Killed at the Whim of a Hat

“Tesco. They’ve got everything at Tesco.” My entire family had gone to the opening of Tesco Lotus out on the highway. It was the biggest thing to happen to the province since…no. It was the biggest thing to happen to the province. Our own superstore and the first possibility to find cream cheese and wine and made-in-Vietnam Chez Guevara T-shirts for forty baht. They had palm oil made from our own local palms via Bangkok on special at twenty baht a bottle, cheaper than we could make it ourselves. They had chocolates from Switzerland and skin whiteners from Malaysia. Except we hadn’t been able to get in that day because there’d been so many people nobody could move in or out. We got to within four meters of the door and Arny lifted me onto his shoulders and I could see a lake of heads spread out before me. But it was a stagnant lake and I doubt any of those people made it out of there before the week was out. But, meanwhile, back at the police station, “Should we really be drinking vodka tonic on duty?” I asked.

“It’s almost midnight and they called me in from a very promising soiree. They owe me. So?”

“So?”

We sipped our drinks. The tonic barely troubled the vodka.

“Brother?” he said.

“Oh, ho. Don’t. Don’t even…”

“He doesn’t look straight.”

“He’s no shape at all.”

“He’s gorgeous.”

“Forget it.”

“I’ll take your word for it but I may involve him in fantasy moments if you think he wouldn’t mind.”

“Go for it.”

We sipped again.

“You and I need to make an appointment,” he said.

“What for?”

“To view the you-know-what.”

“No, I don’t know what.”

“Certainly you do. You wouldn’t want me to say it out loud, would you?”

“Weren’t you listening before?”

“The Chiang Mai Mail taught you ethics, Granddad taught you the law and Mummy taught you morals. How’s that?”

“And why didn’t it register?”

“Your granddad was in traffic for forty years. Your mother did a three-week Buddhism refresher course, and newspaper ethics…?”

This man was starting to make me feel uneasy.

“Do you have a remote camera in my bathroom too? You know nothing, trust me.”

“I know you made a copy of what was on that camera memory card.”

“And how would you know that?”

“Because it’s exactly what I would have done. And you and I have a lot in common.”

“We’re both girls deep down?”

He lingered before his next sip. I wondered if my knee had landed a blow.

“We’re both more capable than people around us give us credit for,” he said.

He’d dusted off my powder-puff attack without a flinch.

“If you don’t want your career to flush completely down the cesspit,” he continued, “you need someone here at your local police station providing information. I need your back-up to make me more than just a pretty face around here. It’s a simple professional trade-off on friendly terms.”

I knocked back the remainder of the drink. My mouth was too small to take it all but I was determined not to choke in front of him.

“You presumably know where we live,” I said.

He smiled.

“Ten a.m.,” he said.

I spent what sleep time was left of that morning in a nightmare of graphically epic proportions. The colors were so loud I couldn’t hear any dialogue. There were nuns and monks in there and noisy bougainvilleas. Yuppies in yellow shirts were vacuuming. Purple heads in plastic bags were swaying at the ends of ropes. Chompu was dancing. John the dead dog was bleeding in B-movie red everywhere. It was the kind of dream you needed ski goggles to get through or else you’d wake up blinded. I came around at six, more exhausted than I’d gone to bed. The sunrise was shocking pink.

I was apparently still seeing life through the lens of that very expensive camera when I arrived at Pak Nam’s mini hospital. The outpatients area was ablaze with color: the dull yellow of hepatitis, the scarlets and crimsons of recent motorcycle accidents, the mauve of football injuries, the pale greens of food poisoning, and the various shades of pink from pregnancy right through the color chart to the weak pallor of anemia. I sat with my hand shading my eyes waiting for the nurse to take me to Sergeant Phoom and I thought about logistics. If it really had been the killer who ran the sergeant off the road and stolen the camera, he had what he wanted now and had no reason to stick around. There would have been a sudden departure. I took out my cell phone and called the hotels I’d visited a few days earlier. My suspects in Lang Suan hadn’t checked out. So I tried the resorts. Nobody picked up the phone at the Tiwa Resort. I talked to the receptionist at the 69 who told me only the Korean lady had left the previous day. A group of Korean electricians had moved in and had spent their lunchtime drinking in the restaurant so there might have been some conflict. It was anyone’s guess. Dr. Jiradet was scheduled to check out that morning and the receptionist also hinted that she thought the teenager might have moved in with the German.

Sergeant Phoom was in a small ward with four beds. The other beds were occupied by people who looked like there was absolutely nothing wrong with them. They were chatting with seven or eight village types who were sitting cross-legged on the floor eating. Only the sergeant seemed poorly and I wondered whether I should suggest the revelers keep the noise down. A young constable I didn’t know sat beside him reading an illustrated brochure on kidney diseases. He looked up when I walked to the bed.

“How is he?” I asked.

I had a bag of mangosteens that I placed on the bedside table. Phoom wouldn’t be in any state to peel away the thick skins for some time to come. Both his eyes were purple and bloated and a shaved section of hair framed a nine-centimeter millipede of stitching. His mouth was closed and bloody. His arms and legs were wrapped in bandages like a cartoon explosion victim.

“He’s fine,” said the constable.

He was a pretty boy, not rugged enough to grow into a gnarled old detective.

“Really?”

“He was awake a little while ago.”

“Did he say anything?”

“Nothing coherent. Um, who are you?”

I was about to dive straight into a lie just in case they’d told him not to allow in the press, but in this little corner of Utopia, that would always come back to bite me.

“My name’s Jimm Juree. I — ”

“You’re the journalist.”

“I know the sergeant. I just — ”

“I always wanted to write.”

Nine months earlier, my reaction to such a straight line would have been ‘You should have paid more attention at nursery school’ or ‘Lucky the police entrance exam is all pictures’. I doubt I would have voiced those smarmy comments although I would certainly have imagined them. But something was happening to my sarcasm skills and I didn’t like it. I found myself feeling disappointment on his behalf, sad that he’d become a policeman and missed out on the chance to be nominated for an S.E.A. Write Award.

“It’s never too late to start,” I said.

Sergeant Phoom coughed and the constable held a small bottle of Red Bull to the older man’s bloody lips.