The Axe Factor: A Jimm Juree Mystery (Jimm Juree Mysteries)

by Colin Cotterill

She laughed. I laughed. Conrad laughed because he hadn’t a clue what she’d just said to me. Among other things, I’d discovered during the night that Conrad had the type of very basic bar pidgin Thai that dispensed with grammar, pronunciation, and comprehension.

  “Then maybe you should get out of the kitchen and go wash some underwear,” I told her in Thai.

  I laughed. She laughed. Conrad laughed.

  “What are you two gossiping about?” he asked.

  “She asked me how good you were in bed,” I said.

  “She…? She did not.” He blushed. The breakfast plates clattered in the sink. I believed I’d just declared war on Burma. It wouldn’t have been the first time, but Thailand had a habit of losing those wars. I wasn’t about to let history repeat itself.

  * * *

  When I arrived back at the resort, I was expecting to find a family frantic with worry that young Jimm hadn’t slept in her bed the night before. Perhaps the police had been alerted. The neighbors out with bamboo sticks in a long line probing the sand for my remains. At the very least, Arny and Grandad Jah unconscious with hunger because their breakfast was half an hour late. But the Gulf Bay Lovely Resort was deserted. The night shutters were down on the shop. The Mighty X, now trunkless, was parked beside it, her rear end with an irreparable sag and no plate. I walked to the family compound. The wind was still up. Sand blew into my eyes. Through tears, I admired the line of washed-up polystyrene that gave the beach a Nordic look. We also had a nice selection of adult diapers. I wondered whether some ill-advised seniors cruise had gone down in the bay. The family bungalows were unoccupied, all but my own. The door was ajar, and I found the damned dogs on my bed. Beer had turned the pillow to candy floss. Gogo looked up with a shrug. I can think of nothing worse than dogs sleeping on your bed. All right, perhaps being interrogated by the Taliban was worse, but this was unacceptable. My first instinct was to beat them with a broom, but I’d had sex, so the world was a much brighter place and all the Lord’s creatures deserved forgiveness.

  I had to take another shower because the salt in the wind had penetrated my herb-scented skin. I dressed conservatively, black cords and a high collar, and took the truck into Lang Suan. It was like traveling by sleigh with the flatbed skimming the blacktop. I drove slowly, and the only radio station I could pick up was Lang Suan City 105 FM, the never-interrupt-good-advertisements-with-music station. So I gave up and used my driving time to think about … everything. About my mother, who was now into the second day aboard a rickety squid boat for the love of a wayward husband. They were probably out of canned sardines and living on raw mackerel by now. Wind-blistered. Sun-baked. Distilling seawater in an upturned Wall’s beach umbrella. Then I wondered whether she had her cell phone with her. They were only a couple of kilometers out. I decided I’d give her a call when I got back.

  With Grandad and his mysterious tree and Arny with his senior fiancée, and Sissi back in her shell in Chiang Mai, I thanked Mazu, the goddess of the sea, that there was one person in our family having a normal relationship. I imagine some women out there wouldn’t consider a one-night stand to be a relationship at all. But I wager those women had never dated Mee, the airport taxi driver, out of desperation and the hope they might get a discount on airport transfers. Compared to that, I was perfectly happy to be referred to as a fame groupie. I understood now why women threw themselves at heavy metal lead singers even if they looked like clams on sticks. It was the thrill of being touched by greatness. Admittedly, Conrad Coralbank was no Rong Wong-savun, but he was a name and—

  My thoughts were interrupted by the back axle falling off the truck.

  * * *

  I arrived twenty-eight minutes late for my appointment at Lang Suan Hospital and was pleased I’d decided to wear black. Twenty-eight minutes is hardly late at all in Thailand, but the woman I’d come to see made a point of looking at her watch every few minutes. Her name was Dr. June and she was the head of the Regional Clinic Allocations Department. She had that rubbery Thai/Chinese look you came to expect of administrators in the south. Their ancestors had come to the wilds, toiled, and sent their children to university to become doctors and politicians. Dr. June was clearly a product of those family values. She was my height, Mair’s age, with a minimalist low-maintenance hairstyle and expensive glasses.

  “Sorry I’m late,” I’d told her when I arrived. “The back axle fell off my truck.”

  Less serious women would have seen that as funny. She’d merely glared at the grease on my fingernails. The story had tickled a woman at a nearby table, but she’d reacted to Dr. June’s nod by leaving the room and closing the door behind her. Dr. June’s gaze returned to my fingers.

  “And you were attempting to reattach it?” she asked.

  “No. I just felt an obligation to remove it from the poor old fellow it rolled over. He was pinned down, and there was nobody else around. But, from then on, it was all good news. He wasn’t hurt and he had a mechanic on speed dial. So they’re down there now putting it all back together. I got a ride from—”

  “This is fascinating,” she said, “but I have another appointment.”

  I picked up an accent. Something deep south, but I couldn’t quite place it.

  “Right,” I said. “Too much information about the irrelevant. It’s a bad habit of mine. Occupational hazard.”

  She didn’t ask what my occupation was. In fact, she’d accepted my request for a meeting without asking anything about me. I’d assumed some people just craved human company, although you’d never know it in her case. She looked again at her watch, then the door, as if expecting the next appointment to walk in at any minute.

  “I’ll get to the point,” I said.

  “Thank you.”

  I wondered why she was wearing a white coat. Was she active in the wards as well as being a chief administrator? I wanted to ask her, but I could tell she wasn’t one for small talk.

  “Dr. Somluk,” I said.

  “Yes?”

  “She’s disappeared.”

  “And?”

  “And I was wondering whether she officially handed in her notice. Whether she gave a reason for having to suddenly stop work.”

  I was surprised that she hadn’t asked me which Dr. Somluk I was referring to. It was a common enough name.

  “And you are?” she asked.

  “Jimm,” I said. “I’m a friend of Dr. Somluk’s nurse. They were close. She’s afraid something might have happened to the doctor. Apart from one message, she hasn’t been in touch.”

  “And the message said?”

  “Not to worry.”

  “But you insist on worrying.”

  “I’m a natural.”

  Dr. June looked at her watch, then reached for a file on the desk in front of her. She flipped open the cover, and there was a photograph of Dr. Somluk. She peeled through a few more pages, stopping here and there to extract information, then closed the file.

  “In fact,” she said, still not making eye contact, “this is a professional matter. Not an issue I’d normally wish to discuss with a layperson.”

  I’d always wanted to be called a layperson. It was like a badge of nondenomination.

  “But?” I said, hoping there was one.

  “I think I owe it to her nurse to pass on my personal knowledge of Dr. Somluk, who has had a very checkered career path. She is what I believe they refer to as a conspiracy theorist. I have her record.”

  Amazing coincidence that it should just be lying there on the desk.

  “Do you realize she has never stayed in a job for longer than two years?” she asked.

  “I’m not really in a position to know anything,” I said. “I’m just the messenger.”

  At last, she looked at me over her glasses.

  “Right,” she said. “Dr. Somluk’s résumé had looked particularly promising when I first read it. But once I got to the references, contacted them personally, it was always the same story. She was good at her job, but s
he got a bee in her bonnet about this or that. At one hospital, she was convinced the director was abusing his nurses. At another, she was convinced the pharmacy was ordering too much cold medicine and sending the bulk of it up to the border to make amphetamines. There was always something.”

  “And is there no possibility there really was always something?”

  “Young lady. Hospitals take these matters very seriously. They all conducted internal inquiries. Every one of her accusations was shot down. It was generally agreed she was unstable.”

  “Then why would you have hired her?”

  “As I say. Her doctoring was impeccable. It was only in personal conversations with her previous employers that I began to understand her character. I doubt you’d understand how hard it is to get qualified medical personnel to work in a remote outpost like Maprao. It was a question of hiring her, then waiting for the references to come in. After a few months, the pattern was quite clear. She was very competent, but doctoring wasn’t enough for her. She needed a cause.”

  “And what was her cause here?” I asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know. She was going on about this and that. She submitted three or four official complaints about unrelated matters. But, by then, I’d already come to expect it.”

  “Do you remember specifically what she was complaining about?”

  “There was so much: inadequate treatment under the thirty baht low income fund, the use of interns with no experience in rural hospitals, no supervision of trainees by qualified doctors. All the things the Health Ministry and we in the field have been pushing for for years.”

  “So there wasn’t anything controversial?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Anything that might have forced her out.”

  Dr. June laughed. It was a silly laugh, all big teeth and hyphenated eyes and a twittering kind of sound through her nose.

  “This is medicine,” she said. “Not the military. You don’t get forced out. You get forced in. Placements in the deep provinces you’d sooner avoid. Moral pressures to do the right thing. The inborn guilt of someone who initially chose medicine for all the right, altruistic reasons. When you snare a qualified doctor to work in a place like this, she could be a part-time vampire and she wouldn’t be forced out. Better to have a good doctor who’s a little unstable than no doctor at all. Trust me. Dr. Somluk just left. We didn’t listen to her rants, so she moved on.”

  “She didn’t discuss it with you?”

  “Not a word. It happens.”

  Dr. June looked at her watch for the sixtieth time.

  “I really do have a—”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  I stood and wai’d her and she wai’d me back swiftly and reluctantly.

  “Thank you so much for your help,” I said.

  She nodded and looked down at a paper in front of her. I walked to the door, but before opening it, I stopped and turned back to her.

  “Just one last question,” I said.

  She looked at her watch. I wanted to rip it from her wrist and shove it up her nostril.

  “Make it quick,” she said.

  “Did you know Dr. Somluk was at a conference in Chumphon just before she disappeared?”

  “Goodness. There are conferences everywhere. I can’t keep a check of who’s off where. We leave that kind of thing to the discretion of our doctors.”

  “So she wouldn’t have needed permission from your office to go?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “Do you know anything about that conference? It was at the Novotel last weekend. It was organized by an NGO called the Bonny Baby Group.”

  “Oh, they’re a very reputable group. They have seminars all over the south.”

  “Dr. Somluk’s name was on the list of affiliates.”

  “That’s her business.”

  “So was yours.”

  She looked down at the paper, then the watch, then the door, but I was standing in front of it.

  “Khun Juree,” she said. “Doctors in this country are highly respected, which is as it should be.”

  Her southern accent had become more pronounced. It annoyed me that I couldn’t put a town to it.

  “And a lot of charitable organizations invite doctors onto their boards,” she said. “If we are confident that the organizations are sincere in their efforts, that their programs will serve to benefit society, we allow our names to be added to the list of affiliates. It doesn’t necessarily mean we are involved.”

  “So, you didn’t know that you and Dr. Somluk were both on the list of affiliates of the Bonny Baby Group?”

  “It wouldn’t surprise me in the least.”

  “But you weren’t there.”

  “I rarely attend conferences these days. I spend most of my weekends writing reports and journal papers. The work here at the department is time consuming.”

  “She tried to ask a question,” I said.

  “Who did?”

  “Dr. Somluk. She stood up at the end of a talk and tried to ask the speaker who her sponsors were for her trip. Then some large woman dragged the doctor away from the mic.”

  Dr. June laughed but with less girlish silliness, fewer teeth, bigger eyes.

  “Again, I am not surprised,” she said. “As I told you, the profession is well acquainted with your doctor friend and her wiles. I wouldn’t be surprised if she was blacklisted in a number of places. I’m sure somebody recognized her and had her removed before she could start in on one of her embarrassing tirades. It can destroy the unity that’s built up over a successful conference to have some maniac stand up and spout her personal grievances.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “She sounds like a complete fruit loop.”

  Dr. June almost smiled before looking at her watch. It had been an interesting visit, but the most fascinating aspect of it to me was that I’d never given her my surname.

  * * *

  “You do know those wheel things are supposed to go around,” I shouted.

  I was on a plastic shower stool, under a beach umbrella, beside the ditch where my Mighty X had come to rest. The welder’s son had kindly taken me to the hospital and brought me back. His name was Geng and he was eleven. A lot of pre-teens drove motorcycles down here.

  “We’re getting there,” shouted the welder, who had my truck up on breeze blocks. My phone rang. The name Conrad flashed on the screen. I pressed “Receive.”

  “Jimm?” he said.

  He always sounded surprised to find me at the end of the phone.

  “That’s me,” I said.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m sitting watching them reattach the rear axle of my truck,” I said, before realizing that the comment would fit exactly into his theory that I attracted weirdness.

  “Oh, my God,” he said. “Are you all right?”

  I was crazy about him. My truck was all broken up. Any other man would have said, “Did you get a quote?” Conrad asks me if I’m all right. My hero.

  “I might have damaged my coccyx when my seat suddenly dropped onto the road,” I said, “but apart from that I’m good.”

  “Where are you? I’ll come and pick you up.”

  “I’m fine. Really. But thanks.”

  “I’ve been thinking about you,” he said.

  Oh my God. This was just … everything. More than everything. I’d had my one night. My still-around morning. And now here I was getting my “I’ve been thinking about you” phone call. It didn’t get any better than this.

  “Who is this, again?” I asked.

  He laughed.

  “It’s the only man in your life who ever measured your tongue with a tape measure,” he said.

  I remembered that. He was amazed at how long my tongue was. “A freak of oral nature,” he’d called it. At the time it hadn’t felt so strange that he’d have a six-meter retractable tape measure beside the bed. It was only on reflection …

  “When can I see you again?” he a
sked.

  There had to be some infirmity I hadn’t yet spotted in the man. Some psychological failing. But … who cared? How often does chemistry with manners come along?

  “I’m kind of busy,” I told him. “I can probably fit you in around October.”

  “I was thinking more this evening.”

  “Oh, wait. I’ve had a cancellation. I might be free after all. But I have to cook.”

  “Fine. Anything but Thai food.”

  “I…?”

  “Only joking. If it’s not Thai food, I don’t want it. When can I expect you?”

  “What time does your maid go home?”

  “You don’t like A?”

  Conrad was the type of person who probably wouldn’t have noticed his maid was infatuated with him. He didn’t recognize his own magnetism.

  “She’s adorable all the way up to her powdery cheeks. But I need a kitchen to myself.”

  “I understand,” he said. “I’ll have her out of here by six.”

  * * *

  It was two thirty by the time the welder insisted the job was done. I made him drive up and down the street a couple of times before I agreed to get in. We played the old “How much? However much you like” to and fro for far too long. I liked the fact that in Hong Kong you’d ask how much and they’d tell you. They might have upped it 40 percent, but at least you had a figure to play with. Down here, the indecision made you want to give him a dollar and drive off. That’d cure him. Instead, I gave him a thousand baht. My life was in his hands, after all.

  I got home at three. The place was still shut down and empty. I passed an empty dog bowl I didn’t recognize, so I assumed someone had been by to feed the mutts. I had a task to perform before my dinner date. I went to my room and opened my Japanese DNA paternity treat. There was an instruction sheet inside. It was written in Japanese and manga. In fact, a complete imbecile could have understood the cartoons. You put a sample in plastic test tube A and another sample in plastic test tube B. You add the liquid contents of vial C and leave them to soak overnight. (Either that or you take them to the top of Mount Fuji to admire the full moon. The cartoon was esoteric.) Then you add chemical X to both samples, shake them up and use the enclosed eyedroppers to put a dab of each on the enclosed magically treated sheet. If they are a match, the point at which the two dabs overlap will turn black. A child could do it.