The Thai Amulet (20 page)

“What?”

“Whatever it was they wanted.” He took a handkerchief out of his shirt pocket and wiped blood from his face. “I don’t suppose you could go to the kitchen and get me some of that brownish liquid we fancy? Straight up. You can skip the ice. I feel rather strange.”

“I’m going to get help,” I said. “Don’t move.”

He grasped my hand as I tried to stand up. “I think we need to talk to my mother,” he said. “The spirit house.”

Then he passed out.

It was much later in the day when I went to see Bent Rowland. I was dreading seeing the odious man again, but there was nothing more I could do for Fitzgerald. The doctors at the hospital told me he had a severe concussion and was in serious condition. The police had been called. They said they’d try to find his mother. Robbery was their official position.

The stairs up to Rowland’s office were dark and smelly. Rowland was sitting in his chair with his back to the door, looking out the small window on to the alleyway just as he had done when he’d contemplated the masterpiece I was writing. The smell in the room was even worse than the last time, the pungent reek of perspiration rather sickening. Rowland had been suffering from the heat and something more, some stronger emotion like fear. There was some other smell there, too, which I thought I might identify if I had time to think about it. However, I had questions for Bent Rowland. I’d ask them as fast as I could and get out of there.

“Mr. Rowland,” I said. “I’ve come to talk to you about my manuscript. This time I’d prefer truth to fantasy.”

Rowland didn’t move. I thought perhaps he’d fallen asleep, and then, given his lack of response that, overweight as he was, he’d had a heart attack in the heat. I suppose in a way he had. The knife through his heart would have done that, no doubt.

Chapter 9

I see now, looking back, the signs that should have warned me that danger lurked in the palace. Soon after Yot Fa was anointed king and his mother queen regent, as I have already recounted, an earthquake rocked the city. If that in itself was not sign enough, later a truly terrible event occurred. King Yot Fa was entertained by spectacle of various kinds, and shortly after he became king, declared that the chief royal elephant would engage in a duel with another. Many, including me, accompanied the king in the procession to the elephant kraal for the fight.

A gasp went up from the crowd when the second elephant’s tusk was broken in three pieces. Even more horrifying, later that night, the royal elephant mourned, making the sound of human crying, and one of the city gates groaned in sympathy. It was a bad omen indeed and perhaps signaled the events that were to follow. But I was distracted and perhaps did not fully understand the significance of the events around me.

It was about this time that a very pretty young woman of the court, a servant to Lady Si Sudachan, caught my attention. I should confess that I was by then well past the age that I should have taken a wife or two, but perhaps because of my close attachment to my mother or the precariousness of my position, I had not done so.

Now I was smitten. I found the young woman’s dark eyes mesmerizing. Everything about her, even the rustle of her garments as she walked made me feverish. To my surprise, she made it clear that she, too, was interested in me. I was flattered beyond all reason. She was the most desirable creature, and I was almost delirious with her attentions.

I will not reveal to you the delights we shared, except to say that for a period of many weeks I was distracted by her presence. I saw less and less of the young king, and the two of us became rather distant. I had hoped he would share my joy in the relationship, but he did not and in fact was quite petulant about it, perhaps because his mother was so obviously besotted by the object of her affections at the same time I was with mine.

If anyone lived the life I had imagined for Will Beauchamp when I’d first heard about his disappearance—it seemed so long ago—it was Bent Rowland. His home was a small but pretty little house with a pleasant neglected garden in a reasonably decent neighborhood, according to David Ferguson, who took me there.

The door was opened by a girl I at first thought must be Rowland’s daughter, given she couldn’t have been a day over fifteen, but I soon realized was his lover. And not just that, but the mother of the sweetest little baby tucked into a bassinette in one corner of the kitchen. The girl, whose name, apparently, was Parichat, wore the shortest of shorts and a tight cotton T-shirt, her long, skinny legs thrust into very high-heeled sandals. She looked terribly young and vulnerable. There are those who have said with some cynicism that the pudgy foreigner and the small-boned Thai woman with delicate features are the quintessential couple of Thailand, but the thought of her and Bent Rowland together made me nauseous.

As she and David spoke, I looked around. The kitchen, while small, had every conceivable gadget and appliance, from a refrigerator with icemaker, to a microwave, to a very trendy looking blender. Everything looked absolutely brand-new. The living room furnishings, while chosen with questionable taste, were also spanking new. A pile of boxes was stacked in one corner of the room.

“Is she moving already?” I asked David, in a lull in the conversation, as she went to tend to the infant who had begun to wail.

He asked her the question. “No, just moved in a couple of months ago. With the birth of the baby, she hasn’t had time to unpack everything. The usual story,” he added in a quieter tone. “She’s from a village up north. Came to the big city to make her fortune. Ended up in prostitution. Met Rowland in a bar. He bought her from her pimp. Lovely story, isn’t it? This is the dark side of Bangkok. Her parents think she’s working in a store and is engaged to a nice Thai boy. There are way too many stories like hers, unfortunately. She thinks she’s got it made here, though, and it’s not a bad spot. Apparently they were living in a tiny little apartment until recently. Rowland must have been a successful literary agent, even if I’d never heard of him.”

“Not judging from his office,” I said. “Nor his attitude. He oozed failure from every pore.”

“According to police, he’s been depositing rather large sums of money every week since the spring sometime, five thousand dollars, always in cash,” David said. “The deposits add up to about eighty thousand. The last one was a week before he died. He was getting money somewhere. I suppose it’s possible he got a big advance for Will’s book and only gave him two thousand dollars of it, and hasn’t been paying him his royalties either, although one could argue that’s because he couldn’t find him.”

“Have you read any good books about Helen Ford lately?” I said.

“What? Oh, I see what you mean. No book, no royalties.”

“Exactly. Looks to me as if he was being paid for something else. His silence, for example.”

“Blackmail? You didn’t take to this guy, did you?”

“No, I didn’t. I thought right from the start he was a sleaze and a con artist. Nothing I’ve seen here today has changed my mind. The timing’s right. Will finished his book on Helen Ford in the spring and gave it to Rowland, who presumably read the whole manuscript. Then he told Will he’d find a publisher, which he hadn’t, at least not the one he told Will about. And suddenly a guy who has been eking out his existence as a literary agent is depositing rather a lot of cash. What if somebody was paying Rowland to keep Will’s book from getting published? Then when Will disappeared, died, whatever, Rowland was suddenly dispensable, too.”

“Are you angling around to saying there’s an eighty-year-old axe murderer out there somewhere still chopping up her victims?”

“I know it sounds ridiculous. I don’t suppose you could just do a little checking of Embassy records, though, to see if there’s anything on what happened to Ford? She was an American.”

“I did already. I confess you got me curious. There’s nothing that I could find. Sorry.”

“Too bad. What’s going to happen to this girl?” I said. The girl in question returned to the room, still holding the child, and started speaking quickly and in a heated manner to David, who kept shaking his head.

When she hesitated for a moment, I said, “Ask her, will you, when you get a chance, if she knows Will?”

He did, and said, “She says she met Will. He once visited them at their former home. She said her husband was representing Will, and had sold his book for a lot of money last spring. Maybe I’m right about Rowland keeping the money. Anyway, let’s get out of here. There’s only so much of this kind of situation I can stand.”

“You didn’t answer my question about what will happen to her,” I said as we drove away.

“I went to discuss with her the fact that Rowland’s sister in Atlanta wants us to help with the formalities of having his body shipped back to the States. That’s what started that tirade. Parichat wants to go to the States. She says she married an American, her kid is American—the kid’s name is Bent Rowland Junior, poor little tyke—and she thinks she’s entitled to citizenship.”

“And is she?”

“I doubt she’s really married to him,” he said. “Let’s just say that complicates matters. And he is dead now, after all. I’ll see what I can do about the kid. I sure hope she has some of that cash still stashed somewhere.”

“Why?”

“Because he left all his money, everything he has, to his sister,” David said.

“Oh no!” I said.

“Exactly. She’ll be back on the street in no time. Some days I really hate my job,” he added. “So where do you want to go now?”

“I need to go and pick up something,” I said. “Robert Fitzgerald suggested I get it.” That was more or less true, although, granted, the man had barely been conscious when he’d said it.

“You mean you want to go now?” he said.

“Yes,” I replied. “Before others get there.”

“What others?”

“I wish I knew. It’s at his house, whatever it is.”

“Neat place,” he said as he looked around the tree house. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Look at these chess pieces, will you? They’re fabulous. Now, what are we looking for here?”

“I don’t know. Fitzgerald told me they, whoever they are, and I assumed it was the people who bashed him and made such a mess of this place, didn’t get what they wanted. He also said we had to go and see his mother. Maybe you could help me find her. Now, what does this look like to you?” I said, gesturing about the place.

“Other than a mess, you mean? People were looking for something, obviously. I have no idea what, but, come to think about it, these shelves are interesting. One of them has been emptied, the others not even touched. Do we know what was on this one shelf?

“Diaries,” I said.

“Hmm,” he said. “In that case, they were looking for diaries for the years between about 1945 and I960. The others aren’t touched. If that is the case, they didn’t find what they wanted, because they went on to go through all the drawers, check under the bed, searching through the kitchen cupboards, that sort of thing, or maybe it was something else they wanted. This is right off the top of my head, but that’s what it looks like to me.”

“Me, too, and some of those dates are about right,” I said.

“For what?”

“The murder Will Beauchamp was writing about.”

“The fifty-year-old crime again: Helen Ford,” he said. “So you really don’t think Rowland got the money from the publisher? That’s how it works, doesn’t it? The publisher pays the agent who takes his commission and passes the rest of the money along to the author?”

“I think so,” I said.

“There are other options here, you know. Didn’t you say Bent gave Will a couple of thousand dollars as an advance? Maybe Rowland did manage to get Will a small advance, took his cut, and passed the rest along, and the money he’s been depositing is from some other source. I suppose the trouble with that is, why lie about the publisher if there really is one? So, maybe you’re right and he’s dishonest, got a lot of money from some other publisher, and didn’t pay Will. Or he just gave Will a couple of thousand of his own money to give the impression that he had sold the book. Maybe the guy was just an abject loser who was trying to play in the big leagues, or at least give the impression he was.”

“You’re right. It could be any of the above. But it is still possible somebody paid him not to find a publisher, and he was just playing for time with Will.”

“Why wouldn’t he just tell Will he couldn’t find a publisher for it?”

“Because Will would get himself another agent. End of payments for Rowland.”

“Will was bound to find out—did find out, as a matter of fact. This ploy was only a temporary solution.”

“My point exactly.”

“You’re saying that Will is dead, and not just dead, but murdered.”

“I’m coming to believe this is the only possible conclusion.”

“Realistically, who would kill over a book?

“If I had the book, I might know the answer to that question. But it wasn’t in Will’s apartment. I looked. I doubt it will be in Rowland’s office, either. Now let’s keep looking here for whatever I’m supposed to find. Fitzgerald said ‘spirit house.” There was one he was working on in the living room, and another, the one protecting the house, is outside.“

“It didn’t do a very good job, did it?” David said. “Protecting the place, or him, I mean. I’ll go check the spirit houses. This one looks perfectly normal,” he said.

“I’ll go down and check the one outside. I’m hoping not to disturb whoever it is lives in these things.”

“I’m sure they’ll forgive us,” I said.

He returned in a minute or two. “Nothing again, I’m afraid.”

“There has to be something,” I said. I picked up the unfinished spirit house, the one I’d promised to buy for my store, and turned it over carefully. I could see where one piece of its floor was not perfectly fitted together, not up to the standard of the rest of Fitzgerald’s work. I gave it a careful tug, then a harder one, and the floor came away to reveal a hollow in which was stuffed two slim leather diaries. “Got it,” I said.

“Good for you,” he said. “Let’s see? Diaries for 1948 and ‘49- We should turn them over to the police,” he said. “They might be relevant.”