.

When he came home and found her there he had had to think fast. From the state of her body he could tell that she hadn’t been dead for long and he knew that whoever had left her body would call the police as soon as they were in the clear. In the space of a few minutes he had found her purse,
gone through her pockets and removed the African jewellery she had been wearing. He had then put everything into a plastic bag and stuffed it into his bedroom toilet. Finally, he had called the police.

I picked up my cellphone and called the station to find out if he was telling the truth about the calls. For a detective, a suspect’s guilt or innocence can lie in a single detail. Sometimes it is simply the kind of detail that the suspect would have no knowledge of unless they had been in a certain place at a certain time that somehow validates his or her side of the story. Sometimes it is something that somehow resolves a contradiction or answers a question that has undermined all possible theories. For Joshua the question had always been why he would leave the body outside his own door when he would have had time to dispose of it if he had wanted to – no one would have traced Macy Jane to him had we found her in some dumpster somewhere.

A few minutes later my cell rang. Joshua wasn’t lying about the calls – there were two: one from his cellphone and another from a phone booth just outside Maple Bluff. The cop on duty played me both calls. The first caller was clearly an American, most probably a Caucasian male. He told the operator that he had just witnessed a murder and he gave Joshua’s address, before hanging up. The other call, just two minutes later, was from Joshua. He was reporting finding a dead girl on his porch. The operator asked him to take the girl’s pulse and make sure she was still breathing, but Joshua was way ahead of him. ‘No, I try bring her back,’ he said, ‘but she dead.’

The more I thought about what Joshua was telling me
the more sense it made. He knew he was being set up and that the killer would have called the cops, so he knew that he did not have enough time to get rid of the body. All he could do was strip it of anything that could help us identify Macy Jane. With his past safely hidden in Africa, he had been sure he could outrun it. He had not counted on my being sent to Kenya.

The two calls were a small detail that had gotten lost early on in what had been a chaotic and sensational case. There were still a lot more questions to be answered but Joshua’s story explained who had killed Macy Jane Admanzah and why. It also explained why I had thought he was guilty of something right from the beginning – he had been trying to hide something from me, but it was his past. He was guilty of many terrible things, but at that moment I was sure that he had not killed Macy Jane Admanzah.

Finishing my Tusker, I picked up my piece and stood to take my leave of the man that only an hour earlier I had been ready to kill. What was going to happen to Joshua? Were we going to punish him for a crime he did not commit? Would we let him go free despite his role in the genocide? Maybe there would be enough evidence to bring him to trial for crimes against humanity. I didn’t know. There were the Kokomat women, and there would surely be others. I wanted to talk it over with the Chief, file my report and let the powers that be decide.

‘Ishmael, I am bad man,’ Joshua said as I moved towards the door. ‘I know, you know. I do unspeakable things. But, Ishmael, I do not kill that girl.’

Suddenly I wondered why his being innocent of Macy
Jane Admanzah’s murder was so important to him. He surely knew his past was about to be revealed and that his life would be destroyed once people knew what he had really done during the genocide.

‘I do not know, Ishmael,’ he said sadly when I asked him about it. ‘Maybe I change. Maybe I change, and I desire truth be known.’

As I drove back to my apartment complex, where I knew I would find the Chief, I couldn’t help thinking about the Admanzahs. For some people they were racists. For others they were true Christians. Some would think of them as bleeding-heart liberals. While others would say that they were simply misguided. But here is a question for you: what makes a husband and wife uproot their family from the US, from a farm that is doing well, from a school a bit conservative but nevertheless a school that offers hope to their children, and take them to Africa?

I had seen many Admanzahs in Allied Drive. In Allied Drive white folk were always trying to save black folk, trying to get them off drugs and out of gangs. Forget the white trash and the rednecks; well-to-do white people wanted to save black folk. So perhaps the Admanzahs enjoyed playing Jesus to Africans. But did they deserve to die for it? What life had they taken? On the contrary, they had saved lives.

When I finally made it to the Chief he was predictably furious – the violence had come to America, to a small town called Madison in Wisconsin, and he had four bodies to deal with, three of them white.

‘Have you gone crazy? You have opened us up wide to get fucked,’ he yelled as he dragged me out of the car. ‘You are coming with me to the station right now.’

‘Am I under arrest?’

‘How the fuck am I supposed to know?’ he asked as he pushed me into his car. ‘I know nothing …’

Back at the station I explained everything as best I could. The Chief had calmed down during the drive and by the time I had finished my story he looked almost happy. We finally had the answers we had been looking for.

‘We have Macy Jane’s killers, it looks like, but Joshua, he gets away with everything?’ the Chief said. It was more of a statement than a question. ‘Feed the story to the dogs,’ he instructed.

That was exactly what I had planned to do. I checked into a motel, called Mo and updated her. For the first time since I’d known her she offered to come over and make sure I was okay, but I told her I was fine. I drifted off with the receiver still in my hand, thoughts of Muddy swimming through my mind.

Mo’s story broke later that morning in
The Madison Times –
and it broke huge. By now she had developed good relationships with several big-time papers and TV stations and they all wanted a piece of the story. It was sweeter than a Mafia bust; a new sort of crime with the good and bad guys in disguise – there was the shadowy Chocbanc, now dead; there was the Macy Jane Admanzah angle; Joshua’s story; the Foundation, its board and the CEOs; there was even my story. So, within hours, headline after headline screamed
Justice for Macy Jane Admanzah At Last, Beauty and the Beasts, Sex and Violence on the Dark Continent, The Black Prince
(not sure if that was me or Joshua), et cetera. Even the KKK circulated leaflets congratulating the Chief and me, saying we were a good example of what our race could offer if it applied itself.

That evening I called BQ and asked him to meet me for a beer. I had never done this before, but after a moment’s hesitation he agreed. I wanted to tell him the case was finally over, that justice had been done by Macy Jane Admanzah. I wanted to tell him because I had never forgotten his off-hand
comment that someone who knew her well, who might have even loved her, had committed the murder.

We sat around for a few hours, talking about the case, Northern and Southern women and even country music. I now had encyclopaedic knowledge of Kenny Rogers – turns out he is not well liked in the South – a sell-out of sorts. It was great to sit around in no particular hurry, drinking beer and listening to music. We played darts and pool – he won easily; my fingers, even though not painful, were still cumbersome.

‘Looky here, my friend,’ he finally said, drunkenly sucking on an unlit cigarette. ‘We sure are friends now, Ishmael, ain’t we?’ He leaned closer to me and placed his hand on my shoulder.

‘Sure, BQ,’ I answered. ‘We are friends.’ I meant it too.

‘Well then, my friend, your case. It raises more questions than a hog at a Christmas party.’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked him.

‘It’s too complicated … just too damn complicated,’ he answered. ‘And, my friend, murders are always simple as rain. You know that.’

From my angle everything fitted. Yes, it was a complicated chain of events, but Joshua had reconstructed the motives behind the crime for me and it made sense. But it was BQ saying this – not the Chief, Muddy, O, or even Mo (they were all too close to the case and all had a vested interest in the outcome for one reason or another). He was as dispassionate as anyone could get – his work, cutting up bodies and holding back his anger long enough to find the cause of death, told me that I should take what he was telling me seriously.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked him.

‘Looky here, my friend,’ BQ drawled. ‘You are asking me to believe that Macy Jane Admanzah came here to expose Joshua, and that whoever it is that was controlling the Never Again Foundation, Chocbanc or whoever, decides to get rid of Joshua before he brings all of the whole thing crashing down around him? So they kill Macy Jane Admanzah and leave her body by his door?’

‘Can you just tell me where this is going?’ I asked.

‘I have no idea, but even this drunken fool knows this: a person cannot be guilty of genocide and innocent of murder. It just doesn’t add up. His instinct is to kill, just like a scorpion stings.’

I thought back to the statement he had made in the morgue as we had stood over Macy Jane Admanzah’s body little more than a week earlier – ‘My guess is it was someone who knew her well, someone who might even have loved her …’ I asked him about it, but he couldn’t remember saying it. I was relieved – he had nothing but a hunch.

‘So, Ishmael, we still friends?’ BQ asked after a few minutes of silence.

‘Yeah, of course, man, we’re still friends,’ I answered and laughed.

And that was that. We sat around drinking beer and singing along to country music until the bar closed. I got home feeling neither depressed nor happy, just drunk.

I woke the following day to find that there had been two immediate casualties from Mo’s story. The first casualty was the Never Again Foundation itself. The board had resigned
even as the powers that be had moved to investigate them for fraud and racketeering. And it wasn’t only the board. Politicians in the US, Rwanda and Kenya whose names appeared in the logbook were also forced to resign, such was the outrage. The US Senate even went as far as to set up a commission to investigate not just the Never Again Foundation but also all major charitable organisations. The second casualty was Joshua Hakizimana. The world’s rage was focused on Joshua. Not for the genocide, but for making the world believe in him. It was as if it had been discovered that Mandela was actually a prison guard. In the days that followed Maple Bluff was mobbed with people literally crying for a piece of him, Hollywood stars tore his picture on live TV and the ICC launched its own investigation into his role in the genocide.