LAUNDRY MAN (A Jack Shepherd crime thriller) (21 page)

The Amex receipts looked easiest, so I gathered them up and shuffled through them, looking for patterns. At a glance, they covered exactly the sort of travel and entertainment expenses that I would have imagined Dollar had been incurring for decades. About half of them were for charges in Thai baht and the rest were in an assortment of United States dollars, Japanese yen, Hong Kong dollars, UK pounds, and Australian and Singapore dollars. Maybe Dollar had just been cleaning out some old files and had decided to toss his out-of-date receipts like most all of us did from time to time.

Taking it another way, I sorted all the receipts into their own separate categories—restaurants, hotels, airlines, merchandise, and those I couldn’t figure out—but that didn’t suggest any pattern either. Then I tried sorting them by currencies and had a look at them that way. Still nothing.

Then, just to touch all the bases, I sorted the receipts by the localities where the purchases took place. The Bangkok stack was the largest, closely followed by a stack for Phuket, then a much smaller one for Hong Kong. After that, the receipts were all over the place, so I gave up.

Okay, so Dollar lived in Bangkok—I knew that, of course—and he liked to get away to Phuket as often as he could. Didn’t we all? What did that prove?

With a sigh I pushed the Amex receipts aside and began to work my way through the telephone bills, the confirmations of the securities trades, and the brokerage statements. Thai telephone bills contained no details about numbers that had been called, so that was a dead end, but I got a pad and made notes of the names of the securities firms and the people whose names appeared in Dollar’s correspondence. Then for good measure I went back over the Amex receipts again and made lists of the hotels and restaurants were Dollar had been doing most of his charging. It was probably all a waste of time, but if Dollar didn’t turn up pretty soon, I was going to have to start looking for him
somewhere.

When Anita eventually came in around ten, the living room of our apartment was largely buried under a layer of receipts, documents, letters, and notes.

“Good God, Jack! What in the world are you doing?”

I tried to tell her, but since I wasn’t altogether certain, it wasn’t easy.

Anita gently lowered herself into an empty space on one of the couches. Her face reflected her bewilderment.

“And you think this stuff will tell you where Dollar’s gone?” she asked.

“Well… maybe.”

“But why does it matter? Dollar’s a grown man. Surely he’s entitled to go anywhere he wants without you snooping through his garbage to try and figure out where he is.”

“Something’s wrong, Anita. One of Dollar’s clients has been murdered in a very public way; Dollar is apparently in hiding himself; and his house has been ransacked by somebody who must have wanted to find something pretty badly.”

“Even if that’s all true, Jack, it’s got nothing to do with you
.”

“Yes, it does.”

“What?”

“I don’t know yet. That’s why I’m looking through all this crap. I’m trying to find out.”

“Well, have you allowed for the possibility that you might be
wrong,
that you’re
not
involved in whatever Dollar is up to?
”

“I am, Anita, somehow. I’m absolutely sure of it. I can feel it.”

“Maybe it’s only gas you’re feeling, my darling. What did you have for lunch?”

“That wasn’t very helpful.”

“I wasn’t
trying
to be helpful. I was trying to show you how ridiculous all of this looks. Dollar may well be doing something that you don’t understand, but why
must
you understand it?”

Anita had a good point, I knew, so I said nothing.

“You have absolutely no business getting involved in any of this, Jack. No business at all.” Anita’s hands motioned vaguely in the air. “You never think of how these upheavals you’re always getting yourself involved in affect
me,
do you? We’re trying to be a sort of a family here, and yet you still act like you’re a man without a responsibility in the world except for yourself. You go running off on your little crusades without giving the first thought to me.”

She turned to look out the window and then almost immediately glanced back.

“Your stupid curiosity is going to be the end of us some day. Maybe you’re one of these men who’s just not meant to be married.”

“I don’t know what to say to that.”

“Neither do I, Jack. Neither do I.”

I took a long breath and slowly let it out.

“This really isn’t fair,” I said.

“No, I suppose from your point of view it isn’t, but as a great man once said,
‘Fuck
fair.’“

“Anita, please try—”

“I’m going to bed now, Jack. Feel free to play with your little scraps of paper as long as you like.”

Anita turned around and walked out of the room and I looked out a window so I wouldn’t have to watch her go. Even after she was gone I kept looking out that window. I just sat there for a long time with my arms folded and stared out at the lights of the city.

I could have dismissed everything Anita said as simple petulance. Maybe she’d had a bad day at her studio and was just taking it out on me. But I wasn’t willing to let it be that easy. There was something she had said that hit a nerve, something I couldn’t shake off by blaming it on her. Maybe I really was the wrong kind of guy for a woman to share a life with. Maybe being that kind of guy was a God-given talent—something like being able to sing opera or throw a ball through a hoop—and it was a talent I just didn’t have. Anita didn’t seem to think I had it, and I supposed she knew me about as well as anyone.

I walked around the living room after that collecting all of the stuff I had gotten out of Dollar’s garbage and dumped it all back in the garbage bag except for the Thai-language documents I had set aside earlier. Then I removed the CD from the drive in my laptop, put it in a manila envelope together with those documents, and took everything down to the Volvo. The envelope went on the front seat and the garbage bag into the trunk.

Even if Anita was right about me,
especially
if she was right about me, maybe I was better off focusing on what I
could
do than worrying about what I couldn’t; so I started the car and drove to Darcy’s place.

I had no doubt that Darcy and Nata could tell me what was on the disk and in the Thai-language documents. I was certain that both were important to me somehow. I just needed to know if I was right.

And yes, Anita, I will admit it to you honestly, I
wanted
to know.

I LEFT THE
envelope with Darcy and Nata and slipped away quickly, pleading fatigue. Back at the apartment I took the coward’s way out and slept in the guest room, then went to my office early on Monday morning. Barely halfway through my first cup of coffee, Darcy called.

“Nothing all that dramatic after all,” she said when I answered the telephone.

It was unnecessary, of course, for Darcy to tell me what she was referring to.

“I’ve emailed you a copy of what was on the disk, but you’re probably going to be disappointed. It was a backup all right, but it was just an address book. Nothing else. Might be something there for you, but…” Darcy trailed off.

“Was it encrypted?”

“Yeah.”

“So how’d you open it?”

“I used the password.”

“But how did you know what Dollar’s password was?”

“People are pretty predictable. When they pick a password, they always use something they won’t have any trouble remembering. That’s why nearly everyone picks just some ordinary word, or maybe a phrase that’s pretty well known. Either that, or they pick a combination of numbers that represent a date or something they can easily remember.”

I listened, making a mental note to change my ATM code as soon as we hung up.

“First we tried a random number crack of four through eight digits. When that didn’t work, we ran the file against English, Thai, French, Spanish, and Italian dictionaries and then for good measure against a database of a few hundred thousand proper names, places, and phrases that people sometimes use for passwords. It only took about twenty minutes to crack Dollar’s password.”

“What was it?” I asked.

“
Berghof
.
That mean anything to you?”

“Doesn’t it have something to do with World War II?” I thought about it briefly. “That’s what Hitler called his vacation house in the Bavarian Alps, isn’t it?”

“That’s right. It seems an odd choice of password for Dollar. Was he a World War II fanatic?”

“Beats me,” I shrugged. “How about those documents I gave you, the ones in Thai?”

“Those might be a little more useful to you. They were property transfers.”

“For what?”

Darcy hesitated, and from something in the way she did it I knew I wasn’t going to like whatever it was coming next.

“You really can’t tell very much from a Thai title deed until you compare the property description with a detailed map of the area where the transfer took place but, as nearly as I can tell, these transfers all involved large tracts of land in Phuket.”

That might explain all those American Express receipts Dollar had from Phuket, it occurred to me.

“Maybe Dollar was working on a hotel development there,” I said. “Who were the transfers made to?”

“They were all corporate, and all the names looked to me like shelf companies. It’ll take a while to find out who’s really behind them. You know that better than I do.”

“But I still don’t see why Dollar would throw title deeds away. Whoever the property was transferred to, the title deeds themselves are still important documents in Thailand.”

“These weren’t originals. They weren’t even complete. My guess is that they were just copies that were attached to something else he was working on, probably as exhibits of some kind just to prove that the transfers had actually taken place.”

“I still don’t see it, Darcy. A man who’d go to the trouble of encrypting his address book wouldn’t just toss copies of transfers like that into the trash. There’s too much information on them. He’d shred them first.”

“He would if they were real.”

That stopped me.

“What do you mean?”

“Now I’m not absolutely sure about this, Jack, but my guess is the transfers you found are all forgeries.”

I blinked at that.

“Not even particularly good ones,” Darcy continued. “My guess is that your man had a pressing need to show somebody that he had purchased a whole hell of a lot of property that he hadn’t, so he manufactured these title deeds to show where a whole bunch of money had gone.”

I thought about that and said nothing.

“Look, I got some real hot stuff running today, so I’m afraid I’ve got to leave all this with you for now. Why don’t you have a look at that address book and see if anything jumps out at you, then we’ll talk again in a few days.”

I thanked Darcy and we said our good-byes and hung up.

AFTER GOING DOWN
to the coffee room and refilling my mug, I logged onto the university email system and retrieved the address book Darcy had sent me. It turned out to be a single file she had converted to plain text so I was able to open it easily enough. I started reading through it, but my mind was mostly on those title deeds and I figured it was probably a waste of time.

I didn’t get any further than the second screen before I realized just how wrong I was.

The fifth entry down the second page was neatly typed all in capitals.

Asian Bank of Commerce.

Next to the name was a number—a phone number, I assumed, since it had seven digits—but there was no address and no country or city code. It could have been a Bangkok number, but it just as easily could have been a number in Teaneck, New Jersey.

What really stopped me, however, was something that appeared in parentheses immediately following the telephone number.

It was a name.

Arthur Daley.

My mind clicked straight back to Took Lae Dee when I had been perched on a stool studying the Hong Kong ID that Barry Gale had handed me.

Christ
,
I thought. Jimmy Kicks’ gangster bank and the name on Barry Gale’s phony Hong Kong Identity Card were both right here in Dollar’s computer address book.

What could
that
possibly mean?

Okay, I lectured myself in a stern voice, don’t jump to any conclusions here. Think this through clearly.

So there might be some kind of connection between Dollar Dunne and Barry Gale. That was all Dollar’s address book was actually telling me, wasn’t it? Finding the ABC and the name on Barry’s phony ID in Dollar’s address book certainly didn’t prove that there was also some kind of a connection between Barry Gale and Howard Kojinski’s body twirling away under the Taksin Bridge, did it? And it absolutely didn’t prove there was any connection between whatever might be going on here and my own relatively minor involvement with Howard and Dollar or with Barry Gale’s effort to recruit me to help him find the money missing from the ABC. Right?

Horseshit. Who was I trying to kid?

How much longer was I going to sit there looking at Barry Gale’s cover name in Dollar’s computer address book and tell myself that it might only be a coincidence? How long was I going to try and convince myself that it really meant nothing, and more importantly, that it had absolutely nothing to do with me?

Over the last few days two big trains had been rumbling through my life—one carrying Barry Gale and Jimmy Kicks, and the other carrying Dollar Dunne and Howard the Roach. I had felt both of them gathering speed, relentlessly building momentum toward something, although I hadn’t had the slightest idea where either one was headed.

But now I knew. Both trains were barreling right down the same track, heading straight for each other.

And I was standing directly between them.

I NEEDED HELP
before I got crushed, and Stanley Ratikun was the only guy I could think of to go to with something like this. For a couple of decades Stanley had been the managing partner of one of Bangkok’s oldest international law firms. Then he retired and became director of the Sasin Institute of Business Administration at Chulalongkorn University, which made him more or less my boss. At least technically.