by Jake Needham
I flipped quickly through the drawer, and then I went back and checked it methodically again from front to back. At first I thought that perhaps I had just overlooked them, but I hadn’t. All of Howard’s files were gone.
Had I returned them to the file room? I was reasonably sure I hadn’t, but then it had been a while since I had last looked at any of them and I supposed it was possible.
The main file room was a few doors down the corridor from my office, but when I turned the handle I discovered it was locked. I pulled out my office master key and pushed it into the deadlock. It didn’t turn. I jiggled it a couple of times, pulled it out and put it in again, but clearly it wasn’t going to open the door no matter how many times I tried.
I was certain that I had never found the file room door locked before, at least not during office hours, but then I never came in on weekends so I couldn’t say for sure whether it was normally locked then. Regardless, my key was supposed to be a master—presumably it fit every lock in the office—so I made a mental note to ask someone on Monday why I couldn’t get into the file room.
Walking back down the corridor I was just opening my office door when I heard a noise in the distance. This time I was certain. It was a voice.
I followed the sound across the darkened reception area and toward the opposite corner of the building. It led me straight to Dollar’s office. Dollar must have shown up early after all. That was out of character for him, I mused, so whatever our meeting was about, it had to be something that was making him anxious.
Dollar’s door was standing slightly ajar and I had my hand on the knob before it registered that it wasn’t Dollar’s voice I heard inside. I stopped and listened quietly. I couldn’t tell who it was or make out what the voice was saying, but it sure as hell wasn’t Dollar. He must have someone else with him, I decided. With a sinking heart I realized that it was probably Howard the Roach.
Dollar hadn’t told me Howard would be here or I might not have turned up. I still hadn’t decided whether to tell Dollar about Jello’s suspicions, but with Howard also here that was going to be even more difficult to do. It appeared that Jello was going to get his way. His trap was about to snap shut on me with a bang.
I knocked lightly. Then I pushed the door open and stepped inside.
TWENTY FOUR
I WAS SURPRISED to see that there was just one man in the office after all. I was even more surprised to see that man was neither Howard the Roach nor Dollar Dunne. It was someone I had never seen before, and he was sitting in the chair behind Dollar’s desk talking on the telephone. He glanced at me and immediately hung up.
The man was a well-built westerner with big ears, the lean face of a chain-smoker, square shoulders, and an even squarer haircut. He was wearing an inexpensive-looking blue suit with a crisp white shirt and a red and blue striped tie neatly secured in a Windsor knot and he had an unblinking stare, rather like a stuffed owl it occurred to me.
“Who the fuck are you?” he snapped. His accent was American with a trace of rural twang in it, too.
For a moment something seemed terribly familiar about the man and I just stared at him. Then I realized what it was. He looked like George Bush on steroids.
“I said who the fuck are you?” the man repeated.
“I work here,” I answered, feeling lame and defensive in spite of myself. “What are you doing in Dollar’s office?”
The man studied me carefully, but he didn’t say anything.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll call the police and they can deal with you.”
“Not necessary,” he said, and then he held up something in his right hand. It was a small black folder with an ID card on one side and a gold badge on the other. I stepped closer and looked at the card: Special Agent Franklin D. Morrissey, United States Federal Bureau of Investigation.
I was still taking that in when I heard the sound of rapid footsteps in the hallway and Dollar burst into the office. He saw the man in his chair before he saw me and nodded slightly to him, but then he realized I was standing there and stopped dead, staring at me.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
Dollar looked awful, like a man who hadn’t slept in days. His eyes were cloudy as if they couldn’t quite focus properly and he was pale underneath his golfer’s tan. I had never seen him like that before.
“You asked me to come in for a meeting at eleven.”
“About what?”
“I have no idea. Probably something about Howard, if I had to guess.”
“Howard?” Morrissey spoke up. “Howard Kojinski?”
I looked at Dollar, not sure what to say, and I saw him staring steadily at Morrissey.
“What the hell is going on here?” I asked, but nobody answered me.
Dollar jammed his hands in his pockets and flopped down on a leather sofa off to the side of his desk. He swung his feet up onto the coffee table, crossing them at the ankle, and looked at Owl Eyes.
“You may as well tell him,” Dollar said.
Morrissey snorted slightly at that, but he nodded. “The local cops found Howard a little before seven this morning,” he said.
I sat down slowly in one of the chrome and leather chairs in front of Dollar’s desk. I had no doubt at all what was coming next.
“You’re saying he’s—”
“Yep,” Owl Eyes finished for me. “Deader’n shit.”
“Where did they find him?”
“He was hanging from a girder underneath one of the bridges over the river, the Taksin Bridge.”
That took me by surprise and I’m sure it showed.
“Suicide?” I asked.
Owl Eyes blinked for what couldn’t have been more than the second time since I had found him sitting in Dollar’s chair.
“Nope,” he said, “the mechanics don’t work. He had help.”
“Then you’re saying Howard was murdered?”
Owl Eyes nodded.
“And hung off a bridge over the river?”
“Under a bridge. He couldn’t have got there by himself. The little shit didn’t jump.”
I said nothing. I didn’t know what to say.
Dollar asked me to wait in the reception area while he talked to Morrissey, which seemed odd to me, but it was Dollar’s office, so I did. After a few minutes Morrissey came out and sat down on the other couch opposite me.
“Somebody on a ferry spotted the body just after dawn this morning and called the cops,” he told me.
“Was that when it happened?”
“Could have been anytime last night.”
“Then you don’t really know what happened.”
“We don’t know jack shit. There’s a Pepsi bottling plant just upriver from the bridge. Anybody who had been watching from there could probably have seen who strung the little bastard up, but it was the middle of the night, so—”
Morrissey stopped talking and spread his hands.
I was still trying to get a grip on Morrissey’s story when the glass doors from the hallway opened and Jello came in trailed by four cops in skin-tight brown uniforms with white Sam Browne belts and big guns riding high on their hips.
“What are you doing here, Jack?”
Jello’s rumbling voice had an edge in it and right then it rubbed me the wrong way.
“I just found out a friend of mine was murdered last night,” I snapped.
Jello’s face softened. He looked embarrassed and for a moment I almost regretted being so harsh.
“I know,” he said. “That’s why I’m here.”
Jello gave Morrissey a long look. “Would you mind letting me have a minute here, Frank?”
Owl Eyes shook his head and walked back down the hallway in the direction of Dollar’s office. Jello waved the uniformed cops outside, then he came over and sat down next to me. I looked at Jello when he didn’t say anything right away.
“Why the scout troop?” I asked, indicating the cops waiting beyond the glass.
Jell
o seemed embarrassed again.
“I want to look around and see if there’s anything here that might be connected with the murder,” he said.
Now I could see why he looked embarrassed.
“Uh-huh,” I said. “And maybe while you’re at it you’ll see if you can dig up anything to prove that bullshit story you gave me about Dollar laundering drug money for some Burmese drug lords. Is that what you had in mind?”
“Look, Jack—”
I was on my feet and pointing toward the front doors before Jello could say anything else.
“To hell with you, man! Fuck you and the little elves who rode in with you! Get the hell out of here.”
Then I turned and shouted down the hallway.
“Hey, you back there! Special Agent whoever-the-hell-you-are! You get out, too!”
Morrissey reappeared so quickly that I wondered if he had been standing just around the corner listening to what Jello and I were saying. Dollar was right behind him.
“You’ve got no authority here,” I snapped at Morrissey.
“Don’t make any difference. I can get as much as I need.”
“Then you just do that. It’ll be good practice for you.”
“What’s this all about, Jack?” Dollar asked. “It won’t do any harm to let them look around.”
I thought about just blurting out what Jello had told me right there, but I didn’t. Dollar had no way of knowing he was the real target of the search, and he seemed so shaken by Howard’s murder that I couldn’t bear to pile that on him today.
“Please take my word for it, Dollar. It’s a really lousy idea.”
Dollar just nodded as if he hardly cared, then he sank down on a couch and stared off toward where the uniforms stood waiting outside. The same unfocused look he had worn when he first walked into his office was back in his eyes.
“Where’s Just John, Dollar?” I asked, squatting down next to him.
“John?” Dollar raised his head slowly. “Just John?”
“Yeah. Can I call him? Do you know where he is?”
“I think he’s…” Dollar paused. “I don’t know where he is. I think he’s out of the country.”
Morrissey looked at Dollar as if he was going to say something, but I bounced up and held up my hands.
“Don’t,” I said to him. “Don’t say a word. Just get the hell out of here.”
The cops out beyond the glass doors had stopped talking to each other and were now watching me standing there with my hand out like some demented traffic cop. Morrissey looked at me for a moment, then he shrugged slightly and opened the door.
“Come on, Jello,” he said. “It’s no big deal.”
“Jack…”
Jello started to say something, but then he just trailed off and stood there in silence until with drooping shoulders he turned away and followed Morrissey out the door. When he was outside, Jello stopped and looked back through the glass at me. I kept my face blank, and finally he gave a shrug and turned and walked with Morrissey toward the elevators.
After Jello, Morrissey, and cops were all gone, I walked around the office turning off lights to have something to do while I gave Dollar a chance to pull himself together, but when I got back to the reception area he was still sitting the same way I had left him, just staring off into space. I watched for a minute, but he never moved or spoke. He just sat there in exactly the same lifeless way.
No matter how hard I might try to explain it in some other way, I had no doubt at all what I was seeing on Dollar’s face and in the slump of his body. It wasn’t surprise, and it certainly wasn’t grief. It was fear. Dollar was a man who had seen a sign, and he was terrified by it.
As I stood there watching Dollar, I asked myself why I was being so fiercely protective of him. I had known him for a long time, of course, but the truth was I really didn’t have the slightest idea what his real connections with Howard might have been. I didn’t even know who Howard the Roach really was.
I thought about it a while, but I still couldn’t come up with an answer that made any sense. That was probably my own kind of sign, a sign that it was time for me to go home. Dollar would have to finish this on his own. I turned away, pushed through the glass doors, and left.
TWENTY FIVE
THE REST OF Saturday I just hung around the apartment with the telephone unplugged and the answering machine shut off. Anita had gone to her studio to paint and I didn’t do much except look out the window and think about Dollar and Howard. It wasn’t grief over Howard’s death or dismay that Dollar may have been involved in some shady deals that had suddenly drained the life out of me. It was my growing conviction that all of this had something to do with me. I just couldn’t figure out what it was.
After breakfast on Sunday, Anita went back to her studio again and I sat drinking coffee and looking out the window some more. A rainstorm was coming in from out over the river to the west and thinking of the river caused me to picture Howard the Roach dangling above it from under the Taksin Bridge. Suddenly I wanted to see that bridge; I wanted to see where they had found Howard.
I put on some jeans and a polo shirt, slipped into a pair of old Topsiders, and went down to the Volvo. By the time I got on the road most of the rain had stopped, but I kept the top up since the wind was still shoving clouds of fine mist over the city. I got on the expressway and drove west.
I didn’t know that part of town very well and the only place that came readily to mind where I might be able to park and look at the Taksin Bridge was a Marriott that was on the river not far from it. When the Marriott appeared on my left, I turned in. I parked in front of the hotel, got out of the car, and walked around to a sort of garden that was on one side of it. Through a line of bare flagpoles that lined the walkway along the bank of the river, I could look directly at the Taksin Bridge.
I walked slowly over the edge of the river, sat down on a low concrete wall, and stared at the bridge. Now that I was here, I couldn’t imagine why I had come. What did I expect to find? The rope from which Howard had dangled still hanging over the water? A banner draped over the superstructure with the name of Howard’s killer written on it?
A light breeze rose from the water and the empty pulley ropes began to swing against the aluminum flagpole above my head. The impacts clanked out mournful little chords, hollow sounds, like tin drums tapping out a clumsy cadence for Howard’s passage to the other side. The simple truth was that Howard was dead, somebody had killed him, but it had nothing to do with me. That was all there was to it.
Suddenly the only thing I could think about was how hungry I was, which I took to be a pretty good sign, so I stood up, dusted off my pants, and went into the Marriott to find someplace to eat. I wandered around inside for a while until I stumbled on a large, sunny room with big windows overlooking the river where there was a Sunday brunch buffet. The place was only about half full so I settled myself at an empty table by a window and ordered a Heineken. I got a plate and helped myself to some mee krob and peek kai from the salad table, then loaded on a couple of pieces of tuna sashimi and two sticks of chicken satay for good measure. I got back to my table just as a slight young girl in a black uniform and a white apron was pouring my Heineken.
“Korp khun krap,” I said. Thank you.
The girl gave me a shy smile, bobbed her head, and slipped quietly away.
I had polished off most of the plate of salad and was halfway through the Heineken when I glanced up and spotted a familiar face eating alone at a table across the room.
Bar Phillips was a columnist for the Bangkok Post, and probably had been since just after the invention of moveable type. His column was called ‘Bar By Bar’ and it had been a weekly staple in Bangkok for longer than anyone now alive could remember. The kind of stuff Bar wrote about was badly out of style now, even a little distasteful to some people, but that apparently had had no effect on him at all. He merely continued doing what he had done for decades: chronicling his rounds through the city’s
go-go bars and massage parlors, reporting the comings and goings of the city’s legion of foreign saloonkeepers, and generally holding forth on anything else that took his fancy about Bangkok’s legendary nightlife.
Bar and I first met not long after I had joined the faculty at Chula. He had apparently come into a bit of money somehow and since we had some friends in common—not surprisingly, since Bar seemed to know everybody in Bangkok—he had approached me for help with setting up and operating a string of bank accounts outside Thailand. I never really knew where his money came from or exactly how much of it there was. Bar offered vague explanations, mostly starring the usual panoply of dead relatives, but I didn’t believe him and I don’t think he expected me to. On the other hand, I didn’t sense anything ominous about his money’s origins either so I had been happy enough to help him out. I hadn’t really see that much of him since then, but I was always happy to run into him. He loved me like a son.
When I walked over to Bar’s table carrying what was left of my Heineken, he glanced up at me without expression.
“What the fuck do you want? Can’t you see I’m trying to eat?”
Loved me like a son, he did.
I sat down anyway and between trips back and forth to the buffet tables over the next hour Bar and I made small talk. After he polished off the last of a large bowl of bread pudding, he bent down and took a package of tobacco and a pipe out of a plastic shopping bag on the floor by his feet. Packing the bowl of the pipe, he tapped the tobacco down with a metal tool, then struck a match and puffed away until he got it going. It all looked like an awful lot of trouble to me. Maybe that’s why I smoked cigars.
Slumping forward on his forearms, Bar took several long draws on his pipe and the aroma of cherry wood blended with the odor of garlic, fish sauce, and chilies. It smelled better than it sounds.
“You got something on your mind other than food, don’t you, Jack?” he said.
