LAUNDRY MAN (A Jack Shepherd crime thriller)

by Jake Needham

  Even if Anita was right about me, especially if she was right about me, maybe I was better off focusing on what I could do than worrying about what I couldn’t; so I started the car and drove to Darcy’s place.

  I had no doubt that Darcy and Nata could tell me what was on the disk and in the Thai-language documents. I was certain that both were important to me somehow. I just needed to know if I was right.

  And yes, Anita, I will admit it to you honestly, I wanted to know.

  TWENTY NINE

  I LEFT THE envelope with Darcy and Nata and slipped away quickly, pleading fatigue. Back at the apartment I took the coward’s way out and slept in the guest room, then went to my office early on Monday morning. Barely halfway through my first cup of coffee, Darcy called.

  “Nothing all that dramatic after all,” she said when I answered the telephone.

  It was unnecessary, of course, for Darcy to tell me what she was referring to.

  “I’ve emailed you a copy of what was on the disk, but you’re probably going to be disappointed. It was a backup all right, but it was just an address book. Nothing else. Might be something there for you, but…” Darcy trailed off.

  “Was it encrypted?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So how’d you open it?”

  “I used the password.”

  “But how did you know what Dollar’s password was?”

  “People are pretty predictable. When they pick a password, they always use something they won’t have any trouble remembering. That’s why nearly everyone picks just some ordinary word, or maybe a phrase that’s pretty well known. Either that, or they pick a combination of numbers that represent a date or something they can easily remember.”

  I listened, making a mental note to change my ATM code as soon as we hung up.

  “First we tried a random number crack of four through eight digits. When that didn’t work, we ran the file against English, Thai, French, Spanish, and Italian dictionaries and then for good measure against a database of a few hundred thousand proper names, places, and phrases that people sometimes use for passwords. It only took about twenty minutes to crack Dollar’s password.”

  “What was it?” I asked.

  “Berghof. That mean anything to you?”

  “Doesn’t it have something to do with World War II?” I thought about it briefly. “That’s what Hitler called his vacation house in the Bavarian Alps, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right. It seems an odd choice of password for Dollar. Was he a World War II fanatic?”

  “Beats me,” I shrugged. “How about those documents I gave you, the ones in Thai?”

  “Those might be a little more useful to you. They were property transfers.”

  “For what?”

  Darcy hesitated, and from something in the way she did it I knew I wasn’t going to like whatever it was coming next.

  “You really can’t tell very much from a Thai title deed until you compare the property description with a detailed map of the area where the transfer took place but, as nearly as I can tell, these transfers all involved large tracts of land in Phuket.”

  That might explain all those American Express receipts Dollar had from Phuket, it occurred to me.

  “Maybe Dollar was working on a hotel development there,” I said. “Who were the transfers made to?”

  “They were all corporate, and all the names looked to me like shelf companies. It’ll take a while to find out who’s really behind them. You know that better than I do.”

  “But I still don’t see why Dollar would throw title deeds away. Whoever the property was transferred to, the title deeds themselves are still important documents in Thailand.”

  “These weren’t originals. They weren’t even complete. My guess is that they were just copies that were attached to something else he was working on, probably as exhibits of some kind just to prove that the transfers had actually taken place.”

  “I still don’t see it, Darcy. A man who’d go to the trouble of encrypting his address book wouldn’t just toss copies of transfers like that into the trash. There’s too much information on them. He’d shred them first.”

  “He would if they were real.”

  That stopped me.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Now I’m not absolutely sure about this, Jack, but my guess is the transfers you found are all forgeries.”

  I blinked at that.

  “Not even particularly good ones,” Darcy continued. “My guess is that your man had a pressing need to show somebody that he had purchased a whole hell of a lot of property that he hadn’t, so he manufactured these title deeds to show where a whole bunch of money had gone.”

  I thought about that and said nothing.

  “Look, I got some real hot stuff running today, so I’m afraid I’ve got to leave all this with you for now. Why don’t you have a look at that address book and see if anything jumps out at you, then we’ll talk again in a few days.”

  I thanked Darcy and we said our good-byes and hung up.

  AFTER GOING DOWN to the coffee room and refilling my mug, I logged onto the university email system and retrieved the address book Darcy had sent me. It turned out to be a single file she had converted to plain text so I was able to open it easily enough. I started reading through it, but my mind was mostly on those title deeds and I figured it was probably a waste of time.

  I didn’t get any further than the second screen before I realized just how wrong I was.

  The fifth entry down the second page was neatly typed all in capitals.

  Asian Bank of Commerce.

  Next to the name was a number—a phone number, I assumed, since it had seven digits—but there was no address and no country or city code. It could have been a Bangkok number, but it just as easily could have been a number in Teaneck, New Jersey.

  What really stopped me, however, was something that appeared in parentheses immediately following the telephone number.

  It was a name.

  Arthur Daley.

  My mind clicked straight back to Took Lae Dee when I had been perched on a stool studying the Hong Kong ID that Barry Gale had handed me.

  Christ, I thought. Jimmy Kicks’ gangster bank and the name on Barry Gale’s phony Hong Kong Identity Card were both right here in Dollar’s computer address book.

  What could that possibly mean?

  Okay, I lectured myself in a stern voice, don’t jump to any conclusions here. Think this through clearly.

  So there might be some kind of connection between Dollar Dunne and Barry Gale. That was all Dollar’s address book was actually telling me, wasn’t it? Finding the ABC and the name on Barry’s phony ID in Dollar’s address book certainly didn’t prove that there was also some kind of a connection between Barry Gale and Howard Kojinski’s body twirling away under the Taksin Bridge, did it? And it absolutely didn’t prove there was any connection between whatever might be going on here and my own relatively minor involvement with Howard and Dollar or with Barry Gale’s effort to recruit me to help him find the money missing from the ABC. Right?

  Horseshit. Who was I trying to kid?

  How much longer was I going to sit there looking at Barry Gale’s cover name in Dollar’s computer address book and tell myself that it might only be a coincidence? How long was I going to try and convince myself that it really meant nothing, and more importantly, that it had absolutely nothing to do with me?

  Over the last few days two big trains had been rumbling through my life—one carrying Barry Gale and Jimmy Kicks, and the other carrying Dollar Dunne and Howard the Roach. I had felt both of them gathering speed, relentlessly building momentum toward something, although I hadn’t had the slightest idea where either one was headed.

  But now I knew. Both trains were barreling right down the same track, heading straight for each other.

  And I was standing directly between them.

  I NEEDED HELP before I got crushed, and Stanley Ratikun was the only guy
I could think of to go to with something like this. For a couple of decades Stanley had been the managing partner of one of Bangkok’s oldest international law firms. Then he retired and became director of the Sasin Institute of Business Administration at Chulalongkorn University, which made him more or less my boss. At least technically.

  It was a post of considerable prestige, although Stanley really didn’t need the prestige. He had been born in New York, but his grandmother was obscurely related to the Thai royal family and he still had his Thai passport. That was one of the two reasons that his law firm had represented just about every significant international corporation that did any business at all in Thailand after the mid-sixties. The other was that Stanley and the other members of his firm were all first-rate lawyers.

  Stanley and I had never exactly been pals, of course, and I hadn’t really even known him all that well back when he persuaded me to abandon the real world for Bangkok and join the faculty at Chula. Still, I had come to know him pretty well since then and in particular I respected the old-fashioned sense of righteousness against which he seemed to test everything he did. Stanley was hardly the sort of guy you hung out with at the Titty Twister ogling the go-go dancers and talking crap while you chugged back the Singhas, but he was a guy I trusted.

  I was pretty sure Stanley would play it straight with me when I asked him flat out about Dollar. He wouldn’t necessarily tell me everything he knew just because I asked him to, but I didn’t think he would exactly lie to me either.

  When I walked up two floors to Stanley’s office I saw through his half-open door that he was on the telephone. I gave him a little wave and leaned against the wall outside his office waiting for him to finish his conversation.

  After Stanley hung up, he smiled broadly and gestured at me to come in.

  THIRTY

  I TOLD STANLEY almost everything. I told him about my telephone call from Barry Gale and I told him about what had happened afterwards. Nothing I said seemed to surprise Stanley very much. He did lean forward once and steeple his fingers. The gesture came about the time I was describing the man in Dollar’s office who had claimed to be an FBI agent named Frank Morrissey, and I thought I saw a flicker of something like dismay cross his face at the same time, but I might have been mistaken.

  All I left out was the part about my ferry ride with Archie Ward in Hong Kong and Archie’s intimations that the Asian Bank of Commerce had been a front for Chinese bribe money rather than the Russian mob operation that Barry had claimed it was. I didn’t think I had the right to drag Archie’s name into whatever was going on here, and more to the point, I wasn’t absolutely sure I really believed him. To do that I would also have had to believe Barry either didn’t know the Chinese were involved with the ABC or had made up the whole business about Jimmy Kicks just to mislead me, and neither of those possibilities made any sense at all.

  I wound up by telling Stanley about the reference I had found in Dollar’s address book to the Asian Bank of Commerce and the notation next to it of the name on Barry’s phony Hong Kong ID. Then I fell silent.

  Stanley’s only response was to purse his lips slightly. “That’s it?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said, not bothering to hide my disappointment. I had just told Stanley what I thought was one hell of a story and he was sitting there like I had strolled into his office and asked to borrow a cup of Nescafé.

  Stanley got up and walked to the window and stood with his back to me for a time. Eventually he turned around and leaned against the sill, his arms folded in front of him.

  “I don’t see how any of it explains why this client of Dollar’s was killed, even if everything you say is true, Jack.”

  “I think Howard stumbled over something he shouldn’t have. Maybe it involved the ABC and maybe it didn’t, but I think whatever it was scared him badly enough to make him tell someone about it. And I think the person he told was Dollar.”

  Stanley’s face was impassive.

  “If Howard started talking to Dollar,” I continued theorizing, “maybe that’s why he was killed. It would certainly explain why Dollar looked so shaken up when Howard’s body was found and why he went to ground so fast after that.”

  “So you’re saying that Jello was right, Jack? That this man Howard was laundering money for the Burmese and that Dollar was helping him?”

  “Howard might have been doing something like that, but not Dollar. Dollar plays it fast and loose, but I know him. He’s not someone who would work for a bunch of drug producers just for money. If Dollar was involved in anything like that, there’s got to be something else going on.”

  “Such as what?”

  “Look, I know this may sound a little nuts to you, Stanley, but just follow me through it. What if the Asian Bank of Commerce was being used in some kind of intelligence operation? Say the FBI was working through the ABC, maybe using it to cover up something they didn’t want to be caught doing, and that was what Howard stumbled over? What if that’s what he told Dollar about?”

  “Are you saying that the FBI killed Howard Kojinski to shut him up about their offshore banking activities, Jack?”

  “No, I’m… well, I don’t know. Somebody killed him.”

  That sounded awfully lame, even to me, but there it was.

  Stanley returned to his desk and settled himself behind it, knitting his hands behind his head.

  “Even assuming this theory of yours has any substance to it at all, Jack, what does it have to do with you?”

  “Howard was walking around with my home telephone number written on a file and Dollar was doing a funny kind of dance all around me that had something to do with Howard. My guess is that they had a problem and they were edging toward asking me to help them out somehow. Maybe the problem even involved the ABC, but I can’t be sure of that. Anyway, then Barry Gale comes back from the dead and starts chatting me up in strange places in the middle of the night.”

  “I still don’t see what you’re getting at.”

  “Look, Stanley, think of it this way. If somebody thought that Howard was talking too much about the ABC—and maybe they even killed him because of that—and this same somebody thought that not only Dollar and Howard, but also Barry Gale might be talking to Jack Shepherd, what kind of conclusion do you think they would draw? Don’t you think they would probably decide I’m right in the middle of everything?”

  “Why are you telling me all this, Jack?”

  “You’re a pretty plugged-in guy, Stanley. You hear whispers. You know what the whispers are saying.”

  “I’ve been away from the firm a long time.”

  “But you’re still a player, Stanley. We both know that.”

  “You’re giving me way too much credit. These days I’m just another retired old fart living out his golden years doing things that nobody cares very much about.”

  This wasn’t getting me anywhere. It was time to chuck one across Stanley’s bow and see if I could get his attention that way.

  “I’m only trying to find a safe place to get out of the way, Stanley. If I stumble around here and fall over something I shouldn’t, or if I mess up things I didn’t even know were happening, you’re going to think back to this afternoon and remember how you blew your chance to prevent it.”

  Stanley swiveled his chair slightly away from me and studied his left hand briefly as if he had just realized how interesting it really was.

  “I think you should have a little history here, Jack. There probably are a few things you ought to know.”

  I nodded and after a short pause Stanley started talking, choosing his words with obvious care.

  “It is true that my former law firm has done work over the years for various branches of the United States government, the kind of work that requires a special form of trust. It makes exotic copy in the press to talk about front companies and foreign banks, but the plain fact is that the world is a complicated and dangerous place. As we all understand domestic law enforcement cannot be
done solely by uniformed officers cruising the streets in brightly painted cars, we must also accept a nation’s international affairs cannot always be conducted by announcing one’s undertakings publicly.”

  Stanley had consciously or unconsciously slipped into his college lecturer’s cadence.

  “Consequently, when national interests require a country to work quietly beyond its own borders to defend its security, it is commonly accepted that such work is frequently undertaken through the structure of apparently private businesses. That is a convenient arrangement for both the country that is pursuing its interests and the country in which those interests are located. It gives both of them the security of deniability, something essential to the conduct of modern foreign policy. In any event, these private businesses require organization and administration, which obviously cannot be done by the governments and such tasks are frequently undertaken by discreet, well-connected law firms who are experienced in such matters.”

  I liked Stanley, and I usually enjoyed his lectures, but this time I wasn’t in the mood to learn how to make a watch. I just wanted to know what the hell time it was.

  “Are you saying your old firm is in the business of camouflaging the FBI behind corporate front companies, Stanley? How about the CIA? You got a few of their fronts in your client files, too?”

  Stanley sighed deeply.

  “I am trying to communicate to you the subtlety of such an undertaking in all its forms, Jack, but—if you must put it so crudely—I guess the answer is yes. Yes, my former firm has had a long-standing relationship with the government of the United States. And, yes, from time to time it has represented companies through which the FBI, the CIA, the DEA, and even quite a few agencies you’ve almost certainly never heard of have conducted their affairs here in Asia.”

  My first reaction was to laugh out loud.

  “You mean In The Pink Inc is really a CIA front?”