The Strange Disappearance of a Bollywood Star

by Vaseem Khan

  Anyway, impressing the inspector was one thing, but impressing the tough Khun Tippawan would be something else altogether.

  She had so much to prepare. Even if she worked twenty-four hours every day for the next week, she would never please Khun Tippawan. So hopefully the trouble—whatever it was—would emerge soon. And it did.

  “I mean to say…” the detective said, “we may be looking for a murderer.”

  Ladarat nodded but suspected that she did not entirely succeed in maintaining a calm, unruffled demeanor. It wasn’t every day that she had such a conversation about murder. In fact, she had never had such a conversation.

  At least the case of the detective’s nervousness had been solved. This was Chiang Mai, after all. A small city. A safe city. Where the old Thai values of respect and courtesy still flourished. A murder here would be… well, not unthinkable. But very, very unusual. Of course Khun Wiriya would be nervous—and excited—thinking that he might have discovered a murderer.

  At a loss for words, she wrote: “Murder?” She looked down with new respect at her humble yellow pad, which had suddenly become very, very interesting.

  “We received a call last night from a young police officer—a corporal—working at the emergency room of this hospital,” Wiriya said slowly. “He called about a patient whose wife had brought him there. When they arrived, the man was quite dead apparently.”

  Ladarat wrote: “Woman. Man. Emergency. Quite dead.”

  “It seems that he had been dead for a little while—long enough, in fact, that there was nothing at all they could do for him. So they called the emergency room doctor to fill out the death certificate.”

  Ladarat underlined “Quite.”

  “But this corporal thought perhaps he recognized the man’s wife,” Wiriya continued. “He thought… he’d met her before at another hospital. But he wasn’t certain, you understand?”

  Ladarat wasn’t at all sure she understood. She nodded anyway.

  The detective paused, choosing his words carefully. Ladarat waited. Thus far she wasn’t seeing the need for an ethicist. But she would be patient. You must never approach an elephant in the forest, her father told her. You must always allow it to approach you.

  “So the corporal asked the doctor in charge, you see. To share his concerns.” He flipped open a small spiral notebook and checked. “A Dr.… Aroon?”

  He looked inquisitively at her, but Ladarat shook her head. It was no one she knew. But then, doctors were always coming and going. They’d work for a year at this government hospital, then they’d move to one of the private hospitals that paid much more. It was a shame.

  “But here it is,” Wiriya said. “This woman? Who he thought he’d met before? You see, the last time they met was in the same exact circumstances. She’d brought her husband into the emergency room after he died. In both circumstances, the men had been brought in too late to help them.”

  She wrote: “Two deaths. More?”

  He paused, and they both thought about what this coincidence might mean. Nothing good.

  “Some women are… unlucky in this way,” Ladarat suggested. “It was a tragedy, to be sure, but this man, was he… an older man?”

  Wiriya shrugged. “He was not a young man, it is safe to say. Neither was the other man. About forty-five, perhaps. That is not too old, is it, Khun?”

  She supposed it was not.

  “And what was the cause of death?”

  “For the first, the corporal didn’t know.” He shrugged. “But for this one, the woman, she said it was his heart.”

  “His heart? Of course it was his heart. Your heart stops and you die. That’s not an explanation, any more than saying a plane crash happened… because the plane, it hit the ground.”

  Wiriya looked suitably chastened. “Well, that’s why I came to you, you see? You have this special medical knowledge. And, of course, you think like a detective.”

  A detective? Her? Most certainly not. That required skills. And penetrating intelligence, and cunning. She herself had none of those attributes. She would leave detecting to others who were better suited for the job.

  “But,” she said, thinking out loud, “if he did have heart failure, for instance, there might have been signs that the doctor noticed. Those would be documented in the medical record.”

  “The corporal said that the doctor didn’t write anything. He didn’t want to admit the patient because that would mean more paperwork. So he just signed the death certificate.”

  “I see. Well, then for two marriages to end in death, it is unlucky, to be sure. Still, it doesn’t sound suspicious, does it?”

  Wiriya was silent. Obviously he thought this situation was suspicious, or a busy man like him would not have wasted his time visiting her. Unless… perhaps this was just an excuse for a social call? Highly doubtful. He was a careful, methodical man, to be sure. Most important, a good man. And not unattractive.

  But what was she thinking? He was here to ask for her help in a murder investigation. Her, Ladarat Patalung, nurse ethicist. And here she was thinking crazy thoughts.

  Still the detective said nothing. He leaned back slightly in his chair and studied the ceiling above his head very carefully. He seemed to be thinking.

  About what?

  What do detectives think about? Real detectives. They look for patterns, don’t they? They look for facts that fit together.

  So perhaps there was a pattern here that Wiriya thought he saw. And maybe he wanted to see whether she saw it, too. Perhaps this was a test.

  She wrote: “Pattern?”

  Well, then. What sorts of patterns might there be?

  “From what the young policeman said,” she asked, “was there anything that these two unfortunate men had in common?”

  “Ahhh.” Wiriya shook his head, dragging his attention back down from the ceiling as if he had come to some important decision. “Yes, but I can’t make anything of it. You see, they were both Chinese.”

  Ah, Chinese. Ladarat glanced at the detective. His face was a blank wall, and his gaze was again fixed with intense interest on the area of ceiling just above her head.

  The Chinese. Some said that the culture of Thailand could be both gentle and intensely proud because the country had never been invaded. Never colonized. But Ladarat wasn’t so sure about that. There were so many Chinese here now, one could be forgiven for assuming that the Chinese had, in fact, invaded.

  It would be one thing if they were polite, but they were not. So quick to be angry. So harsh. So rude. Worse, even, than the Germans.

  So it was with mixed emotions that she contemplated the nationality of these men and wrote “CHINESE” in big block letters.

  Ladarat would be the first to admit that it was bad to stereotype. One should never judge a book by its cover. Although, truth be told, that was often the way she purchased a book—by looking closely at the cover. Like the new biography of that remarkable woman Aung San Suun Kyi. She had purchased a copy last weekend at the night market down by the Ping River largely because of the photograph of the beautiful woman on the cover, who seemed to be looking right at her, about to offer advice. So there was something to be said for the usefulness of a book’s cover. But for people, no, that was wrong.

  Perhaps detectives of the private sort could pick and choose their cases. But she was not a detective. She was a nurse. And an ethicist.

  Where would we be if nurses and ethicists could pick and choose whom they would help? Nowhere good.

  In fact, the slim volume that was sitting in the very center of her little desk had one page that was more thoroughly read than any other, and that was page 18. There was a passage on that otherwise unremarkable page that she knew by heart: “A nurse must always leave her prejudices at the door when she walks into a patient’s room.”

  The book modestly called itself The Fundamentals of Ethics, by Julia Dalrymple, R.N., Ph.D., Professor of Nursing at the Yale University of the U.S.A. Ladarat regretted extremely th
e dullness of the title. It didn’t really do justice to the wisdom of this little volume, which she’d discovered in a used bookstore in the city of Chicago in the United States when she was there for a year of ethics education. Not a day went by that she didn’t seek Professor Dalrymple’s wisdom to answer a question, to solve a problem, or sometimes just to be reminded of a nurse’s obligations.

  So she would follow the good professor’s advice. She would leave her prejudices at the door.

  “And the man’s name?” she asked.

  The detective hesitated. “It was… Zhang Wei.”

  “Oh no.”

  “Exactly. Oh no.”

  As she jotted this name down on her increasingly crowded—but increasingly interesting—yellow pad, Ladarat reflected that Zhang Wei was a very common Chinese name. A little like John Smith in the United States. And when a name was common in China, there weren’t just thousands of them—there were millions.

  “And the previous man’s name?”

  “We don’t know. The corporal can’t even remember which hospital it was—apparently he’s worked at many. So it’s unlikely we’ll ever be able to find out.”

  That sparked another thought that it seemed like a detective might ask.

  “And this other death, when was it?”

  “Ah. Well, the corporal thinks it was in July.”

  That was only three months ago. Two months to find another man, get married, and have him die.

  “You are sure that the woman was truly married to the man who died last night?”

  Wiriya smiled. “So now you’re definitely thinking like a detective. No, we don’t know for sure. She claimed to be, at least.”

  She dutifully wrote: “Married???”

  “So you think this might be… murder?”

  Her first thought was for that unfortunate man, of course. But her next thought, almost immediately, was for the good name of her hospital. What would it look like if they had just let a murderer walk in and walk out? That would be very, very bad.

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