Face-Off. Chris Karsten
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get one.”
She wrote it down and ended the call.
Tanned skins. She felt the legs of a millipede on the nape of her neck, peered at the TV screen, saw nothing of interest. Ran her palms across the strings, strumming the first chords of the Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun” but giving up, and then sat with the harp between her legs, rubbing the hard callouses on the pads of her string fingers.
“Dammit.”
She sighed, picked up the phone and dialled the number Col. Silas Sauls had given her.
* * *
The hotel owner looked surprised when he opened the door. “You’re early, Detective – it’s not even seven,” said Rabie Saadi. “The cops usually keep me waiting for hours.”
“Sgt. Mfundisi not here yet?” Ella asked, staring at the man’s hairdo: black hair oiled and slicked back, gleaming under the dim lights. The stench of the previous night’s revelry – beer, dust, sweat, sweet perfume and stale food – hovered like thick fog in the deserted bar.
He shook his head. “Coffee? While we’re waiting for His Excellency yet again.”
“Black, no sugar. Your guest, the one suspected of killing a cat in his bath, what’s his name? The sergeant told me, but I didn’t quite get it. Unusual name.”
“Fomalhaut. That’s how he wrote it in the register. Neat handwriting.”
“I want a description for an Identikit.”
“I thought the case was closed? Just a cat, no crime committed?”
“There’s a new development,” she said. “The room remains cordoned off. Did he give a first name?”
Rabie brought out the register, opened it on the bar counter, paged back to six weeks earlier, put his index finger under a name. “This is his initial. Looks like a b, why a lower-case b?”
She looked at the name next to Rabie’s dirty fingernail: Fomalhaut b.
“And why write his initial after his surname?” She thought aloud.
“Why did they send you, a Murder and Robbery detective, to invesitgate the death of a cat?”
“Classified information, Rabie, concerning a current investigation. How about that coffee?”
He motioned her to the nearest chair and ordered two coffees.
“While we’re waiting for Sgt. Mfundisi, tell me everything,” she said. “Start at the beginning. The night your guest, Mr Fomalhaut, arrived. What did he look like? Short, chubby round the hips and thighs, like a pear?”
His eyes jumped to her face. She suspected he’d been assessing her, that he’d concluded there wasn’t much under her T-shirt to get excited about. Rabie’s dancers were much better endowed, swinging from the two shiny poles every night.
“How did you know? I mean, about the chubby hips?” he asked.
“Flat nose, almost no chin?”
“No, sharp nose, crooked. Big chin.”
“Sharp nose? Big chin?”
That wasn’t how she remembered Abel. And she’d taken a good look at him that night in his kitchen when they’d talked and he’d made coffee. Later, after she’d been rescued from his house while he was in the process of removing a piece of skin from her stomach, she had described his face for an Identikit. It was now etched in her memory, and she would never forget it; she dreamt of that face, and of the scalpel in his hand.
Before that near-fatal night, she’d called on him twice at his gallery of African masks and ethnic artefacts. The sparse hair, pale eyes, flat nose; the absent chin, pendulous cheeks.
“Are you sure about the nose and chin?”
“Yes, do you want to take a look?”
“I thought the CCTV lens had been spray-painted?”
“Not the one at reception.”
She took the register into Rabie’s office at the back. He sat down at his computer, fingers wriggling like small eels on the keyboard, and the first black-and-white images appeared on the screen, flickering and grainy. She suspected that Rabie had invested in the cheapest CCTV system on the market.
She could make out the guest’s short posture, but millions of men were built like that. He had his back to the camera and was wearing a hat with a floppy brim that cast a deep shadow over the top half of his face as he bent to pick up two pieces of luggage, his face in profile.
“Stop,” she said. Yes, Rabie was right: sharp nose, the chin so big, almost like a caricature. “Is he wearing dark glasses?”
“Yes, at that time of night,” said Rabie. “Said he’d injured his eye in the collision with the train. I could see the swelling.”
She opened the register again, saw he’d booked in at half past eight, three days after the traumatic events at the funeral parlour of Poppe & Son.
“And these are the only pictures you have?”
“He never came to reception again. Used the fire escape. It was the first and last time I ever spoke to him. I saw him briefly a few times and noticed he was growing a beard. Is he the man you’re looking for?”
She shook her head. “It doesn’t look like him. Where’s Sgt. Mfundisi? It’s after eight. Our appointment was for seven?”
“I told you,” said Rabie. “His Excellency takes his time.”
“Show me the room. I can’t wait any longer.”
“It’s sealed. The sergeant said no one except the cops is allowed inside. Threatened me with prison if anyone breaks the seal.”
“I am the cops, Rabie. He won’t put you in prison. Get the key.”
As she was removing the tape, Rabie said behind her: “Here he is now.”
The sergeant was also chubby of hip, his backside and belly even chubbier, boobs bigger than her own, shoulders like an ox, gait like the waddle of a fat goose. She waited for him to get to her.
“Nothing’s been removed from the room?” she asked.
“Only the bottle with the skin,” said Sgt. Mfundisi.
She thought of the skins and furs found in the tumbledown house in Dorado Park, along with the embalmed body of the old woman, Abel Lotz’s mother, with that weird mask on her face. Tanned skins of cats, moles, hares and dassies, still wet, stretched on drying racks, left behind in his headlong flight ahead of the police.
“Forensics haven’t been here?” Ella asked the sergeant. “You took the bottle with the skin to the lab yourself?”
“Can’t waste Forensics’ time with a dead cat, Warrant. If you don’t think this cat-killer is your man, we can clear the scene, close the file, and Rabie can have his room back. I don’t see anything suspicious. But I thought, just to be on the safe side, I’d tell Col. Sauls about the cat skin, just in case it was connected to your investigation.”
She opened a wardrobe door. “If Forensics examine the room and find something that points to the Nightstalker . . . That’s the only way we’ll know, Sergeant, don’t you think?”
“We went over everything, Const. Xala and I: the entire room and the bathroom, the mini-kitchen with the hotplate and pots and pans and stuff. Over there in the corner is the stuff we found: just a pile of old newspapers. And the skin.”
She looked at the pile behind the door. “He didn’t leave behind any personal belongings? No comb or toothbrush or anything like that?” She crouched at the papers and spread them out. There were