Jimm Juree 01; Killed at the Whim of a Hat

impression he wouldn’t have minded that either.
    “So, you aren’t angry?” I asked.
    “Angry? I’m throbbing with excitement. Batman and Robin have arrived. Whatever will they do next?”
    I wasn’t particularly thrilled with the analogy, especially if I was supposed to be Robin. But Granddad Jah continued to glow, both from the beer and the adulation. He rather spoiled the mood once the bill was paid, by informing me that we were both over the alcoholic limit for safe driving and insisting we walk half a kilometer to the 7-Eleven to get motorcycle taxis home. He ignored my pleas that most of the drivers were addicts or imbeciles and we were safer driving drunk. He then wasted another twenty minutes arguing with the freak circus that he wouldn’t allow them to go anywhere unless they put on helmets. I hadn’t seen a motorcycle helmet in all the nine months we’d been here.
    Eventually, we arrived home with doggy bags of Esarn food for Mair and Arny and a peopley bag of scraps for Gogo. As we pulled up, I saw Mair in front of the shop talking to the same elderly lady I’d seen at the plastic awning detective agency. This, I remembered, was the mother of Maprao’s only known villain: an alliance I felt most uncomfortable about. I paused nearby for a moment but the two women were deep in conversation and seemed not to notice me. I went in search of Arny to give him his lunch but he was nowhere to be found. A family of four, young parents and two toddlers, were sitting in front of one of the cabanas. The door was open but their bags were on the front steps. I’d noticed a Suzuki Caribbean in the car park but I’d assumed its owner was walking on the beach.
    “Excuse me, do you work here?” the father called to me.
    “Kind of.”
    “Hope you don’t mind,” he said, “but we couldn’t find anyone to talk to and the door was open.”
    “Are you staying the night?” I asked. Iwo.
    “No problem. I’ll find a key for you.”
    “We could use a meal.”
    I somehow managed to convince them that our plat du jour was delicious spicy northeastern food and went to heat up our takeaways. I ignored the whining from Gogo when I added the scraps and I was quite pleased with the finished meal. The guests didn’t complain either.
    I called Sissi.
    “iFurn executive line,” she said. “I’m Dr. Monique Dubois. Can I help you?”
    She sometimes used this number for her IKEA II customers. She had a Web company called iFurn. Little i’s and e’s were really big in online sales evidently. She had an iFurn Web site with pictures of her exclusive furniture range which was actually cut and pasted from the IKEA site. The only difference was that her prices were three times theirs. Her slogan was IKEA looks but iFurn quality . She claimed to be the IKEA top end, the stuff they produced before they started cutting corners and downgrading materials. And people fell for it. When she got an order she’d pocket the remittance, rewrite the invoice, and send it to IKEA, paying the catalog price. IKEA dispatched it directly to the customer. The phone line was back-up in case anyone received their package and noticed the discrepancy in the invoice. It rarely happened, but when it did she’d explain that this was the company’s way of reducing the tax and, in turn, lowering the overall cost to the consumer. Her philosophy was that some people desperately wanted to pay too much for what they perceived as quality and were less likely to complain. She’d run this scam for two years. The phone connection was untraceable and the Web site was wired against intrusion. She’d know if anyone tried to shut it down. She was a diva.
    “Hello,” I said. “I was looking for a card table that collapses as soon as you rest your arm on it.”
    “Little sister.”
    “You busy?”
    “The world never sleeps.”
    “Are you getting out to see that world, Sis? Breathing any of that air? Bumping into any of those world citizens on street corners?”
    “We have a rooftop garden. It’s very airy at three or four a.m.”
    “Restaurants? Bars? Bank queues? Crowded shopping centers? Society?”
    “Are you channeling our mother?”
    “I worry about you. What was that movie about the woman who stayed in the house all the time and ate and ate and got bigger and bigger till she filled the room, then she exploded?”
    “Yeah. I remember. It was one of Audrey Hepburn’s best.”
    “Sissi. I think Mair’s done something bad. I’m