For the Dead

by Timothy Hallinan

  Ton pushes his chair back and opens the desk drawer. In it is a Sig Sauer P226, blunt and black and ugly. “Just so you know,” he says, resting a hand on the gun. “And this conversation is tiresome.”

  “The gun’s not going to help you,” Rafferty says. “I can’t think of a weapon in the world that would help you. You’re as helpless right now as Sumalee was when her father told her he was going to sell her.”

  “So far, I haven’t heard anything that’s raised my pulse rate.”

  “One girl dead and one you tried to kill. One of them my daughter. Just keep that in mind as I put the rest of the cards on the table.” He unfolds a standard sheet of paper with a piece cut out of it. Then he reaches across the desk and slides the triangular fragment into place and turns the sheet around for Ton.

  Ton looks at it, then lowers his head to study it more closely. Rafferty hears the change in his breathing: shallower, a bit quicker. “Interesting,” he says, “but entirely conjectural. And its implications, I mean the implications you’re suggesting, aren’t even conjectural. They’re fictitious.”

  “Who’s in the middle of that circle? The one who profited from all those murders?”

  “You know perfectly well that I am.”

  “Well, gee, I’m sorry. That’s an early draft.” Rafferty pulls it back and puts out another sheet. He pushes it across the desk and watches Ton’s face go completely still. “This is more up-to-date. The man next to you in the circle is Jurak.” He pauses for a moment and adds, “The father of your two grandsons.” He looks over at the color pictures on the wall. “Nice-looking boys, by the way.”

  The eyes Ton gives Rafferty are, for the first time, the eyes he expected when he first stepped into the room, the eyes of someone who could kill for years without ever getting blood on his cuffs.

  “All those deals,” Rafferty says, drawing a circle in the air above the chart. “All those murders. All for your grandsons. A business empire built one killing at a time, a lifetime’s worth of revenge on your brothers. It will be your grandsons who inherit everything. Or it might be.”

  Ton’s hand is flat on the diagram, as if to obscure it, and now he makes a fist, crumpling it. “This is nothing that would persuade a prosecutor. Anyone could—could draw this up. The murders and the little lines and the, the sums of money, well, yes, it’s suggestive. Just graphics. But you have nothing that actually links either me or Jurak to any of this.”

  “Well,” Rafferty says. He unfolds another piece of paper. “First, I have no interest in prosecutors. Second, have you noticed that kids can do things instinctively with computers that would take you or me—well, me, anyway—days to learn? A thirteen-year-old boy managed to pull this image off a crappy cell phone picture of a reflection in a store window, and I don’t know how—”

  Ton has snatched the page from him. He glances at it and slaps it facedown on the desk.

  “—how he got it to read so well,” Rafferty says, “but he did. And it’s been cropped a bit, but the whole frame shows Jurak quite clearly taking a picture of Thongchai with the same phone that was given to the men who killed Thongchai and Sawat. The phone that started all this.”

  “It’s a fake,” Ton says. “The phone is gone.”

  “We have all the pictures. Even without the phone, they tell a story: shots of the two murder victims, a self-portrait of your son-in-law photographing one of them, even some happy snaps of the men who killed them. All, by the way, date-stamped and sequenced.”

  Ton’s tongue explores the right-hand corner of his mouth.

  “And then there’s this,” Rafferty says, unfolding the last piece of paper. “Did you know your son-in-law withdrew almost fifty thousand US a few months ago from the bank account you and he set up to frame Colonel Thanom? He used this as ID.”

  Ton says, “He withdrew—”

  “Around a million and a half baht. I’m sure you knew about that.”

  “From what account?”

  “You know, the one you and he—wait, listen, you and Jurak really ought to get your stories straight. Why don’t you call him? See if he can clarify things.”

  Ton’s eyes are everywhere in the room, as though he’s taking inventory on the fly. “Call him?”

  “You know.” Rafferty mimes a phone, thumb and little finger extended at his ear, and watches as Ton lets his gaze settle on the copy of the police identification card. “Unless you think he might not be there. Unless that’s where you’ve been for most of the night, looking for him, because you’re afraid the cops have—”

  Ton starts to push his chair back. “I’ve heard enough. Your time—”

  “—because you’re afraid the cops have already picked him up. Because you’re afraid he’s already talking to them. Settle the issue. Call him. See who answers the phone.”

  Ton stares up at him with a new kind of loathing, one that has apprehension behind it. Rafferty says, “Or, if you don’t want to come up on Jurak’s caller ID, since who knows who’ll be looking at it, wherever he is, why not use my phone? Here.”

  He holds out the phone. Slowly, Ton takes it and pushes the first four digits. He pauses and then, very quickly, hits the rest of the buttons.

  Rafferty hears Arthit say, “Hello?” and Ton punches the key to disconnect as though he’s afraid something will come through the receiver. He puts the phone dead center on the desk and stares down at it like it might begin to move on its own.

  Rafferty picks it up and slips it into his pocket. “To settle the issue, I can tell you that he is. Talking, I mean. When I left the room he was talking so fast the stenographer had to ask him to slow down.”

  Ton has put his hands against the edge of the desk to push his chair back, but he stays there bent awkwardly at the waist, the chair half a meter from the desk. He’s looking down, into the open drawer with the gun in it.

  “It will do you no good to kill me,” Rafferty says. “It’ll just make things worse for you. This is too far underway, and too many people are already involved. All my death would do is put you—finally—in the same room as someone you’ve killed.” He takes his foot off the chair, turns it around, and sits. “So, just by way of recap. Over a period of years, you set up Sawat’s operation to kill people who were standing in the way of your business interests. We’ve got it all documented, eight deaths and two more being researched. You and your son-in-law, Jurak, created a ghost bank account to incriminate Thanom. We’ve got the ID cards he used to do both, one with the name Sawat on it and the other with the name Thanom, and both with Jurak’s picture. You hired three killers to have them take out Sawat and Thongchai. Jurak helpfully took Sawat and Thongchai’s pictures first. We have the photo of him doing it. And right now he’s talking about all this, and much more, to a circle of cops. When I left, he was on the verge of telling them how you killed the men you hired to get rid of Sawat and Thongchai.” Jurak had done nothing of the kind the last time Rafferty spoke to Arthit, but by now, Rafferty thinks, he probably is.

  Ton raises a hand as though to speak, but lets it fall again.

  “And you did it all for your grandsons. In the long run, everything you built up, and everything your brothers built up, would go to your grandsons. You would have triumphed. Over time, over family, over your own son’s death, over your rotten relationships with your brothers.”

  Without looking up, Ton says, “What do you want?”

  “Let me back up just a step or two,” Rafferty says. “There still might not be enough to convict someone of your stature of a capital crime, although I doubt it, but by the time Jurak finishes talking there will certainly be enough to disgrace you forever and to put Jurak away for life. And if you think your brothers are charitable enough to let your business, and theirs, pass to the grandsons of a disgraced brother and the sons of a convicted murderer, you have a higher opinion of them than I do.”

  Ton says, thin-lipped, “They’d adopt first.”

  “Pretty much my thought. So, you see, even
if you somehow stay out of prison, which you won’t, you’ve lost everything. Now and in the future.”

  Ton says, “We must be able to work something out.”

  “Just what I was going to say. Suppose no one ever found out about any of this? Suppose it all just went away?”

  Ton straightens up and sits back in his chair. He seems to be working something through, and when he finally looks at Rafferty, his eyes are speculative. “How could you do that?”

  Rafferty shrugs. “What matters is that I can.”

  Ton turns away and looks at the photographs on the wall. “How much do you want?”

  “What if I said ten billion baht?”

  “Then I’d need to know how you’re going to do it and what my security is. I’d need something ironclad. A handwritten and witnessed document acknowledging that you knew about all of this and conspired to cover it up, for profit.”

  “Well, I don’t actually want ten billion baht. What I want is free. Doesn’t cost anything.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I want you to kill yourself.”

  “You’re,” Ton says, and takes a new breath. “You’re joking.”

  “I went to some lengths at the beginning of this chat to let you know how deeply I loathe you. Would you like me to tell you again?” With one hand in his pocket, he presses send on his phone, the signal he and Arthit agreed on.

  Ton says, “This is ridiculous.”

  “It’s just another decision,” Rafferty says. He disconnects and looks at his watch. “But it’s one you’d better make quickly.”

  The phone on Ton’s desk rings. He looks at it and then up at Rafferty.

  “That’ll be the guard at your gate, telling you there are some uniformed cops downstairs, asking to come in.”

  The phone rings again.

  “Answer it,” Rafferty says. “Don’t take my word. Talk to one of the cops.”

  Ton picks up the phone, says, “Yes?” and listens for a second. Then he hangs up. He’s chewing on the inside of his left cheek.

  “You might be asking yourself,” Rafferty says, “how you can trust me and those cops down there not to put your son-in-law on trial anyway, once you’re dead. Well, you can’t. All I can say is that what you should be wondering about is why it’s me up here with the cops downstairs instead of the other way around. We’ve reached an agreement, the cops and I. I have nothing against your grandsons and no reason to want to ruin their lives, and all the cops want is for this scandal to go away quietly. That’s why I’m the one sitting in your nice chair. They certainly don’t want this flap to involve one of the highest-ranking people in the department, putting the whole force under suspicion and probably ruining dozens of careers. So they’ll leave Jurak alone, if you give them a chance to do it.”

  He gets up, goes to the window, and looks down at the gate, feeling Ton’s eyes on his back and listening for the sound of the gun being lifted from the drawer. Down below he sees Arthit, Thanom, Clemente, Anand, Kosit, and two others. “Six or seven of them,” he says. “That makes it your call: lifelong shame and scandal, probably prison, your son-in-law in jail as an accessory to murder and for murder itself the minute we find the bodies of the men you hired. Your grandsons disinherited. Living in the street, for all I know. It’s unlikely, but there would be certain poetry in it.

  “All of that on the one hand, and on the other, you’re dead. A headline: PROMINENT POLICE OFFICIAL KILLS SELF. You get the big funeral, you get the honor guard and the sad speeches. Your family can hold its head up. Your wife’s not disgraced, the grandsons will still inherit. The next day, life goes on just as you planned it. Minus you.”

  The phone starts to ring again.

  He starts to move toward the door. “Don’t want to answer that? I wouldn’t either. One last thing. I know that right now, somewhere in your mind, you’re searching for a way your family’s power can save you. Well, don’t bother. If you’re still alive past my deadline, you’re going to set Phase Two in motion. At eight this morning, less than three hours from now, police officers with copies of all these—graphics, you called them—will make calls on ranking members of your victims’ families. As you can imagine, there’s going to be a lot of interest.”

  With one hand on the doorknob, he turns to face Ton directly. The gun is still in the drawer. “As much influence as your family has, they’ll be outweighed and outclassed. Taken as a whole, if what we’ve learned so far is accurate, your victims’ families control more newspapers, more radio and television stations, more government ministers, and more elected legislators than your family does. And let’s not forget, they still run businesses that compete with yours. Some of them,” he says, “even have princelings in the police department who would advance in your absence.”

  The phone, which had stopped ringing, begins again, but Ton doesn’t appear to hear it. He seems twenty years older to Rafferty than he had a few minutes earlier. He’s looking down at the surface of his desk, with the litter of paper and pictures on it, and one of his eyelids is lower than the other, as it might be after a stroke. Rafferty isn’t sure the man is even following what he’s saying.

  “So here’s the deal,” he says, opening the door a foot or so. “The light from this room can be seen from the street. I’m going to leave and give you ten minutes. I’m sure you have some things to write down, details to take care of. Before the ten minutes are up, you’ll turn off this light and then you’ll use that Sig Sauer on yourself. The police will come in because they heard a gunshot from inside the house, and if they don’t hear a gunshot they’ll say they did and come in anyway, and you’ll be arrested and those visits to the families will be made, and you can deal with all that.”

  The phone isn’t ringing now, although Rafferty couldn’t say when it stopped. He can hear Ton’s breathing.

  “They’ll be bringing up a car to break through the gate,” Rafferty says. He comes back to the desk and picks up all the pieces of paper. “They’ll be watching for the light, so don’t forget to turn it off.” He refolds the papers and shoves them back into his hip pocket. To Ton, who now seems to be studying the color photos of the boys on his wall, he says, “Ten minutes. Up to you.”

  He goes out and closes the door. At the bottom of the stairs, he says to the butler, “He’ll call you if he wants you,” and lets himself out.

  Eight minutes later by Rafferty’s watch the light in the window goes out. Before he’s drawn three breaths, the police charge in at the sound of the shot.

  46

  A Lot Here We Wouldn’t Want to Lose

  “FURNITURE IS GETTING moved around on the top floors,” Arthit says. “There may be a great public silence since the suicide, but behind closed doors people are wheeling desks from place to place. Pictures are being hung.”

  He and Rafferty are knee-to-knee at Rafferty’s desk, shoehorned into the space behind the big flatscreen. Rose is watching something that features a great many women speaking English, and once in a while she laughs. It almost tempts Rafferty to listen to what’s being said, but only almost. Miaow is in her room, rehearsing the speech from Small Town she wants to read for her audition. It was going to be a scene between Julie and Ned, but at the last moment Andrew called to say he couldn’t come.

  “Thanom’s going to get a promotion.” Arthit takes a healthy slug of the Crown Royal Poke had poured. Rafferty’s bottle of beer sweats on his thigh, where he’s put it to keep from making a ring on the top of the desk. His jeans are wet. “It’s more a lateral than a forward pass, but he seems to be happy.”

  “Seems to be?”

  “Our friendship has cooled. He’s found a way, since the department just wants to close the door on everything, to keep the money in that phony account. So he’s better off financially, he’s got a higher rank, and he knows he fell apart in front of me in the embassy. He doesn’t need me any more.”

  “Well,” Rafferty says, drinking. “We certainly need you here, if you ever have time t
o spare …”

  “And Miaow?” Arthit lowers his voice. “Happy ending in sight?”

  “Not even close,” Rafferty says. “Because Nguyen and I talked to that financial reporter Kalmenson about Ton just before the suicide, the ambassador is pulling him out. They may already be on their way back to Vietnam.”

  Arthit says, “I’m sorry.”

  “Andrew called about two hours ago. He was supposed to come over and rehearse a scene from the play for the auditions, but when he called he was in a car on the way to the airport.”

  “How is she?”

  “In her room. I think she’d already given up on the relationship, but you know.”

  Arthit says, “One thing I’ve learned is that letting go of a relationship is a solid-gold bitch.”

  The two of them sit in silence for a moment, until they’re brought back to the present by someone emoting from the flatscreen, with a British accent since Rose hasn’t officially found the remote yet and Miaow left it on the English Channel or something.

  Arthit regards the long high rectangle of the television, its cables trailing across the carpet to the wall. “This is an interesting decorating effect,” he says. “It’s like rebuilding part of the Berlin Wall in your living room.”

  “Rose spends a lot of time in front of it,” Rafferty says, raising his voice. “She’s watching for two.”

  Rose says, as though she’s been saving it up, “The baby already speaks English.”

  “The baby,” Arthit says. He grins. “The baby.”

  Rafferty feels himself grin back. “Yeah. The baby.”

  Rose says, “Poke is a wonderful father.”

  Rafferty says, “Are you eavesdropping?”

  “Shhh,” Rose says. “The good girl is starting to cry.”

  Rafferty puts a finger to his lips, and Arthit drains his glass and puts it down. “I actually had two reasons to come over,” he says softly. “First is to tell you that we found the bodies of the men who killed Sawat and Thongchai.”