Street Music

by Timothy Hallinan

  He looks up. He’s obviously missed her trip to the bathroom because her face is wet and there’s water dripping from the spiky ends of her hair.

  “I’m working on it. But if I were going to do something about it, would you be interested in helping me?”

  The silence stretches out until he puts his hands on the arms of his chair to get up, and then Miaow says, “Do something like what? Helping you how?”

  “By finding me some big pieces of cardboard I can write on, and the thickest, brightest felt-tip we have in the house. A color you can practically see in the dark.”

  She turns her head away until he can see her profile. He can’t find her mother in it. “How big?” she says. “Like a shirt cardboard?”

  “Jesus, do we have any of those?”

  “Yes, as you’d know if you ever wore anything but T-shirts. Haven’t you noticed that none of your nice shirts are in the closet anymore?”

  “I just thought Rose needed the hanger space and that they were probably being used to line the baby’s crib.”

  “Try the fourth drawer down in that big thing in your room. Rose has been taking them to the laundry, and they come back folded.” She does a big sniff, but that seems to be all that remains of her weeping, if she’s been weeping.

  “Let’s tape some together to make a bigger sign.”

  “A sign,” she says. “I’ll be right back.” She disappears into the big bedroom, and he hears a little breeze of whispering break out.

  He realizes that the bright-colored Sharpie is on a shelf at the bottom of a small whiteboard he bought a few years ago in a brief fever of organization. He’d hung it in the kitchen, visualizing it neatly filled out with tidy little shopping and to do lists, maybe bits of inspirational prose and witticisms, even the occasional love note, but most of the time he saw a gradually improving caricature of him, recognizable by the beaky Western nose, and then that gave way to a series of occasional, rather skillful pornographic line drawings in an eye-popping magenta that depicted people who were sexually entwined in physiologically improbable ways. He didn’t know who was responsible for the drawings until Rose came home with the baby, bringing Fon with her. Since then, there has been a new one almost every day. He has taken to erasing the bits that would have been retouched or blurred in a less permissive medium, only to find them redrawn, often with a little extra zing. The pen he takes from beneath the board is the magenta one.

  He goes back into the living room to see a lot of shirts he’d forgotten he owned, all lined up on the coffee table as Miaow works the cardboard out. She says without looking up, “How many?”

  “I don’t know. Six? It needs to be big, so maybe we could overlap six so that the whole thing would be thicker, to make a single rectangle. You know, put about a third of each of them under the one next to it and tape—”

  “I’m ahead of you,” Miaow says, busily tearing tape. “What do you want to write?”

  “Actually,” he says, “I want you to write it.”

  “So it’ll be in Thai?” To her, his inability to master, or even befriend, the Thai alphabet has been a reliable source of humor for years. She’s taping away, using multiple lengths of tape to secure the joins. “We should put a stick in the back so it can be held one-handed or even jammed into the ground.”

  “Great idea.”

  “Well, since I’ve had a great idea, what’s yours? Why are we doing this?” She looks up, and her face brightens. “Oh, that’s the pen I was going to suggest.”

  “I’m taking it to the park. She slept there most nights, I’d guess, for who knows how long. She must have known people there. I’m just doing the cops’ job, trying to find out who cared about her and who might have seen something.”

  She looks down at the cardboard. “Cared about her.”

  “Well,” he says, at a loss. “You know.” He doodles on the page and realizes he’s written what the sign should say, and he gets up.

  She’s on the couch, so he takes the hassock and says, “The biggest, clearest Thai you can write. Nothing flouncy, just—”

  “You’ve never seen me do anything flouncy in your life.” She holds her hand out for the pen, eyes on the cardboard. “What do you want it to say?”

  “I think it should be direct and simple and, I don’t know, to the point. I think it should say help hom.”

  “Help Hom,” she says, and he can barely hear her. She begins to write.

  33

  The View from the Top of the Hill

  The trees’ shadows are long and just beginning to go soft at the edges by the time he finds his way into the park. For a place that looks so peaceful, it’s amazingly noisy. Just on the other side of the trees are Bangkok streets that are perpetually jammed, but now, at rush hour, it’s as though some demonic physicist has found a way to force time and matter into a metaphysical blender and come up with a new matrix that allows him to double the number of cars the road was built to hold.

  The noise follows him into the shadier area beneath the trees and begins to diminish only as he nears the little lake. He hasn’t been here often, and he makes a half-hearted resolution to come back at a happier time.

  His heart feels like something he has to breathe around, cold, heavy, and inert. He is certain that he was—unknowingly and with all the usual good fucking intentions—responsible for her death. And the only amends he can think of is crude, blunt-force revenge. If he’s even capable of that.

  All he’s got with him are the sign, in Miaow’s best magenta Thai calligraphy, and a paper supermarket bag containing a long-sleeve shirt to put on against the virtual certainty of whining clouds of mosquitoes or the slightly less likely event of a drop in temperature, whichever comes first. The bag also contains a thin circular cushion that normally tops one of the stools at the kitchen counter. If the shirt is mainly for mosquitoes, the cushion is mainly for ants. He’s also got one thousand baht in hundred-baht notes by way of persuasion.

  Beneath the cushion is his Glock, just in case the killer should feel compelled to return to the scene of the crime. He doesn’t believe that happens anywhere nearly as often as it’s said to, but he wants to feel prepared if he’s wrong, as he seems to have been over and over during the past couple of days.

  “Hey,” someone says, and he whirls in a spasm of panicky surprise to see a tall young woman in jeans and a T-shirt, the front of which says, in Day-Glo letters, wait until you see the back. It takes him a long, socially awkward moment to recognize her as Kwai Clemente—Officer Clemente—a top-of-the-line cop who had been methodically discriminated against for being half Filipina and all female until Arthit discovered her and put her to work at a more appropriate rank. He’s never seen her out of uniform before. Her most striking feature is her eyes—with their deep brown irises fringed all the way around with gold, beautiful enough to make even men she’s arresting look twice—but this time he’s distracted by her hair, which is generally stuffed into her uniform cap. Minus the cap, it’s much longer than he would have imagined, falling to the tops of her shoulders, and lighter in color than he remembers in the bits he’s seen, with a reddish tint calling attention to itself through the black.

  “Little jumpy, are you?” she says. “Probably a good thing you’re not armed.” She laughs, and he joins her, although it doesn’t feel very convincing, even to him. She looks at him more closely. “You’re not, are you?”

  “Of course not. It was just, um, your hair. It’s not the way I—”

  “Do you like it?” she says, and then she breaks into a deep, full-throated laugh. “Don’t bother, that was a joke. The color was a mistake. I was so busy talking to Anand that I bought the wrong bottle, but I think it’s okay. He thinks it’s okay, too.” She pulls a lock down in front and goes cross-eyed looking at it, and adds, “Maybe.”

  “How is Anand?” He doesn’t wait for her answer. “Listen,” h
e says, “I’m always glad to see you, but—”

  “He’s the same as always,” she says, “but I stick with him anyway. You were going to ask me what I’m doing here, and I’m going to save you all that work by saying that Arthit figured you wouldn’t be able to stay away, and he wanted you to see a couple of the crime scene pictures. I suggested we could email them to you, but Arthit got a little starchy about how they were police property and they couldn’t be allowed to get loose in the ether, so my being here, dressed like this, is his compromise with his conscience.”

  Rafferty says, “What a guy.”

  “And we also figured, given your sense of direction, you could use all the help you can get. So here, take a look.” She holds up her phone and does a couple of swipes, and suddenly he’s looking past a tall, dark tree of some kind. He’s not big on trees, but this one seems to be growing on a gentle slope that angles down to a clearing with a big bush in it; at a guess, the bush might be shoulder-high on Rafferty. The bush seems to have something large folded beneath it. “This is where she was found,” Clemente says, using a bright orange nail to indicate the area of the bush. “Could be where she slept; that thing under the bush is a big plastic sheet that she might have used when it rained. It’s a mark of how important this case was to the investigating officers that they left the sheet there; you’ll be able to see it for yourself unless someone has taken it. To the right, see that little mound with what looks like a rock on it? It’s soft dirt, like it’s been dug up recently—maybe to pull up a bush or something—and it’s got two deep footprints on top of it and a spatter of dirt behind it. She was stabbed low in the chest and then cut downward, and Arthit thinks the dirt spatter might mean that she jumped from this mound at whoever had the knife and it caught her just below the center of the rib cage, which suggests that he was either lucky or knew what he was doing, and then he yanked it down to open her up. She had skin and hair under her nails, and some blood, too, so the way we see it he was standing a little below her, and when she jumped him she also went after his eyes or something with her nails. Most of the blood is here.” She taps the screen to indicate a location six or eight steps from the mound and enlarges it. “This is where she was found. The little rise where she was standing is about a meter and a half away, back there to your right. So she jumps, they stagger, him going backward and her plowing forward, he cuts her, she falls.” She swipes again, and he’s looking at the mound from a new angle that reveals a clutter of clothes off to one side.

  “She was up there when he ordered her to undress, which we know because the clothes are scattered to her right, and she was right-handed. We know that because she’d written all over her left palm.”

  “Yes, she did,” he says, feeling like there’s something pulled tight around his throat.

  The glance she gives him is full of curiosity. “Right, Arthit said you met her. How was she?”

  “Sad and confused and lonely and cheated. Not much left in the will-to-live tank, I thought.”

  She’s regarding him in a way that suggests she might be guessing his pulse rate. “Arthit didn’t say how you came to meet her.”

  “That’s because I didn’t tell him.”

  She takes a step back, away from the intrusion and into the world of professionalism. “Are you sure you’re neutral enough to get involved in this?”

  “I never said I was neutral. What’s that?”

  “What’s what?”

  “The thing with the straight edges.” He indicates a small white rectangle in the photo, on the ground near the bush.

  She enlarges it. “It’s a bag. It’s a little greasy from having had food in it, but whoever emptied it re-folded it as though it were a napkin for a formal dinner.”

  “Make it small again. Over here, the little cloth—”

  “Those are her underpants,” Clemente says, her voice absolutely flat. “All her other clothes are over there, near the mound, but the underpants were found over here, beside her. They’re the only thing she was wearing that has blood on it. What that suggests to Arthit is that he was searching her for something—see, over there, that pile of stuff? That came out of a bag she carried.”

  “Her Louie Vuitton,” Rafferty says, belatedly recognizing the brown object from the earlier shot. He wants to turn and spit.

  “Yes. The guy turned it over, dumped it upside down where he was standing—where most of the blood is—and slashed the lining. We figure that when he couldn’t find what he wanted in the bag, he made her undress. But she wouldn’t take off her underpants, either because she was modest or because that’s where she’d put whatever he was looking for, and she was wearing them when she jumped him and got stabbed. What was he looking for?”

  “Damned if I know.”

  “Mmm-hmmm.” She turns off the phone and takes a diplomatic break, long enough to let her slip it, deliberately and over-carefully, into her purse. “One other thing. One of her ears had been pierced, torn, really, not at the lobe, but at the top. It was like she’d gotten a fishhook through it and then somehow she tore it loose. And there were two of those, one a day or two old and one that was, umm, fresh. None of us has ever seen anything like it.”

  “I noticed something on her ear, the left one, I think, when I met her. But it wasn’t a tear. Looked like a puncture that got infected. She scratched it once or twice, very carefully.”

  “Well,” she says, “this one was new, and it tore the top of her ear open.” She takes a deep breath, steps back, and looks him over. “So the sign is supposed to be an invitation for people to talk to you?”

  “Can you think of anything better?”

  “I didn’t mean it as a criticism. I wish you luck. And if you learn anything helpful, you’ll let us know, right?”

  “Almost certainly,” he says.

  She nods. “I’ll tell Arthit you said yes, absolutely, first thing you’ll do. So, right now, look around for a minute. See the lake?”

  “Sure. It’s that thing with the water in it.”

  “Okay, bear left so the lake is to your right and stick close to it, eight or ten yards from it at most. In three minutes or so the ground will begin to rise to your left, just a gentle slope, easy for a man your age.”

  He says, “Hey.”

  “At the top of the rise is a tree, a pretty big one, the one you saw in the first picture. Go stand next to it, with the lake still to your right, and you’ll be looking down from exactly the place where the first picture was taken, and you can walk straight on down to the big bush. Clear?”

  “Clear.”

  “Good. So the baby is a boy, huh?”

  “Yeah. And lucky enough to look more like her than me.”

  “Well, that’s good, I suppose, although you’re not exactly nightmare material. Anand and I will come by sometime in the next week or two with a teething ring or a savings bond or something. The interest rate is just about what you’d get if you kept the money in your pocket, but it’s what people gave my mother, and I’m hopeless with babies.” She slips past him and heads back the way Rafferty came. Over her shoulder, she says, “Call us if you get anything good.”

  Sure enough, the view from the top of the hill, once he gets there, is the vantage point from which the first picture had been shot. Beside him is a tall, straight tree with thick foliage and occasional branches starting about five feet up the trunk, making it potentially climbable in a squeeze, at least by someone more sure-footed than he is. Below him is the place where Hom drew her last, probably horrified, breath. He reaches into the shopping bag and puts the Glock on top of the cushion, even though he’ll be taking the cushion out once he gets to the bush she had presumably slept beneath. He feels slightly more at ease knowing he won’t have to fumble past anything to get to the gun.

  Once he’s gone down the hill, it’s easy to see the disturbance on the little mound from which Hom had seemingl
y sprung at her killer. She had not been a small woman, so the man with the knife must have been strong not to go over backward. He walks around the mound twice, seeing the throw of dirt where she had launched herself at him. The stone he’d seen in the pictures proves to be a smooth gray oval, maybe eight or nine inches long and five wide at its broadest point, shaped more or less like a potato and half-buried at one side of the mound. It’s so out of place that it looks like a marker, and he taps it lightly with his toe, not thinking about it, as he eyes Hom’s last home.

  Everything that was movable in the photos Clemente had showed him is gone now, except for the plastic sheet and the stone on the mound, and even the sheet has been shoved back until it’s mostly out of sight. The things people possess, even if they look like rubbish to others, carry a kind of energy, imparted to them by the people who owned and used them, and the absence of Hom’s things makes Rafferty feel that he’s in a place where everything important is missing. He’s chosen the spot where he’ll sit—near the mound because the earth is softer there—and now he pushes the sign into the dirt so it stands on its own, puts down the cushion, and seats himself cross-legged.

  This bit of park, with its bush and its mound, had been Hom’s space. Even stripped of the things that were there when the last outrage took place—the scatter of clothes, the fake Louis Vuitton tote, the precisely folded white bag—even without these things, this place still reverberates from the shock of multiple crimes, crimes of neglect and exclusion and indifference. It’s still a place in which a woman had been left to sink into herself and her regrets, alone. This is where she’d landed after falling so far, from the village to the city to the street, losing her child and everything else that mattered on her way down. And now it’s just a clearing in a park that houses a bush with some plastic under it.

  In a better world, he thinks, he would have found her, or she would have found him, earlier, when there was still a chance of some kind of rescue and reconciliation, some eccentric but workable version of an extended family with him and Rose and Miaow, Hom orbiting them like some dotty aunt until she and Miaow reached a kind of equilibrium.