Purged, emotionally drained, but high as a kite, I’m on the back of a bike again. At a traffic light I remember to switch on my cell phone. Instantly there is a succession of bleeps, which chide me for my radio silence. The text message reads,
Skype me.
Using skills honed over the years, I manage to text back, using one hand:
Ten minutes.
“It’s a fake,” the FBI says. I have her on my monitor at home, although the picture is kind of blurred and jerky and the colors don’t really do her justice. Most of the time she’s a feisty redhead these days, although all that exercise they put people through over there has drawn her cheeks; she looks like a super-fit sergeant at boot camp, except that her left arm is in a cast. She is hunched over her monitor and moving from side to side as if avoiding punches. I say, “What is?”
“The end of the movie.”
I stare at her for a moment, wondering if I’ve got the wrong conversation. “Huh?”
“I’m talking about the film you sent me. The movie allegedly recording the suicide of one Frank Charles, famous Hollywood director. The ending is faked.”
I have to let quite a few beats pass while my brain unscrambles. “Faked? You have ways of telling that from a digital copy? Your nerds have confirmed?”
“Actually, yes, they confirmed, but it didn’t need nerds. All it needed was a machine that would play each frame extra slow. You could even try it on your own DVD player. When you play it real slow, you see the saw is touching off concealed strips of skin-colored plastic tubing under the hair-the saw just has to touch it for the ketchup to burst out, so it looks like a real medical operation, but if the saw were really cutting into bone the action would take a lot longer. I spoke to someone who does special effects for the film industry. She watched the movie and said it was a dangerous and unorthodox procedure-the saw could easily have broken the skin and then there would have been a massive civil claim, and maybe even a criminal one. They would never do it that way over here. But it’s very clever-it makes for great cinema.”
“And the other stuff-we see the whole of the inside of his skull?”
“Apparently, that was the easy part. Just a question of trick photography and a lot of work with plastic models.”
“But”-I’m spluttering-“we have the body-that’s how he died-the skull was completely detached, parts of the brain had been eaten-there was real blood everywhere-someone ripped his guts out-the murder wasn’t faked.”
“I didn’t say the murder was faked, honey, only the movie.”
We both hang there in silence for a long moment. I say, “Wow.”
“I agree. Wow! I’m jealous-what a great case! Is it the only one you’re working on?”
“No,” I say, swallowing guilt like something sour in my mouth. “I’m doing something special for Vikorn at the same time.”
She’s smart enough to take the hint. There is sorrow in her tone when she says, “Ah!”
I am realizing how compromised I am, how my freedom of action has been destroyed by the chains on my spirit. For all her faults and her restless need for love and change, the FBI still has integrity; I doubt she’s ever broken the law in her life, or even slightly bent the ethics of her profession. For all her experience, she’s less worldly than I am these days. I envy her the unobstructed speed of her brain when she says, “I don’t want to tell you how to run the case, Sonchai, but if I were you-”
“I know,” I interrupt, anxious, I suppose, to show I still know how to investigate a murder. “The surviving husbands.”
As soon as I’ve closed Skype I find Frank Charles’s movie and slide it into the DVD drive. I fast-forward to the ending, then play around with the controls until I’ve got extra slow-mo. I stare in disbelief. The FBI is right. At this speed it is possible to see the edge of the saw’s circular blade touch on the hair, which is covering some kind of skin-colored strip that bulges slightly in the center, and as soon as it does so the strip bursts, shedding “blood.” I manage to catch a still and magnify it: tiny shreds from the plastic strip are clearly mixed with the spray of gore. You wouldn’t normally notice them, because they look like bone fragments. I’m shaking my head. I need Einstein. I have Sukum.
41
It’s around midnight when I finally decide to call Sukum to get the names of Moi’s surviving ex-husbands. Then I take a cab to the station to dig out the report from the nerds who hacked into Frank Charles’s computer. Then I take a cab to his penthouse on Soi 8.
It’s about two in the morning, and most of the action is finished for the night at Nana Plaza when I pass. There is a drunken farang who has to hold on to the wooden guardrail of one of the bars in order to stand up, and a katoey who is trying to get him to his hotel. A bunch of whores are crossing the street to the Nana Café, where it is possible to hang out until dawn, hoping a customer will show up. There is a line of taxis, too, ready to take stray jet-lagged farang to those unlicensed bars where you’re scrutinized from behind a spyhole before they let you in (you don’t have to be white, just foreign), and where you can drink and play with girls for as long as you have the dough. Soi 8, also, is very quiet but still carries the signs of a party neighborhood: girls with farang sitting on iron seats outside a closed bar; a Westerner in his late twenties singing to himself on his way home (an ancient European Cup song to the tune of “Blue Danube”: Vienna are shit, shit-shit shit-shit); a couple of cops standing by a lamppost, chatting.
At the apartment building they are surprised to see me and not too keen to let me into Charles’s suite-can’t it wait till morning? I’m in no mood for diplomacy, though, and opt for arrogance as a means of getting their attention. Now I’m sharing the elevator with a sulky receptionist who opens the door to the penthouse and shrugs. She doesn’t have the time or the patience to hang around, so she closes the door behind me and returns to reception. All alone in the silence of his death-which, I now realize, has quietly penetrated every aspect of his home-I decide to pause, trying to commune with his spirit. Were you murdered after all? I ask the bust in the Jacuzzi. If so, why? The response is ambiguous; I sense a kind of relief, even amusement, on the part of the deceased’s ghost, while I check out the Windows address book on the PC.
It takes less than a second to find the name, address, and telephone number of Robert Witherspoon, Moi’s American ex-husband. Interesting that Frank Charles had found the need to keep the coordinates on his computer. Still more interesting that Witherspoon is located in Hawaii. When I dig a little further into the computer’s secret chambers, I find a Skype account with Witherspoon’s name and photograph: a square-jawed, balding blond in his midforties, wearing a black T-shirt, is attached to the address book by means of a mug shot. I click on the glyph, and the monitor comes alive with the Skype home page. I double-click on Witherspoon’s mug shot. The program tells me my request to speak to him has been sent. My heartbeat seems to have doubled, and I’m clutching the edge of the desk when Witherspoon himself appears on the screen. Now I realize I don’t have a microphone or computer camera-but Charles must have owned such items to go with the Skype account. I rummage frantically in the drawers under the desk; a plug-in mike/headphone set and camera are in the bottom drawer. I plug them into the front of the PC, don the headset, and say in a rush, “Good morning-is it still morning in Hawaii? My name is Detective Jitplee cheep of the Royal Thai Police. A few days ago I think you sent a DVD to my home?”