Bangkok Noir

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.”