Number Eight
Smelly Man
A Jimm Juree Short Story
By Colin Cotterill
Number Eight: Smelly Man
Copyright © Colin Cotterill, 2018
DCO Books
eBook Edition published by
Proglen Trading Co., Ltd. 2018
Bangkok Thailand
http://www.dco.co.th
eBook ISBN 978-616-456-008-6
All Rights Reserved
This book is a work of fiction. All names, characters, and other elements of the story are either the product of the author's imagination or else are used only fictitiously. Any resemblance to real characters, living or dead, or to real incidents, is entirely coincidental.
Also by Colin Cotterill
Dr. Siri Paiboun series
The Coroner's Lunch (2004)
Thirty-Three Teeth (August 2005)
Disco For the Departed (August 2006
Anarchy and Old Dogs (August 2007)
Curse of the Pogo Stick (August 2008)
The Merry Misogynist (August 2009)
Love Songs from a Shallow Grave (August 2010)
Slash and Burn (October 2011)
The Woman Who Wouldn't Die (January 2013)
Six and a Half Deadly Sins (May 2015)
The Rat Catchers' Olympics (August 2017)
Jimm Juree series
Killed at the Whim of a Hat (July 2011)
Grandad, There's a Head on the Beach (June 2012)
The Axe Factor (April 2014)
The Amok Runners (June 2016)
Other publications
Evil in the Land Without (2003)
Ethel and Joan Go to Phuket (2004)
Pool and its Role in Asian Communism (2005)
Cyclelogical (2006)
Ageing Disgracefully (2009)
Bleeding in Black and White (2015)
Contents
Introduction to Jimm Juree
Smelly Man
Introduction
Brief description of how the Jurees ended up in Maprao, the buttock-hole of the earth.
I’ll keep this brief because it still irks me to tell our story. My name is Jimm Juree and I was, at one stage, a mere liver failure away from fame and fortune in Chiang Mai. But our mother, Mair, dragged the family down south to run a decrepit seaside resort on the Gulf of Thailand. I’m a reporter. A real one. And as soon as the head of the crime desk at the Chiang Mai Mail completed his impending suicide by Mekhong Whisky, I was to step into his moldy old shoes; only the second female in the country to hold such a prestigious position.
Then Mair – nutty as peanut brittle – sold our family home without telling us and headed south. With her went her father, Granddad Jah, the only Thai traffic policeman to go through an entire career without accepting bribes or kickbacks, my brother, Arny, a wimpy lamb with the body of a Greek God, and me. The only one to pass up on family obligation was Sissy, my transsexual brother. Once a cabaret star, and briefly a TV celebrity, now an ageing recluse, Sissy had become something of an internet criminal and although I haven’t forgiven her for deserting us, I do find her skills useful from time to time.
You see, although I would never have guessed it, Maprao and its environs is a hotbed of crime. Although I’m technically the part-time social events reporter for the shitty local newspaper, barely a week goes by that I’m not chasing down some misdemeanor or another. Our local police (who make the Keystone Cops look like the SAS) are of the belief that I brought all this crime with me from the city. I know that it’s always been here but our gentlemen in brown prefer not to notice it. As they say, and quite rightly too, they just don’t get paid enough to stand in front of a loaded gun. All we get from them are complaints about all the extra paperwork we’re causing them.
So it’s down to our disjointed family to solve the mysteries and put the perps away. We’re a surprisingly efficient team of crime fighters but I have to confess we were hopeless at running a resort and deserved all the disasters that befell us. At the time of writing this, we still haven’t been able to salvage our monsoon ravaged bungalows from the depths of the bay and we’ve spent the past year doing odd jobs to make ends meet. The bank has been particularly slow in paying out on our disaster insurance claim. But we’re refusing to budge until they do.
As it turned out, there was some method to Mair’s madness in bringing us down south, but in order to learn what that was you’ll have to fork out some money for the actual books that tell our sorry story. Details of those are below. I can’t say too much because Sissi and I are in a long ongoing dialogue with Clint Eastwood who probably wants to turn our family exploits into a movie. In the meantime, the files that I’m sending you in this series of shorts have been collated from the astounding cases I’ve been involved in since the floods. There is an expression, “Only in Thailand”, used freely by frustrated and frustrating foreigners who like nothing better than to complain about us. But, I have to confess, most of the cases I’ve been involved in here really could only have happened in my country. I hope you enjoy them.
Novels most likely currently under option consideration by Malpaso Productions;
Killed at the Whim of a Hat (July 2011) - Minotaur Books, New York ISBN 9780312564537
Grandad, There's a Head on the Beach (June 2012) - Minotaur Books, New York ISBN 9780312564544
The Axe Factor (April 2014) - Minotaur Books, New York ISBN 9781250043368
The Amok Runners (June 2016) - CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform ISBN 9781533265289
There’s also an exclusive short at Criminal Element called Hidden Genders that gives you some background on Sissi.
It won’t help you much but the writer of these stories has a web page you probably shouldn’t bother going to.
www.colincotterill.com
Smelly Man
It was like renting a room above a bowling alley – amplified by a zillion. The fillings in my teeth rattled with every strike. But the balls were boulders the size of VW Beetles tossed from the maximum height of a squeaky, rust-ridden back-hoe arm. The ground shook with every toss – every semi-trailer unloaded. I was staying in a Porta-office beside a Porta-loo, Porta-shower combined unit we’d rented and placed on the site of our old seaside home. The Lovely Bay Resort and Restaurant and half our land had been washed out into the Gulf of Thailand over Christmas and we’d just won our claim for disaster insurance from the bank. I was the overseer of our new life. Of the three acres of land we’d bought initially, 1.2 acres remained. The rest, along with five bungalows, a kitchen, a bathroom, a few colourful parasols, seats and tables and an abstract sculpture I’d made out of beach garbage, were somewhere off the coast of Vietnam attracting crustaceans.
I was left with a stretch of sand and an architectural drawing that had far too many straight lines for my taste. It had only taken us two years to make a failure of the original resort and the monsoon storm that claimed it could have been referred to by the skeptics as a blessing in disguise. The insurance paid out a sizeable sum, enough to travel Europe and drink red wine with swarthy, good-looking youths with their shirts off. But our mother, Mair, an Alzheimer’s trainee and incurable optimist, had it in her mind to rebuild the resort and try again. It was insanity which, coming from someone insane, should not have been a surprise to us. But, as we were Thais, my brother Arny and I had this filial obligation to honour and obey and be good.
There were no tourists in Maprao, our quaintly dull district. All through-travelers took the highway. We were on the back road to nowhere of interest. Any hope of enticing overnight guests who liked the peace and quiet was being obliterated by the local council. They’d sniffed out a government grant available for conservation projects. A lot of money was invo
lved, most of which could be siphoned off along the way, leaving us with a few plastic sheets and half-a-mountain of bloody rocks. The breakwater would eventually extend from one end of the bay to the other but because they hadn’t expected us to come back, they’d decided on our land as a tryout. Nobody can own a beach in Thailand so we couldn’t object to its being turned into the Great Wall of China. The foreman of the project said there was a likelihood the sand would return to cover the rocks and the beach would become something like normal, albeit a bit lumpier. As the rockery was three metres high, I had my doubts.
Mair’s dogs weren’t that bright and they found some hypnotic fascination with large dangerous pieces of equipment. So Mair, Sticky, Gogo and Beer remained at the small rubber plantation of Captain Kow, our probable father. There they could be walked twice a day without the threat of rocks showering down upon them. Our granddad, Jah, remained incognito and our sister, Sissy, sat glued to the internet way up in Chiang Mai. So the task of rebuilding fell upon Arny and myself. The search for skilled tradesmen was in the hands of Meng, the plastic awning salesman and budget private detective. Sorry to spike your interest in Meng. In fact he doesn’t play any part in this case other than that introduction. He did have his work cut out for him. Skilled workers flocked to the west coast where salaries were higher and projects abundant. Which all serves to explain my state of mind when the following case presented itself. I was more stressed than usual and perhaps not thinking as clearly as I should have been.
Thailand has an amusing assortment of criminal activities. Much of it is unique to my country. Often, those fortunate enough to live elsewhere find my case reports hard to believe. This following anecdote will be no exception. It concerns Chu, a homeless uncle with dreadlocks who had not bathed for many a year. His crime was to space his few belongings along the single line railway track which provided the unreliable service from Bangkok to the southern provinces and onward to Malaysia. The last item the train driver would see was Chu’s moldy sleeping bag upon which the smelly man lay with his head on the warm metal rail. Between 6PM and 5AM, eighteen trains would pass through Lang Suan and every one of them had the choice either to stop a thousand metres south of the station or to squash poor Uncle Chu. Naturally, as everyone knew he would be there and none of them could turn their hand to premeditated murder, they all stopped. This caused the Thai National Railway a good deal of inconvenience.
In the early days, the stationmaster had been able to lure Uncle Chu away from his uncomfortable resting place with offers of food or a can of beer. But Chu soon realized that there was a vein of gold to be mined from the situation. He started to turn down the stationmaster’s petty bribes. He held his ground. The railway reported him to the police for trespassing but the police remarked that Chu’s nest was in fact on one of the many ungated level crossings and neither the railway nor the Road’s Department had legal jurisdiction over the no-man’s-land where the two met.
So it was that Uncle Chu went on salary as a National Railway advisor. As such, he had no duties other than to stay off the track. His income was no princely sum but was sufficient for meals that were not served out of supermarket skips and a nice cold can of Leo beer from time to time. It did not, apparently, stretch to a shower and manicure. I’d heard about Uncle Chu and admired him somewhat. But I hadn’t met him in person before that morning at my Porta-office. I’d woken at about five sure that the Porta-loo was blocked again. My nose is rather touchy. But this was not the scent of hundreds of poisoned fish washed up on the beach. It was not the rotting flesh of shrew cadavers trapped inside the air conditioner. This was the aroma of a lifetime of neglect and abuse. When I stepped outside that morning it was like walking into a mushroom cloud of atomic waste.
I staggered and put my hand over my mouth. A messy man in his fifties sat cross-legged on the porch. I looked away. His trousers were not a pair. They were two individual leggings tied at the waist with a yellow nylon string. Whatever secret other men stowed behind their flies, Uncle Chu displayed proudly like a figurehead on a garbage scow. To my surprise, a dog lay beside him. I was constantly made aware that dogs are blessed with the quality of forgiveness. There is no transgression of character or hygiene they cannot excuse. I, on the other hand, was born dirt honest.
“Does that dog have no nose?” I asked. The man was apparently not offended.
“In the dog world I carry the scent of orchids,” he said, and edged closer to me. I took a few steps back. “And his name is Psycho.”
That didn’t surprise me.
“What do you want?” I shouted. Arny was asleep in the cabin and no odour or cry for help would rouse him before his designated hour.
“You,” said the smelly man.
At last, somebody wanted me but I could see no happy ending to this liaison.
“You’re the journalist,” he said. “Jimm Juree.”
“How would you know that?” I asked.
“I detect a sense of political incorrectness,” he said. “And there I was thinking we’d entered a period of equality for all. No racism, sexism, overweightism.”
He looked me up and down deliberately.
“But apparently streetpersonism is still rife,” he said.
He was right. I had a problem with ‘disgusting’. He continued.
“Surely a disheveled person such as myself would be unable to read or conduct an intelligent conversation. Am I right?”
There was a brain deep inside that shroud of flies. He was right. I was guilty of assuming that only a crazy person or an idiot would go to so much effort to position him or herself outside the walls of civilization and decency. But that didn’t make me like him any more.
“Look,” I said. “Tell me what you want or I’ll squirt Fairy Liquid on you and hose you off my porch.”
He laughed.
“I want to hire you,” he said.
I subdued my hilarity.
“I don’t work for cigarette butts,” I said.
“I have money,” he said. “I’m an employee of the National Railway.”
That’s when I realized who he was.
“You’re the uncle who stops the trains,” I said.
“I knew my celebrity would not have escaped you.”
“What are you doing here…off the beaten track.” (I couldn’t resist it.)
“I…” he began.
But the din of beach beautification cut him short as the back-hoe dinosaurs were reanimated. It was 6 AM and they’d be crunching and thumping for the whole day and into the night. The ground shook beneath us.
“Can we talk inside?” he yelled, and got to his feet.
“Absolutely not,” I shouted.
I led him – from a distance – to the woods behind our land. The trees cut out some of the noise. The dog came with us. I must point out there is no wisdom in entering a forested area with a scary, unwashed flasher and a mangy dog, but I was intrigued by their visit. I would not recommend anyone at home to do the same. I established a position upwind.
“All right, smelly man,” I said. “Why would I be remotely interested in working for you?”
“My life is in danger,” he said.
“I can see that,” I said. “I’d say if the hepatitis and tuberculosis don’t get you, the dengue and malaria certainly will.”
“If we’re to work together you’re going to have to stop being a smart arse,” he said.
“Sorry.”
I was ready to listen to his story. I sat on a log and gestured to a guest log opposite. Psycho the dog lay in front of him.
“First, you can cover that thing up,” I said.
He looked down at his lap with surprise as if he’d only just realized he had a wardrobe malfunction. He crossed his legs and there may have been a blush beneath the grime on his face.
“My apologies,” he said.
The trees shook as another boulder hit the beach.
“I see the cousin of somebody in government has been granted a contrac
t to perform one more unnecessary act of nature rearrangement,” he said.
I realized he was talking about the beach project.
“Total foolishness,” he said. “You should do something about it.”
Considering he’d just arrived, he pretty much had a handle on the situation. I considered hiring him to frighten off the developers. But first things first.
“So, who’s trying to kill you?” I said.
“If I knew that, I could avoid it,” he said. “You’re a chronicler of the underworld. You tell me.”
If half of what I’d heard about him was true I could imagine any number of potential assassins. The railway was an obvious choice. He was extorting money from them. For the cost of a bottle of rum, they could save a tidy sum by hiring a couple of thugs on a motorcycle to put a bullet in him. Then there was the stationmaster who’d been embarrassed by the presence of Uncle Chu. He’d be tired of receiving complaints about him. The station and Roads Department workers would have been sick of dragging him from the tracks night after night. The parents of local children would be offended by his indecency. And, of course, there were teenaged gangs that honed their murderous skills by shooting stray dogs and unloved people. The list seemed to have no end.
“I have no idea,” I said. “What makes you think someone’s out to get you?”
“I was taking a fortuitous shit in the bushes yesterday evening,” he said. “The sun was just going down and I was having particular trouble dislodging a rather large-“
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