Jimm Juree 01; Killed at the Whim of a Hat

He was apparently attempting to scrape the pattern off the ceramic. I wondered if he had the same worms as Gogo.
    “There are two avenues,” he said, unexpectedly. Again I was surprised to hear his voice. “One,” he continued, “is when you go to a crime scene and look for what isn’t there, what’s been stolen: knives missing from drawers, computer discs removed. You’ve seen those scenes.”
    Right. Now he was telling me how to look at a crime scene. The only crime scene he’d ever worked involved bent bumpers and squashed truck drivers. I’d attended more crime scenes than he ever would. All right. Respect for the elderly. Humor him.
    “You follow the victim around and make a list of all the things that should be there but aren’t,” he continued. “Then there’s the second avenue. You go to a crime scene and you look for things that are there, but shouldn’t be: footprints would be one example, cigarettes in an ashtray, a forgotten umbrella, that kind of thing. And sometimes, what shouldn’t be there is so obvious you don’t see it.”
    I didn’t know whether this was a general lecture or whether he had something specific in mind.
    “Was there something the police didn’t see at Wat Feuang Fa, Granddad?”
    “There was, Jimm. There was.”
    “And what was that?”
    “A hat.”
    “A hat?”
    “You said Abbot Winai was wearing a hat. It obscured his face.”
    “That’s the way the lieutenant described it to me.”
    “And how many monks have you seen wearing hats?”
    I had to think about it. In the north there were some.
    “The monks wear little woolly beanies all the time up in the mountains,” I said.
    “That’s true. There are those that get away with it. But it’s more for survival. Better than freezing to death. But it’s still against the regulations. You won’t see any monks down here wearing a hat in the daytime, especially not a high ranking abbot.”
    “It was hot, Granddad. And he was old.”
    “It’s hot everywhere, and most abbots are getting on in years. But you don’t see it. And that’s because it’s clearly laid out in the Monastic Code that you can’t wear a hat. You can put up a saffron umbrella, even pull your robe over your head, but a senior abbot who’d reached that level of responsibility would never dream of breaking the rules. There’s no way he’d wear a hat.”
    Granddad took up his bowl and spoon and went off to the kitchen.
    “Thanks, Granddad.”
    I sat on the rattan seat on my veranda, the seat that always creaked rudely as if I weighed eighty kilograms, and I slapped mosquitoes against my bare arms. I told myself a story. “An abbot’s about to go for a walk in the afternoon heat. The sun burning down on him. There happens to be a nice straw hat on a hook so he grabs it. Nobody watching. No harm done. And he strolls off to enjoy the blossoms.” Why complicate something so simple? Mair was a born-again Buddhist; I decided to ask her.
    I walked to the shop. Mair was sitting at the round concrete table out front talking to someone. I could only see the shadow of his back against the shop lights. He was slightly built and wore a cap. Mair saw me coming and said something that made her guest rise quickly and head off along the road into darkness.
    “Who was that?” I asked.
    “A customer,” she said.
    “Mair, you did a three-week intensive meditation course at Wat Ongdoi to make yourself a better Buddhist, and I know for sure that on the door of your cabin, number four on the Top Hot Precepts list, if I remember rightly, was, ‘Abstain from False Speech’.”
    “I’m not lying. It was a customer.”
    “It was Meng the plastic awnings man. Maprao’s own private dick.”
    “He bought a box of matches.”
    “Distortion is just a breed of lying. What did he have to tell you?”
    “Nothing.”
    “Mair?”
    “Really. He said most people have poison of some type or another. It’s too broad a field. We need to narrow it down.”
    “Mair, you’re trying to find out who it was that killed John. What good will that do you? You aren’t going to bring her back to life. And forgiveness is a blessing, or something, isn’t it?”
    “I can forgive. I just need to know who it is I should be forgiving. I think the perpetrator needs that release from guilt.”
    “You want to know who poisoned John so you can tell him John forgives him?”
    “Yes, exactly.”
    I felt one of those Maprao migraines coming on.
    “It’s late, Mair. We