The Axe Factor: A Jimm Juree Mystery (Jimm Juree Mysteries) (19 page)

“Oh, say this isn’t happening,” said Grandad.

“I didn’t want him around after three years, you see?” said Mair. “And he was really itching to get back to his sea and his squids. So it worked out quite well. You were his life experience—like Peace Crops. He took odd jobs in Chiang Mai, mostly laboring, just to keep himself from getting bored. Producing children isn’t exactly an occupation, you see. Not for a man. Three ten-second spurts at the most. But I confess I did insist on a lot of practice. And we needed him around for signing documents and the like.”

I remember being speechless just four times in my life but never like this, with my mouth open and my eyes bulging like an ornamental goldfish.

“Where did you get all this … this procurement money from?” asked Grandad.

“Oh, he wasn’t that expensive,” said Mair, the way you’d discuss a secondhand bicycle. “And I’d put away quite a bit from when I was selling marijuana at the university.”

“You what?” said Grandad.

“Don’t worry, Father. They still sold it at country markets back then. It wasn’t actually illegal. And I only dealt to students. NO CHANCE of undercover cops spoiling that gig.”

Arny and I put our heads in our hands, and the little screen Sissi was doing the same in Chiang Mai. Mair just rattled on as if she wasn’t unleashing the dragons.

“And you all had a legal father without the negatives,” she said. “When it was all over, we had one last night of passion, I took him to the train station on my bicycle … actually he pedaled us there and I pedaled back alone. And I thought that was that. Everything had gone so smoothly.

“But then he started to write. That really wasn’t part of the deal. I supposed he must have jotted down the address from the postal box, and once a month I’d get a few lines telling me about Maprao and asking after you lot. I didn’t want to encourage him, so I didn’t reply.”

“What, never?” Sissi shouted.

“Not for the first twenty years,” she said.

I found my voice.

“And you kept writing, Captain Kow?” I asked.

“Every month. Regular as clockwork,” he said and smiled so wide I could see his tonsils through the gap.

“Why?” asked Arny.

The captain leaned back on his chair, almost buckling the plastic legs. He looked at us all in turn with an expression of … I suppose it was pride.

“Sometime in those three years I was up there in the north, I fell in love with your mother,” he said. “I knew she didn’t want me in her life, but, well, it’s like when you’ve got a big fish on a fragile line. You can’t give it one big yank ’cause you know it’ll snap. So you tug gently and often and it tires the fish out.”

He grinned and I had a ghost image of those beautiful missing teeth.

“Isn’t that romantic?” said Mair. “He tugged on me till I was completely tuckered out. The hook bloody inside my mouth to the point that I could only ingest passing plankton, because I couldn’t chew on say, mackerel or sandfish. But whales … I mean look how big they grow on tiny little water vermin. If I’d been—”

“Mair!” Sissi shouted. “Enough with the fish.”

“No need to shout,” said Mair.

“Go on,” I told her.

“It was the day Arny finished high school,” she said, “and started his physical trainer’s course. I felt … I felt that in your own unique ways, you had excelled. I had produced three remarkable children. Not counting steroids, none of you were on drugs. No criminal records. You were all independent and so not mainstream, it made me cry with pride. So I wrote to Kow to let him know. It was rather a long letter.”

“One hundred and thirty-four pages,” said Kow. “A4.”

“Well, I had a lot to tell him,” said Mair. “Sissi, your rise in show business and leanings toward severing your links to manhood. Jimm and your remarkable intelligence and language skills. Arny’s magnificent body. I wanted Kow to see how beautiful you’d all turned out. So I sent photos.”

“Two hundred and sixty-one,” said the captain. “Taken from the day I left through every birthday and school award and beauty competition and hospital visit.”

“And so we became penfriends,” said Mair. “And after all those years of hearing about Maprao, I started to fall in love with the place and, very slowly, with the man who’d tugged on me all that time. And when I found that my mind was starting to go, all I could think of was for all of us to be together here in the place that Sissi was conceived.”

“Wait!” shouted the cell phone. “I’m a bastard?”

“Of course you aren’t,” said Mair. “We tied the knot right here at the Ny Kow Temple. You were the result of that blessed, star-filled wedding night on the beach, right here when it was still deserted and unpolluted and startlingly beautiful. Just like you.”

She squeezed Captain Kow’s hand, and they stared into each other’s eyes like models in an ancient chocolate commercial.

*   *   *

There was nothing more to be said. It was hard to decide who to hate first: my mother, who’d hired a fisherman’s son to fertilize her or the squid boy for agreeing to … damn, there wasn’t even a word for it. We all walked away from that meeting in zombie silence. The cell phone was speechless in my hand. I waded through the beach garbage down to the angry surf and squinted into the salt wind. It was a long while before I raised Sissi to my ear.

“You still there, Sis?”

“Just.”

“Can we…?”

“Not talk about it?”

“I think I need time for this one.”

“We all do.”

“I’ll call you later.”

“All right.”

I sat on a Brother printer, circa 1980, and was wondering whether there were entire reefs of discarded IT equipment down in the Gulf that would one day regenerate the fish stocks, when the phone vibrated in my hand.

“No, wait. I have information,” said my sister. “Sorry, I forgot.”

A distraction. Perfect.

“Your conference in Chumphon,” she said. “You were wondering why your Dr. Somluk was so upset about who sponsored Dr. Bangkok?”

“Right.”

“Well, I’m thinking she just targeted the biggest name as an example.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I went through the accounts of all the speakers at that conference. Locals and overseas experts. And you know what? Every last one of them was paid to be there by the Medley umbrella organization, the TFG. And I looked at the papers. Virtually all of them dealt with the inherent dangers of breastfeeding in rural communities. They had scientific data to support their arguments. And you know who comprised eighty percent of the participants?”

“Midwives?”

“And nursery school teachers,” she said.

“So it was a set-up,” I said. “Select your speakers. Tell ’em what to say. Fill the place with professionals who work directly with mothers, and mail them a lot of free samples to get them hooked on the product. Off they go to spread the word. Formula is the future. Mother Nature got it wrong. This is what the Lord Buddha would have given pregnant women if only he’d had access to a clean chemistry lab. But I still don’t understand why the experts would be so easily lured into the honeytrap, Sis. Don’t any of them have morals?”

“There are things more important than morals, Jimm.”

“Like money?”

“Like how to take care of an elderly mother.”

“You found something?”

“Dr. Aisa, your Bangkok specialist. She has a mother in a hospice. Cancer. She’s been hanging on for almost two years. Up until a year ago, Dr. Bangkok was a prominent voice against the abuse of formula. She was the same type of thorn in the side of Medley that your Dr. Somluk is threatening to be. Then, quite out of the blue, she had a change of heart. New research findings. Improved production methods. New additives. Perhaps formula wasn’t quite as bad as she’d thought.”

“And her mother’s hospice care is miraculously taken care of.”

“You’ve got it.”

“That’s why Dr. Somluk targeted Dr. B. These people are monsters. We have to find Somluk. She’s hiding out somewhere in need of friends. She’s too afraid of her phone being tapped to call old colleagues. I reckon she’s been threatened to keep her mouth shut.”

“Or someone’s already shut it for her.”

I shuddered at that possibility.

“I’m into Dr. Somluk’s e-mail account,” said Sissi. “There have been no sent messages for seven days. You might be right. She might be playing it cool. As soon as she feels confident enough to get in touch with anyone, I’ll be on it.”

“I just…”

“What?”

“I just wonder whether big business might be on it too. Maybe they really are looking for her.”

*   *   *

I was on my way back to my cabin when Grandad Jah popped out from behind a hedge like an anorexic mugger. I was afraid he might want to engage me in a debate on why none of us look like Captain Kow … or each other. But like all of us he was opting to keep quiet on the subject.

“I’ve been watching your Burmese,” he said.

“Good man.”

“They’re both illegal.”

“You can tell that just by watching them?”

“They live in a room in Kor Kow Temple, just down from your elderly boyfriend’s place. He pays protection money to the nun there.”

“So she doesn’t beat them up?”

“So she doesn’t report them to the police. I went through their belongings while they were up at the house. They are not married.”

“Wow. All this in one day? I’m impressed. Are they living in sin?”

“They’re brother and sister.”

“What? The nun told you?”

“There were photographs of the pair of them from a young age. With parents. Progressing through school. It was a rural school where all the pupils studied in one room. There was a photo with the kids’ names written in English. Your Burmese have the same surname. I rather doubt they got married when they were five.”

“So why would they pretend to be married now?”

“As yet I do not have an answer to that question.”

“Any insights into the machete or the sack?”

“No indications from their room. They may have a hiding place. I shall endeavor to find it. Do you happen to know when your author might be away from home?”

“He’s in Bangkok.”

“Perfect. A rowing boat, a pair of binoculars and the property without its master could yield up a vast array of data. People in glass houses should not expect to keep secrets.”

12.

It Is Our Pressure If You Come Again

(guest house sign)

Given her less-than-truthful replies to my earlier questions, I decided to pay another visit to Dr. June, the head of the Regional Clinic Allocations Department at Lang Suan hospital. To add weight to this second interview, I took my own policeman. Lieutenant Chompu, on day five of his program to recover from homosexuality, was still hiding from the psychologist in one of our cabins. Even though the income at our resort in the monsoon season was approximately zero, I hadn’t charged him for the room, so he owed me. He was miffed that I’d aced him on the CD clue, so he’d been particularly pedantic going through Dr. Somluk’s files. She was a one-woman campaign. If you believed everything she wrote, you’d have to think Medley had shares in the Thai Ministry of Health. The company sponsored doctor fact-finding missions and mother-and-child picnics and half a dozen TV spots on childcare issues. Medley incarnate was a six-foot blue teddy bear who cuddled overweight toddlers in shopping malls all over the country. The world according to Dr. Somluk was snowing formula. The new operating theater at the Lang Suan hospital had been funded quite unashamedly by Medcafé. The blue bear would be appearing in person next month to cut the ribbon and officially open this state-of-the-art medical facility. A five-meter-high poster to that effect had been erected on the highway in front of the hospital.

Chompu and I had come to discuss this and other matters. We were directed toward the new building, latticed with bamboo scaffolding that tentatively supported a dozen painters arranged like shelf ornaments. We found Dr. June inside haranguing the foreman of the work team. She was not leaning on the side of diplomacy and her regional accent became more pronounced the louder she shouted.

“Because this isn’t a brothel,” she said. “If I’d wanted red floor tiles, I would have ordered red floor tiles. Did you ever consider that?”

The southern building contractor smiled angrily.

“We just thought it wouldn’t show the blood so much,” he said.

“Oh, that’s so considerate of you,” said Dr. June. “Goodness knows we wouldn’t want to know where the blood was so we could clean it up.”

“But—”

“White,” she yelled. “Tear up these ridiculous things and find me some white ones. Either that or I’ll find a foreman who knows how to read plans and follow instructions.”

Chompu and I had been standing in the ante-room during this exchange. A lot of money had been pumped into the space where the surgeons would wash and have a quick bite to eat before heading into the cutting arena. It contained splendid stainless-steel sink units, an off-suite shower stall and toilet, an air-conditioning unit the size of Norway, and a fully equipped emergency firefighting cabinet with, among other things, a fifty-meter hose. There was a flat-screen computer and a large refrigerator. As often happens, the equipment for the theater itself had arrived long before the room was completed, so it was still packaged and piled up to the ceiling.

Dr. June turned and saw us in the doorway. She closed her eyes as if to say, “Haven’t I had enough to deal with for one day?”

“I take it you haven’t found her,” she said, walking between us and not stopping. We followed her out of the new building and across the car park.

“I’m not surprised,” she continued. “People like Dr. Somluk make enemies. Eventually she’ll push just a bit too far.”

“There are one or two things we need to discuss with you,” said Chompu in his rehearsed baritone.

She stopped and turned to us.

“We?” she said. “Has the police force adopted a community buddy system I haven’t heard about?”

“If we could go to your office…” he said.

“I’m sorry. I have no time for this,” she replied.

“Doctor,” he said, “we can either talk here or I’ll have no choice but to take you to the police station and get a statement from you there.”