Free The Axe Factor: A Jimm Juree Mystery (Jimm Juree Mysteries) by Colin Cotterill Page B

more notice of that last comment, but I’m a non-native speaker and I assumed it was related somehow to something he’d said earlier. But there it was. Momentary loss of control. I didn’t need to be native to recognize that. He looked up into my eyes, to see whether I’d noticed his nakedness. He stared into my face until it was almost uncomfortable, before his lips peeled back like mangosteen rind to show me the irresistible whiteness inside.
    “What she got was a closed joint bank account,” he said. “A studio apartment with a view of the apartment block next door, and an Italian restaurateur named Giuseppe.”
    “And how do you know all this?” I asked.
    “She told me a couple of weeks ago. She turned up on the doorstep with the suitcase and the foam box she’d left with. She said she’d thought it over and decided her life would be better with me. I sat her down at the kitchen table with a gin and tonic and asked her how she’d been spending her nights since I kicked her out. I recorded the whole conversation on my phone. As a writer, you can never have too much original material. She relaxed. She thought that a confession—of everything—would cleanse her. Make her pure again in my eyes. But the woman I loved was already a character in a story. And the story ended and the character stopped being real. You may fall for Gatsby while you’re reading how great he is, but when you turn that last page, you have to draw the line between life and fiction. My wife had stopped existing.”
    I looked into his damp blue eyes and my heart sagged. I hadn’t counted on this much honesty over lunch.
    “So you shot her,” I said. Well, I thought the situation could use a little levity. His eyebrows rose and seemed to nudge his mind back to the here and now. He laughed. He was a good laugher.
    “Drove her to the airport and put her on the first flight,” he said.
    The under-Sprinter motorcycle was being removed in small pieces. Like Conrad Coralbank’s heart, I doubted they’d ever put it back together again. Beer tended to make me morose. I wanted to crawl through the empty plates and hug my old author, say “There, there” and stroke his hair. He was perfect. All but one of the questions had been answered. His wife was a heartless wench. Mair was right. She had seen her two weeks before on her way to beg forgiveness. Conrad was telling the truth, and now he was being stalked by an aggressive maid. He was doubly a victim. A poor soul. And so to the final question.
    “Why did you agree to this stupid interview?” I asked.
    We were sharing a plate of pineapple chunks on toothpicks at this point.
    “I thought it might enhance my career,” he said, straight-faced.
    I glared at him with one eyebrow raised. A month earlier he’d been featured in a five-page spread in Cosmopolitan . The Chumphon News wasn’t even a lifeboat on that great ocean queen.
    “All right,” he confessed. “I didn’t agree. I like my anonymity. I always refuse local news and TV interviews. But your Khun Boot wrote back, saying he had a world-class reporter named Jimm Juree who was a near neighbor of mine and she was willing to do the interview. That’s when I said yes.”
    “Why?”
    “Because I’d—”
    “Well, what a blast” came a high-pitched squeal from somewhere behind me. Conrad’s eyelids sprang open. I turned to see a slim man in the uniform of a police lieutenant mince across the restaurant floor like the opening act of Simon Transvestite cabaret. He put his hands to his cheeks.
    “Jimm Juree,” he said. “I can’t believe it.”
    Lieutenant Chompu was the only unashamedly camp police officer in Thailand. He certainly wasn’t the only gay policeman—not by a long pole—but his refusal to restrain his feminine side, particularly in moments of high drama, had resulted in his transfer to the last stop on the line: Pak Nam. It was a sad end for a man with keen instincts and brilliant policing skills. His timing,