Nairobi Heat Read Free Page A

things I didn’t understand around that time, like how you could ask a man to choose between his life’s work and love?
    ‘Do you want to know what she chowed down before she met her untimely death?’ BQ asked, pulling back the sheet to reveal the girl.
    The glow she had had in death was gone. With cross-stitched sutures running along her chest, across her belly and below her hairline – where BQ had cracked her open – she looked like a white leather mannequin. By the time BQ had finished with them the dead always looked like the dead.
    ‘Spare me the details …’ I grumbled, ‘just get to it.’
    ‘Well, Detective Ishmael, you sure gonna love this. It wasmurder made to look like an overdose.’
    BQ paused for dramatic effect, but I wasn’t biting. ‘How do you know?’ I asked, careful to keep the surprise out of my voice.
    ‘Real easy … For a start the heroin was injected into her arm after she was long gone. Exhibit A: no trace of it in her blood. And B: see this …’ He pointed to her arm. ‘This is the only needle mark on her whole precious body. She was no addict.’
    More questions than answers. ‘How did she die then?’
    ‘She was asphyxiated. A pillow over her head I would guess …’ he said. ‘She died from oxygen deprivation. Poor thing was murdered.’
    ‘What time?’
    ‘My guess? Somewhere between eleven pm and one am.’ BQ paused. ‘Look here, Detective, I might be going off half-cocked, but whoever killed her didn’t want to destroy her. My guess is it was someone who knew her well, someone who might even have loved her …’
    I made it to the Madison Police Station around nine am to find it in chaos. Someone had called the press – someone always calls the press – and they had set up camp on the steps, pulling in dozens of civilians, all of them struggling to see what was going on. We should have been better prepared. We should have had some kind of media strategy. But instead, as I pushed through the crowd, I saw the Police Chief, Jackson Jordan, standing in the eye of the storm, trying to calm everyone down. He would hold a press conference with theMayor as soon as they had more information, he was telling the assembled throng as calmly as he could.
    Luckily the press didn’t know I was the lead detective and I made it to the Chief’s office relatively unscathed. He came in shortly, huffing and puffing, calling the press all sorts of names. I knew what the problem was. Jackson Jordan was the black police chief of a mostly white police force in a mostly white town. The victim was a young white woman and the main suspect, even though not officially, was a black man, an African. There would be the facts of the case and the politics of the case, and the two never mix well. None of this was said between us, we just understood it.
    Jackson Jordan had been elected because he was tough on crime. That is, he was tough on black crime. I respected the Chief well enough to work under him, but it wasn’t always easy. He was liable to pander to politics, and I always followed the evidence to wherever it led – to the cat selling two rocks by the corner liquor store; to the Mayor or the Governor himself. But like I said, I liked him well enough to work under him, and at the end of the day we all had a grudging respect for him.
    ‘Chief, I’m working this case alone,’ I said.
    My partner, a white guy, had just retired and I knew where this was going – a white partner for the nigger cop to make everyone feel safe. But I wasn’t going to have it. If I was going to get a partner, I wanted one for the right reasons, not to balance the racial math.
    ‘Who’s the girl?’ the Chief asked, ignoring my statement.
    As I didn’t know I gave him BQ’s report instead. He sank into his chair and ran his hand over his balding head. Nowin his fifties, the Chief was the kind of fat that cops get when they spend too much time behind the desk – not an obese fat, just a lazy roundness that