The Song Dog (33 page)

He went back to the wardrobe and, bearing in mind that neither Ma Suzman nor the maid servant could reach the top of it, that’s where he felt first, running his hand all the way round and then across its plywood surface—nothing. The inside of the wardrobe revealed nothing either, and the same was true of its bottom drawer and all the drawers in the dresser.

Conscious that time was slipping by fast, and not knowing
how much longer Zondi could keep Ma Suzman at bay, Kramer began to search less logically, poking into every corner he could think of, and even lying on the floor to check to see if anything was wedged under the bed, between the mattress and the bedsprings. Then he rolled over and examined the parquet flooring itself, quickly realizing that the wooden blocks would not readily lend themselves to providing a place of concealment, being tight-fitting and glued to concrete.

“No, this is stupid!” Kramer muttered, getting to his feet again. “If it’s hidden anywhere here, then it’s got to be where he can get to it easily, but the women would be very unlikely—”

He turned and looked at the washstand. Its marble top was a good inch thick, while it was at least a yard wide and two feet the other way. A tall man would find it a bit of an effort to lift away; a short female would really struggle to move it at all, not having the same strength or leverage—and anyway, why should she want to do such a thing in the first place? A good wipe with a wet cloth was all that it ever needed.

For a moment, Kramer dithered, knowing he really ought to first make a quick check from the kitchen window on whether Zondi was still managing to keep Suzman’s mother at bay. Then he decided just to chance it, and having transferred all the hairbrushes and all the other bits and pieces over onto the desk, he took a firm grip on the heavy slab of marble.

“Listen, boy!” said Mrs. Suzman, beginning to move toward the doorway of Miriam Dinizulu’s little room. “I’m going to find your boss and get him to deal strictly with you! All this bloody talk and you’ve told me nothing!”

“
Hau
, missus, please not to go! Just this second this maid begin to me inform your clock regarding!”

“Oh, ja? What did she say, hey?”

“You’d better tell me
something
about this blessed clock, my
sister,” Zondi growled at Miriam. “We can finish getting to know each other later.”

“She keeps accusing me of many thefts, my brother,” said Miriam, with the right sort of snivel. “Mostly thefts of her gin and of certain foods that she can’t remember having eaten herself because she is so drunk all the time.”

“Has she always been such a mess as this?”

“They say it began maybe a year ago. I have worked for her only a short time, so I don’t really know.”

“The clock!” Zondi snapped in Afrikaans.

“She says I have taken a small one that folds shut like a little box with a hinge in it. It used to be on the top shelf in the store cupboard where she keeps her old suitcases, with also a special iron for hotels and a—”

“That’s enough!” bellowed Zondi, then turned to Mrs. Suzman. “The girl she still deny all knowledgings of—”

“Nonsense! It was there, I saw it myshelf on Sunday night when I went to get a new light bulb for my reading light! Up on the top shelf? Monday it was gone! Gone, you hear? Tell her I want it back right now, hey!”

Zondi grabbed Miriam Dinizulu, hauling her to her feet. “It is good to touch you, my sister!” he yelled at her. “Your skin is very smooth and your limbs are so supple!”

“And my knee is hard, my brother, very hard, should you dare to take any further liberties!” Miriam whispered.

“What did she say then, hey? Come on, tell me!”

“Very, very soon, missus, big promise!” said Zondi, and asked Miriam: “That bruise on your face? Was it this clock that caused it?”

She nodded. “Boss Suzman,” she said in the same whisper. “His mother sent him to beat the truth out of me. He said afterward he was satisfied she had just lost it herself as she loses many things, and so I was not going to be sacked. His mother would soon forget, he said—she could not remember a week
ago. I was surprised, but I am already looking for another job, I can tell you!”

Zondi very nearly turned back to Mrs. Suzman then, but something made him pause, think again, and say to Miriam Dinizulu: “You say you were surprised when Boss Suzman just let the matter drop?”

She nodded. “Yes, my brother, he had not even searched my room for the clock. Just shouted, hit me a bit, and seemed content that the whole matter be forgotten. It seemed a strange thing for a white policeman.”

“Too right!” agreed Zondi, feeling a sudden surge of excitement, slightly dizzying in its implications. “This clock that disappeared sometime after Sunday night, did it look an expensive one?”

“No, cheap, my brother, very cheap, only three jewels,” said Miriam Dinizulu.

Kramer, knowing now what it meant to stand stunned, went on staring down into the shallow cavity hollowed out with a chisel in the wooden top of the washstand, and usually hidden from view by the heavy slab of polished marble.

At a glance, one thing was obvious: the cavity contained nothing remotely resembling a school exercise book turned into an intimate diary by a licentious young woman. Yet that hardly seemed to matter any longer.

Neither did the tracings over on the left, topped by a picture, made from a film still of Victor Mature and Susan Hayward embracing in the nude, to which erectile tissue had been clumsily added.

Rather, what riveted Kramer’s attention, making his heart beat, his fists clench, and his breathing difficult, was the scatter of contact prints, all taken on the same 120-size film as the murder-scene shots of the dead detective sergeant, Maaties Kritzinger. The uppermost picture showed a personable young
couple, arms around each other’s shoulders, dressed in bathing costumes at what was obviously a beach barbecue, and smiling at the camera; Kramer could only guess who the man was, but it didn’t take much imagination because, sitting beside him, thigh-to-thigh and not caring who saw it, was the Widow Fourie, looking the happiest he’d ever seen her.

She wasn’t to know, of course, that the picture would finish up with a jagged, violent scribble in ballpoint all over the man at her side, canceling him out, ruthlessly ripping him from her embrace forever, and ripping the surface of the print, too, so that the crazed line ended at a fat, obscene puncture mark.

K
RAMER AND
Z
ONDI
half collided in the kitchen doorway, and said simultaneously: “It’s
Suzman!
”

“Jesus, how did you find out?”

“The time bomb, boss! He—”

“Later,” said Kramer. “First, we’d better get the hell out of here with the minimum of fuss and—”

The shrill scream for help had come from the servant’s quarters.

Zondi spun around and sprinted off, Kramer hard on his heels, and they got there just as Mrs. Suzman took another wild swing with her brass-tipped walking stick. The maid, also trying to dodge the dog, had been forced back into the farthest corner of her room, and was stumbling about on the collapsing truckle bed, quite frantic.

“Take me away, take me away!” she begged in English. “Please lock me up somewhere safe,
po-eee-seeeee!
”

“Ta, auntie,” said Kramer, plucking the walking stick from Mrs. Suzman’s grasp. “Sergeant, arrest that thieving bitch and bloody chuck her in the car, hey?”

“At last!” said Mrs. Suzman, dragging the dog back. “But why was it left to an old woman to force a confession? What’s the matter with you SAP? Have you all turned into nancy boys and bloody poofters, hey? That’sh what I keep asking Sarel!”

Zondi bundled the maid out, still sobbing, and Kramer tossed the walking stick onto the bed, very aware this drunken old bitch could now cause even greater problems in the wake of his shattering discovery.

“I kept saying to that soft bloody son of mine: ‘Arrest her, man!’ He wouldn’t hear of it!”

“Auntie, you know something …?” remarked Kramer, glancing around the room, noting the thick bars over its single high window near the ceiling in the rear wall, and the hefty door lock, in which the maid had left her key. “This place looks very bare without a phone, hey?”

Mrs. Suzman blinked. “What wash that?” she said, giving a snort of amused disbelief. “
No phone in a kaffirs room?
Tell me, whoever heard of a kaffir who wanted to—”

“Ach, I wasn’t thinking so much of kaffirs as of a life-form even lower,” said Kramer, stepping out of the maid’s room and locking her into it.

“
Hau
, boss!” said Zondi, as the Chevrolet was gunned away from the curb. “But what if the neighbors—”

“Not one of the buggers has appeared yet, despite all the row she’s already made, hey? Don’t you think they’re more than used to the sound of her bloody ravings and think it wiser to take no notice?”

“
Eh-heh
, that is true, Lieutenant. Although the maid told me—”

“Where the hell is she, by the way?”

“I gave her bus money to go running back to hide meantime with her father in the reserve, boss—she knows too, too much, that one!”

“Not as much as
I
bloody know!” said Kramer grimly, digging into his jacket pocket. “Here, take a look at these—but make sure you handle them only by their edges …”

And he tossed Zondi a small packet that turned out to
contain five contact prints, wrapped in a very rude tracing. As soon as he saw the first of the prints, Zondi sat bolt upright.

“But this is the photo, Lieutenant, of Boss Cloete and the madam dead in the Renault crash, with terrible scribbles all over them!
Hau
, what kind of hatred is this?”

“We’ll just have to ask Suzman, hey? The next picture shows Fourie …”

“
Hau, hau, hau!
But look, only the boss has the marks made on him.”

“Uh-huh. He was the only one killed, see?”

“And this young madam with the young boss, Lieutenant?”

Kramer, who was making for Jafini police station with his foot down, glanced away from the road for only a split second. “That’s little Annika in her bikini,” he said. “I’d recognize the gorgeous curve of that bum anywhere; the hand is hers also, plus the ear with the diamond earring. The bloke in the frog flippers and carrying her in his arms is—”

“Boss Gillets, Lieutenant?”

“Uh-huh. What else do you notice about that one?”

“The mad lines go all over both. Lieutenant! Was the plan to make him
and
the young madam dead?”

“Uh-huh, looks to me like Gillets had a lucky escape that night, hey?” said Kramer, turning right onto the main street.

Zondi frowned as he examined the remaining prints, turning them this way and that. Both showed happy-looking couples, wearing bathing costumes on the beach, and each had been attacked so violently that the ballpoint had torn through the emulsion.

“Does the Lieutenant know who these last bosses and madams are?” he asked, as the Chevrolet came to a stop in the police yard beside Terblanche’s Land Rover. “More victims?”

“Kritz did hint he wasn’t sure how many killings were involved,” Kramer reminded him. “Or maybe, those couples
haven’t had their turn yet—who knows? We’d better try and identify them soon, in case we need to warn them.”

“
Hau, hau, hau
 …”

“I’ve also whipped the rest of the bastard’s collection, hey?” said Kramer, taking out two Lucky Strikes and lighting them. “But they’re not worth bloody bothering with. Unmarked, just more females catching a tan on the beach—you know, crotches and big tits, something else in the foreground. Here, this one’s yours …”

“Ta, boss!” said Zondi, taking a long pull on the Lucky the instant he was handed it.

“And then,” said Kramer, “there’s a final set that looks like it was taken at various times from the scrub line behind the cook boy’s hut, showing Annika Cloete doing this and that, as though the bastard’s been doing a lot of spying on her, sort of a bloody Peeping Tom with a camera.”

“No more couples, then, Lieutenant?”

“No, none. You’ve noticed there’s a pattern?”

Zondi nodded. “And no pictures with Boss Kritzinger in them?”

“Uh-uh. I double-checked, looking for Ma Kritz to help identify him; looking for a bloke simply fitting Kritz’s description. Nothing! No more scribbles either.”

“Then we have a break in the pattern, boss,” said Zondi, blowing a smoke ring. “It could mean that finally we have proof Boss Kritzinger
was
an accidental victim of that dynamite explosion.”

“You know something, Mickey? You could be right! No wonder Suzman bloody panicked and tried to make as big a mess as he could of the original evidence, hey? And then got the Colonel to call the dogs off, telling bloody lies about Maaties’ reputation, saying
anything
just to avoid what he knew would otherwise be the consequences!”

“What dogs, Lieutenant?”

“Ach, you know: bastards a lot harder and smarter than you and me, my son—
real
detectives. The kind you call in from Jo’burg Murder Squad when you really have a problem, something a bit personal or truly unacceptable? No-necks who just walk in, pick you up, nail you to the wall, and—”

Zondi laughed.

“You think I’m joking? Listen, they came to Bloemfontein last October, to help look for this white male who’d raped his servant girl’s seven-year-old. Three days later, they went away again, and a week later, we locals found the bugger. The DS said that because of the cauterized blood vessels, done with a blowtorch, he’d not bled to death but had died choking on his own cock, very slowly.”

“Hau!”

“Oh, ja, they don’t mess around, and Suzman must have heard that. What they especially hate is any cop who does harm to another cop, no matter what his excuse is.”

“Then, Lieutenant, perhaps we had better be very sure that we aren’t about to make another big mistake ourselves, not so?” said Zondi, arching an eyebrow. “How strong is our evidence? Maybe Boss Suzman was very fond of these couples he took pictures of, and when they were killed, he became so upset he took his pen and—”