Red Night Zone - Bangkok City

by James A. Newman

  The mamasan returned. “They say they have full membership. But big boss want meet you tomorrow night. At the club at eight…”

  “Okay, thank you, Mam.”

  She nodded and sighed before picking up a rag to wipe the bar. She got half way across the bar before she remembered the glass. She stopped cleaning, walked back to the huge glass of whiskey, and knocked it back. She smiled like she had the answer to a cryptic riddle. The rag and the cleaning could wait.

  Joe paid the bill and walked back out into the street.

  The pro-skirts outside were dipping a long runner bean into some kind of paste… Looked Joe over... They had clocked the money he had just handed the mamasan…Joe smiled… Crossed the street an alley opposite the Demon Dreams…

  A large building… Blacked out windows…

  Footsteps on concrete, a weight fell on his shoulder. Hit the ground… Looked up to see a foot and then two feet hit him in the ribs…

  A black suit…

  Joe rose…

  Got a look at the face…

  …Thai, solid, eyes darker than a Bangkok cop’s soul… He swung a right… Connected on the Black suit’s chin… Black suit brought up a knee… Made contact with Joe’s stomach… The sidewalk grew larger… Much larger.

  He swam into a black hole…

  …Difficult to breathe…

  …A kick to the ribs...Another… “Lizard… Buffalo…” Closed his eyes.

  Opened them. Nobody was there… Thought for a moment... Got up on shaky pins…Hailed a yellow and green and got inside…Shit…

  TWENTY-ONE

  8th October 2010

  BANGKOK NEVER slept, but back in the hotel room, Joe made it. His ribs were bruised; some pain about his jaw, his teeth felt loose, but the sleep process was easy: he climbed into bed and then took out the well-thumbed copy of Monica’s Midnight Bell. Set in London, a John falls in love with a prostitute. He gives her all his money until he is destitute. He was a chump. The city was full of them. Joe read passages before sleep curled her fingers around his temples and massaged him into the void.

  You open your eyes to a cold panic. Darkness. Your knees are beneath your chin, arms wrapped around your legs. You try to stretch out. You cannot. Trapped inside an object. A box. You try to scream. Outside the sounds of pain and pleasure. Just another scream. Male and female grunts. Leather on flesh. Adrenaline washes through your body. You shake with the fear and withdrawal. How did you get inside the box? Who put you inside? Will they ever open the box?

  When the box opens, you wish it hadn’t.

  Joe got up and shook himself over to the shower, under the weak jet of cold water his body awoke. It was as hot as hell and the air-conditioning was dead. His head was a nest of snakes and his ribs were an angry distraction. Joe sat on the vanity and watched some kind of insect crawl across the surface. He brought his fist down and shot the bug into the next life. Maybe he would become a lawyer, a murderer, a horseplayer, or a taxidermist’s assistant. Maybe he would become the stuff that dreams are made of. Football player, millionaire. Maybe he would become nothing. Niente.

  Zilch.

  Nada.

  An angry thought on a dull afternoon. Joe dried himself with a rough towel. Dressed in a white shirt with a pair of black slacks. Deck-shoes, no socks. Dark shades. They had to be dark. He needed to wear iron. Opened his Samsonite suitcase and took out the pocket Glock 26. Joe didn’t like to carry heat, but yesterday had made him slippery. He selected a black cotton jacket and slipped the heat in the inside pocket. Joe hit the street and stopped a yellow and green travelling west. He told the driver to take him to the morgue. His side ached. His brain ached. Everything ached. Yeah, the management wasn’t happy about the call from the Warhol and there was more to it than a Chinese whisper.

  Joe pulled the boyfriend line. The medic remembered him. The hospital owed Joe a favour, following some work on an insurance claim he’d fabricated for them last year. Sometimes it paid to be living in a corrupt third-world metropolis with contacts in the dirty world of corporate payouts. In a previous incarnation, Joe had worked as an international claims negotiator. Pretty neat at it too when he wasn’t hanging onto the bottle, which wasn’t often.

  There were two cops. One male and one female. Both of them trying their hardest to look ambitious. Joe weighed each of them according to their age, sex, and social standing. The higher up a stranger is perceived to be in the complex social hierarchy, the higher up you put up your hands. These two were lower than Joe was age-wise, but higher up in their chosen occupations.

  Inside the cold room stood a pathologist. She was firmly in her early forties with short hair jelled up and a beauty spot on her left cheek. That’s to say it might have been a beauty spot if she happened to be beautiful. She wasn’t. She was stunning. She wore a white lab-coat and looked at Joe through her glasses as if he was some kind of specimen pinned underneath her microscope. She didn’t like what she saw. Joe smiled what he thought might have been a pleasant smile and considered whether she found it difficult picking up dates with that kind of attitude and curriculum vitae. She held out her hand for a handshake, but Joe knew where those hands had been. Instead, he kept his hands in his pockets while she put hers together just below the tip of her chin to let Joe knew exactly where he stood on the rungs of Thai polite society: At the bottom below the corpses she spent the better side of her morning poking around inside.

  They brought out Monica from the cooler and placed her on a slab in the middle of the room. Her body covered with a plastic sheet. The pathologist passed Joe a four-page document. He glanced at the Thai script. “Would you like me to translate into English?” The pathologist said in a tone of voice as patronising as the smile that followed it. She had scored a point. She liked scoring points.

  “If you are comfortable with the technical transliterations,” Joe said, passing the document back to her. She smiled at the minor victory and walked the two steps to the slab.

  “I studied at Harvard,” she lifted the plastic sheet.

  Joe realized two things.

  One.

  It was no suicide.

  Two.

  He had a weak stomach.

  The head had been hacked and ripped, torn, sheared, ripped, and pulled from the body. It lay on its side next to the corpse. The face? Shock and realization. A death snarl. A muscular contraction. A physical reflex, rigor mortis, death. That cosmetic nose, full blue lips – perhaps she wasn’t in control. Joe preferred it to have been that way. Out of it. That final panic. The present moment is all we have. All we’ll ever have. That sudden feeling of waste, remorse, regret; that thing we call life given in an instant and taken away just as fast. The tongue hanging out from the mouth, eyes open, staring madly. That was how they found her. Madly staring with crazed, insane dead eyes.

  Mad.

  Insane.

  Crazy.

  Dull green skin. Dull green with patches of black and burgundy around the eyes. Starved of oxygen in a dingy apartment room. Head rapidly severed from her body. The work of a beast. The devil’s work. An angry bite of some kind on her wrist. Smaller bite marks covered her breasts, her neck, and her shoulders. Something or somebody had tried to eat her. Tried to eat her after they had ripped the head from the body in a cold-water apartment.

  Five days before in Joe’s bed. He’d felt something special. The feeling had returned. This time with more intensity. What was it? It could have been fear or it could have been love. It might have been some-thing else. Joe’s head began to ache with a sudden rush of blood and he found his stomach beginning to move. There was nothing in there. A dry gag and a dose of the sweats. Like the early stages of a hangover, he held on knowing that the passage of time would get him out of that room.

  …That memory…

  The pathologist spoke in clipped academic tones: “I will condense the report
for you. The victim was brought in from an apartment in Udom Suk on the sixth of October. It appears the victim had been deceased a little over two days. The body was detached from the head. She was wearing a latex cat suit. Items on the body included one large earring in each ear and one gold bracelet on the left wrist, about three baht weight in gold. A long black belt was fastened around the upper neck tied at the buckle. The opposite end of the belt was tied in a knot, which was used to affix to a supporting beam where the body was found.”

  The cop handed Joe a long leather ladies belt with a metal buckle in the shape of a butterfly. “The gold is worth at least fifty thousand baht,” the cop said, “this was not a robbery.”

  Joe exchanged a look with the pathologist. She managed a mocking smile – yim yor – at the officer and continued: “The body is that of a normally developed woman measuring one hundred and thirty four centimeters, weighing just over forty-five kilograms and appearing generally consistent with the stated age of twenty-four years. Lividity is fixed in the distal portions of the limbs. The eyes were open and the tongue was distended from the mouth. The irises are brown and corneas are cloudy. Petechial hemorrhaging is present in the conjunctiva surfaces of the eyes. The pupils measure point three centimeters. The hair is black with lighter blonde highlights, wavy, layered, and approximately fifty centimeters in length at the longest point. It had been worn up in the beehive style.”

  “Long hair for a short girl. Can I smoke?” The policeman said in Thai, taking out a box of Marlboro reds.

  She shook her head.

  He put the cigarette box back into his pocket. She looked at him and then at Joe. They were both unwelcome additions to a room full of stiffs. She glanced at the report and then at her notes. She found her place in the text and continued: “‘Removal of the belt revealed a laceration like that caused by a serrated object, such as a large kitchen knife, on the neck below the mandible. She has bruising on her neck and the ligaments were stretched before the detachment of the head, consistent with hanging. Minor abrasions are present to the face and lower neck. Of course, such markings can occur post mortem. We have to look underneath the skin.

  “‘Upon removal of the victim’s clothing, areas of the rest of the body were shown to have general light bruising consistent with whipping, but not recent. Her nipples and neck displayed signs of biting, consistent with some kind of sex play. Again, not recent.”

  Demon Dreams.

  The pathologist continued: “There is evidence of sexual penetration about three hours prior to death, but no seminal fluid found in her vagina. Pubic hair has been shaved in its entirety within six hours of death. There is a Khmer tattoo on her left shoulder and a birthmark on the right arm. Also there is this,” the pathologist pointed to Monica’s wrist and what looked like a bite mark. “This is confusing. At first, we thought it was a bite, perhaps from a dog, but the pattern is all wrong. That is, it is not consistent with a canine or indeed a carnivorous mammal that I know of.”

  “What could have done this?”Joe asked her.

  “The impression is consistent with a reptilian jaw. I emailed the picture to a colleague who thinks it is what polite Thai society calls the silver and gold animal, or what westerners call a monitor lizard. But the impression suggests a larger jaw than a normal sized monitor, and frankly, who in their right mind would keep such an animal?”

  “Who in their right mind commits suicide?” Joe said.

  “Who in their right mind doesn’t?” The pathologist looked him over. “My colleague suggested a komodo dragon, but they are too rare and only exist in the zoos here. Whatever it is, it is puzzling and it bit her shortly before or after her death. A matter of minutes in fact.”

  “Who identified the body?”

  “Confidential,” said the female officer.

  “Is there any evidence that she tried to take her life before? Slash marks on the wrists or anything like that?”

  “No. Nothing like that.”

  “Any reptiles at the crime scene?”

  “No.”

  “Toxicology?”

  “We have a cocktail, yaa baa, and valium inside the subject. Not much food in the stomach apart from some partially ground beef and bread.”

  “Enough drugs to kill her?” asked the cop.

  “Depends on her tolerance, and that we can’t really tell. Some people can take up to 100 milligrams of diazepam in a day; for others, twenty is enough to sleep forever. She had roughly fifty milligrams of Valium diazepam in the system.”

  Joe took two steps towards Monica. “Doctor, when one has enough stimulants in the system, then high doses of depressants may be used to keep one alive. Plus, who’s to say she administered those drugs herself?”

  “True. I see you have done your research,” the pathologist smiled knowingly.

  “Would you say she was dead before the hanging? I mean to say, did someone kill her and then try to make it look like a suicide?”

  The policeman spoke. “If they do, then they do a bad job. No professional. Maybe she like wild party and want to kill her body. Maybe she make mistake and she stab herself in the neck,” he mimes an action, one hand around his throat, the other in a stabbing motion towards the neck. “Maybe she try to cut the belt with the knife.”

  The same smile exchanged between Joe and the pathologist.

  “But no knife was found at the scene?” Joe said. “And frankly, why would someone have a knife in their hand whilst hanging themselves?”

  “In case she change her mind, blien jai,” the policeman said.

  The room fell silent.

  “Maybe somebody came in and took the knife after she was dead?” the female officer ventured.

  “And who would do that?” asked the pathologist.

  “The murderer,” Joe said.

  An orderly put Monica back inside the cooler. They stood around looking at the slab before the pathologist escorted them out into a corridor. Joe turned to the female police officer: “Were you at the crime scene?”

  “Yes. The room smelled of cigarette smoke, like there had been a party. Then I saw her, her hair was sticking up and shooting outwards in every direction, like she received an electric shock. There was blood on the wall behind and above her. She was decapitated. But she had a smile –yim mee layz-nai you know?”

  Joe knew: “The smile that conceals a wicked thought?”

  “Yes.”

  The male officer cut in, “We are busy people detective. Is that all?”

  “No. That’s not all. I’ve been hired to investigate this murder. I’m here to help find out what happened.”

  “We are busy, Mr. Dylan,” the female officer interjected. “I hope we can meet again. But you need to understand that this is a suicide,” she didn’t believe it for a moment. It was the company line. Her job wasn’t worth crossing that line. Black magic sex deaths. Bad for tourism. Dead hooker?

  Not worth investigating.

  The pathologist glanced at her timepiece. The show was over. She handed Joe a card with her name and a telephone number on it. “If you wish to discuss the report again, please call for an appointment.”

  Joe pocketed the card. “Maybe I can call you and we can discuss this situation in more depth, in a more uplifting environment?” he said glancing around the room.

  “I am afraid my boyfriend wouldn’t like it.”

  “Your boyfriend?”

  “Yes, my boyfriend. He is one of Bangkok’s most successful funeral directors. He is an expert mortician.”

  Joe was about to ask how they both met, but skipped it. “Doctor, just one last question, please.”

  “Yes?”

  “Were any body parts taken, any organs, anything like that?”

  “Patience, we haven’t examined full post mortem yet, Mr. Dylan. But it is very unlikely, unless they were skilled physicians. I can
say as an expert: no.”

  “When you do…”

  “…Yes, we will call you.”

  “Thanks. Mr. Mortician is a lucky man.” He told her. “And if you find out anything more about that bite, please let me know. I once heard that monitor lizards are sometimes dumped on people as a symbol of bad luck. Could they also be used in some sort of black magic ritual?”

  “Possibly. I study modern medical matters. I leave the superstitions to the people behind the mountains,” she smiled.

  “But you must be intrigued by the bite?”

  “It puzzles me, yes. But I am a pathologist, not a detective.”

  “Of course you are.”

  Joe headed out of the hospital and out onto the streets. The sun beat down like an angry thought.

  He palmed a yellow and green.

  TWENTY-TWO

  JOE PAID the bucket and headed up to the sky station.

  Took an eastbound.

  The sky-train glided along the rails elevated above the city.

  Tower-blocks shot up into the grey smog above the horizon. These were pigeon coups for the rich expatriate residents of Bangkok City. Sky-dwellers who sat pretty elevated above the town’s trash. They glanced down on the chaos below like the lady pathologist looking down at a stiff. The hooker sizing up a John. The five-star hotel concierge evaluating the wealth of new skin. Those bastards never touched the city. Joe envied them, tucked away with their air-conditioning and wide screen plasmas, Hello subscriptions, foot massages, pizza deliveries, laundry services, swimming pools, yoga lessons, piano practice, pedicures, panic attacks, and low carb diets. Bangkok City was something they’d dip into now and again travelling from their high-rise offices to their high-rise homes. They were NGOs, corporate financers, legal representatives, and social media consultants. Sometimes they’d venture downstairs to spend money on stuff they couldn’t get delivered. The kind of stuff that made Bangkok different. There were certain commodities to be bought in places like the Demon Dreams, the forbidden swamps, city streets rich with enchantments and attachments. They wanted a piece of it now and again. They’d glide through top-end supermarkets or slip into the high-class cathouses on the Street of Dead Artists. Then they’d return to their secure palaces high up in the sky. They glanced down at the gunmen, the beggars, the prostitutes, the buses, and the bums. Reflect on life and all her bruises with a glass of brandy, a copy of the Herald Tribune and a line of cocaine. The telephone number of a woman from Surin who spoke five words of English and delivered on time.