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“Who was her contact here?”
“Some farang in Kaosan Road. He’s just a low-level platoon manager-he never has more than five mules working for him at any one time, and he doesn’t know anyone above his manager, who is another farang who doesn’t speak Thai.”
“So how did she get busted at all?” Lek wants to know.
“Exactly. Someone’s infiltrated our organization at an overseas outpost.”
“ Kathmandu?”
“Right.”
“Vikorn has people in Kathmandu?”
“Not exactly. They are remote subcontractors, but they do supply quite a lot of low-level mules, like Mary Smith.”
“So why not just go to the subcontractors in Kathmandu?”
I scratch my ear. “You ever have anything to do with Hindus? They have such huge extended families. You start out thinking you’re with the eldest son, then it turns out he’s fronting for an uncle, who is fronting for one of his cousins, who’s fronting for the patriarch on the mother’s side, and so on.” I raise my palms to the Buddha: “We don’t really know who they are.”
“You don’t have names?”
“Sure. Narayan or Shah. Same as fifty percent of the phone book.”
“No addresses?”
I cough. “That’s what we’re trying to get. The address of our subcontractors in Nepal. Our firewalls are so good, only the mules seem to know.”
When my phone explodes with Must be some way out of here, I see that it is Sukum calling, and share a wink with Lek. I’ve already told him that the Fat Farang Case has taken a bizarre twist which may have Sukum and Mad Moi working together again.
“She’s gone,” Sukum says in an excited voice. “Fled. I checked with her probation officer. I even called her sister, the one who talks to me, and the pharmacy where she usually gets her prescription drugs for her mental problems. None of them has seen her in more than five weeks.”
“Five weeks? That’s a long time before he was killed. Doesn’t sound like proof of murder to me.”
“Five weeks, three weeks, two days, what’s the diff? I’m being intuitive here, cutting out u
“Nobody knows Doctor Moi like you, Khun Sukum,” I say, sharing a grin with Lek, who has gone into a devastating mime of Sukum, including his compulsive teeth cleaning and his zippy little farts. This colors the tone of my voice, which causes Sukum to suspect flippancy. Sukum loathes flippancy because he doesn’t understand it, even though he’s been trying all his life.
“You’re being flippant?” he wants to know.
“No. Not at all.”
“You’re putting two and two together, yes? Just before the murder she disappeared?”
“Okay, Detective Sukum, okay, I accept your expert advice. But we do need to know exactly why she disappeared, d’you see? A suspect who disappears five minutes after the criminal act is not at all the same as a suspect who makes themselves scarce a month before the event.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Assuming guilt in both cases, the second will have a cast-iron alibi.”
“I’ll check,” Sukum says without nuance, and closes his phone.
What with the day going to sleep on us, and the traffic hardly shifting-even though we have made the crucial turn from Asok onto Sukhumvit, we are now stuck behind a builder’s truck in the gridlocked outside lane, which we need in order to access the turnoff for the highway, so it looks like we’re in for the long haul-Lek and I ca
After a low-speed chase that lasted for most of Sukum’s career as a detective, he was only able to bust her on ca
When the cab finally passes the tollbooth and we’re speeding toward Suvarnabhum we’re entertaining each other with speculations of how Doctor Moi will stitch Sukum up this time. I have to say, it’s fun sometimes to watch Lek’s darker side. As he points out, We’re all dual, darling.
“But what’s so amazing about her is the way she always manages to look so good in those HiSo magazines. How does she even get invited to those fantastic parties, that’s what I would like to know.”
“She’s old money,” I explain. “Teochew-her people originally hailed from Swatow about a hundred and fifty years ago, where they were members of one of the triad societies. Apparently her family is quite senior in one of them. While she was growing up her grandfather maintained mob co
“Each of them died tragically in mysterious circumstances.”
“Right. While she was out of the country. But HiSo is HiSo. As long as she plays the game and turns up in those amazing ball gowns at those society events, they’ll protect her. They may even be proud of her. How can you tell with the Chinese?”
Lek and I fall to pondering in the taxi, which is speeding now on the highway to the airport. “When you think about the Fat Farang Case, though, and then you put Moi in it as a suspect, it does all seem to fall into place,” Lek opines with a yawn.
“It does. I’ve been racking my brains trying to think of anyone in Thailand who could possibly have done it, and Mad Moi simply didn’t occur to me. Now that Sukum’s onto her, though, I’m wondering why I never thought of her.”
“He’s going to claim all the credit, you do know that? Even though it was Nong who first mentioned Doctor Moi-if it weren’t for you, he wouldn’t even be thinking along those lines.”
I sigh. “It doesn’t matter, Lek, it really doesn’t. I don’t want promotion anyway. I’d feel even more of a fraud than I feel now.”
“Don’t talk like a fool, darling. The minute he gets his promotion they’ll start to put pressure on him to take money. White turns to gray at that level, and soon after that you get to black. They’ve only let him keep his i
While we are leisurely discussing Sukum and his imminent forensic triumph, he calls on my cell phone: his name is flashing on and off to Dylan’s heartfelt There is too much confusion, I can’t get no relief. I wink at Lek.