Dawson realized they were both speaking English, and he switched to Ewe to avoid Kudzo misunderstanding a question. “When you found Mr. Bao dead, after some time, Yaw came around and you were talking to him, is that correct?”
“Yes, please.”
“Did he talk to you?”
“No, please,” Kudzo replied. “He didn’t say anything at all to me.”
Dawson described to him the short video of the crime scene that included Kudzo communicating with Yaw. “Were you trying to show him something?”
“Please, you mean?”
“You tell me if I’m right,” Dawson said, deciding to phrase it differently. “You were showing Yaw how there was a lot of soil inside Mr. Bao’s nose and mouth.”
“Yes, please. I told him maybe it went inside his mouth and nose when he was trying to breathe, because one time when I was working at a mine, the wall of one of the pits slid down and buried two guys. One of them died, and when we pulled him out, his mouth was open, full of mud, like Mr. Bao’s.”
Dawson remembered: when he had asked Yaw if he had strangled Bao, his response was, “Please, for what? He will try to breathe inside the soil and die like that.”
Is this how he knew? Did Kudzo inadvertently supply Yaw useful information that he could later use?
“Tell me the truth, and you will not get into any trouble,” Dawson said to Kudzo. “Did you tell Yaw that Mr. Bao’s excavator was not operating and that he was going to fix it on that Friday morning?”
“No, please. I never told him that.”
“Do you think he killed Mr. Bao?”
“No, please. I don’t think so.”
“Then why did he say he did?”
“Because he loves his father.”
And Dawson had the feeling that Kudzo, who had a kind of wisdom beyond his years, was right.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Dawson felt he needed to talk to Daniel Armah, the best person to explore ideas with while on a case. He was at home when Dawson called.
“Of course,” Armah said. “Come by and let’s discuss it.”
Dawson set out immediately, and for the entire journey from Obuasi to Kumasi, he wrestled with the questions: Do I have the right man? Did Yaw really kill Bao Liu? If not, who did?
Armah welcomed Dawson and invited him to the backyard for refreshments-Star beer for himself, and Guinness Malta for Dawson. They wasted little time getting down to business, and Dawson laid out the present theory about Bao’s murder and Yaw’s key involvement.
One: Bao allegedly killed Amos, Yaw’s beloved older brother.
Two: Yaw, grief stricken, becomes mute from a “conversion reaction.”
Three: His anger growing, he decides to avenge Amos’s death.
Four: By a mechanism yet unknown, Yaw learns on the day before Bao’s murder that the site excavator is not working and that Bao intends to repair it sometime on Friday morning.
Five: Yaw lies in wait until Bao arrives, attacks him, and ties him up in a torturous posture.
Six: Having stolen the keys to one of Chuck Granger’s excavators, Yaw drives the machine over to Bao’s site and dumps loads of moist, heavy soil and gravel on top of the Chinese man, ultimately causing his painful death by asphyxiation.
Seven: As a means of evading the police Yaw continues the charade of muteness.
Eight: Yaw is arrested but still refuses to talk.
Nine: Yaw talks and confesses to the crime after his father attempts to take the blame for the murder in an apparent attempt to protect Yaw.
“But now we have an alternative possibility,” Dawson told Armah. “What if Yaw is protecting his father to atone for the hurt he feels he has caused Mr. Okoh? Yaw has witnessed and observed the crime scene and taken mental note of Kudzo’s astute observation that Bao might have been suffocated while gasping for air and inhaling soil. Yaw also learns from Kudzo what time Bao tried to call Wei, since Wei mentioned it to Kudzo the morning Bao was found. So Yaw can use these facts to ‘confess.’”
“The only missing piece, then,” Armah said, “is that we don’t know how Yaw could have found out that Bao was expected at the site that Friday morning.”
Dawson agreed. “That is bothersome, yes.”
“Let’s go back and look at the other possibilities to be sure we haven’t omitted something.”
“All right,” Dawson said. “First there’s Lian, Bao’s wife. I don’t have any reason to believe she had a motive to have her husband killed. As I said to Chikata, Bao was her rock and her financial support. No, she isn’t a suspect from my point of view.”
“But I sense a gap in what you know about her,” Armah countered. “You’ve met her only once, and we don’t know a lot about her relationship with her husband. Was it a loving one? Did they argue? In your story, you said Bao was flirtatious with Amos’s girlfriend. Could it be that he was a womanizer and that Lian knew about it and had him killed?”
Dawson was doubtful. “Anything is possible, but…”
“I can see that isn’t going down very well with you,” Armah said with a chuckle.
Dawson grinned. “But you’re right. I should follow that up. I have an idea whom I could ask.” He was thinking of Mr. Huang.
“Good. Who else? What about the victim’s brother-what’s his name?”
“Wei. He has an alibi-he stayed overnight with his friend Feng.”
“I see. And outside the family circle? The young man-Kudzo?”
“His alibi is solid. But there’s Chuck Granger, the American whose mining site is adjacent to Wei’s. Granger had motive. He hated Bao and saw him as a threat. But he was down in Accra on business with Tommy Thompson, director of PMMC, on Thursday and he came back on Friday.”
“That’s confirmed beyond a doubt?”
“Not exactly,” Dawson confessed. “I tried to contact Thompson once without success, and then the business of Yaw came along and I got sidetracked. I’ll ask Chikata to look for the man and talk to him in person.”
“Good,” Armah said. “I concur.”
“So I have a couple of possible leads, at least,” Dawson said, feeling better.
“Yes. By the way, this journalist, Helmsley, has she told you anything useful?”
“She’s working on conspiracy-type things,” Dawson said. “For example, she claims that a whistle-blower has told her that the PMMC actually buys illegal gold and uses that to inflate figures about the amount of gold produced in Ghana.”
“Actually, I’ve heard that before too,” Armah said, leaning back and unconsciously cracking his knuckles one by one. “Who is her source?”
“She declined to say. Supposedly she went down to PMMC in Accra and was kicked out for asking Tommy Thompson snooping questions. She says her source also tells her that PMMC buys the gold from Chinese or at below market price and they don’t like galamsey who don’t play the game.”
“In other words,” Armah said, “what if Bao was resisting the PMMC? They would not have taken kindly to that. They might either react by teaching him a lesson or killing him-without getting their hands dirty, of course.”
“But would the PMMC worry about one Chinese individual not playing by the rules?”
“Why not?” Armah asked. “One here and one there can add up. It’s reported that a rich Chinese miner can pay off a police task force with as much as ten thousand dollars.”
Dawson’s eyebrows shot up. “You said ten thousand dollars?”
“Dollars. Green.”
Dawson shook his head in astonishment. “I had no idea they deal in those kinds of sums.”
“Yes, indeed. So some of the special police or military forces that conduct these raids on the Chinese mining sites are in reality taking money to ignore the owners and in fact allow some of the workers they arrest to return to the mining site after a photo opportunity is held for the benefit of the press. From time to time, we see these headlines in the papers about illegal miners being rounded up for deportation or imprisonment, along with a picture of a group of sullen Chinese guys. It’s all for show. It’s a cynical move designed to give the public the impression that their government is actually doing something.”