Killed at the Whim of a Hat

Eleven

I sat on a stool in front of Maprao Awnings, the shop belonging to the private detective, Meng. It was humiliating. He had a client. His wife had placed the stool in shadow and given me a cool pack of 30 % fruit juice but I was still visible from the road. I’d been in a funk since Granddad Jah’s story. I’d completely forgotten to make lunch so Chompu had driven back to Pak Nam and the family had been forced to make do with dom yam-flavored instant noodles with a side plate of dried squid. I couldn’t eat. I sat and watched them and wondered why I’d been so keen to beam myself back into the ugly twenty-first century. Once I could no longer stand watching them tuck into the fast food with the same relish they attacked my meals, I jumped on the auntie bike and set off for the plastic awning shop. I could have walked. It was only three hundred meters. But I felt I needed to be traveling at speed to get past Ed who was still there at the concrete table.

“Koon Jimm…?” I heard over my shoulder.

“Not now, Ed.”

What kind of man, I ask you, given the current economic turndown, would have two and a half hours to waste in the middle of the day? An unemployed loser, that’s who.

But now I wish I’d walked because a stroll in the midday heat would have been preferable to being eyed by every motorcycle and truck that passed along our village’s one road. At last I heard voices emerging from the shop, and Auntie Summorn, the mother of Maprao’s only known villain, Daeng, was thanking the detective and walking with him to the roadside.

“That makes me feel much more comfortable,” I heard her say, and I didn’t get the feeling she was talking about awnings. A truck that was neither a taxi nor the vehicle of an abductor of elderly people stopped beside her and swept her off. That happens a lot down here. You go for a stroll and everyone stops to give you a ride. Annoying in a lovable kind of way, I suppose. The detective turned to me. If you already have an image of a private detective in your mind, you’ll need to delete it and start again. Koon Meng was about my height but skinny as an ink line. I was surprised he could stand up under the weight of his clothes. I assumed it was the pen in his shirt front pocket that gave him his stoop. He had a five hair mustache and long gray hair tied in a ponytail.

“Sorry to have kept you,” he said. “It’s getting to the stage that I could use a waiting room.”

He laughed with only his bottom teeth which I thought was impossible.

“Nice to see the detecting business is doing so well,” I said with a thick smattering of irony I didn’t expect him to get.

We walked to his office which was merely the front room of his single-story house with a desk off to one side. I sat. He sat.

“How can I help you?” he asked.

“I want to know what service you’re performing for my mother and how much you intend to charge her for it,” I said.

I hoped he wouldn’t ask me if I’d posed this question to Mair because then I’d have to admit I hadn’t, not directly, which would make it look like I didn’t communicate with my own mother. And then, as I’d been sitting on his humiliating little stool I’d wondered how I might react if he cited the problem of detective-client confidentiality, at which juncture I’d point out that he was a plastic awnings installer and, as far as I knew, there was nothing in the Awnings Code of Honor that covered such ethical dilemmas. But he didn’t give me a chance to use any of my smart-arsed retorts.

“I’m chasing up some poison for her,” he said.

All right. I gave him points for honesty.

“And how would you go about that?”

“Take a sample to the lab in Chumphon.”

“A sample of what?”

“Stomach contents. From your poisoned dog.”

“And where did you…? Oh, yuck.”

The plastic container in the freezer flashed into my mind. Surely she didn’t…She couldn’t have. I shook the thought from my head like a dog shaking off a bath.

“And what did you discover?”

“Lannate 90.”

“And that is?”

“A common pest control. It was considered too toxic for use as an insecticide but it’s still available. A nasty way to go, I’d imagine. A lot of restaurants and resorts use it to keep down the stray dog population. They don’t like dogs worrying customers. They mix it with scraps and leave it out front overnight.”

“And this poison has the ability to distinguish between stray dogs and dogs in collars with their telephone number printed on them?”

“No. Kills em all.”

“But the only resort or restaurant for five kilometers is ours.”

“Right.”

“And we didn’t…”

“Right.”

“So, was that the end of your involvement in this case?”

“No.”

“What else are you doing?”

“Your mother wanted to know the strength and effects of Lannate 90 and who’d have access to it. I told her anyone can buy it but most people with plantations or orchards would have it handy. But that’s most of the population of Maprao.”

“And that was it?”

“Almost.”

“Almost?”

He twirled a plastic curtain ring around his little ringer. I glared.

“She asked me to buy some for her.”

“What? How much, exactly?”

“Twenty bags.”

I decided not to ride back home right away. I needed a break from intrigue. My mind was out of practice. The nearest thing to a crime I’d experienced since we dropped down here was the kidnapping of our brand-new red garbage bin from the front of the shop one night in April. The case hadn’t even made it as far as the police station. The neighborhood council had been so devastated that they’d set up a vigilante team. Bless them, they’d found the bin at a small peripatetic fishing community of north-easterners who were using it to ice their catches. The head of our council fined them in lieu of arrest, our bin was returned and we had free squid for a month. It had been an impressive display of local support but hardly front page Thai Rat news.

Now, my out-of-shape intellect was having to juggle buried hippies and stabbed abbots and battered policemen, and grand television larceny…and crazy, revenge-seeking mothers. All this on top of my cooking, gardening, and chicken feeding duties. I parked the bicycle out of view from the road under a sprawling deer’s ears tree and sat on a block of polystyrene. In the monsoons, the Gulf spewed up so much of the stuff, some mornings the beach looked like the frozen coastline of Alaska. But we can all rest assured that, thanks to man’s inventiveness, that same indestructible polystyrene will be washed up on other beaches for many decades to come. Why did I always get distracted by issues when there was a life to live here?

I needed that moment. I’d seen it often in the cinema. The weathered old cop, mired in a case of unspeakable horror, drops everything and takes his rifle and his case files off to a cabin deep in the woods where nature has lain unchanged for thousands of years. And after emerging from a week-long affair with a case of rye, the answer comes to him. “It was the twin brother suffering from amnesia that done it.” That was the moment of clarity I craved. I called to the trees, to the ferns, to the god of polystyrene for an answer. The cell phone in my back pocket rang. I was impressed. Mother nature had gone high tech. I pressed the green phone icon.

“Jimm speaking.”

“Hello, little sister.”

“Sissi?”

“Wachadoin?”

“I’m in a jungle retreat cut off from all forms of communication.”

“All right then. I won’t keep you long. I’ve been reading the personal e-mails of a number of senior members of the Sangka.”

“Do you feel okay about that?”

“I checked. There’s nothing about hacking in the precepts. It doesn’t count as a sin.”

“Then tell me all.”

“Your abbot, the live one, he’s got a relative in high places.”

“Well, that might explain the media blackout. Would this relative be a leading light in the current board games in Bangkok by any chance?”

“Right up there between the bishop and the rook.”

“OK. So it would be very helpful if this relative in saffron wasn’t accused of stabbing another monk to death at this particular time.”

“Any other time and nobody would say a thing.”

“I get it.”

“It would be very, very convenient if the investigators could produce another suspect in a hurry.”

“Would a nun do?”

“Ah, so your mind’s already there. There’s been some research commissioned on your nun. An agency was hired to dig for dirt.”

“I’m not sure I really want to hear this.”

“She was a singer.”

Lot of implications there.

“Nightclub?”

“No. Molum. Thai country. Quite a following, evidently. Then one day she shook off the spotlights and announced she was leaving the profession. The record people tried to sue her, but she was outta there.”

“Did she give a reason?”

“Nope. And six months later she was hairless and didn’t have to worry about the colors running in her washing machine anymore.”

“When was that?”

“Thirty-two years ago.”

“She’s been a nun for thirty-two years?”

“In fourteen different provinces.”

“Ooh, that’s a lot of walking.”

“It is. But, at this point, let me take you back to a time when Sister Bia was just flat-chested Nong Bia, a high-school student in a little village in Burirum. In her class was a young fellow called Kem.”

“Abbot Kem?”

“Don’t spoil the story.”

“They’re about the same age? I don’t believe it. He looks twenty years older.”

“It appears he picked up the odd skin-ravaging disease during a prolonged stay in the jungle. But you’re pushing me ahead of myself. Kem wasn’t the most handsome boy in the class even before the leprosy. But he was sincere and honest. He obviously had something the other boys didn’t have because Bia spent a lot of time with him. There were those who speculated that these two might even get married. But on the final graduation night, when all the other couples were rushing off into the bushes to celebrate their arrival at adulthood, Kem announced that he was entering Thamathiraram temple and would be ordained as a monk.

“Imagine her surprise. She continues to sing with her family troupe and soon makes a name for herself. But, whenever she’s in Burirum, she visits her old flame at the temple. She becomes famous for a love song she wrote herself called, ‘My Love Is Draped in Saffron’.”

“You’re kidding? I’ve heard it. It’s beautiful.”

“I’m sure. It thrust her into the serious ranks of molum celebrities.”

“Did she wear a hat?”

“What sort of hat?”

“An orange one. A sort of a prop, like Michael Jackson?”

“I didn’t see one. I downloaded pictures of her on stage. I didn’t notice a hat, but I tell you, she was something. You’d have to be one serious monk to turn your back on a babe like that. There were quotes from her manager. He said she was a difficult client because she insisted on regular returns to Burirum in her itinerary. And, on one fateful trip to the temple, Kern’s no longer there. He’s gone on a pilgrimage. For years nobody knows where he is. Bia’s career plummets. She lacks the confidence and motivation to continue and so she makes the astonishing announcement. In her late twenties she becomes a nun and begins her trek from province to province.”

“In search of Kem.”

“Isn’t it sickly?”

I would never have admitted to the tears in my eyes just then and I knew Sissi would keep her mouth shut about hers.

“So, when did they get back together?” I asked with a sniff.

“Four months ago she arrived at Wat Feuang Fa.”

“Any record of them getting together in those interim years?”

“None.”

“Then finally she finds him and refuses to leave and he accepts her as a nun in his temple until the Sangka IA bangs down the door.”

“Ironic, isn’t it?”

“But she said they’d been in touch, letters, phone calls…”

“No evidence of it.”

“And what did the council make of the murder and all?”

“That the Bangkok monk arrived in Maprao and told the nun she’d have to leave. That she’d been searching for her love for over thirty years and she wasn’t going to go without a fight.”

“So she hacks him to death with a carving knife?”

“That’s the way they’re seeing it.”

“It’s all wrong.”

“It may be but that’s the version they’ll be passing along to the police.”

I’d looked at the photographs. I didn’t see it as the work of a broken-hearted woman. It was premeditated, cool, not hot blooded. It was no crime of passion.

“Sissi, there’s something wrong here.”

“Perhaps, but don’t you think it would make a fabulous movie?”

I thought about it.

“Yes,” I agreed.

“I could play the lead.”

“The abbot?”

A silence gushed out of the end of the phone in a scolding blast. I sometimes forgot how hairy was the trigger upon which her finger rested. You’d never know what might cause it to twitch.

“That was a joke,” I said.

Ever-increasing silence. I expected to hear a click and the groan of a dead line.

“Come on, Sis. Laugh!”

“Not funny.”

“I know. I’m sorry. But to make this movie work for Clint…” We both had a burning admiration for Mr. Eastwood — we’d seen all his stuff on pirated DVDs. All right, perhaps we didn’t admire him enough to contribute to his royalties but we did like him. “We can’t send Sister Bia to the chair.”

“It’d be lethal injection.”

“So, what do you want me to do?”

“I’m not sure.”

For the next ten minutes, until my cell battery ran dry, I told my sister about the incident with the camera and described the photographs. I think she got most of it. When I stood up, the polystyrene stuck to my backside like a saddle. I don’t know whether it was as a result of the heat I exude down there or some natural latex dripping from the tree but it took me five minutes to disengage myself. It wouldn’t have been fitting for me to go and visit a former Minister for the Environment with a block of foam stuck to my rear end.

The plaque stating that this was the Awuso Foundation National Headquarters was screwed to a solid concrete post beside a fancy fretwork iron gate that towered above me. The two-story house beyond was an iced wedding cake with Roman pillars and strawberry trimming. I dabbed at the gate with a damp finger in case it was electrified. The glass shards topping the four-meter wall had alerted me to the possibility, but my finger wasn’t shriveled to a sausage stub. I put more effort into the gate and discovered that the big fancy beast rolled effortlessly on rubber wheels. It was so well oiled, in fact, that it didn’t stop rolling and I had to run to catch up with it before it crashed into an ornate flower bed.

By then I was aware of eyes. At first count I made out six belonging to camouflaged gardeners in army surplus, armed with hoses and hoes but merely standing around like extras. Two more eyes were looking at me from an upstairs balcony. These, I assumed, belonged to the man I’d come to see, Sugit Suttirat. They were set deep in a piggy little head on top of a beefy body. It was like looking up at the underbelly of a turtle except this particular turtle was wearing a Kim II Sung special safari suit and a baseball cap. I didn’t know whether he’d come to the balcony specifically to meet me or whether he’d been there all day practicing his false-teethy smile and his air-calculator finger wave. I’d phoned ahead, of course. “Freelance journalist doing follow-up stories on memorable politicians.”

I couldn’t have been accepted any more warmly if I’d arrived naked on a mattress of thousand-baht notes.

“Nong Jimm?” he called.

Nong was designed to rub you up the wrong way if you weren’t an actual younger relative. You used it on waiters and cleaners and street children so it really put you in a place you didn’t want to be. But to a man of his standing it meant nothing at all.

“Tan Sugit,” I squealed.

Tan was top-end suck-up. As far from nong as Klong Toey slum was from the Ginza. Once I’d jumped through all those superfluous honorific hoops and clambered over the ice-breaking debris, I was beside him on a vast brown leather couch in his living room. From this close I could see that Tan Sugit had been worked over by a plastic surgeon or two. He was able to move his mouth but, north of his neck, that was pretty much it. His beady eyes didn’t blink and his cheeks didn’t billow when he smiled. He was in a sort of facial truss.

My old faithful tape recorder sat between us. I could have gone the digital route but I enjoyed watching the tape rotate. I tested it; “One-two, one two,” in English to establish my international credentials, then launched into the interview. My intention was not to head straight into the ‘Did you murder two hippies and bury them because they threatened to expose your criminal activities?’ question. That could come later. This was more a get-to-know-you session. As an almost award-winning journalist I had to remain impartial and talk to him as if he’d been born of human parents rather than eels. As a member of the press you remained passive and talked to your interviewee without allowing yourself to imagine feeding the tail of his navy blue safari suit into the jaws of the ice crusher at the fish factory. You are a professional.

Throughout the interview, as I studied him, the question ‘How does a short and overweight person, obviously incapable of looking after himself with his fists, get to be an influential figure?’ kept arising. The answer, as always, was ‘money’. He stank of it. My brief run through his early years had arrived in Surat in 1978. I looked pointedly at my clipboard.

“I believe at the end of the nineteen seventies you were involved in the rental car business,” I said. It was just another in my list of questions and I didn’t put a great deal of emphasis into it. His smile stretched to its limit. I was afraid it might crack a seam all the way up the sides of his face and across his bald head. I’d be a witness to his face falling off. But it held.

“I don’t know where you heard that one,” he said. “I was involved in a number of ground-breaking ventures back then but car hire wasn’t one of them.”

An overweight woman in her fifties with short cropped hair dyed crimson arrived with coffee on a tray. She was dressed all in white like a late-starting Judo student with no belt to her name. He ignored her so I knew she was either a maid or a mistress. A wife he’d be obliged to introduce.

“Really?” I asked.

“I think I should know.”

I flipped back to the previous page of my clip file.

“It says here that there was a disturbing incident in nineteen seventy-eight when allegations were made that your…company had been accused of stealing rental cars. My records tell me you spent some time in prison.”

He laughed again, or, at least, his mouth did. As there were no tics or flickers to be found on his face I couldn’t look for indications of guilt.

“Nong,” he said in his deep baritone, “with a man of my standing, it’s only to be expected there’ll be envious individuals trying to pull you down. There’s a lot at stake. When you have an honest man at the helm, the criminal classes see him as a threat to their well-being. A man who cannot be corrupted or bribed is always going to be a target.”

“So you weren’t ever arrested?”

“Of course not.”

Ooh, he was smooth. The lie was so deft I felt certain a polygraph needle wouldn’t have flickered through the whole performance. A politician if ever I saw one. He glanced at his watch and I could tell he was becoming irritated by the direction in which the interview had headed. So, I fed him a few more scraps of ego fodder to get him back on track. He was chuffing along nicely again with all the aplomb of an elected official, so I chanced throwing another metal bar across the rails.

“So, we come to your relationship with the Chainawat family in Ranong,” I said casually.

Of course, I had no idea whether there was such a relationship but it was worth a try.

“Where are you getting all this background information from, exactly?” he asked sternly.

“Oh, you know, public records, old news archives, the Internet. I was even discussing you with the provincial governor on the telephone a few weeks ago. He was the one who suggested I write a feature on you. You’re really a local celebrity so it’s thrilling for me to be here in person. I actually went to see the Chainawats on another matter and even they mentioned you.”

“They did, did they?”

I had him. His teeth had been exposed to the air for too long and they’d stuck to the inside of his lips. My tentative dig had hit a pipe and caused a sudden charisma leak. There was something. I was prepared to leave it at that and go on to a different topic but he’d switched to slow advance.

“What exactly did she say?” he asked.

“Who?”

“The…Madame Chainawat.”

“Well, actually, we were discussing land. There’s a plot in Ny Kow that my family’s interested in procuring. We have a number of projects on the drawing board, hotels, you know, study camps for university students, cattle ranches, erm…”

I was struggling. I needed a few seconds to think of why on earth wicked old lady Chainawat might have mentioned the eel to me.

“…paintball courses, that kind of thing,” I continued. “Mrs. Chainawat said if I needed to know anything about land in that area, Nong Sugit was the man to ask.”

Whew! I thought the Nong was a nice touch.

“That’s how she put it?”

“Pretty close.”

“Nong Jimm,” he said, after a sip from a coffee cup long empty, “there are a large number of good, respectable Chinese families such as that of my ancestors: families who only have the future of our great kingdom in their hearts. Then, there are people like the Chainawats. Be very wary about doing any business with their sort and certainly don’t believe anything they tell you.”

With that, we were suddenly at the end of our interview. The ex-minister was on his feet and hustling me to the door.

“Would you mind if I scheduled another session with you?” I asked. “I’d like to get on to your years in government and perhaps take a few pictures. Matichon Weekly news magazine wants to make it a two-page spread.”

“Of course, of course,” he said, still prodding me onward. “Only too pleased to speak with the press.”

“When can…?”

But he’d turned and was back in the shadows of his house, leaving me in the sunshine of the front step surrounded by three or perhaps four camouflaged gardeners.