“Well, if that’s true…” I said.
“…and if the second witness was correct about seeing a man and woman at the accident scene,” Chompu added, “it means that the other car at the scene was driven by a woman. The police here can’t get hold of the brother. He presumably hasn’t yet worked out how to charge his cell phone. But the crutch dealer said his brother had mentioned the accident. He’d said something about a Chinese woman in an expensive car who couldn’t speak any Thai. She was all aflutter because she was the first at the scene. Once the brother arrived she drove off. He was by himself. He didn’t have any choice but to phone for help.”
“This is all getting rather complicated,” I said.
My head buzzed. There was a road team in there working on my narrow mind. Trying to broaden it. I had to go over all the events of the previous week, deleting a male perpetrator and replacing him with a female. How sexist was I? I hadn’t once asked the hotels and resorts about women. I hadn’t once considered the possibility of a female being capable of a series of violent acts. Even when they presented me with a female suspect, I balked at the possibility. I was a chauvinist of the worst kind.
“She wasn’t necessarily Chinese at all,” said Granddad Jah in his annoying unexpressive tone. “She could very easily have been a Thai with a wig.”
I laughed.
“Why would she need a wig to convince anyone she was…? Oh.” I got it. “You’re still with the nun, aren’t you?”
“It all fits,” he said. “She sets it up to look like someone from outside has done it, puts on a disguise. Car rental. Sneaks in and out of the temple without being seen. Motive. Opportunity. Plus, she’s a classic psychopath, following this monk around for two thirds of her life. She takes my bet.”
I didn’t buy it. It wasn’t just because she was a nun who’d spent most of her life in pursuit of true love. It’s possible I might have empathized, but a good journalist is able to remove herself from a case. Even if I went along with Granddad’s scenario and I arrived at the point where I needed to exterminate Abbot Winai from Internal Affairs so I could be with my lover, it could never have been planned this methodically. I didn’t see the murder of the abbot as a mid-play act. This wasn’t the bumping off of a threat, the removal of a plot spoiler on the way to the final scene. I’d seen the photos. Abbot Winai was undoubtedly the star of the show and his demise was the climax. This was all about him, not her.
“I think it’s time to show your granddad the photos,” said Chompu.
I’d considered it myself, of course, albeit briefly. Granddad Jah had earned our trust, but this was more than just sharing information. It was sharing a secret. The lieutenant and I had deliberately withheld evidence. It was a criminal offense. Granddad Jah couldn’t even drink a beer without Breathalyzing himself. He was a stickler. He’d made his own life miserable by being honest. I had no idea where this would fit in his moral code book. Chompu could lose everything he’d fought for on this one throw of the dice, but he’d tossed the suckers anyway.
Granddad Jah was pensive for several seconds. His head nodded in time with the bleating of the ‘door unfastened’ buzzer. Then he looked at the policeman.
“I was wondering when you’d get around to it,” he said.
“You knew I’d downloaded the pictures?” said I.
“You didn’t think I’d be curious as to why a police lieutenant was going with you to your room at ten thirty in the morning?”
I should have had a snide answer to that but I was still in shock.
“Were you spying?”
“Just happened to be sitting in a bush, minding my own business. But I confess I wouldn’t mind seeing those slides from closer range.”
Granddad was in. We were safe. An alliance of three untrustworthy people.
“Well, if that wasn’t good enough news in itself,” said Chompu, “I have even more information to impart on our own modest VW inquiry. In his statement, Tan Sugit had mentioned being apprehended by four villains – sometimes stretching to six or eight depending on who he’s talking to – driving a refrigerated Milo chocolate drink van. The Milo company reported that such a van had been stolen the previous evening. Lang Suan police found it abandoned a few hours ago behind the clay urn foundry. The print people have been all over it but it seems to have been wiped clean. It all indicates that Tan Sugit’s abduction was not a figment of his imagination, after all.”
♦
Chompu dropped us home and promised to call as soon as the results from the Benz driver interview came to light. I put Granddad Jah in front of my computer and showed him where to click. I was on my way to find Mair in the shop when I noticed our young family of guests back on the balcony. I noticed Gogo sitting with the kids, showing them her belly. She never showed me her belly. She seemed to like everyone except me.
“Would you mind if I asked you a question?” said the father.
I hoped it wouldn’t be anything difficult: the tides, the names of the islands you could vaguely see on the horizon, or the genus of the bright turquoise birds that sat regularly on our back fence. My local knowledge was remedial.
“Certainly.”
He walked leisurely beside me along the path behind the beachfront tables. He was cheerful, attractive in a young-married-man kind of way, and very polite, and the question he asked was a lot simpler than I’d imagined.
“Would you be interested in selling this place?”
My first reaction was that this crowd must have escaped from some maximum security family asylum. I looked back over my shoulder at the young wife and the happy children. They seemed normal enough.
“Why?” I asked.
“We’ve been driving down the coast,” he said, “looking for a little place to take over. My wife’s father passed away last year and left us a small sum we hadn’t expected. We have a modest dream to make a go of something on the coast. We aren’t rolling in money but I can make you a fair offer. We like it here.”
“You do? Why?”
“Haven’t you looked around?”
At his bidding, I looked around. The noncommittal weather of the past week had finally got its act together and a black pudding of a storm cloud was rolling toward us, filling the entire vast sky to the east. It was a Steven Spielberg moment. I instinctively knew I should have been egging the young father on, but all I could see were the faces of his children starving to death.
“Look. Really. This is the toilet plunger of resorts. We’ve been here nine months and we haven’t made enough money to get the truck tires pumped up.”
“But that’s because you don’t love it.”
“What?”
“None of you is really here. I’ve been watching you. I see you all come and go but your hearts aren’t here with you. A place like this, you have to work at. You’ve got no food in the kitchen refrigerator, no stock in the store. The cabins are sparse and uninviting. Nobody sweeps the beach.” (People sweep beaches?) “You’re all just staying here. I can make you an offer to give you all the chance to be where you really want to be, wherever that is.”
I walked into the shop and caught Mair darkening a white surgical mask with a black felt pen. It suddenly didn’t seem important anymore. I was in a state somewhere between excited and scared legless. I knew this would be the first engagement in a long-drawn-out battle but fate had armed me.
“Mair, you know the family in room two?”
“We’ve got guests?” she said, tucking the mask and pen into her apron. “That’s nice. Arny didn’t mention it.”
“That’s because he probably doesn’t know. He’s not here. He’s off romancing Granny. He’s hardly been here since the family arrived. They had to drive down the coast in search of lunch. They’re using their own towels. The guy fixed the cistern in the toilet. That’s embarrassing.”
“The cistern was broken?”
I sat beside her on the little bathroom stool and I took hold of her hand. I sighed a deep breath.
>
“Mair, listen. It’s not working. Whatever magic you thought might happen down here, it’s not. And the people in room two like it here. It’s a miracle, but they want to buy the resort. I know you – ”
“All right.”
“All right, what?”
“I’ll sell it to them.”
“Really?”
“If that’s what you all want. Yes, I can sell up.”
I’m not sure I can actually describe the feeling that slithered through my body when she said that, but I’ll try. I was ecstatic at first, elated, gold-plated. It was if a legion of warm maggots had been deployed into my veins. But, unexpectedly, their pace slowed and they grew heavy and cold and eventually froze. I had a body full of iced maggots.
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“Child, in Chiang Mai we were five people in a house. Five individuals with nothing in common but a surname. We were hemmed in by traffic and breathing soot. We floated in noise and aggression and other people’s troubles. We were all so inside ourselves we stopped living for each other. I hoped coming here might pump life back into us as a family. I wanted my children and my father back while I could still recognize them, before it was too late.”
“Mair, I – ”
“But we gave it a good shot. Nine months is something to be proud of. I’m sure Sissi will be pleased to have us back.”
It was that easy. We could all go home and be happy again. Granddad Jah to his car spotting. Arny to his asexual body shop. Me to my desk beside the head crime reporter who always promised to die, one drink at a time, but never did. And Mair to…
“What are you doing here, Mair?” I asked.
“Doing?”
“Yeah. And don’t lie to me. It’s humiliating. I don’t like it. What do you do every night with your black get-up and your pest killer and your beach creeping?”
She was just about to slide into her Titanic smile but I suppose she realized the gig was up. She took me by the hand and massaged my knuckles with her thumb.
“We’re haunting a man,” she said. I held in my breath and waited. “The man who killed John. I found out who it was. The son of Auntie Summorn. He’s a nasty man, a drunk, a bully. He carries a gun and threatens people. My private detective knew who’d poisoned my dog straightaway. It wasn’t hard to work out how far John had walked before the poison took effect. And the man had killed countless other dogs who’d worried his precious chickens.
“I had a meeting with the owners of the other dogs he’d killed. They were all angry but the police do nothing about it. They say everyone should keep their hounds tied up. It’s our fault, they say. But, child, look at this place. How can you keep a dog chained with all this beautiful nature around? Our dogs were all well fed. They didn’t chase chickens because they were hungry. It was just a game to them. They played with the chicks, annoyed them a little. And his chickens weren’t penned. He thought they had a right to run wherever they liked but the dogs couldn’t.
“The people here were too polite or afraid to confront the thug with their suspicions. They talked to his mother but she’d long since lost control over her son. In fact she was afraid of him too. He lives in a cabin behind her house. He doesn’t work. He steals. He extorts money with threats. He’s a bad piece of work, Jimm. At our meeting we decided we should haunt him with the spirits of all the animals he’s killed. He’s a drunkard so it wasn’t so difficult to invade his dreams. At night, the voices of the dogs would come to him. Their shadows would pass his window but when he ran to the door there would be nothing there. Empty bags of pest killer that he thought he’d destroyed would return every morning on his doorstep. And there would be the howls, the incessant all-night howls keeping him awake. He’d walk around the hut with his gun but there would be no dogs, yet when he went back to bed, the howls would continue. He hasn’t slept for three nights.
“Last night he didn’t drink any alcohol. This morning he went to Kor Kow temple to make an offering to Jao Mair Guan Im, the Chinese goddess of mercy. When he came back home he went to his mother and told her he’s being haunted and asked her what he should do. She reported back to us. She told us in another day or two he should be broken completely.”
Mair had a smile on her face that wasn’t the old brand. It was fresh and alive and real. It was the smile I’d seen on Mayuri’s face that lunchtime: young and mischievous. It was the smile another Mair had projected to us little folk to illuminate tales. It was evidence that her embers were still burning.
I walked back to room two and thanked the young father for his offer, but told him my mother had refused to sell at any price. The storm clouds had lingered briefly overhead, then labored on toward Burma without shedding a tear.
♦
Granddad Jah was walking along the sand with his head bowed and his shoulders hunched. I caught up with him.
“Sorry we didn’t show you before,” I said.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“What do you think?”
“I think there’s much more to it. I apologize to the nun. It wasn’t her. This was, I don’t know, psychotic. I’ve never seen anything like it. It wasn’t a hit or a revenge killing. The photographs weren’t merely a record. If you were going to document a killing like this, you’d video it. You’d film the whole thing. Then you wouldn’t miss anything.”
“With modern equipment you can stop at any frame and print it out,” I said. “The quality’s almost as good as a still camera.”
“Then the expensive still camera is relevant somehow. It was as if she or he wanted individual works of art to show how clever they were. Wanted to show off.”
“A sort of performance,” I said.
I thought about the colors. They’d mesmerized me from the moment I’d first looked at the photos. Colors. Then the image of luminous green overalls seeped into my mind, facedown in an unfinished mosaic pool on a raft of blood. Orange hat and all. I took out my cell phone and pressed an old number.
“iFurn executive line. I’m Dr. Monique – ”
“Siss, it’s me. Listen, can you get back to Yoshi?”
“Toshi.”
“Toshi, right. Ask him if there were any suspects for the hotel murder in Guam, the guy who landed in the swimming pool.”
“Are you suddenly taking me seriously?”
“I’ve always taken you seriously, pee. And, while you’re at it, can you ask your alcoholic detective in California for more details about the weirdo who photographed road-kill? Ask him if the party hats were orange.”
“I might even have another one for you.”
“Another what?”
“Orange hat murder. I got a message from Taiwan. A skinny Chinese inspector. I hope he didn’t doctor his profile photograph ‘cause if he did his real self must be hideous. He vaguely recalled a knifing at an aviary. They didn’t ever catch the killer. The peculiar thing was that she, the victim, was wearing an orange People First Party election rally hat, but she was a staunch Kuomintang, and their party color is blue. Originally they thought it was a political killing but nobody could see what was to be gained by it. She was an aviary worker. She cleaned up parrot shit. So, the case vanished into the dead files.”
Aviary. Exotic birds. Orange hat. Color.
“OK. Include that in the sweep,” I said. “I’ll take anything with orange hats and colorful locations. I’ve got a very bad feeling this is all connected somehow.”
“I could be the hottest one-legged Russian on Police Beat if we solve this one.”
“You can’t tell anyone anything. This is all still in the realm of the ridiculous. But let me know as soon as you get anything. There’s a nun in a greasy cell in Bangkok surrounded by tomboys with tattoos and we’ve got to get her out.”
“Will do. Over and out.”
♦
We were walking back toward the shop, me and Granddad Jah. Kow, the squid boat captain, was across the street dispensing fishballs from his side car.
“
Have you heard?” he called.
“I never hear anything,” I said, even though it was no longer true.
“Abbot killed up at Wat Feuang Fa. Some nun gutted him.”
How did he do it? He fished in the empty sea at night and drove around on his motorcycle in the day. How did he one-up the world on news? So much for the media blackout. If Captain Kow knew, it wouldn’t be long before every newspaper in the country heard. I was in a tough spot. I had the bulk of my story written but it didn’t have an ending yet. I’d left blanks for a lot of police quotations I could harvest at the last minute, and I’d done my best to avoid accusing my nun. I knew the other rags wouldn’t be so delicate. No, I wouldn’t send anything yet. I hoped the blackout pressure on the newspapers was heavy enough to keep the story off the front page for at least twenty-four hours. But, by then, I had to have it all sorted out. This was my story.
♦
The afternoon stretched out like a long, nylon net with one single tangled sprat in its snare. Boats bobbed. Palms shimmied. Clouds stuck. How long could it take to interview a suspect in a murder inquiry? All right – weeks, yes. It could take forever. But this was just a rental car driver. He couldn’t have that much to say. Mair and I watched the family check out of room two and decided not to charge them. It was the least we could do for bursting their bubble. I was convinced we’d done them a favor. We thanked them for fixing the cistern and for offering us freedom. The father slipped me his name card just in case…I told him there was absolutely no way and put his card in my pocket.
And we waited, me and Granddad Jah. A loudspeaker van crawled by asking for old metal and bottles and tin cans and broken motors. The driver could have easily leaned out of the window and asked nicely, but he had the volume cranked up so high our windows vibrated and I almost missed the ‘Mamma Mia’ jingle. I clicked on the phone.
Jimm Juree 01; Killed at the Whim of a Hat Page 24