Daylight
Alex Kerr
All the witnesses agreed. The victim, an upcountry visitor to Bangkok of no particular importance, had died by stabbing on the BTS platform at three in the afternoon. He was thirty-eight years old, was named Kaew, had worked in a motorcycle repair shop in Khon Kaen and had died from stab wounds to his legs, abdomen and lungs. After a thorough autopsy had determined the cause of death, the family had collected the body and taken it back to Khon Kaen for cremation.
Including Kaew’s brother Nop, there had been about thirty witnesses on the crowded platform that day, of whom six had come forward to the police. Two young office ladies had been quick enough to actually record the incident on their cell phone video cameras, and the images were crystal clear because it had been a bright, sunny afternoon. They had all pinpointed the same person as the murderer, who had been duly questioned by the police.
At this point the rather thin file ended. An open and closed case, really. I put it down on the desk, looked out the window at Bangkok’s rows of white skyscrapers stretching off under the pale light of early morning and wondered why this would interest anyone. It must have been a very slow day in New York because my editor had somehow become aware of a murder on the Skytrain in Bangkok and asked me to look into it.
I live for the night. Bangkok, for me, begins at about four in the afternoon and only comes alive around midnight. So it was a grim moment when the phone rang at 5:00 a.m. with a sharp Brooklyn accent demanding that I get up immediately and submit a full report to New York within twelve hours.
Staying up all night and going to sleep when the sun rises is fine, but dawn is truly depressing when seen from the wrong end. A few cups of coffee later, the first rays of sunlight were striking the tops of the skyscrapers, and I was feeling a bit better. I reviewed the file again and then noticed the dissonant note that should have been obvious from the beginning: the suspect hadn’t been arrested. More strangely, his name was never mentioned at any point in any of the reports. A police cover-up? But if so, why, in a case involving someone of no particular importance? Or was it just a slip-up in the paperwork? Well, New York needed something fast, and I had just a day to find some angle on this case.
Time for breakfast. In the soi next to mine I used to enjoy walking past a charming but decrepit old wooden house intriguingly overgrown with huge vines. Then they tore it down and replaced it with a sleek white apartment building and opened an all-day breakfast café in an airy, glassy room on the first floor. All I had to do was to bear the morning heat for a few minutes as I slipped through the back streets to this little hideaway. There, surrounded by the French models who stay at the apartments in the upper floors, I could sit and surf the internet on the café’s Wi-Fi. If lucky, I’d find the missing pieces of this case online before finishing the last piece of toast.
But here I drew a blank. Usually murder cases get some mention in the news, often complete with lurid photos of gruesomely wounded corpses spread across the front page of daily newspapers like Thai Rath. In this case there was only silence. The sources and pages that should have covered the case just weren’t there. It was as if a hole had opened up in the internet and swallowed the whole incident. Well, the internet in Bangkok is like that. There are gaps, and you get used to it.
Curiosity piqued, I made my way back to my soi, now palpably a few degrees hotter, the tarmac simmering under the morning sun. I reentered my office with a sense of unease. Usually an hour or two on the internet is enough to satisfy New York. This time I had the foreboding that this case would actually involve some work.
First, some phone calls. The obvious person to start with would be Nop, Kaew’s brother. Nop had suffered minor cuts while trying to protect his brother, and after being treated in Bangkok had returned to Khon Kaen to recover.
I considered. Yes, one could catch a flight to Khon Kaen and get back in twelve hours. But I’m lazy. I’ve become a true Bangkokian in that I tend to feel that the civilized world falls away somewhere along the Bangna highway. There’s town, and there’s the long hot trek to a resort somewhere. Better to stay in my air-conditioned office. That’s what telephones are for.
It was easy enough to reach Nop. Although a Khon Kaen farmer, he too had a cell phone, making him just as accessible as someone in Bangkok. And then began one of those baffling conversations you can sometimes have in Thailand.
“Do you know who killed Kaew?
“Of course I know.”
“Who is it?”
“You should ask someone about that.”
“You mean the police? They’re not talking.”
“I guess they wouldn’t.”
“Is there anything you can tell me?”
“Just talk to the people you know. And then you’ll know.”
And with that, Nop hung up.
Nop was trying to tell me something, but who in the world would “people that I know” be? All I could think of were the people who had been at the scene. Best start with the six official witnesses. When I took another look at the files, the police had duly noted the names and contact numbers of the two girls who had taken the videos.
So an hour later I found myself eating lunch with two giggly office girls in one of those huge food courts on the top of a department store downtown. By now it was the noon-time rush hour, and bathed in the all-pervading glow of fluorescent lights, and surrounded by the coming and going of people clinking trays and plastic plates, it didn’t seem like a place to unravel a murder.
It took a while to get the girls, dressed smartly in red and green, to stop smiling and giggling out of embarrassment at being accosted by a foreigner. But finally they calmed down and pulled out their cell phones. Sure enough, the videos they’d taken were still there, and I could see the whole tragedy unfold, from the knife attack on Kaew to the moment when the police rushed up and apprehended the suspect. He looked to be about forty, was clean-cut, but neither in his clothing nor speech seemed to be anyone of importance. He was defiant. “I had to kill Kaew,” he declared. “There was no other choice.”
“What do you think he meant by that?” I asked. The girls wanted me to help decide which of their two cell phones had taken the best video. We watched again. The red-dress girl thought her Nokia version was clearer and the colors brighter, and I had to agree. But the green-dress girl insisted her Samsung sound quality had been better. Off they went in high spirits.
I still didn’t know the name of the suspect, or his motive, but one thing that came across was that this wasn’t a crime of passion. It was planned; it was serious. Maybe this was a gang killing. “I had to kill him”—that’s the sort of thing they say in gang vendettas. I wondered if Kaew was perhaps mixed up in drugs. There must have been lots of money, and maybe family pride was involved.