The Steam Pig

by James McClure

  Zondi had been left with instructions to find Shoe Shoe. He was to wheel him in his wheelbarrow to the corner of De Wet Street and the Parade and wait there to be picked up.

  Only four years back Shoe Shoe had been an up-and-coming mobster with a pay-night protection racket just beyond Trekkersburg in the Bantu township of Peacehaven. Every Friday he had twenty men at the bus terminus who would escort breadwinners home at R1 a time. Not a vast sum but on a good night—particularly after some idiot had refused the service and was brutally reprimanded—the takings were nothing to be sniffed at.

  Then he had foolishly decided to move in on the Kwela Village terminus, thinking his only competition would be from a few young toughs who stopped once they had sufficient for drink and a dolly. The thing was he had never heard of any trouble there. Why he had heard nothing was ultimately made terrifyingly clear.

  Come the first Friday night, his scouts returned with a shock report: the Kwela terminus was already being worked and so subtly that the passengers were bled dry even before they reached the shadows. No one had been able to detect how it was done.

  When Shoe Shoe received the news calmly, they felt bewildered and nervous. Normally he reacted to any upset with a tantrum of appalling ferocity. But these were new men, they had not known him long enough to realise that he had got places by a careful study of what he reverently called Big Time.

  And this was Big Time all right. It excited Shoe Shoe tremendously, making him repeat Big Time in every other sentence. It also made him determined to discover the system and apply it in Peacehaven, where a street-lighting project threatened to inhibit his present methods.

  So he sent all his men in the following week. It was risky but worth it. Anyway, they had strict instructions to do nothing but watch. Big Time would be far too busy to notice.

  Wrong again. Big Time decided to set an example—and extend its operations to Peacehaven. Which meant that when Shoe Shoe eagerly answered a knock on his door around midnight, he opened it on Big Time and bad times.

  It happened very quickly. He was held down on his sagging divan and had his Palm Beach shirt ripped from tail to collar. A match flared briefly. The first prick of the spoke came near his coccyx—just his legs were to go; a minor infringement. Then the point began to tickle its way up. His arms as well. Higher still. The spinal cord was punctured.

  It was a clean wound and healed in three days. The neurologist at Peacehaven Hospital found this evidence of sterile procedure even more disturbing than the impressive display of anatomical insight. He mentioned it to Dr Strydom. The DS shrugged and said that as there was nothing the hospital could do, it was rather ridiculous admitting such cases when there were so many patients that some had to sleep under beds occupied by more serious cases.

  So on the fourth day Shoe Shoe was discharged before breakfast. Two porters carried him out and set him down on the lawn a few yards from the exit gate. There he sat, with a small plaster visible through his torn shirt, until eleven o’clock when the sun baked a thirst within him that made him call out for help.

  It arrived in the form of Gershwin Mkize, following up a hot tip. Gershwin ran the beggar circus in Trekkersburg, often travelling far into the bush for his exhibits positioned strategically about the town, and he was always on the lookout for new attractions. This one needed no improvisation.

  The State pension would provide half a loaf of bread a day. Gershwin could offer two loaves, a little meat, a pot of beer and a roof—plus the comradeship of other unfortunates who, between them, could assist in intimate matters such as feeding, dressing, moving and evacuating.

  Shoe Shoe accepted without a word and seldom spoke again. A Bantu constable, fresh from the police college, made a few ineffectual inquiries. Shoe Shoe gave him an outline then clammed up. The constable’s superiors criticised the spelling in his report and left it at that. After all, this time society had been left better off by a crime.

  Now Kramer wanted him to break that silence. He did not relish the thought of working over a man four parts dead already, but he was prepared to go beyond strenuous coaxing. He knew the link was tenuous. But he also knew that Shoe Shoe must have seen his assailants and thereafter maintained a particular interest in anything concerning bicycle spokes.

  Kramer turned into Arcadia Avenue and slowed down. About half way along his headlights glinted off a brass plate and he killed the engine to glide up on the grass verge. As he got out he noticed half a dozen cars parked outside the house on the other side. Their owners were no doubt gathered to celebrate a golden anniversary, it was that sort of neighbourhood.

  He took the path in four paces and rang the bell.

  Dr Matthews was in the hall balancing on one leg. By extending the other as a counter-weight, he had been just able to retain his hold on the telephone receiver while using his free hand to grasp the doorknob. He grinned feebly. Just a smile in return would have been charitable.

  “Police,” Kramer said, and walked past into the surgery, closing the thick door behind him.

  He was immediately struck by the quiet and the stink of ether. Another man whose profession demanded soundproofing—and another cue to stop breathing through his nose. He went over to see if any of the windows were open behind the long, moulting drapes. Not one. Not touched in fifty years if the rest of the room was anything to go by. He noted the Victorian furniture, the quilted leather, the tassels, the instruments laid out in what resembled museum cases. Across the road there was a movement in the back of one of the cars—ah, the younger generation was succumbing to the wild wind.

  And Kramer turned to stare at the couch, half screened off in one corner. So this was where Miss Le Roux had felt it right and proper to undress and recline. Sick. Horrible. The whole room was sick. It was certainly not the place to be told you had three months to go, taking things easy. For that you needed one of those unreal skyscraper suites with pretty receptionists to smile unwittingly at you on your way out to the lift shaft. At the very most it was a room which should serve only for offering up afflictions of the anal region. Which seemed to be Dr Matthews’s level anyhow, so maybe he was expecting too much.

  The GP was in the room without warning, moving lightly as became a fat man so daintily shod. His likeness to his mother’s photograph on the desk was remarkable—except his moustache turned upwards.

  “What brings you here, officer?” he said. “Don’t tell me—I’ve made a balls and so has Strydom but he’s also getting the glory, lucky man.”

  He stopped and frowned.

  “As a matter of fact, he was rather rude to me. I told him her history. I told him it was congenital angina. Remained quite unimpressed. Very rude when I said I hadn’t her previous records but one has to trust patients, hasn’t one?”

  “And doctors,” Kramer observed, ignoring the outstretched hand.

  “Now then!” Dr Matthews said. “May I take your coat?”

  “No coat,” Kramer replied.

  “Of course, I’ve been in touch with the medical association,” Dr Matthews continued unruffled. “Speaking to the secretary at his home only a moment ago. He said that off the record he was inclined to agree I’d come to a reasonable conclusion under the circumstances. One can’t go ordering post mortems for everyone who pops off.”

  “But she was only twenty-two.”

  “Good God, man, she’d had cardiac irregularities since she was nine!”

  “Hearsay,” Kramer snapped, resorting to a bit of his own jargon. “Now just hand over that file you’re waving about, I want to take a look for myself.”

  Dr Matthews did so with a mildly insolent thrust and then pottered about the room, humming plump, complacent hums. Eventually, however, he came to a stop behind his desk where he patted his pockets and took from them a stethoscope, auriscope, ophthalmoscope and stainless steel spatula. He was like a balloonist dumping ballast in an effort to regain height. He slumped down into the swivel chair, his clothes creasing into great loose folds.


  Kramer closed the file and stared across at him. Then he picked up the ophthalmoscope, switched it on and played the tiny beam across the room until it stopped in the middle of the practitioner’s pink forehead.

  “You examined her thoroughly?” he asked softly.

  “Naturally. Dozens of times, as you’ve seen—every square inch.”

  “With this thing?”

  The spot of light dropped to bore into Dr Matthews’s right eye. He raised a protecting hand, flushing with anger.

  “See here,” he barked, “stop fooling about with what you don’t bloody well understand. Who the hell do you think you are?”

  “Lieutenant Kramer of the Murder Squad, and I have reason to believe you are lying, Dr Matthews. This is an ophthalmoscope, an instrument used for the examination of the human eye, and yet you get Miss Le Roux’s eye colour wrong in your records.”

  “What the devil do you mean?”

  “It says here they were blue.”

  “Correct, she was blonde.”

  “Oh, yes? I saw them in the mortuary this afternoon. They were brown.” “Brown?”

  “Correct,” Kramer mimicked.

  Then nothing was said for some considerable time.

  “I have a little theory,” Kramer murmured at last, “that you never gave Miss Le Roux a look-over from top to toe. From your notes it seems you concentrated your attention on an area quite unconnected with cardiac irregularities—or eye irregularities for that matter.”

  Dr Matthews looked up sharply.

  “Now why would you do that, doctor? Your colleague Dr Strydom is quite certain she never suffered from any disease of that kind.”

  “There was not much I could do for the heart,” Dr Matthews blustered. “Just give her pills and sleeping drugs so she rested properly.”

  “Yes? Go on, man.”

  “Surely it’s obvious from the file the silly little bitch was neurotic?” Dr Matthews exploded. “Open it, count how many times you see Wassermann test in it. Came in here demanding one damn near every week, for a time. Practically insisted she had the clap.”

  Which destroyed a very beautiful illusion. Kramer paused a moment to mourn its passing. There had been something so refreshingly healthy about Miss Le Roux’s previous image, both physical and spiritual. Hating Dr Matthews a little, he pressed the attack.

  “You say she was neurotic?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yet you gave her these tests every time?”

  “That’s so.”

  “I see. How much is a Wassermann worth to you—ten, twelve Rand? A nice little side-line.”

  “Lieutenant, take care with what you’re implying. And if you knew anything about the practice of medicine at all, you would know that humouring a patient is often as important as treating them. You should have seen the girl each time I reported a negative result: she took new heart.”

  Kramer could not resist it. “Made you feel like Christiaan Barnard, did it?” he sneered. “Pity you aren’t so handy with the transplants.”

  “That was a very uncalled for remark.”

  “Sorry,” Kramer said, almost meaning it. “Let’s get back to the clap. Did she ever give you any reason for her—”

  “Anxieties? No. She was the kind that pays promptly and feels they have a right to use us like garage mechanics.”

  “But weren’t you curious?”

  “Not unduly, the chronically ill are apt to find some counterattraction to their main complaint elsewhere in their anatomies. Also, she was a very edgy girl. She shied away from questions. I didn’t bother, I’d come across similar cases before.”

  “Really?”

  “You’d be surprised how common they are, Lieutenant, especially among engaged girls. Little things make them suspect their future hubby is having his final fling and they get it into their sweet heads that some of this may backfire on them. After all, they say, nice girls don’t sleep with other girls’ fiancés.”

  “A lot they know.”

  “Quite, but that’s the way it goes. Miss Le Roux just seemed less talkative than the rest.”

  Suddenly Kramer felt reasonably disposed towards Dr Matthews. He offered him a Lucky Strike, exchanged it for one without a kink in the middle, and supplied the match. The truth was they had a lot in common. They both dealt with that perverse species homo sapiens and both had to make what judgements they could on the evidence.

  “You think she could have been going to get married?”

  “Well, she didn’t strike me as being a loose sort of a girl but she—”

  “Yes, I know, but what about her heart? Had she a long life ahead of her?”

  “No one could say. It could happen any time—as I thought it had, you see. She could have lasted for donkey’s years.”

  “So you didn’t warn her—I mean in case it might change her wedding plans?”

  “I didn’t have to, she knew already.”

  “Hence the Trinity Burial Society?”

  “I presume so.”

  It fitted, but like the first pieces of blue in a jigsaw that was half sky.

  “We must track down this bloke with the intimate relationship,” Kramer murmured.

  “Anything to go on?”

  “Bugger all, no one at the funeral and no flowers.”

  Dr Matthews rose with a slight smile.

  “Actually I’m bloody shaken and ashamed by all this, Lieutenant.”

  “Ach, don’t worry, doctor—I’m sure they won’t want your scalp by the time we get to the end of this one.”

  “I’m not so sure. You see, I didn’t fill in eye colours and that until I heard the balloon had gone up. Funny, I could have sworn …”

  “Just formalities. But can I take the file along, anyway?”

  “Of course, let me show you out.”

  Kramer stopped on the doorstep to warn Dr Matthews that he would probably send a man round in the morning for an official statement. As they were speaking, all the cars across the road started up almost simultaneously and drove off.

  “Every good party comes to an end,” Kramer said.

  “What party?” Dr Matthews asked.

  But it was already time to get Bob Perkins to work on the tape, so Kramer just walked off down the road.

  Mrs Perkins showed Kramer into the workroom and apologised that Bob had not finished his bath. He always bathed after work because of the ink from the proofs, they were ever such messy things.

  Kramer knew that Mrs Perkins was Bob’s wife but he had never grown used to the idea. She doted on him like the pale but proud mother of a prodigy born under mysterious circumstances. They even looked alike. If they had not both been round about thirty, he could well imagine her having spent years bringing him up in neat navy suits and a flutter of clean handkerchiefs.

  “Please make yourself comfortable, sir,” she said, unaware of the discomfiture her presence caused. “I was just going to pour out his cocoa—would you like some, too?”

  “May I have coffee, please?”

  “Do you think that’s very wise? My Bob was telling me only the other day what awful chemicals there were in it. He knows a lot about what happens to the brain, you know.”

  “Black, please, if it isn’t too much trouble.”

  “Of course not, I’ll be back in a jiffy.”

  Mrs Perkins bustled out, a cuddly heap of woollen night garments topped with a curly head of hair the colour of a teddy bear’s fur.

  Kramer walked over to the wall of bookshelves. Bob Perkins should know something about the brain if he had waded through that lot: Let Hypnosis Work For You, Amateur Hypnosis, Hypnosis and Healing Therapy, Hypnosis Through the Ages, Hypnosis. He lost track, they were scattered all over between similarly bound books which promised, among other things, to show you How to Make a Million and how to Be Master of Yourself in Seven Days. Two of the shelves were piled with radio and electronics magazines. This was reassuring.

  Bob entered carrying the tray of hot drinks and o
nly just avoided being tripped up by Mrs Perkins who rushed past to clear a place on the table which was cluttered with wires and circuits.

  “Ah, Lieutenant,” Bob grinned, “it’s good to see you again, man.”

  “Bobby, you must talk to him about coffee,” Mrs Perkins said earnestly. “He won’t listen to me.”

  “Time enough, I think our friend’s got other things on his mind tonight.”

  “Too true,” Kramer agreed.

  “Well, I’m not staying, so you boys can get on with it right away,” Mrs Perkins said. “I must give Bobby his welcome but that’s all I can manage at this time of night.”

  Kramer bit hard on his lower lip.

  “Good night then, dearest,” said Bob, hugging her with his cheek to her bosom.

  Kramer went on stirring his coffee until she had left the room. Bob failed to notice Kramer never took sugar.

  “Just before we begin, Lieutenant,” he said, “I want you to hear something special. No, I won’t touch your tape unless you listen.”

  So Kramer sat back and watched him operate the controls of a large tape deck which stood against the wall. The volume came up and he heard Bob’s voice saying: “What is your attitude to the pop scene, Mr Sinatra?” The reply came unmistakably from the crooner. The recording lasted eight minutes and at the end it was plainly not a parody although the contrast of accents was most striking.

  Bob laughed delightedly. “I see I’ve got you wondering, hey?”

  And then he explained what he had done was to record a Voice of America programme, make a transcript of the interviewer’s questions and then substitute his own voice using another recorder and the master tape.

  “Not bad, is it?” Bob concluded. “It gives the wife goose pimples.”

  Kramer conceded he, too, might have had the goose pimples if the coffee had not been so hot—which was how he preferred it, so please don’t fetch any milk.

  “Okay, now what is it you’ve brought me?”

  “This tape—open it and you’ll see the problem.”