Nights of the Creaking Bed

by Toni Kan

  Buzz was in a foul mood, but this was nothing new because Buzz was always in a foul mood. Today was different, though: the dead, big-bosomed woman lying in the puddle at his feet was someone he used to know.

  Buzz looked at the dead woman and then flung the half-smoked cigarette into the overflowing gutter. He circled the woman, looking for something only the experienced eye could see. Buzz was a homicide detective attached to the Pedro police station. A twelve-year veteran, he was the go-to man whenever a stiff turned up.

  Behind him, a woman’s voice was raised in fevered explanation, as if she had been accused of the murder.

  ‘I open door this morning make I piss and the deadi body just tanda for there.’

  Ignoring the raised voice that answered a question no one had asked, Buzz regarded the body with a cocked eyebrow. Bending down, he looked past the woman’s wide open legs, glossed over her pink panties and focused for some time on her enormous breasts. There was something glinting deep between them. Buzz reached in and fished out a necklace and pendant. It was a gold pendant, inlaid with four stones. It looked expensive and out of place on the shabby corpse. He turned it around, and on the other side was the inscription: “To Nana with luv, Otunba.”

  Buzz straightened, lit up and began to walk away with brisk, long strides.

  ‘Buzz, wetin you want us to do?’ a cop asked and, without breaking his stride, Buzz flung a crisp reply over his shoulders.

  ‘Do your job, Mister Man.’

  Nana had worked as a waitress and dancer at No. 7, a seedy bar tucked into one of the labyrinthine streets in Shomolu.

  Buzz had once been a regular for what, seven, eight months? Always on the move, he never dallied anywhere for too long because quotidian routine always left him bored. Which was why he loved his job. No two murders were the same. Every murder, whether pre-meditated or not, had its own signature, its own peculiar DNA, and it was up to people like Buzz to look beyond the surface to see what others could not see.

  It was at No. 7 that Buzz first crossed paths with Nana.

  ‘You have a spare cigarette?’ she asked, sidling up to the high stool beside Buzz.

  He didn’t say a word; he just shook out a cigarette and held it towards her. She took it and stuck it between her lips but made no move to light it. Sighing, Buzz produced his lighter and lit her cigarette, then turned to his beer. He had watched her dance night after night and, though he liked how she moved her fluid and full-figured body on stage, he didn’t want her sitting next to him and making small talk.

  ‘You come here all the time and you never talk. Did somebody steal your tongue?’

  ‘No, no one stole my tongue,’ Buzz said, surprising himself by even bothering to answer. ‘I just like to look.’

  ‘Is your name Lookman?’ she joked and laughed and, surprising himself again, Buzz laughed too.

  ‘Are you married?’ she asked, letting out a perfect ring of smoke.

  ‘Nope,’ Buzz answered.

  ‘But you have a girlfriend?’

  ‘No.’

  She looked at Buzz, and then burst out laughing.

  ‘Buy me a drink and I will be your girlfriend for tonight,’ she told him, tapping her long fingers on the formica top of the bar.

  ‘I don’t need a girlfriend for tonight,’ Buzz said and looked at her from beneath his black fedora.

  ‘Buy me a drink and I will leave you alone,’ she said and laughed her girlish laugh again.

  Buzz bought her a drink, but she didn’t leave him alone. She told him her name was Nana and that she was born in Ghana. She told him she was pursuing a part-time degree programme at the state university and was dancing in bars until something better came along.

  Buzz didn’t believe her but he played along, because he was suddenly keen on seeing what her big breasts looked like when they were set free. And, it had been a while since he’d last had a woman.

  He found out what her breasts looked like four hours and six bottles of beer later, when they both stumbled, half-drunk, into his two-bedroom flat. They kissed slowly as they fell into bed. Then he divested her, taking her top off and gasping when he undid the clasp of her bra and two watermelons sprang at him.

  They made love twice before he fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

  Nana was gone by the time he woke up. He checked for his wallet and the gun he kept under his pillow and, satisfied everything was alright, went back to sleep.

  Buzz went straight to the police station and wrote his preliminary report. Then he made some calls to a few people he knew, people who made it their business to know the kind of things people like Buzz wanted to know. When he was done, he lit another cigarette, put his legs up and shut his eyes, his mind wandering.

  Buzuzu’s ambition had been to get into the military and become an officer. He was intelligent, had left school with good grades and believed he could make it to the Military Academy. He bought the forms for the entrance exam. He passed the exams but was not admitted. He made three more futile attempts before he finally had to accept that getting into the elite academy depended on more than intelligence.

  ‘Let us go to Lagos,’ his father had said. ‘We will go and see my cousin. He retired from the army five years ago. I am sure he can help.’

  But when they arrived, the cousin’s house was in turmoil. Children were crying and women were bawling, while the men stood around with arms folded across their chests, pretending to be strong. That morning the former soldier had been attacked and stabbed to death while out running. One of the blows had been so bad, it severed his jugular.

  Buzz felt not so much grief as a sense of deprivation. It was as if, by dying, his father’s cousin had joined hands with all his other real and imagined adversaries to deprive him of his dream.

  It was that night, after most of the mourners had gone and he was lying wide awake on the mat beside his sleeping father, that he had had his road to Damascus experience. In a moment of clarity, the face of the dead man’s widow had loomed before him in all its grief-stricken ugliness and Buzz vowed, there and then, to make sure that no murderer ever went scot-free, if he could help it.

  ‘Papa, I want to join the police,’ he told his father the next day.

  Homicide was a natural choice. His success rate was high because he was thorough and detailed in his investigations, with a natural nose, colleagues and superiors agreed, for sniffing out murderers. But sometimes, there were obstacles where men of power and influence suddenly appeared on the horizon, obscuring the landscape of an investigation with their shifty eyes and their blood-stained fingers.

  ‘Take it easy, Buzz,’ his Divisional Police Officer told him once, when an investigation led them to the doorstep of a rich and influential politician. Rising from his seat and coming to perch by the edge of the table in front of Buzz, he placed an avuncular hand on the young man’s shoulder and said, ‘Our job is to serve and protect, but remember we are only too human and, most of all, remember it’s just a job. So take a week off, go and see your parents in the village. By the time you come back, we will have sorted this out. Someone else will die and you will do what you do best. But on this one, your job is done.’

  Buzz rose, saluted and walked out, a lump in his throat.

  His DPO was right. There would always be two sets of rules, one for the rich and one for the poor, but the DPO was wrong about one thing: his work as a homicide detective was not just a job. It was a calling.

  No. 7 looked different. The walls had a new coat of paint. The long stools were new and the formica top had given way to tiles. Buzz ordered a beer. He drank, belched and lit a cigarette.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said, motioning to the bartender. ‘I am looking for Nana. Has she come in today?’

  The barman shook his head. ‘I never see her. You know say she no dey work here again.’

  ‘Oh, I never come here in a long time. Where I go see Nana?’

  ‘I no know. But she come here yester-night with Mr. Next-door.’
<
br />   ‘Ok. Next-door don come in today?’

  ‘No, but if you wait small, you go see am when e come in.’

  ‘Ok. Give me another beer and one for you,’ Buzz told him and sat down to wait.

  Buzz waited till past midnight, drank two more bottles of beer, bought the barman, who said his name was Jango, as many bottles, then stood up to leave when Next-door still hadn’t shown up at 2am.

  ‘If e no come today, e go come tomorrow,’ Jango said, slurring his speech and holding out Buzz’s change. Buzz waved him off, said goodnight and went home.

  He was back the next night and the one after, but Next-door didn’t show up. It didn’t stop Buzz from enjoying his drink, though, and, watching the girls dancing on stage, he remembered the night Nana had come to him at the bar and asked him whether his name was Lookman.

  On the fourth night, Next-door ambled in. Buzz thought he looked like shit. Tall, dark and lean, he wore his guilt like a tattoo. It was so bad, you could see it even if you weren’t looking. The moment he stepped in, Buzz knew he was the man, even before the barman nodded to indicate that his quarry had arrived.

  Next-door had one drink and then rose to leave. It was obvious that he had come expecting to meet someone or have someone join him because he kept glancing at the door and looking at his wrist watch. Buzz gave him a minute’s lead before he drained his glass, slapped a five hundred naira note on the bar and headed out after him.

  Next-door was standing beside a car and passing water when Buzz came out of the bar and began to walk towards him. Something, a sixth sense or primordial warning system, must have set off an alarm, because the moment Next-door looked up and saw Buzz crossing the street, he cursed and began to run, trailing urine as he sped down the street.

  Buzz gave chase but Next-door was fast and fit and as Buzz increased his pace to catch up, he cursed all the cigarettes he had smoked, all the pinched butt-ends crowding the old glass bowl that served as an ashtray in his room.

  Next-door tore down the street, turned the corner and leapt over a parked car. Buzz burst out just in time to see him crash into a couple and the three of them fell in a heap. Buzz increased his pace, his heart pounding as he laboured to narrow the lead. But Next-door was up in a flash and running with a slight limp. He turned another corner and burst out on Bawala Street. Next-door jumped over the gutter and stopped suddenly. In a brief moment his body was illuminated by the headlights of an oncoming vehicle.

  Buzz saw the car hit Next-door, who flew up and rolled over the roof to land on the road with a loud thud.

  By the time Buzz reached him, a small crowd had gathered.

  ‘Police! Police!’ Buzz said, panting and clearing a path through the crowd. He felt for a pulse on the bloody and bent neck, but found none. The man was dead. Buzz searched through Next-door’s pockets with one hand, keeping the other on his gun, his senses alert to the eyes in the crowd watching him. He pulled out a wallet and rifled through it. Inside were naira notes and call cards. On the back of one of the cards was a phone number and address, hand-written in blue ink. Underneath, in a different scrawl, someone had added Otunba Bakare in red ink, followed by a phone number and note in blue that said, “meet Otunba at No 7 by 8pm.” Buzz was sure Otunba Bakare was the same Otunba who gave Nana the necklace, but he was not so sure that the number in blue ink belonged to the name in red.

  Buzz pushed the wallet back into Next-door’s pocket, palmed the card and reached for his mobile. He dialled a number and spoke rapidly into it. Then he put it back in his pocket and began to walk away.

  ‘Hey, who go carry dis dead body?’ someone screamed, but Buzz just kept walking.

  Back at home, he set the card down on his table and gazed intently at it, as if by staring hard at the blue and red scrawl, the answer he sought would jump up and smack his forehead with a thump.

  Who was Otunba and why was he turning up like a bad penny everywhere he looked? Why did Next-door run when he hadn’t even been asked a question? What was Otunba’s name doing on a card in Next-door’s back pocket and on the pendant of a dead woman? Still ruminating on these and other questions, Buzz shrugged off his sweat-drenched clothes, stepped into the shower and cursed when the water didn’t come spurting out. He scooped water into a bucket from the reservoir he kept and showered with that, while his mind wandered.

  He slept fitfully, rising early to go to the police station. As he entered, he saw a young, prematurely-aged girl lying on the bench behind the counter. She had on heavy make-up and her lipstick was smudged. Her short skirt had ridden up to expose blue panties. Buzz stopped and tapped her on the shoulder.

  ‘How is your father?’ he asked when her eyes fluttered open.

  ‘Wetin? Abeg leave me alone,’ she snapped, and went back to sleep.

  She was a prostitute, but Buzz had known her years earlier when he was a rookie cop and she was a prepubescent teenager with a penchant for tight clothes. Her father was his landlord then: a hard-drinking, skirt-chasing husband of four wives and father of fourteen children.

  Acknowledging greetings from his colleagues, Buzz went to his desk and opened the drawer. He updated his report, adding details of the chase and the fatal crash that claimed Next-door, but leaving out every reference to Otunba. No need to get thrown off the case. Then, he checked his gun, holstered it and, picking up the card, set out for Oyadiran estate in Yaba, the address on the card.

  Buzz asked the okada man, the driver of one of the ubiquitous second-hand bikes that serve as quick transportation for many Lagosians, to let him off four houses away from No. 387. Then he walked all the way down the street before sitting at a mallam’s shed and ordering cigarettes, even though he had a pack in his jacket. Pulling his fedora down over his eyes, he smoked slowly while his gaze focused on a house with a small black gate. It was an insignificant house, made more prominent by the very reason of its insignificance. It looked out of place in the midst of the stately, well-appointed houses that lined the quiet street, occupied mostly by expatriates and Indian merchants.

  It was the kind of house that seemed to scream out a silent warning, the kind of place where people entered and never came out again. The gate was set into a corner of the wall and someone had defaced it with a deranged scrawl that started with an F and ended with what looked like a k.

  Buzz sat and waited for the length of time it took for him to smoke six cigarettes and watch two men, one short and bushy-haired, the other tall and gangly, park an old Mercedes Benz outside and disappear through the gate.

  Buzz waited until they came out again. Then he dialled the number on the call card, and to his surprise, the short man answered on the second ring. Buzz ended the call and dialled again just to make sure.

  This time he let it ring and then heard the gruff voice say, ‘Haba, who is this?’ the question carrying across the road to him.

  Buzz ended the call again and began walking, his eyes scanning the road for an okada, as he heard the old Benz cough to life and begin to move. The Benz was already about one hundred metres away when he found a bike.

  ‘Quick. Follow that Mercedes.’

  Buzz was just in time to see the Benz turn off at Atan cemetery and head towards Customs.

  ‘Just go slow, no run too much,’ Buzz told the okada man as he handed him a two hundred naira note. The Benz burst out at Abule-Oja, drove all the way to the Unilag gate and turned left towards Akoka. At Pako, the driver turned left and then made a series of turns until they were at Fola Agoro.

  When the Benz came to a stop, the short man got out and went to a tyre shop. He spoke to a beefy man who was naked from the waist up. Buzz paid the okada man and watched as they spoke. Then, when the short man returned to the car and the car started moving, Buzz hailed another bike and gave chase.

  As the car meandered through the crowded streets of Shomolu with its many printers’ shops, Buzz had an overwhelming feeling that he knew where the Benz was heading and he gave himself a mental pat on the back when it came to a
halt in front of No. 7.

  As Buzz watched the men go into the bar, he knew at once that this was where the story was meant to end because this was where it had all begun. He paid the okada man and reached into his jacket to check his holstered gun. Satisfied, Buzz crossed the road and approached the bar.

  The gate was open. Buzz checked to see that there was no one at the door. Then he entered the compound, pushed the door open slowly with his right foot and edged into the dimly-lit space.

  He made out three men as his eyes adjusted to the barely-lit interior. There was the barman looking cowed as he stood in front of the two men. The tall, thin one was seated, a cigarette burning between his lips, while the short one had a gun in his hand.

  ‘Otunba, make I waste this guy? He is lying to us,’ the short man said, waving the gun around like someone high on very cheap drugs.

  ‘Tell us the man name and we go leave you alone,’ the Otunba said in a wheezy voice.

  ‘I no sabi the man name. E come here and e ask for Mr. Next-door. The first night, e no see Mr. Next-door, then the day wey e see Mr. Next-door na im we hear say car don kill Mr. Next-door.’

  ‘The man come here two days and you no sabi im name?’ the Otunba asked and the barman nodded.

  ‘E no ask my name and I no ask im name,’ the barman lied.

  ‘Otunba, dis man dey talk nonsense,’ the short man said and hit the barman on the head with the butt of his pistol.

  ‘Don, easy,’ the Otunba said as the barman screamed and raised a palm to check whether he was bleeding.

  ‘Tell us the man name and we go leave you alone,’ the Otunba said and stood up.

  ‘Put your hands up!’ Buzz barked, gun in hand as he strode towards them.

  The short man was fast. Buzz didn’t even see it coming.

  One second, he was raising the gun, its nozzle pointing downwards. The next second, the gun was spitting fire. Buzz crouched low as the bullet whizzed past, and then he let off two shots and saw the short man drop. By the time he rose to his feet, the Otunba had dashed behind the bar and disappeared.