♦
We were driving back across the picturesque hills of Phato. This had been the driest August on record but still the vegetation was lush and the roadside trees hung out their blossoms of lilac and yellow and orange like risque underwear on drying day. Spirit houses were wrapped in gaudy colored cloth. A bus stop was tied to a power pole with plastic string. Children not old enough to smoke were driving motorcycles. Unpainted concrete houses. Mountains of coconut husks. Royal Umbrella rice and eggs of different natural hues for sale in bamboo shops the size of cupboards. Things you only notice when you take the trouble to.
“She was lying,” I said.
Chompu turned down the screaming of Mariah Carey and discontinued his accompaniment.
“Now, how would you know a thing like that?”
“Because little old Chinese ladies always lie.”
“Ah, a sound investigative premise.”
“They do. They have a code. If they feel they’re in a corner they give you whatever answer they think you want to hear.”
“At what point did she begin to leave you in doubt as to her veracity, lady friend?”
“From the moment she started speaking. Don’t you think it odd that the company owns fourteen thousand hectares of land but she can recall the details of one little plot in the boondocks? And all that horse manure about helping out a neighbor. Did she give you the impression she was the caring type? No, she had a reason to remember that land. It meant something to her.”
“You’re a suspicious lady.”
“Crime reporters can’t afford to believe everything they hear.”
“Crime reporters aren’t that trustworthy themselves. Oh, there goes my mouth again.”
“Did you have any particular crime reporter in mind with that statement?”
“No, really, I shouldn’t.”
“It’s too late to turn back.”
“All right, let’s start with a charming reporter from the Chiang Mai Mail who flew down to pursue a case in the south.”
Busted.
“I didn’t actually use those words.”
“And you didn’t actually use the words ‘I quit my job and moved down to live in a rundown resort in Maprao,’ either.”
“People hear what they want to hear irrespective of what I actually tell them. Their mistake.”
I cast a sideways glance at the lieutenant who was smiling serenely at the scenery.
“How long have you known?” I asked.
“Since the day of your romantic lunch with the boss.”
“You checked up on me?”
“Call me nosy.”
“Do the others…?”
“Not sure about the major. He’s been hard to tie down lately. Can’t even get him on the phone. The constables? Well, they’re locals. Nothing happens down here that doesn’t spread like water hyacinths on a warm pond. Everyone knew about you the day you stepped over the provincial border.”
I pouted. I hated to get found out on a lie.
“You aren’t exactly lieutenant open-and-aboveboard yourself.”
“How dare you. I’m as honest as a mountain spring. Not that I actually know how honest mountain springs are. I imagine they’re quite unsullied, however.”
“Really? This morning? My phone call telling you I’d found the previous owners of Old Mel’s land? ‘Oh, can I come along?’ he says. ‘You’re so resourceful,’ he says.”
“So?”
“So we arrive in Ranong and you drive straight to the company. I hadn’t told you the address.”
“Oops. You hadn’t?”
“No.”
“Lucky guess?”
“You’re a man to watch, Lieutenant Chompu.”
He blushed.
“And talking about men to watch…” he said.
“Hmm. Lovely smile. And I bet he ironed his own shirt.”
“Too bad he’s his mother’s pet.”
“Reminded me of Liu De Hua.”
“Ah, scream. I had a crush on him for years.”
“Me too.” We slapped palms and the truck swerved dangerously onto the hard shoulder. “And there I was thinking I’d never have anything in common with the police.”
♦
The family ate dinner that evening at the table nearest to Mair’s shop so she could keep her eyes open for a sudden unexpected rush. Arny watched over the two cabanas occupied that night: one by our largely absent ornithologist, another by a young couple who had arrived with no luggage on an old motorcycle. The television in the room was old and clunky and, frankly, not worth stealing, so Arny had taken cash in advance and didn’t bother to fill out the Tourism Authority of Thailand registration form. He considered it an unfriendly intrusion into the guests’ private lives. It was in Arny’s nature to trust everyone he met. I suspected his oversensitivity was a result of the constant beatings he’d taken from the gloves of disappointment. He never learned.
The last of the evening light was reflecting off the slimy backs of beached jellyfish: hundreds of them like macrobiotic UFOs forced into shallower and shallower waters by the over-fishing of the Gulf. Overnight they’d be cannibalized by our nascent community of tiny crabs that lived in pinprick holes in the sand. Once I’d seen what they could do to a jelly the size of a bin lid, I was loath to sit on the beach for longer than five minutes at a time. To a shortsighted crab, my expanding backside could very well have been mistaken for some washed up sea urchin.
“Anyone got any news or should we just sit here and eat in silence?” I asked, breaking Mair’s dinner rule by surreptitiously letting a prawn tail drop through a crack between the floorboards to where Gogo waited on the sand.
“I found a gym,” said Arny. “I mean, a sort of gym.”
“Good news, little brother,” I said insincerely. I knew a gym would drag him further away from his duties and leave more for me to do.
“Where is it, child?” Mair asked.
“Bang Ga. Just two villages away. It’s not exactly California Fitness. They’ve got weights and a Nautilus, but it’s better than rolling logs along a beach. Some old fellow donated money to the temple there and the locals couldn’t think of what else they needed. So, someone suggested investing in health rather than death. He figured everyone would be in better shape for the trip to the afterlife.”
“That someone sounds like a football coach,” I offered.
“Muay Thai boxing. I met him today. He asked if I’d be interested in joining his squad.”
Some hope of that. First kick in the ear and my little brother would be squealing. He wasn’t the fisticuffs type. It always surprised me that bodybuilding was classified as a sport. It had its own categories in the national games. All the strutting and posing. I would have put it in the same category as hairdressing. I wouldn’t dare mention that to Arny, though.
“And what did you tell him?” I asked.
“Said I’d think about it.”
“Good for you. Don’t make any rash decisions. How about you, Granddad Jah? What have you been doing today?”
I hoped we’d be able to build on the previous day’s uninterrupted flow of speech but I guess he’d exhausted himself. He looked up from his rice and grunted. He needed inspiration.
“Fine,” I said. “Then it’s my turn.”
I didn’t dwell on the visit to Ranong, if only because it wasn’t that interesting. Instead I described the crime scene at Feuang Fa temple as recounted to me by Lieutenant Chompu. There’s nothing like a murder scene description to keep the family engrossed during a meal. At one point, Granddad Jah looked up and I thought he was about to make a comment. But he had second thoughts and continued to shovel food into the hatch of his mouth. Granddad Jah had good solid bones but you could see most of them, so I had no idea where all that food went to.
“And Mair,” I asked, “how was your day?”
“Ed stopped by again,” she said. I wished I hadn’t asked. “He was on his way to put up a roof.”
“I thought he cut grass.”
“He’s a carpenter, too. He asked after you again.”
“I hope you told him…you know what.”
“It was against my principles, but, yes I did.”
“Good Mair.”
Granddad Jah grunted and pointed his fork. We followed the direction of the prongs. Someone was outside the shop waiting. Mair put down her utensils and went to attend to the customer.
“Business is booming,” said Arny. He collected the plates from the table and carried them to the kitchen. It was his turn to wash up. Granddad Jah refused to give up his bowl and spoon. He was apparently attempting to scrape the pattern off the ceramic. I wondered if he had the same worms as Gogo.
“There are two avenues,” he said, unexpectedly. Again I was surprised to hear his voice. “One,” he continued, “is when you go to a crime scene and look for what isn’t there, what’s been stolen: knives missing from drawers, computer discs removed. You’ve seen those scenes.”
Right. Now he was telling me how to look at a crime scene. The only crime scene he’d ever worked involved bent bumpers and squashed truck drivers. I’d attended more crime scenes than he ever would. All right. Respect for the elderly. Humor him.
“You follow the victim around and make a list of all the things that should be there but aren’t,” he continued. “Then there’s the second avenue. You go to a crime scene and you look for things that are there, but shouldn’t be: footprints would be one example, cigarettes in an ashtray, a forgotten umbrella, that kind of thing. And sometimes, what shouldn’t be there is so obvious you don’t see it.”
I didn’t know whether this was a general lecture or whether he had something specific in mind.
“Was there something the police didn’t see at Wat Feuang Fa, Granddad?”
“There was, Jimm. There was.”
“And what was that?”
“A hat.”
“A hat?”
“You said Abbot Winai was wearing a hat. It obscured his face.”
“That’s the way the lieutenant described it to me.”
“And how many monks have you seen wearing hats?”
I had to think about it. In the north there were some.
“The monks wear little woolly beanies all the time up in the mountains,” I said.
“That’s true. There are those that get away with it. But it’s more for survival. Better than freezing to death. But it’s still against the regulations. You won’t see any monks down here wearing a hat in the daytime, especially not a high ranking abbot.”
“It was hot, Granddad. And he was old.”
“It’s hot everywhere, and most abbots are getting on in years. But you don’t see it. And that’s because it’s clearly laid out in the Monastic Code that you can’t wear a hat. You can put up a saffron umbrella, even pull your robe over your head, but a senior abbot who’d reached that level of responsibility would never dream of breaking the rules. There’s no way he’d wear a hat.”
Granddad took up his bowl and spoon and went off to the kitchen.
“Thanks, Granddad.”
I sat on the rattan seat on my veranda, the seat that always creaked rudely as if I weighed eighty kilograms, and I slapped mosquitoes against my bare arms. I told myself a story. “An abbot’s about to go for a walk in the afternoon heat. The sun burning down on him. There happens to be a nice straw hat on a hook so he grabs it. Nobody watching. No harm done. And he strolls off to enjoy the blossoms.” Why complicate something so simple? Mair was a born-again Buddhist; I decided to ask her.
I walked to the shop. Mair was sitting at the round concrete table out front talking to someone. I could only see the shadow of his back against the shop lights. He was slightly built and wore a cap. Mair saw me coming and said something that made her guest rise quickly and head off along the road into darkness.
“Who was that?” I asked.
“A customer,” she said.
“Mair, you did a three-week intensive meditation course at Wat Ongdoi to make yourself a better Buddhist, and I know for sure that on the door of your cabin, number four on the Top Hot Precepts list, if I remember rightly, was, ‘Abstain from False Speech’.”
“I’m not lying. It was a customer.”
“It was Meng the plastic awnings man. Maprao’s own private dick.”
“He bought a box of matches.”
“Distortion is just a breed of lying. What did he have to tell you?”
“Nothing.”
“Mair?”
“Really. He said most people have poison of some type or another. It’s too broad a field. We need to narrow it down.”
“Mair, you’re trying to find out who it was that killed John. What good will that do you? You aren’t going to bring her back to life. And forgiveness is a blessing, or something, isn’t it?”
“I can forgive. I just need to know who it is I should be forgiving. I think the perpetrator needs that release from guilt.”
“You want to know who poisoned John so you can tell him John forgives him?”
“Yes, exactly.”
I felt one of those Maprao migraines coming on.
“It’s late, Mair. We should shut up shop.”
I scooped an embarrassingly small sum of money from the takings drawer, turned off the light and helped Mair pull down the shutter. We walked down to the water’s edge, found a spot with no jellyfish and sat on the sand. Crabs eyed us hungrily. I started the timer on my watch. Mair was smiling at the moon as it slipped in and out of the clouds. She really could find beauty anywhere. I told her about Granddad Jah and his new-found detecting aspirations. I expected her to laugh along with me, but instead she took my hand.
“Your Granddad Jah didn’t get beyond the rank of corporal…”
“I know. That’s why I was so shocked he – ”
“…because in all the forty years he was with the police, he refused to take bribes.”
“He…?”
“He passed his exams but no stations wanted him because of his reputation. He had a philosophy, a moral code. He vowed never to break it. If something was against the law it was against the law no matter who the perpetrator was. It wasn’t affected by interference from influential figures or pressure from senior police officers. Eighty-seven percent honest was dishonest in his book. He’d been one of the brightest recruits of his year and would have been fast-tracked for the higher ranks if only…But all a clean policeman succeeds in doing is showing all the others just how dirty they are. Nobody trusted him. Your granny tried to convince him to take the odd bribe, just to fit in, but he wasn’t having any of it. So, for forty years he blew his whistle and directed traffic.”
I could feel tiny claws nipping at my rump. It was long past the safe period for beach sitting. Mair had left me to my thoughts and gone to bed. It was just me and the back end of Gogo and the crabs. A longtail boat was passing slowly. The crewman was thumping the calm water with a heavy plunger to scare the sandfish out of the holes and into the nets. The steady rhythm was like a buffalo’s heartbeat. My own pulse had quieted some. There really was never a dull moment in our household. Why had Mair or Granny or Granddad Jah himself never told us about his moral code? Did they think we’d laugh at him because of it? Was honesty such an embarrassment? Why, I wondered, were we such a family of secrets?
Seven
“First, let me make it very clear, poor people aren’t necessarily killers. Just because you happen to be not rich doesn’t mean you’re willing to kill.”
—GEORGE W. BUSH, WASHINGTON, D.C., MAY 19, 2003
I was awoken early the next morning by the sound of someone banging on my cabin door. I opened it to find Arny dressed in only a towel.
“They’ve gone,” he said.
“What?”
“The guests in room two.”
“They paid in advance, didn’t they?”
“Yes, but…”
♦
Constable Ma Dum was the poor m
an assigned to investigate the loss of our television. He was honest in his appraisal that, as we didn’t ask for personal details of the couple in room two, nor did we insist on holding on to their motorcycle license until they checked out, we shouldn’t become too excited about the possibility of recovering the stolen TV. True, there may have been witnesses who saw a couple on a black’n’rust Suzuki fleeing with a large television, but as the sheets, towels and curtains were also missing, one could assume that the television was disguised in some way. People piled their motorcycles with all kinds of junk in these parts.
So, our TV was as good as fenced. A very small crime. Room – two-hundred baht. Sale of secondhand TV – five hundred baht maximum. Profit, about the cost of a Starbucks mocha supreme and a vanilla slice. When I’d phoned Pak Nam to report it, Sergeant Phoom had instantly recognized my voice. My name found itself on a report card which was checked by Major Mana. He turned up at our place at ten a.m. in his shiny truck. He was extremely uppity.
“So,” he sniffed, walking around with his hands behind his back like a very confident bullfighter. “Flew to the south for the VW case, decided you liked it so much you convinced your family to move down here permanently, uh? Swift move.”
“I didn’t actually say – ”
“Deceiving a police officer.”
“Which isn’t a criminal offense unless I’m a witness or a suspect,” I told him and immediately bit my tongue. “As I’m sure you know.”
“Of course. And I’m willing to forgive you.”
That didn’t make sense but I’d take it.
“Thank you.”
“After all, you did spell my name correctly in three major newspapers.”
I knew it. I bet he went out and bought all the dailies the morning after our interview.
“Spelling’s one of my strong cards,” I told him.
Jimm Juree 01; Killed at the Whim of a Hat Page 11