To cut a long story short, the killer made one fatal mistake – he had left a partial thumbprint on the note. Five years later there was a fire in a hotel basement that was put out without much damage, but because we suspected arson we fingerprinted all the hotel guests and employees and crosschecked the fingerprints against our database. We didn’t catch the arsonist but it turned out that our Random Killer had been holed up in the hotel doing all sorts of things with a hooker. Nothing much to him in the end; just a local pharmacist with a loving wife and kids.
When he was brought in I looked him straight in the eye and told him that he had fucked up. A perfect crime has no motive. And if there is no motive, then there’s no crime? But he just looked up at me with pity in his eyes. ‘You are a fool,’ he said. ‘Did it not occur to you, Detective, that I was trying to prove that chance is not random?’
I don’t know what the hell he meant by that, and he refused to say another word – to me, to his lawyers, to his kids and wife – but this much I did know: there had to be a connection between the white girl and the African professor. If I found it, I would be closer to understanding what had happened. There had to be a connection, but what was it? I was tired as hell but I woke up early that morning to go see the coroner – one strange dude.
‘Always stuck with the real pretty ones, ain’t we, Ishmael?’ Bill Quella – BQ for short – said as he pulled the girl out of storage, his Southern twang, sing-songy and a little high-pitched for a man, echoing off the tiles.
‘Unlucky in life, lucky in death I guess,’ I answered.
BQ laughed a nervous squeal of a laugh. He, like everybody else I worked with, knew my wife had left me. What they didn’t know was that she had left me because I was a black cop. At least that is what she’d said. I didn’t understand. How could I be a traitor to my race when I was protecting it? But then there were lots of things I didn’t understand around that time, like how you could ask a man to choose between his life’s work and love?
‘Do you want to know what she chowed down before she met her untimely death?’ BQ asked, pulling back the sheet to reveal the girl.
The glow she had had in death was gone. With cross-stitched sutures running along her chest, across her belly and below her hairline – where BQ had cracked her open – she looked like a white leather mannequin. By the time BQ had finished with them the dead always looked like the dead.
‘Spare me the details …’ I grumbled, ‘just get to it.’
‘Well, Detective Ishmael, you sure gonna love this. It was murder made to look like an overdose.’
BQ paused for dramatic effect, but I wasn’t biting. ‘How do you know?’ I asked, careful to keep the surprise out of my voice.
‘Real easy … For a start the heroin was injected into her arm after she was long gone. Exhibit A: no trace of it in her blood. And B: see this …’ He pointed to her arm. ‘This is the only needle mark on her whole precious body. She was no addict.’
More questions than answers. ‘How did she die then?’
‘She was asphyxiated. A pillow over her head I would guess …’ he said. ‘She died from oxygen deprivation. Poor thing was murdered.’
‘What time?’
‘My guess? Somewhere between eleven pm and one am.’ BQ paused. ‘Look here, Detective, I might be going off half-cocked, but whoever killed her didn’t want to destroy her. My guess is it was someone who knew her well, someone who might even have loved her …’
I made it to the Madison Police Station around nine am to find it in chaos. Someone had called the press – someone always calls the press – and they had set up camp on the steps, pulling in dozens of civilians, all of them struggling to see what was going on. We should have been better prepared. We should have had some kind of media strategy. But instead, as I pushed through the crowd, I saw the Police Chief, Jackson Jordan, standing in the eye of the storm, trying to calm everyone down. He would hold a press conference with the Mayor as soon as they had more information, he was telling the assembled throng as calmly as he could.
Luckily the press didn’t know I was the lead detective and I made it to the Chief’s office relatively unscathed. He came in shortly, huffing and puffing, calling the press all sorts of names. I knew what the problem was. Jackson Jordan was the black police chief of a mostly white police force in a mostly white town. The victim was a young white woman and the main suspect, even though not officially, was a black man, an African. There would be the facts of the case and the politics of the case, and the two never mix well. None of this was said between us, we just understood it.
Jackson Jordan had been elected because he was tough on crime. That is, he was tough on black crime. I respected the Chief well enough to work under him, but it wasn’t always easy. He was liable to pander to politics, and I always followed the evidence to wherever it led – to the cat selling two rocks by the corner liquor store; to the Mayor or the Governor himself. But like I said, I liked him well enough to work under him, and at the end of the day we all had a grudging respect for him.
‘Chief, I’m working this case alone,’ I said.
My partner, a white guy, had just retired and I knew where this was going – a white partner for the nigger cop to make everyone feel safe. But I wasn’t going to have it. If I was going to get a partner, I wanted one for the right reasons, not to balance the racial math.
‘Who’s the girl?’ the Chief asked, ignoring my statement.
As I didn’t know I gave him BQ’s report instead. He sank into his chair and ran his hand over his balding head. Now in his fifties, the Chief was the kind of fat that cops get when they spend too much time behind the desk – not an obese fat, just a lazy roundness that seems unbecoming for a police officer.
‘Tell me about the African …’ the Chief said.
There was nothing much to tell beyond the bare facts. Joshua had told me that he had found her on his doorstep, dead. He had an alibi and his place was clean; no signs of a struggle inside or outside. There had been no visible scratches or marks on him. And he hadn’t given himself away with any of the usual telltales. The body seemed to have literally fallen on his doorstep.
‘Did you tear the place apart?’ the Chief asked.
I hadn’t. My first instinct was that whatever had happened hadn’t happened in Joshua’s house – I had been convinced of it and BQ’s estimated time of death had pretty much confirmed my suspicions. I tried to explain but the Chief said he would send forensics in anyway. ‘A fucking murder,’ he muttered under his breath. ‘Just what I need …’ He paused. ‘Listen, this African of yours is some sort of hero back in his country.’
He handed me a folder from his desk. It contained newspaper and magazine articles about the African taken from the Internet. He was indeed a hero. There were photos of him with Bill Clinton, Nelson Mandela and even the Dalai Lama. He had even received a humanitarian award from Bill Gates. There were many articles about him surrounded by kids, him holding larger-than-life cheques in the thousands of dollars made out to something called the Never Again Foundation. I had heard of it before, Hollywood types were always appearing on TV appealing for donations, ending their spiel with the now famous catchphrase, ‘Not on my watch!’ It wasn’t clear from the cuttings what Joshua’s relationship to the Foundation was – in some he was named as a founder, in others as a past chairman – but whatever it was it seemed like the man was at the centre of every good deed. And every other do-gooder wanted a photo with him.
Initially, I was a little bitter – cops die every day without as much as a nod from the powers that be – but reading on I saw that he had earned every accolade he had received. A former headmaster, he had turned his deserted school into a safe haven during the Rwandan genocide. Revered by the genocidaires, who were his former students, he had persuaded them to let him and the school where they had once been students alone. An Island of Sanity In a Sea of Blood one headline screamed. He gave sanctuary to thousands, many of whom he managed to smuggle over
the border one way or another. But at the height of the genocide his former students surrounded the school and told him, ‘No more in; no more out.’ After this those who tried to make it in were massacred.
This is where his story became even more remarkable. During the siege he was only allowed to drive in and out with a driver and a bodyguard, but this didn’t stop him. He ferried out two refugees at a time – disguised as his driver and bodyguard – and smuggled them over the border to camps in Tanzania and Kenya. On his way back to the school he would then pick up two more of those trying to escape the violence and dress them up as his driver and bodyguard.
What a story!
Now I could see why he was so calm in the face of the white girl’s death. It must have taken nerves of steel to pull the same trick over and over again, risking not only his own life but also the lives of all those inside the school. He hadn’t been exaggerating. He had lived with death, and a dead white girl on his doorstep was just one more dead amongst a million. Only the living would interest a man like him.
‘You can find all that stuff online, but take the file,’ the Chief said as we both stood up. ‘Ishmael, we’ve been at this for a long time now, what does your gut tell you?’ he asked after a pause.
In our world, this is not a light question. On the surface it meant we had nothing much to go by but underneath it meant that he was prepared to stick his neck out on my say. It’s a rare question.
‘He may be a hero somewhere in Africa, but he’s mixed up in this shit somehow,’ I said, remembering how I had drawn my gun – that was my gut speaking. ‘It’s simple, Chief, when was the last time a body landed on your doorstep from nowhere?’
‘We have to get the son of a bitch who did this. You hear me?’ he said fiercely. ‘This is a little more than the department looking bad.’
I understood him. If we solved what was going to be a high-profile case, it would open more doors for black people in the force. And if we fucked up, other doors would close. It didn’t make things any easier.
Just as I stepped outside the Chief’s door my cellphone rang. It was my contact at The Madison Times, a small ragtag tabloid that everybody read. Most cops, if they want to leak something, go to the big papers, but over the years I had learned that criminals, accomplices and those that wish them ill don’t read the Wisconsin State Journal, and they certainly don’t read The New York Times. If you want to get something back from your leak, get it to the small papers – everyone reads them. So I was glad it was Monique Shantell, or Mo as she preferred to be called, on the phone.
‘Hey, Ishmael, you got something for me?’ She sounded all sorts of sexy.
‘Are you outside with the rest of them?’ I asked.
‘You know me, baby, I don’t swim with the sharks. You must be ready for breakfast. Meet me at the usual place.’
The press looked up as I walked down the steps and convulsed towards me, realised I was not the Chief and went back to their chatter. For them, there were only two kinds of black people in the police station – those in handcuffs and the Chief.
I found Mo in my favourite little coffee shop, a few blocks from the station. I was a regular because they made the best coffee in Madison – milk, coffee, water and sugar boiled together for hours on end. Mo was beautiful and she knew it. She would never date me for the same reason that my wife had left me – I was a black cop and I sometimes arrested black people: I was a traitor to my race. At least that’s what I told myself. I didn’t like the alternative – that she just wasn’t attracted to me.
‘The shit will hit the fan with this one,’ Mo said after I had given her a copy of the girl’s Polaroid and a random story from the file the Chief had given me.
‘Yeah, but you don’t mind being in the trenches. Wear them boots,’ I teased her.
‘You know something? It makes sense that he would kill her and leave her body right there,’ she said with conviction.
‘Why?’ I asked. She had my attention.
‘You’re the detective, you tell me,’ she said and laughed. ‘Gotta run, babe, story to write, Pulitzer to win.’ She stood up, leaned over and kissed me lightly on my mouth. That’s how she kept my hopes alive. I didn’t mind.
I stared at my coffee thinking about the legwork in front of me. Jesus, don’t I hate it, but the devil is in the details as they say. So I went to the university and talked with Joshua’s alibis – they had parted ways somewhere between half twelve and one am. The cops going through registration records had found nothing. The neighbours had seen nothing. No, there was nothing out of the ordinary about him. I went to motels around Madison: nothing. Missing person’s files: nothing.
In the meantime the forensic search of Joshua’s house had also produced nothing – and they had torn the place apart, even stripped his car. The Chief had then pulled Joshua’s phone, credit card, and bank records, but even this move had failed to deliver any new information. Not only did the girl not exist, there was absolutely nothing to tie her to Joshua except that we had found her dead on his doorstep. By the end of that day, my only hope was that Mo’s story would reveal a grieving parent, sibling, lover, or just someone who had served her some coffee – anyone who had seen her before she died.
Mo’s story broke the following day, but it didn’t bring us any new information. Instead it made race relations much worse. Just the week before some Hmong guy had shot five white hunters, picking them off one by one. Afterwards he had said that they fired at him first, but how do you shoot five armed men in self-defence?
The Hmong guy was an immigrant, and here was another killing by an immigrant. It didn’t matter that this immigrant was also a hero, and not just any hero but one who had saved hundreds from death in the middle of genocide. The KKK, led by a nasty-looking little man called James Wellstone, began mobilising its members from outlying farming towns to march across Madison and, according to their more radical members, lynch him. I had knocked some respect into James a couple of years earlier when he had entered my office yelling niggers this, niggers that after a white kid, a prep boy who loved his weed, had been beaten up in Allied Drive. And so when he came to the station to get a rally permit I did my best to talk him out of doing something stupid, but I knew that the best I could hope for was an uneasy peace.
Meanwhile, as I had expected, CNN, The New York Times and talk TV and Radio shows had picked up Mo’s story – the same photograph being shown over and over again. In a few short hours the girl had come to represent all that was right and had gone wrong in America. The whites felt they were under siege; the black folk felt that white justice was going too far in incriminating Joshua.
To make it worse, the Mayor and Governor were coming down hard on the Chief, but not so hard as to rally the blacks against them. Politicians are masters of double speak. If the Mayor says that he ‘trusts the Chief of Police will do all in his power to ensure that the right thing is done’, to the whites it means that the Chief won’t hesitate to hang a fellow black man if it comes down to it. To the blacks it means – don’t forget who owns the police.
Only two days had gone by yet the dance was in full motion. The black leaders – Jesse Jackson-Al Sharpton-types – had crawled out of the woodwork for another fifteen minutes of fame, rallying around Joshua, calling him the black Schindler. The Mayor and Governor were guaranteeing results – hoping for a lifetime of white votes. Even the KKK had new recruits. Only one thing would remain unchanged – the white trailers, the black ghettoes and the cops holding down the lid so that nothing spilled into Maple Bluff.
I was getting angry and had to remind myself to stay focused. This was my job and I was going to follow the evidence wherever it led me. They say for each detective there is the one case that makes or breaks him or her. My training and my other cases had led me here. I would follow this path to whatever end. My reason was simple but immutable – it was wrong that someone had killed her and even more wrong for the killer to go free. My allegiance was to the dead white girl.
She had died alone. No one had claimed her.
As the second day came to an end I still had nothing, not even her name. It’s not that we hadn’t tried everything. By that evening her clothes, her nail polish, her stomach contents – you name it – had gone through forensics. We had even managed to trace the trash from Maple Bluff to the dumping grounds and rummaged through it. And we still had nothing that would narrow her down from the millions of young women who shop in malls and occasionally eat a slice of pepperoni pizza.
At eight o’clock that evening with nothing more to do, I decided to pay Joshua a visit. He was under heavy police protection, and I had to show my badge several times before finally knocking on his door. There was a uniform inside and he let me in, but to my surprise, I didn’t find the same Joshua I had met just two nights earlier.
‘I survived! I will not die here!’ He was pacing up and down in his silk pyjamas, clearly agitated, in his hand a nearly empty bottle of red wine. He looked much thinner and much taller. ‘Never again,’ he said. ‘Never again.’
He must have known that the MBPD cops were there to protect him from being lynched – he wasn’t under arrest – but it didn’t seem to matter to him. He had gone somewhere inside his own head, somewhere where what was happening around him made a different kind of sense, and when he looked at me it was without any sign of recognition. In fact, it was only once he had emptied the bottle of wine, and sent the cop to the wine cellar with the order ‘Any year will do’, that he looked at me like he knew who I was. ‘Sit,’ he commanded. I sat. ‘We shall drink any year, all year and celebrate America, eh?’ he asked sarcastically. ‘You, I answer all your question with no warrant, eh? Why did you send police to search my home?’ But before I could answer he said, to no one in particular, ‘But I understand. You similar, like all of them … You only follow order, no?’
Nairobi Heat Page 2
