Colin Cotterill - Killed at the Whim of a Hat

“Mair, I — ”

“But we gave it a good shot. Nine months is something to be proud of. I’m sure Sissi will be pleased to have us back.”

It was that easy. We could all go home and be happy again. Granddad Jah to his car spotting. Arny to his asexual body shop. Me to my desk beside the head crime reporter who always promised to die, one drink at a time, but never did. And Mair to…

“What are you doing here, Mair?” I asked.

“Doing?”

“Yeah. And don’t lie to me. It’s humiliating. I don’t like it. What do you do every night with your black get-up and your pest killer and your beach creeping?”

She was just about to slide into her Titanic smile but I suppose she realized the gig was up. She took me by the hand and massaged my knuckles with her thumb.

“We’re haunting a man,” she said. I held in my breath and waited. “The man who killed John. I found out who it was. The son of Auntie Summorn. He’s a nasty man, a drunk, a bully. He carries a gun and threatens people. My private detective knew who’d poisoned my dog straightaway. It wasn’t hard to work out how far John had walked before the poison took effect. And the man had killed countless other dogs who’d worried his precious chickens.

“I had a meeting with the owners of the other dogs he’d killed. They were all angry but the police do nothing about it. They say everyone should keep their hounds tied up. It’s our fault, they say. But, child, look at this place. How can you keep a dog chained with all this beautiful nature around? Our dogs were all well fed. They didn’t chase chickens because they were hungry. It was just a game to them. They played with the chicks, annoyed them a little. And his chickens weren’t penned. He thought they had a right to run wherever they liked but the dogs couldn’t.

“The people here were too polite or afraid to confront the thug with their suspicions. They talked to his mother but she’d long since lost control over her son. In fact she was afraid of him too. He lives in a cabin behind her house. He doesn’t work. He steals. He extorts money with threats. He’s a bad piece of work, Jimm. At our meeting we decided we should haunt him with the spirits of all the animals he’s killed. He’s a drunkard so it wasn’t so difficult to invade his dreams. At night, the voices of the dogs would come to him. Their shadows would pass his window but when he ran to the door there would be nothing there. Empty bags of pest killer that he thought he’d destroyed would return every morning on his doorstep. And there would be the howls, the incessant all-night howls keeping him awake. He’d walk around the hut with his gun but there would be no dogs, yet when he went back to bed, the howls would continue. He hasn’t slept for three nights.

“Last night he didn’t drink any alcohol. This morning he went to Kor Kow temple to make an offering to Jao Mair Guan Im, the Chinese goddess of mercy. When he came back home he went to his mother and told her he’s being haunted and asked her what he should do. She reported back to us. She told us in another day or two he should be broken completely.”

Mair had a smile on her face that wasn’t the old brand. It was fresh and alive and real. It was the smile I’d seen on Mayuri’s face that lunchtime: young and mischievous. It was the smile another Mair had projected to us little folk to illuminate tales. It was evidence that her embers were still burning.

I walked back to room two and thanked the young father for his offer, but told him my mother had refused to sell at any price. The storm clouds had lingered briefly overhead, then labored on toward Burma without shedding a tear.

Granddad Jah was walking along the sand with his head bowed and his shoulders hunched. I caught up with him.

“Sorry we didn’t show you before,” I said.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“What do you think?”

“I think there’s much more to it. I apologize to the nun. It wasn’t her. This was, I don’t know, psychotic. I’ve never seen anything like it. It wasn’t a hit or a revenge killing. The photographs weren’t merely a record. If you were going to document a killing like this, you’d video it. You’d film the whole thing. Then you wouldn’t miss anything.”

“With modern equipment you can stop at any frame and print it out,” I said. “The quality’s almost as good as a still camera.”

“Then the expensive still camera is relevant somehow. It was as if she or he wanted individual works of art to show how clever they were. Wanted to show off.”

“A sort of performance,” I said.

I thought about the colors. They’d mesmerized me from the moment I’d first looked at the photos. Colors. Then the image of luminous green overalls seeped into my mind, facedown in an unfinished mosaic pool on a raft of blood. Orange hat and all. I took out my cell phone and pressed an old number.

“iFurn executive line. I’m Dr. Monique — ”

“Siss, it’s me. Listen, can you get back to Yoshi?”

“Toshi.”

“Toshi, right. Ask him if there were any suspects for the hotel murder in Guam, the guy who landed in the swimming pool.”

“Are you suddenly taking me seriously?”

“I’ve always taken you seriously, pee . And, while you’re at it, can you ask your alcoholic detective in California for more details about the weirdo who photographed road-kill? Ask him if the party hats were orange.”

“I might even have another one for you.”

“Another what?”

“Orange hat murder. I got a message from Taiwan. A skinny Chinese inspector. I hope he didn’t doctor his profile photograph ‘cause if he did his real self must be hideous. He vaguely recalled a knifing at an aviary. They didn’t ever catch the killer. The peculiar thing was that she, the victim, was wearing an orange People First Party election rally hat, but she was a staunch Kuomintang , and their party color is blue. Originally they thought it was a political killing but nobody could see what was to be gained by it. She was an aviary worker. She cleaned up parrot shit. So, the case vanished into the dead files.”

Aviary. Exotic birds. Orange hat. Color.

“OK. Include that in the sweep,” I said. “I’ll take anything with orange hats and colorful locations. I’ve got a very bad feeling this is all connected somehow.”

“I could be the hottest one-legged Russian on Police Beat if we solve this one.”

“You can’t tell anyone anything. This is all still in the realm of the ridiculous. But let me know as soon as you get anything. There’s a nun in a greasy cell in Bangkok surrounded by tomboys with tattoos and we’ve got to get her out.”

“Will do. Over and out.”

We were walking back toward the shop, me and Granddad Jah. Kow, the squid boat captain, was across the street dispensing fishballs from his side car.

“Have you heard?” he called.

“I never hear anything,” I said, even though it was no longer true.

“Abbot killed up at Wat Feuang Fa. Some nun gutted him.”

How did he do it? He fished in the empty sea at night and drove around on his motorcycle in the day. How did he one-up the world on news? So much for the media blackout. If Captain Kow knew, it wouldn’t be long before every newspaper in the country heard. I was in a tough spot. I had the bulk of my story written but it didn’t have an ending yet. I’d left blanks for a lot of police quotations I could harvest at the last minute, and I’d done my best to avoid accusing my nun. I knew the other rags wouldn’t be so delicate. No, I wouldn’t send anything yet. I hoped the blackout pressure on the newspapers was heavy enough to keep the story off the front page for at least twenty-four hours. But, by then, I had to have it all sorted out. This was my story.