by Smith, Roger
He shrugs, lets the chair fall forward with a clatter and empties the Coke down his throat, burping even louder. “Don’t worry with breakfast for me. I gotta be somewhere.” He stands and shoves his chair back.
Yvonne is already beating the eggs in the bowl. She stops, the yellow yolk dripping from the egg beater. They’ll go to waste now.
“Boy, I need my insulin,” she says. “It’s getting really low.”
She waits for him to lose his temper but he doesn’t. Just nods, tucking his shirt into his jeans. “Okay, I buy you some today.”
He walks out whistling “Tie A Yellow Ribbon Round The Old Oak Tree.” She hates that song. It was her husband’s favorite, they even played it at their wedding, and she can’t hear it without seeing his brains smeared all over their bed, positive that Vernon whistles it to torment her. Yvonne feels sick, the smell of the eggs enough to make her puke.
She hardly shut her eyes in the night. The screaming from the next-door shack was the worst it’s ever been. She tried to put the pillow over her head, to block her ears, but it didn’t help. Whatever sympathy Yvonne had for the little one inside that shack is gone, she’s worried about herself now. She can’t go without sleep night after blessed night, not with her hypertension and diabetes.
This morning she barely had the strength to drag herself from the bed, and as she pulled her robe over her nightdress she saw bruises on both her arms. Not from Vernon, he hasn’t hurt her for a while, and she didn’t remember bumping herself. She lifted the hem of her nightdress and saw more bruises on her legs. Not bruises, she realized, but burst blood vessels. From the blood-thinners she’s on to control her blood pressure. The stress from living with what her son has become, coupled with not sleeping, is just too much for her.
Yvonne walks away from the stove and opens the back door to get some air. The screams are even louder now. Before she can stop herself she hurries through to the phone in the living room and dials the cops.
Speaks to some girl who sounds like a child herself. Tells her about the screams. Gives the address but refuses to leave her name. She hangs up, knowing that she’s wasted her time. The cops will do nothing.
Yvonne goes through to the airless bathroom, still stinking from Vernon’s morning visit to the lavatory, and soaps under her arms and between her legs, doesn’t have the strength for a shower. She dries herself and pads barefoot into the bedroom and pulls on a T-shirt and sweatpants, knows she looks a sight, but who’s going to see her?
She slumps down on the bed, arms dangling, staring at dust dancing in a shaft of sunlight that pokes through a tear in the curtain. She sits like that until she’s covered in sweat and the room is like an oven.
She opens the curtains, letting some air in, and the first thing she sees is two cops, a man and a woman, in their gray-blue uniforms and bullet-proof vests, walking up to the next-door shack. Yvonne jumps away from the window in case they spot her.
She hears banging on the shack door, the woman cop ordering them to open up. Nothing happens, so she bangs again. Yvonne edges forward, peeping between the curtains, more confident now the cops have their backs to her. The woman leans down and tries to look in the only window of the shack but it’s blocked off with cardboard.
The man cop hammers on the door and the thin whine of the child starts up, growing louder and louder, like a siren. The woman draws her gun, a big thing in her hand, and the man takes a step back and kicks at the door, planting the sole of his boot high on the rotten wood. It splinters but holds. He steps back and kicks again and the door tears free of the loops of wire that keep it in place and falls inward.
Now, Yvonne is no stranger to human cruelty, not after what she’s lived through in this very house. But nothing, as true as God in all his heavens, has prepared her for what she sees as that door flies open and the bright sun floods the room, hitting the thing writhing on a mattress, and the thing becomes the jailbird and the baby, their shadows flung against the torn walls of the shack.
Chapter 31
Terror gnawing at Exley’s entrails rips him screaming from his sleep. He is assaulted by consciousness, literally experiences it as a blow to the solar plexus, curling himself into a fetal position, trying to grab onto the coat-tails of oblivion and drag it back. Too late.
Catapulted by panic from Sunny’s bed, he stands in the litter of her toys, gasping for breath, his heart a wrecking ball in his chest, his mind full of knife blades and shit and blood and death.
He’s dripping with sweat, and even though he wears a clean T-shirt and boxers—he has no recall of shedding the clothes in which he committed murder—his nostrils are full of the old-iron stink of blood.
He flexes his left hand, the wrapping of bandage and surgical tape tight on his flesh, a reminder of those moments before he killed Caroline.
When he still had a choice.
Exley goes to the window and stares out into the cauterizing brightness and has no idea how to begin to process the last day, wishing he could retreat into the convenient Hindu trope that there is no reality, that all is maya, all is illusion. Newsflash: this is your life, Nicholas Exley, and it is fucking real, okay?
And then the big question tries to batter its way into his consciousness: who the fuck are you? Not ready for that. Not now. So, okay, let’s ease into this, he tells himself. Let’s rather try and figure out who you are not.
Not a father.
Not a husband.
Not an innocent.
Which leads to the inevitable answer to the first question: he’s a killer three times over. Killed his child through negligence. Killed his wife in a moment of conscious fury. Killed that homeless Rasta by allowing Vernon Saul’s dark gospel to prevail.
The doorbell startles Exley and he finds his glasses beside the bed and stumbles into the corridor toward the intercom phone and manages to say, “Yes?”
“Hey, Nick. Open up.” Vernon Saul, sounding full of spunk and vigor.
A real fucking piece of work, as Exley’s late father would have said.
Exley wants to slink away and hide, curl up somewhere and let the world continue hurtling forward without his participation, but he hits the button to open the gate and walks down the stairs. He’s in his socks and the big toe of his left foot emerges through a hole, naked and pink. He reaches the bottom step and stops, his motor nerves seizing at the sight that awaits him: the cheerful morning light illuminating the horror that is his kitchen.
Exley is astonished by the volume of blood. The tiled floor is awash with it, the plasma drying brown and viscous. There are wild Jackson Pollock splatters across the kitchen cabinets and the counters. The second hand of the wall clock ticks away gamely beneath glass made semi-opaque by blood. The refrigerator sports a red handprint. Exley resists the temptation to walk over and match a palm to it, to see if it is his or Caroline’s.
A loud banging on the front door jolts Exley into motion and he follows the spoor of dark blood that the cops and crime techs tracked onto the Labrador-colored carpet. He opens the door to find Vernon flanked by two brown men in blue jumpsuits, each with a kitbag slung over his shoulder.
“Nick, meet Dougie and Oscar. They do trauma cleanups. Brought them to sort out your kitchen.” The two men nod, regarding Exley with eyes empty of curiosity.
Exley steps back and Vernon heaves his way into the house. “Nick,” he says, “why don’t you chill in your computer room? I’ll get these guys going then we can have a talk, okay?” Without waiting for an answer he heads off toward the kitchen, the brown men at his heels.
Exley doesn’t have a better idea so he walks down to the studio and slides open the door, the murk drawing him in, the room silent but for the hum of his workstation. Shutting the door, Exley settles back in the Aeron chair, letting it enfold him. He closes his eyes, trying to breathe through the horrific images his memory keeps serving him, trying to remain detached.
The door bumps open and Vernon, stinking of cheap aftershave and hair gel, loud
gusts of air escaping his nostrils, clatters his way inside and falls into a chair that protests at his weight.
Exley sits upright, attempting to present himself with some authority, even though he’s in his underwear. “What do you want, Vernon?”
The big man shakes his head. “Come again?”
“Do you want money? For what you did?”
Vernon forces a laugh, strangely high pitched and girlish. “You’re kidding me, right?”
“No, Vernon, I’m not kidding.”
“Jesus, Nick, now you’ve offended me.”
“Then explain to me what you want.”
“I don’t want nothing from you.”
“Nothing?”
Vernon shrugs. “I just want to help, is all.”
“By shooting that homeless man?”
“Come, Nick, where you going with this? You’re off the hook. What’s the bloody problem?”
“The problem is you killed him.”
“Just like you killed your wife.”
“That’s different.”
“Ja? How?”
“What you did was cold-blooded murder.”
Vernon laughs. “You reckon a court of law gonna think what you done is any better than what I done?”
When Exley says nothing, Vernon reaches forward and lays a hand on his bare knee and Exley flinches and wheels himself away from the big man’s clammy touch.
“Nick, just take it easy now. You saw the guy. He was starving, living like an animal. Half out of his mind and probably rotten with AIDS. How long do you think he would’ve lasted? I did him a favor by putting him out of his misery.” Exley shakes his head. “Nick, why not just go with the version we told the cops?”
“Because I know the truth.”
“The truth, Nick? What the fuck’s the truth? Back when I was a detective I’d interview ten witnesses who seen the same shit go down and each and every one got his own version, swears it’s true. Hear me, man, it’s not a lie if you believe it, buddy. So, believe the guy killed your wife. Simple.”
In that moment Exley understands that it really is that simple for Vernon Saul. He has the sociopath’s gift of wholly believing his own fabrications. Exley shakes his head again, staring at a pilot light winking beneath the console of his computer, like an airplane at night. He feels the urge to phone the police captain and confess. Unburden himself.
“Nick, we not gonna have a problem, are we?” Vernon asks, as if he’s reading Exley’s mind.
“What do you mean?” Exley says, looking into those lifeless eyes.
“Just understand something here, my friend. Right now the cops are happy as pigs in shit. A high-profile case is closed. They gonna be very pissed off if they have to open it again. Not gonna like you very much. And I can tell you how it’ll play out: you’ll be the rich whitey who murders his wife then hires some poor colored fucker—that would be me—to waste a homeless darkie and pin it on him. No fucken wriggle room there, Nick. No self-defense. No sympathy from the court. We’re talking first-degree murder, on not one, but two counts. You’ll die in prison, my friend. That what you want?”
Exley stares at Vernon. “And you’d support that version of events?”
“Hey, if you drop the ball I gotta look out for number one, Nick. Plea-bargain for all my ass is worth. Nothing personal, understand?”
“Yes, I understand.” And Exley does understand. Understands that his fear has trumped his morality. He manages a hollow laugh. “Okay, Vernon’s version it is, then.”
The big man laughs, too. “Vernon’s version. Hey, I like that! So, we okay, you and me?”
“Yes, we’re okay.”
“Good. You just need a couple of days, Nick, to get over the shock. Then things will calm down and you’ll be thinking clearer. Ready for your new life. You know what I mean?”
Exley shrugs. They sit in silence, Vernon jiggling his good leg, shaking some change in his pocket, his loud breath washing the room.
A trilling sound announces a Skype call and Exley, relieved at the interruption, wheels himself to his computer and sees the name “Alberto” displayed in the little orange and white window. Normally he’d ignore this—Alberto Pereira is a dilettante, a Brazilian playboy who bought Life in a Box on a whim—but right now any voice from outside this madness is welcome.
Exley clicks the red button to accept the call and Pereira’s tanned face appears on the monitor, all white teeth and dark hair, like a South American racing driver.
“Al,” Exley says, keeping his webcam disabled, unwilling to let the eyes of the world in.
“Nick, where the hell you been? I been trying you on your cell and sending you emails, man.” Pereira’s Americanized drawl booms from the speakers.
“I’ve been busy.”
“Listen, dude, you gotta help me. I’m doing this music video and I need to capture a girl dancing but your system, man, it’s giving me hassles.”
“It’s not the system,” Exley says, “it’s you.”
“Whatever. I’m emailing you the music right now, kinda of an updated Astrid Gilberto, samba thing. Just get some girl out there in Cape Town to shake her ass nicely and send me the motion stream. I’ll make it worth your while.”
“Can’t do it, Alberto. Sorry.”
“Nick, I’m not taking no for an answer,” the Brazilian says, smiling irresistibly, shaking his curly locks. “Just listen to it, okay?”
Alberto ends the call and disappears. In a moment a ping announces the arrival of an email.
“That the music coming through?” Vernon asks.
“Yeah.”
“So play it.”
“No. Not now.”
“Come on, Nick. For me, buddy. I’m a music lover.”
It’s the last thing Exley’s in the mood for, but he clicks on the MP3 and brassy salsa fills the studio. Staccato drumbeats and absurd Brazilian love calls. Vernon gets a little groove going in his seat, moving his massive shoulders, clicking his fingers. Disturbing to witness. Exley mutes the music.
“I’m feeling it, Nick,” Vernon says, drumming fingers on his knee. “Where’s he, this guy?”
“Rio.”
“So you gonna do it for him?”
“No way.”
“Why not?”
“Jesus, Vernon, at a time like this?”
“Do you good, get your mind off all this crazy shit.”
Exley shakes his head. “No. And where the hell would I find a dancer, anyway?”
Vernon taps himself on the chest. “Me.”
Exley stares him, shaking his head. “He wants a girl, Vernon.”
“No, man, don’t be an asshole. I can get you the perfect girl. Professional. Even looks Brazilian.”
Exley waves his hands, killing this at source. “No ways. Forget it, Vernon. You hearing me?”
Vernon says, “Ja, ja” but what he’s hearing is his cell phone bleating in his pocket. He clicks it open and says, “Vernon Saul.” Gets to his feet, grimacing, shaking blood into his withered leg. “Okay, gimme fifteen minutes.” He closes the phone and pockets it. “That’s the cops, down in Hout Bay. They wanna go over a few things with me. Don’t worry, Nick, just routine shit.”
“Okay,” Exley says, uneasy in the knowledge that his fate rests in this lunatic’s hands.
Vernon looms over him. “So, I’ll speak to you later, buddy, maybe pop in for a beer,” he says, and jolts his way out the door and down the passageway, shouting something in Afrikaans to the guys in the kitchen, leaving Exley to wonder exactly what karmic wind blew Vernon Saul into his once neat little world.
Chapter 32
Vernon walks into Hout Bay cop shop like he owns the place, still high on what happened the night before—that black captain almost ready to kiss his ass he was so pleased at closing the case. Vernon gives the door to the captain’s office a half-knock and enters without waiting for a reply, expecting the darkie to be behind his desk, ready to treat him like he’s God’s gift.
“Vernon.”
“This is a surprise, Dino.”
“No, the Boogie thing was a surprise. This one I asked for.”
“Ja? Why?”
“Because it stinks worse than those cunts at that club of yours.”
Vernon keeps himself cool, gives the captain a glance. The black man looks troubled. He outranks Erasmus, but there’s no doubt who’s driving this session. Still, Vernon plays to the darkie. “Mind if I sit, Captain?”
The cop shakes his head. “No, no, Mr. Saul.”
Vernon sits, consciously relaxing, his body language talking chilled and in control. “Okay, Captain, so what’s up?”
“What’s up, Vernon,” Erasmus says, “is the shit you pulled last night in Llandudno is all too familiar, man. Dead body. Murder weapon. No witnesses. How many times you done it out on the Flats when you a cop? Plant tik and a weapon on some fucker who crossed you, say he drew on you?”
Vernon, not looking at Erasmus, says, “Captain, if the detective has any proof of these allegations I’d like to hear it.”
“Fuck proof,” Erasmus says, leaning on the desk, getting in Vernon’s face, snot hanging like tree bananas from the hairs in his gaping nostrils.
“Maybe you got away with that bullshit when you wasted tik dealers and gangsters. Who the fuck cared? But now we got a foreigner dead and you’re covering up for her murderer.”
Vernon tries to make eye contact with the darkie, who watches a meat fly banging up against the closed window. “Captain, you got my statement. If you got any questions, please put them to me.”
The captain skids his heavy-lidded eyes across to Vernon and shrugs. “This is in the hands of Special Investigations now.”
Vernon stands. “I got things to do.”
“Sit the fuck down, Saul,” Erasmus says.
Vernon looks at him. “Dino, you want me to stay, arrest me. Otherwise I’m out of here.” He heads for the door, tension making his left leg even heavier.