The Axe Factor: A Jimm Juree Mystery (Jimm Juree Mysteries) (17 page)

“Did you know he was my father?”

“What?”

“Before Sissi came down and exposed him. Did you know that Captain Kow had a family he’d deserted thirty-four years ago?”

“No.”

“Then I guess you aren’t as close-knit as you think you are. When did he come here?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, how many years has he lived here?”

“He’s always been here. His family’s from here. He went to school here. Apart from those four or five missing years, he hasn’t been away.”

“So he just decided to take a short hiatus, father three children and leave the mother to raise them?”

“It’s really not my business.”

“Don’t you think that’s a bit irresponsible?”

“He’d have his reasons. He’s a good man.”

“He’d have…? Bloody hell. Why couldn’t I have been born a man so I could get my non-accountability license, too? I wish I’d brought Grandad’s gun. Rid the world of two more chauvinists in one…”

Ed turned off the engine.

“Look,” he said.

“What is it?”

Bobbing jauntily on the brine was a large block of polystyrene with a small generator and a green light bulb.

“It’s Kow’s position,” said Ed.

“It’s a block of foam.”

“It’s a fishing method. There’s a fine mesh net under the float. The fish are attracted to the light and get tangled in the net. The sea used to be peppered with them until they were banned. It’s still not legal, but it beats sitting out here night after night getting pummeled by the surf. You just sail out when it’s calm and see what you’ve collected.”

“So the light I’ve been seeing the past two nights…?”

“Was this.”

“So where…?”

“Your guess is as good as mine, Jimm.”

UNPOSTED BLOG ENTRY 4

(found two weeks too late)

I think this weekend would be as good a time as any. She’s in awe of me. She needs a figurehead in her life. She’d probably do anything I told her right now. I need time to prepare. To establish an alibi. I’m going to do it right this time. The first dismemberment was too rushed. This one I’ll savor. Why did it take me so long to discover this feeling?

C.C.

11.

Kindly Watch Your Hands Before or After Using Computer

(java coffee shop)

While Arny was off in search of Mair and Captain Kow’s boat, I was back staring at the DNA equipment, which was a little bit like staring at a chair, wondering who might sit in it some day. I was thinking about Conrad and Ed and how poorly the latter stacked up against the former. There was no competition really, which made me wonder why I was thinking about Ed at all. I wondered what Conrad might be doing at that moment. Wondered if I’d seem too keen if I phoned him and invited him down to the Gulf Bay Lovely Resort. Give him mildew and bedbug experiences he wouldn’t get in his glass castle on the bluff.

And the phone rang.

And it was him.

“I miss you” was the first thing he said. I couldn’t remember how much time had passed since anyone had said that to me. I mean, anyone who wasn’t obliged to say it due to family ties. He was such a romantic.

“Oh, Steven, I miss you too,” I said.

“Who is this Steven?” he said. “Bring him to me.”

“I’ll organize a joust,” I said.

“How on earth would you know a word like ‘joust’?”

“
A Knight’s Tale
. Heath Ledger. And they say there’s nothing to be learned from cinema and TV.”

“You really are remarkable, in so many ways. What are you doing on Saturday?”

“Well, there’s the ladies’ darts tournament.”

“Do you feel like a drive and a night out?”

“With you?”

“Yes, of course with me.”

“Where are we going?”

“It’s a surprise. But I promise you it’s something you’ll never forget. I’ll be away in Bangkok for a few days, but I’ll give you a call on Friday to confirm the details. I wish I could be with you sooner.”

“Me too,” I said, and I meant it. Although I’d told Ed otherwise, I knew one lunch and two nights of satisfying sex did not make a relationship. But they were a lot closer to it than anything else I’d been through in recent history. I tried to force images of attending crime-writing conferences and book readings out of my mind. My hand on the crook of his elbow as we chatted amiably with Salman Rushdie. But those past few days had infused me with confidence. I was better than I’d given myself credit for. That alone was worth the price of admission to the “other woman” stable. Who cared what Ed and Grandad and half the damned province thought? I wanted to write Conrad’s name in fancy letters on my school exercise book. Put his photo in my underwear drawer. Write him little rhyming sonnets. It was a really strong “like.”

*   *   *

I went to see Da for my rabies shot and to confirm that Dr. Somluk hadn’t returned. The skinny nurse seemed a lot chirpier than she had been during my previous visits. I asked her what she was smiling about.

“Gogo’s talking about getting engaged.”

“Wow. Now that’s serious.”

Actually, talking about getting engaged was just like talking about world peace. Much easier than actually doing it.

“So tell me about him,” I said.

“No, Jimm. I wish I could. But this is a small town. I know what it’s like here. I don’t want everyone knowing my business. Especially if it doesn’t work out.”

Romance had steadied Da’s hand. I hardly felt the shot. We talked about Dr. Somluk, and I told her all the news I’d gathered from my meeting with Dr. June and the conference.

“Any idea why she would have singled out the pediatrician from Bangkok at the conference?” I asked.

“Do you know what subject she was speaking on?”

“Something about breasts being a figment of our imagination, which in my case…”

“Ah, well. That’s why,” said Da. “Breastfeeding was one of the doctor’s pet subjects. It wouldn’t surprise me if the Bangkok woman was encouraging mothers to shift over to formula.”

“See? I still don’t get this. If formula’s as healthy as they say, why shouldn’t they switch?”

“Right. Dr. Somluk’s argument was that formula’s a poor substitute for breastfeeding, but the company promotes it as a healthy alternative. It’s cleaner, they say. Easier to use. It turns your kid into some preschool genius. She agreed there were times it was necessary if the mother can’t breastfeed for any reason, but basically it’s only healthy in the same way that vitamins are healthy. No doctor’s going to recommend people give up food and live on vitamins.”

“So you’re saying that mothers aren’t using formula as a supplement.”

“We’re in the countryside. Mums see the healthy chubby babies on TV, and they start thinking they’ve done their babies wrong by giving them breast milk. Formula babies do get fat faster, but big isn’t necessarily a positive thing. The doctor said that these babies are more likely to become obese when they get older. But the companies convince mothers that suckling is old-fashioned. You never see the high society divas on TV giving babies the nipple. Mothers figure the more formula they give, the more healthy, happy and smart their babies will be. So they spend money they haven’t got on the products. Then, when the money runs out, they water down the formula.”

“And babies are getting sick?”

“The doctor had all the figures. She said that twenty-something percent of babies that didn’t get breastfed between one and twelve months were toast. She might have phrased that a different way, mind you. No antibodies in formula, you see, so no natural ability to fight diseases. She said that worldwide, optimal breastfeeding up to two years of age would prevent over a million deaths a year. Then there were the stats on child deaths in the region due to mothers confusing the packaging on formula and coffee creamer.”

“And where does she keep her figures?”

“On her laptop. In her room, with her stuff.”

“She left it behind?”

“She left everything. I got another text yesterday saying she’d come by to pick it up later.”

“She texted you?”

“Telling me not to worry about her. That’s the third time.”

“That’s weird. She can text, but she can’t talk? Can I look at her things?”

“OK.”

We walked to a low building with a corrugated roof behind the main complex. Dr. Somluk’s room was closed and padlocked.

“Has anyone been here since she left?” I asked.

“Only the policeman, as far as I know.”

“Tall? Gay?”

“That’s the one. The way he was dressed, I didn’t believe he was a policeman. I asked him to show me some ID. He whipped out his Thai Savings Bank ATM card.”

“And that got him into this room?”

“He said he was a friend of yours.”

“I’ll have to get him to stop doing that.”

Da found the room key on a ring of twenty or so similar keys and opened the padlock. The room was sparse and tiny. There was one small bed and a foldable plastic closet with a zip door. In my mind there were two types of doctors: those who died of malaria working for the natives and those that drove Mercedes and had air-conditioned toilets. This was a jungle doctor. I unzipped the closet. Her clothes were piled in two neat stacks. Hanging from loops were two white coats and a funeral dress. Below were two pairs of shoes, one black, one white, a small selection of books and a laptop. I took out the books and the computer, which didn’t seem to have a lead. I hoped there’d be enough power in the battery to show me what was stored there. I turned it on and thumbed through the books while I was waiting. They were all medical apart from one which was titled
Advertising Practices in the Twenty-first Century
.

“This is all she has?” I asked.

“I guess.”

“No TV. What did she do in the evenings?”

“I don’t know. I went back to my room in the village as soon as the clinic closed. There’s a TV in the main building. She might have watched that, although I never saw the lights on over there if I passed by at night. She stayed here all the time.”

“Anyone living in the other rooms?”

“No. Just her.”

“Did you ever see her using this laptop?”

“Yeah. All the time. She had a lot of downtime.”

“Do you recall seeing a little rectangular gadget sticking out of the side of it?”

“Do you mean a dongle?”

Once Sissi had taught me how to use a dongle, I thought it would be very cool to spread the word to the locals. “White man in big city, he make big magic. Small gadget put in computer. Pick up cell-phone signal.” But they all reacted with “You mean a dongle?” as if I were the last person to have heard of one. And they’d add insult to injury by saying, “We had one last year, but we upgraded to MiFi.”

“Yeah, a dongle,” I said.

“She was online, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Thanks.”

The computer sang its annoying, “New York, New York” ditty, and the screen came to life. I went digging. The desktop had no files saved for easy reference. “My documents” was empty. C drive was empty. The machine might as well have been straight from the shop.

“It’s been wiped,” I said.

“I know,” said Da, who sat on the bed behind me looking over my shoulder.

“How do you know?”

“Your policeman checked it. In fact, he asked all the same questions you just did.”

“Well, thanks for that information. What else did he ask?”

“If anyone else had a key to this room.”

“And you said…?”

“Just me and Dr. Somluk. And he said somebody could easily have taken her key when she was abducted and come here in the dead of night and removed any evidence she had stored away.”

“Right. Anything else?”

“He asked if she had an external hard drive or access to another computer, and I said I’d seen her on the clinic’s desktop computer from time to time.”

“You know you could have saved us a trip to this room if you’d told me all this in the beginning.”

“Sorry.”

“And I’m assuming you went to the clinic’s computer, and he turned it on and that was empty too.”

“Right.”

“And he went home.”

“No, I think he said he was heading back to the bar.”

“One more honest policeman. I suppose I’d better stay faithful to the joint investigation and take a look at that computer too.”

We returned to the surgery, where a very large mother was sitting patiently beside a red-welted child. I counted some thirty stings on him.

“Why isn’t he crying?” I asked the mother.

“
Bai dteui
,” she said. It was a local version of betel leaves that slowed down reaction time and numbed the senses.

“Hornets?” Da asked. The mother nodded.

“He was up a tree and knocked it down by accident,” she said. “He would of got bitten worse if he hadn’t fell out the tree.”

“How did you get here?” said Da, opening the medicine cabinet.

“Motorcycle.”

“OK. I’m allowed to give him an oral dose of antihistamine,” said Da. “Then we rush him down to the bike, and you ride as fast as you can to Pak Nam hospital. Take him straight into Emergency.”

“All right,” said the mother, who had apparently chewed a few leaves herself.

After the shot, Da and the mother raced the boy downstairs. I turned on the clinic computer and found nothing but government training programs and reference material. It was a nice machine, a Dell Optiplex; Thailand, with its ex-communications tsar PM, was big at dropping lumps of IT here and there for show without explaining how they might be best utilized. It was not online and apparently never had been, which posed an interesting question. If Dr. Somluk had her own computer and was online, why would she bother with the desktop at all? And the answer was pretty damned obvious.

Nurse Da returned from her race, shaking her head.

“See?” she said. “I could have fixed that myself. We’ve got all the right drugs here, but I’m just a nurse. There are restrictions on what I’m allowed to do, which include saving a patient’s life. I’ve got a cupboard full of adrenaline up here that would work instantaneously. But I’d be fired if I gave him a shot. That’s why we have to have a doctor here. Then, if she screws up and the patient dies, the clinic has insurance cover. They might as well just employ a traffic cop to redirect emergencies from here to Pak Nam.”