Читать книгу Dirty Diaries - Bayo Inc. David - Страница 4

Whenever a public property was missing in the neighborhood, folks suspected the gentle-looking Jerry Smith. Whenever a neighbor came home from office and found his wardrobe broken and jewelry stolen, he walked up to Jerry and begged him or ordered him to return it. If Jerry swore he didn’t take it, it was certain someone would soon bring it to him to help sell it.

From the extreme end of the street, an old couple had come to Jerry’s house to ask if he knew the whereabouts of their wayward teenage daughter who hadn’t come home the previous night.

The twenty-four years old, six-foot-two, slim and handsome Jerry was the dream of every young girl in his neighborhood. Before terrible circumstances and society remolded his character, he was a law-abiding gentle soul who could have been in one of the noble professions.

A closer look at him would reveal a black dot below his left eye, which eventually added to his handsomeness. Temporarily, on his cheeks, he had a fading wound that could be mistaken for a tribal mark. Unfortunately, they were on both sides, looking very deliberate—the result of a horse whip or purposeful wickedness during gang torture.

He was now going through another round of torture, but this time, by the police.

On the day he was arrested, he wore a beautifully cut white shirt and a roughly knotted yellow silk tie under a light yellow suit, proving to neighbors that he wasn’t what they took him for. He was a good citizen like them.

Kane Duncan had been his best friend since they were both four. His aunt, with whom he lived, became a family friend to Kane’s mother because of the lads’ closeness. And when Clara Duncan was found dead, Kane had gone to live with Jerry’s family.

Throughout their lives, whenever either of them departed to a secret place for one reason or the other, his friend knew where to find him. For three months now, however, it had not been so. Kane had gone in search of his last business, and Jerry had gone in pursuit of a rich uncle.

As soon as he arrived home, the police were waiting for him.

He was waving and flashing his well-positioned set of white teeth to a young admirer when he was bundled off by men from the Caston police department. They only needed him to answer some questions about Kane. He was a victim, and Kane Duncan was also a victim. Judas Duncan was the target.

A police department on the Mainland knew that a man, Judas Duncan, who had a son in Clackamas Estate, was into money printing. They knew he had just served a sentence and was going to see his son. He had only escaped by thin luck before they could nab him.

After some days of searching for Judas or Kane without success, the police department to which the case had now been transferred settled for seeking Jerry’s help. This was made possible by information from his neighbors. “If you are looking for Kane, you might as well ask for Jerry,” the sixth person had confirmed after seeing the detective’s ID card.

Soon Jerry was sitting on a chair in a dark room under a bulb, crying but pretending exhaustion. For over an hour he had been subjected to questioning and inhuman treatment. To the sadistic low-ranking officer conducting it, the interrogation process seemed to be flagging. The elderly officer knew that he was not good at interviewing suspects, but any tyrant could rely on him for extracting information from dissidents through torture. He had made many criminals talk, but Jerry wasn’t one of them.

For the fifteenth time, he demanded. “Where is Judas Duncan?”

“Judas Iscariot, my ass.” Jerry said low, under stress, and in an instant received another high-grade cop slap. Again he muttered a provocative word and received yet another slap.

The officer put his hands on the table, bending. “All right . . . I’m, er . . . sorry—I didn’t mean to . . .”

“Sorry for your dick.” That earned him a heavy slap on the throat. “Your bitchy wife will beg me on a Sunday morning to lick my crazy motherfuckin’ balls—bet on it.”

The officer moved impetuously, giving Jerry the impression of a sudden attack. Quickly, the suspect tossed his head backward an inch in an effort to escape the blow.

“Even if you are the commander-in-chief, you can’t threaten me. I am not an uneducated civilian. I know something about the UN charter on my rights.” His voice was hardly audible. “And you can’t force me to answer what shit I don’t know anything about.” He felt some pain in his jaw. He watched his assailant move to the window, and waited silently. He was looking outside and speaking to himself as if he was asking someone hiding there what the next question should be.

Dusk was rapidly descending.

Trying to look as if he were really experienced at scenes like this one, the interrogator returned to his seat and said, “Now let’s forget about Judas Duncan. I know that Kane Duncan is your friend. You told me this yourself, right?”

“Yes, I can’t deny my friendship with Kane, but I have not seen him for a long time. That Judas you mentioned, I don’t know.”

“Tell me anything about Kane.”

Twisting his mouth, Jerry wiped his tears, assuming that his ordeal was gradually coming to an end. That silly question should give him some edge over the black shirt as he normally called them. “This game is not worth the crazy candle. It is a character assassination exercise. Everything my neighbors told you was constructed under biased minds. I don’t know no Judas or Kane. Believe me, If I knew them, I wouldn’t have been enduring these crazy motherfuckin’ beatings.” He soon realized that he was contradicting himself. He didn’t care, knowing that the black shirt was not mentally organized. He stuck to the newer ground. “I’m serious. What am I going to gain by covering for a criminal? I know neither of them.”

The officer stood still, trying not to believe him. When he came to his senses, he queried, “Which Kane did you tell me you knew then?”

“Maybe you didn’t hear me very well. I didn’t say so.”

“My Jesus! Just now! You are a lying bastard.”

“Two years ago, I stopped seeing the only Kane I know when I heard he was blackmailing me, telling my girlfriends I had gonorrhea. Later on, he was telling everyone I was a hermaphrodite.”

The officer was scared out of his mind. He opened his mouth and stared, wondering if Jerry truly had two sexual organs. Looking at the interviewee’s trousers, he sipped his coffee and wiped the corners of his mouth delicately with the back of his hand.

Briskly, the door flung open and Superintendent Kelvin Lucas strode in gallantly, his face drawn and pinched.

An upsurge of fear assailed Jerry. He fastened his eyes on the intruding officer’s hands to see if he had brought in some weapons of torture. He was not aware that Kelvin was staring at him studiously, wondering if he had revealed anything.

As the interrogating officer moved from his seat in concealed annoyance to shut the door that had been left intentionally open, Kelvin seized the opportunity to ask Jerry, with a gesture of mouth sign, if he had said anything about the Duncans.

Jerry found the indecorous gesticulation meaningful, but took it for mockery. He also twisted his mouth in reaction.

Has this chap revealed anything? Kelvin wondered. If he has, it would only be a matter of time before his own treachery against the police and the state was known. The exposition would not be a good piece of news.

Kelvin’s inquisitiveness was dispelled when Jerry reaffirmed to his interrogator, “I don’t know any Judas or Kane. I swear. Let me go my own way and mind my damn business.”

Confident that there was no leakage yet, Kelvin, leaning on another desk with folded arms, said furiously, “Look Marvin, how many times have I told you to leave this Judas-Kane thing alone? You are not the one to handle it. Why don’t you check out more important matters? This is your second week on this case and all you have to show for it is a young man sitting before you and crying his eyes out. Again, I will advise you to stop wasting your time acting like you’re investigating Kim Philby. Later on, we might have some fresh and better evidence against the Dean . . . I mean Judas . . . er, whatever. Then we would not have to depend on an indefinite piece of information passed through the phone, ordering you to stop your more taxing jobs and start chasing an invisible Judas. The case was not even properly filed.”

Marvin only frowned, mumbling unintelligible protests. He gave a careless salute by merely flinging his right hand past his nose like he was swatting off flies, then excused himself.

Watching him as he went out, Kelvin thought of what he could do to the stubborn elderly Marvin. He could open his gate of sudden retirement, or simply get him some long weeks of leave. Kelvin Lucas’s connection in the State’s police was far and wide.

Since his university days, he had been loyal to Judas Duncan. Whenever he had problems with the school authorities, he always had the Dean’s brotherly support. Every day after school, he always went to Judas’s house for free, extra lectures in such phenomena as economic crime, corruption, fraud, assassination, drugs and narcotics abuses, and trafficking. But in practical, he was a dull student theoretically. And despite all odds, his godfather, the Dean had made sure he passed through with first-class honors.

Kelvin had joined the police out of pressure from parents who wanted a uniformed man in the family, thereby tarnishing his dream of becoming a professional thief who was going to break the record of the most dangerous robber in history. While Adolf Hitler was his hero, Judas, the Dean, was his mentor.

He had concocted a very dangerous plan to get Judas out of prison in the third year, but it was abandoned because the Dean disliked the method of execution. And then he had promised that one day he would unravel the mystery behind Clara’s death and also the brain behind his boss’s eighteen-year imprisonment.

Judas had told him as he held the iron bars of the prison, “I know you would, my dear Kelvin, and when the masquerades are uncovered, nobody would be able to circumvent my own intransigent type of requital.”

At forty-two, with three legal wives and eleven children, Kelvin still believed that his dream of becoming what he originally wanted to be was not a lost one. He would soon check out of the police and face the world.

Just as he stepped out of his station, he shoved himself into a waiting taxi and directed the driver to take him somewhere within a five-minute walk from Judas’s house. He would trek the remaining distance. He ignored the cabdriver, who was trying to crack a joke and get friendly.

For a moment, Kelvin looked thoughtfully, then sighed, realizing that after some years of slow investigation, followed with some amount of money for the mission, he had fulfilled the promise he made to the Dean in prison. He remembered vividly that he had said with concealed tears, “I know you don’t deserve to be here because you have not done anything wrong to anyone. BM Kazeem and I will take care of your son. Nothing will harm him.” Then he had hardened himself as he remembered a sentence in Hitler’s message of encouragement to the SS. He had said to Judas, “I will make sure I get to the bottom of your case, my Dean. Nobody can hurt you and go scot-free while I still have breath. I promise you this day, I’ll get at whoever framed you up and killed your wife.”

He got out of the taxi and, with quickened steps, walked down to the lone bungalow. He reasoned that he would keep back a vital truth when telling the Dean the outcome of his findings. He shouldn’t hit him with too many blows at a time.

***

Judas had been crawling in and out of his laboratory, taking in a bowl and bringing out a telescope or something. Exhausted by the stress of his work, he sat heavily on a tapestry-covered wing chair in the dining space where he had set his lunch—some self-made wine in a fat flask and a long parcel of weeds.

He rested an arm and stared at the bathroom door down the narrow corridor. As he splashed the contents of the flask into a glass, still looking at the door, he wondered what Kane was doing there all day. He’d seen him enter the bathroom for the fourth time that day, coming out at intervals to watch pornographic films.

On all four occasions, there hadn’t been water spilling as a sign of bathing. Something was going on.

Slowly, pushing his chair backward and standing erect abruptly, he decided to check him out. He moved silently, nearly on tiptoe. He paused for a moment, leaned on the door, careful not to make a sound, and plastered his eyes obliquely on it in an effort to locate a tiny hole the last occupant of the house had carefully drilled there, he was sure, to watch his daughters and female visitors bathe. Judas found it and closed an eye, squinting with the other one. He saw Kane standing before him, with head tilted backward a bit and mouth twitched with pleasure, releasing silent oohs. With mounting interest, Judas started to examine the situation. He noticed that his son kept closing and opening his eyes halfway, like someone trying to sleep. Is there a girl kneeling in front of him? Judas asked himself, then lowered his head to answer. No. Pants down, a hand moving back and forth. “My motherfuckin’ god!” he shouted, laughing. “You’re fuckin’ jerking off.” Just as he was about to bang on the door to make a jest of Kane, the doorbell rang. He quickly went for it. He hated the unmusical sound, even though he’d invented it.

Kane, still in the bathroom, quietly belted his trousers, wondering who was visiting. He bent down to search for the tinier hole he’d also drilled on that door the day he’d arrived.

When Judas had satisfied himself that the caller wasn’t unknown, he opened and held the door for his main man. Superintendent Kelvin walked past him and sat on his favorite seat, clasping hands on his knees, staring ahead.

Without as much as good afternoon, Kelvin began. “Master, er . . . there are some facts I have gathered. You . . . er, Clara.” He waited for Judas to get seated.

“I am so grateful to you, my dearest Kelvin.”

“Before your journey to prison, your wife, Clara, had been having a relationship—sexual, of course.”

“My fuckin’ God!” Judas’s heart skipped for a moment, then began to pound in his head.

“She had been dating one Larry Harrison, a very young widower and the only son of a millionaire. The Larry guy had a daughter by his first wife. There was nothing he didn’t do to get your wife to divorce you and marry him. You can . . .”

“Divorce me? When did they start committing adultery?” Judas queried dryly.

“It must have been a couple of years before you started lecturing us—in Hertford, that is, barely a year before Clara was pregnant with Kane. What I found out revealed that she loved the Larry guy as much as she loved you.”

“So a trusted jewel like my immortal Clara could be so wonky to smudge me by getting mucilaged to this kind of wormwood.” He drew a stool to himself, draped both soft white arms on it, and continued more dryly: “So all along, I was standing comfortably on a three-legged vanity. Someone was inserting his third leg inside my cherished canoe. Clara, shame on you.”

“My Dean, I will suggest you don’t interrupt me because I may forget some important discoveries.”

If Judas was thinking rightly, without this bad news in his head, he would have reminded Kelvin that he always told them as students to make use of jotters all the time.

After a short disturbing silence that kept the Dean waiting, Kelvin started tapping his head rapidly with a finger, staring blindly at the carpet, in an attempt to recall what he said last.

He finally went on. “Your late wife wanted the relationship to continue secretly as it had been, but never consented to the idea of divorcing you. So the Larry guy reasoned that you were the only obstacle to his dream wife. Through one terrible Othollo from MOPOL, he organized to get rid of you for some time. The guy who gave the false confession that nailed you was a real armed robber, an Othollo man. Immediately he wrote that confessional statement against you, Othollo presented him with a poisoned meat pie and some money. Then he died.”

Superintendent Kelvin paused for breath and wiped his forehead. “It wasn’t long before the Larry guy was down with a complicated disease or something. On his sick bed, surrounded by family members, he never stopped muttering the two words—Clara Duncan—until he died. His father, Dave Harrison, himself a gangster in his early years, wouldn’t give another meaning to the names, Clara Duncan, other than a murderer. He wouldn’t accept that his now-deceased son was calling the only name he loved. The Dave guy employed the services of his friend, the same Othollo, to find whoever bore that name. It took some years before she was found and killed in that club.”

“I am stained, nauseated. I feel like I have been injected with homicidal intention. It will surely give vent to my display of fangs. How can we get this Dave?” Judas asked pointedly. “Is he still alive?”

Kelvin removed a sheet of paper from the book, the last days of Hitler. “That contains everything necessary for you to know about Dave Harrison.”

Judas collected it with a shaking and sweat-soaked hand. He soon decomposed it. “I am grateful to you, my dear Kelvin.”

“My Dean, I did not investigate this case for the fun of it.”

“Undeniably so.” He was absent-minded. What clouded his disturbed mind was Clara’s unfaithfulness.

“Dave Harrison must face justice, my Dean.”

“Definitely, he must.”

“If he faces the State’s justice, by and by he will free himself.”

“Surely, he will.”

Kelvin frowned. “If he frees himself with money, we would be unhappy and we’ll be interested in killing him.”

“Essentially, we would.”

“And if we do, we’ll be prime suspects because we’ve just had a case against him.” Kelvin said enthusiastically. “So we must drop all evidence that can nail him and go ahead with a well co-coordinated jungle justice.”

Judas folded the sheet of paper, hid it in the cushion he sat on, and made Kelvin know how careful they must be if they had to kill a man like Dave. “Investigation will boil at 1,000 degrees centigrade. To execute the plot is not in the least difficult as planning the plot. We must not bare our furious faces in the murder. I can’t afford to do another eighteen years.”

“Don’t worry about that—I shall come up with a plan.” He adjusted his shirt. “I should be going now.” He dipped a hand into his back pocket and brought out some money. “This is twenty thousand. I need some version.”

Judas collected the original money and as he headed to his laboratory he mumbled an appreciative sentence. He crawled in and presently returned with fifty thousand. Kelvin and BM Kazeem were the only partners who received fifty thousand fake at the presentation of twenty thousand original. Others received that amount for twenty-five thousand original. Judas said he appreciated his patronage, and watched him divide the money into all the pockets in his narrow gray trousers.

Mixing wine in his bar after he had bolted the door against his visitor, Judas was startled by the sudden slam of the bathroom door. “That was scary.” He turned to Kane.

“So you befriend cops, eh?” Kane asked lightly but with pretended annoyance. He’d heard their discussion and knew that Kelvin was not a threat to his safety. “That fellow is a cop, eh?”

“Oh, relax.” Judas shrugged it off. “You care for an ounce of whiskey on the rocks?”

“Whiskey on the mountain, my ass! You pal with the police and told me to feel at home.”

Judas patted him on the neck. “Sit down, my boy—don’t get fearfully aroused.” He drained his glass and told his son how important Kelvin Lucas was in his life.

***

Kelvin returned to Judas’s house when his memory had clicked to one of those discoveries he’d forgotten to reveal, but by then some days had passed. He was about to sit down when Judas emerged from his bar with two glasses of wine and offered him one.

“I have helped you make that. It will reduce your amnesia.”

Kelvin, perceiving a foul smell coming from the glass, had a quick look at it and saw leaves and seeds floating. “Thanks.” He downed it and frowned. “Very bitter.” He rejected the offer of another glass.

“How are your wives and the kids?”

“All are well.” The look on his face didn’t suggest so.

“I know that the sketching of a master plan wouldn’t take you an eon. Let me hear your theory before I say bravo and then redesign it,” Judas said roughly, with a wrapped weed hanging on a corner of his mouth.

“I haven’t come up with a plan yet. I’m still going to get one crucial report about Dave Harrison before anything constructive.”

“You are not alone.” He’d been fumbling with the lighter to get the weed on fire. He finally lit it and winked from the effect of the smoke. “I was going to tell you about my noble intention of adding some five or six neophytes to our circulatory chain stores.”

“My dear Dean, we will talk about all that later.” Kelvin narrated what happened in his station few days back, how an officer arrested Kane’s best friend, the interrogation and how he had successfully quelled the threatening case. He advised the Dean to be more careful about his assumed son and the men who worked for him. “Only BM Kazeem can be fully trusted. You are too generous, and you trust everyone. There are some secrets you need to keep to yourself. One doesn’t see a calamity coming. It always comes from behind, but it’s a pity you don’t look behind you. Be careful of what you tell your Kane.” He paused to look around, and lowered the tempo of his voice. “Is he around?”

Judas fixed a pair of red eyes on the long corridor. “He is, but he can’t be within earshot. He had a terrific moment in the bathroom this morning.”

The look on Kelvin’s face said he was doubtful as he still glanced left and right.

Judas reassured him. “He should be sleeping, not attuned.” He inhaled his weeds deeply, making his cheeks sag. “I’m listening.”

It took some seconds before Kelvin remembered what he was saying. “Anyway, keep your things away from Kane. He is dangerous. You need not be told. BM Kazeem and I told you in prison how he killed mercilessly. The robberies he masterminded were all successful. He did so much evil stuff. Do not pity him. Have no deep love for him. Kane does not depend on you. Show him no sympathy. I may not have another chance to tell you all these. Don’t rely on him. Do not treat him like a son. He is a beast in human form.” Kelvin stood up impulsively and walked to the door like a disappearing ghost. “Put a limit to every good thing you do.” He vanished into the street. Judas did not see his back when he peeped from the window. He had gone.

Feeling gratified by the note of warning, Judas walked quietly to the door to bolt it, murmuring. “Kelvin has pulled at my heart string. I can’t think about Kane’s monstrous past undisciplined pictures. A scatterbrain.” He was born at a time Clara was having an extramarital affair—and Kelvin, who had investigated the mystery, now said that Kane should not be treated like a son. “I saw in his face that there was a spasm to fear. Something must be friggin’ fishy.” Judas drew aside the curtain to his laboratory and crawled in. Still speaking to himself, he finished: “I need two or three more facts to sum to the corpus of already acquired . . .”