Jimm Juree 01; Killed at the Whim of a Hat

her.”
    “What? How much, exactly?”
    “Twenty bags.”
    ♦
    I decided not to ride back home right away. I needed a break from intrigue. My mind was out of practice. The nearest thing to a crime I’d experienced since we dropped down here was the kidnapping of our brand-new red garbage bin from the front of the shop one night in April. The case hadn’t even made it as far as the police station. The neighborhood council had been so devastated that they’d set up a vigilante team. Bless them, they’d found the bin at a small peripatetic fishing community of north-easterners who were using it to ice their catches. The head of our council fined them in lieu of arrest, our bin was returned and we had free squid for a month. It had been an impressive display of local support but hardly front page Thai Rat news.
    Now, my out-of-shape intellect was having to juggle buried hippies and stabbed abbots and battered policemen, and grand television larceny…and crazy, revenge-seeking mothers. All this on top of my cooking, gardening, and chicken feeding duties. I parked the bicycle out of view from the road under a sprawling deer’s ears tree and sat on a block of polystyrene. In the monsoons, the Gulf spewed up so much of the stuff, some mornings the beach looked like the frozen coastline of Alaska. But we can all rest assured that, thanks to man’s inventiveness, that same indestructible polystyrene will be washed up on other beaches for many decades to come. Why did I always get distracted by issues when there was a life to live here?
    I needed that moment. I’d seen it often in the cinema. The weathered old cop, mired in a case of unspeakable horror, drops everything and takes his rifle and his case files off to a cabin deep in the woods where nature has lain unchanged for thousands of years. And after emerging from a week-long affair with a case of rye, the answer comes to him. “It was the twin brother suffering from amnesia that done it.” That was the moment of clarity I craved. I called to the trees, to the ferns, to the god of polystyrene for an answer. The cell phone in my back pocket rang. I was impressed. Mother nature had gone high tech. I pressed the green phone icon.
    “Jimm speaking.”
    “Hello, little sister.”
    “Sissi?”
    “Wachadoin?”
    “I’m in a jungle retreat cut off from all forms of communication.”
    “All right then. I won’t keep you long. I’ve been reading the personal e-mails of a number of senior members of the Sangka .”
    “Do you feel okay about that?”
    “I checked. There’s nothing about hacking in the precepts. It doesn’t count as a sin.”
    “Then tell me all.”
    “Your abbot, the live one, he’s got a relative in high places.”
    “Well, that might explain the media blackout. Would this relative be a leading light in the current board games in Bangkok by any chance?”
    “Right up there between the bishop and the rook.”
    “OK. So it would be very helpful if this relative in saffron wasn’t accused of stabbing another monk to death at this particular time.”
    “Any other time and nobody would say a thing.”
    “I get it.”
    “It would be very, very convenient if the investigators could produce another suspect in a hurry.”
    “Would a nun do?”
    “Ah, so your mind’s already there. There’s been some research commissioned on your nun. An agency was hired to dig for dirt.”
    “I’m not sure I really want to hear this.”
    “She was a singer.”
    Lot of implications there.
    “Nightclub?”
    “No. Molum . Thai country. Quite a following, evidently. Then one day she shook off the spotlights and announced she was leaving the profession. The record people tried to sue her, but she was outta there.”
    “Did she give a reason?”
    “Nope. And six months later she was hairless and didn’t have to worry about the colors running in her washing machine anymore.”
    “When was that?”
    “Thirty-two years ago.”
    “She’s been a nun for thirty-two years?”
    “In fourteen different provinces.”
    “Ooh, that’s a lot of walking.”
    “It is. But, at this point, let me take you back to a time when Sister Bia was just flat-chested Nong Bia, a high-school student in a little village in Burirum. In her class was a young fellow called Kem.”
    “Abbot Kem?”
    “Don’t spoil the story.”
    “They’re about the same age? I don’t believe it. He looks twenty years older.”
    “It appears he picked up the odd skin-ravaging disease