The Axe Factor: A Jimm Juree Mystery (Jimm Juree Mysteries) Read Free Page A

got a real run-out with Sissi in our long bilingual phone conversations. We prided ourselves on our skill at speaking English in foreign accents. I did a good Brazilian. She had Eastern Europe down pat. It didn’t, however, improve the actual language.
    That was another good point. It would be a boon to find a down-and-out Westerner within cycling distance who could help me with my conversation skills. He’d probably be an alcoholic with skin allergies, grateful that a voluptuously curvy young Thai girl should stop by occasionally for a chat. I’d bring him a bottle of Mekhong whiskey, watch his liver-polka-dotted hands shake as he poured it neat into his cracked Amazing Thailand mug and partook of a grateful swig. Of course, I’d take the mace. Western writers in Thailand drew most of their inspiration from bars. He’d assume I was as loose as all the girlies in farang novels. That’s the problem, you see? When you have a government full of dirty old men who have more sex with professionals than with their own wives, it’s very difficult to dismantle a sex industry that for many years was the country’s only drawing card. The U.S. military left two-thirds of its combat pay in Pattaya. Word got around, and soon every Tom, Dick, and Helmut was on a charter flight to Bangkok. A lot of powerful people here got where they are today on the back of the male libido. You see why I could never write fiction? I get too tied down with issues. Nobody wants to read all this, so … Conrad Coralbank. The editor allowed me to sit and look him up online. His computer was dial-up. The connection was such that I drifted into a daydream where I was a Neanderthal staring at a rectangular block of stone, occasionally hammering it with my club. Then the Wikipedia page arrived. Here’s what didn’t surprise me. The photo was of a fresh-faced, big-teethed, blue-eyed man—late forties according to the caption—with fashionably long hair. They do that—authors. They dig out a picture from thirty years before that they kept because although it didn’t actually look like them, it looked the way they’d willed themselves to look at the time. They send it to their publisher who airbrushes out the pimples, and there it is: the jacket photo.
    I was, however, thrown by the number of books he’d supposedly written and the awards he’d purportedly been nominated for, and by the fact that he was apparently married and enjoyed cycling, kayaking, and walking the dogs on the beach. None of that sounded particularly down-and-out to me. But, hey, anyone can write themselves a Wikipedia page, and if nobody who knows any better ever looks at it, nobody will edit out your lies. The net was Club Med for the scammer. So I wasn’t exactly shaken by this introduction, just a little stirred. And to stir me even more, Conrad had photos.
    Conrad on the beach with his two Rottweilers. Conrad in the garden with his beautiful Thai wife, both smiling with seedlings in their hands. Conrad about to set off on a bicycle rally with the Pak Nam Mountain Bikers’ Club. And in every photo he was that same airbrushed young man from the jacket photo. There was one pensive black-and-white picture where he leaned over his keyboard in search of adjectives, and you could see his wrinkles. But they weren’t deep, merely the friendly parallel arcs of an artist’s pencil.
    I zoomed in to his face until his forehead and chin no longer fitted on the screen. I’d lived here a year. Spent a lot of time by the roadside praying some gypsy family might steal me away. Why had I never seen Conrad Coralbank? Why had I never seen his tall, beautiful wife? With La Mae twenty kilometers south, and Lang Suan eighteen kilometers west, Pak Nam was his nearest metropolis. He’d have to pass our resort to get there. I’d spent hours in the Pak Nam 7-Eleven, marveling at the vast choice of potato chips, mixing myself various flavors of ice gunk, doing impersonations for the CCTV camera. Why