“Let’s avoid unnecessary details,” I said.
“But it was relevant,” he said, “Because I was away from my precious personal belongings for some time so I had taken up a position from which I could watch them. Two men arrived.”
“On a motorcycle?”
“On foot. They came out of the trees.”
“Did they look like thugs?” I asked.
“No. They were dressed quite respectably and they spoke in central Thai.”
“You could hear them?”
“It’s not a busy intersection.”
“What did they say?”
“The older of the two, thinning hair, paunch, amulet around his neck, he said, ‘Shit, he’s not here. That’s his stuff.’ The other one, no fat on him, fancy shoes, said they should wait there for me. Paunch reminded him the sun was going down and the mosquitoes would be out soon. The place would be buzzing in a few minutes and they’d be bitten to hell. He said ‘I was hoping he’d be here and we could just get it over with fast.’”
Smelly man stopped talking and threw Psycho a palm berry. It hit him on the nose. Poor reflexes.
“That doesn’t mean they’re planning to kill you,” I said.
He looked at the ground.
“No,” he said. “But what followed does. The lean one reached behind him into his belt and pulled out a gun. Paunch told him to put it away. But the gunman went to my bedroll, pointed the gun and said, ‘Bang. Gotcha. Dead. I’m coming for you, you piece of shit.’ And they walked back to the tree line together.”
“That is weird,” I said.
“So you’ll take the case?”
“I don’t have cases,” I lied. “If you want a detective I can put you in touch with one you can afford. And I suppose there’s an argument for you reporting this to the police.”
He laughed until he’d dislodged a fist of green phlegm.
“Yeah, you’re right,” I said. “Bad idea.”
“I want you,” he said. “I’ve read your stuff.”
“Oh yeah?”
I was about to make another streetpersonist comment but it was just as well I didn’t.
“Your mother showed me your articles,” he said.
Of course. Waifs and strays Mair. Naturally she’d know all the lepers and orphans and guardians of the gutters. I didn’t bother to ask how they’d met.
“I presume she offered you my services.”
“Said you happen to be free at the moment. Said it’d be good for you to get away from the stresses of conservation for a while.”
“And she gave you a cup of herbal tea and let you sleep on the hammock on her balcony.”
“She’s a kind woman.”
*
For the investigation to begin I needed the services of Granddad Jah; forty years a traffic cop, limited advancement due to his refusal to take bribes. He was annoying in many ways but he was a first-rate detective and, importantly, he could track like a Comanche. We found out where he was crashing and Arny and I picked him up in the Mighty X. There was a spare seat inside but we insisted Chu and the dog travel on the flatbed. Not prejudice – just olfactory common sense. I can’t safely drive and vomit at the same time. We headed off to his level crossing. A light rain had been falling since the previous night.
“Your valuables have got damp,” said Arny.
Apart from the bedroll there were three full plastic Tesco bags and a box covered in multiple layers of masking tape.
“It’s all survived worse,” said Chu. “I didn’t want to take the chance to rescue it yesterday evening and bring it with me with those two in the bushes.”
“They stood here?” granddad asked, looking down at the railway track.
“Right here,” said Uncle Chu. “The guy with the gun leaned over my sleeping bag like this.”
He showed us the stance.
“Does it-?” I began but I was interrupted by the bullet. It sounded like the crack of a lobster leg. We all looked around to see who’d been hit. It was Chu. He looked at his own shoulder as if it were someone else’s. The blood oozed. I had a feeling there’d be another bullet coming his way but Arny got to Chu before I could. He wrestled the tramp to the ground and shielded his body with his own. Someone would be needing a good hot shower that night. Granddad Jah, ever the cowboy, took his service revolver from his shoulder bag and fired off four rounds into the trees. He had little chance of hitting the gunman but it should have been enough to dissuade him. We lay still for a minute. Even the birds had been silenced by the shooting. Then we heard the start of a motor and the crunch of wheels spinning on gravel.
“Truck,” said Granddad. “New one.”
I never doubted Granddad Jah when it came to matters of vehicular transportation. He was a world authority. He jogged off in the direction the sounds had come from and I followed him. We found the gravel patch a little way into the trees. The truck had gouged out two deep ruts and sped off towards a gap in the railway fence, skidding on the wet ground as it went. Granddad Jah told me to stand still and he retraced the footsteps to the gravel.
“Older prints of two men,” he said. “Probably when they came yesterday. And new prints today, but only one man. He parked in the same place as before. Same shoes. Fancy footprints. It looks like the shooter came back to finish the job by himself.”
“What does ‘fancy footprints’ mean?” I asked.
“You know, those cross trainers you young find so appealing. Lots of useless tread patterns that don’t help at all. The other guy was wearing dress shoes, the ones with the ridiculous long toes like circus clowns.”
“So he wasn’t dressed for a quick escape?” I asked.
“Surprised he could even walk in these things,” said granddad. “And look at that.”
He used a twig to pick up a plastic bag. He held it up to his nose.
“Not even had time for the ants to get to it,” he said. “I bet this was the shooter’s breakfast. Pork balls in spicy sauce. There’s the skewer on the ground. Looks like he got here early and settled in for the long haul. He was pretty determined to off your smelly man.”
“So determined he didn’t care we were there with his target,” I said.
“Pretty damned good shot from this difference. It sounded like an M14 but it could have been an M21. Pistol yesterday. Sniper rifle today. The guy’s got an arsenal.”
Granddad walked to the fence. I followed him.
“And what’s this?” he said.
“What?”
“This last skid had him smack into the fence here. He’s left some of his paint on the wire. Gold, by the look of it.”
“Great. A new gold-coloured pickup with scratch marks.”
Granddad had gone through the gap in the fence and was standing by the sand track beyond it.
“Headed north,” he said. “So we just look at the CCTV cameras at the nearest intersection.”
I thought about it. We weren’t exactly official anythings.
“How do we go about that?” I asked.
“We need someone on the inside,” he said. “What about your poofy police lieutenant?”
“Chomphu?” I said. “We’re out of his jurisdiction.”
“His type’s sure to have a bum buddy in the Lang Suan station,” said Granddad. “Multiplying like squirrels those gays. None in the force when I was active, I tell you. Wouldn’t have been tolerated.”
Like I said, he was annoying.
“Uncle Chu won’t report it,” I said.
“He was shot. It’s a real crime now.”
“That’s even more of a reason for him not to report it. All that human contact. Men in uniform, interviews, press. No way. Not to mention the fact he might be dead.”
I should have thought of that sooner. We headed back to the level crossing. Chu wasn’t dead. The bullet had passed through his shoulder and Arny was treating it with tincture and dressings from the Mighty X medical kit. He had a wad of cotton wool up each nostril but I coul
d see the stench was getting to him. His eyes were watering.
“I assume you have my full attention now,” said Chu, admiring his wound.
“Granddad Jah says you should report it to the police,” I told him.
“And what if the police are responsible?” asked Chu.
We had no answer to that. It wasn’t impossible.
*
We left Uncle Chu, Psycho and their belongings at a roadside pavilion and paid visits to all the agencies that might stand to gain from shooting a bum. On the way I called Sissy in Chiang Mai.
“What can you tell me about face recognition?” I asked.
Since we were kids we’d spoken to each other in English. It annoyed the pants off everyone around us. It was one of Mair’s strategies to make us all children of the planet.
“Well, when you see a face you recognize you probably know the person that owns it,” she said.
If she hadn’t gone into computers she’d have done quite nicely in standup.
“You know very well I’m talking about a computer program,” I said.
“In the trade we call it an ‘app’,” she said.
She knew I wasn’t cut out for IT.
“Don’t tell me,” I said. “It stands for ‘Appy to make your acquaintance.’ (There was room for me up on that stage.)
“It’s an ‘application’, fool,’ she said. “What I believe you’re referring to is facial recognition technology. They’ve started using it at airports to spot terrorists and people with bad haircuts.”
“Do you have it?”
“I have everything.”
“If I email you some photos I’ve just taken of a homeless man, do you think you can see if there’s a match anywhere?”
“You’re photographing homeless men?”
“These are hard times for a single girl.”
“I wish you a happy and fruitful life together.”
*
If anyone at the agencies we visited had plans to shoot Uncle Chu, they were doing a good job of masking it. He was a joke to most of them. The police had set up a sort of lottery, the losers of which were assigned to arrest the old tramp whenever he blocked the rail line. This meant getting close enough to put the cuffs on him. A test for any man in uniform. Before becoming an employee of the railways Chu had been picked up some thirty times. The cell had to be fumigated upon his release. They were glad to be rid of him but not – I believed – so glad they’d find it necessary to shoot him.
The stationmaster told us about the emergency fund they had tapped into to employ Uncle Chu. It was an amount assigned to alleviate calamities that contributed to delays. Chu was considered one such calamity. It was such a small sum the stationmaster doubted the railways would miss it. The Roads Department people had no recollection of the events we described but they tended to change personnel often. I didn’t sense enough enthusiasm anywhere to arrange a hit. Government workers were inherently lethargic. We didn’t get a sniff of a cover-up in our investigations.
I called Chomphu, my darling gay policeman and explained our situation. The Pak Nam station was currently being repainted and he was only too pleased to get away from the fumes. He surprised me by describing to me just how easy it would be to access the CCTV data bank. Twenty-two of the thirty cameras dotted around the town were dummies, there only as a deterrent. The eight that functioned were plugged through to a central computer in a small alcove in the Lang Suan station. He couldn’t promise that the cameras at the junctions of interest were of the functioning variety but he did assure us he’d have no trouble getting us in to watch the footage. In fact the duty sergeant was delighted that anyone would be interested.
The nearest operating camera to the shooting was at the Duckxury Coffee Shop intersection. The traffic lights had been temporarily removed so vehicles tended to slow down rather than speed up. Statistically, unlighted crossroads were safer. We watched that morning’s recording from 10AM which would have given the shooter five minutes to get back into town, assuming he wanted to. There was any number of alternative routes. All we knew was that he’d headed north from the railway crossing.
“The excitement of reality TV,” said Lieutenant Chom as we watched car after truck after motorcycle crawl across the intersection. The highlight of the first ten minutes was a coconut truck loaded with monkeys one of whom removed the hat of a portly lady on a motorcycle and put it on his own head. We were relying on Granddad Jah’s assertion that we were looking for a new gold-coloured pickup. But after twenty minutes it appeared unlikely the shooter had come that way. In fact we were about to click over to footage from another camera when granddad shouted,
“Stop!”
Sure enough, a gold pickup approached the intersection at speed and charged through doing about eighty. We reversed the recording and played it on slow. The sunlight reflected off the windshield so we couldn’t make out the driver, but with a bit of zoom we could read the license plate. Chomphu went off to check on the owner. Things were going well. We’d convinced Uncle Chu not to go back to his crossing that night but hadn’t succeeded in getting him to see a doctor. That could only have been good news to the patients in the waiting room. Arny and I went to our Porta-settlement and I sat on a dune and admired the progress of our beach eradication project. I had to respect the back-hoe operators who were there for twelve hours a day slotting together rocks like pieces in a jigsaw. The sea was no longer visible from the resort unless you stood on a chair. Conversation was out of the question before 7PM when the machines shut down and the drivers went home. That was when Sissy called.
“Was this one of your hunches?” she asked.
“What are you saying?”
“Well you obviously must have suspected he wasn’t just your average disgusting street person, right?”
“What did you find?”
“There’s never 100% correlation in these things,” she said. “75 to 80 is considered a good match. And your tramp was around the 65% mark. There’s room for doubt plus one major spoiler. If you could give your boyfriend a shave and a haircut we could be more certain.”
“Of what?”
“You heard of Thrifty Retail?”
“No.”
“Then you’re obviously not an on-line shopper. It’s a mini-Thai version of Alibaba. Only the Thais would give a company a name they can’t pronounce. It was set up by two Thai businessmen in the late nineties. Did really well. I’m sending you a photo of the two owners in their smiley heydays.”
“And you think one of them’s Uncle Chu?” I asked.
“As I say, apart from one major dichotomy, it’s not impossible, but…”
“What happened?”
“There was a home invasion. One partner was shot…killed.”
The scene flashed before my eyes. Previous-life Uncle Chu leaning over the bloody corpse of his beloved partner. There and then he decides the rich man life isn’t worth dying for. He leaves behind his wealth and his luxury and goes on the road. At least that’s how I would have written it in the screenplay. But Sissy denied me my dramatic moment.
“The one that got killed…,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“It was your homeless guy.”
“Damn.”
“His name was Chucheep. Like I say, this face ID technology is still in its infancy but it sure looked like Chu. My app was pretty excited about the match.”
“So why would you lead me on with all this Thrifty Retail nonsense if you knew the lookalike was dead?”
“I wouldn’t, but for one fact.”
“What’s that?”
“They lost the body.”
“Cool!”
“On the evening your man died there was yet another bus crash. A lot of dead and dying all arriving at the hospital at the same time as our corpse. Chaos. The usual medical system cock-ups. And, all of a sudden, no Chucheep. One theory was that his family came to collect his body without announcing the fact to the business partner. There was
evidently some friction. Another theory was that Chucheep was accidently cremated. Whatever. They couldn’t find him. Everyone tried to sue the hospital but the administration said there was no evidence he’d ever been delivered there.”
“But they were sure Chucheep was dead?” I said.
“Pronounced dead by the police coroner at the scene of the crime. Chucheep was shot in the head so it probably didn’t need a degree in forensic pathology to work it out.”
“Look, Sis, I know you’re really bogged down stalking Hollywood actors on-line but could you do me one more favour?”
“What?”
“Can you get in touch with Chucheep’s family and find out what the friction was all about?”
“You know how much I love solving your cases for you.”
“I don’t have cases.”
“Right.”
*
I had two reasons for driving back to the highway pavilion where Uncle Chu had made his bed that night. The first was to show him the photo Sissy had sent me. It was a magazine article picture of two smart, good-looking Thai guys in neckties poring over a laptop. That one of them might have been Uncle Chu was a stretch. The guy labeled ‘Chucheep’ was buzz-cut and clean. You could smell the lavender body soap in the photo. I certainly wouldn’t have said ‘no’ if he’d invited me for cocktails and a flash of his on-line credentials back in his room. I looked at my smelly man and cringed at that thought.
I held the phone forever as Chu studied the photograph. It was an odd sensation beyond visual. It was as if the picture was a small cell phone portal leading into other dimensions he slowly walked through.
I asked him, “Do you recognize either of these two men?”
But, if one of them was himself the realization certainly didn’t register on his face. He looked at the screen like a visitor at the Tate Gallery perusing a portrait.
“Apple Mac,” he said, “old version.”
“Good,” I said.
His finger moved from the archaic computer to the face of the business partner.
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