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.
The girls had let me download their videos onto my computer. If I watched the videos closely enough, there might be some clue. So, seated in the vast food court, I looked again.
I noticed that there were faces in the crowd that I could recognize. I knew these people. Was that the lady who sells fried chicken at the corner? That man wearing a striped shirt — he lives on my street. We’ve talked in the café. As happens at a moment like this, my mind ran amok. I went from seeing one or two people that I thought I recognized to where suddenly every single person in those videos looked familiar. I couldn’t place them exactly, but I could swear that I’d seen them all.
Obviously, that was impossible. I decided I must be suffering from an overdose of morning light. Maybe it was the fluorescent glare and the tray-clinking crowds that were making me dizzy. Too many photons striking the retina at an early hour. It’s not healthy.
I stumbled out onto the open street, baking under the full blaze of the afternoon sun. Cars crawled sluggishly along clogged avenues, while busy pedestrians veered around me on the crumbling sidewalk. A vendor tried hard to sell me a wooden frog whose serrated back he stroked with a little stick, producing a croaking sound. I’ve seen that frog a hundred times, and it came as such a relief, a return to normalcy, that for a moment I even considered buying it. I was back to Bangkok as I knew it.
But no, something had changed. It had happened while I was watching the videos in the food court. I had the feeling I had become a cell phone recording an incident that had happened or was about to happen, but the color and sound quality were not as good as either a Nokia or a Samsung. The light was too bright, the sounds muffled. Bangkok hustled by, in all its chaos and color, but I was missing a key ingredient. People on the street knew something I didn’t. Maybe Kaew’s killing, although he was a person of no importance, really did have some importance.
It was time to call Evelyn Xu. She’s beautiful, goes to all the parties and is infinitely savvy about the city and full of good gossip. Why didn’t I think of her before? But first I needed to get off the street and sit down. It wasn’t long, of course, before I found a Starbucks, which was perfect because in its bland international chicness, it erased Bangkok for a moment. In here there were no gangs, no mysterious money, no Kaews or Nops. Just tall or grande.
“Evelyn, what do you know about the murder that happened last week on the Skytrain?” I asked. “You mean Kaew?” she replied. I was shocked that she was familiar with the name. How did Evelyn know about it? “Everyone knows about Kaew,” she said dismissively. In that case, did she know the name of the suspect? “Well, you hear stories. But it’s useless to even think about it,” she replied. “Anyway, there’s going to be the most incredible party this weekend. The top ten Japanese fashion brands are doing a joint event, spread over ten penthouses across the city. You really should go.”