Safari

by Parnell Hall

  We’d had breakfast, such as it was, before being sent to our tents. Toast, oatmeal, and coffee, most of which had been cooked before we found the body. The bread was toasted over the campfire by Clemson. I half expected him to throw himself in it.

  “We’ll have lunch. Don’t expect much.”

  “Yeah. So how’d the killer get ahold of your knife?”

  “That’s the first question the police are going to ask me.”

  I figured that was probably the second question the police were going to ask him. The first was, Did you kill her?

  “When’s the last time you saw it?”

  “I don’t know. The last I remember seeing it was in the jeep, when I pulled it out to wave in that moron’s face.”

  Clemson speaking derogatorily about a guest was an indication of how upset he must be. On the other hand, it was only Keith. Anyone could be excused for not liking Keith.

  “Did you take it out of the sheath?”

  “Didn’t you see me?”

  “I don’t mean then. I mean later, when you got back to the tent, took your equipment off.”

  “I never take it off the belt. Except when I wash the pants. You know how often that is out here?”

  “You leave the belt in your pants when you take ’em off?”

  “Sure, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, but I don’t have a knife on it. You didn’t notice it was missing when your took off your pants?”

  “If I had, I’d have known it was gone. I didn’t know until I saw it in the body.”

  “Could someone pull it out of the sheath while you were wearing it?”

  “Not unless they wanted their arm broken.”

  “When could someone take it?”

  “While I was in the shower.”

  “Or while you were asleep?”

  He shook his head. “Not a chance. I’d wake up. I’d know someone was there.”

  I was sure he would. So it could only have been taken while he was in the shower. That left a very narrow window of opportunity.

  “That’s the situation,” Clemson said. “Can you help me?”

  I couldn’t think of how, but I had to say something. He was in such distress, I couldn’t let him down. I could question people in a last-ditch effort to get to the truth before the police got there, not that it would matter. In all likelihood, even if I solved the damn thing the cops wouldn’t care. They’d reject the solution just because it was mine. Alice would pooh-pooh it too. Of course, the police didn’t know Alice. If I could get to them before she did—

  Good lord, there I was, grasping at straws, having flights of fancy and worrying about my problems while Clemson was in abject despair suffering the torments of the damned, desperate for the slimmest words of encouragement, be they hollow, hoping, if only for the briefest of moments, to occupy his mind with something other than his personal and financial ruin. All he wanted was for me to say that I would help him if I could. He hadn’t asked for anything specific, he just wanted to know if I could do anything.

  I couldn’t lie to him.

  I sighed, shook my head.

  “No.”

  43

  MY RIGHT LEG

  I LAY ON MY COT, brooding about what was to come. Our safari was over. Of that there was no doubt. Not that we would lose anything. Alice, of course, had trip insurance, and the only thing that had stopped her from filing for it already was the fact we had no Wi-Fi service. She was on the iPad, editing yesterday’s pictures and the ones she shot of the sunrise. There were no safari pictures from today. And Alice isn’t big on crime-scene photos, not that I blame her, but it would have been nice. It would have given me something to work on. If I had an iPad, of course.

  Instead, I lay on my back, waiting to be called.

  As predicted, I didn’t crack the case before lunch, and the full complement of local law enforcement, national law enforcement, and international law enforcement that arrived had wanted food and conversation. The staff had whipped up hamburgers, which were supposed to have been for dinner, but Clemson was pulling out all the stops in the hope of appeasing the unappeasable, while the police milled about, marking their territory and fighting over jurisdictional rights.

  All of this took a lot of time but eventually resulted in a schedule of interviews, all likely to be equally fruitless. By schedule I don’t mean we had a schedule: the police did, in terms of who got to talk to people first. We, the great unwashed, were chosen at random to submit to this series of interviews, all conducted according to a particular pecking order, strictly adhered to unless one of the interrogators wanted to see someone again.

  Thwarting all of their efforts was the ambassador from the U.S. Embassy, hopelessly torn between safeguarding the rights of the suspects and safeguarding the rights of the deceased.

  I could see why Clemson doubted their prospects of success.

  I hadn’t gone yet, which was just as well, as I had nothing to contribute except hearing sounds from the tent, which, were they lethal rather than amorous, would have placed the time of death around midnight, which any medical examiner worth his salt could have done anyway.

  I’m not sure the medical examiner they brought along did anything more than pronouncing the body dead, but at least he got it moved out of the tent. It was in a van on its way back to civilization.

  I envied it.

  I had not spent the morning going tent to tent. I was sorry to let Clemson down, but no one needed that. I’d have been about as popular as the Ebola virus. I hung out in our tent, listened to Alice explain how we were getting our money back. She didn’t have to convince me, but she couldn’t get through to the travel agent so I was the substitute punching bag.

  During lunch, our tour group had huddled away from the cops and discussed insurance claims, alternate travel plans, intentions to wash out undies, requests for Tylenol, and whose toilets worked, which turned out to be no one’s. In short, anything but the crime.

  After lunch, we’d returned to our tents to await our impending interrogations in our third straight murder investigation. I sat outside to see who they took first. It was Edith, of course, the bunkmate of the deceased. Who they chose next might have been illuminating, but so might staring at a Ouija board. Which was why I was lying on my cot trying to think things out.

  Edith was the most likely suspect. She had the opportunity. Moreover, her presence practically precluded any other killer. The tent was small. It would be hard to enter it and stab Pam without waking Edith. Maybe you could get in from the side, slip your arm under the mesh mosquito netting and the rolled-down canvas side flaps, slide the knife up between the cot and the side of the tent, plunge it into Pam and release it, letting your arm slide out. You’d have to rely on a single thrust, accurate and lethal, but it could be done.

  But as Sergeant MacAullif, my cop friend from the city, liked to point out, just because a thing was possible didn’t mean it happened.

  No, Edith was clearly the most likely suspect.

  Next would be Clemson. Edith had the opportunity, but Clemson had the means. The murder weapon was his. Someone could have taken it while he was in the shower, but how would the killer have known he would be in the shower? Or was that just coincidence? Was the killer looking for any murder weapon that could be identified with someone else? Not likely. When it came to means, Clemson won hands-down.

  He flunked out on motive. Clemson had no motive for the crime. Quite the opposite. It ruined his business, ruined his life. Nothing could induce him to do it.

  Nothing.

  I read too many murder mysteries, but when a person has a perfect anything I suspect him. A perfect alibi. No motive. Warning bells go off. Was that really true, or did it just seem that way?

  Clemson had a strong motive not to kill Edith.

  Could he have had a stronger motive to kill her anyway?

  And what could that possibly be?

  Killing her destroys his business and brings about his financial ruin.
What could be worse than that?

  Well, how about death? You hear about a fate worse than death, but isn’t that hyperbole? Well, maybe not. Maybe stockbrokers really do jump out the window when the market collapses. But say for the sake of argument that Clemson would rather go broke than die. Was Pam a lethal threat? Hard to fathom.

  All right. What about incarceration? Clemson was an outdoors man, flourished in the wild. He would do almost anything to stay out of jail. Even give up his business. Going to prison would end his business anyway. Sort of the lesser of two evils. Jail and destitution, or just destitution. Kind of a no-brainer.

  Okay, Clemson will do anything to stay out of jail. Why does he kill Pam? She could send him there. How? Obviously, she found something that implicates him in the other killings. Which only follows. If Clemson is the killer, he committed all three. He killed Pam because she figured out he killed Alice. He killed Alice because she figured out he killed Daniel.

  So why did he kill Daniel? Well, Daniel trafficked in drugs. Drugs were a threat to his business. He eliminated the threat.

  But why kill him? Why not just fire him?

  Maybe he couldn’t. Maybe Daniel had something on him. It was blackmail, not drugs. Clemson wasn’t the type to submit to blackmail. Daniel had to be killed. He had to be killed, and it couldn’t look like murder. That’s why he went to such elaborate lengths, dragging the body to the sausage-fruit tree, making it look like one fell on his head. How long had it taken Clemson to find a sausage fruit on the ground? Had he had to climb the tree to get one? If I had looked closely at the sausage fruit, would I have noticed that the stem had been sliced in half by Clemson’s hunting knife?

  I shook my head to clear it.

  What was I doing? Succumbing to a storybook plot. Thinking the least likely person committed the crime.

  I needed to stop my mind. I looked at Alice. She was still busy with the pictures.

  I realized that I’d shot some too.

  I took out the video camera, rewound the tape, pushed PLAY.

  I had some shots of people paddling canoes down the river from the point of view of someone not paddling down the river, a few crocodile and hippos, always from a safe distance, and various assorted animals along the bank.

  I also had some very shaky shots of people running through the bush in the hope of seeing a lion, and shots of the same people walking for the same reason to no avail. Since they were all shot from behind, they were not particularly memorable. Of course the camera wasn’t rolling for the Trish face.

  I had half of an elephant charge. Then the camera went in all directions when I fell down. By the time I got it focused again, the elephant was standing there as if nothing had happened.

  I had a few shots of cheetah cubs sleeping. A shot of Mommy standing up and starting to move. Then a lot of footage jumping around crazily in and out of focus as the jeep rocketed through the meadow in hot pursuit. Finally Mommy holding the impala by the neck.

  According to the timer on the camera, all that footage took a whopping seventeen minutes. I still had a lot of afternoon to fill.

  I remembered I had another tape. The buffalo charge I never got to see because the battery was dead. I scrounged through the backpack, dug it out, stuck it in the camera, and hit REWIND. Nothing happened. Of course not. The tape was already rewound. That was how I’d run the battery down.

  I hit PLAY, lay back in my bunk to watch the show.

  It was weird seeing the beginning of our trip. I had a shot of the airport. Not Lusaka. The landing strip in the bush. I saw the second airplane arrive, disgorging the four women, Victoria and Annabel, and Pam and Edith.

  I had a few shots of assorted impala along the road, back when I was wondering if that was all there was. And then the first camp, the one Clemson slipped in for one night to make us think this was a luxury tour. Some shots of elephants in camp, a highlight, and hippos in the river too far to see.

  I had shots from the night drive that hadn’t come out well, despite all Daniel’s efforts with the searchlight. They were hard to see now, knowing he’d been killed. As were shots of Alice and Pam.

  Among the poorly lit shots, alas, were the leopard and hyena, the highlight of the night drive.

  Despite John tying the record, I hadn’t caught a single shot of a genet.

  There were shots of the first bush camp. I finally got to see the bull charging. Or rather the bull retreating: I missed the whole charge, but I had a damn good shot of him racing out of sight.

  And I had shots of the aftermath, shots I hadn’t realized I’d taken. Shots of Alice with her camera, and Victoria and Keith on the ground. I wondered if there was any way to zoom in. I remembered the expression on Victoria’s face, but I would have liked to see the one on Keith’s. It seemed to me there was a note of malicious triumph, of macho glee. The type of look a movie star’s publicist would pay a fortune to keep out of the tabloid press. The type of look that could end a career, at least a career as a leading man. One look at that and Victoria would never give Keith a second thought. Not that she would anyway. Her interest was in Jason.

  Was there a shot of him?

  He wasn’t in the frame. Where had he been standing when the bull charged? More to the point, where had he been standing after the bull charged? Had he dived for cover? Not likely. Then he’d have been on the ground too.

  The camera didn’t look for him. Instead it hung limply at my side and filmed forty-five minutes of my leg.

  Well, at least I’d figured out when I left it on.

  Actually, the footage of my leg was by far the most interesting. The camera was rolling, but I wasn’t pointing at anything, so people weren’t inhibited by it. No one was making comments for the sake of my soundtrack. They were just being themselves.

  Keith was just being a jerk. Whatever the situation, he did not disappoint. He could always be counted on to say something arrogant, crude, and offensive, sometimes to women, but often to one and all. So the audio portion was pretty damn good.

  The video left a bit to be desired. Granted, it was a mighty fine leg, as any impartial observer would be forced to concede; still there was such a thing as too much of a good thing. Nor was it always appropriate. The footage of me marking my territory, for instance, might need to be edited.

  I kept waiting for someone to say something relevant, like, “I wish we didn’t have to kill Daniel,” but nobody did. Anything would help. A nuanced remark. A strained inflection. I hadn’t heard one, but I didn’t give up hope.

  The camera was still rolling when we stopped for sundowners. I recalled that was when I was going to question the guests after the Alice 2 murder. Only Annabel was busy protecting Victoria from Keith so I hadn’t done it. Instead I’d made an abortive attempt to talk to Jason, who’d blown me off as quickly as possible without uttering one helpful word.

  Of course the minute I had that thought, the whole mystery-story mentality kicked in. One helpful word. My rash assumption that there hadn’t been one didn’t mean there had, but you could have fooled me. I listened very carefully to the audio portion of the encounter.

  Unfortunately, I’d done most of the talking. Our first exchange was my “Pretty exciting, eh?” and his “What?”

  The rest of his responses were: “What murder? The woman died in her sleep,” “No one gave her poison,” and, “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” during the last of which I had a shot of his hand pouring soda out on the ground before walking off to put the can on the table. I recall thinking he’d done it just to get away. While that might have been revealing, it was also effective. I had no more footage of Jason.

  I stopped the tape. Rewound. Played it again.

  Was there anything there?

  “What?” was not particularly helpful.

  “What murder? The woman died in her sleep.” How did he know that? Was he a doctor? No, he was just denying that it was a murder. Which he’d be eager to do if he was the one who’d committed it.
/>   The same went for “No one gave her poison.” The flat denial. Just like any two-bit punk ever picked up for anything: “What wallet? I never took nuthin’.”

  And finally, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The total copout, fleeing the interrogation.

  Put that all together and the cops should be fitting the guy for handcuffs.

  Or ignoring, reasonably enough, a particularly innocuous exchange.

  I couldn’t help thinking there was something I was missing. The first time I’d played the tape, something had registered. It wasn’t registering now. Why? Because I was looking for it. I was torturously wrapping my mind around minutiae, looking for subtleties and nuances. Why couldn’t I just look at the tape? With no preconceptions. Like the first time.

  I rewound the tape. Tried to clear my head. Hard to do. Don’t think of an elephant. I smiled. I’d chosen the example at random; but having been charged by an elephant, it was amazingly apt.

  And particularly wrong. In this case, I should think of an elephant. Anything that cleared my mind from thinking about the conversation.

  I hit PLAY. Thought about the elephant. And me slipping on the termite mound. And the camera going every which way.

  On the tape Jason was telling me the woman died in her sleep. I barely heard. I was thinking about what Clemson said about ants in my pants. It was enough to make me squirm even now.

  And just like that, it was over. Jason said I don’t know what you’re talking about, dumped out the can of soda, and—

  My mouth fell open. It was like being charged by the elephant. I stopped the tape, rewound it just a little, played it again.

  There was a PAUSE button. Not STOP, PAUSE. STOP turned the playback off. PAUSE froze the frame.

  By the time I found it, Jason was long gone.

  I stopped the tape, rewound it again, hit PLAY.

  I’d gone back a little further. I got to hear him tell me she died in her sleep. Which gave me time to take my eye off the screen, find the right button, and put my finger on it. I looked back up just as Jason told me he didn’t know what I was talking about.