Links
Our banners
Latest News
Newsletter archive
Interviews
Sileakhunt
Book Store

Note to readers: Sorry for the long delay, life cropped up the way it sometimes does.

And now, another horrifically metaphoric recap:

The night sky was full, round and pert, bulging over the top of its Earthly bra like a voluptuous bosom.  We join our boob of a hero in his hotel lobby, eager to make a bust and making more of a spectacle of himself than Janet Jackson’s nipple ring at a Super Bowl.  He’s in Pattaya, the over-stuffed D-cup of S.E. Asia, but not for long.  Like a matching pair of jiggling milk bags, he and new pal Captain Sorkan are headed north, deep into the cleavage of the night, into the countryside’s bosom, to see what new evidence they can tweek, fondle and squeeze.

“The Blow-Torch Murderers have struck again!” cried the desk clerk as I walked into the lobby.  She had one ear to the phone and was relaying the sizzling details to a group of shit-scared maids perching wide-eyed on a nearby sofa.  “Same-same before, but this one work Laem Chebang!  No Bangkok! Happen in very near, in Chon Buri! Only one hour from here, up Suhkumvit Highway!”

I was out the door in a flash.  Those girls must have thought I was insane as I struck off toward the Ugly Parrot at an all out sprint.  I had to find Sorkan!

I almost knocked over a short-time girl as I banked into the tiled doorway of the Parrot.  Lek saw me in my tremendous haste, and her eyes lit up with eager lust.

The barman was extending the telephone to Captain Sorkan who stood arched over the bar like a cobra ready to strike.  His eyes were clear and bright.  He chattered hastily in Thai as he scribbled notes.  The shit-anxious look on the barman’s face told me what the phone call was about.

Sorkan hung up in a flurry of foreign words when he saw me.

“You heard?” he asked.  He had a haggard, travel-weary look to him, but his eyes were lit with excitement that rivalled my own.

“Yes!  Fuckin’-eh, another murder!” I gasped.

“I too have just found out, it seems I have been played for a fool.  I have been in a car for the last three hours while the naves struck again in my very back yard!”

“Where have you been?”

“Bangkok, but allow me to explain on the way,” he said moving toward the door, “You will join me, won’t you Mr. Spanner?  For there is a fresh murder scene to investigate and the game is afoot!”

“A foot?  Wha’d they chop off his foot too?”

But my words dissolved into haste.  We charged into the street like men possessed and jumped into his small brown patrol car as Lek looked on with disappointed eyes.  I felt tremendously cavalier at that moment, and blew her a parting kiss that rekindled her beautiful smile.

Boy, I love this place! I chuckled to myself.  It’s like I’m living in an old Bogart movie.  Sorkan grinned at me and punched the gas.  As the tires squealed, we thundered away.

His hands gripping the wheel, I noticed that the skin on Sorkan’s forearm was dark, and almost scaly it was so dry.

“It is my sound belief that the key to this mystery lies at the victims’ place of work,” said Sorkan as he drove, “that being the most obvious connection between the two...I mean three, of them.  Therefore I have spent the day in Bangkok, down at the Krung Toey container yards to be precise, seeing what crumbs might have been overlooked by Inspector Lastradisomp and his men.”

 “What did you see?”

“Mostly Lastradisomp’s boys tearing apart shipments of dairy products...” (and we both chuckled), “...but I did hear of the appearance of a most singular individual.  A leper.”

“Cool!  Was its stomach white or all covered with spots?  Because I saw this show and it said that was how you could tell if they are in heat or not.”

Sorkan just stared at me with a puzzled look on his face for a really long time.  Poor dude.  I’d lost him again.  Better explain more.

“Because, you see, if they are in heat you can breed them with your dog and get Dalmatians.”

Sorkan squinted his eyes closed and said, “No, Mr. Spanner.  A leper.  I said I saw a leper.  A man suffering from the disease: leprosy.”

“Well, you wouldn’t want to let him near your dog then.  Not if your dog comes in the house anyway.”

Sorkan closed his eyes again, like he’d been blasted with a bright light.  “No, Mr. Spanner, I don’t suppose you would.  Nevertheless, he was there, set-up on the side of the road, they say, begging.”  Sorkan’s brow crinkled in thought and a grin curled his lips.  “...‘A crippled wretch of hideous aspect’, as it were.”

“The Man with the Twisted Lip!” I cried.

“Precisely, Mr. Spanner!” chuckled Sorkan.  “Quite an extraordinary looking fellow, I understand too.”

“ ‘His appearance, you see...’ ” I began to quote the passage from memory, then to my delight, he recited the rest of it, word for word, with me, “ ‘...is so remarkable that no one can pass him without observing him.’ ”

Our chuckles trailed off into the night as we drove into the murky darkness of the countryside.  The air felt thick—an oncoming bank of thunderclouds, creeping in off the Sea of Siam, was compressing the heat from the afternoon into a thick evening swelter.

 “In The Man with the Twisted Lip, it was all just a disguise, though!” I said.  “Do you think this is the case with this dockyard leopard?”

“Leper.”

“Right.”

“Well, as you know, Mr. Spanner, sometimes the more obvious a thing, the more discrete.  And the leper’s vantage point would be an excellent one for observing the comings and going at the customs yard.  Furthermore, the industrial roads surrounding Krung Toey are mostly only travelled by large commercial trucks, that I suspect very rarely stop to give money to roadside beggars.  So one has to wonder at this leper’s entrepreneurial judgement.”

“A spy!”

“So it would seem, for what I find most singular is that the leper appeared sporadically, day or night, and that the men on-shift down there recall seeing him for the first time only a week prior to the second murder.  Yet no one has seen him since the murder itself.”

“Does Lastradisomp know about this leopard?”

“Leper.”

“Huh?”

“Never mind.  But yes, Lastradisomp does know about the leper.  In fact, I drew it to his attention personally,” he said sadly.

“And?”

“I was ridiculed and told to cease my scrutiny of the case.  He, it seems, considers the appearance, and subsequent disappearance, of a roadside beggar to be unrelated to the murders.”  He sighed.  “But he did give me a splendid account of his considerable cheese thwarting efforts.”

“Well hopefully Lastradisomp is still up there,” I said.

“No.  Unfortunately, because of my absence, he has beaten me to the scene again...right in my own jurisdiction!” he hissed with a hint of anger.  “My deputies couldn’t resist them when they came.  Lastradisomp pulled rank on them just like always.  His men were just putting up their perimeter tape while I was on the phone back there.”

“Damn it!”  I pounded the dash in frustration.

“Don’t worry, Mr. Spanner.  This case offers many avenues of investigation, and I have not been idle since our last meeting.  I am confident that we will get to the bottom of this case despite Lastradisomp’s interference.”  His reptilian features curled into that mischievous grin again.

“What?” I asked.  “What have you found out?”

“The blanket, which he has gone to lengths to throw over the evidence, has several holes it seems.  As Wil has hinted, he’s not a terribly intuitive man, and thus there are many things he has missed.”

“Dude’s missing his blanket now?”

 Sigh.  “One, for example, is the daily records kept by the customs office itself.  Records that show the types of shipments that passed through inspection.  From these, I have cross-referenced the companies that had containers in the customs yard during the first two victims’ final days at work but have found no matches.  That is to say, no single company had shipments there on both sets of days.  But the sheer volume of products that pass through their hands, means that there are literally hundreds of companies shipping products in at least as many containers on the days of interest.  It will take time to analyse the lists more closely.  But it is a task that I am commencing eagerly.”

An off-shore storm glowered over the moonlit landscape.  The night air was as charged as my building anticipation.

“I was told today that Thai customs inspects shipments leaving the country as well.  Is this true?”

“Indeed it is, Mr. Spanner.  And this fact makes the list of shippers to examine, even longer.”

 “Can I help?  I mean, I’ve collected enough evidence on my own case to choke a horse with.  A gay horse in fact.”

“I thank you Mr. Spanner,” said Sorkan smiling at my enthusiasm, “But the records, I’m afraid, are all in ”

 

*                      *                      *

 

The glow of Pattaya well behind us, we drove on in silence for some distance.  Sorkan was lost in thought, I was lost in the strange beauty of the Thai countryside beneath that restless sky.  It was like staring at an album cover after smoking a big fatty.

My hat was in my hands, my fingers tracing the outline its crest.

Occasionally, splashes of neon or fluorescent light would appear, marking a restaurant or roadhouse brothel for the locals (we hadn’t seen a foreign face since leaving Pattaya).  Sometimes I’d see roadside food stands strung with naked fluorescent tubes, casting unnatural hallows of too-white light over their grainy customers, sort of like a James Dean poster.

I’m headed to a real murder scene.  Not small time P.I. stuff, but a real murder!  The notion almost made me shit myself.  If I thought too much about what it might be like—lifeless body, blood, haunting stillness, the scent of burnt flesh—I’d have to pinch my ass shut and breath slowly.

The hovels we passed became more and more run-down and shitty looking.  It was a slow decline into simplicity and raw human necessity.  We turned off the main road at Chon Buri and the descent intensified.  Before long we were at the world’s arse hole.

The site of the third murder was an apartment complex that was a scene of unholy chaos like I’d never fucking seen.  The glare of police spotlights cast an eerie wash over the stark concrete and third world decay.  At street level, television crews crowded shoulder to shoulder with a raggedy mob of peasants, street people, and hundreds of others with fuck all else to do but catch a morbid glimpse of the most recent victim of the mutilations.  From balconies above, the glassy-eyed leaned and gawked.

Strands of police tape provided a precarious barrier to the swelling pressure of the mob.  I saw a policeman at the front steps viciously beat a helpless kid as he was carried too close by the sway of the crowd.  The mob recoiled from the policeman’s blows like it were a living thing.  Emboldened by their fear, the officer turned his shiny black night-stick onto an over-eager journalist who’d jumped into the boy’s place.  I turned to Sorkan wide-eyed!

“Lastradisomp’s men,” he replied.

The surrounding neighbourhood looked like a garbage dump.  The building itself was an unfinished concrete honeycomb where not a glimmer of internal light shone—a hollow concrete shell that had been abandoned by its creators before any plumbing or wiring could be installed.  In a central courtyard, not far from the human melee, was an open well.  I saw a filthy rag-doll girl drawing water from it, hand over hand, with a rusty pail.  The grass was tall, the bushes overgrown.  Rubbish was piled high in the middle of the courtyard and the stench of open sewage poisoned the air.  Christ!  How clean can that well-water be?

“Jeeze!  What a crap-heap,” I said.

“Yes,” replied Sorkan, “I perceive that this poor fellow was in a far worse state financially than either of the first two victims, for it is my understanding that the poor chap lived here in this dreadful place.”

The crowd was getting ugly.  Impatience at the police, for denying their dark appetites for gore, was slowly turning to anger.  Shouts rang out here and there, demanding to know how they could have let these horrid murders continue.

Sorkan shook his head grimly.

“What’s wrong?”

“My officers are all out here, in the street—many of them crime scene specialists, some trained detectives—all relegated to being mere traffic cops.”

Several of the officers acknowledged the Captain as we parked.

“Situation?” demanded Sorkan of the nearest one.

“We can’t get close to the place, Captain.  The Bureau men won’t let us help them up there.”

“Looks like they need it too.  Sure don’t like the looks of that crowd.  Lastradisomp is playing a dangerous game here.”

“I’m sorry sir, we tried to offer our help but they refused.  Don’t want us anywhere near the crime scene!  That bastard Dang even threatened the Sarge’ with his gun!”

Sorkan just hissed a disappointed sigh.  “Come Mr. Spanner, let’s see what we can make of this.”