Big Mango (9786167611037)

by Needham, Jake

  With a long sigh, Eddie pushed himself to his feet. Of course he had things all wrong. Jennifer and Michael both had new lives now and he wasn’t a part of them. He was an ex-husband—twice, he reluctantly reminded himself—and now it looked like he might be well on his way to becoming an ex-father, too. Eddie had gone into the bedroom with some vague idea that he was calling home, not that anyone else apparently thought of it that way. When was he going to stop being so surprised about that? Clearly his whole concept of home required some serious reappraisal.

  With a shake of his head, he jammed his hands in his pockets and went out to the living room to wait for Winnebago.

  Sixteen

  THE Thonglor police station was on soi 55, out Sukhumvit Road past the Sheraton Hotel. On the way from the Oriental, Winnebago spotted a McDonald’s just opening up and Eddie waved the taxi driver to a stop.

  Splashing through the rain that had been falling steadily all morning, he and Winnebago ran inside and had some surprisingly passable coffee and a couple of Big Macs. Winnebago bought a second round and carried it back outside where they flagged down another cab. Eddie gathered Winnebago was slowly returning to a state that was reasonably close to normal, at least for Winnebago.

  “I didn’t remember these were so good,” Winnebago said, wiping mayonnaise from the corner of his mouth.

  “Don’t get carried away. You’re probably still in shock from last night.”

  “Damn, man,” Winnebago shook his head, thinking back. “Too much of that shit could put you off pussy forever, couldn’t it?”

  By the time their driver pointed out a nondescript, two-story building composed primarily of cracked, gray concrete, the rain had slowed to a drizzle. They got out and paid off the taxi.

  Eddie put a hand on Winnebago’s arm. “Let’s double-check how this conversation is going to go. I want to make sure we’ve got our stories straight.”

  “It’ll go like always, won’t it? You’ll do all the talking and I’ll keep my mouth shut.”

  “That’s pretty much what I had in mind.”

  “What do you think this cop’s going to tell you anyway?”

  “Maybe nothing. But if someone identified Austin’s body or claimed it for burial, and he’ll give us a name, we’ll have a place to start.”

  “You really think he’s going to do that?”

  “I don’t know, but whatever he says, just keep smiling. Being a hardass doesn’t play well with Thais. Smile even if it’s killing you. Got that?”

  Winnebago made a noise of some kind, but Eddie wasn’t sure what it meant.

  Inside the station, three scarred wooden desks were scattered around in no apparent order. In one corner a bored-looking young policeman sat pecking slowly at an old manual typewriter, one key at a time. A second cop was leaning against the wall across the room reading a newspaper with one hand while the other rested on the wooden grips of a .45 automatic riding high up on his hip in a holster with no safety strap. Both men wore their brown uniforms stretched over their bodies as tightly as spandex. The color of the fabric reminded Eddie of the inside of a baby’s diaper.

  As the two cops registered Eddie and Winnebago’s presence, they shifted dark eyes in their direction and regarded them both with a degree of curiosity. The appearance of two farangs in the Thonglor police station, on a purely voluntary basis at least, was unusual.

  “I’m looking for Lieutenant Sirapop,” Eddie smiled, taking his own advice.

  Neither policeman moved or gave any hint that they knew Eddie had spoken.

  “Lieutenant Sirapop?” Eddie repeated slowly.

  “Why you want him?” the cop with the newspaper asked in a toneless voice.

  “I have some questions for him. Bar Phillips told me to see him. Lieutenant Sirapop is a friend of his.”

  The sound of a throat being cleared drifted out of an open door to their left and shortly a voice followed it.

  “I know him, yes, but friend? Not so sure.”

  The two policemen returned to what they’d been doing before as if Eddie and Winnebago had suddenly ceased to exist.

  “Who are you?” the voice continued.

  “My name is Eddie Dare. I need some information about an accident that happened near here.”

  “Information?”

  The voice toyed with the word as if it were entirely novel, suggesting delights heretofore unimagined.

  “Look, may we come into your office?” Eddie called out.

  He was still smiling, but he felt ridiculous talking to a disembodied voice.

  “We?”

  “I have a friend with me. Mr. Jones.”

  Winnebago raised his right hand to shoulder level and gave the room at large a little wave. Neither of the policemen paid any attention.

  “I am very busy.” There was a short silence before the voice came again. “Okay, okay. Quick, quick.”

  The first thing Eddie noticed when they entered the office was the posture of the man in the chair behind the plain, metal desk. It was a slump that made his attitude unmistakable, although whether it was an attitude about farangs in particular or about the world in general Eddie couldn’t guess.

  The man’s face was long and narrow for a Thai, with a nose that looked like it had been broken several times. He wore the same tight brown uniform the other two cops did, but his version was embellished with a white plastic Sam Browne belt.

  “Lieutenant Sirapop?” Eddie asked.

  The man nodded and Eddie looked him over carefully. He was very short, probably not much over five feet tall, although Eddie couldn’t tell exactly since the man didn’t stand up or even offer his hand. In spite of being indoors, he wore sunglasses so dark he looked like a tiny, blind man.

  Still smiling, Eddie nudged the office door closed behind him, and he and Winnebago sat down in the two straight chairs that faced the desk. Eddie pulled a stack of 500 baht notes from his trouser pocket and fanned ten of the purple bills out on the desk, keeping his hand on them.

  “I’m very grateful for your time, Lieutenant. I need some information about a man I knew. Bar Phillips says he thinks you can help me.”

  The lieutenant’s head remained stationary, but Eddie got the impression that his eyes flicked down to the money spread out over the desk even though Eddie couldn’t see them through the dark glasses.

  “Who is this man?” the lieutenant asked after a moment, still not moving.

  “His name was Harry Austin. He was killed in an accident near here about a month ago.”

  The lieutenant said nothing for a few seconds. Then he pushed back in his chair slightly and folded his arms.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you remember the name?”

  “Maybe.”

  So this was how it was going to be.

  “I’ve been hired by this man’s family in America to find out about his death,” Eddie ad-libbed. “They wonder if the newspaper reports they have seen might not be correct.”

  “Not correct? How?”

  “Not correct in calling his death an accident.”

  The lieutenant nodded slightly and then tilted his head unmistakably toward the stack of notes under Eddie’s right hand. Eddie lifted his hand away and folded his arms, mirroring the lieutenant.

  “Aow fam kong farang tee tuk kaa tee Little Princess maa si!” the lieutenant called to one of the policeman in the outer room.

  The young policeman who had been typing in the outer office came in so quickly that Eddie wondered for a moment if he’d been waiting right outside the door the whole time. He handed the lieutenant a thin, green file folder, shooting expressionless looks at both Eddie and Winnebago as he did.

  “I puak nee pen krai?” he asked.

  “Kae farang,” the lieutenant answered.

  Eddie didn’t much like the short, barking laugh the young cop gave as he left the office.

  The lieutenant slowly flipped through the file without removing his dark glasses. Eddie wondered if the man cou
ld actually see anything that was in it.

  “Death certificate here. Say heart stop.”

  “By accident?” Eddie kept smiling, “Or did somebody stop it for him?”

  The lieutenant lifted his head sharply. “He dead anyway. Why you care?”

  Eddie noticed that the man’s English seemed to be growing distinctly worse. He wasn’t sure what that meant.

  “He killed by truck, I think.” The lieutenant seemed to consider for a moment. “Maybe bus. I not remember.”

  “Then you’re saying it was an accident.”

  The lieutenant stabbed with one finger at the open file. “Heart stop.”

  “Who claimed the body?”

  Sirapop consulted the file again. “Friend.”

  Eddie’s patience was running out, but he kept smiling.

  “A man or a woman?”

  “Man.”

  “A Thai?”

  “No, farang.”

  “What was his name?”

  “This name.”

  The lieutenant pulled out a sheet of paper from the file and pushed it across the table toward Eddie. He leaned forward and pointed with his forefinger to the last line on a page of incomprehensible Thai characters below which an illegible signature was scrawled.

  Eddie had little real hope of learning anything else, but he had paid for it, so he tossed out one more question anyway.

  “Did you see this friend?”

  To Eddie’s surprise, the lieutenant nodded and he felt his hopes rise.

  “He come here.” Sirapop pointed to the chair where Winnebago, not knowing what else to do, was grinning maniacally. “He sit there.”

  “What did he look like?”

  The lieutenant thought about that for a long time as Eddie studied his own reflection in the man’s dark glasses.

  “Like you,” he eventually said with a shrug. “Like farang.”

  “Young? Old? Tall? Short?”

  The lieutenant thought some more.

  “Like farang,” he repeated, and this time Eddie saw the smile flickering at the corners of Sirapop’s mouth.

  “Where is the body buried?”

  “Buried?” The lieutenant seemed genuinely puzzled. “What you mean?”

  “Didn’t this friend take the body and arrange for burial?”

  Eddie gestured at the floor, miming a man digging.

  “Ah.” The lieutenant nodded in understanding. “No bury, burn. This Thailand. We burn.”

  “You mean the body was cremated?”

  “Cremated. Yes.”

  The lieutenant stood and with his right hand he swept the stack of purple bills off the desktop and into a drawer in one smooth motion. Eddie got the impression that he’d had a lot of practice doing it.

  “Okay. Finish now. You want any more question you ask Little Princess.”

  Eddie didn’t know whether he was supposed to laugh or not.

  “Who’s the Little Princess?” he asked as he pushed himself to his feet.

  “Not who,” the lieutenant answered.

  He walked around his desk and opened the door for Eddie and Winnebago to encourage their departure. Winnebago tilted his head toward Eddie and lifted his eyebrows, but he was still smiling.

  “Little Princess is massage parlor on soi 31. Big place. Many room. Many girl. Thai not go, only farang.”

  The lieutenant held his open hands about a foot apart as if to illustrate something. Eddie couldn’t imagine what it was, but surely, he told himself, it couldn’t be what he was thinking.

  “What’s the Little Princess got to do with Harry Austin?”

  “Body in street there. Outside Little Princess. Maybe he go there sometime. Maybe farang friend go there.”

  As Lieutenant Sirapop ushered Eddie and Winnebago out of his office, Eddie decided that the visit had been about as much fun as a root canal, but he’d probably gotten his 5,000 baht worth anyway. Now he might be able to begin putting together a picture of Harry Austin’s life in Bangkok.

  At least he had a place to start.

  The Little Princess massage parlor. On soi 31.

  Seventeen

  IT had been hot when they went into the Thonglor police station, but when they came out it was hotter still and the air was so humid it was almost solid. As they walked toward soi 31, sweat rolled down their faces.

  Eddie doubted there would be anyone at the Little Princess so early in the day, but he figured it wouldn’t hurt to go by and at least check the place out. Soi 31 wasn’t far, and ten minutes with Sirapop had left him longing for fresh air, even Bangkok’s peculiar version of it, so he thought they might as well walk it regardless of the heat and humidity.

  “You sure you know where you’re going, Eddie?”

  Eddie briefly toyed with the philosophical implications of Winnebago’s question, but he let them go. “Yeah, sure.”

  After twenty minutes of walking broken-up sidewalks and trying not to trip, Eddie realized that the building he had been using as a landmark wasn’t getting all that much closer. That and the sweat accumulating under his shirt and around the waistband of his trousers made a good argument for giving up the idea of walking to the Little Princess and finding a taxi. He had just turned his head to tell Winnebago that when he noticed something which bothered him a lot more than either their slow progress or the sweat in his pants.

  He noticed that they had picked up a tail.

  Eddie’s first thought was that it had to be the same guy Bar Phillips had spotted the night before outside Popeye’s, but then he saw it wasn’t going to be that easy. This was a local guy, and Bar Phillips said the man following them last night was a farang.

  A Caucasian following them in an Asian city was about as subtle as tailing somebody across Los Angeles in a float from the Rose Parade. That had been the point of course, Eddie assumed last night, for them to know they were being watched. He could play that game and understand how it worked. Now they had a local on them, so they were either dealing with somebody else entirely or the script had changed.

  When they stopped at the next traffic light, Eddie kept his eyes straight ahead and spoke in a voice just loud enough for Winnebago to hear him.

  “There’s somebody following us.”

  He glanced over without turning his head and saw Winnebago go very still.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he added. “It’s probably nothing.”

  But Eddie knew it was not nothing. Picking up a local tail clearly suggested that somebody was getting serious about something. That didn’t, off the top of Eddie’s head, seem like particularly good news.

  The guy wasn’t too bad and Eddie wasn’t too good. It was just a coincidence that he spotted the man at all. He would never have made the guy if he and Winnebago had known exactly where they had been going but, since they were less than certain, their tail’s job had been a lot tougher. Eddie had started down a small side street and, when he realized it went nowhere, he had immediately turned back in the opposite direction and actually bumped into the man as he came up behind them. That alone meant nothing, of course, but when Eddie accidentally spotted the same man behind them again fifteen minutes later and way too far up Sukhumvit for it to be just a coincidence, he got the idea immediately.

  The man has probably guessed he was made, Eddie realized, but he apparently didn’t care. It was Eddie’s experience that Asians usually thought farangs were all more or less equally hopeless outside of their own countries. He figured that the guy assumed they were just the usual Caucasian idiots, lost and confused on the streets of an Asian city and, even if they thought they were being followed, there still wouldn’t be anything they could do about it. From Eddie’s point of view, there was only one problem with their new friend’s reasoning. He was absolutely right.

  Eddie had to find a way to dump the guy or give up the idea of going anywhere near the Little Princess right then. That was his only lead to Harry Austin, and he damned sure wasn’t ready to share it.

 
“What are we going to do, Eddie?” Winnebago hissed out of the side of his mouth like a gangster in a B-movie and Eddie almost laughed out loud. “Try and shake him?”

  Eddie nodded, but he didn’t say anything.

  “How you going to do that?”

  “I’m not sure,” he admitted. “All I know about losing a tail comes from spy novels and late night TV.”

  But then a light rain started to fall and Eddie suddenly got an idea. He ducked into a doorway and pulled Winnebago with him. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw their tail do exactly the same thing.

  “Why don’t we just get a taxi back to the hotel, Eddie? If somebody wants to follow us to the Oriental, it’s fine with me.”

  “I want to check out the Little Princess. Nobody’s going to scare me off this easy.”

  Eddie scanned the street as subtly as he could. He didn’t see anyone else making a similar move so he decided their shadow was more than likely working alone. Either somebody was short of manpower or maybe they just thought Eddie was too much of a jerk to need the full court press.

  He hoped, if that was the reason, that somebody wasn’t right.

  Ducking from doorway to doorway, trying to stay as dry as they could, Eddie and Winnebago worked their way up Sukhumvit until Eddie found what he was looking for. The office building across the street and up a block on their left was plain-looking and about a dozen stories high. It was perfect.

  Waiting until the traffic was at its heaviest, Eddie grabbed Winnebago’s elbow. “Let’s go!”

  Dodging across the street, they headed straight into the building’s lobby. As they shook off the rain, Eddie glanced quickly around and saw that he couldn’t have hoped for better. The lobby was empty and there were only two elevators. One was just opening right in front of them and, according to the lights above the doors, the other elevator was nearly at the top of the building.