Enough about them.
“Anyway, what can I do for you, Ed?”
There was a long pause. Long enough for Thai Airways flight TG250 from Surat to Bangkok to pass overhead with its taillight flickering.
“I was talking to your mother,” he said.
“Oh, yes?”
“Asking about you. I’m sorry to be so nosy.”
“That’s all right.”
I think the wine had given me a little heart flutter. They say it’s a result of kick-starting a heart that’s already working just fine.
“Mine’s a small family,” he said, apparently trying to pick out stars in the moonlit sky. “Just me, my mother, and my sister. My mother’s doing all right. She’s got sixteen hectares of land with coconut and oil palm. Lots of fruit trees. Yeah, she’s doing all right.”
“That’s nice.”
Probably what they’d refer to down here as ‘a comfortable dowry’.
“My sister had a man for a while,” he continued. “What they’d call an arranged marriage. Don’t think that ever works. So she came back to live with us last year. She’s not…you know, her mind isn’t really here. She knows she’s different. She doesn’t really fit in. She’d probably be better suited for the city but she’s shy.”
It was quaint of him to tell me about his family. They seemed very normal, probably some girl’s dream relatives. I doubt anyone in their right mind would say the same about our family. I almost envied the simplicity of his life. I decided I owed it to him to perhaps go out for a meal with him so he could tell me about the grass business and how he’d learned roofing from Uncle Wit the builder.
“But she’s very attractive,” he was still going on. “Men are around all the time. I have to beat them back with sticks.”
I watched him smile. It was a lovely smile, warming like good whiskey.
“I was wondering if you’d like to meet her,” he said.
“Well, of course. That would be very nice. Sometime.”
“She heard about you and she’s seen you around. She saw you on the bicycle one day. It was all she could talk about over dinner that night. I’ve never heard her talk so much. The Chiang Mai girl with her trousers rolled up to her knees.”
We both laughed and then…I suppose there are times when you can’t see the rain for all the water that’s falling out of the sky. That was one of those times. I was already soaked before I knew what had hit me. I don’t know how it had gone so far without me getting the point. I’m usually a lot brighter than that. I felt sick, not wobbly sick, sick like I could happily throw up my entire day’s food intake right there on the beach. I was stupid. So very, very stupid. I couldn’t get away from there soon enough.
“OK, that’ll be fine,” I said without thinking. “I have to…cook dinner. Bye, Ed. Thank you.”
I left the chair and him and my wine and half my face there on the beach and clambered up through the soft sand to the resort. I lost one flip-flop but couldn’t even imagine going back for it. My hand shook as I reached for the handle of my unlocked hut and I threw myself onto the bed without turning on the light. Lucky the bed was in the same place as always. It wasn’t yet eight thirty. I wasn’t yet tired. The only thought in my wide-awake head was Ed the grass man trying to fix me up with his sister. I rolled onto my back and crossed my arms against my chest and willed myself to die.
I woke up at three a.m., four fifteen, five ten and five seventeen before I finally admitted I probably didn’t need ten hours sleep. I heard the grunt of returning squid boats in the distance and the pre-dawn rehearsal of the cocks. I turned on the bedside lamp and looked in the mirror. I was still stupid. I had a shower, dressed, and went to make an early start with breakfast. It was still dark and I was using a crack of shimmering gray at the bottom of the sky to see by. I was about to turn on the light in the kitchen when I saw a dark figure walking along the beach toward the resort. It was wearing baggy dark trousers and a black windcheater with the hood up. The lower face was obscured by a mask. There was something ominous in its heavy footfall across the sand. I took a step back behind the customer toilets, hoping I hadn’t been seen.
I could hear the crunch of footsteps on the gravel and there was no mistake they were heading directly toward me. I ducked inside the toilet block and hunted desperately for a weapon by the glow of the little red nightlight. Bathrooms are notoriously poor arsenals. There was a toilet brush, a plunger and a bunch of aromatic plastic tulips. None of these instilled in me the confidence to step outside and confront our invader. Then I found my weapon. Leaning against the far wall was a meter section of PVC piping. It was solid enough to bang an intruder over the head but light enough not to bring me up on a murder charge.
I took one step outside with my pipe raised and there, facing me like a mirror image, was the dark ninja with a block of beach bamboo hoisted. I screamed. She screamed.
“Mair?” I said.
“Jimm?”
We dropped our weapons and embraced, mainly to bring our respective shakes under control.
“Child, what on earth are you doing hanging around the public toilets at this time of the morning?”
“I woke up earl – No, wait. Never mind me. What are you doing creeping along the beach dressed like a bun-raku puppet master?”
She pulled down her mask, lowered her hood and looked down at her costume.
“Oh,” she said.
“Yes.”
“I got dressed in the dark. I had no idea I was wearing black. And besides, these trousers are navy blue. You’ll see when the sun comes up. And this?” She pulled the surgical mask up over her head. “Chicken flu.”
“Chicken flu?”
“From the poultry manure. Very high incidence of chicken flu from dung. It’s airborne.”
“Where exactly do they sell black face masks?” I took it from her.
“There are so many viruses around you can buy almost any color. It’s become a fashion statement.”
“Mair, this is a regular surgical face mask colored in with a black felt pen.”
“Really?”
“All right. Enough.”
I led her by the arm to the nearest table and sat her down. A puddle of pink was leaking out through the gap at the bottom of the night. The sun was rising somewhere beyond the Philippines and our sky was rushing through the dark tones in an effort to find something suitable to wear for the new day.
“Mair, what have you done?” I asked, staring her straight in the eyes. She stared back and slipped on an entirely different skin.
“Nothing to be ashamed of,” she said. “And I’m your mother. And I remind you that I am the breadwinner of this family and the day you go out and earn a salary, then, and only then, will you have the right to criticize your mother. Do I make myself perfectly clear?”
She stood and huffed away from the table with an indignant gait. She walked toward the shop but realized that wasn’t where she’d intended to go and retraced her steps toward her hut. I watched her march. I knew that walk and that speech well. All of us did. Eight-year-old Jimm had heard it a thousand times. On every occasion Jimm junior complained about having to clean her room or do her chores she’d had to sit through that same rant. Mair was in a dangerous altered state and wherever she’d been that morning I needed to know before the police found out.
Thirteen
“They misunderestimated me.”
—GEORGE W. BUSH, BENTONVILLE, ARKANSAS, NOVEMBER 6, 2000
Granddad Jah and I had arranged to meet Lieutenant Chompu at the Northeastern Seaside Restaurant overlooking the concrete battleship. Arny had wanted to take the truck to his gym and he sulked so much when I challenged him that I finally relented. He wouldn’t even tell me why he needed it so badly but he was dressed up: long-sleeved shirt, jeans with a crease, real shoes. I tried to joke with him about a date and he turned the color of ripe chili.
That left me with a new problem. I had to use the motorcycle but I had Granddad Jah wit
h me, and he was old-school when it came to sexism. There wasn’t a hope in hell that he’d let me drive the motorbike. He even tried to get me to sit sidesaddle as it was more ladylike. I won that tussle, but Granddad Jah on a motorcycle was road safety personified. We spent half an hour digging out the spare helmet from the removal boxes before he’d agree to set off. He rode 100% by the book: correct procedure, hand signals, turning protocol, but, as everyone else was ignorant that there was a book, they were busy doing everything the wrong way just as their forefathers had done before them. That made us the most dangerous people on the road. And heaven forbid you’d be in a hurry. He practiced what he called ‘defensive driving’ which meant we traveled so slowly we were often overtaken by maimed war veterans on tricycles.
We’d gone first to Wat Feuang Fa as I’d wanted to show him the crime scene and, perhaps, get him in conversation with Abbot Kem. It took us so long to get there I could feel myself aging. I wished I’d brought some embroidery to while away the trip but instead I yelled the details of the case through his thick helmet. All I left out was the contents of the camera. I was afraid if I told him, he’d be morally obliged to pass on the information to the police. He was a tough one to read.
At the temple, we were to be disappointed. All we found there was a young novice whose duty it was to feed the dogs, and a monk so ancient and so covered in religious tattoos that he looked like he’d been excavated from some historical site. He seemed half blind, staring out through misty opal eyes and massaging each shuddering hand with the other. I joined him in the office. Granddad Jah had opted to stay outside. He seemed uninterested.
“We’ve come to see Abbot Kem,” I told him. I half expected his inner workings to be as rusted as his casing but his voice was surprisingly young and his mind bubbled with energy.
“Vanished, poof, into thin air,” he said. “Haven’t seen a sight of him since they took the girl.”
“The girl?”
“The nun. Can’t remember her name but we only had the one.”
“Who took her?”
“Those scruffy Bangkok detectives, the tall one and his podgy mate.”
“Was she formally arrested?” I asked the monk.
“Must have had a warrant, I’d suppose. Not even Bangkok detectives can just kidnap a nun and whisk her off, can they now?”
“Do you think the abbot followed her?”
“You know I do a bit of palm reading on the side but I can’t claim my ESP’s all that hot. All I know is she’s gone and he’s gone and I’m left holding the fort. Just hope I can stay alive long enough to welcome him back. Wouldn’t want to be running a place this size all by myself.”
I thanked the old fellow and went outside to join my granddad. I was surprised to find both sandals there waiting for me although I did spot one black eye peering out from the bushes. We walked up to the crime scene along the concrete path. Granddad stood back for a few seconds and shook his head.
“If ever I saw a murderer who wanted to get caught,” he said.
“Open, isn’t it.”
“Look at it. Top of a slope. Well used road at the bottom. Bright flowering bushes advertising the location. Plain view from the temple. And you say the dogs attacked him?”
“Abbot Kem said he’d been alerted by the sound of the dogs barking.”
“Well then, anyone might have looked up once the dogs got going.”
“So he was lucky?”
“I’d say so. And where did he run? A man with a pack of dogs after him. He’s not going to head downhill into a wide open space. He’d have to go this way.”
Granddad Jah pushed his way through the unruly bougainvilleas and, for want of a better plan, I followed him. We emerged on the far side where the temple perimeter posts were lined up alongside a wood. There was no wall. To the left, the posts stretched all the way down to the road. To the right I could make out a small green roof.
“Any idea what that is?” he asked.
“Yes.”
He waited.
“Gonna tell me?”
“It’s the nun’s hut.”
“Well then.”
I’d suggested the possibility of the nun being implicated in the murder and done my best to make it sound unlikely. The concrete path meandered over the crest of the hill and approached the living quarters from the south. It was a very open track. But looking along the perimeter directly to the hut, I could see a case for someone concealing herself in the bushes and leaping out on an unsuspecting abbot. That’s when I decided to tell him about the photographs. Not that I’d downloaded them, but that Arny and I had seen them. We sat in the shade of a particularly tall bush and I hoped that my description of the crime might point the finger away from my sweet, love-struck nun.
“You still think she did it?” I asked.
“Well, if I was one of those modern, hi-so techno yuppie police superstars from Bangkok, I’d probably put all this information together and say, ‘Yes, she’s the common denominator’,” he said. “And I’d stop looking. But if I was an old, retired traffic policeman with not a single commendation or service ribbon to his name, I’d probably do this.”
And with that he headed off into the overgrown woodland straight ahead of us. He was fit for his age. It was all I could do to keep up with him. The branches he pushed past whipped back into my face and the ground was thick with roots and nasty nettles that bit my ankles. I doubted any other creature had entered this jungle since the dinosaurs. But some thirty meters from the perimeter fence, Granddad Jah and the vegetation stopped dead. I ran into his back. Before us was a red dirt track cut through the undergrowth. It was common enough down here where locals planted cash crops where they could and dug out trails through the jungle for access. The way was heavily rutted with what looked like truck tire and motorcycle tracks. Granddad Jah looked left and right but didn’t step out onto the dirt.
“All right,” he said. “It’s narrow. If, for whatever reason, I was to stop here in a car, I’d know some local farmer might need to get past to plant his palms or collect his berries, so I’d pull over as tight onto the verge as I could. About…there.”
He was pointing to a grassy area ten meters ahead. We picked our way along the edge of the wood, being careful not to step on the track, and stopped at the rough patch of weeds.
“What if he came on a motorcycle?” I asked.
He contemplated that possibility.
“Then we’re buggered,” he said. “But let’s go with the black Benz theory for now and see where that takes us. Ready?”
“OK. He parks here,” I said. “He cuts through the jungle, kills the abbot, for whatever reason, then comes back to…Wait! Look at this.”
I crouched down to get a better look. A cigarette butt in the grass. It was tipped and imported, not the type of thing Maprao locals would smoke. Granddad Jah knelt beside me and found another, then one more. We didn’t touch them.
“Three cigarette ends,” he said. “Now that’s either totally irrelevant or really significant. If the latter, it changes the theory completely.”
“It does?”
“Certainly. It either means our killer was so cool and collected that he felt he could get away with having a leisurely smoke or three, either before or after the murder…”
“…or he had an accomplice waiting in the car,” I added.
“Sometimes, Jimm,” he said, with one of his almost smiles, “I think you’re wasted as a girl.”
I held my tongue. In his mind it might have even been a compliment.
“You think that was good?” I said. “How about this? You’ve got a whacking great Mercedes Benz on a little dirt track and somehow you’ve got to get it out again. Sooner than reverse all the way back to the road, you keep going till you find somewhere to turn around so you’re facing the right direction for the getaway.”
He really smiled this time and squeezed my hand. I don’t remember him touching me since primary school.
“And t
hat,” he said confidently, “is where we’ll find our perfect car tracks. Good girl.”
We hurried along the edge of the trail. There was one break in the tree line but the ditch there would have made it impossible to drive in. Then, around the next bend, we came upon forensic heaven 101. Sand, and one perfect M of tire marks, in and out. Forgetting myself briefly, I raised my hand for Granddad Jah to high-five me. He had no idea what I was doing and glared at me until my hand was back at my side.
♦
That was the morning’s work, and now we sat waiting for Lieutenant Chompu at the empty Northeastern Seaside Restaurant. Opposite, local tourists paid thirty baht to set off firecrackers in honor of the Prince of Chumphon, father of the Thai navy, part-time magician. This would be followed by a climb up to the deck of a fifty-meter concrete battleship erected in his honor. Pak Nam’s most famous landmark, complete with concrete sailors and interlocking dolphins. What can I say?
Chompu arrived on foot. I was surprised. Pak Nam police station was only six hundred meters away, but policemen rarely walked. It made them look too common. I’d been nervous, I confess, about what Granddad Jah’s reaction might have been to this flowery policeman. He was hardly in a position to complain, of course. He’d indirectly sired one grandson who was the 1992 Miss Pattaya World, and one more who’d refused point-blank to have sexual relations unless it was a sincere love match, ergo, a thirty-two-year-old virgin. With a record like that, a man would have to have serious doubts about his own gene pool.
To my surprise, Granddad Jah stood and saluted when Chompu arrived. It didn’t feel sarcastic. The lieutenant generously returned the salute and removed his hat. We sat under the wooden canopy and Granddad and Chompu briefly exchanged professional backgrounds. I took the female role and ordered an assortment of Esarn Lao delicacies and cold beer and Coca-Cola for the lieutenant. Chompu was very respectful and I got the feeling my granddad had warmed to him early on. He told the policeman about the dirt track we’d found beside Wat Feuang Fa and I smiled at Granddad’s look of awe when the lieutenant immediately took out his cell phone and passed on the information to somebody at the station. He related the story exactly as it had been told to him. He even asked Granddad for his full name so he could be cited as a witness. With the detectives back in Bangkok with their suspect, the local stations were now responsible again for any ongoing developments in the case. When Chompu turned off his phone, both he and Granddad were grinning widely.
Jimm Juree 01; Killed at the Whim of a Hat Page 20