Killed at the Whim of a Hat

continued to glow, both from the beer and the adulation. He rather spoiled the mood once the bill was paid, by informing me that we were both over the alcoholic limit for safe driving and insisting we walk half a kilometer to the 7-Eleven to get motorcycle taxis home. He ignored my pleas that most of the drivers were addicts or imbeciles and we were safer driving drunk. He then wasted another twenty minutes arguing with the freak circus that he wouldn’t allow them to go anywhere unless they put on helmets. I hadn’t seen a motorcycle helmet in all the nine months we’d been here.

Eventually, we arrived home with doggy bags of Esarn food for Mair and Arny and a peopley bag of scraps for Gogo. As we pulled up, I saw Mair in front of the shop talking to the same elderly lady I’d seen at the plastic awning detective agency. This, I remembered, was the mother of Maprao’s only known villain: an alliance I felt most uncomfortable about. I paused nearby for a moment but the two women were deep in conversation and seemed not to notice me. I went in search of Arny to give him his lunch but he was nowhere to be found. A family of four, young parents and two toddlers, were sitting in front of one of the cabanas. The door was open but their bags were on the front steps. I’d noticed a Suzuki Caribbean in the car park but I’d assumed its owner was walking on the beach.

“Excuse me, do you work here?” the father called to me.

“Kind of.”

“Hope you don’t mind,” he said, “but we couldn’t find anyone to talk to and the door was open.”

“Are you staying the night?” I asked. Iwo.

“No problem. I’ll find a key for you.”

“We could use a meal.”

I somehow managed to convince them that our plat du jour was delicious spicy northeastern food and went to heat up our takeaways. I ignored the whining from Gogo when I added the scraps and I was quite pleased with the finished meal. The guests didn’t complain either.

I called Sissi.

“iFurn executive line,” she said. “I’m Dr. Monique Dubois. Can I help you?”

She sometimes used this number for her IKEA II customers. She had a Web company called iFurn. Little i’s and e’s were really big in online sales evidently. She had an iFurn Web site with pictures of her exclusive furniture range which was actually cut and pasted from the IKEA site. The only difference was that her prices were three times theirs. Her slogan was IKEA looks but iFurn quality. She claimed to be the IKEA top end, the stuff they produced before they started cutting corners and downgrading materials. And people fell for it. When she got an order she’d pocket the remittance, rewrite the invoice, and send it to IKEA, paying the catalog price. IKEA dispatched it directly to the customer. The phone line was back-up in case anyone received their package and noticed the discrepancy in the invoice. It rarely happened, but when it did she’d explain that this was the company’s way of reducing the tax and, in turn, lowering the overall cost to the consumer. Her philosophy was that some people desperately wanted to pay too much for what they perceived as quality and were less likely to complain. She’d run this scam for two years. The phone connection was untraceable and the Web site was wired against intrusion. She’d know if anyone tried to shut it down. She was a diva.

“Hello,” I said. “I was looking for a card table that collapses as soon as you rest your arm on it.”

“Little sister.”

“You busy?”

“The world never sleeps.”

“Are you getting out to see that world, Sis? Breathing any of that air? Bumping into any of those world citizens on street corners?”

“We have a rooftop garden. It’s very airy at three or four a.m.”

“Restaurants? Bars? Bank queues? Crowded shopping centers? Society?”

“Are you channeling our mother?”

“I worry about you. What was that movie about the woman who stayed in the house all the time and ate and ate and got bigger and bigger till she filled the room, then she exploded?”

“Yeah. I remember. It was one of Audrey Hepburn’s best.”

“Sissi. I think Mair’s done something bad. I’m frightened.”

There was dead air on the iFurn line, then she said, “All right. Let me hear it.”

I told her the lot: John, the awning detective, the poison, the early morning ninja show by Mair.

“I have frightening visions of her wiping out anyone in Maprao who bought that particular brand of insect killer. And we’re talking hundreds.”

“Hmm. Hickville genocide. Have there been any reports of a death?”

“No.”

“Then, good luck to her. She’s getting away with it. She still has the savvy to cover her tracks, and we always encouraged her to get a hobby.”

“You think I’m being paranoid, don’t you?”

“No. I think you’re a complete idiot. Mair’s a little odd. But you don’t go from dotty to wiping out half a community with rat poison. What I do think is that you’ve been down there in oogaboogaland long enough. It’s time to come home. I have a spare room and a whole cabinet of movies you haven’t seen. We can drink Absolut vodka and watch old Wagon Train episodes on Utorrent and stuff ourselves with chocolate.”

I sighed. It did sound tempting. Almost a deal. But I had some unfinished business.

“All right,” I said. “That’s close to being an option. But let me sort out all these murders first. Have you had any thoughts about my abbot slaying?”

“I had a brainwave,” she said. “I’m a member of this Web site called Police Beat. It’s like Facebook but it’s for anyone with police connections. It’s mostly old cops, men, retired and active — unattractive police officers trawling for women with uniform fetishes. In fact, that’s why I joined. But it gets an interesting mixed clientele as well. Some female officers, public prosecutors, crime writers hoping for scraps, the odd hooker throwing in a discreet ad masked as a chat. But the fascinating thing is, it’s international. You get dialogues in bad English discussing law and swapping police techniques. I guess there are a lot of people out there who don’t realize what the site’s really about.

“My site identity is Elena. I’m a Russian homicide detective who lost a leg in a gang fight. But I’m gorgeous, you see, and all those noble police officers are prepared to ignore my stub. You’d be surprised what information one-legged Elena can elicit. But, anyway, there’s this chat-room for discussing cases. So I mentioned our temple killing and the weird thing with the hat and I sent out a plea for any other hate/hat related stories.”

“You mean, just in case there’s a worldwide serial killer who puts hats on his victims before he stabs them to death? Siss?”

“You asked me to think outside the box.”

“Not outside the planet.”

“Fine. You don’t want my help then I won’t…”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. You’re right. I mean, you’re absolutely right. So? Any luck?”

“Not yet. I had an alcoholic ex-detective in southern California tell me in great detail about a performance artist who used to put party hats on roadkill and photograph them. She had an exhibition. That’s as close as we’ve come so far. But this is a huge network. It’ll take time.”

“I trust you.”

“You should.”

“How’s the Web idol job?”

“We have conflict.”

“Already?”

“They want me to post my picture — pre-work. Me in the raw.”

“Naked?”

“My Webcam would never forgive me for such a thing. No, they want me to show my actual, time-ravaged face. They say it would inspire the youth.”

“Do they know your real name?”

“No.”

“So, do it.”