Cockroaches(19)
“You’ll learn,” she said and started walking. “Bangkok is cramped.”
“And what about the radio?” Harry looked back at the invitingly open windows. “Do you reckon it’ll be there when we get back?”
She flashed her police badge to the attendant, who straightened up with a jolt.
“Yes.”
“No fingerprints on the knife,” Crumley said with a satisfied smack of her lips. Sôm-tam, a kind of green papaya salad, didn’t taste as weird as Harry had imagined. In fact, it was good. And spicy.
She sucked the foam off the beer with a loud slurp. He looked around at the other customers, but no one seemed to notice, probably because she was drowned out by a polka-playing string orchestra on the stage at the back of the restaurant, which in turn was drowned out by the traffic. Harry decided he would drink two beers. Then stop. He could buy a six-pack on the way to the flat.
“Ornamentation on the handle. Anything there?”
“Nho thought the knife might be from the north, from the mountain tribes in Chiang Rai province or around there. Something to do with the inset pieces of colored glass. He wasn’t sure, but in any case it wasn’t the standard kind of knife you can buy in shops here, so we’re sending it to an art history professor at Benchamabophit Museum tomorrow. He knows all there is to know about old knives.”
Liz waved, and the waiter came and ladled some steaming coconut soup from a tureen.
“Watch out for the little white guys. And the little red ones. They’ll burn you up,” she said, pointing with a spoon. “Oh, and the green ones, too.”
Harry stared with skepticism at the different substances floating around in his bowl.
“Is there anything here I can eat?”
“The galanga roots are OK.”
“Have you got any theories?” Harry asked in a loud voice to drown her slurping.
“About who the murderer could be? Yes, of course. Lots. Firstly, it could be the prostitute. Or the motel owner. Or both.”
“And what would the motive be?”
“Money.”
“There was five hundred baht in Molnes’s wallet.”
“If he took out his wallet in reception and Wang saw he had a bit of money, which is pretty likely, the temptation may have been too much for him. Wang wouldn’t have known that the man was a diplomat and that there would be such a big stink.”
Crumley held her fork up in the air and leaned forward excitedly.
“They wait until the ambassador’s in the room, knock on the door and stab him with the knife when he turns his back. He falls forward on the bed, they empty his wallet, but leave the five hundred so it won’t look like robbery. Then they wait three hours and call the police. And Wang is bound to have a friend in the force who’ll make sure everything runs smoothly. No motive, no suspect, everyone keen to sweep an incident involving prostitution under the carpet. Next case.”
Harry’s eyes suddenly bulged out of his head. He grabbed the glass of beer and put it to his mouth.
Crumley smiled. “One of the red ones?”
He got his breath back.
“Not a bad theory, Inspector, but there’s a flaw,” he gasped in a throaty voice.
She frowned. “What’s that?”
“Wang keeps a private guest book, probably crammed with names of politicians and civil servants. Each visit is logged along with the date and time. To have some defense, if anyone should make a fuss about his establishment. But when there’s a visitor whose face he doesn’t recognize he can hardly ask for their ID. So what he does is join the guest outside under the pretext of making sure there’s no one else in the car, right, to find out who he is.”
“Now I don’t follow you.”
“He writes down the plate number, OK? Then he checks it afterward against the register. When he saw the blue plates on the Mercedes he knew at once Molnes was a diplomat.”
Crumley studied him thoughtfully. Then she swung around to the adjacent table with her eyes open wide. The couple jumped in their chairs and busily concentrated on their food.
She scratched her leg with a fork.
“It hasn’t rained for three months,” she said.
“Sorry?”
She waved a hand for the bill.
“What’s that got to do with the case?” Harry asked.
“Not a lot,” she said.
It was almost three in the morning. The noise from the city was muted by the regular hum of the fan on the bedside table. Nevertheless, Harry could hear the odd heavy lorry driving over Taksin Bridge and the roar of a solitary riverboat setting off from one of the piers on the Chao Phraya.
As he’d unlocked the door to the flat he had seen a red flashing light on the telephone and after pressing a few buttons he’d listened to two messages. The first was from the Norwegian Embassy. Tonje Wiig, the chargé d’affaires, had a very nasal voice and sounded as if she was either from Oslo West or had a strong desire to live there. She told Harry to present himself at the embassy the next day at ten, but then changed the time to twelve as she discovered she had a meeting at a quarter past ten.