“Fishy,” said the paunch. “I’d like to hear how you both wound up at the temple in the first place.”
“Very well.” I nodded my head. “Then let’s all get comfortable, shall we?”
I walked through the throng of visitors to the bosom of the local team. It was one of those ‘think on your feet’ moments. I needed time to come up with a story that didn’t damage the already fragile reputation of Pak Nam police but one that didn’t push me and Arny into the front chorus of suspects. I sat on the low window ledge and folded my arms.
“The reason we were at Feuang Fa temple,” I said, “was because I’d received a telephone call telling me there’d been a killing out there.”
“Who from?” asked longan skin.
“I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to divulge my sources.”
“So, you’re saying that someone just happened to have your number, knew you lived around here and randomly chose you to pass the information on to?”
“No, nothing random about it. I moved down here nine months ago at which time I traveled hither and thither passing around my name card and telling everyone I’d pay for information on serious criminal activity in the district. This was the first seedling to poke up its head following that early sowing. With regard to my…our visit to the temple, my boyfriend, who is actually my brother, agreed to drive me there that afternoon, despite the fact that he was still grieving over his beloved dog, John, who had been poisoned that morning. Arny is a very sensitive man and the journey proved to be too much for him. His need for solace was quite genuine. I, on the other hand, was devious. I opted to sneak out of the truck in search of witnesses. As there was no crime scene marked off I was perfectly within my rights to do so.”
I was grateful that the expense and the lost weekends of my M.A. course hadn’t been totally in vain. If nothing else, my analysis of George W.’s oratory style had taught me that a sincere countenance and a confident stance were sufficient to distract your audience from the fact that you were talking rubbish.
“Which brings me to the camera,” I said. “This may be harder to believe, but there was a small dog called Sticky Rice who was in the habit – ”
“All right,” said longan skin, “we know the dog story. What we need to know is whether you made a copy of the photographs.”
“How dare you?” I said, with heapings of indignation in my voice. I was ashamed at how quickly the deceit had sped from my mouth. In the background I could see Arny’s eyeballs roll.
“I confess, when I found the camera I did attempt to turn it on,” I said. “I mean, it could have belonged to someone at the temple. But it had experienced serious damage at the paws of the dog and I couldn’t operate the ‘play’ mode.”
“You didn’t think to take out the memory card?” asked the paunch.
“Cameras have memory cards?” I gasped. “I thought that was just computers. Whatever will they think of next? Why are you asking? Haven’t you been able to open it?”
I hadn’t seen so many heads exchange guilty glances since our secondary school chemistry teacher asked us who was responsible for exploding a stink bomb in the staff room. There was a geometric web of eye contact around me. At last the tall detective nodded to Mana.
“First of all,” said the major, “nothing you’ve heard over the past week, nor things you’ll hear tonight, are for publication. You print anything before we’re ready to release it and I’ll have you arrested.” He paused but I didn’t react at all. “The reason we called you in, is that…the camera’s lost.”
“Lost?”
“Stolen.”
The police were always good for a laugh.
“From a police station?”
“No,” he said, grimly. “This afternoon I had Sergeant Phoom run it over to the Lang Suan station on his motorcycle. There was an accident.”
“That was no accident,” said Chompu.
“Lieutenant! Quiet! We don’t know for certain. It could have been an accident.”
“Is the sergeant all right?” I asked.
“He’s in Pak Nam hospital,” said Chompu. “He was run off the road by a car. He lost a lot of skin and was knocked out. A passerby phoned an ambulance and the hospital called us. When we got there, the passerby was gone and so was the camera.”
“Technically, it could have been highway robbery,” said longan skin. “But it’s unlikely. There are much safer targets than a police officer in uniform. That’s why we need to know who you’ve told about the camera.”
“Who I…?”
I had to think about it. If they asked Arny he’d tell them without even a suggestion of thumbscrews.
“Just me and my brother knew,” I told them.
“You didn’t tell anyone at the temple?”
“I didn’t see anyone, apart from Abbot Kem.”
“You told him?”
“Er, no.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure. I said goodbye to him, went to get my shoes, then followed the dogs to the back of the hut.”
“What about the nun?”
“She wasn’t there.”
“But she could have seen you. She could have been somewhere else.”
I looked around the room. Some of the men turned away in embarrassment.
“Is the nun…?” I began.
“That’s nothing for you to worry about,” said Mana. I could see he was perturbed at being outgunned in his own station. He’d been relegated to crowd control. I didn’t want to think about the nun being a suspect. I swung the subject back to the accident.
“Is anyone with Sergeant Phoom?” I asked.
“We’ve got a man there,” Chompu said.
“Were there any other witnesses apart from the person who phoned it in?” I asked.
“It happened at a point on the way to Lang Suan where the road curves around the river,” Chompu told me. “There are no houses there and the road’s very quiet after midday.”
It was the perfect location at the perfect time.
“All right, then assuming I’m not lying, and I really didn’t tell anyone,” I said, “how could the perpetrator know that Phoom had the camera? Did the sergeant have any idea?”
“He’s still unconscious,” said Mana. “But we didn’t actually invite you here to conduct an interview. We just want you to answer our questions and leave the inquiry to us.”
“And there I was thinking I’d been helpful,” I said.
“You have,” said the paunch. “Did you happen to note down the make of the camera?”
“Yes.”
He produced a piece of paper from his folder.
“Do you remember if it was a Nikon DSLR D3555?”
There was something going on between Bangkok and our Major Mana. They glared icicles back and forth across the room. I wondered why the police needed to ask me about the make of the camera. I have a good memory for little facts with numbers and letters in them.
“That’s the make that I wrote down,” I told them.
“Are you sure?”
I wished he’d stop asking me if I was sure. If I wasn’t sure I wouldn’t say anything, would I now?
“Yes. Why?”
“Because, according to our detective friends from Bangkok, here” – Mana smiled – “the camera details that both you and I wrote down are wrong.”
“We didn’t say they were wrong,” said longan skin. “All we said was there was no such camera listed in the Nikon catalog. We’d have to contact the company and have them run a check on it. It may be a discontinued line.”
“And you’re sure you didn’t make a copy of the film?” asked the paunch.
If only I’d had a machete on me…
“Sir,” I said, earnestly, “not all reporters are rebels. I worked for a responsible newspaper and they taught us ethics. My grandfather was a member of the Royal Thai Police force for over forty years. He taught me the difference between legal and illegal.” I noticed Arny duck out
of the room. “My mother is a religious woman. She taught us all the difference between right and wrong. Please don’t insult me by suggesting I’d do anything underhanded.”
See? I didn’t exactly say, no.
“Then that’ll be all,” he said. “We may have to contact you again.”
I was dismissed. The meeting broke up. The detectives and city cops retired to Lang Suan and I heard Major Mana’s souped-up truck growl out of the car park. I didn’t know where Arny was. He was probably in the temple opposite, sulking. Lies weighed heavily upon him even if they belonged to somebody else. My lieutenant had told me to meet him in his office in five minutes and I was sitting on his side of the desk enjoying its neatness when he arrived. He was carrying two suspiciously non-steaming mugs and put one down in front of me. I gazed into it and saw the stain on the bottom. “Water?” I asked.
“Vodka tonic.”
“They’ve got tonic down here?”
“Tesco. They’ve got everything at Tesco.” My entire family had gone to the opening of Tesco Lotus out on the highway. It was the biggest thing to happen to the province since…no. It was the biggest thing to happen to the province. Our own superstore and the first possibility to find cream cheese and wine and made-in-Vietnam Chez Guevara T-shirts for forty baht. They had palm oil made from our own local palms via Bangkok on special at twenty baht a bottle, cheaper than we could make it ourselves. They had chocolates from Switzerland and skin whiteners from Malaysia. Except we hadn’t been able to get in that day because there’d been so many people nobody could move in or out. We got to within four meters of the door and Arny lifted me onto his shoulders and I could see a lake of heads spread out before me. But it was a stagnant lake and I doubt any of those people made it out of there before the week was out. But, meanwhile, back at the police station, “Should we really be drinking vodka tonic on duty?” I asked.
“It’s almost midnight and they called me in from a very promising soiree. They owe me. So?”
“So?”
We sipped our drinks. The tonic barely troubled the vodka.
“Brother?” he said.
“Oh, ho. Don’t. Don’t even…”
“He doesn’t look straight.”
“He’s no shape at all.”
“He’s gorgeous.”
“Forget it.”
“I’ll take your word for it but I may involve him in fantasy moments if you think he wouldn’t mind.”
“Go for it.”
We sipped again.
“You and I need to make an appointment,” he said.
“What for?”
“To view the you-know-what.”
“No, I don’t know what.”
“Certainly you do. You wouldn’t want me to say it out loud, would you?”
“Weren’t you listening before?”
“The Chiang Mai Mail taught you ethics, Granddad taught you the law and Mummy taught you morals. How’s that?”
“And why didn’t it register?”
“Your granddad was in traffic for forty years. Your mother did a three-week Buddhism refresher course, and newspaper ethics…?”
This man was starting to make me feel uneasy.
“Do you have a remote camera in my bathroom too? You know nothing, trust me.”
“I know you made a copy of what was on that camera memory card.”
“And how would you know that?”
“Because it’s exactly what I would have done. And you and I have a lot in common.”
“We’re both girls deep down?”
He lingered before his next sip. I wondered if my knee had landed a blow.
“We’re both more capable than people around us give us credit for,” he said.
He’d dusted off my powder-puff attack without a flinch.
“If you don’t want your career to flush completely down the cesspit,” he continued, “you need someone here at your local police station providing information. I need your back-up to make me more than just a pretty face around here. It’s a simple professional trade-off on friendly terms.”
I knocked back the remainder of the drink. My mouth was too small to take it all but I was determined not to choke in front of him.
“You presumably know where we live,” I said.
He smiled.
“Ten a.m.,” he said.
♦
I spent what sleep time was left of that morning in a nightmare of graphically epic proportions. The colors were so loud I couldn’t hear any dialogue. There were nuns and monks in there and noisy bougainvilleas. Yuppies in yellow shirts were vacuuming. Purple heads in plastic bags were swaying at the ends of ropes. Chompu was dancing. John the dead dog was bleeding in B-movie red everywhere. It was the kind of dream you needed ski goggles to get through or else you’d wake up blinded. I came around at six, more exhausted than I’d gone to bed. The sunrise was shocking pink.
I was apparently still seeing life through the lens of that very expensive camera when I arrived at Pak Nam’s mini hospital. The outpatients area was ablaze with color: the dull yellow of hepatitis, the scarlets and crimsons of recent motorcycle accidents, the mauve of football injuries, the pale greens of food poisoning, and the various shades of pink from pregnancy right through the color chart to the weak pallor of anemia. I sat with my hand shading my eyes waiting for the nurse to take me to Sergeant Phoom and I thought about logistics. If it really had been the killer who ran the sergeant off the road and stolen the camera, he had what he wanted now and had no reason to stick around. There would have been a sudden departure. I took out my cell phone and called the hotels I’d visited a few days earlier. My suspects in Lang Suan hadn’t checked out. So I tried the resorts. Nobody picked up the phone at the Tiwa Resort. I talked to the receptionist at the 69 who told me only the Korean lady had left the previous day. A group of Korean electricians had moved in and had spent their lunchtime drinking in the restaurant so there might have been some conflict. It was anyone’s guess. Dr. Jiradet was scheduled to check out that morning and the receptionist also hinted that she thought the teenager might have moved in with the German.
Sergeant Phoom was in a small ward with four beds. The other beds were occupied by people who looked like there was absolutely nothing wrong with them. They were chatting with seven or eight village types who were sitting cross-legged on the floor eating. Only the sergeant seemed poorly and I wondered whether I should suggest the revelers keep the noise down. A young constable I didn’t know sat beside him reading an illustrated brochure on kidney diseases. He looked up when I walked to the bed.
“How is he?” I asked.
I had a bag of mangosteens that I placed on the bedside table. Phoom wouldn’t be in any state to peel away the thick skins for some time to come. Both his eyes were purple and bloated and a shaved section of hair framed a nine-centimeter millipede of stitching. His mouth was closed and bloody. His arms and legs were wrapped in bandages like a cartoon explosion victim.
“He’s fine,” said the constable.
He was a pretty boy, not rugged enough to grow into a gnarled old detective.
“Really?”
“He was awake a little while ago.”
“Did he say anything?”
“Nothing coherent. Um, who are you?”
I was about to dive straight into a lie just in case they’d told him not to allow in the press, but in this little corner of Utopia, that would always come back to bite me.
“My name’s Jimm Juree. I – ”
“You’re the journalist.”
“I know the sergeant. I just – ”
“I always wanted to write.”
Nine months earlier, my reaction to such a straight line would have been ‘You should have paid more attention at nursery school’ or ‘Lucky the police entrance exam is all pictures’. I doubt I would have voiced those smarmy comments although I would certainly have imagined them. But something was happening to my sarcasm skills and I didn’t like it. I found myself f
eeling disappointment on his behalf, sad that he’d become a policeman and missed out on the chance to be nominated for an S.E.A. Write Award.
“It’s never too late to start,” I said.
Sergeant Phoom coughed and the constable held a small bottle of Red Bull to the older man’s bloody lips.
“Is that prescribed?” I asked.
“He swears by it.”
Whatever works, I thought. Why not a placebo of sucrose and glucose and caffeine? The sergeant turned his bruised and bloody head slowly to my side of the bed. It was like watching a piglet turn on a rotisserie.
“Nong Jimm,” he said. I had to strain to hear him.
“Isn’t this ward a bit noisy for you?” I asked.
“It’s like this all the time,” he said.
I looked to the constable for an explanation.
“His family,” he said, nodding at the floor party. A couple of them waved at me. I waved back. I pulled across a chair and sat close to the sergeant.
“Did you see the car that hit you?” I asked.
“I’ve asked all that,” said the constable.
“Poor man’s hit his head,” I reminded him. “It always pays to ask twice just to confirm the answer’s the same. Sergeant?”
“I got a brief glimpse of it in the mirror,” he said. “It was right on top of me then. Black Benz. New one.”
I got that bat in the belly flutter and looked up at the constable.
“That’s what he said before.” He nodded.
“Have you got your radio with you?” I asked. He patted the back of his belt. “All right. Call the station. Ask them if anyone’s been to the Tiwa Resort. If not, tell them there’s a guest from out of town staying there in room seven. He’s got a black Benz.”
The young man looked uncertain.
“Go ahead,” said the sergeant.
The constable called through and passed on the message. There was silence as he listened. I listened. The three patients and the family on the floor listened. The policeman nodded when the reply came through and he switched off the radio.
“They’ll send some men out there right away,” he said.
That didn’t result in a cheer exactly, more a group “Hmm.” There really is no way to describe that feeling you get when you believe you’ve contributed to the solving of a crime. I might have even joined the police force but for the fact I’d be cleaning toilets and making tea for the rest of my career. Gender equality hasn’t found a home in the police force. At least as a journalist I was allowed to ask questions. I leaned back down to the sergeant.
Jimm Juree 01; Killed at the Whim of a Hat Page 16