Colin Cotterill - Killed at the Whim of a Hat

On the drive home I was thinking about the ornithologist who’d spent a week in our end room and checked out a day early. I also considered our local postman’s wife, the noodle lady and forty-odd other local women who fitted or could be decorated to fit the description of the killer from Hong Kong, Ming Xi Wu. And I thought about my nun and wondered whether anyone would take the driver’s statement seriously. It didn’t make any sense at all to consider her a suspect. But it was only by seeing the photos that anyone else might understand. I was afraid we’d have to give them up. My thoughts were interrupted by the jaunty Swedish tone of my cell phone. It was Chompu.

“Was that your doing?” he asked.

“What’s that?”

“Sergeant Phoom’s amnesia with regard to the telephone number.”

“Word gets around fast.”

“The major had me trace it. We still had some mileage left on our old warrant with the phone company. The caller had left a return number so we didn’t think they’d be directly connected to the crime. We were right. It was the number of a business service center called, uRinguist.”

“What’s that got to do with a missing camera?”

“Well, I haven’t actually called the number yet, but I looked up their Web site. It appears they do a thriving trade in translations and interpreting. A business person arrives from overseas and needs to send a message to, say, a Thai factory owner. He calls uRinguist and leaves a message in his own language whence it’s translated into Thai. A native Thai speaker then calls the factory owner ostensibly passing on the message as the visitor’s personal assistant. If there’s a reply, the process reverses itself and the visiting business person receives the reply in his or her own language. It gives the visitor some added status and a little class. It’s one of those huge ideas everyone wishes they’d thought of.”

“So, you’re saying Sergeant Phoom was called by a service?”

“Yes. They just read the message. ‘Hello, I’m calling on behalf of…’ et cetera.”

“And he called back to the service.”

“So it would seem. They translated the reply and probably sent a text message to the killer in her own language telling her the camera was on its way to Lang Suan. It was the moment she’d been waiting for all this time. But I’m afraid I’m going to have to make googoo eyes at the judge again to get into the uRinguist records. It’s a confidential service. And all that will have to wait till the morning ‘cause no self-respecting judge works on a Sunday. And I don’t even have a client’s name to give him.”

“The Hong Kong connection was false?”

“Surprise, surprise. None of the details sent to the rental company checked out. We have no idea what her real name is, but we do know something about her.”

“Shock me.”

“uRinguist doesn’t have Chinese interpreters. It only operates in three languages, Thai, English…and Japanese.”

“Mika Mikata.”

“That’s not a really southern Californian name, is it?” I said. “Perhaps it’s Mexican?”

“It’s Japanese.”

I could tell Sissi was stressed when she couldn’t be bothered to get my jokes. Best stay serious on days such as this.

“And what was she doing in the States?”

“It was an East-West Center arts council grant. She had a year to pursue her artistic bent.”

“Which was photographing roadkill?”

“Dressed roadkill. Sunglasses. Bermuda shorts. Little waistcoats.”

“And hats?”

“And party hats — colored ones.”

“Would have made nice postcards: Even the roadkill parties in California .”

“She had an exhibition of her photos.”

“And that’s what got your drunk detective on the case?”

“Nope. Evidently, in the States, roadkill has no rights. You can dress it up any way you like. She hadn’t broken any laws. People were outraged but you know how it is in the arts; the more controversial you are, the more famous you become. One high class magazine called her ‘the Caligula of on-the-edge photography’.”

“So where did the red-nosed policeman come in?”

“His name’s Gerry Moore. There were complaints that some of her roadkill wasn’t quite dead when she started dressing them up.”

“Oh, yuck.”

“One complainant specifically accused her of running over her cat on her motorcycle. When the owner ran out into the street to see what all the squealing was about, she found Mika fastening a pink tutu around dying Fluffy.”

“Did she do time?”

“We’re talking Los Angeles in the eighties here. Animal cruelty wasn’t high on the list of crime investigation. She was fined a couple of times but continued to gain notoriety from her slide show exhibitions.”

“And then she vanished?”

“No. On the contrary. She blossomed. She became a celebrity. She has an enormous cult following still. She’s got her own bilingual Web site and you’ll never guess what she calls it.”

“If it’s got the word ‘orange’ or ‘hat’ in it she’s mine.”

“Dressed to Kill.”

“You aren’t serious.”

“Deadly. There are quotations on there from famous artists calling her a genius and a guru. Andy Warhol said, ‘She has a visual grasp of death so vivid it makes you wonder whether she’s been there.’ Her site gets twelve thousand hits a day.”

“You’ve seen it?”

“It’s all there; the old nostalgic roadkill period with her doing V signs behind prostrated elk, crows in tiaras splattered across windscreens, upended coyotes in pale blue baby booties. Then there’s the less obviously dead roadkill pictures. Is the possum in headphones perhaps looking at the camera? Isn’t that a slight blur of movement from the snake in a stocking? I have to admit it all makes spectacular yet stomach-curdling photography. But then we get to the humans.”

“Oh, don’t tell me.”

“I don’t know how. Really I don’t. But she got access to morgues. Bodies laid out on their trays in bobble hats with streamers in their mouths.”

“No.”

“Striped football socks, boxing gloves — cross-dressing.”

“That’s got to be illegal.”

“Unless someone recognizes a near and dear one in a Madonna cone bra she could always claim it was set up, all done with actors.”

“But you think different?”

“I’ve seen actors die in TV dramas all the time, even ones who didn’t intend to. I have a nose for bad acting. These were definitely dead bodies.”

I’d read everything there was to read on criminology in Thai and English. I’d studied all the cases — the famous murders, the notorious serial killers — and one point that cropped up often was that the killers of people often began their careers by practicing on animals. Mika Mikata had started her apprenticeship in the public eye and been encouraged. She’d progressed with adoration through all the stages, and I knew there was only one more level. I knew Mika Mikata was either a potential or a practiced murderer. But there was no connection between her and our slain abbot and I could think of absolutely no reason why she’d come to our little nowhere village to do her nefarious deeds.

“Is that as far as the site goes?” I asked. “Cadavers?”

“There are three galleries. There’s the free White Gallery which is all mostly weird but innocent stuff. Then there’s the pay-to-view Black Gallery which wasn’t that hard to get into. That’s where I found the roadkill and the morgue pictures. But then there’s a members-only Orange Gallery.”