Bangkok Noir

but he forced it back the way it should have been.

“You found me,” she said. “You found me.” She wiped his face gently with her hand. “Always I wait for you.”

Someone had a hand in his pocket but when Wallace looked down the world tilted again, and this time it kept going and the street light went down like the sun. He was alone in an empty room, the walls rushing away from him, the space growing bigger and emptier and darker until the only light was him, whatever he was, a sharp point of white light, narrowing to a pinprick, and he said again, “Jah,” and the light blinked out.

“Who’s Jah?” asked the boy with the crimped head, fanning the wad of bills.

“How would I know?” the woman said. “Some teerak from a hundred years ago. Why’d you hit him so hard?”

“He hurt Beer’s leg,” said the boy with the crimped head.

“Pussy,” the woman said. “Hurt by an old man.”

She eased Wallace’s head off her leg and lowered it softly to the pavement. His eyes were open, looking straight up. “Give me a hand.”

The boy called Beer limped forward and helped her up. Instantly, she was slapping him, hard, and then she clawed his face and backed off. “All you had to do was take the money,” she said. “Make me look like a victim and take the money. You stupid boy.”

She lowered her head to look again at Wallace. She said, “I liked him.”

Thirty seconds passed in silence. No one even shuffled his feet. The woman extended her hand, and the boy with the crimped head passed her a tight crumple of bills. She tucked them into the front of her dress, brushed cement dust from the black fabric and leaned down to straighten Wallace’s shirt, which had been pulled up when he slid down the wall. Then she smoothed the long gray hair from his forehead. The boys filed out, leaving her there, her eyes on Wallace’s face.

“Long time ago,” she said to no one, not even knowing she was speaking English. “Long time ago, I think you was hansum man.”

Timothy Hallinan

Timothy Hallinan is an American thriller writer, based in Southern California and Southeast Asia. In the 1990s, Hallinan created the erudite private eye Simeon Grist, who appeared in a total of six novels, all set in Los Angeles. Since publication in 2007, his second series, set in Bangkok, has received critical acclaim.Tim has lived off and on in Thailand since the early 1980s. His Bangkok-based series features a rough-travel writer named Philip (“Poke”) Rafferty, who has settled in the Thai capital and is in the process of trying to cobble together a family comprising Rose, the former go-go dancer he loves, and a precocious street urchin named Miaow. His newest series, which begins with the 2010 novel Crashed, features a burglar named Junior Bender who moonlights as a private eye for crooks.

Daylight

Alex Kerr

All the witnesses agreed. The victim, an upcountry visitor to Bangkok of no particular importance, had died by stabbing on the BTS platform at three in the afternoon. He was thirty-eight years old, was named Kaew, had worked in a motorcycle repair shop in Khon Kaen and had died from stab wounds to his legs, abdomen and lungs. After a thorough autopsy had determined the cause of death, the family had collected the body and taken it back to Khon Kaen for cremation.

Including Kaew’s brother Nop, there had been about thirty witnesses on the crowded platform that day, of whom six had come forward to the police. Two young office ladies had been quick enough to actually record the incident on their cell phone video cameras, and the images were crystal clear because it had been a bright, sunny afternoon. They had all pinpointed the same person as the murderer, who had been duly questioned by the police.

At this point the rather thin file ended. An open and closed case, really. I put it down on the desk, looked out the window at Bangkok’s rows of white skyscrapers stretching off under the pale light of early morning and wondered why this would interest anyone. It must have been a very slow day in New York because my editor had somehow become aware of a murder on the Skytrain in Bangkok and asked me to look into it.

I live for the night. Bangkok, for me, begins at about four in the afternoon and only comes alive around midnight. So it was a grim moment when the phone rang at 5:00 a.m. with a sharp Brooklyn accent demanding that I get up immediately and submit a full report to New York within twelve hours.

Staying up all night and going to sleep when the sun rises is fine, but dawn is truly depressing when seen from the wrong end. A few cups of coffee later, the first rays of sunlight were striking the tops of the skyscrapers, and I was feeling a bit better. I reviewed the file again and then noticed the dissonant note that should have been obvious from the beginning: the suspect hadn’t been arrested. More strangely, his name was never mentioned at any point in any of the reports. A police cover-up? But if so, why, in a case involving someone of no particular importance? Or was it just a slip-up in the paperwork? Well, New York needed something fast, and I had just a day to find some angle on this case.

Time for breakfast. In the soi next to mine I used to enjoy walking past a charming but decrepit old wooden house intriguingly overgrown with huge vines. Then they tore it down and replaced it with a sleek white apartment building and opened an all-day breakfast cafe in an airy, glassy room on the first floor. All I had to do was to bear the morning heat for a few minutes as I slipped through the back streets to this little hideaway. There, surrounded by the French models who stay at the apartments in the upper floors, I could sit and surf the internet on the cafe’s Wi-Fi. If lucky, I’d find the missing pieces of this case online before finishing the last piece of toast.

But here I drew a blank. Usually murder cases get some mention in the news, often complete with lurid photos of gruesomely wounded corpses spread across the front page of daily newspapers like Thai Rath. In this case there was only silence. The sources and pages that should have covered the case just weren’t there. It was as if a hole had opened up in the internet and swallowed the whole incident. Well, the internet in Bangkok is like that. There are gaps, and you get used to it.

Curiosity piqued, I made my way back to my soi, now palpably a few degrees hotter, the tarmac simmering under the morning sun. I reentered my office with a sense of unease. Usually an hour or two on the internet is enough to satisfy New York. This time I had the foreboding that this case would actually involve some work.

First, some phone calls. The obvious person to start with would be Nop, Kaew’s brother. Nop had suffered minor cuts while trying to protect his brother, and after being treated in Bangkok had returned to Khon Kaen to recover.

I considered. Yes, one could catch a flight to Khon Kaen and get back in twelve hours. But I’m lazy. I’ve become a true Bangkokian in that I tend to feel that the civilized world falls away somewhere along the Bangna highway. There’s town, and there’s the long hot trek to a resort somewhere. Better to stay in my air-conditioned office. That’s what telephones are for.

It was easy enough to reach Nop. Although a Khon Kaen farmer, he too had a cell phone, making him just as accessible as someone in Bangkok. And then began one of those baffling conversations you can sometimes have in Thailand.

“Do you know who killed Kaew?