THE DEAD AMERICAN (The Inspector Samuel Tay Novels Book 3)

by Jake Needham

  Part of the problem was that the whole idea of living in a foreign country was just so strange to most Americans, particularly since very few of them had ever seriously entertained the thought, however fleetingly, themselves. After all, everyone wanted to come to America, didn’t they? Half the population of the earth was fighting to live in Orange County and work in a 7-Eleven, wasn’t it? Why in God’s name would an American even think of living anywhere else?

  Before I had made the big jump, back in what now felt to me like another life, Barry Gale and I had both been partners in a large and well-connected Washington law firm. The firm was huge and, in spite of our common occupation, I had run across him only occasionally. Truth be told, I could remember very little at all about Barry Gale.

  Except, really, for one thing.

  Barry Gale had been both the outside legal counsel and a member of the board of directors of the Texas State Bank in Dallas when it was engulfed in scandal, a hugely psychedelic mess involving a bunch of Russian mobsters from New Jersey who had been using the bank to clean and press their income from a variety of rackets up and down the East Coast. The character at the center of the imbroglio was an Armenian named Jimini Zubokof, who was better known as Jimmy Kicks because he had once, so the legend went, personally taken his gleaming Ferragamos to an FBI informant and kicked the poor bastard to death.

  Somehow Jimmy became inexplicably possessed by the idea of shifting his money-laundering operations to Asia—anywhere in Asia, really—and he demanded his people find a compliant bank somewhere that would serve his purposes. Of course, all Jimmy Kicks actually knew about Asia was how to order Chinese takeaway and he wasn’t even very good at that, so in the ensuing upheaval at Texas State Bank offshore accounts and foreign currencies were whizzing all over the place and quite a lot of money disappeared. Tens of millions of dollars, or so the press reports claimed, were lost by the bank through dealing forward contracts in the foreign exchange market, although whose contracts they actually were or how the losses had been incurred was never made entirely clear.

  Just as the whole saga was turning into old news, the disappearance of one of the bank’s directors and the suicide of another freaked out the conspiracy buffs and the story jumped straight back onto the front pages. As far as I knew, no trace had ever been found of the director who vanished, but the so-called suicide had been dramatic enough to grab most of the attention anyway.

  There was a guesthouse in North Dallas that the bank leased for the use of out-of-town directors. That was where Barry Gale had been found, at the bottom of the swimming pool, pinned to it by a manhole cover tied around his neck with barbed wire.

  I drew on my Montecristo and exhaled a slow stream of smoke into the darkness. From somewhere I heard faint music and I listened quietly for a long while as the mournful voice of a young girl sang Thai love songs full of sorrow and loss. Her voice had a quavering, reed-thin quality, and the sound of it drifted over the city like wisps of river fog. The air smelled of ozone and rancid water. Lightning leaped soundlessly between clouds off in the distance, and the breeze cranked up a notch.

  While I smoked I studied the city’s skyline in the distance. The towers were brightly lit, etched into the night sky by lights so blindingly white that they seemed to drain the color from everything around them. In the distance beyond the skyscrapers I could just pick out the floodlights on the soaring, golden spires and preposterous-looking green and red tile roofs of the Grand Palace. Once the heart of a dazzling, secret world ruled over by a god-king, this eccentric collection of whimsical structures had lately fallen on less glamorous times. The King had long since decamped for more modern quarters and the Grand Palace was now neither grand nor a palace. These days it amounted to little more than a faintly shabby tourist attraction for the hordes of foreigners that swept over Thailand year-around.

  There was a sudden flash of lightning and moments later a single, crunching boom of thunder drove the air out of the night. I dumped my cigar into an ashtray and walked back inside. As I shut the door, the storm hit like a fist.

  LAUNDRY MAN

  THREE

  CHULALONGKORN UNIVERSITY IS RIGHT in the middle of Bangkok and the Sasin School of Business is in the northwest corner of Chula’s main campus. Sasin is housed in two mid-rise buildings that make up for what they lack in construction quality with their mediocre design. My office was on the sixth floor of the larger of the two buildings, around on the south side. It was nothing special, but at least I had a fine view of the golf course at the Royal Bangkok Sports Club and the towers of the Silom Road financial district just beyond it.

  I had slept poorly and woken at dawn so I went in on Monday morning a couple of hours earlier than usual. In spite of the rain during the night, or perhaps because of it, the new day was glorious. The sky was so blue it reminded me of Hawaii, and a promising breeze out of the south carried the smell of salt all the way up from the Gulf of Thailand. None of the secretaries had come in yet, so I walked down to the little kitchen at the end of the hall and made some coffee.

  Mondays were particularly pleasant days for me since I had only one class scheduled. It was an eleven o’clock lecture course entitled “Legal Aspects of the Regulation of Multinational Corporate Acquisition Finance Transactions in the Countries of the Pacific Rim.” The kids called it “Wheel, Deal and Steal.” The course was a second-year elective that had never been very popular before I took it over, but now the enrollment was well above a hundred and the meetings had been moved to one of the large lecture halls across campus to accommodate the crowd.

  My lectures were supposed to focus on case studies of the financing structures of major corporate acquisitions in Asia, but I always made an effort to sprinkle them with a few war stories to lighten up what otherwise would have been a dreary discourse on tax treaties, banking practices, and securities regulations. Almost all of my stories naturally concerned money—frequently very large amounts of it—and I had quickly discovered that money was an even better topic than sex for keeping students absolutely riveted.

  The word around campus was that my lectures were entertaining and I suppose they were. Moreover, I was something less than the world’s toughest grader. If you turned up with reasonable regularity, course credit would be yours at the end of the semester without a great deal of fuss. I was a charter subscriber to Woody Allen’s Postulate: at least eighty percent of life is about just showing up.

  There was another reason this particular course drew so well, however, one about which I had decidedly mixed feelings. My lectures generally featured anecdotes drawn from my own recollections of the bad old days, of gunslingers that had bought companies with big gestures instead of money and somehow gotten away with it for a while. Those stories were obviously popular with the students and that was what bothered me. I often got the uncomfortable feeling that they were less interested in absorbing the moral object lessons I was trying to impart than they were in figuring out how they could pull off the same kind of crap for themselves.

  Regardless, today I was entirely free of the need to fret over what my students might make of my tales of greed and derring-do because I didn’t have to tell any. I was about to engage in the oldest ruse known to academia, the guest lecturer ploy. All I had to do today was appear attentive and not get caught closing my eyes.

  I went down to the administrative office while I waited for Mr. Coffee to finish dripping, gathered the weekend’s harvest of incoming faxes out of the machine, and picked up copies of both the Wall Street Journal and the Bangkok Post. Flipping quickly through the faxes, I found only one addressed to me, a notice that the board meeting for Southeast Asian Investment in Hong Kong later in the week had been shortened from two days to one. That wasn’t particularly welcome news since I really enjoyed my all-expense-paid junkets to Hong Kong.

  I walked back to the kitchen carrying the fax and the newspapers, picked out what looked like a clean mug from a cabinet above the sink, and poured myself some coffee.
Then I returned to my own office, shut the door, dumped the fax on my desk, and settled back with the newspapers to do some serious coffee drinking.

  TWO NEWSPAPERS AND three cups of coffee later, I made a preemptive toilet stop, then strolled across campus to the lecture hall where I found the guest lecturer for the day waiting outside for me. My designated hitter was an old Bangkok hand named Dollar Dunne, an American-born lawyer who had been around Thailand for longer than anyone I knew. As unlikely as it might seem, Dollar actually was his real name, one hung on him by a mother who either had a strange sense of humor or, given his ensuing success dealing his way around the back alleys of Asia, was startlingly prescient.

  Dollar and I made small talk until the class had all taken their seats, then I did a couple of quick announcements and gave Dollar the kind of effusive and deferential introduction my guests always said was unnecessary but would have been mortally wounded not to receive. After that, I settled into a seat up at the back of the lecture hall and smiled as Dollar leaned against the podium and launched into what were no doubt wildly embellished tales of his adventures as a legal mercenary stalking the commercial jungles of Asia.

  Dollar was at least in his mid-fifties, but his wiry build and the way he wore his thick, silver hair in what was almost but not quite a Marine Corps buzz cut made him look much younger. His skin was perfectly tanned and his features still had a boyish, open quality to them. Instead of the predictable uniform of expensive suit and a white shirt, Dollar was wearing rumpled khakis and a green golf shirt that looked faded from many hours in the sun. His choice of wardrobe said a lot about him. He was probably happiest when he was doing exactly the opposite of whatever was expected. I had to admit the image Dollar affected, although a little studied for my taste, was pretty potent. It gave him a raffish quality that a lot of people found irresistible.

  Dollar and I had first met back when I was still in living in Washington. Dollar’s firm had been lead counsel for a company called the Merchant Group that had gone suddenly and spectacularly belly up and left a good number of Stassen & Hardy’s banking clients holding embarrassingly empty bags. The Merchant Group had technically been a Luxembourg corporation with its operating headquarters in Bangkok, but in reality it was as Australian as a red kangaroo. Lyndon Merchant was an Aussie and mostly he ran the organization out of Perth. He called it a private international merchant bank, but I had never met anyone who could figure out exactly what that crafty assembly of buzzwords was actually supposed to mean.

  What the company actually did was equally difficult to divine. It did deals, of course, as the players liked to say back when the expression was still socially acceptable if not exactly laudable, but there was no consistent quality to them. It bought random companies all over the world, mostly with money borrowed from gullible and greedy bankers whose primary interest was in pumping up their reported profits with fat fees; then it either flipped the companies quickly for a fast profit, generally to some sucker lined up in advance, or it cut the companies up, pulled the valuable assets out, and dumped what was left.

  When Stassen & Hardy sent me out to Bangkok to fish around in the wreckage of the Merchant Group to see if anything was left for our clients to claim, it wasn’t long before I was up to my butt in a morass of untraceable fund transfers and funny-money loans involving shell companies headquartered in places like the Cook Islands, Vanuatu, and Tonga. The gamy odor of the whole sordid mess was unmistakable, but I couldn’t develop any solid connections between the Merchant Group’s operations and the usual suspects in international scams of that sort: the intelligence agencies, drug traffickers, and arms brokers who were generally skulking somewhere in the shadows. Dollar, as I recalled, seemed to find the whole muddle more amusing than sinister, and working that case with him turned out to be the finest graduate seminar in Asian commercial skullduggery I could ever have wanted.

  Dollar was right in the middle of telling my students a few stories about the Merchant Group, winging his way to the considerable amusement of the class through some of the wilder conspiracy theories, when he suddenly looked up at the back of the hall and cut me a wink that was impossible to miss. A few of the kids twisted around in their seats to check out my reaction. I reflexively returned a half-smile, but Dollar’s gesture left me a little unsettled. The wink seemed to imply that Dollar and I shared some secret concerning the Merchant Group that he couldn’t impart to the class. If that’s what he thought, I couldn’t imagine what that secret was supposed be.

  I was still thinking about that when the class started to applaud and I realized that Dollar had finished. The kids gathered their stuff, slid out of the narrow rows of theater-style seating that were tiered up off a center aisle, and began to make their way down to the main floor and out of the hall.

  By the time I reached the bottom of the steps, the hall was almost empty and Dollar was leaning on the lectern at the front of the room waiting for me.

  LAUNDRY MAN

  FOUR

  “WAS THAT WINK SUPPOSED to mean something to me?”

  “You’re getting kind of Canadian in your old age, Jack. Anybody ever tell you that?” Dollar eyed me for a moment and then he shrugged. “A kiss is just a kiss; a smile is just a smile; a wink is just a wink. Like that.”

  I knew Dollar wasn’t normally one for empty gestures. Regardless, he obviously wanted to let this one slide, so I didn’t press the point.

  “Anyway, forget that,” Dollar said. “I’ve got something I need to talk to you about.”

  “Maybe we should move this outside, Dollar.”

  The man’s voice came from behind me, and when I turned I saw John Hanratty slouched down in a seat in the front row right next to the entrance to the lecture hall. I hadn’t noticed John come in and I wondered what he was doing there. John wasn’t a lawyer, not as far as I knew anyway, although he worked for Dollar’s law firm in some capacity. I had never been absolutely certain what John actually did for Dollar’s firm, but I gathered he functioned as a sort of greeter for out-of-town clients when they came to Bangkok, something most of them were happy enough to do whenever they could come up with an excuse that their wives would buy. Clients were always flying in for what were euphemistically called conferences, only to spend most of their time on a stool next to John at one of the city’s justly famed go-go bars.

  Everyone I knew called John by his nickname: Just John. The source of that nickname was a local legend. Whenever someone who knew only John’s first name asked for his last, so the story went, John would invariably reply, “It’s just John.” Popular rumor had it that Just John was retired from the CIA. That, of course, interpreted his gesture concerning his name as a penchant for secrecy rather than just an indication of friendliness. I thought the story far too colorful to be true, but I really didn’t know Just John all that well so I had never asked him about it.

  “I didn’t know you were coming this morning, John.”

  “Shit,” he grinned as he pushed himself out of his seat, “neither did I until a couple of hours ago.”

  Just John was a big man and all of his features seemed slightly over-scale: big hands, wide forehead, barrel chest, prominent nose. He must have been in his sixties, but he was tanned and fit-looking despite a beer gut that rode his middle like a kangaroo’s pouch. His gray hair was long enough at the back to curl down inside the collar of the neat, button-down white shirt he wore tucked into sharply creased, dark gray trousers.

  “Come on, Jack.” Dollar placed a hand against my back and nudged me gently toward the door. “Let’s take a walk.”

  The three of us left the building and turned north across the campus. Just John said nothing at all, but Dollar and I made small talk as we strolled unhurriedly in the general direction of a massive, lumpy pile of masonry that looked like a bomb shelter built on the surface rather than underground. In actual fact it was an eight-story, windowless shopping center with a doubtful reputation where a lot of Chula students hung out between classes,
eyeing each other over the vendors’ stalls heaped with knockoff clothing, cloned cell phones, and pirated DVDs.

  Eventually I got bored with waiting for someone to tell me what this conversation was supposed to be about.

  “What’s on your mind, Dollar?” I asked.

  “As I recall, Jack, we referred Howard the Roach to you last year. That’s right, isn’t it?”

  I nodded. Howard Kojinski liked to pose as a big-time financier, but he was actually one of those guys who seldom made it past the fringe of anything that mattered. He had earned his colorful moniker, so I understood, because of the way he operated on those rare occasions when he accidentally stumbled into something that involved real money.

  Why are cockroaches so unpleasant? the question goes. It’s not because of what they eat, is the answer, it’s what they fall into and mess up.

  “You organized a company for him in Hong Kong, didn’t you?” Dollar kept walking, his hands folded behind him. “Then you used it to set up an LA property deal he had going with a some Chinese hustlers.”

  I nodded again and waited for Dollar to get to the point.

  “Just John’s looking into what Howard’s been up to lately. What have you heard from the little asshole?”

  “Nothing.”

  Then I thought about Dollar’s question and realized how odd it was.

  “Why would you think I’d heard anything from Howard?”

  “Well, Jack,” Dollar gave me a tentative look, “you know more about manipulating corporate structures than anyone I’ve ever known. You’re the man when it comes to all that shit. If Howard had a problem with some of his funny-money stuff, I thought he might have called you.”