Colin Cotterill - Killed at the Whim of a Hat

He started across the street. The Olympuss lights were beckoning in red and silver. The girls sat out front on a bench, watching traffic, their little skirts climbing up their thighs, their faces…well, who really cared if they had faces? He stood on the white line to let a slow-moving Milo chocolate milk van pass by but it slowed even more, then stopped in the middle of the road. He was expecting the driver to wind down the window and ask directions but the glass was dark and he saw no one inside. He cursed and walked behind the van. The left rear door was flung open suddenly and it smashed into his face. He heard his reconstructed nose snap and felt the blood flow over his lips .

“ What the…? ”

I remember that Sunday in a blur, manure flying in every direction as if a ceiling fan had fallen into a tub of chocolate mousse. It began at six a.m. with a call from Sissi.

“Jimm, I’ve got one,” she said.

I was still fuzzy from the Romanian wine. I took my cell phone out to the veranda and squeaked down on one of the rattan chairs.

“Since when did you get up before sunrise?” I asked her.

“Never,” she said. “I haven’t been to bed. I’ve had rather a heavy night with the police.”

“You in trouble?”

“Not the real police, fool. The Police Beat police. They’re really bullies online too, let me tell you. I have bruises.”

“I believe you.”

I looked down at the beach and saw a shadowy figure trudging along the sand.

“And I found you a hat,” she said. “An orange one.”

“OK, thanks. Mail it down.”

“Look, will you slap yourself in the face or something? You’re always educationally challenged when you first wake up. I’m talking about a case. An unsolved murder.”

“All right. And it’s a stabbing?”

“No.”

“Victim have religious connections?”

“No.”

The little enthusiasm I’d managed to rouse was on its way back to bed.

“Thailand?”

“Guam.”

If you’d handed me a map and offered me a million baht I couldn’t have told you where Guam was. Neither could I give a lizard’s back end.

“So, the connection is an orange hat?”

“Do you think you can downgrade a little of that cynicism? I’ve been up all night looking for this frigging hat.”

I’d unlocked the beast so it was the least I could do to hear her out.

“All right. I’m sorry.”

“Toshi.”

“Bless you.”

“My Japanese detective. A judo black belt. Olympic medal and very fond of Eastern European women.”

How sweet. Two nonexistent people had found one another.

“He replied to my search ‘unsolved murder — incongruous hat’. His English was crap but he made up for it with his enthusiasm. He said this was the case that had most baffled him. A Japanese engineering firm was in Guam building a two-million-yen hotel.”

“Which is about fifty dollars.”

“All right, I don’t know, two-hundred billion yen — a very expensive hotel, twenty story, designed by a famous architect. One of the Japanese foremen supervising the local workers falls from the top of the almost complete hotel into the empty swimming pool. An accident, they all assume, until the coroner discovers a small-gauge bullet hole in his lower back.”

I was growing impatient. The figure on the beach was clearly my mother in her ninja costume.

“Does the incongruous hat arrive soon?” I asked.

“That was the confusing thing. Something nobody could explain. You know the Japs and their look-alike costumes. The firm that undertook the construction had their own very distinct uniforms: luminous green full-body overalls and white hard hats. No fashion statements. No individual touches. They were Japanese and they’d all arrived on the bus together that morning. But when the foreman hit the pool, he was wearing a bright orange hard hat. And do you know why?”

“Rebellion?”

“Somebody had spray painted his hat luminous orange while he was still wearing it.”

“He didn’t do it himself?”

“The paint was in his eyes, around his neck. There was no sign of a can. Whoever sprayed him took it with them. And they never found the shooter.”

It was weird and it was irrelevant and I was distressed to have been woken up so early and forced to listen to it.

“That’s great, Siss. Thanks.”

“You don’t sound very excited.”

“No, I am. Tired, that’s all. Let’s keep pushing on the orange hat thing. Good job. Listen, everyone’s growling here for breakfast. I’m going to have to leave you. Talk to you later.”

Bad start to the day: hangover, long stupid phone call, mother up to no good. It could only get better.

It didn’t.

Sitting in front of the kitchen block was a little man on a very old motorcycle. He weighed so little I imagined it was only his thick gold helmet that stopped him being blown off the saddle as he rode. In his hand he had a brown paper envelope.

“Are you Koon Jum?” he asked.

“Jimm.”

“That’s probably it.”

He handed me the envelope and drove off. I hadn’t had the presence of mind to ask him where he was from or why he’d ridden out at such an unholy hour to make his delivery. By the time I’d formulated all my questions he was gone. The envelope did indeed have the words ‘ Koon Jum, Lovely Resort’, written in thick felt tip. I put on the pot to boil water, then ripped open the envelope. It contained a simple black and white election flyer. On the front was a photo of a grinning candidate with a large rosette on his shirt. The flyer was very old, the paper almost separating at the crease. If the name hadn’t been written there I would never have recognized the man. It was the decidedly younger and unplasticized face of Tan Sugit beside a large, handwritten, number three. It was the type of thing poll delegates would pass on, hand to hand in villages.

“Here’s twenty baht . This is the number you’ll vote for. We’ll know if you don’t and we’ll be back.”

The only thing that had changed since those days was the cost of a vote. You could get up to five hundred baht for your name on a list these days. I turned over the paper and on the back in scrawled handwriting were the words, “Ask his daughter about the VW.” It was written in some watery ink that had dried brown at the edges. I really wasn’t in the mood for a mystery.

Breakfast was a simple affair. Our guests had given up on us and driven off early to find somewhere else to eat. We couldn’t do that. We were captive. Most families would help themselves as they were coming and going from bed to work: rice porridge, a quick Chinese doughnut, some sort of dried meat, a plastic bag of warm soybean milk for the road. But Mair insisted we all eat breakfast together; sit down at one of our tables and ‘talk’. The policy hadn’t been a great success so far. Most mornings we’d just stoop over our plates and fuel up for the day. But, on this awful Sunday, Arny had an announcement to make.

“I’ve got a girlfriend,” he said, a smile sliming across his face. We all looked at him with our spoons and forks on pause, some full on their way up, some empty on their way down, but all static. For many years we’d hoped to hear such a proclamation. We’d encouraged him. I’d introduced him to girls at school. But by the time he’d reached thirty we’d come to the conclusion there was more likelihood of America getting an African American president than of Arny having a girlfriend. We’d all secretly assumed there was something of Sissi in him that he was trying to suppress. I blamed our absent father for his lack of male hormones. We’d all given up.