Killed at the Whim of a Hat

“If he is, and I’d have to take your word for it because nobody tells me anything, it’s because A, he has a motive, or B, he’s the only suspect they have.”

That was a bull’s-eye on both.

“I don’t believe he did it but all they’d need is a murder weapon,” he said, “and your Abbot Kem is well and truly defrocked.”

Nine

“ I understand small business growth. I was one.”

— George W. Bush, New York Daily NewS, February 19, 2000

I arrived home just in time to start preparing lunch. I wondered whether my family might just happily starve to death if I didn’t bother to come home again. The nearest pizza restaurant that delivered was four and a half hours away. I’d even checked how far they’d be prepared to go. I tell you, I don’t make long-distant calls just to get laughed at. That was the last hint of business they’d see from me. I was exhausted. I thought of all the male crime reporters around the country returning home about now to those wives in Understanding Thailand who greeted them with a smile and a table of food. Why didn’t I have a wife like that?

I would start on the mackerel. I was sure they’d missed me, whereas Arny walked past and ignored me completely. I’d had the truck all morning, preventing him from going to his gym. I knew he’d be mad. Mair was in the shop slicing huge banana bunches into smaller banana bunches and writing the price, 5 baht, on the skins. Everybody in Maprao had banana trees so I couldn’t think who’d buy any. Across the road, Granddad Jah was sitting under the banana leaf roof on the bamboo platform watching traffic.

I had nobody to tell about my morning. I’d been a busy investigator. There were four hotels and seven resorts in or around Lang Suan, eight if you included ours, but I can’t think why you would. After leaving the police station at Pak Nam I visited every one of them. I could have flashed my press card with my finger over the expiration date and gone that route, but I was sure the police would have been there already and told them to get in touch if anyone came nosing around. Someone would always call if they were approached by the press.

So, I made up a story. I told them my family had taken over a resort and we didn’t really know what the hell we were doing. All right, perhaps I didn’t make it up, but I did say we were having trouble with registration. I had the stolen TV as a ready anecdote and I wondered how other places registered their guests to avoid such a dilemma. I started off general, was very friendly, laughed a lot, then got on to the subject of the guest register itself. Every one of them let me take a look. In fact they were all so forthcoming and amiable it was almost embarrassing to be deceiving them. I was looking for guests who’d arrived the day of, or the day before, the killing, then checked out after the attack on the guard. This was merely my attempt to eliminate out-of-towners from the list of suspects. Lang Suan wasn’t the kind of place you could spend a night in your car without being noticed so I thought I’d start with hotel guests: someone who’d registered with a car or a truck. The victim was from Bangkok and had only been scheduled to stay here for three days during his investigation. It was conceivable that the killer followed him here.

Either way, it was easier to start at this end of the investigation rather than knock on doors in ever- increasing circles around the temple. As it turned out, elimination was a lot simpler than I’d expected. Room occupancy everywhere was down to fifteen percent. Apart from the fact that nobody really wanted to come here in the first place, the downturn in the economy, the cost of petrol, and tourism killed off by the silly unrest in the capital, would have left the majority of the rooms empty anyway. Most of those who’d spent the night had been driving along the main highway, been overcome with fatigue, and pulled into the first place they could find. They’d invariably continued on their journeys early the next morning.

From the hotels I ended up with a sketchy list of two: a salesman called Apirat who was booked into the Radree for the week and someone called Adul who was staying at the Uaynoi Grand and had put his occupation down as ‘tourist’. He had no definite departure date. He was traveling on a very large motorcycle. Nobody with a car or truck matched, or got anywhere close to, the dates I was interested in.

The resorts were even worse. Even the high-end places were virtually empty during the week when very few Thais would consider staying there. I found just the two at the 69 Resort, a short ride from Pak Nam. One was a middle-aged man who’d signed in as Dr. Jiradet, and the other a teenaged girl called Nong Pui on the far side of the compound. They told me the doctor was an adviser for the Pak Nam hospital. There were two foreigners. One was an elderly Korean lady who smiled at everyone, which appeared to be her only method of communication. She’d chosen a room by the busy road rather than the beachfront which made the staff think she might be deaf or demented. Then there was a German man who sat drinking beer on the balcony of his room most of the day. The receptionist had no idea when either was due to check out. I nodded at the German who invited me to join him, I assumed in a little more than a drink, and I quickly exhausted my three words of Korean on the lady.

At five other resorts there were no guests at all, although I was assured there was a good deal of ‘night traffic’ at all of them. I knew what that meant. But the Tiwa Resort, my last port of call, was my best bet of all. A middle-aged Japanese backpacking couple stayed in one of the cheapest rooms and were, according to the staff, living on instant noodles. They’d been their only customers for three days. But then a mysterious Thai guest in room seven had arrived in a very expensive black Benz the day before the killing. He’d retired immediately to the room and ordered room service from their restaurant. My interest had been piqued when the receptionist described him as a hit-man type. It was a fact in Thailand that criminals often went out of their way to dress and look like criminals. It made the job of identification a lot easier.

He’d registered as Ny Wirapon and left all the other boxes in the form empty. He hadn’t yet checked out. I drove slowly past his room. There was somebody inside but the Benz was nowhere to be seen. The only thing that made him an unlikely suspect was the fact he was still there. Why stick around once you’ve made your kill?

The most significant outcome of my inquiries had been an overall feeling of doom for the tourist industry and the Gulf Bay Lovely Resort and Restaurant in particular. If the places of quality couldn’t attract guests, what hope in hell did we have? I took my scaling and gutting buckets and sat beside Granddad Jah. He ignored me, pretending to be more interested in a meter-long monitor lizard ambling along the grass verge. I read that they can grow up to fourteen feet. I’m assured they only eat insects and small rodents but it seems to me, if you’re as big as a truck, you can eat anything you damned well please.

I was on my third mackerel before I spoke.

“I could use some help on another case,” I said, as if into thin air.

“Ask the police,” he said.

“I did. They’re lost.”

“That’s a state they should feel familiar with.”

I mentioned to the hot midday breeze that I’d had a chance to visit the excavation of a VW camper van and went on to describe everything that had resulted from that discovery. By the last fish, I’d arrived at the tail end of the story. He didn’t speak for a very long time and the mackerel was starting to sing off-key in the heat. I was wondering whether the old man had heard me at all. I stood.

“Sit down,” he said.

I sat down.

“You’d need to find the original detective,” he said. “The one that investigated the case of the car hire scam.”

“I’ve got his name,” I told him. “It’s Waew. He was a captain. He’s retired now.”

He turned to look at me as if perhaps there was some sliver of hope for me in this world.

“So, find him,” he said.

“I did.”