Free Death at the Voyager Hotel by Kwei Quartey Page B

intended to ask more questions. It wouldn’t hurt
to have Dr. Biney help in any way, but for the reasons she had given Thelo, she
wasn’t going to hang her hopes on him, and certainly not on Chief Inspector
Agyekum. In effect, she thought with irony, she was up against a men’s club—men
who didn’t fundamentally understand why Heather Peterson would not go swimming
drunk and in the nude.



CHAPTER NINE
    On Saturday, Thelo had family affairs to attend to, and Paula
was to drop Stephan and Stephanie off at their cousins before going off to do some
shopping. They were running a little early, so Paula opted to first swing by
the General
Post Office to pick up some mail. On the way there, they passed through
Jamestown, home to most of the students at High Street Academy and probably the
oldest part of Accra. It was a jumble of open-air markets, houses with
corrugated metal roofs, winding streets and mysterious alleys.
    Traffic slowed
to a crawl at Ussher Fort . People walked by the decaying edifice without
regard for its ancient history. In the next block, in an abandoned, skeletal
building that had never gotten past the first floor, teenage boys in mismatched
shoes or none at all played a sweaty game of soccer under the burning morning sun.
Market women with impossible loads on their heads walked the uneven pavements
and cut across the street between cars, while itinerant vendors used their best
sales tactics to unload trinkets on captive drivers in the paralyzed traffic.
    Stephan was
beside Paula in the front passenger seat, his head bent studiously over his
handheld video game as his thumbs worked. He had begged her to allow him to
take the device along and she had relented.
    “Five more
minutes of that, then you put it away,” she told him quietly. “Hear me?”
    “Yes, Mummy,”
he said, looking up at her for a brief moment of acknowledgement.
    Paula was
undecided whether these games were good, bad, or of no consequence. Facing the
reality that she could never stamp out the boy’s devotion to them, she limited his
playing time. She turned for a second to look at Stephanie, who was in the back
seat gazing out of the window with absorption. Physically, she was a female
copy of her fraternal twin brother, but she was the gentler and more
introspective of the two, often exerting a moderating influence on Stephan, who
could easily get out of hand. 
     A young man with
vestigial, crumpled legs rolled up the middle of the street on a skateboard that
he propelled with his hands, stopping at each vehicle to beg for some loose
change. He and many others like him all over Accra had astonishing traffic
negotiation skills, but what they did was still dangerous. As he drew up to Paula’s
Highlander, he stopped and looked up, reaching up with a hopeful, cupped palm.
She lowered her window and greeted him in Ga. “How are you?”
    “I try, madam.”
He had a brilliant, infectious smile and a powerful upper body from years of his
particular form of locomotion.
    She smiled
back. “All your life in the street?”
    “Since about
twelve years old.”
    “Tough, eh?”
    “Very tough,
Madam.”
    She gave him a
cedi bill, perhaps ten times what many people would give. His face lit up. “God
bless you, Madam.”
    “Thank you, sir.
And you.”
    He sped off and
zigzagged to safety on the pavement as traffic began to move again. She put her
window back up.
    “Why is he like
that, Mummy?” Stephanie asked.
    “He probably
had polio when he was a little boy.”
    “What’s that?”
Stephan asked, looking up at her.
    “It’s a disease
where the germ goes to your spinal cord and you can’t move your legs anymore.
So they get small and weak.”
    “Can we get it,
Mummy?”
    Paula shook her
head. “No, we’re all safe, because we had the vaccination at the doctor.”
    “Oh,” he said,
looking relieved.
    “Is it because
he’s crippled that he’s poor and has to beg for money?” Stephanie asked.
    “Something like
that,”