Colin Cotterill - Killed at the Whim of a Hat

Every log and shell and homicidal crab was picked out by the big full spotlight in front of me. I sat on the grassy lip where the sea had left off its sand supper last monsoon season. Gogo was beside me, absentmindedly munching at the hair on her haunches. I always got the feeling dogs had seen cats do it and thought it was cool without really grasping the concept. Dogs were all male when it came to cleanliness. It was midnight. I’d considered breaking open one of the wine bottles I’d brought with me from Chiang Mai but while I’d searched through the unopened packing cases for the missing corkscrew the question ‘Why should I?’ began to flash in front of me like a low-battery warning. Was I celebrating the comeback of crime journalist, Jimm Juree, or mourning the demise of my short-lived innocence? Would I be toasting the return of my hard-arsed self or bemoaning her arrival? Or perhaps I was hoping that, wine-drunk on a grayscale beach, I would no longer see those forty-six photographs in color. I thought that big, almost-full saucer in the sky — just a chip off the underside — might help me to think, to have something to tell Arny the next morning. Something more satisfying than:

“It’s work.”

But it just hung there and drained me of all my excuses and, for the second time in three days, I cried my eyes out in front of a dog.

I handed over the camera to Major Mana the next morning. I’d exchanged greetings with Sergeant Phoom at the desk and he’d waved me up. Mana was in his office talking on his cell phone. It was something personal judging from how he put his hand over the phone and turned to the window when I appeared in his doorway. He didn’t seem terribly pleased to see me. He finished his conversation and nodded for me to come in. I put the camera in its plastic bag on his desk.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“Me, scratching your back,” I said. “I think this might be the camera nobody lost.”

I told him how and where I’d found it earlier that morning and that I wouldn’t mind at all if he took credit for its discovery. I expounded my theory that the mystery person who’d called asking if anyone had retrieved a forensic camera from the crime scene, might, in fact, have been the killer himself trying to find a camera dropped during the attack. I could only hint that the dogs may have frightened the killer away as I obviously couldn’t tell him I’d already looked at the photos.

Major Mana looked decidedly unenthusiastic about my theory. He thanked me for bringing in the camera and gave me a brief lecture on the importance of not touching evidence, as if the plastic bag had been a stroke of luck on my part.

“Should we take a look?” I asked. I felt that a journalist who’d recovered a camera should be excited about what was on it.

“At what?” he said.

“The pictures on the camera. They might be important.”

“Ah, no. We need to process the camera first.”

“Process it?”

“Check it for fingerprints and trace elements, you know…blood, fluids. We don’t have those facilities so we’d need to send it to Lang Suan who in turn would take it to Chumphon.”

“Aren’t you just a little bit curious to see what’s on it?” I asked. “You know, once you send it to Lang Suan they won’t share their findings with you.”

“Of course they will.”

“All you’d have to do is turn it on and take a look. You’d be perfectly justified.”

“There’s certain…protocol.”

“Really?”

“I promise, as soon as Lang Suan reveals the contents of this camera I shall pass the information on to you. I haven’t forgotten our deal.”

That pretty much confirmed that I wouldn’t be getting any useful inside information from my major. I thanked him for his cooperation and wai’d as I reversed out of the room and walked along the corridor to Chompu’s room. He was enjoying a morning pla tong go dough puff and coffee whose color confirmed its instantaneousness. He looked up and smiled.

“My journalist. I’ve missed you. Doughnut?”

I sat opposite him and broke off a limb of dough.

“I wasn’t expecting you all to be in so early,” I confessed.

“Are you joking? Two murder inquiries? The province has sent us oil tankers full of overtime money. We’re supposed to be on call. If Lang Suan needs a manicure or a change of light bulbs, we’ll be there. You watch.”

“I just stopped off at the major’s office. He didn’t seem pleased to see me.”

“You probably interrupted his Amway dealings. Direct sales of unwanted products for the discerning housewife.”

“He sells Amway?”

“Not a lot of income from bribes down here. He has to make his money in other dishonest ways.”

“How was the crime lab?”

“Useless and marvelous. How was Surat?”

The creep. How could he possibly know I went to Surat?

“If you’ve fitted a GPS device to the bottom of our truck I’ll — ”

“Tsk, tsk, little scribe. I’ve had a requisition for staples in the system for three months. How long do you think it would take me to produce a tracking device? You really should stop watching all that televised American junk. It’s all made up, you know?”

“Then how do you know I went to Surat? You’re starting to give me the willies, Lieutenant.”

“It’s all very simple. Imagine a world where there are no strangers, where everybody is either related or acquainted.”

I resisted aristocracy jokes.

“It sounds unhealthy,” I told him.

“But it exists. My mother has a girl who does the garden. The garden girl’s husband drives fish from Lang Suan to Surat. The owner of one of the restaurants he delivers to has a daughter who works on the Dairy Queen stand in front of Home Art Mega Store. I’ve had her observe the manager for me. Collect gossip from staff, that sort of thing.”

“That doesn’t sound particularly ethical.”

“Everybody wants to be police. I’m just letting them live out their fantasy. And my Dairy Queen police lady reported to me this morning that she’d observed a woman with a bad haircut accompanied by the Incredible Hulk go into the manager’s office yesterday afternoon and stay there for a very long time. She even took a picture on her cell phone. Technology continues to astound and frighten…You’re looking particularly depressed. Can I help?”

“She said I have a bad haircut?”

“Surat isn’t ready for the accidental-razor-attack look. It’s really you. Don’t let it ruin your life. She works in Dairy Queen, God bless her.”

“But how the hell did you find out about the manager?” My voice had climbed into the soprano loft.

“I’m a policeman,” he said with a straight face, and there was no evidence to the contrary. Lieutenant Chompu really was a policeman. You couldn’t let those minute traces of nail polish fool you. He knew his job. We made a deal. I’d tell him all about our interview with Koon Boondej and he’d share his findings from the lab in Prajuab. I decided not to tell him about the camera, out of spite, I suppose. I wanted to hold something back or there’d be no lollipops for negotiation. It was a mistake but I’m not immune from stupidity. I finished my tale first. He drained the last coagulants from the bottom of his coffee cup.

“Well done,” he said. “No, really. Very well done.”

“You understand it does rely on my instincts,” I told him.

“No problem. Your instincts are super. But that does leave us at a nasty dead end as far as our VW goes.”

“Not really. At least we know the couple in the VW weren’t just innocent tourists. They were involved in a criminal act. I wouldn’t be surprised if they did something to piss off old Auntie Chainawat and she got revenge on them.”