Jimm Juree 01; Killed at the Whim of a Hat

our course was a weekender. Two days of classes and homework for the weekdays. Most of us were working Monday to Friday so you had twenty mature (said with a straight face) students like me with no social lives getting together at weekends to read out our essays on magical bloody realism in English and being critiqued by our peers. After three years of that, assuming you continued to pay your fees and could fight your way through a final dissertation that neither you nor the lecturers really understood, you ended up with a Master of Arts in Critical English. Stay with me. There is a point to this sidetrack.
    One course was called Public Oration and Oral Improvisation. We called it Pooi for short. It was taught by an old ex-playboy Englishman who still thought he had what it took. He flirted a lot and held in his gut for an hour and a half. It must have been a relief for him to get home and breathe normally. At the beginning of the course he allotted everyone a case study. This came in the form of a famous person who gave a lot of speeches. The point was to select one of his or her speeches, or excerpts from several, and analyze the techniques following a style analysis chart handed out by the lecturer. I was envious of my friend, Ning, because she got Bill Gates and he kept his speeches simple to the point of sometimes dropping his audience into a coma. I was lumbered with George W. Bush. I tried to trade him for Condoleezza Rice. I’d always thought if an ethnic girl with the surname Rice could pull herself out of anonymity, we all could. But nobody wanted George, so for six months I studied the oratory skills of the President of the United States of America. And I hadn’t thought it was possible but Condoleezza was way down the if-this-one-can-make-it…inspiration table compared to George W. The poor man really wasn’t a public speaker and I wondered whether he could make real sentences in his private life. But George was a hit and I got an A for that course.
    Now, that was a very long way around explaining where I’d heard the phrase ‘killed at the whim of a hat’. George was in Washington, D.C., and he’d fallen off the edge of the teleprompter again and he was caught somewhere between ‘on a whim’ and ‘at the drop of a hat’ and ended up with terrorists killing one another ‘at the whim of a hat.” I’d spent a fortnight trying to work out what it meant. But it was the first phrase that came to mind when I heard about the abbot’s orange hat. For some reason, weird as it may seem, I knew that hat had a bearing on the case.
    Every log and shell and homicidal crab was picked out by the big full spotlight in front of me. I sat on the grassy lip where the sea had left off its sand supper last monsoon season. Gogo was beside me, absentmindedly munching at the hair on her haunches. I always got the feeling dogs had seen cats do it and thought it was cool without really grasping the concept. Dogs were all male when it came to cleanliness. It was midnight. I’d considered breaking open one of the wine bottles I’d brought with me from Chiang Mai but while I’d searched through the unopened packing cases for the missing corkscrew the question ‘Why should I?’ began to flash in front of me like a low-battery warning. Was I celebrating the comeback of crime journalist, Jimm Juree, or mourning the demise of my short-lived innocence? Would I be toasting the return of my hard-arsed self or bemoaning her arrival? Or perhaps I was hoping that, wine-drunk on a grayscale beach, I would no longer see those forty-six photographs in color. I thought that big, almost-full saucer in the sky – just a chip off the underside – might help me to think, to have something to tell Arny the next morning. Something more satisfying than:
    “It’s work.”
    But it just hung there and drained me of all my excuses and, for the second time in three days, I cried my eyes out in front of a dog.
    ♦
    I handed over the camera to Major Mana the next morning. I’d exchanged greetings with Sergeant Phoom at the desk and he’d waved me up. Mana was in his office talking on his cell phone. It was something personal judging from how he put his hand over the phone and turned to the window when I appeared in his doorway. He didn’t seem terribly pleased to see me. He finished his conversation and nodded for me to come in. I put the camera in its plastic bag on his desk.
    “What’s that?” he asked.
    “Me, scratching your