Jimm Juree 01; Killed at the Whim of a Hat

the only one doing any work. Mair was in charge of the shop, which largely entailed standing at the cash drawer gazing out at the quiet road and chatting with the two or three customers who came in to buy something they probably didn’t need. I suspect they felt sorry for Mair. Everything in stock was in cans, packets, boxes or bottles and some of the labels were written in languages they hadn’t used since King Taksin ruled the country two-hundred-odd years ago. We had nothing fresh, exotic or home-made and, more importantly, nothing you couldn’t buy from Yai Yem’s much bigger shop half a kilometer along the road.
    As the resort manager, Arny was in charge of the five budget bungalows that faced a largely uneventful body of water and the five thatch-roofed tables we playfully called a restaurant. Including the hectic Songkran holiday rush in April, that year we’d averaged two overnight guests and eight diners a week. Currently, our cash cow – no offense to her – was an ornithologist from Khon Kaen University who’d booked our end room for the week. She was studying the migration of hawks on a grant and was attracted to us, not for our five-star service or our luxurious rooms, but because we were so close to a bog which, evidently, the hawks were particularly fond of. I suppose I should be berated for having a fixed image of an ornithologist in my mind. There was nothing pasty, shortsighted, spidery or matronly about our own bird fancier. She was a Thai Indiana Jones type with tight-fitting safari shorts, muscled legs, luscious thick hair and a certain attitude that I admired. I have no idea where she ate or how she spent her day as she was out of her room before sunrise and back after dark. She’d paid in advance and was the nearest thing to an income our resort had experienced since we’d moved in.
    With guests like this to manage, Arny found himself with a lot of free time, so he’d set up a flotsam gym on the beach. He’d improvised with old oil drums and car tires, bamboo poles and rocks. He’d chase crabs and swim till the jellyfish forced him from the water. It was all very sad to watch him roll half coconut trees from one end of the beach to the other because we both knew he wouldn’t be attending any bodybuilding galas for some time, if ever again. After school, teenagers, both boys and girls would sit in clumps at the extremities of the beach where he turned around. They’d smile and be friendly and exchange small talk but it’s hard to know what to say to someone like Arny. I got the feeling my brother was more of an exhibit than a celebrity.
    Granddad Jah was responsible for sitting on the bamboo platform opposite and overseeing our desperate resort. He may have been distracted now and then by passing trucks and motorcycles and other old men who nodded as they passed and whom he ignored. But mainly he sat for hours beneath the banana leaf canopy, wearing one of his wardrobe of coral-white undervests…and he oversaw us. If he was formulating a grand plan for our improvement he never did share it.

Three
“ It’s a time of sorrow and sadness when we lose a loss of life .”
    —GEORGE W. BUSH, WASHINGTON, D.C., DECEMBER 21, 2004
    A day after the discovery of the VW they had the entire vehicle uncovered and they’d ferried the bones to the army hospital in Prajuab. There was talk of the case being taken over by the main station in Lang Suan, the nearest ‘city’ (sorry, I chuckled again). It was only twenty kilometers away but I couldn’t let that happen. This was my case and I wanted it to stay local, within cycling distance. I’d phoned the Pak Nam station four times since that Saturday afternoon, only to be told there’d been no developments in the case and that I should be patient. My patience had expired. I demonstrated good manners and warned them I was coming in to see them on Sunday.
    I arrived at the Pak Nam police station at ten a.m. The building was the usual white, two-story concrete affair with a wide forecourt surrounded by token displays in flower beds: either a humble psychological ploy to calm violent criminals or a sign of the lack of anything else to do. The elderly man at the desk – Sergeant Phoom, he said his name was – beamed with sincere joy when I told him who I was. He was a soft, happy-uncle type with cropped white hair and teeth like rectangles of tapped rubber drying on a line.
    “Constables Ma Yai and Ma Lek told me all about you,” he said.