Jimm Juree 01; Killed at the Whim of a Hat

was somebody inside but the Benz was nowhere to be seen. The only thing that made him an unlikely suspect was the fact he was still there. Why stick around once you’ve made your kill?
    The most significant outcome of my inquiries had been an overall feeling of doom for the tourist industry and the Gulf Bay Lovely Resort and Restaurant in particular. If the places of quality couldn’t attract guests, what hope in hell did we have? I took my scaling and gutting buckets and sat beside Granddad Jah. He ignored me, pretending to be more interested in a meter-long monitor lizard ambling along the grass verge. I read that they can grow up to fourteen feet. I’m assured they only eat insects and small rodents but it seems to me, if you’re as big as a truck, you can eat anything you damned well please.
    I was on my third mackerel before I spoke.
    “I could use some help on another case,” I said, as if into thin air.
    “Ask the police,” he said.
    “I did. They’re lost.”
    “That’s a state they should feel familiar with.”
    I mentioned to the hot midday breeze that I’d had a chance to visit the excavation of a VW camper van and went on to describe everything that had resulted from that discovery. By the last fish, I’d arrived at the tail end of the story. He didn’t speak for a very long time and the mackerel was starting to sing off-key in the heat. I was wondering whether the old man had heard me at all. I stood.
    “Sit down,” he said.
    I sat down.
    “You’d need to find the original detective,” he said. “The one that investigated the case of the car hire scam.”
    “I’ve got his name,” I told him. “It’s Waew. He was a captain. He’s retired now.”
    He turned to look at me as if perhaps there was some sliver of hope for me in this world.
    “So, find him,” he said.
    “I did.”
    “And?”
    “He won’t talk to me.”
    “Get your police on it.”
    “He won’t talk to them, either. I believe he said something like, ‘You bunch are just corrupt, evil bastards.’ Then he hung up.”
    I wouldn’t have put my life savings on it but Granddad Jah might just have cracked a smile about then. If only I’d had my camera with me.
    “He sounds all right,” he said.
    “I thought you’d like him. Do you want his address?”
    “All right.”
    “Lunch in half an hour.”
    ♦
    “Mair. Have we found the sinner in our midst?” I asked. “He that shall be forgiven?”
    “Not yet,” she said.
    I was in her cabin and we were hand writing brand-new menus for the restaurant. Our resort was officially empty again following the flight, that afternoon, of our bird lady.
    “You will tell me when you do, won’t you?” I said. “I’m really interested to know…who it is we aren’t going to do anything vindictive to.”
    “I’ll tell you,” she said, absently.
    I watched her stick fish transfers on the corners of the menus. My mother. At high school I’d gone through periods of not liking her. But whereas my classmates were not liking their mothers because they were too much of a presence in their lives, I resented mine because of her absences. When she was home it was as if you were plugged into the world. When she was away you’d sit staring at the empty socket: Granny Noi sitting counting and recounting the banknotes in the shop till, Granddad Jah with his vocabulary of grunts.
    It was probably because of Mair’s absences that I studied so hard. I wasn’t trying to impress her. I was trying to earn whatever qualification it took for me to be out there with her, her personal assistant carrying her bag of tricks like a wise caddy. By the time I was sixteen I knew what I wanted to be. What better way of reaching the horizon than as a journalist? I read all the newspapers, Thai and English, that we sold in the shop. It was the perfect start. I didn’t have to pay for any. I saw myself interviewing my mother, exploring the mysterious depths of her life. Mair, a special feature. My mother, exposed. And I broke into a metaphorical trot to get through those cumbersome study years so I could be the person outside that I already was inside. And I was running so fast that I almost missed the middle-aged lady I passed ambling in the other direction.
    “Mair, is that you?”
    She’d run her race. Done her dash. Her bag of tricks was upended and she had no more passion. Even her stories became gray, as if she could no longer see her life in the Technicolor it once was. I was flying