A Beautiful Place to Die Part 22

"Please...to..." The fragile woman stumbled over the words. "Wait..."

Lilliana Zweigman disappeared into the front of the store and returned with her husband, whose hand rested on her arm.

"I need to talk to Davida and Tottie," Emmanuel said. The hum of the machines died down and an expectant silence took its place.

"I will accompany you. Davida and Tottie, come with me, please. Angie, could you take care of the counter?"

"Yes, Mr. Zweigman." Angie pushed her chair back and went to take her place at the front of the shop. The sewing machines whirred to life and the two remaining women went to work attaching sleeves to half-made cotton dresses.

Emmanuel motioned the women over to a table positioned beneath the shade of the lemon tree. He ignored the shy brown mouse. He couldn't afford to expose her and the information she had about the calendar to anyone. Zweigman stood at the back window of the store with his nose pressed against the gla.s.s. He showed an almost paternal concern for the women in his wife's care. Or was it more than that? Captain Pretorius certainly thought so.

"Sit down," Emmanuel instructed Tottie and Davida, and slid two pieces of blank paper and two pencils across the table. "I want you to draw me a map of your houses. Label the rooms. Draw the windows and doors. Mark the room where the Peeping Tom made his appearance."

"Yes, Detective." Tottie gave him a smile guaranteed to pop the b.u.t.tons off a grown man's fly. The coloured beauty didn't care how many moths got burned against her flame.

Davida was bent over her paper with intense concentration. She drew the outline of a house with a small servant's room out the back.

"Detective?" Hot Tottie was thrown into confusion by an uncharacteristic lack of male attention. "Is this what you want?"

Emmanuel made sure to maintain eye contact before looking down at the map, which was hastily drawn but adequate for the task at hand.

"It's exactly what I want," he said, and smiled.

The shy brown mouse slid her finished map across the table without a word. She didn't look up once. Emmanuel placed the drawings side by side and studied them, paying particular attention to the location of the rooms where the Peeping Tom struck.

He tapped a finger to Tottie's map. "Your room is here at the back of the house?"

"It used to be." The beauty flicked a strand of dark hair over her shoulder to give a clearer view of her exposed neckline. "My daddy moved me to the front room after it happened the second time."

"Your room is here, separate from the house?" he asked Davida.

"Yes. My room is the old servant's quarters."

"Do you live with Granny Mariah?"

Her gray eyes flickered up in surprise. "Yes."

Emmanuel wanted to ask why she didn't live in the house with her grandmother but concentrated on the maps again. Both Davida's and Tottie's bedrooms were at the very back of the house, with windows facing the kaffir path. Was that a common element in all the crime scenes?

"Do either of you know the layout of Anton's house?" he asked.

"You know where the bedrooms are in Anton's house, don't you, Davida?" Tottie said, and almost purred with satisfaction when Davida blushed two shades darker.

Davida didn't rise to the bait, just pulled a piece of paper across the table and drew a quick sketch.

"Mary's bedroom is in the back." She slid Anton's house plans back over to him. "Della's bedroom is also in the back of the house."

"Does the kaffir path run close to the rear boundary of all the houses?"

"I don't know anything about the kaffir path," Tottie said. "My daddy only lets me use the main streets. You have to get Davida to answer that question for you, Detective."

Emmanuel took stock of Tottie. The curvy beauty was a spoiled little miss who liked to take a cheap shot. She'd as good as called her workmate a kaffir by implying that respectable girls, girls with a daddy to look out for them, didn't go near the native byway. Why was the shy brown mouse a target for Tottie?

"The path runs by them all," Davida said without moving her attention from the tips of her fingernails.

The connection between the rooms and their proximity to the kaffir path was too obvious to miss. How had the attacker managed to evade the captain, who policed the path and the streets most days of the week? Then a radical thought occurred to him.

"The attacker? Was he a big man like Captain Pretorius?"

"I don't know," Tottie announced with a triumphant smile. "That man didn't lay a finger on me. My daddy and my brothers made sure I was safe."

A teaspoonful of Hot Tottie went a long way. Emmanuel had enough of a taste to last a full week.

"You can go back to work," he told her. "I have a few more questions for Davida."

"You sure, Detective?"

"I don't want to embarra.s.s you with the sordid details of the attacks. You shouldn't have to hear such unpleasantness."

"Of course," Tottie said. She looked disappointed at missing the good stuff.

He waited until she sashayed into the shop before he turned to Davida.

"Was the attacker big like Captain Pretorius?" he asked again.

"He was bigger than me but not as big as the captain."

"How can you be sure?" The connection between the captain and the molester was too strong to dismiss. Willem Pretorius traveled the kaffir paths with impunity day and night and he had the power to pull the plug on the investigation when things got too hot. Was he protecting himself all along?

"Did you know the captain well enough to be certain that he wasn't the man who grabbed you?"

"Captain Pretorius was very tall with wide shoulders. Everyone in town knew that." She moved her hands from the table to her lap so he couldn't see them. "The man who grabbed me wasn't so tall."

"You think it was a white man?"

"It was dark. I didn't see him. He had a strange accent. Like a white man from outside South Africa."

"Could he have been a Portuguese?"

"Maybe, but I don't think so."

Emmanuel noticed the old Jew still had his nose pressed hard against the back window of the store. So, Hot Tottie wasn't Zweigman's fancy. It was the shy brown mouse he had an eye for.

"You sure you're not used to being touched by one of my kind?" Emmanuel asked straight out. Maybe the gray-eyed girl was keeping his secrets and a few more besides.

She shifted in her chair but didn't look up. "Just because I don't have a daddy doesn't mean I run around."

"What about Anton? Did you run around with him?" He wanted to know if he'd been mistaken in his judgment that she was a silent and watchful woman who kept to herself.

"I saw Anton a few times but it didn't work out."

"Have you told me the truth about everything, Davida?"

"Why would I lie?"

"I don't know."

He had a perverse desire to pull her head covering off and unb.u.t.ton her shapeless cotton shift so he could search for the hidden places he sensed below the surface. She glanced upward suddenly and he had to look away.

"You can go back to work." He pretended to shuffle the reports into place and then watched her disappear into the back room of the store. Was Davida hiding something or was he simply revisiting the shameful sense of power he'd felt over her outside the stone hut?

Emmanuel deviated off the path and swung past the post office before making his way to the police station's back entrance. He rested against a tree and waited for Shabalala to appear on his bicycle. It was sunset and the kaffir path was busy with blacks funneling back to the location for the night.

"They have been looking for you," the constable told him after they'd exchanged greetings.

"Are they still looking?"

"There were many phone calls from Graystown and now they are not looking for you anymore."

"Phone calls about what?"

"A man. A Communist," Shabalala said. "That is all I heard."

"And how did you hear that?" Emmanuel asked. How did a six-foot-plus black man move in and out of a Security Branch investigation without drawing attention to himself?

"Tea." Shabalala gave a straight-faced answer. "My mother. She taught me how to make good tea."

"Ahh..." The invisible black servant was etched into the white way of life. Shabalala had used that to its full advantage.

They moved along the rear property line of the houses on van Riebeeck Street and soon drew level with the captain's house. The shed door was open and the sound of contented humming drifted out onto the kaffir path.

Inside, Louis was at work on the Indian motorcycle, which was close to fully a.s.sembled. The boy's overalls were covered in grease, his leather work boots splashed with oil and dirt. Did the contents of a hymnbook get Louis humming out loud with happiness?

"That one." Emmanuel pointed back in Louis's direction once they'd pa.s.sed the captain's house. "He is going to be a pastor?"

"The madam has told everyone that it is so."

"You don't see it?"

"I see only that he is different."

"I see this also," Emmanuel said, and they continued along the narrow path. The icy Mrs. Pretorius was aware that Louis was not like her other sons, but she chose to interpret this as a sign of his greatness.

"I've been thinking..." Emmanuel stayed with the Afrikaner family for a moment. "When did Captain Pretorius tell you the old Jew was a doctor?"

"Before the middle of the year," Shabalala said. "I think in April."

"Before the accident in front of the shop," Emmanuel said. "How did he know Zweigman was a doctor?"

"The captain did not tell me how he knew this. He said only that the old Jew would fix me better than Dr. Kruger."

Better. That was a value judgment. Willem Pretorius knew that Zweigman was more than your run-of-the-mill general pract.i.tioner. Clever Captain Pretorius had tabs on everyone in Jacob's Rest except the killer.

"The old Jew, where is his house?" Emmanuel asked.

"It is on the same street as the Dutchmen's church. A small brick house with a red roof and a gum tree near the gate."

They walked on in silence until they came to the Grace of G.o.d Hospital. Sister Angelina and Sister Bernadette were kicking a patched-up soccer ball across a vacant lot with a group of orphans. Dust rose in the twilight as the diminutive Irish nun dribbled the ball through the opposition defense and made a run for goal. A shout erupted from the barefoot soccer team when Sister Angelina lunged to the side and caught the ball as it sailed toward the mouth of the net. To thrive in Africa, nuns had to take and block a few shots on goal.

Emmanuel waved a greeting and he and Shabalala moved on to the grid of coloured houses where a pickup truck painted with the words "Khan's Emporium" was backed up to a wooden gate. Two Indian men loaded crates of sealed jars into the vehicle while Granny Mariah watched.

"Detective. Constable Shabalala." The steely-eyed matriarch greeted them with a brisk nod. "How's the investigation coming?"

"Still checking into things," Emmanuel said. A huge vegetable plot crowded with rows of furrowed earth ran the entire length of the backyard. To the far right of the market garden stood the one-room building that once served as the servant's quarters.

"That's Davida's room?" He pointed to the whitewashed structure hemmed in by flowering herbs and empty wood crates stacked to the windowsill.

"Yes. What's that to do with anything?" Granny asked.

Emmanuel walked over to the open gate and looked toward the small white room. There was a clear view from the kaffir path to the curtained window. He checked the locking mechanism; a piece of timber that slotted into two brackets at either side of the entry held the gate shut.

"Was this always here?"

"I had it put on after that man grabbed Davida. We had no problems once the lock was there."

Did the a.s.sailant give up indulging his compulsion when access to the women became difficult? Tottie was moved to the front of the house where her brothers and father surrounded her, and the gate to Davida's yard was locked tight.

"Did the other women who were attacked have extra security put in?"

"Oh, yes." Granny Mariah paused to direct one of the Indian men to the last crate of bottled pickles. "When it first happened back in August last, the men started patrolling the kaffir path at night, but after three weeks, not a whisper. It was like the man just disappeared, so everyone went back to their business. Then came the December troubles and we all got locks put in."

"What did the captain have to say about the patrols?"

After dark, the kaffir path was Willem Pretorius's domain. He might not have welcomed a rival patrol.

"He said fine so long as the men kept to the coloured area. They weren't allowed past the hospital or Kloppers shoe store on the other side of town."

Despite what Davida said about the size of her attacker, he couldn't let go of the niggling feeling that Willem Pretorius might be the right fit for the perpetrator. The Afrikaner man knew the kaffir paths like the back of his hand and he was used to traveling on them without arousing suspicion. He knew the women and where they lived. The patrol was no barrier to his activity. No group of mixed-race men would dare stop a white police captain for questioning.

If Willem Pretorius was involved in the attacks, that fact opened up a whole new set of possibilities regarding his death. What lawful avenue was open to a coloured man when he found a white police captain was molesting his sisters? Tiny and Theo had come after Emmanuel himself with a loaded gun.

He leaned his shoulder against the open gatepost. Candlelight flickered out from behind the curtain in Davida's room. A shadow moved past the window. Signs of a small and secret life. Just what did the shy brown mouse do when night fell?

"You checking the other girls' rooms or just Davida's?" Granny Mariah's question was hard-edged.