Present Darkness (56 page)

“Why would Mason came out at dawn to protect these robbers?”

“They were his men,” Emmanuel said. “Had to have been.”

“Interesting …” The doctor stopped and tapped his fingers together while the cogs of his brain turned. After a long while, during which the sun lit up the windows of the big house like mirrors, he said, “Could the robbers who broke into the Brewers’ house and the robbers who broke into the dance hall be the same men? That would explain lieutenant Mason’s erratic actions. He feared you’d dig into the dance hall incident and connect him to both crimes.”

“It’s possible,”
the Sergeant Major said.
“Good help is hard to find, even for a dirty cop. How many men would Mason have on his books? Six at the most, I reckon.”

“Your theory makes sense,” Emmanuel said to Zweigman. “We’ll stick with the Brewer investigation and hopefully find the link to Mason.”

“Heads up, soldier,”
the Sergeant Major warned.
“Incoming. Twelve o’clock.”

Winston King, Davida’s brother, stood on the driveway, his tanned skin lit golden by the dawn. A beautifully formed mixed-race man living and passing as white, a thug with enough charm to talk the birds out of the trees, Winston could give lessons in living a lie.

“Friends of yours?” Winston asked of the three departed detectives. He too wore pyjamas and a dressing gown: fine Egyptian cotton thread hand-woven by nuns in a high-altitude cloister, Emmanuel imagined, and then dyed a colour that might be called “Amalfi Blue” or perhaps “Caribbean Wave”.

“I know them,” Emmanuel said. “They’re cops, which is how they got on the grounds. The guard couldn’t have stopped them.”

“There is one way to make sure they never come back here and that’s for you to pack up and get out of my father’s house,” Winston said. “This experiment in happy ever after is over, Detective Cooper.”

“Davida will decide whether I stay or I go,” Emmanuel said. However impossible his dreams were of a stable relationship, they could not be dismissed by the flick of a rich youth’s hand. “Ask her. See what she says.”

“I don’t think I will.” Winston prowled in a semi-circle, taking in the rumpled shirt, cut knuckles and the bruise-darkened skin on Emmanuel’s cheek. “Women confuse sex with love and I’ll bet you’re good in bed, aren’t you, Detective? Plus my sister has a weakness for rough white men with guns, which makes her opinions completely invalid.”

“This from a glorified drinks waiter! You will not take orders from a spoilt child, Cooper.”

“I’ll go when Davida tells me to.” Emmanuel turned and walked in the direction of the hut. Between Mason’s ultimatum and Winston’s threat of eviction, the morning had unravelled in spectacular fashion. He had miscalculated. The case had crossed into his personal life and now he had twenty-four hours at most to break the case against Aaron Shabalala or run the risk that Davida and Rebekah’s identities would be revealed.

“What would Mason do in similar circumstances?”
the Sergeant Major wondered.
“How would he ride out this shitstorm?”

Emmanuel knew.

20.

Andrew Franklin’s body contorted into a U shape. He dug his heels into the concrete driveway and threw his weight from right to left like a horse bucking a rider. “You can’t do this. I have work. I have obligations.”

“I’ll write you a note.” Emmanuel pushed Andy into the Brewers’ empty garage and threw him into a chair. Shabalala stepped out of the shadows and applied the full weight of his palms to Andy’s shoulders, locking him down.

“This is kidnapping. It’s against the law.”

“Asking questions is completely legal.” Emmanuel crouched and made eye contact with Cassie Brewer’s next-door neighbour. “Carnal knowledge of a minor, on the other hand, is definitely illegal.”

“What are you implying? I have a wife and a child, for heaven’s sake. I don’t have time to listen to this rubbish.” Andy tried to shake off Shabalala’s grip but the Zulu detective’s fingers flexed, giving Franklin a taste of the power that lay behind his palms.

“You’re not going anywhere until you tell us about your relationship with Cassie Brewer,” Emmanuel said.

“There was no relationship.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“
Ja
. Completely.”

“All right then.” Emmanuel gave Shabalala a quick nod. The Zulu policeman grabbed Franklin’s wrists and pinned them behind the chair in a vice-like grip. He strained and bucked against the tight hold but could not break free. Emmanuel laid his hands on Franklin’s knees.

“Stop struggling and listen to me closely,” he said. “I don’t have time to scratch around for the truth. I need the truth and I need it now.”

“I’m a married man I …”

Emmanuel’s right hand flashed up and he gripped Franklin’s throat, cutting off the air supply. He slowly tightened his hold. “Have I got your full attention, Mr Franklin?”

Franklin gasped, his eyes blood-shot and terrified. He gargled a wet sound, his body flexed against the wooden slats of the chair.

“I’ve killed better men than you, Andy: husbands and brothers fighting to keep their loved ones safe in a war. Those men are buried and gone. And now you are standing in the way of something I need. That makes you expendable. Do you understand?”

Franklin nodded, or tried to, before the steely grip of Emmanuel’s fingers forced his head back again. Shabalala steadied the chair and kept his eyes fixed on the oil stain on the concrete floor. His son had not stolen the red car from this garage. Nor had he beat Principal Brewer to death. This terrified white man might be the key to Aaron’s freedom. If his friend Emmanuel Cooper could open the door to the truth, Shabalala would let the interrogation run as long as it needed to.

“Friday night, you and Cassie Brewer played house in the back shed.” Emmanuel eased his hold on Franklin’s throat in order to give him enough oxygen to talk. “Then what happened?”

“Sounds,” Franklin croaked. “Voices in the garden.”

“You saw who it was?”

“No …” Franklin hesitated, on the verge of revealing an uncomfortable detail. “Cassie thought it might be the kaffir who was visiting her parents from up north. She figured he was opening the back gate so his friends could come in and rob the place. She went to check.”

“While you stayed in the hut?”

Franklin squirmed under Emmanuel’s disapproving gaze. “I … I had the most to lose if we got caught out. Cassie volunteered.”

“And you let her.”

“She knew the lay of the land … it was safer that way.”

“Safer for you, certainly.” A mix of youth and inexperience rendered Cassie incapable of seeing beneath Franklin’s bland good looks to the cowardly heart beating at his core. “What then?”

“She came back to the shed and said it wasn’t the kaffir. It was two white men, a big one and a little one, walking very quiet to the house. She didn’t like the look of them; the way they moved in the dark.” Franklin swallowed and winced. “I suggested we end things for the night and meet again in a few days. So we split and I went home.”

Franklin’s one saving grace was providing a detail that tied the assault on the Brewers to the murder of the Afrikaner doorman. A big white man and a little one had led the break in at Fatty’s club. Zweigman’s theory could be right.

“You left the girl alone and in danger,” Shabalala said. “You who are the elder. The man.”

Red crept into Franklin’s cheeks: that a kaffir should talk to him with such contempt felt worse than an open-handed slap or a bruised windpipe. He threw his head back and tried to pin Shabalala with a cold stare. “Watch your mouth,” he croaked. “A kaffir in a suit is still a kaffir.”

“I am half Zulu and half Shangaan,” Shabalala answered with good humour. “And you are not even worthy to be called a man.”

“Are you going to let him speak to me like that?” Franklin played the “white men against the natives” card and got a shrug in reply.

“I’d let him break your arm if he wanted to,” Emmanuel said. “Now tell me about the black man who came to visit Cassie’s parents.”

Franklin remained sullen in the face of his own impotence. “The kaffir came from the country. Cassie’s mother was helping out with a land problem. I don’t know the details.”

“Any idea where the man came from exactly?”

“Up north.”

Delia Singleton, Cassie’s aunt, lived on a farm north of Pretoria. That might explain how Mr Parkview came to have the Brewers’ address in his pocket.

“So,” Emmanuel clarified. “You saw nothing and you know nothing because you hid in the shed and then ran off home while two men broke into the Brewers’ house and beat one of them to death. Is that the sum of it?”

“I told Cassie to wait till the men had left. I said to be careful.”

“A true gentleman.” Emmanuel signalled Shabalala to release Franklin. They moved to the garage door and stepped out into the garden, leaving Franklin sweat-stained and cowering in the chair.

“Where to, Sergeant?” the Zulu detective asked.

“Sophiatown.” He crossed the lawn with car keys rattling. “Let’s find out why Aaron is lying.”

*

Emmanuel, Shabalala and Zweigman gathered around a pine table covered with breakfast plates and dirty crockery. Fix Mapela wore his standard uniform: striped pyjamas and a dressing gown with a silk collar.

Emmanuel had explained the gangster’s unusual apparel on the path leading to the plain brick house. “He thinks that wearing pyjamas in public will make him unfit to stand trial if he’s ever caught and charged. Knowing Fix, he read that in a law book while actually in jail.”

Penny, Fix’s church sanctioned wife, poured coffee. Half a dozen years, at most, separated her from the school playground. The pretty woman-child with a shy smile and doe eyes was too sweet for a township gangster. It was probably what Fix loved most about her.

“Go now,” the gangster said to her. “Leave the men to business.”

Penny slipped out of the room and shut the kitchen door. Apart from a soft “hello” when introduced, she’d said not one word or made eye contact with anyone at the table, not even Fix. It might as well be 1835; when traditional men expected modest and obedient wives.

Emmanuel sipped the bittersweet coffee and said, “I’ve got two names. One of them lives here in Sophiatown.”

“I will help you if I can.” Fix spread a thick layer of butter and plum jam onto a slab of burnt bread; a taste he’d acquired from living on the streets and cooking over an open flame. “Tell me the names. Everything you know.”

“What I know isn’t much.” Emmanuel flicked to the page where he’d penned the key points of the prison warden’s rambling monologue. “First we have an older man with white hair and broad shoulders who goes by the name of Bakwena. He drives a black sedan with a dented front bumper. The second man is a Khumalo with brown hair and brown eyes and younger than Bakwena. Both of them neat and well-spoken.”

“Bakwena is from Sophiatown?”

“Yes.”

Fix crunched down on the blackened toast and chewed slowly. Shabalala and Zweigman drank coffee and waited, hoping the flimsy descriptions would transform themselves into names and addresses for the men who’d visited Aaron in jail.

“There is one man …” Fix licked jam from his sticky fingers, savouring the taste. “A Bakwena who owns the ‘Eternal Rest’ funeral parlour on Morris Street. He has a dented black car and white hair. He is a big noise here in the township and likes to speak against the government whenever there is a meeting or a strike.”

“We’ll call in and say hello.” They’d knock on every door and check every name like prospectors searching for gold in a river. “Which end of Morris Street?”

“Eternal Rest is near the open land at the far end. Come, I will take you.” Fix stood up and grabbed the edge of the table with a startled expression. Twenty-seven years with a stunted right leg and its shortened length still surprised him every time he got to his feet. Use the word “cripple” within earshot, though, and he’d introduce you to the sharp end of a knife, free of charge. “Bakwena will answer questions quick, quick with Fix Mapela by your side.”

Bad idea. A truly terrible idea. Fix didn’t ask questions, he interrogated and he intimidated until answers spilled out … along with blood and other fluids. Emmanuel pretended to weigh the offer before answering.

“Stay. Spend time with that pretty wife of yours. This business with Bakwena will take ten minutes, tops. You’ll be bored.” Fix and boredom were mutual enemies.

“Remember, I am your blood brother. Brothers stick together through thick and thin.”

“Of course.” Had he known at the age of six that the slice of a penknife blade across his palm would have real and actual consequences in the future he’d have declined. Or perhaps not. Fix had made a nightmarish childhood bearable and had even stolen shoes and pens for Emmanuel’s sister Olivia so she could concentrate on school instead of the empty money jar on the kitchen counter. Fix
had
been a brother: a wild, tearaway sibling who lived on the streets, but a brother nonetheless.