Paying Back Jack

by Christopher G. Moore

  “The Colonel’s going to the Java Jazz Festival,” said Calvino.

  Ratana’s eyes widened.

  “It’s a long shot,” said Colonel Pratt, displaying no emotion.

  “That scout loved you. The audience loved you.”

  Ratana smiled, “And we love you, too.”

  Colonel Pratt walked ahead to Calvino’s side of the office and sat down with his briefcase, unfastening the clasp.

  “If Casey phones, take a message,” Calvino said to Ratana.

  “He’s already phoned twice this morning.”

  He sighed, looking at Colonel Pratt. “You wouldn’t believe this guy.”

  Colonel Pratt was prepared to believe just about anything one of Calvino’s clients might say or do. The trouble with clients like Casey is that they assume their fee buys the investigator and not just his professional services. Ordering him around fell in that hard place between ego-inflated, know-it-all boss and neurotic father telling a child to finish eating his vegetables or else.

  After questioning the Birdman the previous night, the Colonel had gone to his office and done some homework. Now he arranged spreadsheets, photographs, and computer printouts of emails neatly on Calvino’s desk. Calvino listened as the Colonel walked him through the chronology. A red sports car had entered the hotel parking lot at 3:39 p.m. and left the following morning at 1:12 a.m., according to the receipts. Calvino placed himself in bed at the time the red Mazda must have sped out of the hotel parking lot. The attendants had a shift change at 6:00 p.m. But the descriptions of the car and driver given by the two attendants had matched. They’d both remembered seeing a red Mazda RX-8 with Bangkok plates and described the driver as a young Thai male who wore sunglasses and a hat like a movie star. No one got a good look at the driver. The police had shown the witnesses a hundred photos of possible suspects. But there had been no positive identification, and this left the investigation stranded in the zone of nowhere.

  The cops, who had polished off the liter bottle of vodka, had flopped down and were fast asleep. Colonel Pratt had emailed a JPEG photo of the Birdman to his friend in the Pattaya police, who’d showed it to the underground parking attendants, who were able to ID the Birdman as the driver of the red Mazda.

  “They had no doubt in their minds,” said Colonel Pratt.

  “That puts him at the hotel, but not in her room.”

  “We’re working to find hotel staff who worked the day before you arrived and the night she died.”

  “I’d start with the staff who upgraded my room.”

  Colonel Pratt smiled. “Where else would we have started?”

  Calvino heard the office phone ring. Ratana picked up and told the caller that he wasn’t available. He assumed from her chilled, formal tone that she had Casey on the phone.

  “Was the Birdman alone in the car?” asked Calvino.

  Colonel Pratt nodded. “No one noticed a passenger when he arrived. Or the next morning when he left.” He paused as a realization struck him. “It’s hard to miss a passenger in a small car.”

  That model of Mazda had enough trunk space for a six-pack of beer, a bag of potato chips, and a few bananas.

  Calvino smiled. “There are a lot of small people in this country, in case you haven’t noticed.”

  “What are you saying?”

  Calvino leaned forward and, fingers gliding over the keyboard, typed in a search phrase for the Birdman, and then turned his computer screen around. “This guy gets more action than a starting pitcher for the Yankees.” On the screen were photos of the Birdman with a dozen different women, all of them young and beautiful, with toothpaste-selling smiles and shiny hair.

  “Is Nongluck in any of the photos?” asked Colonel Pratt.

  Calvino shook his head. “Doesn’t look like it. But not every photo of this guy is on the Internet.”

  “We questioned him for three hours, Vincent. According to his story, he wanted to get away from the big city. ‘Downtime’ is what he called it. A phrase he picked up from a farang. The Pattaya police confirmed that he’d checked in at the Rama Gardens a couple of miles away from your hotel. He parked at your hotel because it was close to the restaurant and the beach. Going to Pattaya alone is strange. He let something slip about a woman, but when I called him on it, he said that he meant he was likely to run into a few fans who wanted to meet him. But that he’d never met Nongluck. He said he had no idea who she was. And as far as Apichart was concerned, he knew him only from the newspapers. There were a lot of people in the hotel that day and night, coming and going. He swore that he’d been on the beach and crossed Beach Road to eat at a restaurant. The people at the restaurant remembered him. He’s a celebrity. In the local jazz scene, people know him. And he has no motive.”

  “You’re saying he’s a dead end?”

  Colonel Pratt, showing fatigue, feeling a defeat pulling him in a direction he didn’t want to go, nodded before he looked away. He searched for the words to explain that a search-and-rescue for a Burmese on a Thai fishing boat had been called off because of a manpower shortage. The men had been reassigned to help with the election. The reality was that law enforcement priorities gave way to political reality. How could he expect a farang, even one who’d been around as long as Calvino, to accept choices that were largely unacceptable but necessary nonetheless?

  “There’s no apparent connection to Apichart or Nongluck. At least nothing we’ve found on the surface. I need a reason to dig beyond that. I don’t see one. Do you?”

  “What he’s saying? He drove alone to Pattaya so he could walk on the beach alone and then eat alone? Does that sound very Thai to you? The Thais are social animals; people who do such things alone are sociopaths.”

  “But that’s his story, and I don’t see any holes in it.”

  From Ratana’s side of the office partition, Calvino heard the squeak of the hand puppet, silence, and then Ratana’s official office voice. The door opened and an aggressive alpha male asked to see Vincent Calvino. Calvino recognized Casey’s voice.

  Ratana stuck her head around the corner and announced Casey’s arrival. Calvino held up two fingers, meaning two minutes. Her kid started crying at the same time. It didn’t take long for the other babies to join the wailing chorus, but once she returned to the playpen, the tiny soprano voices shifted from the terror of Wagner to the giggles of Gilbert and Sullivan. Casey must have scared the babies, setting off a panic and distress. He was the quintessential figure that made dogs growl and back up. Calvino felt some sympathy with the kids; something about the enigmatic and angry Casey scared him too.

  Colonel Pratt had started to put the documents back into his briefcase.

  “What’s the baseline? Are they putting Nongluck’s death down as a suicide?” asked Calvino.

  “It doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a suicide. It’s a wrongful death under suspicious circumstances. Unless we get something more to go on, Vincent, there’s not a lot anyone can do.” Nongluck’s death was looking more and more like one of those unsolved cases that were swallowed into a black hole called “open and unresolved.” There wasn’t much to connect Calvino to the death. Pratt said that finding the sports car in the hotel parking lot wasn’t necessarily evidence of the musician’s involvement in the wrongful death. The case had splintered into many pieces, and there was no apparent way to fit them together.

  “Please tell him Casey’s here and it’s urgent,” said Casey.

  Colonel Pratt glanced at Calvino. Calvino shrugged his shoulders and shook his head.

  “Is execution done on Cawdor?” said Casey in a loud voice.

  “What does that mean?” asked Calvino.

  “It means he knows a little Shakespeare,” said Colonel Pratt.

  This hadn’t been a side of Casey that Calvino had seen before.

  Colonel Pratt finished putting the photographs and documents in his briefcase. He started to leave Calvino’s office but found Casey blocking the narrow passage into the reception are
a. Casey wore his baseball hat and aviator glasses, with his hands in his pockets, chewing gum.

  “‘There’s no way to read a man’s mind by looking at his face. I trusted Cawdor completely,’” Colonel Pratt quoted Duncan’s speech in Macbeth.

  “The king in Macbeth said that.” A certain pride was in his voice. “I heard that you liked Shakespeare,” said Casey.

  “Which makes me ask why, with such good intelligence sources, you need the services of a private investigator?”

  Casey didn’t like the question. His jaw pumped up and down as he chewed the gum. The Colonel had upset him in some strange way.

  “Colonel, I’ll phone you later this afternoon,” said Calvino. The two men continued an awkward stare down before Casey stepped aside and let Colonel Pratt walk through. Ratana hovered near the playpen like a mother hen. She had the duck hand puppet on and tried as best she could to entertain her son. Her Donald Duck aria sputtered and died. The babies continued unconsoled in a tonality colored by their boredom and listlessness until Calvino couldn’t hear himself think. Calvino heard the door close behind the Colonel. He returned, brushing his fingers through his hair, wondering at what point he’d start pulling out his hair, and sat down hard at his desk. He remembered how, the night before, Pratt had fused music and poetry on the stage. But that had been yesterday’s performance and he was back on the ground as a cop, in a world with a different beat where the poetry was written as tragedy.

  “He’s your fucking friend. Big deal,” said Casey. “He knows a little Shakespeare like I know a little Thai. But I didn’t come here to talk about your colonel. I want to know what you found out about Somporn’s whore,” said Casey. He spit out the gum, balled it between his forefinger and thumb, and then pulled a piece of paper from Calvino’s desk. Sticking the gum inside, he crumpled the paper and tossed it at the wastebasket, missing.

  This client wasn’t much for pleasantries and wanted to get straight down to business. He was one of those guys who had a genius for creating an urgent, supercharged atmosphere. “That was a senior police officer you stared down,” said Calvino. “That’s not a good thing to do in this country.”

  “Colonel, general, they’re all the same to me. I stopped being impressed by that shit in about 1993. So save any lectures about how important a Thai cop is for another client.” Casey rubbed his perpetual three-day-old beard and waited for Calvino. “What have you got for me? You’ve done the surveillance, right?”

  Calvino ignored the jab like a professional boxer bobbing to one side, instantly recovering as if no serious punch had been thrown.

  “Have you come across a jazz guitar player named Nop?” Calvino remembered that this was the Birdman’s real name and how his real nickname didn’t quite capture the full image of the man.

  Casey looked perplexed. “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

  “What about a Thai woman named Nongluck? Or a businessman named Apichart? Do you know them?”

  “What is this? Twenty questions? I don’t know any Thai woman with luck in her name. Or anyone named Dope who plays the guitar. And who is this Thai businessman? What did you say his name was? Applecart? Never heard of him.”

  Casey had a better memory for Shakespeare than for Thai names. His nasty attitude combined with impaired pronunciation made his attempts to instill fear more difficult. He stared at Calvino as if he had a growing suspicion that Calvino was trying to spin him, make him dizzy and disorientated with references to some degenerate hippie guitar player, a whore, and a businessman. He’d strung together a bunch of civilians and thrown them at him. He didn’t like for anyone who hadn’t worn a uniform to talk to him that way.

  Calvino brushed off the bad-tempered response. Surly was about as happy as someone like Casey ever got on a good day. There was no point fighting against a mountain of anger and regret. “Nop. I call him the Birdman. He has something going with Cat. Maybe you know something about their relationship, since you have all these sources on the street?” In most cases, it would involve a complex web with a trail leading to money. Maybe, Calvino told himself, there was a more philosophical dimension since Cat had her source of funding, and the Birdman had forged a private empire of relationships for special entertainment.

  “They’re fucking each other?” Casey was either a good actor, pulling down his aviator glasses to register his surprise, or he’d been caught off guard.

  Calvino smiled, thinking that this was the kind of philosophy he understood. “I can’t confirm that. They could be holding meditation classes together or arranging flowers for Somporn’s campaign. But probably not.”

  The Birdman had been turning up in all the wrong places. He’d been at the hotel where Nongluck had gone over the balcony and at Cat’s condo. Had parked his red Mazda sports car in the underground hotel parking lot in late afternoon. Calvino figured that even for a musician, Birdman got around troubled women a little too frequently to immediately write it off as coincidence.

  It crossed Casey’s mind that he might have underestimated this investigator. That was both a good thing and a bad thing for his plans. He started with what Calvino already knew: Cat had been going behind Somporn’s back. It had fucked up the hit, but at least he could factor a jazz musician boyfriend into the equation.

  “I want to know if Somporn’s still seeing her,” said Casey.

  “She’s meeting him again on Thursday.”

  “You’re certain about that? That’s very close to the election.” His eyes narrowed, his jaw clenched as he waited for the answer. “I need to be certain. Not a maybe, or ‘she’s thinking about it.’” When a man spent too much of his life behind enemy lines, all he could think about was the certainty of the escape route and the men he needed to get him through that passage.

  Calvino stood up, turned, and looked out his window at the soi. A van was delivering office paper to the translation service on the ground floor. It looked like business was good.

  He turned back to Casey. “It’s not like he’s made an appointment for open-heart surgery. She’s a mistress. He might have a conflict and cancel. Maybe she got her period. You know that happens every month, right? Or he might have a press conference or a speech to make. Any number of things can happen. From what I know, they plan to see each other late morning on Thursday.”

  “You got a tap on her phone?” Like an animal licking an old wound that would never heal, Casey never let up the pressure.

  “I’m listening to her every word.”

  Casey seemed tone-deaf to irony. In a way, Calvino envied him the simplicity of his literal world. “You hear anything different concerning their next love fest, you phone me. How much do I owe you?” Casey pulled out a wad of cash. It was his way of dealing with civilians; they were a cash-and-carry crowd who’d howl at the moon if they thought it would cause money to rain from the sky. The men he’d served with lived by a code other than money. It was called honor. Calvino wrote down “forty thousand baht” on a sheet of paper and showed it to him.

  “Give me an extra fifty baht for the paper you threw away. I have to print it out again.”

  Casey handed him forty thousand in thousand-baht notes plus a one-hundred baht note. “Keep the change.”

  Calvino heard Ratana sigh with relief once Casey had left. He walked to her side of the office. She had Colonel Pratt’s duck puppet on her hand. She pointed it at the door. “Jai dam,” she said in a Donald Duck voice. “That is a very jai dam man.”

  He thought about Colonel Pratt’s immediate reaction to Casey standing in front of him, chewing gum, looking hostile. He liked that the Colonel had nailed him to the floor—“There’s no way to read a man’s mind by looking at his face.” It was one of Pratt’s talents, matching Shakespeare to the real-world petty thugs and big-time villains.

  Ratana had nailed Casey in her own very Thai way. A black heart was a condition Thais wished to avoid in others. It meant a person who had a capacity for evil, and anyone who got in the path
of such a person paid a price. The people around me are good judges of character, Calvino thought. They also warned me against sending a coffin to Apichart. He promised himself to listen better.

  The babies had been brought under control, the silence ruptured now only by an occasional cough or fart. Whatever instinctive threat Casey had brought into the room had vanished. Ratana held John-John, hugged him, kissed his cheeks, and sniffed his neck.

  There were clients Ratana didn’t like. There were others who made her skin crawl. Even one or two she thought had been overshadowed with coldness and embroiled in a world of deception from which they desperately sought escape. Casey, she thought, was in the unique category of men who showed no sign of wishing to escape from their secret universe.

  As he sat back at his desk, Calvino put on his leather shoulder harness with the .38 police special snug inside. There was something about Casey that he’d left behind him: a man with self-inflicted wounds, a casualty of beliefs and action that were on a course to destroy him. Most of Calvino’s expat clients had something shameful they tried to hide. Calvino understood such feelings as being normal; a tainted reputation was hard to shake off, and when the damaged reputation got out into the expat community, the person was finished. But Casey’s wound was deep and jagged. What festered inside was the memory of a murdered son, and Casey’s personal redemption—and reputation—depended on his ability to right that injustice, and until that happened, his outrage would eclipse civility, decency, and tolerance.

  EIGHTEEN