The Merry Misogynist

Civilai about his morning.
 
    All Siri wanted to do after lunch was go home and sleep, but he’d arranged to meet Inspector Phosy at the morgue. Saturday was officially a half day; so when he returned, Dtui and Mr Geung had already left. He unlocked the door and went directly to the cutting room. He unfastened the freezer and pulled out the drawer. His beautiful Madonna was wrapped in a blue plastic sheet that he rolled down as far as her neck. He took a step back and looked at her pale mask of a face. She had been so lovely. What had led to this? Why could he not rub some consecrated sticks together and summon her spirit? Why was his supernatural power so ineffective when he could most make use of it? One or two answers from the beyond and he’d have the bastard who did this. He hated his own psychic impotence every bit as much as he hated the maniac who had erased this beauty’s life and stolen her dignity.
    “She must have been very pretty.”
    Siri hadn’t heard Phosy arrive. The inspector – upright, middle-aged, and muscular – looked none the worse for his seven months of marriage to Nurse Dtui. He ate like a horse, but it melted off. He had raven black hair that Dtui assured everyone didn’t come from a bottle, and a keen, curious face.
    “Did Dtui tell you everything?” Siri asked, forgetting his greeting manners.
    “Yes, she was home for lunch. She wanted me to tell you she was sorry for – ”
    “I understand. Do you have any idea who’ll be handling this case? I want to be involved.”
    “You already are,” Phosy told him. “It’s me.”
    “I thought you only handled political issues these days.”
    “It was Comrade Surachai’s idea. He’s the committee member who rode in with her this morning. He knew about me from Kham, my old boss. Surachai has some clout with my chief. The folks up at Vang Vieng are frightened there might be a killer on the loose. So let’s get to it.”
    Siri was delighted. He’d worked with Phosy on a number of cases; he thought they made a splendid team. Siri had been ramrodded into the coroner’s job, but it did give him the opportunity to vent his detective proclivities. As a penniless young medical-school student in Paris he had been deprived of the type of raunchy entertainment other men his age sought. Instead, he’d found solace in the two old-franc cinema halls and in libraries where Maurice LeBlanc, Gaston Leroux, and Stanislas-Andre Steeman took him on noir journeys through the nettle-strewn undergrowth of the criminal world. His hero, Inspector Maigret, had convinced him that there could be no better career than that of solving crimes and putting blackguards behind bars.
    There hadn’t been much detecting to be done in the jungles of Vietnam and northern Laos in his army days; so his dream, like most of the dreams men harbour, had turned to snuff and been huffed away by history. Until now.
    “Where do we start?” Phosy asked, a question every closet member of the sûreté de police yearns to hear. Although brilliant in his own way, Phosy never pretended to be anything he wasn’t. He knew his limitations.
    “You already have a picture of the girl?” Siri asked, although he knew Phosy’s subordinate, Sergeant Sihot, had arrived that morning to meet the body and taken a Polaroid instant photograph. The camera was one of the police department’s latest crime-fighting tools.
    “Sihot went back with the cadre to Vang Vieng. He’ll show the picture around and try to get an identification.”
    “Good.” Siri nodded. “Then I suggest we look at the pestle.”
    Rinsed clean now and tagged, the object sat innocently on a shelf above the dissection table.
    “It’s not your common or garden variety,” Phosy noticed, weighing the heavy, blunt tool in his hand. “Unusual size; somewhere between a cooking implement and a medicine crusher.”
    “Black stone. Looks expensive,” Siri agreed.
    “I’ll have someone show it around, too, and see what we can come up with. Does the body tell us anything?”
    Siri walked to the corpse and pulled back the plastic wrapping. He held up the callused fingers and indicated the sunburned ankles. He and Phosy ping-ponged ideas back and forth for almost an hour but still they were unable to come up with anything plausible. The state of the corpse left them both baffled.
∗
    Dtui usually put her foot firmly down on any plans her husband might have to work on the weekend, but this case had become