Killed at the Whim of a Hat

“Who’s Old Mel?” I asked.

“Got twenty hectares out off the Bang Ka road just before Bang Ga.”

I was elated. This was the first burst of excitement I’d felt all year. I had to get over there. My little brother, Arnon, playfully known as Arny, was out somewhere with the truck and Granddad Jah had the motorcycle. I didn’t have any choice but to use Mair’s old auntie bicycle with the metal basket on the front. I shouted to my mother that I was taking it and heard a faint ‘Make sure you put petrol in it’ from deep inside our shop. Right, Mair.

Apart from the bridge over the Lang Suan river the roads are mostly flat around here, all palm and coconut plantations. Pleasant enough if you like green — I don’t. There are limestone cliffs sticking up here and there, making the place look untidy, but not much in the way of hills. Old Mel’s place was a good ten kilometers away and exercise wasn’t one of my strong points. But you know how it is when you get the scent of blood in your nostrils. My little legs pumped away at the pedals and the adrenaline coursed through my veins and, in a sudden bubbly rush of clarity, my mind became filled with all my glory moments. The marvelous crimes I’d reported; the numerous bodies I’d stepped over — being careful not to tread in the blood — the castrated cuckolds, the jimmied ATMs, the druggies, the lesbian high-rise suicides, the motorcycle hit squads, the truck smugglers, the mysterious backpacker mutilations, the high-speed schoolbus-race crashes, philandering fake fortune tellers, gangsters I’d exposed (albeit anonymously), stabbings, stranglings, garrotings…Oh, I could go on.

What a career I had ahead of me. My name, Jimm Juree, was synonymous with accurate crime reporting all over Thailand. Not even the simple dim fare left after the medusa had feasted on me could detract from my obvious affinity for my job. I was respected. I was one seat away from the senior crime reporter’s leather chair. Saeng Thip rum had left little of the incumbent and everyone knew his health was shot and his days were numbered. They gave him six months. Then I’d be in. I’d all but been given the nod. The first female senior crime reporter in Chiang Mai Mail history. Only the second in the entire country. Me. Flying high.

And then, one hot early evening in August last year, my rice-paper balloon burst into flames and crashed to the ground. I obviously didn’t pay enough tea money to the right people in a previous life. Our mother, Mair, despite her red-handed involvement in the affair, would continue to say it was fate. Karma, she called it, but I don’t think it was any coincidence that she’d rediscovered Buddhism at roughly the same time the dementia started to kick in.

That evening, almost exactly a year ago, will be forever burned into the DVD of my soul. It plays over and over even when I’m not switched on. I see the scene. Hear the soundtrack. I know exactly which frame’s going to freeze with the look of horror plastered over my face.

I’d had a great day, which made it all the worse. I mean, a great day. An old-timer in Maerim had been found shot through the temple with a pen gun. The police had arrested the teenager next door who had a history of trouble and a tattoo of a kitten impaled on a lance on his shoulder. I’d had dealings with him before. He had the devil in him, I knew, but I doubted he had the stomach for a killing. That takes an altogether different type of villain.

His grandparents had raised him, albeit badly, for the past thirteen years, ever since his bar-girl mother had dumped him and vanished without a trace. They obviously hadn’t been able to do the job any better with him than they had with their daughter. I went to interview the grandparents. The police case file was officially closed and the boy was at the start of a long murky tunnel that would eventually spew him out in an adult prison for murder. He’d threatened the old-timer in front of witnesses and the police had found the murder weapon under his bedroll. They weren’t looking any further. Dirt-poor family. No money for a lawyer. A nice neat victory for this month’s statistics chart. Granny was distraught — unavailable for comment. But there was something edgy about Granddad. He’d been the old-timer’s drinking buddy. They’d been friends since primary school. I could have marked his grunted responses and lack of eye contact down to angina or the fact he was missing his best friend, but I felt there was something else. He was a man who wanted to talk.

I went to the corner drink stand and returned with a half bottle of Mekhong whiskey. I suggested a toast to the deceased — wish him well on his way through nirvana to the next incarnation. Let’s hope he does better there. Granddad poured the drinks without saying a word. There was a slight shake to his hand as he passed me my glass. He raised his drink to his lips but it paused there. He snorted the fumes and looked down into the glassy brown liquor as if he could see his conscience.

“We were drunk that night,” he said, more to the whiskey than to me. I put down my own glass to listen. “We often got drunk but that night was more foolish than most. He’d just come back from Fang with half a dozen bottles of hooch and that sodding amulet. He’d bought it from some Akha hill tribesman, he said. It was magic, he said. He swore to me before he’d paid for it he’d seen the Akha stare down a rifle and not even flinch when his missus fired it at him. Bullet just bounced off him…he said.”

That was the start of the confession and neither of us touched the Mekhong whiskey the whole time. But I considered it eighty-two baht well spent. It turned out the old-timer had been convinced the amulet made him bulletproof and as the evening wore on and they got drunker and drunker, the neighbor goaded his friend. “Go on! Shoot me. Shoot me if you don’t believe me.”

“At first I ignored him,” Granddad said. “But he wouldn’t shut up about it. I knew the boy had a pen gun. I’d seen it. I fetched it more for a threat than anything else. Just to bluff him. Shut him up. You know? But it got him even more excited when he saw the gun. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘I know you don’t believe me. Go on you coward, do it’.”

“And you did it,” I said.

“Yeah.”

The boy was released and the old man was charged with accidental homicide. The Mail let me write it up as a personal account. The medusa didn’t like that. She took out all my adjectives and dumbed the piece down but it was still my story: How I solved a case the police had closed. There’s no way to describe how that feels. It should have been the happiest day of the week. I bought a five-liter cask of Mont Clair red to celebrate and two packets of Tim Tarn biscuits. I imagined we’d all sit around the kitchen table getting pickled, laughing at Mair who turned into a completely different person just from getting her lips wet with booze.

We had a small shop right beside the campus of Chiang Mai University. Most nights you could hear the high- pitched squeals of practicing cheerleaders — some of them female — and the late night drunken revelers careening their motorcycles into flower beds. Serious scholars retired to Starbucks for peace and chocolate croissants. Education had changed since I studied there. Our shop didn’t sell much: packet noodles, rice crackers, mosquito coils, shampoo, beer, that type of thing. We were a sort of rustic 7-Eleven. Mair had put in a few washing machines for the students to leave off their laundry and they’d invariably pick up a snack and a drink at the same time. And we were right beside a condominium full oifarang, the type of white-meat foreigners who couldn’t imagine a night of cable TV without half a dozen Singha beers. That was our customer base. We wouldn’t make it into Forbes but we did all right. The bungalow we grew up in, the only home we’d ever known, was at the back.

I’d taken a shortcut through the university, always an iffy move because the guards often left early to avoid traffic. It wasn’t yet four fifty but the side gates were shut. The padlocked chain was loosely wrapped. Lean Thai students could squeeze through the gap; overweight large-boned rapists could not. The girls could sleep easy in their dorms. I parked my motorcycle beside the guard post and inserted myself between the gates. A few more pizza dinners and I’d have to start driving the long way round.

I knew something was wrong when I saw my granddad Jah sitting on the curbstones in front of our shop. He was wearing his undervest and shorts and had his bare feet in the gutter. Neither the attire nor the setting were unusual. He liked to sit beside the road. Over the past few years, his reason for living had become the scrutiny of every vehicle that passed in front of our shop: study the number plate, look at the condition of the bodywork and glare threateningly at the driver. It was evening rush hour, his favorite time, but his head was bowed now and he was missing some fascinating evening traffic.

I asked if he was all right but he shrugged and pointed his thumb back over his shoulder. Granddad Jah wasn’t a great communicator and I had no idea what the gesture meant. He might have been telling me about the two customers waiting in the shop with nobody there to serve them. Heaven forbid he’d get up off his haunches and do a bit of work for a change. No. Too many passing cars to observe for that. I called out to Mair but nobody came so I served the customers myself and went through the concrete yard to our kitchen. I walked in on a scene reminiscent of a military court-martial.