Jimm Juree 01; Killed at the Whim of a Hat

by Colin Cotterill

  I turned and headed for the car park but I could hear his mind ticking over behind me.

  “This wouldn’t have anything to do with” – and he lowered his voice – “the abbot?”

  “See? You do know.” I smiled. “You’re just playing with me.” I walked back to his desk.

  “Terrible thing, isn’t it?” he said.

  “I was shocked. Shocked, I tell you.”

  “We go three years with barely a punch on the nose and then, bang, two cases in the one day.”

  My heart turned a little but I had to be careful now. I didn’t want to alienate one of my new friends at my local station but I had some fishing to do.

  “What do you think happened?” I asked, leaning across his desk.

  “Now, wait,” he said. “How do you know about it?”

  “Sergeant Phoom,” I said, with my most sincere face attached, “I’m a reporter for national newspapers.”

  “But there’s supposed to be a news blackout.”

  “Never underestimate the power of the press. Come on, what’s your theory?”

  I could hear Chompu speaking upstairs. My time was running out.

  “Well, I don’t have many facts,” he confessed.

  “But?”

  I seemed to hover there for an inordinately long time before:

  “But the stabbing to death of an abbot suggests a personal conflict to me.”

  An abbot got stabbed? Holy mackerel. I was suddenly in the crime capital of the Eastern Seaboard. I was so excited I wanted to pee. Look out Pulitzer prize. I made a mental wai to the abbot for my disrespect. One last cast of the net.

  “But wait, it’s out of your jurisdiction, isn’t it?” I tried.

  “Not at all. Wat Feuang Fa is just on our side of road four-three-six. That’s the border. Anything on the other side is handled by Lang Suan.”

  Chompu came tripping down the stairs and I pulled in my net. I had everything I needed. The lieutenant was shaking his hands in front of him. I took him for the type who didn’t trust communal hand towels.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  The VW visit had lost a certain amount of piquancy for me in the past few minutes but it would have been suspicious for me to cry off.

  “And willing,” I said.

  ♦

  Old Mel was sitting on the back fence of his plantation wondering where all the peace and quiet had gone. He was admiring the water spraying from the heads of a dozen sprinklers. The blue PVC pipe upon which they perched snaked between the palms until it reached a sturdy Chinese pump. This in turn drew water from a newly dug pond at the center of which stood a rusty but surprisingly intact VW Kombi van.

  “Good morning, Mel,” said Lieutenant Chompu.

  “Morning,” said Mel.

  The old man remembered me from the previous day’s dig. He briefly slapped his hands together in response to my wai. I imagine he’d read my news report that morning, which largely ignored the thirty-minute interview he’d given me on Saturday.

  “Your well is surely the envy of the province.” Chompu smiled. “Such an attractive centerpiece.”

  “Right,” laughed Mel. “Until the rust kills all my palms.”

  “Nonsense,” said the policeman. “All that iron. They’ll flourish. You watch.”

  The old man had been in a hurry to get his sprinklers working. I looked around at the plantation. Deep ditches ran between the rows of palms all the way from the road to about twenty meters from the back fence. Each contained a shallow trough of water. It was a confusing layout. One that didn’t make sense.

  “Koon Mel,” I said (selecting the polite ‘Mr.’ over the less-than-polite ‘Old’), “can you tell me why the ditches don’t extend all the way to the rear fence?”

  “Ah,” said Mel. “We dug the ditches fifteen years ago. I was a lot fitter then. Me and my brothers dug them by hand. None of that mechanized backhoe stuff. Everyone was still planting coconut palms back then. Only a few of us had the foresight to see the future of palm oil. Now everyone’s cutting down their coconut trees and planting palms. We were the pathfinders.”

  “So, why…?” I pushed.

  “Oh, right. Well, back then the ditches did go all the way to the back fence. But about seven years ago the owner of the land out there came by and asked if I’d like to buy another three hectares to extend our plantation. He said they had properties to develop and needed to sell off some of his scrubland in a hurry to grab some good building real estate in Phuket. He needed cash in hand so he was selling cheap. We had money in the bank so I said yes.”

  I walked to the pit and looked at the rusty VW.

  “So, this vehicle was actually buried on your neighbor’s land,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  From the truck, Lieutenant Chompu had removed a large Government Savings Bank umbrella which he now held over us to keep off the sun. He remained silent as I continued my questioning.

  “And what do you know about your neighbor?” I asked.

  “Chinese.”

  I’d heard the word ‘Chinese’ on numerous occasions down here, not used as a description of ethnicity but more to explain a multitude of ills. In a lot of South-East Asian countries there were us – the natives – and them – the Chinese business community. Old Mel had decided that ‘Chinese’ gave me all the information I needed about his neighbor. The land beyond the fence was twenty-odd hectares of overgrown grass and shrub land. People parked their cattle there year-round to graze for free.

  “Did your neighbor offer to sell you the whole lot?” I asked.

  “No.” Mel shook his head. “I asked, but he wasn’t interested.”

  “Just the three hectares?”

  “Yeah.”

  Just the strip of land that incidentally happened to contain two dead bodies in a VW. Some coincidence. I decided it might not be a bad idea to locate the owner and have a little chat.

  “Fancy a paddle?” Chompu asked, nodding in the direction of the van.

  I couldn’t say I was fond of the idea but that was the reason the nice lieutenant had brought us here. I doubted the investigators had left too many stones unturned but I kicked off my sandals, rolled up the legs of my jeans to my knees and lowered myself into the warm, stewy pond. The water only came to my shins but the gunk below it was so soft I sank to my thighs. Jeans probably ruined. To his credit, the lieutenant was right there beside me. We waded one cursory circuit of the old van. Things were slithering around my feet. I wanted to go home. I half expected a Transformer moment where the old VW reared up on its hind wheels and snapped at us but, of course, it didn’t.

  I reached the side where the sliding door had once been. It now lay beneath my feet, giving me some solid base upon which to stand and examine just how ruined my jeans were. I climbed into the belly of the beast and sat on one of the two stubs that had once been front seats. In no time, the salt air would consume this museum piece but today it stood defiant. The steering wheel poked out gamely before me. I grabbed it, half expecting it to crumble like the driver but it was surprisingly solid. A testament to German engineering. The seat, too, felt secure. The back had wilted but the square of springs beneath my bottom still squeaked when I moved. My feet were submerged in water still but I imagined that the water had only risen once the pit was dug; otherwise I doubted all this metal could have survived. The windscreen in front of me was intact. The view was a wall of dirt, but I had an active imagination: a hippy driver and his companion.

  “You happy, babe?”

  “Blissful.”

  “Glad you came?”

  “Yeah. You OK to drive?”

  “Sure. Not much traffic. Floating really.”

  “Want another smoke?”

  “Why not, sweet baby? Why not?”

  Mair had told me about the hippies, the cheap foreigners who came on her treks. They didn’t come for the nature or the culture. They came for the opium and the mushrooms. She didn’t say she’d joined in. That’s on
e of the gaps I had to fill in myself. But Mair was something special. She’d been a lot of things. I’m guessing she was a communist for a while – spent time hiding out in the jungle during the military dictatorships. I remember hearing she’d spent time as a karaoke lounge waitress. Then she grew pomelos out in Kanchanaburi and raised, I think it was, pigs. But what I remember most warmly is her time as a tour guide. That’s where most of her stories came from. Granny Noi was still alive then. She ran the shop in those days. Granddad Jah was with the police. They’d look after us when Mair was away on her tours. Her homecomings were like someone turning on a tree swathed in fairy lights. She’d have stories to tell us about exotic and weird places and even weirder people. She’d bring bags full of sweets and souvenirs, hand-crafted cloths that she’d sat and watched being woven, shells from the islands, animals crafted from straw and beautiful colored stones. I had a collection of dirt from every province in Thailand. It was New Year’s every time Mair came back. Then, one time, she came home and she didn’t go away again and, one by one, the fairy lights went out.

  But one thing I’ll never forget is Mair laughing about the resolve with which the stingy, locally labeled ‘bird shit’, foreigners hung on to their weed. Ganja was growing all around but in their drug-induced bouts of paranoia they’d protect their own personal stash with their lives. It was very Granddad Jah of me to assume that everyone in the seventies smoked dope. But the combination of Kombi, long hair and beads made me think I could get away with being prejudiced just this once. And I wondered where our VW couple kept their stash.

  “Who did the search of the van?” I asked Chompu, who was tugging the sliding door out of the mud.

  “The boss sent Senior Sergeant Major Tort to go over it.”

  “And he’s a forensics expert?”

  “No. He keeps our books in order.”

  “So, nobody’s really…”

  “Nope.”

  “And who’s in charge of the case?”

  “Me.”

  “So why haven’t you…?”

  “Because I was just bequeathed it by Major Mana in front of the toilet door in the upstairs corridor of the police station half an hour ago. He doesn’t want it anymore. Something else came up.”

  It certainly did. But the fact that nobody had really looked at the VW gave me new hope. The stash. The glove-box was a gaping hole. What was left of the mattress and all the trace evidence it contained was probably in a skip behind the police station. I didn’t have too many places to look. I felt under the seat and wished I hadn’t. It occurred to me later that this was where all the body fluids and loose parts would have found their way over the years. I wasn’t about to dive into the murky water and feel around. I was on the verge of giving up when I remembered the Web site. I’d had to look up the make of the VW before I could send my report. The site had photos of a renovation and there behind the driver’s seat was a mound – some toolbox or the like – but it had stuck in my mind. It would have been directly under the mattress. A perfect hiding place. I clambered behind the seats and reached down into the shallow water.

  “You look inspired,” said Chompu.

  I found a latch of some description and some rusty knobs.

  “Have you got any tools in that truck of yours, Lieutenant?” I asked. “I think we might have something here.”

  ♦

  “Arny, Arny, not now.”

  My brother was about to set off along the beach in the midday heat rolling his log. It was starting to irk me. It was up there with self-flagellation and cross-carrying. He stopped, sighed and walked over to me along the light brown sand. My brother was a creation, the answer to a problem. He’d been bullied at school due to his sensitive nature and the fact that his brother, four years his senior, wore lipstick to class. Arny spent more time playing with girls than boys so it had been relatively simple for bullies to single him out from the herd. If she’d been around more, my mother would have taught him to negotiate his way out of trouble, taught him the value of a well-placed joke. But he was left to the one-track male logic of Granddad Jah to sort him out. Toughen him up. Teach him to fight. Of course, he didn’t ever learn how to fight but he did bulk up. The deeper his frustration, the harder he hit the weights. He couldn’t punish the boys that were making fun of him so he punished himself. Every barb put another disk on the barbell. And soon the weight room became his sanctuary and his body his barricade.

  And here he was, a mini-Mr. Universe. And the type of people who wanted to meet him saw an incredible hulk of a man. They assumed he ate pigs whole and smashed bricks with his forehead. Men wanted him as a friend because he was incredibly cool to be seen with. And women? Forget it. Once his love emotions were unscrewed there was nothing holding him together at all. Women assumed he was all animal, but in reality Arny was delicate. He was a sort of Grand Palace made of potato crisps. From a distance you saw invulnerability but you just had to lean on him slightly and he crumbled. It took a special kind of person to befriend a contradiction like that.

  Arny and I were close. We’d been inseparable – now we were just close. Since we’d followed Mair down to non-event world we’d been oddly distant. We’d both been too busy locked up in our respective moods.

  “What is it, pee?” It was nice to hear him call me ‘older sister’.

  “Can you drive me somewhere?”

  “OK.”

  That’s the way it was with Arny. He’d always do what anyone asked whether he was busy or not. He’d never ask why. He’d always assume you had a good reason, otherwise you wouldn’t have asked. In fact I didn’t have a reason at all, not one I could explain. I just felt having Arny around on this trip might provide a distraction. Sometimes you have to follow your instincts. He was reversing the truck out of the carport when Mair came running out of the shop and stood directly behind us. Arny stamped on the brake.

  “Now, what do you two think you’re up to?” she asked, her hands on her waist, John between her feet.

  “Going for a drive,” I said. “Won’t be long.”

  “I suppose you know how old you have to be before you can drive a vehicle on the main road,” she asked.

  “Mair, I’m thirty-two,” Arny told her.

  There was a pause, a brief awakening, then, “Well, then that’s all right, I suppose.”

  She smiled and returned to the shop. We’d been on the road for five minutes when Arny turned to me.

  “That wasn’t a joke, was it?”

  “No.”

  We turned our heads to admire a hedge of glaring yellow golden trumpet. It probably caused a lot of accidents.

  “Do you think she’ll get worse?” he asked.

  “No, not at all,” I lied. “All this fresh air and nature and healthy macrobiotic food and calcium. It’s big city pollution that eats away at people’s sanity. There are ninety-year-olds down here who can recall what they had for breakfast on their sixteenth birthday.”

  Arny drove, focusing on the white lines.

  “That’s because they’ve had the same breakfasts for the past ninety years,” he said.

  I laughed. “You’re right.”

  “We did the right thing.”

  I knew he was talking about following Mair south.

  “Yes, we did. She’ll get better. She just needs something to occupy her mind.”

  “Yeah.”

  We turned at an intersection where towering casuarina trees stood sentry on either side of us. I called it Christmas corner. I was always surprised that evergreen conifers could find it so easy to grow in the tropics. Didn’t they know where they were? I wondered if they had dreams of snow. They looked as out-of-place as us but they thrived. Perhaps we weren’t trying hard enough.

  “We stopped being brother and sister,” Arny said.

  “We’ve been angry.”

  “I think it’s time to let it go.”

  “You’re right.”

  “It’s good here.”

  “I know.”
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  I doubt whether a more unconvincing exchange had ever taken place on planet Earth. Both of us desperately wanted to believe it but didn’t have the acting skills to make it sound real. Before yesterday I doubt I would have even bothered to make the effort. But since then I’d been introduced to two dead hippies who were now giving up clues, and a dead abbot that nobody was allowed to talk about. I’d checked the wire services, the Web sites, even phoned the Thai Reporters’ Club information line. There was no news of a stabbed abbot. Either Major Mana had tossed out a red herring (a good source of vitamin D) or there really was a press blackout. But the only way to be certain was to go and see for myself. Nowhere in our electoral district was more than fifteen minutes away by truck when Arny was at the wheel.

  “Do you think we’ll ever make any close friends down here?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I met some nice policemen today.” He looked sideways at me and laughed. “All right. I know that didn’t sound like me but it’s true.”

  “Stop it, pee. I can’t drive and laugh at the same time.”

  “Really, I…OK, never mind.”

  It was nice to hear him laugh.

  Feuang Fa temple was at the top of an incline with one of our rare hills as a backdrop. From the road it didn’t look like anything special but when you got to the top of the dirt track you could clearly see that it really was nothing special. There was a standard, rather dowdy prayer hall to the right, a cramped ordination hall, a gazebo and a stupa. None of these were worth investing adjectives on.

  The highlight of the place was a spectacular bank of bougainvilleas on the crest of the hill to the left that followed a path toward the monks’ quarters at the rear. There had been little rain for several months and the plants were ablaze with color. Like Scotch whiskies, bougainvilleas were at their happiest without water.

  We were only halfway up the hill when a middle-aged man in a slate gray safari suit and flip-flops stepped out from behind a large pregnant water urn with his hands up. He seemed to be some kind of low-budget sentry.

  “Nothing for you here,” he shouted.

  Arny braked and we stared at the scrawny man through the windscreen.