In the palm of his hand lay a dozen or so small pins—small smooth porcelain blue “Cs” and on the back of the “C” was the clasp which fastened it to the member’s lapel.
“What are they?” asked Pratt. He picked one out of Jess’s hand, examined it, and then looked over at Panya. “Is this some kind of a club?”
Naylor had worn the same kind of pin on his jacket. “The Cause, Colonel. This is the pin members wear when they travel to Thailand, Cuba, the Philippines or wherever so that they can recognize each other,” said Jess.
“What are they doing in the bottom of the fish tank?” asked Calvino.
By now everyone was huddled around Jess looking at his catch of “C” pins.
Panya looked perplexed. “I don’t know.”
Chaiwat reached into the fish tank and pulled out another handful of the “C” pins and stepped forward. “My father doesn’t know about the pin. Going through the clothing of the farangs, I found them. I liked the color blue so I threw them in the fish tank. If you think we were stealing them, then you are wrong.”
“The dead farangs were all members of the same club as you so rightly called it. Naylor’s Cause-member club,” Calvino said to Pratt. “And they all ended up here.” Poached off the Causeway with their last stop being Panya’s funeral home, where the undertaker’s son helped himself to their membership identification.
“Naylor’s club?” asked Pratt. “Bring him back inside.”
Calvino opened the door and Naylor was leaning against the wall, smoking a cigarette.
“Wes, we need you to identify something,” said Calvino.
“Another fucking body?”
He pushed his way to the desk. Panya sat back in his chair, eyes half-closed; he wasn’t mediating, he was projecting himself into another time and place. Only all the sounds of this time and place continued to intervene. When he heard Naylor’s voice, his eyes popped open.
“These Cause pins were taken off about thirty bodies.”
That got Wes Naylor’s attention. He lifted his foot and stubbed the cigarette out on the sole of his shoe and put the half-smoked butt back into the pack. Calvino could begin to understand how cheap the guy was, and how even one broken window would make him go postal if he thought that he had to pay for it out of his own pocket. Naylor looked at the pins.
“They’re real all right,” said Naylor. “Where did you get that many?”
“From the fish tank,” said Jess. “Chaiwat kept them in the bottom of the fish tank.”
“Goddamn. Stealing personal property off the dead. Looting. That’s fucking terrible,” said Naylor.
“Khun Panya, would you go with us to the wat?,” said Calvino.
The undertaker looked like someone had driven a stake through his heart. He shook his head violently. “No, I have so much work. I cannot go. Impossible.”
Pratt turned one of the Cause pins over in his hand. He looked up at the undertaker, who was still shaking his head.
“You and your son will go to the wat with us.” This wasn’t a request but an order and Panya knew he was defeated. “We will need you to identify the people involved.”
From the moment Panya had been phoned and asked to collect Daniel Ramsey’s body, he felt this farang’s death was a bad omen. This was the first time in memory that he ever embalmed a farang whom he recognized, had joked with, had drunk with. Daniel had become his friend. He had been at the funeral home many times to make arrangements for the dead farangs. Now in death, Daniel was pulling Panya and his son Chaiwat to the one place they did not wish to go—the wat where the embalmed farangs had been taken for cremation. Whatever Daniel’s game had been, Panya suspected that there was more to it than an ordinary religious service. How could all of these farangs be Buddhists? Why weren’t at least some of the services in a church? Why, why, why kind of questions that had caused him to suffer more than one sleepless night. Chaiwat found a way of dealing with Daniel’s mystery emotionally; he said it wasn’t their business. What happened along the edges of another’s life had nothing to do with him; he had no responsibility to go over to that edge and peer down. Chaiwat’s other two brothers always went along with Daniel to the wat and they reported nothing strange. They had never said anything unusual ever happened.
Daniel always arrived at the funeral home with two or three Thai associates in attendance—gangsters, Panya had thought. From the way these associates acted and dressed, the roughness of their speech, he knew that inquiry into their background would produce hard looks, and lies. But he didn’t have to ask. He knew who these men were who escorted the bodies to the airport. But the transportation and cremation end of matters was strictly speaking none of his business, Panya had told himself. He had done his job. After that, well, it was not his place to inspect the world for all the things that might be out of order. Mr. Morgan knew that Panya always did a first class job. Never once had there been a complaint. Yes, Panya knew it was wrong to embalm a body that would be cremated. But, on the other hand, it was a small wrong. The farangs were rich and he was now a poor man with a fifteen-story building to finish.
Noi, who had sat in a fugue-like motionless state until she thought Jess was about to deliver a cross-over punch into her face as his arm whizzed past and then plunged into the fish tank, rose from her chair and walked over to a side table displaying many framed photographs. She picked one up. She looked closely at the framed photo of Panya with another Thai who looked like a businessman. Both were smiling into the camera. The other Thai had his arm wrapped around Panya’s shoulder. Noi’s hands were firm on the frame as she turned and looked straight at Jess, holding the photo up for him to see.
“Why is a photo of Khun Kowit here?”
The whole room of people stared at Noi holding the photo.
“That’s Kowit?” asked Jess.
Noi nodded.
“I could have told you that,” said Naylor. “He’s the one who introduced me to Dr. Nat.”
“That we understand,” said Calvino. “What is less clear, is how Khun Panya knows Kowit. Maybe he would like to explain his friendship to us.”
A drop of perspiration fell onto his black mourning tie. “Khun Kowit’s my friend from LA. He’s also in the funeral home business,” said Panya. “Perhaps you know him?”
“We know Khun Kowit very well,” said Jess. He still looked like parish priest with one wet arm dripping on the glass covering the photo as if he had just rushed out of a baptism.
“I didn’t know pee Kowit was a Catholic,” said Panya as he took the framed picture and wiped the water off with the sleeve of his jacket.
“There may be a few other businesses Kowit has that you don’t know about. Or maybe you do know,” said Jess. “Maybe Naylor might have some ideas as well.”
Naylor’s lip rose in a sneer. “Ideas? When was the last time an idea bit your ass?”
“Not a polite way to speak to a priest,” said Pratt.
Noi, pressing the photo against her breasts, said in Thai, “You will go to hell.” She was looking past Naylor and straight at Panya. The undertaker’s knees seemed to buckle as he fell back into the chair behind his desk.
At the LAPD, the ballistics people call this moment of realization a “cold hit.” The distinctive marks on the casings which come from one handgun used in a crime in LA matched up on the central computer network with the distinctive grooves and scratches that left on a casing found at a murder scene in Chicago. The process requires running a line from one known point to an infinity of possibilities, only to find a connection, a confirmation that the same gun had been used in both places. Grooves and scratches etched into metal link an LA homicide to a murder in Chicago and suddenly two unrelated murders can be traced to the same gun and, more likely than not, to the same gunman. Except no one ever knows that such a line can be drawn until the casings match. Matching bullet casings is like matching funeral directors. It requires some luck. Then out of the blue a funeral director in Los Angeles under suspicion of smuggling
drugs appears in the same photo with another undertaker 10,000 miles away. And the point A to point B link is transformed into a trail of thirty-three dead foreigners. A cold hit. Hugging the photograph, Noi looked happy for the first time since Calvino laid eyes on her. She had found the equivalent of the casing that linked LA and Bangkok, a new trail of evidence that did not involve her brother. She was smiling and humming lyrics to a Thai song. Hello, Hello, Hia, la ka. She knew that she had hit a bull’s eye and that felt good.
Before Panya rose from his desk again, Calvino, holding onto the folder of records, noticed the funeral director’s passport in the half-opened drawer. He leaned over and grabbed it.
“You shouldn’t leave home without it,” said Calvino, sliding Panya’s Thai passport inside his jacket pocket.
“I don’t intend to go that far,” said Panya.
“This may be your lucky day,” said Calvino.
AS they drove to the wat, a rainstorm came down. The smoky white clouds turned black and opened with what was at first a light, almost gentle rain that swept from the East over the road; but the gentleness soon vanished, and a torrent came straight down like water poured out of a bucket. Pratt switched the windscreen wipers onto maximum. This wasn’t the rainy season. Planes had been dispatched to salt the clouds with chemicals to force the rain to fall to relieve the drought upcountry. As the approaching hot season loomed there was fear that Bangkok might run out of water. After a couple of minutes, solid vertical sheets of rain fell. The wipers could not keep up with the volume of water. Calvino was thinking it was a bad day for a funeral. He was also thinking about the pilot who had tried to land the plane at Surat Thani Airport, a small airport in the south; the airport lights were not working, and there had been driving rain, like this now, and the pilot, having failed twice to put the plane down, made the fatal decision for a third go around. Air speed, the position of the stabilizers, the degree of ascent became scrambled and the plane stalled and crashed, killing more than a hundred people. Calvino had lost a friend in that crash. A good man who had worked to preserve the environment had gone down with the plane. Rain, errors, being in the wrong place at the wrong time. How many times can one miss the runway before one’s luck runs out? Sitting next to Pratt, he wondered if their luck would hold. Luck may have been the wrong word; there was no luck, only a destiny that awaited each man.
The traffic slowed to a crawl along the wet streets. Calvino looked over at Pratt at the wheel and wondered how he intended to handle Panya. There was a small sliding panel between the cab and the back of the van. It was shut after Panya gave directions to the wat. The wat turned out to be a considerable distance from the funeral home. Panya had lied about the location of the wat in his office. Inside the van, he had a change of heart. He had intended to stay in his office and send them on a wild goose chase to the wrong wat. His plans and directions to the wat changed once he and his son were in the van. As Pratt strained for visibility of the cars in front of him, Calvino leafed through Panya’s Thai passport.
“He’s been to LA four times in the last year,” said Calvino, reading the dates on the LAX chop inside Panya’s passport.
“Maybe he has relatives in LA,” said Pratt. The jazz on the cassette player had switched to a Coltrane album. “There are over two hundred thousand Thais in LA.”
That made LA the third largest Thai City in the world. Bangkok, Chaing Mai and then LA. Only the latter was a Thai city inside America and different rules came into play.
“Panya has at least one good friend who is involved in the drug business.”
“He’s scared, Vincent,” said Pratt.
“You would think a funeral home owner wouldn’t be afraid if he were innocent.” Calvino’s law was that a court operated under the presumption that the accused was innocent until proven guilty, while cops in the street assumed a suspect sweating as much as Panya was guilty until he could square his fear by proving himself innocent.
Pratt didn’t react to the issue of innocence. For him it wasn’t innocence or guilt but the nature of how a man faced death. “A Buddhist is not afraid of dying. What he should be afraid of is that if he dies in torment, in anguish, then that is the condition to which he will be reborn. When you die you want your mind at peace, you want to be tranquil. The next life is always a condition of the last moment of the last life.”
Calvino put the passport away in his jacket, wondering about Pratt’s wisdom about the transition between lives. It didn’t look all that good for Panya’s rebirth at the moment. “Maybe it is some kind of an insurance scam. Daniel Ramsey and a couple of grifter friends were in it for the insurance, arranging death certificates, collecting the money. White-collar crime. Bad, but not too bad.”
“I am not sure just how much he really knows,” said Pratt.
“Every one of the heroin overdose cases ended up at Panya’s house.”
“You said yourself the Embassy recommends him.”
“That’s why I asked him if Ramsey ever mentioned Dwight Morgan,” said Calvino.
A smile creased Pratt’s face. “You think Morgan is the serial killer you’ve been looking for?”
Calvino returned the smile. “In matters of realpolitik there are no friends or enemies, only a convergence of interest. And, no, I don’t think Morgan killed anyone.”
“Vincent, it doesn’t mean anything that the Embassy handled these routine papers. Or it doesn’t prove anything that Panya handled the shipments to the States. That is his business. And he’s got a good business. He doesn’t need to ship a few more dead farangs to the States to keep his condo project on track.” Pratt paused and exhaled. “But we both know Panya’s guilty as hell. What we don’t exactly know is the crime.”
Calvino watched the rain striking the window. It pissed him off knowing what Pratt said was right on the money. There still was no reason established. Even if Panya was padding the bill, this was chump change compared with the money and valuables found on the dead farangs with needles stuck in their arms. It was as if he were submerged in a world from which reason had been sucked out.
“I’m working on the crime,” said Calvino.
“You’ll let me know when you come up with one.”
“What matters is Panya doesn’t have a lot of choices to make right now. And if he makes the wrong one, then that’s it. He’s reborn as a beggar. Give me some time and I’ll have our motive.”
After they lapsed into silence, Naylor’s cursing from the back filled the void. “Fuck this” and “Fuck that” and “I want money for the fucking window.” The Thais were deadly quiet.
“The original plan isn’t going to work, Vincent.”
“I know. But I have a couple of ideas.”
“For instance?” asked Pratt.
“What if it turned out that Panya’s testimony could send Kowit to prison?”
“I am glad Noi spotted that photo,” said Pratt.
“And that she said something. She didn’t have to. She could have sat on her hands.”
“Still the photo doesn’t prove anything,” said Pratt. “Other than they know each other and are in the same business. That’s not a crime, Vincent.” Pratt checked his rearview mirror before changing lanes. He kept on talking to Calvino, “We still have the problem of getting Jess out of the country. And now we have the added problem of what to do with Panya. I can’t see him voluntarily stepping onto a plane.”
“We have his passport. So we need to give him an incentive to go to LA. He has to want to go,” Calvino said.
“Why would he do that?”
“He’s in a lose-lose situation. If he’s dirty, then he’s going to be afraid to stay in Thailand. If he’s clean, he’s still going to be afraid no one will believe that he went to a wat with a Thai police colonel and revealed nothing about the operation.” The force of the rain lessened and the traffic was moving again as they headed towards Klong Toey. “Remember a few years ago, the Chinese drug dealer who begged that the Americans take him back t
o the States? He said he felt safer in an American prison. Here was a guy who had lived on a diet of fried bugs in the jungle, lived with constant danger, snakes and tigers, but when push came to shove, pleaded to be sent back to the States. Because he knew those he did business with would kill him if he stayed. Panya isn’t a moron. If he’s doing funny business with Kowit, they will whack him in five minutes once they know we’ve been to his place and he’s helping us and we have the photo of him and Kowit.”
The original plan had been simple and straightforward. They would make a switch on the way to the airport. Jess would trade places in the coffin with Daniel Ramsey’s body. Later, at Don Muang Airport, they would check the coffin in at the cargo terminal. They had all the paperwork. This would be a routine transaction and Noi would be driven to the passenger terminal and put on a flight to Los Angeles. Pratt would walk her through the paperwork even without a passport. They would book her on the same flight that Jess would be riding cargo class inside the coffin. Jess would square her entry into the States at the other end. Once that flight was airborne, they’d take Danny’s body to a wat, pay a small fee to have it cremated, and scatter the ashes in the klong . The following morning, Calvino would go with Pratt to police headquarters, and Calvino would file a complaint that someone had blown up his car. He would demand that those who committed the crime be arrested and punished. The best defense was always an in-your-face offense. He wouldn’t give the cops a chance to say they had been looking for him. He’d say he had been looking for them. And when they got around to questioning him about his companions, including the Thai national with the American accent, he would say, “Oh, that guy, he’s gone upcountry for a kick-boxing tournament.” Pratt would stand tall beside him and the cops would get the picture, it didn’t need to be framed and hung on a wall, there was nothing they could do but turn him loose and watch him, tap his home and office phones. And they could watch him forever because it wouldn’t matter; once that plane set down at LAX, Jess’s commanding officer and a dozen other LAPD would be taking delivery of the coffin, clearing Noi through customs and all would be right in the world.
Cold Hit Page 32
