CITY OF ANGELS – A Murder Story in 30 Chapters (part 6 + 7)

On Thailandblog you can read the pre-publication of the thriller 'City of Angels' which, as the title suggests, takes place entirely in Bangkok and was written by Lung Jan. Today chapter 6 + 7.

Chapter 6.

The morning light does not always have gold in its mouth. Very occasionally J. fancied himself a philosopher in the depths of his thoughts. Back in the day, long ago, when he was young and handsome, he thought smugly that he knew everything. Today, now that he was only handsome in a slightly decrepit way, he knew better. Several times in his first weeks, months and even years in this country, in a dazzling display of absolute and breathtaking stupidity, he thought he had kicked his pants. An opinion that, unfortunately for him, was also shared by others… Which later, but much later, he slowly but surely began to realize, and that was perhaps the most important life lesson he had learned here - through trial and error , was that he, like so many before him, had fallen victim to culture shock. Everyone seemed stupid when they stepped outside the comfort of their own familiar frame of reference. It was that simple. And so he learned to be patient, a lot of patience…. A beautiful virtue not only in the West, but also in the Far East.

During the course of the day, however, his patience would be sorely tested. Kaew, for example, had fallen foul of a number of rather shady art and antiques dealers whom they had put together on a list of possible suspects yesterday. J. secretly admired Kaews' sharp analytical skills and his investigative skills. Talents that would have benefited De Bolle as a journalist. Kaew had set off early, contrary to his habit, but apparently had caused a lot of irritation with his questioning. In one of the immense antique halls behind the Chatuchak market, his faithful partner had even been grabbed by the collar with a soft hand and thrown down the stairs. This huge market has earned its reputation as the 'Thieves market' did all the honor again… To make matters worse, it took until noon before Tanawat contacted us, as agreed.

Tanawat was a real chatterbox, but for some reason, not immediately obvious to J., he didn't seem very keen on a conversation today. He mysteriously let it be known that he finally had a concrete lead, but refused to go into details over the phone. He certainly managed to build up the tension because three times in a span of less than an hour he arranged another location where they would meet. This secrecy irritated J. immensely. Tanawat could be very suspicious at times, but J. didn't care. Finally, that afternoon, J. sauntered from his loft to Wat Po, a lightning-fast melting ice cream cone in hand. Shortly before closing time, this largest and oldest temple complex in the city was bursting with tourists and their meet & greet not stand out. Exactly at 16.30 pm. J., as agreed, found himself with sticky hands at the western Wihan behind the central temple. While between the Wihan and the Phra Si Sanphet Chedi paced, to his surprise there was no sign of Tanawat. For the next half hour, he didn't take one of J.'s calls or text messages. This was not normal behavior for the academic known for his punctuality. Half an hour later, with a growing sense of anxiety, J. let himself through the security float out. J. waited across Chetuphon Road for the last of the visitors to disappear, but Tanawat seemed to have gone up in smoke.

Back in the loft, even the aggrieved Kaew had stopped for a moment in his endless lamentation about the heavy-handed treatment he had received at Chatuchak. He, too, seemed slightly alarmed by Tanawat's sudden silence. After much deliberation with his employer, he immediately went to check at the faculty to see if he could be found there, but they hadn't seen him there since yesterday morning. When he didn't show up today, one of Tanawats' assistants had to take over a practical this afternoon… News that only increased J.'s concern….

Chapter 7.

The next morning, shortly after 06.00 a.m. J. received the phone call that not only abruptly woke him up from a restless sleep, but also hit him like a hard punch in the stomach. He recognized the number as Tanawat's, but he was definitely not on the line. A raw voice snapped at him with an undertone of timeless malice: "Your friend, the chatty professor, is waiting impatiently for you under the bridge of the Toll Road behind Wat Saphan Phrakhong in Khlong Toei. Be quick because it looks like he might swallow his tongue…”

J. wasn't sure how to describe it, but there was something wrong with the air in Bangkok. Every time he came to the metropolis from the North, he had to get used to it again or 'catch your breath' as he himself described it. It didn't really smell—though—but he always felt that the air here was old and decrepit, like it had been overused. After the call, it seemed as if all the oxygen had been used up in one fell swoop. He felt dizzy. He dressed in a hurry and walked out with Sam's uncomprehending look behind his back. With a sickening feeling of pressure in his diaphragm, he hurried downstairs and called one of the bums loitering on the corner of the street in a fluorescent vest who drive a motorcycle taxi. The motorcycle taxi is the most dangerous in the City of Angels, but without a doubt also the fastest way of getting around. J. wasn't sure exactly where to go because at the indicated spot it was a confusing maze of bridges, klongs, alleys and roads. However, the wailing police sirens flawlessly showed them the way for the last few kilometers.

Like so many things in this country, the bridge exit just ended in a dead end on the canal. He was just there, as was J. and the mob that had converged on the strip where the hot tarmac turns to gravel. It was worse than he expected. Before his eyes was a busy but orderly scene that seemed to have been cut out of a second-rate TV detective series. A seemingly endless parade of on and off brown police uniforms, some of them plainclothes. Technical detectives routinely walked around searching. The body had been identified. The place where it lay, next to one of the concrete piers of the bridge, was, as usual at a crime scene in Thailand, not really hidden from the eye of the onlookers. A few photographers shot their pictures so that all the gory details would be widely spread on the garish front page of their newspaper tomorrow. The raw Exhibitionism of Death that Thai readers loved. What was it with crime for the inhabitants of the City of Angels? They loved it, they never got tired of it… J. would never get used to it. He consoled himself with the thought that if there ever was a miraculous end to crime in this country, the newspapers would go out of business immediately.

To his chagrin, a number of blood-hungry bystanders crowded the red-and-white ribbon improvised barrier like vultures as they tried to catch a glimpse of the scene with their phones. They were served at their beck and call. Because there was blood, a lot of blood. J. could see that even from this distance. Large puddles that in the heat of this morning were already covered by a matt black membrane like a dried-out pudding and that seemed to come alive in some strange way by the trillions of blue-green shiny fat carrion flies that greedily feast on the corpse and the clotted pools of blood. had deposited.

What a shitty place to go off, J thought. The area was littered with junk, the gunk of the big city: rusted food cans, broken bottles, candy wrappers and plastic bags, hundreds of plastic bags, the packaging plague of this country. More rubbish floated in the Phra Khanong Canal and just above the water level J. saw the weathered handle of a shopping cart that had tipped in here, who knows how long ago…

'J! Hey J….!' He turned around. A tall and broad-shouldered plainclothes police officer, tall by Thai standards, came briskly towards him. They didn't really know each other well, but enough to know what they had in common. It would go too far Roi Tam Ruad Ek or Chief Inspector Uthai Maneewat of the Serious Crimes Section a good friend, but they had helped each other out a few times in the past and that somehow forged a bond. Judging by his expression, he had just choked on a huge gulp Took Prik, which mainly consists of raw chillies, fermented fish sauce and lime juice spicy seasoning. 'Will you walk with me for a moment?' he asked invitingly and with a wave of his hand, ordering the uniformed sergeant guarding the ribbon to let J. through. J. thought he should ask if there were no plastic foot caps available for the crime scene not to contaminate, but decided against it because the chief inspector did not seem really into it the mood for a joke.

'This is a shitty situation',  Maneewat came right away to the point. 'What are you doing here? '

 "What's that got to do with you, Chief Inspector?" '

 'Well,' said Maneewat, ' let me refresh your memory. A few days ago, one of my more observant colleagues saw you and the deceased during a cozy tête à tête on a terrace on the Chao Phraya. The cell phone of the deceased shows that he has repeatedly called you in recent days and vice versa. The last call was this morning. And that was really strange because then, according to our forensic experts and the doctor, he had been dead as a stone for at least an hour... Do you find it strange that I ask questions when you suddenly show up here? '

'Oh…' J. tried very quickly to come up with an answer that sounded as plausible as possible, without showing his cards. ' As you know, our relationship was purely business. From time to time I – just like you, by the way – appealed to his expertise. Also a few days ago when I asked him to figure out some things for me…'

J. gasped for a moment. Unbeknownst to him, Maneewat had guided him in the direction of the corpse, and what he saw and smelled certainly did not cheer him up. There was already a faint, gassy stench about the corpse, like a stale fart, which wasn't really surprising in these temperatures. Despite the fact that J. had had his share of physical violence in Northern Ireland, he had never really gotten used to it. He had seen enough in a blink of an eye and had to fight against the urge not to vomit spontaneously. With an ultimate effort and clenched jaws, he managed to keep the chunks inside.

The body showed signs of excessive violence and torture. The professor lay on his back, his torso bare on the gravel. A large piece of skin hung limp, torn from his left shoulder, which appeared to be skinned. He had been beaten. Perhaps with the sturdy-looking, bloodied claw hammer lying a little further. His nose was broken, many of his teeth were scattered like bloody pebbles, and his right eye socket and jaw appeared to be shattered. A mush of splintered bone and broken tissue. Perhaps the same claw hammer had also been used to nail his tongue to a piece of driftwood with a long nail. A matter of shutting him up…. With a shudder, J. saw the heavy bolt cutters lying next to the corpse. All of Tanawat's fingers, with the exception of the thumbs, had been unceremoniously cut off. As far as he could see, the gray skin around some stab wounds in the chest and abdomen already showed bruised-looking purple spots. Possibly from the handle of the knife, which could indicate that Tanawat had been stabbed with blind and above all brutal force. He must have driven someone to a huge tantrum, but who?

Shocked to the core, J. closed his eyes briefly. Not out of fatigue but because he got through the rigor mortis Tanawat's stiffening body did not want to see. But it was as if the image, in all its gruesome detail, had burned itself into his retina. To his relief, J. was able to determine that the blood-curdling scene had also affected Inspector Maneewat. His body language spoke of a strained pent-up anger, which J. could well understand, for he knew that Tanawat had often been a valuable informant for the police in general and the Chief Inspector in particular. J. looked up with unseeing eyes, at the rusting uprights of the viaduct, the flaking concrete, the decaying graffiti. The noise of rushing traffic on Toll Road high overhead made it even harder for him to concentrate. J. Was convinced that he would soon get a raging headache….

'Which matters?' asked Maneewat suspiciously.

'Oh, you know, the usual stuff, nothing special. '

"Do these not-so-special cases have anything to do with this?" Maneewat asked, pointing to what appeared to be a few bloody streaks on the gray concrete of the bridge pier. Intrigued and suppressing his horror, J. took a few hesitant steps closer. Tanawat may have smeared a letter J and the numbers 838 on the pillar with a last effort, the bloodied stumps protruding from the broken bones that had once been his fingers. A bloody message from the afterlife, but what did it mean? A question that apparently also occupied Chief Inspector Maneewat intensely, because for the next fifteen minutes he continued to talk about it, with an undertone that showed increasing impatience.

'Come on J., you're not kidding me. Don't play games with me.'

'I don't feel the need for games at all, on the contrary.'

' A very intelligent man who was once my mentor once told me not to teach an old monkey how to draw faces… I have such a dark brown suspicion that you know all too well the meaning of what is written here. Either you bring it up, or I'll arrange for one of my guys to take you to the station. If necessary, you can sit there for hours or, as far as I'm concerned, even days to think before we continue chatting...'

'Whoa! Calm down, Chief Inspector,' said J. 'Honestly, I haven't the faintest idea. Like you, I break my head, but I can't make head or tail of this. Go on… Take me away, you won't get any wiser…J. meant what he said. He desperately tried to find a connection, but it soon became clear to him that this was neither the right time nor the right place for logical analysis, combination and deduction… Jeez, the headache had registered and how…

Maneewat recognized the desperate undertone in J.'s speech. 'Okay, you may leave as far as I'm concerned. But do keep yourself available. We guarantee that you can expect a friendly invitation from us one of the following days to continue this conversation. I therefore request that you do not leave the city. If you still want to travel urgently, I would have liked to have been informed in advance…'

As a still shaken J. left the crime scene, he realized that the attention of the cops in a murder case in the City of Angels usually started to fade after the first XNUMX hours. If there were still no important new developments after a few days, the case was often solved at most by chance. J. hoped from the bottom of his heart that this would not be the case here. Taking one last look at his slain companion, he swore to himself that he would at least put his best foot forward to apprehend Tanawat's murderer. Whatever the cost…

To be continued…..