The Complete Jimm Juree Case Files: 12 Short Stories

Introduction

Brief description of how the Jurees ended up in Maprao, the buttock-hole of the earth.

I’ll keep this brief because it still irks me to tell our story. My name is Jimm Juree and I was, at one stage, a mere liver failure away from fame and fortune in Chiang Mai. But our mother, Mair, dragged the family down south to run a decrepit seaside resort on the Gulf of Thailand. I’m a reporter. A real one. And as soon as the head of the crime desk at the Chiang Mai Mail completed his impending suicide by Mekhong Whisky, I was to step into his moldy old shoes; only the second female in the country to hold such a prestigious position.

Then Mair – nutty as peanut brittle – sold our family home without telling us and headed south. With her went her father, Granddad Jah, the only Thai traffic policeman to go through an entire career without accepting bribes or kickbacks, my brother, Arny, a wimpy lamb with the body of a Greek God, and me. The only one to pass up on family obligation was Sissy, my transsexual brother. Once a cabaret star, and briefly a TV celebrity, now an ageing recluse, Sissy had become something of an internet criminal and although I haven’t forgiven her for deserting us, I do find her skills useful from time to time.

You see, although I would never have guessed it, Maprao and its environs is a hotbed of crime. Although I’m technically the part-time social events reporter for the shitty local newspaper, barely a week goes by that I’m not chasing down some misdemeanor or another. Our local police (who make the Keystone Cops look like the SAS) are of the belief that I brought all this crime with me from the city. I know that it’s always been here but our gentlemen in brown prefer not to notice it. As they say, and quite rightly too, they just don’t get paid enough to stand in front of a loaded gun. All we get from them are complaints about all the extra paperwork we’re causing them.

So it’s down to our disjointed family to solve the mysteries and put the perps away. We’re a surprisingly efficient team of crime fighters but I have to confess we were hopeless at running a resort and deserved all the disasters that befell us. At the time of writing this, we still haven’t been able to salvage our monsoon ravaged bungalows from the depths of the bay and we’ve spent the past year doing odd jobs to make ends meet. The bank has been particularly slow in paying out on our disaster insurance claim. But we’re refusing to budge until they do.

As it turned out, there was some method to Mair’s madness in bringing us down south, but in order to learn what that was you’ll have to fork out some money for the actual books that tell our sorry story. Details of those are below. I can’t say too much because Sissi and I are in a long ongoing dialogue with Clint Eastwood who probably wants to turn our family exploits into a movie. In the meantime, the files that I’m sending you in this series of shorts have been collated from the astounding cases I’ve been involved in since the floods. There is an expression, Only in Thailand, used freely by frustrated and frustrating foreigners who like nothing better than to complain about us. But, I have to confess, most of the cases I’ve been involved in here really could only have happened in my country. I hope you enjoy them.

Novels most likely currently under option consideration by Malpaso Productions;

Killed at the Whim of a Hat (July 2011) - Minotaur Books, New York ISBN 9780312564537

Grandad, There's a Head on the Beach (June 2012) - Minotaur Books, New York ISBN 9780312564544

The Axe Factor (April 2014) - Minotaur Books, New York ISBN 9781250043368

The Amok Runners (June 2016) - CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform ISBN 9781533265289

There’s also an exclusive short at Criminal Element called Hidden Genders that gives you some background on Sissi.

Number One: The Funeral Photographer

I was a genius at creating shadows where there were none, at capturing that split second of despair on a joyful face. These were the qualities that collapsed my first photographic career. What couple could be pleased with a wedding album full of sombre reminders of their happiest day? Wedding photography was just one of the many professions I launched myself into on that first year after we lost the Lovely Bay Resort and Restaurant to the monsoons. And, like our beachfront kitchen and bathroom block, they went under without trace.

I guess somebody like me should have known better. I’d been one of those women in white. I’d smiled the phony smile and gazed lovingly into the eyes of a man who, even on our wedding day, was already hoping for something better. I could imagine him going through the album once we were divorced and photo-shopping Michelle Yeoh in my place. He ended up with some stork of a woman who had a firm belief that pink would make her more attractive. Her wardrobe looked like someone had emptied a bottle of rosé into the washing machine. Perhaps my clients could sense my aversion to pink and my resentment that anyone else should smile sincerely on that, their supposed happiest day. But, to cut a long story short, after five months my name was mud in the betrothed community.

The only thing classy about me was my equipment. I had a very expensive second-hand Nikon given to me by a retiring photographer in Chiang Mai. He said I was the best crime reporter he’d ever worked with and he wanted to remain a part of my career. He had faith in me and even when I gave up that career and moved to the end of the earth to keep my mental mother safe, he didn’t ask for the camera back. He told me it was a gift that would always remind me how great I was. So it hurt me more than a little that I had to sell it. We needed the money. I’d placed an advertisement in the Ban Kow news and prepared myself for an ignominious return to the airport taxi service counter in Surat – my previous, brief career. It would kill me to beg for my old job back. Since Chiang Mai, my life had been one of deflated ambitions. It was like the day after a launch of floating paper lanterns. So bright and quick to rise only to burn and drop to earth and burn down poor people’s houses before the morning came.

Then, a miracle of sorts. On my way to delivering the camera to a crooked dealer in Lang Suan, I’d taken our resort motor scooter on a distant detour. Perhaps I’d been delaying the moment when the camera and my greatness would part company forever. Or perhaps I was just hungry. After several wrong turns I’d found the funeral. The invitation card had been impersonal and badly printed. I barely remembered the host and had never met the deceased. But no matter. A Thai funeral was a feast. No end of poor folk with rumbling bellies honed in on the overly loudspeakers of a funeral party. I wasn’t one to let insincerity stand in the way of a good meal. I could never have dreamed that attending a celebration of death might bring me back to life – however temporarily. But that is exactly what happened.

The flashing police sign warned motorists half the road was taken up by a clumsy plastic awning on metal legs. It gave speeders no time at all to brake, and many a road top celebration had become a massacre at the hands of a drunk Benz driver. A second awning filled the small front yard of a wooden house. The awnings, sixty stackable plastic chairs, eight stackable plastic tables, four-square metres of assorted plastic flowers, a temporary casket (ostensibly teak but actually plastic) to view the body, and an easel with a blown-up photograph of the departed comprised the set. It was known as the Compact Village IV package, one of many put together by an events company in the town. The flashing road sign was compulsory but extra, payable to the police driver upon delivery. As I looked around, I could tell the whole show was beyond the means of these poor villagers. They’d be paying it off far into the future, but the relatives were obliged to preserve face. To help them keep up the payments, the company heavies would drop by once a week to jog memories and crack knuckles. The guests handed over envelopes when they arrived but these would contain the smallest denomination of foldable money. Hardly any help at all.

I dropped my envelope into the cardboard donation box and looked at the time on my cell. It was 7pm and nearly all the chairs were occupied. Three tables contained card players and their supporters. Betting on cards was illegal but the police usually turned a blind eye to the perpetration of the evil crime during a period of mourning, not wanting to disturb the spirit’s progress to the next life by conducting a raid on a funeral. Most of the players were beady-eyed women saying farewell to their housekeeping money. The other tables housed the menfolk; reefs of crusty males around atolls of empty bottles. They’d probably been drinking since the tents were erected that morning. Conversation had given way to head nodding to the beat of nostalgic Thai pop on speakers that shimmied back and forth from their own vibrations. The only person I recognized amongst the drinkers was Bung, although I had to take a second look to be sure. Like me, Bung had been chubby at school but now wore skin a size too big for him. His jowls hung like mud flaps.

‘Sister!’ Bung cried when he finally focused his gaze on me. He tried to rise but the sudden altitude was too much for him and he flopped back onto the flimsy chair. ‘Over here, Sister.’

I wai’d the partygoers and joined my schoolmate of what felt like half-a-century ago. We hadn’t been that close in class and hadn’t been in touch that much since. He’d lived with relatives in Chiang Mai for a couple of years and went to my high school. He’d probably mentioned where he was from but, back then, Lang Suan had meant nothing to me. I couldn’t have located it on a map. To tell the truth, it meant even less to me once I moved here. I was at Tesco supermarket one day buying adult diapers for my granddad. Bung had recognized me straight away and came running over to me like a saggy wild pig. I had no idea who he was. He wai’d me politely and proceeded to remind me of the great times we’d had together at school in the north. Even when he’d exhausted his nostalgia I was none the wiser. It was only when he mentioned an incident where he brought a live chicken to class on a leash that I remembered him at all, although I remained at a loss as to why he’d brought the chicken. I couldn’t be bothered to ask.

And that afternoon meeting at Tesco was as intimate as it would ever get. We’d nodded once in a while at the Lang Suan market and I’d heard rumours about him from mutual friends. But funerals, and weddings and inaugurations brought out the old address books. Every donation helped. And here we were. I nodded to the drunks at his table and noticed how few of them were aware of my presence. My unremarkability had always been my outstanding feature. By the time I’d borrowed a chair from the neighboring table, Bung had already poured me a strong Thai rum and soda and was attempting to drop an ice cube into the evasive glass.

‘He was a good man,’ said Bung, indicating the far corner of the yard where the deceased lay staring at the manufacturer’s label on the inside of the coffin lid.

‘Your father?’ I asked.

‘Yeah,’ said Bung. ‘I mean, no. Uncle Beung. But he was like a father. Better than a damned father, I’d say.’

While Bung was sorting out his relationship issues I scanned the party for the food table. I spotted it under a halo of Christmas lights. I got to my feet and nodded in the direction of the meal. I thought a parting comment might be in order, so I asked, ‘How did he die?’

‘They killed him.’

I sat back down.

I was no longer a crime reporter. I was writing unread columns on rural issues for the Chumphon Gazette on a part-time basis. But the word ‘killed’ stirred some deeply embedded ache.

‘Who did?’ I asked.

‘Them. The neckties,’ said Bung.

‘The neckties?’ I said, ‘That’s what? A gang name?’

‘Yeah,’ said Bung with renewed energy and volume. ‘A gang. That’s exactly what they are. Right boys?’

The drunks in their own respective comatose ways reacted, although it was clear not all of them knew what they were agreeing with.

‘Yeah!’ they said, and banged their palms on the table.

One man fell off his bendy plastic chair.

‘A gang,’ Bung repeated. ‘But our gang’s gonna get their gang. Right boys? We’re gonna mess ‘em up.’

One or two of the men who still had hand-eye coordination looked warily at Bung then nodded towards the outsider in their midst.

‘It’s all right,’ said Bung. ‘This is Jimm. We’re family. Like this we are.’ He squashed his first two fingers together, noticed how much like a gun they looked, and fired them off into the darkness. He’d made his point but, naturally, country folk never stopped at level crossings even when the train was on its way.

‘Me and Jimm were something at school,’ he continued. ‘Right Jimm? We were the lovebirds of the fourth form. Right Jimm? Eh?’

It was obvious Bung was confusing me with another much better-looking fantasy character but I nodded anyway. I wanted to hear more about the neckties. To endear myself to the gathering I said, ‘Voted the most envied couple in Form Four, we were. They all thought we’d be married before we graduated.’

It worked. The account was met by screams of lustful approval and clinking of glasses and a vile smelling hug from Bung. While I had him close, I asked, ‘How did they kill Uncle Beung?’

‘They squashed him, Sister,’ he said. ‘Squeezed him. Drained him.’

It sounded violent but I assumed that Bung, in his own tethered chicken way, might have been speaking metaphorically.

‘Did they use weapons?’ I persevered.

The oldest member of the group, a crunchy old man deep-fried by the sun, leaned over to me.

‘Sweet mouths,’ he said. ‘Sweet mouths and dirty money. That’s how they do it nowadays. No blood. We’ll all be dead by the year’s end and they’ll have got away with it.’

‘But we’re gonna get ‘em,’ said Bung. ‘Right boys?’

‘Yeah.’

Again, all eyes turned to me. I thought for a second, raised my glass and said,

‘Death to the neckties.’

The table was toasted to life. Glasses clashed, drinks were downed, Saeng Thip and sodas were replenished. Someone threw up under the table. I was in, but for all my probing I still wasn’t clear what I was in to. And I had no idea how the neckties had killed Uncle Beung. I excused myself and went in search of dinner. I couldn’t think on an empty stomach. At the food table, two large women with ladles sat like circus elephants on tiny stools. The first nodded at the clean plate stack and I took one and handed it to her. The other woman lifted the lids of the aluminium pots and dished a little of everything onto it. Southern curries are wicked. The victuals on the plate sizzled with spice. But I’d developed an indestructible stomach and the women watched with glee as I tucked into dinner.

‘Is that a camera?’ said the first woman.

I patted the black camera bag that hung from my shoulder and all my disappointments came bouncing back on me.

‘Yeah,’ I said.

‘You a photographer?’ the woman asked.

I should have said, ‘I used to be,’ or, ‘I never really was,’ but what the hell? While the camera and me were together I was still, technically, a camerawoman.

‘Yeah,’ I said.

‘There’s not much money left,’ she said. ‘My Beung spent most of it. That’s him over there in the box. Big appetite for a little man. But I’ve got some put away. Think you could take a few?’

‘A few what?’ I asked.

‘Photographs.’

‘What of?’

‘This,’ she said, scanning the gathering with the tip of her nose. ‘Thousand baht be enough?’

It wasn’t the kind of offer I’d have expected from a country woman. A thousand baht was a lot of money. But I couldn’t take advantage of a widow.

‘You don’t want to waste your money on this,’ I said.

‘Yes, I do. It wouldn’t be a waste, I mean. I’d like to have something positive to remember him by. His friends coming by to show their respect, eat our food, drink the last of his booze. It’d be worth it.’

At that moment in my pathetic, aimless life, I would have stripped naked and wrestled a monitor lizard for a thousand baht. Without a regular salary at the airport, just commissions from the tourists I could hog tie and drag to the company’s rental booth, I was barely drawing even. And the widow seemed to have money.

‘Actually I do have a job later tonight,’ I said, not wanting to look too available.

‘Twelve hundred,’ said the woman.

‘Deal.’

And thus began my first assignment as a funeral photographer, a vocation which, I discovered, suited me down to and beneath the ground. I took out my Nikon and cruised the event. My objective, I decided, was to capture the good humour of those in attendance yet project an air of mournful respect. I floated almost unseen from table to table as if I were merely that sector of the night responsible for recording events. I found I had a knack for noticing intimate moments such as when Granny Su blasphemed then pressed her hands together in a wai of apology to the corpse. And I felt changes in mood. There was, for example, a sudden drop, a depression when the SUV pulled up in front of the police sign.

Two men climbed down. One was old, wizened. The other young, brash and Chinese-looking. He was dressed like a bank worker in a crisp white shirt…and a necktie. After what I’d heard, I feared this arrival might spur a riot. But everyone who wasn’t holding a full glass, or a full house, rose from their seats and wai’d the young man as if he were a minister. He wai’d half-heartedly in return and laughed and patted backs and squeezed arms and it was quite evident to me nobody liked him. My first reaction was that this was a shame because he had a very muscular build and fashionable chin stubble. I immediately felt a motherly desire to give him a cuddle and see how far I could poke my tongue down his throat. But, in fairness, I had been throwing back the Saeng Thip sodas as I worked. Stoked by alcohol, my reactions were rarely those of a well-bred Thai woman. My libido often took control in such settings.

The mood at the funeral party had clearly been sucked down into the earth with his arrival. But whereas the hostility toward the young man was cloaked in prettily coloured hues, the reaction to the old man at his back was black as charcoal. He was dressed like one of them, a well-worn shirt and fisherman’s trousers, but if the looks that passed his way had been razor blades, he would have been sliced to bits and left in stacks for the dogs. So, what were they doing here, this mismatched couple?

There comes a time when a woman is so filled with mysteries that she either seeks answers or explodes like a stick of dynamite in a jelly fish. Through my viewfinder, I had seen the world lose a dimension. I needed to know why and for that I had to get the alcohol out of my system. I sat at the food table on the vacant stool and sipped a glass of something resembling carbonated seaweed. The other fat lady was serving food to the new arrivals so Beung’s widow and I watched the insincere fawning. The woman spoke without prompting.

‘Look at him. Stuck up little twerp. Fresh out of some private university and his daddy’s already got him managing four hundred hectares of prime palm plantation. There’s good fortune for you. He must have suffered something awful in a previous life.’

‘Four hundred hectares? That’s a lot of land,’ I said. ‘Where’s the plantation?’

‘Right here, Sister. You’re in the middle of it.’

‘Here? But I remember most of the land around here being coconut farms.’

‘Used to be. Used to be,’ she repeated. ‘We all made a tidy profit with the nuts just like our grandparents and theirs. Low maintenance. Monkey handlers came in once a month. We’d get paid for watching the trees grow. Wouldn’t ever have made us rich but…tidy. You know? Then, all of a sudden, about eighteen months ago, you couldn’t give a coconut away if it had a pink ribbon round it.’

‘What happened?’ I asked.

‘The middlemen told us the bottom had dropped out of the coconut market. Nobody wanted them any more, they said. They wouldn’t even make us an offer. That’s why everyone was suddenly converting to oil palms. That’s where the money was, they said. But none of us had savings. We couldn’t survive those two years while we waited for the saplings to grow big enough to yield fruit. Manure. Insecticide. Sprinklers. We just didn’t have that kind of money. Our men started renting themselves out as day labourers. Not easy I tell you after a lifetime of laziness. We were struggling, Sister. Struggling. Then the neckties arrived.’

I looked up to see one of the jolly drinkers parading his daughter back and forth in front of the plantation manager as if she were a market cow.

‘And they offered to buy up your land,’ I said.

‘For cash. They had plastic bags full of the stuff. They were ferrying us back and forth to the land registry office in a mini van and handing over cash when we signed the deeds. When you feel the weight of it in your hands, smell the notes, hear the flutter when you run your thumb over a wad of actual money, you hardly notice that it’s a fifth of what the land’s worth. We’d taken dirt for granted for so long it didn’t occur to us it had a value. None of us had been offered so much money in one lump sum before. Even when the backhoes were knocking over our coconut trees our men were making fancy with their new wealth; drink, TVs, trucks, lucky amulets. Not one of them considered investing it. By the time the oil palms were in the ground and the land was fenced off, the money was all but gone. That’s when we found out we’d been had.’

I was way ahead of this story.

‘The middlemen,’ I said.

‘They’d been paid off,’ she spat. ‘The neckties had got to them. Buy nothing from District 2 they were told. Show no interest in their coconuts and we’ll make it worth your while. Don’t know if they ever did make it worth their while. I hope they got ripped off too. But there was no way to prove any of it. The police were already on the payroll. And then, so were we. The only work around here is tending land that used to be ours for minimum wage. The company owns all the shops in the district and the petrol pump and even the company that rented us all this plastic. We have to be nice to them or we starve. We were lucky we were allowed to keep our houses.’

‘What about him, the old fellow?’ I asked.

‘Him?’ The widow made an effort to spit again on the dirt but her mouth was dry from all the talking. ‘Pop Bounnat. He used to be one of us. Treacherous bastard he is. One minute there he is telling us to hold off, not sell until we got a better price, then he runs off and takes a job as foreman. There are more qualified men…and women for that matter. But he’s there sucking up to the neckties until they decide to take him on. So he gets to keep his little parcel of land ‘cause he’s producing all their fertilizer for them. He’s got cows and pigs. All he has to do is make sure they shit regular. Can you believe that? He’s better off now than he was before they came. He keeps coming around, trying to sweet talk us, but we know a turncoat when we see one. We don’t talk to him.’

Bung and his co-conspirators sat huddled at their table looking back at the invaders and speaking in hushed and slurred tones. I put on my telephoto lens and took photos from the dinner table. I was fascinated by the expressions on the faces of the new arrivals. The boy looked uncomfortable, as if mixing with such people was below him. But Pop smiled and drank and enjoyed the music with no guilt of his treachery on his weather-worn face. He was clearly a man with no conscience. After no more than thirty minutes, not once noticing me, the necktie looked at his Rolex, made some comment and returned to the SUV. Pop followed him. Someone threw half a glass of stale beer on the old man’s shirt but he laughed it off and climbed into the truck. As the tail lights vanished into the night the good humour seeped back up through the earth and reclaimed the party.

I was sober by then, if a little queasy from the sugary drinks. Bung was most certainly drunk as an eel. It’s always hard to know what level of stupidity to adopt when speaking to a drunk. I decided to go straight for the kill.

‘Great,’ I said. ‘So that was him, eh? How are we gonna mess him up?’

Bung leaned in too close, lowered his head, and breathed hot rum fumes down my shirt collar.

‘We’re gonna bring ‘em down, darling,’ he slurred. ‘Bring ‘em all down. The whole necktie clan. We’re gonna wipe ‘em out. Get our land back. They’ll be sorry they messed with us.’

To me it seemed a high ambition for such a small group of incoherent farmers. It was the kind of bomb likely to blow up on the way to the post office. I didn’t want to see them get hurt.

‘Wouldn’t it be better to hire a lawyer?’ I asked despite the fact the profession was renowned for the size and flamboyance of its neckties. ‘I mean, perhaps you can prove they bribed the brokers. Do it all legally. No need to -.’

Twenty empty bottles jumped into the air when Bung banged his fist on the table.

‘Too late, darling,’ he said. ‘We want revenge.’

Three days later, I had delivered a CD and glossy prints of the ceremony to Beung’s widow. Although the woman seemed indifferent when shuffling through the photographs, she’d handed over the fee in cash. Then, three days later, I received a call from District 9 in Ban Kow where a respected monk was due to be cremated. The abbot had heard from Beung’s widow that I was a most accomplished funeral photographer. Would I be available to document the ceremony? Word has a way of getting around down here in the south. In fact, over the next two months, I was so busy with funerals I completely lost interest in the intrigue in District 2.

It wasn’t until the second week in May that a headline in the Ban Kow community newsletter jumped at me from the paper: FIRE RAVAGES FOUR-HUNDRED HECTARES OF PALM PLANTATION. No such news had made it to my darling Chumphon Gazette. According to the report, the devastation to the plants was so complete that none were salvageable. It would be at least eighteen months before the land could be replanted. Twelve kilometres of sprinkler system and several cabins on the plantation were destroyed. Two bodies were found in the charred remnants of one wooden shack. I fell back onto my sofa and read, and reread, the report. I couldn’t believe my eyes. It looked like Bung and his cronies had wreaked their revenge after all. But murder? Was that their plan, to do away with the boy and the old man?

There was a lot in the report that didn’t make any sense at all. The necktie plantation amounted to four hundred hectares. The area burned was almost exactly four hundred hectares. Yet fire had little respect for boundaries. How could it be that none of the village houses on the perimeter of the estate was touched by the fire? No neighbouring farms were damaged by the flames. Not so much as a chicken was roasted. And then again, how could there be a fire at all? The rainy season had begun on schedule in the middle of April. Although not the wettest beginning, there had been several downpours and the land should have been too damp to support such a devastating fire. I wondered whether the police had considered any of this and I was planning to ride back out to District 2 when the detectives came to me. Not local rustics these but serious criminal investigators from Bangkok. The neckties obviously wanted the case solved.

‘Is your name Juree?’ asked