LAUNDRY MAN (A Jack Shepherd crime thriller) (27 page)

I pointed angrily toward where Dollar’s body had disappeared behind the white Toyota van.

“
And
he
was just a lawyer. Guys like us push papers around when somebody tells us to. That’s all we do. It’s guys like you who screw around with stupid schemes that get people killed, not us. I
don’t
know
where any money is, and I’ve got
nothing
to do with whatever is going on here. How many times do you want to hear it?”

John’s sigh was long and deep.

“Let me run it down one more time for you, Jack. Dollar and Howard were using the ABC to handle enough black money that somebody is willing to kill people to get at it. Barry Gale fronts the ABC. Gale disappears one day, then he turns up in Bangkok and goes straight to you. You get curious and start sniffing around the ABC and that idiot Tommy turns up in your apartment and tells you to back off.”

John saw me blink.

“Gotcha,” he grinned. “Yeah, sure we know about Tommy going to your apartment, but that’s not what you should be focusing on here, Jack. Focus on what this looks like to us when we put it all together. Focus on how it looks to anybody wondering where you fit in. How do you think it adds up?”

Just John waited patiently for me to meet his eyes before he finished.

“It adds up to you being the link between Howard and Dollar’s operation and the ABC, Jack. That’s how it adds up.”

“That’s not how it
is,”
I said.

The people who had been in the parking lot began to drift away and first one then the other of the mercury-vapor lights snapped off. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t get that orange bag out of my mind and the darkness only made it more vivid. It was almost as if the bag had left behind a vapor trail where it crossed the lot, a luminescent orange wake that still hung in the air all the way from the door of my Volvo out into the street.

“Look, I can’t help you,” I finally said, not knowing what else to say. “Why don’t you just go find Barry and ask him what’s going on?”

“Jello and I sort of thought you might do that for us.”

“I don’t know where he is.”

“Oh,
fuck,
Jack.” Just John sounded genuinely disgusted. “When are you going to show us some respect, man? You figure we think you’re down here in Bangkok’s favorite hot spot to check out the action? Or maybe just because you were dying for a beer?”

“An unfortunate choice of words.”

“Not for me, Jack.”

“You know a lot of people,” Jello said. “And you’re not the kind of guy to sit around and wait for something to happen. We figure you either know where Barry Gale is or you have some way to contact him.”

“Somebody has been following me around town for weeks already, John, and we both know who it is. So what’s the problem? You’ve already found out who I know and where I go. And you know I’m not hanging out with Barry Gale.”

I had no doubt at all now that it was John’s people who’d been on my tail—that would certainly account for the high-tech tracking device—although it was dollars to donuts that nobody had let Jello in on the plan.

That immediately raised an even thornier question, however, one I wasn’t sure I was too keen on answering for myself right then.

If it really
was
Just John’s people following me, were they the people who killed Dollar and left his body in my car? Or, at the very least, wouldn’t they know who did?

I thought back for a moment on my conversation with Stanley.

In my experience,
the CIA does
not
go around killing American citizens in order to advance vast and shadowy conspiracies.

Maybe not, it occurred to me now, but how about in order to hide small and fucked-up ones?

“I’ve got nothing to do with any of this,” I repeated stubbornly.

“Then, Jack, you’re going to have to give us something,” Just John said. “Something that might make us believe you.”

“Like what?”

“Like Barry Gale.”

“I don’t have Barry Gale.”

“Get him.”

A patrolman started rolling up the yellow tape and the spectators continued to thin out. In another few minutes the parking lot would be empty, as empty as if nothing had ever happened there at all.

Some son of a bitch is going to kill me if I don’t get myself out of this,
I thought.
Sure as hell, some son of a bitch is going to kill me just like he did Dollar and Howard, and I’m not even going to know why.

“Barry Gale told me that the ABC was raided by somebody and lost a lot of money,” I finally told John and Jello. “He’s scared shitless that the Russian mobsters who set the whole deal up in the first place will think that he scammed the bank himself.”

“So why did he come looking for you?”

Just John asked the question like a man who already knew the answer and just wanted to see if I would tell him the truth.

“He asked me to help him find the money and get it back.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I said I wouldn’t get involved and I haven’t seen him since. That’s all I know. I can’t help you find him.”

Just John’s eyes were locked on mine.

“Yes, you can, Jack. And I’m absolutely sure that you will.”

I didn’t respond, but I could feel John watching me as my eyes drifted away from his and back across the parking lot.

The Volvo’s passenger door was still hanging open and the car’s interior light was shining like a beacon in the darkness. It was the only indication left of the spot where Dollar’s body had been lying when two men zipped it into a bright orange bag and hauled it away.

WHEN I GOT
home, Anita was packing for a trip to an art show in Hong Kong. She had so much stuff spread around the bedroom that I could hardly find a place to walk much less sit down, but boy was I glad to see her. Actually, I would have probably been glad to see almost anybody about then who had no interest in killing me; and as far as I knew, Anita didn’t. At least not right at that moment.

Anita asked me how I had spent the evening. I thought it was probably best to keep things simple. So I lied.

My reward was that we went to bed early.

When I woke the next morning, I lay still and kept my mind empty as long as I could. Eventually, in spite of my best efforts at inducing amnesia, a fresh surge of foreboding overwhelmed me. I got up and, taking care not to wake Anita, I pulled on some running shorts and an old Jerry Garcia T-shirt, then padded out to the front door to pick up the
Bangkok Post.

I put on some coffee and while it was dripping I flipped through the
Post
looking to see what spin they would put on Dollar being found dead inside my car the night before. I didn’t immediately see any mention at all of it, so I fixed a bowl of bran flakes, poured a mug of black coffee, and took everything over to the kitchen table so I could read the paper more carefully while I ate. I was finishing the bran flakes and was halfway through my second cup of coffee when I realized why I hadn’t noticed the story the first time I looked.

It wasn’t there.

Maybe the
Post
was just trying to avoid scaring the tourists, but I was suspicious that there was more to it than that. First there had been that odd little story they had run passing off Howard’s death as a suicide, and now there was no mention at all of Dollar’s murder. The killing of a prominent member of Bangkok’s foreign community was a newsworthy enough event, so why was the
Post
ignoring it?

Maybe they got the story too late last night to make their deadline. Maybe the
Post
was just lazy and printed whatever was given to them and nobody had handed them the story all neatly wrapped up. Maybe whoever was responsible for Dollar’s murder had enough leverage to tell the
Post
what they could print and what they couldn’t.

Maybe I was getting paranoid.

I slipped back into the bedroom, put on my running shoes, and took the stairs down to loosen up a little. When I pushed open the metal door at the bottom of the stairwell, I looked glumly at the empty space in the garage where the Volvo usually was.

It hadn’t been until the tow truck drove into the parking lot the night before and backed up to the Volvo’s bumper that it had occurred to me I wouldn’t be driving home after the cops were done. The tow truck driver brought over the clipboard for my signature and I tried to ask him where they were taking my car, but his English was limited and my Thai didn’t include the vocabulary for having my car towed after a dead body had been removed from it. I figured I could ask Jello about it later.

When I watched the man hooking up to the Volvo, it suddenly occurred to me that the garbage bag full of stuff from Dollar’s house was still in my trunk. If the Thai cops found that
,
I figured the fun would really begin; but Jello and John were both still standing around and trying to retrieve the bag would have made me pretty conspicuous. I just left it where it was and hoped for the best. After all, a couple of years back the local cops had impounded a truck and never noticed a dead body in the back until the smell became impossible to ignore any longer. I always had sheer incompetence going for me.

I WALKED BRISKLY
down the driveway wheeling my arms in ineffectual warm-up gestures, turned into Soi Chidlom, and jogged slowly toward Ploenchit Road. The morning air was fresh and the slight breeze blowing from the north kept the humidity down. I made the traffic light on Ploenchit, crossed over, and jogged south on a narrow soi running alongside a shaded canal.

The waters of the little canal looked fresh and blue and the grassy bank was lined with tall trees that knitted at their upper branches into an almost continuous canopy. The softly shifting mottle of morning light through the branches dappled the water in a way that made me think of Monet, and it wasn’t often that anything in Bangkok made me think of Monet.

When I got to the Polo Club it was still too early for the gate attendants to be paying much attention so on impulse I dodged past the traffic barrier, tossed the uniformed guard a quick salute, and ran inside before he could stop me. Of course, it was unlikely he would have stopped me anyway. Thai security guards seldom challenged foreigners regardless of where they were going, and a foreigner mad enough to be running the streets of Bangkok in a Jerry Garcia T-shirt before seven o’clock in the morning would have been one to avoid in particular.

I ran across the parking lot, loped down the wide brown-tiled walkway between the tennis courts and the bar, and emerged onto a large field of neatly clipped grass. Circling it between white railings was a sand track about fifteen feet wide with a yellow sign that warned me to watch out for passing horses. Although the track wasn’t meant for runners, I soon settled into a comfortable jog on the loosely packed sand.

With Howard and Dollar both dead and too many people starting to look at me as the only remaining link to the ABC’s missing money, Barry Gale was the only person left who might have a way to call off the dogs. I
had
to find Barry and I thought I could do that. Maybe Manny would help me and maybe he wouldn’t, but either way I could do it. I was starting to feel certain of that.

The next time I passed behind the club’s huge swimming pool I left the track and took the steps up to the pool area two at a time. I flopped down in one of the blue lounge chairs on the deck surrounding it, fell back against the cool cotton cover, and gave in to fatigue, my chest rising and falling in deep heaves until my pulse rate got close to normal. Pushing myself into a sitting position I pulled up my knees and checked out the early arrivals filtering into the club.

There weren’t many. A portly, middle-aged Thai with an ancient-looking wooden tennis racket was patting balls gently against the backboard on one of the tennis courts. In the pool, two elderly foreigners who I took to be husband and wife were swimming together, stroking slowly but methodically back and forth from one end to the other, staying side by side as they swam. I liked the look of that and I wondered briefly if someday Anita and I would grow old the same way, just staying together and stroking methodically along side by side. I hoped so.

It was while I was watching the old couple that I noticed the man in mirrored sunglasses. He was sitting alone at a table in the shadows at the front edge of the tennis pavilion. He looked familiar, but the distance and the sunglasses made him difficult to place. Then he raised his hand and waved me over and something about the gesture caused my memory to click.

It was Mango Manny.

I walked over and dropped into a chair across from him. “I didn’t know you were a member of the Polo Club, Manny.”

“Too bloody right I’m not. You high society fuckers would never let a working-class boy like me into a place like this.”

“Hey,” I protested, lifting up my T-shirt and wiping sweat from my face. “Leave me out of this. I’m not a member either. I’m just passing through.”

Manny was wearing sharply creased pearl-gray slacks and a matching silk shirt. He looked liked he might have come straight from Caesars Palace and, for all I knew, he had.

“So what are you doing here so early this morning?” I eventually asked when he didn’t say anything else.

“Waiting to talk to you.”

I looked closely at Manny. He had to be kidding.

“Why would you be waiting here for me? I didn’t even know I was going to be here until a half-hour ago.”

“I know things, mate. Just like you know things.”

“Yeah? Well, I only know things
after
they happen. Knowing things
before
they happen is kind of spooky.”

Manny just shrugged, but I understood what he was saying.

Foreigners in Bangkok, even long-time residents, forget how conspicuous they actually are. Since most Thais politely pretend not to notice us, we drift into the agreeable sensation that we are going about our lives almost invisibly, although nothing could be further from the truth. Everywhere a foreigner goes in Bangkok, there is someone who sees him go there. Everywhere a foreigner is in Bangkok, there is someone who knows he is there. And that information is always available to people who know how to get it.