The Score

by HJ Golakai

  “Ugghh, no,” Vee groaned. “He just stood by and watched while –”

  “Yes, yes. He let the bad man touch your special place.” Chlöe waved her quiet. “But he also spoke up this morning and cleared your name, which could’ve gone a completely different, disastrous way. So let’s just get this over with.”

  Back at reception, Vee drew in a breath. “Hello Trevor, I’m Voinjama Johnson,” she said, extending her hand and leaving it afloat until he had little choice but to take it. “We didn’t meet properly and I apologise for that. I’m sorry too, for …” she exhaled, “impersonating a guest and crashing the convention party. I’m sure y’all get all kinds of riffraff coming through here and pulling stunts, and it must get very old. It was unprofessional and again, I apologise.”

  The pause ate up the air, till finally Trevor dipped a nod, relaxing a little. Vee looked to Chlöe and shared a flicker of triumph. “Then can you please help us? We’re only asking if anything’s been overlooked, and that’s possible if Gavin Berman left something here.” After the minutest shake of Trevor’s head, she adjusted: “Or something was left here for him to pick up?”

  “Everything belonging to Mr Berman, including his correspondence, has been turned over to the police.”

  “That’s that,” Vee said as they walked away.

  “Yeah. It was a long shot.” Chlöe chewed her lip, slowing. Trevor couldn’t have cooperated anyway. Berman’s belongings were his no more; they belonged to the investigation. Then, to his next-of-kin, if they bothered to claim it, whosoever they were. Everything else … “Oh!” Her eyes bulged. She turned and dashed back.

  “What about something of his that wasn’t really his property?” When Trevor frowned in response, Chlöe flailed her hands in frustration. “Uhh … like, it was in the room while he occupied it, but it belongs to the lodge.”

  Trevor blew a weary, cigarette-tainted sigh into her face. After checking the relevant cubbyhole and coming up empty-handed, he disappeared into the back room, emerging minutes later with a small, black plastic bag. Chlöe sucked in her breath. Vee skittered back to her side.

  “I really shouldn’t be doing this. We do not make a habit of compromising our guests’ privacy.” Trevor’s aspect had altered; he looked unsure, an ill at ease expression sitting on his otherwise placid face. A nudge from Vee and Chlöe placed on the desk, from her back pocket, an envelope. In it were five crisp R100 notes. Trevor peered within, barely twitching. “But I suppose, seeing as you did make the valid point of that not being much of an issue at this point …”

  Chlöe snatched the bag with grateful fingers before he could change his mind, Vee right by her shoulder.

  “Haaayy! Now we know who was entertaining us from the hilltop with these movies. Ninja Nurses Reloaded, Weapons of Ass Eruption,” Vee chuckled, scanning through the pile of DVDs with lurid covers. “I should thank God o. If this demonstrates the contents of the man’s mind, I got off easy. Who left them here?”

  “He probably did, seeing as he was supposed to check out this morning.”

  “This is all from his room that belongs to the lodge?” Chlöe sagged. It was a nice tidbit, knowing their victim and porn fiend were one, but she’d been expecting more.

  Trevor blanched. “Those absolutely do not belong to The Grotto. They’re from a video rental store in Oudtshoorn. We do at times procure …” he paused for delicacy, “special materials of this kind if our guests make a specific request, but we certainly don’t make a habit of it. All rented material is returned within a day or two, usually by one of our drivers or the laundry truck when we make a run into town.”

  “No, I meant …” Chlöe squirmed away from Vee’s finger poking into her side, and looked where she was pointing. Snuggled in one of the DVD cases was an extra disk, bright blue and otherwise unlabelled. Vee slid it out and put it on the table. They both looked at Trevor. Trevor looked back at them.

  “There’s this,” Chlöe tapped the extra CD, “but this,” she waved the case adorned with a girl scantily clad as neither a nurse nor ninja, “is not a two-disk movie. So …”

  Trevor plucked the case from her fingers, hastily gathered up the others and stuffed them into the carrier bag, which he stashed out of sight behind the counter. “These are our responsibility. That, I know nothing of. Finish and klaar.” He retrieved an A5-sized envelope, slipped the offending disk into it, placed it back onto the table with a parting two taps of his fingers and walked off to serve a gentleman at the far end of the desk. Chlöe shrugged, slid the envelope to her chest and turned on her heel.

  Vee stopped short. “We really gon’ take this?”

  Chlöe eyeballed her, exasperation mixing with incredulity. Cold feet and back-pedalling … this was new. Vee’s style when it came to the questionable was a lot more arse-to-the-wind impulsive. “I don’t know. Should we?”

  “We should. Shouldn’t we? It’s not like it’s evidence.”

  “We’ve been calling it evidence for the past twenty minutes. Now suddenly it’s not?”

  “What’s defined as evidence? Any item the police are specifically looking for –”

  “In the designated area where they expect to find it,” Chlöe jumped in. She bit her lip; they were on very shaky ground. “Which isn’t where we got this from.”

  “Exactly. And it might have absolutely nothing to do with the murder. Or it might be a real clue.”

  Chlöe waited, watching Vee chew at the insides of her cheeks, furrow between her eyebrows ever deepening. She held out her hand. Chlöe placed the envelope in it, and Vee slapped her palm on top of it with a decisive ‘thwack’.

  “Alright, here’s what we do. We look this over, and if it has anything that’s directly linked at all to the murder or murderer, we hand it over to the police.” When Chlöe pursed her lips, Vee added: “When we get to the bridge of explaining how and why we have it, we’ll manoeuvre the crossing.”

  “I’m sure we will.” Chlöe paused, shuffling her own thoughts and then said: “There’s just one thing, though. This was a shot in the dark no matter how you look at it. If we accept Trevor’s assumption that Gavin brought it in himself, then we’re looking at a different scenario. But if we work with my previous assumption that it was taken from his room to conceal something, which is my instinct …” She shook her head vigorously. “That’s risky to the point of stupidity. How did our perp manage to sneak into Berman’s room during all this chaos and get this out? And once they had it, why not destroy it?”

  “Come on. There’s been more than enough time between last night’s horror show and the time it took the police to show up. I doubt it was that risky; who’s paying attention to someone carrying innocent DVDs around?” Vee crooked her mouth wryly at ‘innocent’. “As for why it’s still hanging around … I suspect we’ve intercepted something. An exchange, a link to something or someone important, or it was meant to be picked up. Dunno. This lil bone got a dog attached to it, so we hang on to it, maybe wave it around a lil, and something’s gonna come barking. Who and why, we’ll know soon enough.” She flashed another sardonic quirk of her lips.

  Chlöe shrugged defensively. “What? That did not qualify as a stupid question.”

  “No, not that. How badass were we back there? I’ve rubbed off on you. We’re like a CSI tag team.”

  “What an insult. We’re so much craftier than those overpaid, glossy actors.” Though I doubt any of them ever got infected by head lice. Chlöe reached back and pulled a corkscrew from her ponytail close to eyelevel for inspection, almost expecting to see an offending insect wave back at her. She tossed it back over her shoulder with a sigh. “Though I wouldn’t mind being glossy and overpaid, considering how much busting our arses we do.”

  “Amen to that,” Vee chimed.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “Hhayi sisi,” Zintle shook her head several times, “your hair is so nice. If you had told me before, I could have done a nice style for you. I do hair very well. That’s what
I used to do before I came here.”

  “For true? Me too,” Vee enthused. “Working in a salon was my first real job.”

  “Ja but you know, it didn’t make enough money. That’s why I started working here, to help pay for college.”

  “Which one? Damelin?” Vee tossed a pair of jeans into her carry-on. ‘College’ over here never meant ‘university’, as she’d always understood the term, but alluded rather to a number of smaller schools. Amazing and sad, to think of the number of locals engaged in diploma and certificate courses when access to education was still a major issue back home.

  Zintle beamed, nodding enthusiastically. “Business management and administration. This year I’m working full time so next year I can finish up and graduate.” When Vee straightened up, Zintle leaned closer and ran her fingers over her upsweep. “Such nice texture. How do you keep it soft?”

  “Plenty of coconut oil and good moisturising lotion, the ones without mineral oil or petroleum jelly. And I don’t relax it often. It’s bad for black hair.”

  “I know, neh. We don’t listen. Look how our hairdressers like to dump relaxer on and pull your hair like ‘tcchweeee’ …” Zintle’s face contorted as she mimed a painful-looking stretching motion. They cackled and slapped palms.

  “Hem hem hem,” Chlöe coughed, drawing closed the zips of her small wheelie with pointed finality. Squinting reproach, she helicoptered a finger in a ‘wrap it up’ gesture behind Zintle’s back.

  Vee waved her away. “You were telling me about Rhonda.”

  “Ag. That one.” Zintle sighed onto the bed and shook her head, clearly defeated by the topic. “I don’t know. Sad sad sad story.”

  ‘Sedsedsed’, a snaky word tumbling over itself. Surreptitiously, Vee frowned in Chlöe’s direction, lost. Chlöe turned her mouth down and rubbed a fist near an eye like a sobbing child. “Oh, sad,” Vee murmured. She looked to Zintle again. “Ehhn? She seemed like a perky person to me. Not at all sad.”

  “Ja man, of course she was. She had to be. Pretending was her job; you can’t serve clients with a sour face. But ja. You think you can get yourself to that point and not be bitter? Working somewhere for thirteen years and you’re still second in command. No husband, no children. What rubbish. Sies.”

  Vee closed her eyes, inhaled, took a second before unclenching her fists. “She was never married? I thought …”

  “Divorced. They say he left her for a younger woman, now they have two kids.”

  “Before or after she started working here?”

  “After. Maybe …” Zintle lifted her eyes to the ceiling, “eight years ago. I think he left her because she was never home long enough to be a wife.” She finally cottoned on to their glares and silence and shrank, clipping her knees together and knitting her arms over her bosom. “It’s not me, that’s what I heard people saying.” Her chin shot out. “She was a workaholic; that was true. I’ve seen it myself the seven months I’ve been here. She was always here. That’s why she left her house in Oudtshoorn to move into the chalet at the back, so she was always at work. And she was a drinker.” She eyed Vee up and down, shooting a scornful click from the recesses of her throat. “Why was she drinking if she wasn’t unhappy?”

  “When did she start drinking, do you know?”

  “For always. That’s what alcoholics do, right.” Zintle’s right foot bounced, picking up speed as her scowl intensified. “Me, I know about drunks. There are enough in my family, in my neighbourhood. So don’t tell me. Don’t look at me like I don’t know something about it.”

  Over Zintle’s head, Chlöe fired an ‘I told you so’ glower. Vee replied with a mini eye-roll, sinking onto the mattress.

  “Listen.” Vee slung a sisterly arm around Zintle’s shoulders. She contemplated extolling the virtues of a single, career-focused life, saw little chance of success with her current audience and ploughed on. “I know you liked Ms Greenwood. Everybody liked her. She was a nice woman, wasn’t she?”

  “Very nice lady,” Zintle echoed meekly.

  “It hurts when good people die like that. It don’t sit correct in your heart. That’s why you threw that liquor bottle away, so it wouldn’t make her look bad when they found her body.”

  Spasms quivered through Zintle’s shoulders, echoing under Vee’s fingers.

  “I … ehhmm …” Zintle opened her mouth, jawed the air for a few seconds, shut it. She looked at her hands, face pained. “Did you …”

  “I didn’t see you. It only clicked later, that sound I heard. It was glass hitting against the frame of the bed, and I never saw or had any pictures of glass or anything solid enough to make that sound. There was only the wineglass; there had to be a bottle somewhere. No-one else had been inside that room except you.”

  “I thought if they found it … it would look like … I put it in the bin bag with the other rubbish. Are you going to …”

  “No.” Vee gave another squeeze. “Don’t worry about that. It’s too late now and you didn’t destroy anything the autopsy didn’t point to already. But you must tell me everything you remember.”

  “But I’ve told you everything.”

  “Start again. Tell me about every time you had an interaction with Rhonda the day she died, even just a few words in passing, every time you saw her.”

  Zintle puffed a gust of warmth against Vee’s cheek. “Well, she and Ms Motaung handled the morning meeting for the day shift and then … nothing special after that. They had to get organised for the convention, so we were instructed to be on our toes throughout. This is a busy weekend so they couldn’t afford to waste time on silly mistakes; we had to watch ourselves. Mr Gono, he’s head of housekeeping, he had a brief meeting with some of the maids about getting across to the boot camp to clean up a bit, air out the empty bunks and bring in fresh linen. Ms Greenw–”

  “Oh, meaning you guys actually clean up on the other side,” Chlöe arched.

  Zintle shot waves of vitriol through slatted eyes. “Nxc. Of course we clean. It’s part of the lodge so it’s part of our job. We handle the basics, clean when people are off the camp site, but no-one waits on them like at the lodge. The boot camp’s supposed to be like rural areas but even then it’s been getting neglected.”

  “I’ll say. Frickin’ lice haven …” Chlöe muttered under her breath.

  Zintle frowned and ploughed on. “Ja, anyway. Our workload’s been stretched lately. Two of the maids left recently so we’re a bit short-handed. We’ve had to pull extra weight until new girls can start in two weeks.”

  “People got laid off?” Vee asked.

  “Not laid off like fired. They left … they didn’t exactly leave us, they were asked to leave. Smh. Okay, one was let go, and the other one was severely warned and not long after she resigned on her own.” Zintle eyed Vee, scouring her face. “Fine, you said ‘everything’. But this was long before. Things started going missing here and there and it became a problem. Small things. Mr Gono brought it up to Ms Greenwood and they decided not to bother Ms Motaung with it at first, they’d deal with it. Then it got worse – one time a guest forgot a lot of money behind and no-one could find it when he came back to check. After that they were proper pissed off, but Ms Greenwood insisted she would handle it quietly. She caught two of the housekeepers. Well, she announced that she caught them doing ‘improper behaviour’, who knows how she did it and what they’d done exactly. We were relieved, until the extra work kicked in. I’ll be glad when those girls start.”

  Zintle caught her breath, waited for Vee’s nod to continue, then streamed on: “So, day before yesterday. Mr Gono had a chat to some of us about boot camp clean-up. Ms Greenwood was waiting to talk to him so she hung around outside his office. After we left, I didn’t speak to her again. I saw her rushing around a lot, very busy. One of the other maids saw her, maybe for five minutes, and she brushed her off. There was another debrief before the party started but it was more for the kitchen staff –”

  “Wait, wait, wait. You said
another maid spoke to her and Rhonda blew her off.”

  “Mm-hmm. Mamelo. She wanted time off the next day because her son was sick, but Ms Greenwood said no. Actually she was distracted; she said they would talk later and she would see. That made her hopeful she had a chance.”

  “Hold on. Who was distracted and who was hoping what?”

  Zintle huffed impatiently. “Ms Greenwood … this is what Mamelo told me. She had been trying to corner Ms Greenwood all day to get time off but she couldn’t get her when she was alone.”

  “Why not ask Mr Gono? He’s her direct boss.”

  “Ja but uMamelo …” Zintle’s brows folded, disapproving. “Since she got a new boyfriend, she’s been missing work and making excuses. Like, she wants to be full time in cleaning the nice chalets, like how I do Ms Greenwood’s, but she’s not reliable. I keep saying she must watch herself. She’s taking advantage neh, because since we’re short-staffed she’ll only get a warning for now. If she had gone to Mr Gono he would have said no straightaway. But sometimes if you found someone willing to exchange shifts and asked Ms Greenwood nicely, she could talk to Mr Gono for you. But you had to corner her when she was alone. That’s why Mamelo persisted all day, and then she had to wait while she was having an argument with some lady before she got her chance.”

  “What lady now?”

  Zintle drew her shoulders to her ears in a ‘does it matter?’ shrug. “Ms Greenwood was talking to a lady. So Mamelo waited around for them to finish.”

  “And they were having an argument?”

  “I don’t know. That’s what Mamelo said. She said when Ms Greenwood walked away she looked confused. That’s why she didn’t say no when Mamelo asked her.”

  Vee frowned, silent. “Where’s Mamelo now? She on shift today, right now?”

  “For sure. I can …” Fetching her cellphone from her apron’s pouch, Zintle waved it with a questioning lift of her eyebrows. Vee nodded quickly.