Snake

by James McClure

  Strydom had already been captivated by the clockless back rooms of the museum, and very nearly asked if they ever employed skilled pensioners on bird stuffing or the like. Then wonder returned his thoughts to the immediate.

  “Lovely and shiny,” he said.

  “Vaseline; prevents it sticking to the p.o.p. The fact the colors fade so rapidly is one of the main reasons we’ve gone over onto casts. Now, Python regius, consent has been given, so it’s time for your little operation.”

  Strydom, who could have kicked himself for not going through the proper channels in the first place, and so saving himself much anxiety, said idly, “King python, is it?”

  “Royal. Must have been imported from up north and have cost a pretty penny, too. Although, with proper care, their life span makes it a goodish investment. Very gentle nature; an excellent pet.”

  “No, thanks!”

  “Any animal,” Bose reminded him pointedly, with a mischievous smile, “is apt to behave in a strongly defensive manner if it believes itself to be threatened. Usually, our friend the royal makes himself into an almost perfect ball, with his head tucked away on the inside—you can literally roll him about with your foot. Quite a trick.”

  “Wonder if it was in her act.”

  “Shouldn’t think so; once they’re tame, they stop doing it. Excuse me a moment.”

  The dead reptile was now lying stretched out on its back along the zinc-topped table. Strydom put down his bag and went over to examine the two horny claws just in front of its vent.

  “Vestigial hind limbs,” Bose explained, unrolling a canvas holder lined with dissecting instruments. “The family Boidae have a quite recognizable pelvic girdle, which I’ll show you. Males use the claws to stroke the female during courtship— while they seem to have no use for them at all.”

  “Hell, I never thought of them as lovers.” Strydom chuckled. In fact, as he realized then, he had lived all his life surrounded by snakes without giving them any thought at all—except, momentarily, while dispatching them with his golf club.

  “Nor had I,” said Bose, selecting a large scalpel.

  But Strydom’s curiosity had been aroused. “So how come they lost them? I thought legs were a step up the scale, if you get my meaning!”

  “Ah, not much good for burrowing. It’s believed that snakes evolved about one and a quarter million years ago from some lizards that took to burrowing, lost the use of their legs, and returned limbless to the surface. There are several other indications of this as well.”

  Bose was plainly flattered by an attentive pupil, so Strydom decided this would be a good moment to put a question that might have seemed impertinent before.

  “I’ve been wondering, man, why you keep shoving the blame on the girl when how can we be sure that the python didn’t attack her in the first place?”

  “Aha, the Tarzan fallacy! Come up this end and take a look at the teeth. Notice how big they are and how they point backward—and now contrast them with the two fangs of this viper here.”

  Strydom did that.

  “Neither, you have noted, are designed for chewing. Snakes do not chew their food, but swallow it whole. The nearest thing to mastication is found in the eggeater, known hereabouts as Dasypeltis scaber, which has a special downward-pointing projection from its spine that breaks the shell of an engorged meal, allowing it to spit out the bits. But come now—why does the royal have them, do you think?”

  There was obviously a catch to this, so Strydom’s reply was grudgingly given. “To bite with?”

  “Good.”

  “But I’d already thought of that. She must have just been quicker.”

  “Quicker than this chap? Contrary to Lord Greystoke’s simian beliefs, constrictors begin like any other snake by striking, not by wrapping themselves around you. The teeth are for holding on, for getting to grips with their prey. Having secured a hold, then they coil themselves around and try, if they can, to keep their tails anchored to a fixed object in order—”

  “I know,” said Strydom, “but how hard exactly is the squeeze?”

  “Sufficient to cause suffocation by immobilizing the respiratory apparatus. Strangulation may, or may not, come into it, too, but they are certainly not given to crushing anything to a bloody pulp. As pulp fiction would have it!”

  Strydom only half heard this afterthought and neglected to smile; he was already anticipating questions from the floor of the conference hall.

  “The degree of pressure always interests us,” he said. “There have been cases when in orgasm the human male has inadvertently caused the death of the female with his hands. Can you be more specific?”

  “Certainly. If you had a small boa in a figure eight around your wrists, it would seem virtually impossible to disengage yourself and your hands would rapidly swell. And I’m speaking in terms of an averagely powerful man. Living handcuffs.”

  “Or a living ligature,” remarked Strydom solemnly, as Bose slit open the python from chin to tail and peeled back the outer layers of muscle.

  “Not as putrid as we thought,” the scientist said.

  Strydom looked again. Conditioned by years of doing much the same thing to Homo sapiens, he had expected to see the same glossy array of paired organs exposed before him in their God-ordained order.

  “You’ve only dealt with frogs, I take it,” Bose said, noticing the lift of the thick bushy eyebrows. “This shape is ideal for digestive purposes, being, to all intents, one long length of gut, but it does make a rather tight fit otherwise.”

  “Only one of each?”

  “As you say, sometimes only the one. Sometimes they are arranged one behind the other, sometimes the right is much larger and better developed than the left, and, of course, gross elongation comes into it as well. Observe how this lung extends for more than half the length of the body. But let me poke about a bit and see if it was your boy or the young lady in her extremis who did the damage.”

  “Most grateful,” said Strydom, now not giving a fig for the time either.

  Pedro, the giant tortoise at the Trekkersburg Bird Sanctuary, was said to have shared Napoleon’s exile on the island of St. Helena. He looked as if he’d had a hell of a life. There were splashes of egret dropping almost half an inch thick on his black shell, and his mouth had a permanent downward twist to it.

  Kramer knew how he felt. He empathized.

  But decided to wake Zondi all the same. So he got out of the Chev, where he had been dozing uneasily, shook down his trousers to ankle length again, and went across to the bench. It was amazing how the little bugger did it—slept like that, out cold, at the drop of his cocky straw hat, even though the new road system had destroyed the value of the place as a quiet retreat during daylight hours.

  Kramer picked up the hat and let the sudden blaze of direct sun burn into the eyelids.

  “The bench was comfy, boss,” Zondi said, his old self again.

  “Uh-huh. And the new car smelled like you said it did.”

  “You’re not so good, then?”

  “Worse than you think.”

  Zondi opened his eyes and sat up. “In what way?” he asked.

  “I switched on the radio just now to see if there was anything on the go in Peacevale.”

  “Aikona, no!”

  “Relax, all’s quiet. But you know that case Sergeant Marais was handling? With the snake? Prisoner’s gone and killed himself.”

  The vertebrae were exposed.

  “Neat, hey?” enthused Strydom.

  “Complex ball-and-socket joints, articulation at no fewer than five points.”

  “No wonder they can twist about.”

  “Ah, but within limits,” said Bose, dissecting cautiously. “Each joint can bend through roughly twenty-five degrees from side to side, but only a few degrees vertically. That’s why there are so many of them, like drawing a circle using lots of tiny straight lines. On the vertical axis, it can take only so much of a curve before snapping. Spinal cord gets pinc
hed, spasm follows … Hmmm.”

  Strydom craned forward to see better.

  “Just a moment, Doctor. We mustn’t nick ourselves.”

  Bose excised a section of the spine and placed it under the special light he used for painting—which had the same color temperature, whatever that meant, as the neon strips in the cases.

  “Now use the glass yourself,” he said to Strydom, handing it over. “You’ll see the cord has actually been torn apart; not pinched but—”

  “Ja, I see—the same as a banger in a Christmas cracker.”

  “So that’s your boy exonerated. I had thought, when you said you were hard pushed for space, that he might have overdone things and effected a fracture in that way. But I doubt very much he would have played tug o’ war with it.”

  “Oh, no. Not him. He’s a good worker, never fools around.”

  “Then we’re back to the unfortunate young woman. She must have had an exceptional pair on her.”

  “Hey?”

  “To pull—or counterpull—like that. Quite a lengthy battle it must have been, but I think I can provide you with a respectable explanation for your forensic colleagues.”

  “Oh, ja?”

  “Do point out to them that snakes are incapable of their legendary capacity for swift cross-country sorties in pursuit of game rangers,” Bose said. “The truth is they easily tire, due to their blood’s slow rate of oxygenation. Terribly sluggish, if I may use the term. As to top speeds, I would put a mamba’s best sprint at somewhere around the four-miles-an-hour mark, but that’s rather a tangent.”

  “I get you! Bergstroom’s pulling one way, to bring it round and get it off, but it’s pulling the other way in panic and just for one second it starts to go flop and boomph!”

  Bose nodded slowly after due consideration, and then replied, “Would you like me to draft out a more detailed exposition, for inclusion, say, as a footnote?”

  “Man, would I appreciate that? Please. But for how long would this have gone on? A minute?”

  His mentor politely hid a smile but the big gray eyes leaked it.

  “The metabolism of Python regius is not altogether quite as.…” Bose paused and rephrased: “The process of suffocation by constriction is always fairly prompt, and yes, as you say, three or four minutes would or could be sufficient. But I’d imagine, with regard to a struggle, it would take at least five times as long to exhaust him.”

  Strydom did the sum, then saw the dressing room quite vividly in his mind’s eye: while it was messy and untidy and nothing was in its proper place, it certainly showed no sign of a prolonged struggle. Why, there was the stool, right beside the body, and still upright. The mirror wasn’t straight, but seemed to have been put up that way.

  Then somehow he was led on to think the unthinkable.

  The colonel had broken his plastic ruler. He placed the halves of it on either side of his blotter and took up the note.

  “Where did he get pencil and paper?” he asked Kramer.

  “Off Ben, who was acting for him.”

  “This was last night? Late?”

  “Uh-huh, in the cell.”

  “What was the nature of their conversation?”

  “Stevenson hoped Ben could get him off the charges. Says he kept asking for it to be settled out of court, like a civil case or something. Ben explained the difference, said he’d have to appear in court today to be remanded, but it wouldn’t take long and he’d get bail. Asked Ben if the press boys would be there, and Ben told him you could never tell—and it wasn’t any good trying to bribe them.”

  “You would not have opposed bail?”

  “By this time, Marais was in possession of fresh information. Did you know—”

  “Later, Tromp; this first. I’ve got to ring Ben Goldstein myself. Already the widow is onto us for ‘unlawful harassment’ of her husband. What the hell did you do at his place yesterday? Now the maid there says she overheard you threatening him with a broomstick!”

  “Fairy stories. And as for his wife, she despises his guts.”

  “She doesn’t have to anymore, Kramer. She can just cherish a dear, sweet memory of him. That’s trouble you’ve been in before.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Pleased with yourself, hey? Then you take another look—here!”

  Colonel Muller dropped the note into Kramer’s lap as he stalked across to the window.

  On one side the thing read in neat, but progressively heavier writing:

  I am sick of who you think you are. I will NOT take orders to stand up in court and face that kind of publicity. Why should I? I’ll show you I can still be a free man. I’m only sorry for Jeremy.

  And, on the reverse side, in thin, hasty loops:

  Why not ask Shirley, Lt. Kramer? Maybe it’s too late for me to remember that now though!!! M.S.

  So Stevenson had seen that the pen was a sword that cuts both ways, Kramer noted with a smile.

  “Now it’s a laughing matter!” the colonel exploded. “You’ve got him crapping himself so hard that the last thing he does is try and bloody cooperate! He scribbles that on the back and then what? He takes his stinking socks and ties knots in them and stuffs them down his throat! They tell me he must have pushed them as far as his finger could reach. God in heaven!”

  “Ja, but I think it was him puking up behind them that made the wool seal off tight,” Kramer muttered, staring at the last line again.

  “Where’s the district surgeon? That’s his job!”

  “Nobody knows, sir. Wife says he had a bad night.”

  “Huh! My heart bleeds. Whatever happens, see he knows about the conference at eleven. I want you, the DS, and Marais all here on the dot!”

  “Look, meantime I’ll give Sam a bell for you,” Kramer said, rather than offered. “This is my doing, so there’s no need for you to worry.”

  And he left the room, with the colonel staring suspiciously after him, saying for the umpteenth time, “God in heaven.”

  As first guesses go, it went. Shirley was not Mrs. Stevenson’s first name; hers was Trudy. Then Winifred Amelia.

  “Fly me to Miami,” said Bix Johnson, mystifying Marais.

  Who had asked him to show him where things were kept at the Wigwam.

  “Then we’ll just have to go through the whole list of members,” Marais said, still showing imagination. “He’s the sort of bloke who uses first names in preference, am I right?”

  “He does, he does.”

  Marais was pleased with his clever use of the present tense; he needed the piano player’s spite kept alive for a while yet.

  “And yet you are sure he didn’t have any women friends or acquaintances by that name?”

  “You must be joking, Sarge. Only got Eve to sit with him because he was the boss.”

  “Ach, look—it’s only initials,” Marais complained, flipping over the pages of the membership roll.

  “Upsy—a page back. There you are: Shirley.”

  “And it’s Mr., so it must be a bloke.”

  “Quick!” said the enigmatic Johnson.

  Marais was as quick as he could be, and copied down two telephone numbers and a home address before checking in the other book kept near the entrance. Shirley had been in the club on Saturday night.

  “Any good fascist reason why I shouldn’t stay on awhile and get through some blues, Sarge?”

  “Not my piano,” said Marais, pleased at how his English had improved in such company to include repartee.

  Big Ben Goldstein looked like Nero after the fire insurance paid out. His clothes were the most expensive, his manicure came at fifty cents a cuticle, and his expression was one of ill-concealed glee.

  Which misled some people into thinking he was not totally honest—not only the dishonest themselves, but others with old-fashioned prejudices. Ben was so honest that sometimes it hurt, but it hardly hurt at all to tell Trudy Stevenson there was nothing he could do for her that would be of help.

  “And so, my l
ove, we leave it there—all right? Don’t worry, I’ll not send a bill. If it’d just been Monty, then you had grounds. But I can’t act now knowing what I do. You follow?”

  “He’s dead, and he was the only other one who knew! What can they prove?”

  “Me, I wouldn’t try them.”

  “You tricked me!”

  “Okay, okay, so I tricked you. Better I should trick you than it happens in front of a judge. If the police are willing to drop everything now, so be it. Come back in the morning if you still want to discuss details so soon, the winding-up, all that. But I myself would see a doctor, get some pills. Elspeth, my dear, will you show this lady out?”

  Mrs. Stevenson jerked her elbow free.

  “You bastard,” she hissed at Ben.

  “Paternity suits I don’t contest, madam.”

  “Wow!” said the delectable Elspeth, who had been left standing. “That was like a cork out of a bottle!”

  The outer door slammed.

  “No, that was Mrs. Rat out of a rat trap,” Ben said sadly, and then started to dial the CID number. He owed it to the hard-arsed bugger to thank him for the warning.

  “Only if it’s pertinent to the matter in hand,” warned the colonel as Kramer came back into the office. “Then we’ll just have to start without Strydom.”

  Kramer sat down and said flatly, “I was right. We didn’t crack Stevenson—the wife did.”

  “Hey?” exclaimed Marais, in great surprise. “What the hell gave you that idea, sir?”

  “Sergeant, if I blasted you in the bum with a twelve-bore, could you tell me which pellet hit first?”

  Crushed, Marais put his head back in the morning paper.

  “Maybe it’s time we all cooled down a bit,” the colonel suggested after a while. “We’ll give the DS two more minutes. Well, Tromp?”

  “Sir?”

  “Wouldn’t Sergeant Marais at least hear a bang first?”

  “Ach, I suppose it was the writing.”

  “Ja?”

  “The assumption was that the suicide note ended with the man’s initials, M.S. But the pencil line there was thin, so the pencil had to be sharp. So I read it again like it was what he first wrote—‘Why not ask Shirley…?’—and saw it was like a message he wanted passed on to me. ‘Too late’ could have been a reference to the time of night—you had used the word ‘late’ yourself, Colonel. He was in a hurry with an idea, but in writing it down this crystallized his position. Okay?”