[Jack Shepherd 01.0] Laundry Man

by Jake Needham

  Bar drew on his pipe again and exhaled an enormous cloud of smoke. He didn’t appear to care whether I told him what it was or not, but he probably assumed I would anyway. And I did.

  “You heard about the man they found hanging under the Taksin Bridge?”

  Bar nodded so I told him about my encounter with Jello and the FBI agent at Dollar’s office. He listened without expression.

  When I finished, Bar crooked a finger at a passing busboy, muttering something to him that I missed, then folded his arms and went back to puffing on his pipe as if he was sitting all alone at the table. I was just on the verge of asking him what that had all been about when the boy reappeared with a copy of the Bangkok Post and handed it to Bar. He flipped through it until he found what he was looking for, and then he folded the paper over and laid it in front of me.

  The story he pointed to was short, not more than six column inches, and it was down at the bottom of an inside page. The headline was ‘American Tourist Found Dead.’ But it was the subheading that got my full attention: ‘Police Call It Suicide.’

  “The reporter must have screwed up the story,” I said. “Howard was certainly no tourist, and the FBI agent said it was a murder. He said it would have been impossible for Howard to have hung himself.”

  “Who was this guy?” Bar asked. “One of the local legats?”

  Most American embassies had at least one FBI agent assigned to them, sometimes more if it was in a country like Thailand where criminal investigators could find a lot to do. To keep from offending the host country, FBI agents were always technically referred to as legal attachés, legats in State Department talk.

  “I don’t know. I assumed he was with the embassy. What else would he be doing here?”

  “What was the guy’s name?”

  “Frank something.” I thought a moment. “Frank Morrissey.”

  Bar dipped back down into the plastic shopping bag and produced a mobile phone, one of those old green Motorola’s that was about the size of a World War II walkie-talkie.

  “Who are you calling?” I asked him.

  “The American Embassy.”

  “Isn’t it closed on Sunday?”

  “Not to me.”

  I watched as Bar finished dialing and hoisted the huge handset to his ear.

  “Duty officer, please,” he said after a moment.

  There was a wait, apparently first for his call to be switched and then for it to be answered.

  “Hey, Barney. It’s Bar Phillips.” Bar listened for a couple of beats. “Uh-huh.”

  While Bar listened some more, I studied his expression, but it gave nothing away.

  “No problem, pal,” he eventually said, “but I need a favor in return. There’s an FBI guy named Morrissey who is either attached to the embassy or in town on some kind of temporary duty. You know him?”

  He listened for a moment, then said, “Yeah, that’s right. His first name is Frank.”

  Bar glanced at me and I nodded quickly.

  There was a pause, then Bar said, “No shit,” followed by a long, low whistle. “Hang on a second Barney.”

  Bar lowered the telephone, slipped his hand over the mouthpiece, and looked at me.

  “He says Frank Morrissey used to be one of the legats all right, but he’s been retired for three or four years. Lives somewhere in Florida, he thinks.”

  “So what’s he doing back here now?”

  Instead of answering my question, Bar asked me one of his own.

  “What did this man in Dollar’s office look like?”

  I described the man as well as I could, including his natty dress and cool demeanor.

  Bar lifted the headset back to his ear. “Barney, let me ask you something. Is Frank Morrissey a middle-aged guy of average size and weight who’s a sharp dresser and comes across as serious and intense?”

  I could hear the laughter coming from the other end of the telephone without Bar taking it away from his ear.

  “I see,” he said after listening for a moment longer. “Well, I’m sure it’s all some kind of mistake. Thanks a lot, pal. I owe you one.”

  Bar pushed the disconnect button and lowered the heavy headset to the table.

  “He says Frank Morrissey is probably older than I am. He also says he’s a fat slob who looks like an unmade bed and never stops talking shit.”

  “This guy showed me his ID, Bar. And both Jello and Dollar knew him. He had to be legit.”

  Bar sat impassively, saying nothing.

  I pointed to the telephone. “You’ve probably got a secret weekend number for Jello, too. Call him. He’ll tell you.”

  Bar shook his head. “Not a good idea.”

  “Why not?”

  Bar shook his head again and looked away.

  “Oh, come on, Bar,” I said. “Tell me you’re not about to say there was a conspiracy between Dollar and Jello to pass this fellow off as an FBI agent just to fool me.”

  “Okay. Then I won’t tell you that.”

  I was starting to get a headache.

  “Look, Jack, think about it. Somebody doesn’t just kill this poor bastard you knew, they dangled his body off a prominent landmark where all sorts of people could see him twisting up there in the wind. Now doesn’t it strike you as a pretty clear message of some kind?”

  I said nothing. Bar was obviously right.

  “Then some guy masquerading as an FBI agent shows up before the body’s cold,” Bar went on. “And a few minutes later, Jello walks in with enough manpower to turn the whole place over.”

  “But then Jello just left. He didn’t do anything.”

  “You scared them off when you threw your fit.”

  I thought back to the empty look in Dollar’s eyes on Saturday morning and wondered again why I had been so protective of him.

  “But if you’re right, wouldn’t that mean Jello and Dollar know who killed Howard?”

  “Sharp as a fucking cue ball, aren’t you, pal?”

  The busboy materialized and began quietly gathering dirty dishes. Neither of us said anything else until he had wiped down the table and withdrawn.

  “You sure you’re not a player here, Jack?” Bar asked quietly when the boy was well out of earshot.

  Bar produced the metal tool again and started poking at the bowl of his pipe, narrowing his eyes in concentration. He looked like a plumber examining a jammed toilet and unhappily contemplating what he had to do next.

  “I’m just a teacher now, Bar. I’m not a player in anything anymore.”

  “They don’t always ask you if you want to play, Jack. Sometimes they just stick you in the game.”

  And with that Bar pushed himself up from the table with surprising nimbleness.

  “Got to go,” he said grabbing his bag. “Good luck.”

  As I watched Bar walk away, it occurred to me that he had stuck me with the check, but I didn’t mind. I figured it was pretty good value.

  It was early afternoon and the dazzling shimmer of the sunlight on the river just beyond the windows made the table where I sat seem like a good place to think about what Bar had said and let some time pass. I ordered another Heineken and watched the river. The beer was rich and thick and time and possibilities swirled around me as if my thoughts were no more than pieces of flotsam floating on the river’s currents.

  Then they passed, and they were gone.

  TWENTY SIX

  THERE WERE A lot of things I could have done with the rest of my Sunday afternoon. I could have gone to my office and prepared my lectures for next week’s classes. I could have headed over to Lumpini Park and pounded around the lake until I sweated out the sense of foreboding rising within me. I could have retreated to my apartment, locked the door, and gone back to bed. That’s probably what I should have done.

  Instead, I drove out to Dollar’s house. It wasn’t that I particularly wanted to see Dollar, but he and I were going to have a serious conversation pretty soon—that seemed absolutely inevitable—and I figur
ed there was nothing to be gained by putting it off. I could have called first to see if he was at home, but of course I didn’t. The trip might turn out to be a waste, but I figured I would take that risk. Catching Dollar by surprise would make for a far more compelling conversation than letting him know in advance that I was coming.

  Dollar lived on the river north of the city, not far from the international school where a lot of the city’s foreign residents and a few wealthy Thais with pretensions sent their children. I had been there four or five times for parties but had never actually been inside the house. Dollar’s parties always took place on the lawn, a sprawling, close-cropped expanse of grass impenetrably walled with towering banyan trees and rolling as smoothly as a putting green down a gentle slope to the Chao Praya River.

  On party nights the lawn was bathed in white light from powerful floods tucked discreetly in the trees and a string quartet from some university was usually out there floating Mozart and Bach off on the heavy night air. Dollar’s smartly-dressed guests generally represented more nationalities than I could name and, as they wandered among linen-draped tables engaging in pleasantly ambiguous conversation, they generally made certain that they were noticed by everyone else who was there. The first time I had gone to one of Dollar’s parties, I remembered standing quietly at the top of the slope and looking down across the lawn for a long time. The illumination was so white, so flat and colorless, and the people and the table settings looked so faultless, so perfectly formed, the whole scene made me think of a tiny diorama atop a really expensive wedding cake.

  Dollar’s house was a rambling two-story affair of no particular style, but it was large and comfortable looking, the kind of a place in which you had no difficulty imagining a man living. The story around town was that Dollar had been married three times—once to a Japanese woman, once to a Chinese, and once to an Indonesian—and each woman had in turn left him. Dollar had no children, none that anyone had heard about anyway, and as far as I knew he lived alone except for the Thai couple that cooked and cleaned for him.

  I pulled the Volvo to the side of the road and parked close to the high concrete wall that pinned Dollar’s house against the river. You couldn’t see the house from the street because there was only one opening in the wall, a black metal drive gate that slid open like a huge peephole. Set into the larger gate was a door for any callers who had the misfortune to be on foot.

  I’m not certain exactly how long I sat there looking at the gate and doing nothing else. I kept asking myself if I really wanted to do this. I didn’t, but I was going to do it anyway. I got out of the car and pressed the intercom button quickly before I had a chance to change my mind.

  While I was waiting for someone to answer, I reached down and rested my hand on the handle of the little door within the drive gate. As I touched it the door drifted open, propelled by nothing more than the weight of my hand. The motion was so smooth and silent that it was a little eerie, but I pushed the door the rest of the way open and stepped inside.

  The front of Dollar’s house was a solid wash of white stucco without a single window or opening other than a big pair of dark teak doors that Dollar swore he had personally taken from a Khmer temple near Angkor Wat. Naturally I had never believed that for a moment and I doubted anyone else had either. I knew that the other side of the house, the side that faced the river, was exactly the opposite in style. It was an unbroken curtain of glass that opened the whole house to a sweeping view of the Chao Praya River with its constant traffic of longtails, rice barges, tourist boats, ferries, and ambiguous vessels whose real tasks you hesitated to guess.

  I started up the walkway to the front, but finding the door in the gate open and seeing no sign of life made the whole scene feel a little spooky. On impulse I angled off across the grass and circled around to the back. It wouldn’t hurt to have a quick look around before I just blundered up and rang the bell.

  As I rounded the northeast corner of the house, Dollar’s spectacular view of the river captured me just as it always did. For a moment I stood absolutely still and watched a long train of teak rice barges, tethered nose to tail like a column of elderly circus elephants, wallow noiselessly downriver toward the Gulf of Thailand. So peaceful was the sight that when I finally turned back toward Dollar’s house and glanced inside through the glass curtain wall it took several moments for me to register what I was looking at.

  The living room was in shambles. It looked like a bulldozer had run through it from one end to the other. Lamps were broken, chairs overturned, tables smashed, and every book pulled from the long shelves flanking the fireplace and dumped into piles on the floor. Two once-plush couches lay on their backs with their bases toward the windows. The rich blue of their silk upholstery had been sliced into ribbons as if some maniac had attacked them with a broadsword.

  I stood and stared, rooted to the spot by the appalling yet still mesmerizing magnitude of the destruction.

  “Looks like a real messy burglary, doesn’t it?”

  Startled, I jerked my heard toward the sound of the voice and was confounded to see Bar Phillips standing with his arms folded across his chest looking into Dollar’s house alongside me.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  Bar’s eyes searched around as if he might find the answer inscribed on the sky.

  “I figured you might be coming out to see Dollar,” he finally said.

  “What’s that got to do with you?”

  He lifted his arms and let them flop back to his sides in a gesture that combined bewilderment with exasperation. “Well… I thought maybe someone ought to watch your back.”

  “The hell you did. You’re a reporter and you smelled a story.”

  Bar made a face at that and fished his pipe out of his shirt pocket.

  “You flatter me, boy. All I write anymore is a load of shit. Nobody’s thought of me as a real reporter in thirty years.”

  “Then why the sudden concern about my welfare? If you thought I was walking into trouble, you could have just told me back at the Marriott. You didn’t have to follow me all the way out here.”

  Bar stuck the pipe in the corner of his mouth and chewed on it without any indication that he planned to light it anytime soon.

  “I always do what I can for my friends. But I only do what I can, not what I can’t.”

  I took a long breath and let it out slowly. “Does that mean anything?”

  “Nope,” Bar responded cheerfully. “Living in Thailand’s made me a happy convert to the church of creative ambiguity.”

  Bar walked up to the glass, put his hands around his face to block the glare, and briefly studied the interior of Dollar’s house.

  “Man,” he said, puckering his lips as if he were lining up a particularly difficult putt. “They did a good job of making it look like a burglary, didn’t they?”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked. “You don’t think this is a burglary?”

  Bar glanced at me. It was plain he relished my puzzlement. Then he started back around the house toward the front. Not having any better idea, I followed.

  When Bar got to the big teak doors, he rattled the brass handles with both hands, but they were securely locked. I reached past him toward the doorbell, but Bar gave me such a look of disdain that I pulled my hand back without touching it.

  Bar dug in his trouser pocket and pulled out his pipe tool. Flipping from it what looked like a stainless steel toothpick about three inches long, Bar slid the pick into the keyhole above the handle on the right hand door, bent forward slightly from the waist, and began to jiggle it gently between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, chewing on his lower lip in concentration.

  I burst out laughing. “You’ve got to be joking.”

  Bar didn’t answer, but after a few seconds I heard a soft click and he didn’t have to. He straightened up and turned the knob with his left hand while retracting the pick and pocketing the silver tool with his right.

&nbs
p; “Okay,” I said. “Maybe you weren’t.”

  TWENTY SEVEN

  AS SOON AS we got inside it was obvious that the whole house had gotten the same treatment as the living room. Whoever had turned the place over had clearly done a thorough job of it. I followed Bar silently from room to room. Nothing seemed to have escaped unscathed.

  “Very professional,” Bar said with a note in his voice that sounded almost like admiration. “Really very professional.”

  I didn’t know what to say. The house just looked like a mess to me. I would have to take Bar’s word for the fact that it was a professional mess.

  “What makes you think this wasn’t just a burglary?” I asked.

  Bar gave me a disgusted look and started down a hallway that looked like it led to the bedrooms.

  “Holy Christ,” I murmured softly when I got to the end of it and looked around.

  The master suite consisted of a huge bedroom with a line of walk-in closets on one side and a small study with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on the other. The king-sized bed was in the middle of the room, its headboard a futuristic-looking rack of reading lights and telephones shuffled together with an elaborate collection of video and sound equipment. The whole setup faced a curtain of glass that overlooked the river and I glanced involuntarily toward the ceiling. I was a little surprised not to find a mirror up there.

  The room had been spectacular once, but now it looked like a garbage dump. Clothes, shoes, papers, framed pictures, files, and books were heaped in a massive pile at the center of the room. The place looked like someone had begun to build a bonfire, but had been interrupted before they could ignite it.

  Bar crossed the room to the walk-in closets and shoved aside a long chrome and glass table overturned in front of them. He checked the first closet, then pushed his head into each of the others and examined them as well. When he had finished, he turned to me and delivered his verdict.

  “Dollar’s on the run.”

  “Christ, Bar. I’d be halfway to Madagascar by now if I came home and found that someone had worked my place over like this.”