The Axe Factor: A Jimm Juree Mystery (Jimm Juree Mysteries) (13 page)

“And what was her cause here?” I asked.

“Oh, I don’t know. She was going on about this and that. She submitted three or four official complaints about unrelated matters. But, by then, I’d already come to expect it.”

“Do you remember specifically what she was complaining about?”

“There was so much: inadequate treatment under the thirty
baht
low income fund, the use of interns with no experience in rural hospitals, no supervision of trainees by qualified doctors. All the things the Health Ministry and we in the field have been pushing for for years.”

“So there wasn’t anything controversial?”

“What do you mean?”

“Anything that might have forced her out.”

Dr. June laughed. It was a silly laugh, all big teeth and hyphenated eyes and a twittering kind of sound through her nose.

“This is medicine,” she said. “Not the military. You don’t get forced out. You get forced in. Placements in the deep provinces you’d sooner avoid. Moral pressures to do the right thing. The inborn guilt of someone who initially chose medicine for all the right, altruistic reasons. When you snare a qualified doctor to work in a place like this, she could be a part-time vampire and she wouldn’t be forced out. Better to have a good doctor who’s a little unstable than no doctor at all. Trust me. Dr. Somluk just left. We didn’t listen to her rants, so she moved on.”

“She didn’t discuss it with you?”

“Not a word. It happens.”

Dr. June looked at her watch for the sixtieth time.

“I really do have a—”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

I stood and
wai
’d her and she
wai
’d me back swiftly and reluctantly.

“Thank you so much for your help,” I said.

She nodded and looked down at a paper in front of her. I walked to the door, but before opening it, I stopped and turned back to her.

“Just one last question,” I said.

She looked at her watch. I wanted to rip it from her wrist and shove it up her nostril.

“Make it quick,” she said.

“Did you know Dr. Somluk was at a conference in Chumphon just before she disappeared?”

“Goodness. There are conferences everywhere. I can’t keep a check of who’s off where. We leave that kind of thing to the discretion of our doctors.”

“So she wouldn’t have needed permission from your office to go?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Do you know anything about that conference? It was at the Novotel last weekend. It was organized by an NGO called the Bonny Baby Group.”

“Oh, they’re a very reputable group. They have seminars all over the south.”

“Dr. Somluk’s name was on the list of affiliates.”

“That’s her business.”

“So was yours.”

She looked down at the paper, then the watch, then the door, but I was standing in front of it.

“Khun Juree,” she said. “Doctors in this country are highly respected, which is as it should be.”

Her southern accent had become more pronounced. It annoyed me that I couldn’t put a town to it.

“And a lot of charitable organizations invite doctors onto their boards,” she said. “If we are confident that the organizations are sincere in their efforts, that their programs will serve to benefit society, we allow our names to be added to the list of affiliates. It doesn’t necessarily mean we are involved.”

“So, you didn’t know that you and Dr. Somluk were both on the list of affiliates of the Bonny Baby Group?”

“It wouldn’t surprise me in the least.”

“But you weren’t there.”

“I rarely attend conferences these days. I spend most of my weekends writing reports and journal papers. The work here at the department is time consuming.”

“She tried to ask a question,” I said.

“Who did?”

“Dr. Somluk. She stood up at the end of a talk and tried to ask the speaker who her sponsors were for her trip. Then some large woman dragged the doctor away from the mic.”

Dr. June laughed but with less girlish silliness, fewer teeth, bigger eyes.

“Again, I am not surprised,” she said. “As I told you, the profession is well acquainted with your doctor friend and her wiles. I wouldn’t be surprised if she was blacklisted in a number of places. I’m sure somebody recognized her and had her removed before she could start in on one of her embarrassing tirades. It can destroy the unity that’s built up over a successful conference to have some maniac stand up and spout her personal grievances.”

“You’re right,” I said. “She sounds like a complete fruit loop.”

Dr. June almost smiled before looking at her watch. It had been an interesting visit, but the most fascinating aspect of it to me was that I’d never given her my surname.

*   *   *

“You do know those wheel things are supposed to go around,” I shouted.

I was on a plastic shower stool, under a beach umbrella, beside the ditch where my Mighty X had come to rest. The welder’s son had kindly taken me to the hospital and brought me back. His name was Geng and he was eleven. A lot of pre-teens drove motorcycles down here.

“We’re getting there,” shouted the welder, who had my truck up on breeze blocks. My phone rang. The name Conrad flashed on the screen. I pressed “Receive.”

“Jimm?” he said.

He always sounded surprised to find me at the end of the phone.

“That’s me,” I said.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m sitting watching them reattach the rear axle of my truck,” I said, before realizing that the comment would fit exactly into his theory that I attracted weirdness.

“Oh, my God,” he said. “Are you all right?”

I was crazy about him. My truck was all broken up. Any other man would have said, “Did you get a quote?” Conrad asks me if I’m all right. My hero.

“I might have damaged my coccyx when my seat suddenly dropped onto the road,” I said, “but apart from that I’m good.”

“Where are you? I’ll come and pick you up.”

“I’m fine. Really. But thanks.”

“I’ve been thinking about you,” he said.

Oh my God. This was just … everything. More than everything. I’d had my one night. My still-around morning. And now here I was getting my “I’ve been thinking about you” phone call. It didn’t get any better than this.

“Who is this, again?” I asked.

He laughed.

“It’s the only man in your life who ever measured your tongue with a tape measure,” he said.

I remembered that. He was amazed at how long my tongue was. “A freak of oral nature,” he’d called it. At the time it hadn’t felt so strange that he’d have a six-meter retractable tape measure beside the bed. It was only on reflection …

“When can I see you again?” he asked.

There had to be some infirmity I hadn’t yet spotted in the man. Some psychological failing. But … who cared? How often does chemistry with manners come along?

“I’m kind of busy,” I told him. “I can probably fit you in around October.”

“I was thinking more this evening.”

“Oh, wait. I’ve had a cancellation. I might be free after all. But I have to cook.”

“Fine. Anything but Thai food.”

“I…?”

“Only joking. If it’s not Thai food, I don’t want it. When can I expect you?”

“What time does your maid go home?”

“You don’t like A?”

Conrad was the type of person who probably wouldn’t have noticed his maid was infatuated with him. He didn’t recognize his own magnetism.

“She’s adorable all the way up to her powdery cheeks. But I need a kitchen to myself.”

“I understand,” he said. “I’ll have her out of here by six.”

*   *   *

It was two thirty by the time the welder insisted the job was done. I made him drive up and down the street a couple of times before I agreed to get in. We played the old “How much? However much you like” to and fro for far too long. I liked the fact that in Hong Kong you’d ask how much and they’d tell you. They might have upped it 40 percent, but at least you had a figure to play with. Down here, the indecision made you want to give him a dollar and drive off. That’d cure him. Instead, I gave him a thousand
baht
. My life was in his hands, after all.

I got home at three. The place was still shut down and empty. I passed an empty dog bowl I didn’t recognize, so I assumed someone had been by to feed the mutts. I had a task to perform before my dinner date. I went to my room and opened my Japanese DNA paternity treat. There was an instruction sheet inside. It was written in Japanese and manga. In fact, a complete imbecile could have understood the cartoons. You put a sample in plastic test tube A and another sample in plastic test tube B. You add the liquid contents of vial C and leave them to soak overnight. (Either that or you take them to the top of Mount Fuji to admire the full moon. The cartoon was esoteric.) Then you add chemical X to both samples, shake them up and use the enclosed eyedroppers to put a dab of each on the enclosed magically treated sheet. If they are a match, the point at which the two dabs overlap will turn black. A child could do it.

Were I a wronged Japanese woman, my first sample would be from my baby. There was no cartoon to tell me how to get a blood sample from the womb, so I had to assume this test only worked on fully birthed babies. I had no baby, so I carefully cut the bloody fingerprint from the threatening note and put it into the liquid that would go into the first test tube. All I needed then was to find something generic from A, the maid; a mustache hair, perhaps, blood spatter from a punch in the nose, a slice of skin. Then I’d be able to compare the DNA. It was almost as simple as a pregnancy test.

My phone.

“Sissi!”

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“DNA paternity test.”

“I think it might be too soon to tell. Give it a few months.”

“No. It’s not that. I’m attempting to match a warning note and Conrad’s maid. She’s got a thing for him, and I’m the femme fatale who’s taken him from her.”

“You bitch.”

For some reason my mind wandered to the dog bowl in front of our shop and the fact I hadn’t seen the animals since I got back.

“Siss, can I get back to you?”

“Certainly. But I do have information for you.”

“About the conference?”

“Yes.”

“That’s great, but I’ve just had a bad feeling.”

“Overuse of MSG?”

“Worse than that. I’ll phone you back.”

I hung up and went to the balcony. It was unusual this close to mealtime that the dogs weren’t clambering around my ankles. I whistled. Nobody came. I banged a spoon on a pot—still no response. Nothing to worry about. They’d probably gone on their beach walk without me. Come across a snake. But, no. Not even tug-of-war with a snake took precedence over food. I walked to the shop. The new bowl was still lying there. I picked it up. It was the largest size you could buy. Pink with a bone motif. And there were words handwritten in Magic Marker around the outside.

I told you to keep off. This will happen to you if you don’t.

The letters got smaller toward the end so they’d fit. The bowl was empty. My dogs—my eat-anything dogs—were missing. I put the bowl to my nose, not sure if I was mistaking new plastic for that bitter smell of poison. My stomach buckled. I called their names. They never came when I called their names, but I thought they might sense the urgency in my voice and oblige me.

I jogged around the huts, calling frantically. The strengthening wind carried my words away. I got on my knees and looked beneath the gazebo tables. I screamed above the growl of the surf for them to stop pissing me about. I’d envisioned it already, individual deaths at the hand of nature—brained by a falling coconut, liver flukes, drowning, kicked by a mad cow—but I’d never considered genocide. Not the annihilation of the entire pack. I’d never confess I was fond of them, but I wouldn’t wish them a slow, painful death. And Gogo had escaped the grim reaper once that week. It didn’t seem fair.

I walked around the back of the coconut shed, and that’s where I found them. The scene was oddly ceremonial. Their bodies lay parallel, like lines of coke. I sat, exhausted, on the old water pump and sighed. This was the result of a troubled mind. Why would she do this to me? To us? Could love really be this cruel? The three dogs looked up at me at the same time, as if they’d received a stage cue. They’d been staring at the dead rat, fixated. As we don’t have CCTV fitted I could only guess how events had unfolded. I wrote it up later as a screenplay for a short, but I’d read how hard it was to work with animal actors—especially rats.

EXT. DAY—BESIDE THE CLOSED SHOP

A bowl of bacon slices wrapped around an unidentified substance sits in the middle of the car park. A motorcycle is driving off in the distance. STICKY, GOGO, and BEER watch the motorcycle, then look to the bowl. STICKY, who has been known to eat entire cowpats, marches up to the bowl, tail wagging.

G
ogo
:
Wait, brother. No.

S
ticky
(
Indignantly
): Why not? It’s bacon. You know how I’ve dreamed for a bowl of bacon?

G
ogo
:
You wouldn’t know pig from lizard. (
She coughs from the exertion of her recent medical traumas.
) This looks suspicious. Beer, you tell him. He never listens to me.

B
eer
(
Who doesn’t give a hoot or a howl either way
): She says it’s suspicious.

S
ticky:
How would she know?

G
ogo
:
It was delivered by a stranger. You know what a stranger is? Someone who hasn’t invested any time or love into our upbringing. If a rasher of bacon looks too good to be true, it’s probably too good to be true.

Sticky pushes his nose against the still-warm fat.

S
ticky:
I’m eating it.

G
ogo
(
With the last of her strength
): Look, just indulge me this once. I’ll make a deal with you. We sit back over here under the tree. In a few minutes the fat rat from the woodpile will get the scent. She’ll come and take a bite. If she finishes that and goes for a second helping, we chase her off and you can have the entire bowl to yourself.