Jimm Juree 01; Killed at the Whim of a Hat

by Colin Cotterill

  “Did you see the driver?” I asked.

  “The glass was smoked,” he said. “All I got was a shadow. Little fellow. It all happened in a flash. I hit the ground. I was woozy for a second. I looked around and then I was out of it.”

  Something troubled me.

  “Were you riding without your helmet on?” I asked him.

  He laughed and the scent of a dentist’s office, blood and antiseptic, puffed into my face.

  “More than my career’s worth, that would be,” he said. “You just have to sit on the saddle, parked, without your helmet and they’ll have your stripes these days.”

  “And it was fastened?”

  “Strapped tight.”

  “So, how did you get that crack on your skull?”

  He reached up slowly and painfully and caressed his head.

  “I was wondering about that myself,” he said.

  I found the office of the hospital director, Dr. Fahlap. He was a small man of Chinese stock in his late fifties. He had the most forgettable face I’d ever seen. In fact if you asked me now to describe him, I wouldn’t be able to. I asked him whether the injury to Sergeant Phoom’s head could have been a result of him hitting his head on the road. Fahlap was the type of man who gave thought to questions and you could see the replies forming in his eyes.

  “No,” he said at last. “It was a blow from a blunt object. Perhaps a tire lever.”

  That’s what I’d been afraid of. On a quiet stretch of road, the killer had removed the sergeant’s helmet and smashed him over the head. He wanted the policeman dead. Perhaps he was afraid he’d been seen and could be identified. So why was the sergeant still alive? Why just the one blow? Of course. The killer was interrupted. That had to be it. We needed to find who phoned in the accident. I bet that person had seen the killer.

  I was just about to thank the doctor and get back home when I had another thought.

  “Doctor, do you know anything about a hospital adviser staying at the 69 Resort?”

  A pause.

  “What hospital is he advising at?”

  “Yours,” I said.

  “Do you have his name?”

  “Dr. Jiradet.”

  “I’ve never heard of him.”

  ♦

  I arrived home at ten fifteen. Sitting at the concrete table out front of the shop were my Lieutenant Chompu and Ed the grass man. They seemed to be getting along famously. It had a strange effect on me. It wasn’t jealousy exactly. Neither of them belonged to me or ever would. It was more like an annoyance that they should form an alliance so quickly. I ignored them both as I stepped down from the truck and walked into the shop.

  “Nong Jimm,” Chompu called. “Are you not talking to me?”

  “I don’t want to interrupt,” I said, deliberately not looking at Ed the grass man.

  “When’s showtime?” the policeman asked.

  “Give me five minutes.”

  I walked in through the open shop front. There was no sign of Mair. I looked in the storeroom and peered out into the back garden. There were chickens aplenty but no mothers. I was on my way back when I noticed two bare feet sticking out from under the counter. By edging sideways I was able to take in the entire vista of my mother’s backside.

  “Mair?”

  “Shhh.”

  I went to the counter and knelt down.

  “Mair, why are you under the counter?”

  “There’s a policeman out there.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s all over. The game’s up.”

  I had the strongest urge to laugh but I felt there was some method to this particular madness.

  “Mair, what have you done?”

  My mother was shaking like a rat at a lab interview. I reached under the counter and hugged as much of her as I could.

  “Mair, the policeman’s here to see me. He’s a friend of mine. We’re working on a case together. There’s nothing to worry about.”

  One by one the shakes subsided and I heard a couple of recovering breaths, then a rapping sound. She was tapping on the underside of the counter with her knuckles.

  “I’ll have to get Ed in,” she said.

  “What?”

  She reversed past me and climbed stiffly to her feet. She started to knock now on the top of the counter.

  “Everywhere, they are. Little bastards.”

  “Who?”

  “Termites.”

  I really had to laugh then.

  “Mair, that down there had nothing to do with termites.”

  “Don’t be silly, child. What else would I be doing on the floor?”

  “Hiding out?”

  “Such an imagination. You should be writing novels, girl, not reporting on other people’s failings.”

  I watched her banging her fist on the plastic counter-top and knew it was the time for me to go and have a talk with the awning detective. But, first things first. I walked outside and collected my lieutenant and had intended to ignore Ed, but the beanstalk called out to me,

  “Koon Jimm?”

  I was afraid he’d shout something embarrassing so I left Chompu tapdancing on the gravel in the driveway and walked casually back.

  “Yes?”

  “I need to speak with you,” he said. He stood up and towered over me like a palm tree.

  “I don’t need any grass cutting,” I said. I mentally took a long run up and kicked myself in the backside. There had been no need for rudeness, but it was said so I couldn’t take it back.

  “It’s not about grass.”

  “As you can see, I’m rather busy.”

  His hands were in front of him holding his cap like some farmhand talking to the wife of the prime minister. I looked up at his face glaring at me, tangled in the rays of the sun. It was the first time I’d looked him in the eye. His mustache didn’t suit him and his hair was either uncombed or uncombable. But his eyes were molten dark chocolate. I wished I hadn’t looked into his eyes.

  “I can wait till you’re free,” he said.

  “It might be a while.”

  “I can wait.”

  “Don’t you have some important weeding to do, or something?”

  I already had welts on the cheeks of my mental bottom.

  “The weeds will still be there tomorrow,” he said, and he smiled. If the eyes hadn’t been bad enough, the smile…

  “Suit yourself,” I said. “I’ll be finished when I’m finished.”

  I left him standing there. He really was far too tall to be taken seriously and annoyingly persistent. I collected Chompu and we went to my hut. Unless there’d been another power failure – daily now; a concerted education project provided by the Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand to show us what life was like in the Stone Age – my laptop should have been fully charged. Just in case it wasn’t, Chompu had brought his own. A darling little Dell in puce. We sat on the veranda with the laptop on my cane table and us on the rattan chairs that squeaked and creaked like mouse S&M. I offered him a can of beer from my bar fridge but he said he was watching his weight and settled for an iced water.

  As we waited for the computer to come to the boil, I told him about my visit to the hospital and the Benz. It didn’t surprise me at all that he’d already heard. He’d been following events on his truck radio and he’d passed by the hospital in my wake. The driver of the Benz had long since departed and the police were following up on both the name he’d registered under and the license plate of the car. He said he’d pass on the theories about Sergeant Phoom’s injuries.

  I plugged in my USB onto which I’d copied the photos from the computer at Home Art. When the ‘select file’ message popped up, I hesitated to click. The pictures were still heavy in my otherwise lightweight heart.

  “This isn’t family viewing,” I told him.

  “I imagine I’ve seen worse,” he said.

  I doubted it. I clicked, and one by gruesome one the slides appeared on the screen. He watched the ent
ire show with his hand over his mouth but the pupils of his eyes active, darting from point to point on the screen. I’d had my fill of that. I’d been through it all, zooming, highlighting, sharpening, redefining and all I’d found was the brutal assassination of an abbot.

  “Again,” said Chompu.

  He dragged his chair closer to the screen so his nose was barely a sniff away from the carnage. He watched the entire performance one more time from beginning to end. When the skinny dog sang in the final frame, Chompu stood and unclicked the hinges in his neck before walking inside my hut and getting himself a beer.

  “Damn,” he said, “that was beautiful.”

  That was the scariest moment of the morning by far.

  “Beautiful?” I said. “Beautiful? How sick are you to see anything beautiful in that?”

  He took a very masculine swig of his beer and dabbed his lips with a tissue.

  “What do you want me to say?” he asked. “That it was awful and bloody and premeditated and sick?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, of course, ‘yes’. It was all of those things. Nobody in his or her or its right mind would think otherwise. But didn’t you see it? Didn’t you see the composition? The scenery? It was staged. It was a final operatic montage. It was a tour de force of color and spectacle.”

  If I’d been a police officer at that moment and he’d been a run-down resort manager, I would have asked him about his whereabouts on that Saturday afternoon. I even felt uneasy sitting there beside him.

  “What do you think?” he asked.

  “I think it’s lucky you didn’t watch the show beside Major Mana and the Bangkok detectives. You’d be in a cell by now.”

  “But that’s why it’s so much more fun to watch it with you. They’d just have seen it as the documentation of a murder. You and I see it as so much more.”

  “We do?”

  “Of course we do. It’s not just a killing. It’s a climax. It’s a loud, ‘Look what I’ve done, world! See how poetic this murder has been’.”

  “Poetic justice?”

  “Exactly. It all had to be recorded because it’s an artistic image that’s been germinating in the killer’s mind. The cameraman or -woman just needed to match the actual slaughter to the vision. That’s why getting back the camera was so important. It was confirmation that justice had been done according to the divine ordinance.”

  “Man or woman?”

  “What?”

  “You said, ‘cameraman or -woman just needed to match…’”

  “Hmm. Did I?”

  “You know you did. What did you see in those pictures that suggested the killer might be a woman?”

  “Not that it precluded a man, more that it included a woman. The glove.”

  “It was an oven mitt. I assumed he’d worn it to add to the color.”

  “Whereas I assumed it was worn as a disguise. A tight glove or none at all would have immediately given away the size of the hand, the length of the fingers.”

  “That’s all?”

  “I don’t know. If it had been a video recording I would have felt more confident to pass on my gut feeling. There was just something about the grip on the knife, the way the blade was poked rather than thrust, the forensic report that said the wounds had all been comparatively shallow. It all suggests a lack of strength.”

  “Ergo, a woman. Huh! And I thought you were one of us.”

  “And I thought you had to be gay to be prickly.”

  “You do. But once you open up the possibility of the killer being a woman, you’re down to the one suspect. I don’t like that.”

  “The nun? And you like her.”

  “I don’t know her well enough to like her. But I want to believe that all this time in the bush hasn’t completely erased my instincts.”

  “Don’t underestimate the power of love.”

  “Oh, shut up. I suppose I’m going to have to pay another visit to the nun lady. You won’t arrest her just yet, will you?”

  “Based on what? We haven’t seen anything to suggest the killer could have been a woman because we haven’t seen anything. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “And that’s another problem.”

  “What is?”

  “I have to find a way to introduce these pictures into the case without committing you to a three-year jail term for tampering with evidence in a murder inquiry.”

  “Come on. It wasn’t even evidence when I tampered with it.”

  “Even so, you did lie to, ooh, how many was it? Twelve police officers?”

  “Play back the tape. I said nothing of the sort. I just intimated.”

  “Of course you did. You’re basically a very honest person. That’s why I knew you were lying through your teeth. But I doubt Mana will remember it like that, nor the Bangkok detectives.”

  “Who’d ever have thought they’d lose the damned camera? So how do you propose we do this?”

  “Do you have a printer?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is it traceable to you?”

  With every encounter, Chompu climbed higher and higher in my esteem and lower on the table of people I’d trust, which was a very short table to begin with. I left him to watch the painfully slow color printer and made my way to the kitchen to prepare lunch. I’d invited the lieutenant to eat with us. Something minuscule in the far back left-hand closet of my mind wondered whether Ed was still waiting at the concrete table for me, but before I could get that far I heard a grunt from behind. I looked around to see Granddad Jah sitting at one of our grass-roofed tables. He was dressed, which surprised me. He wore a dark blue Mao shirt and gray slacks.

  “So, you weren’t planning on asking me anything?” he said, gruffly.

  “I haven’t seen you,” I told him. “How could I – ?”

  “I travel halfway down the country for you and you don’t even say thank you.”

  “You’ve been to Surat already?”

  I must have been impressed because I’d squealed my question. He definitely smiled this time. I sat and squeezed his hand and he enjoyed that for a few seconds before pulling his coralesque fingers away.

  “No big deal,” he said.

  “And you saw Captain Waew?”

  “Of course.”

  “Brilliant.” We’d all tried. Me, the major, the lieutenant. He wouldn’t give us the time of day. “How did you do it?”

  “I’ll tell you someday.”

  I knew he wouldn’t. It was starting to look as if lunch would have to cook itself.

  “All right. I’m all ears,” I told him.

  He cleared his throat and produced a small notepad from his back pocket. He barely referred to it.

  “An influential person…” he began (always a bad start to a story), “headed a gang that was involved in various nefarious operations. Waew, who was a lieutenant colonel at the time, had been approached by an aide to this gangster who brazenly offered Waew a very reasonable monthly stipend if he would keep his eyes averted from the gang’s activities. Waew being, at that time, one of the very rare Thai police officers with a conscience, told the representative that he was on board, but also informed his superior officer of the offer. Thereafter followed a very in-depth investigation of the gang’s comings and goings. Even though this said villain had his finger in a number of pies, the police decided to focus on just the one activity in order to build a cast-iron case against him.”

  I noticed then as I looked across the table, that there wasn’t actually anything written in Granddad Jah’s notebook but he gave the appearance of reading from it like a report. Impressive. I was sure if ever I made it to seventy-four I’d not even remember which end of the toothbrush to hold on to.

  “As Waew had received three complaints of automobile theft from car rental companies,” he continued, “and as the detective knew from the aide that this was one of the figure’s most lucrative operations, he decided – ”

  I put up my hand.

 
“What?”

  “Why take cars from rental companies? Why go to all the trouble of counterfeiting IDs and investing in deposits when you could just break into a parked car and hotwire it and drive it off?”

  It was a dumb question but I thought Granddad Jah would enjoy it.

  “A good point,” he said. That was probably the first compliment I’d received from him since grade six when I won the new-year greetings card design competition at Guides. “But use your brain, why don’t you?” (deflation) “You rent a car for, what? A week? Two? That gives you two weeks to change the plates, forge the paperwork, and drive the vehicle across a border. If you steal someone’s car, you have the police out after you from day one.”

  I smiled to acknowledge the point. Where was this granddad during the early days of my career? Watching traffic. I could have used him.

  “Should I continue or would you like to interrupt again?” he asked.

  “Please.”

  “It was clear that the influential figure was recruiting hippies to do his dirty work. There were a lot of backpackers hanging around the islands, living cheap, smoking marijuana. Of course, most of them were foreigners. But there were the dregs of the communist movement, Thais who’d fled to the jungles to escape the junta, and they’d never been able to fit back in to society. Some of them set up communes that attracted younger kids. Most of them were just anti-establishment; others were playing at being flower children. There were a couple of farms down here in the south.

  “Blissy Travel was the sixth tour company to be hit by the gang. Then there was a similar establishment down in Songkla. Hiring out cars without drivers was a relatively new phenomenon here, so it wasn’t hard to chart all the establishments that offered rentals. It wasn’t possible to stake out all of them so Waew had to take a chance. Blissy Travel had reported a van of theirs hadn’t been returned on the agreed date. Their second van had been rented out two days earlier, also by what the owner called ‘a hippy couple.” Waew put out the registration information and got lucky. The second VW had been pulled over in Tha Chana the day after it was rented. The driver and his passenger had been charged with indecent exposure. They’d been found sleeping naked in the back of the van early that morning.