LAUNDRY MAN (A Jack Shepherd crime thriller)

by Jake Needham

  “What you drinking that Singha shit for?” he muttered as he sat down. “Tastes like fooking horse piss.”

  Manny snapped out something to a hovering busboy. I had never heard Thai spoken with a cockney accent before and the combination produced an interesting if utterly unintelligible sound. The boy apparently had no trouble understanding Manny however because he nodded and disappeared. Moments later a white-jacketed waiter materialized. He poured Manny a cup of tea—white, no sugar, in a china cup that looked to me like Wedgwood—and then whisked away my Singha and replaced it with a Corona that had a dewy slice of lime tucked into its long neck. The bottle was so cold that the condensation formed a little pool on the metal table before I even touched it.

  Manny took a pack of Marlboros out of the inside pocket of his jacket. He offered it to me, but I shook my head and sipped at my beer while he lit one. When he returned the pack to his jacket and I was certain I had his full attention, I put the Corona down and folded my forearms on the table.

  “Darcy told me to come see you if I ever needed help, Manny,” I said. “I need some help.”

  He nodded, drawing on his cigarette, then he sipped tentatively at his tea and nodded again in what I took to be a gesture of permission for me to continue.

  While I told Manny the story of Barry Gale and the Asian Bank of Commerce, he sat quietly and puffed on his Marlboro, taking an occasional sip of tea. At the mention of Tommy’s nocturnal appearance in my apartment and his parting threat, Manny raised his eyebrows slightly, but he didn’t say anything.

  I intended to tell Manny everything. I assumed he knew Dollar since everyone else seemed to, and I was even going to tell him about the apparent connection I had stumbled on between Dollar and Barry Gale, but somewhere in the middle of the telling, I changed my mind. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust Manny—frankly I wasn’t absolutely sure whether I could trust him or not in spite of the weight that Darcy’s endorsement carried—it just seemed to me that keeping a few cards in my hand wouldn’t really hurt anything.

  I wound up my tale with a description of the tracking device I had found in my car and I finished talking at exactly the same time Manny finished his Marlboro. He took out the pack back out of his jacket and shook out another, tapping it against the table a couple of times before lighting it. This time he left the pack lying on the table next to his cup. I took that as a good sign.

  “All this shit got anything to do with that geezer they found under the bridge?” he asked.

  “No.” I bit my lip slightly. “At least, not as far as I can see right now.”

  I was prepared to edit the truth a little, but I hated flat-out lying to a man whose help I was asking for.

  Manny stared directly at me, his face as flat as a dinner plate, and he continued to watch me while he took a long hit on the fresh Marlboro. He almost looked to me like he was sniffing the air for the scent of danger, and I wondered briefly if he had found it. Apparently not, because before long he shifted his eyes away from my face and focused somewhere out over my shoulder.

  “So what you want from me, mate?”

  “I need to find either Dollar Dunne or Barry Gale. Darcy says your people have the whole country wired. I was hoping you might be willing to help me.”

  “I thought you said you weren’t involved. Now you want to find these buggers?”

  “Look, Manny, think about it. I’m right in the middle of something here and I don’t know what it is or how to get out of it. When you start discovering surveillance devices in your car, you know you’re on somebody’s shit list. I can’t think of anybody but Dollar or Barry who can tell me whose list I’m on and how to get off it.”

  Manny looked doubtful. The tea had grown cold and he pushed it aside with the back of his hand.

  “Where these geezers gone?”

  “Nobody knows.”

  “Somebody always knows.”

  “It’s not me. That’s why I’m here.”

  “You think they’re together.”

  “No, probably not.”

  “But you saying you got no idea at all where either one of them might be?”

  “Well…”

  Many leaned back, folded his arms and waited.

  “There’s some other stuff I didn’t tell you about,” I said after a few moments.

  Manny nodded. He looked anything but surprised.

  “I’ve got a hunch—and this is just a hunch, Manny—that one or both of them might be in Phuket.”

  “Little birdie must a told you that, huh?”

  I sighed. So much for keeping a few cards in my hand.

  I explained to Manny about the connection I had found between Dollar and Barry Gale, and I told him what I had heard about Dollar laundering money for American intelligence. I didn’t tell him where I had heard it or what Stanley had said the money was going to be used for, and I noticed that he didn’t ask. Manny was a smart guy, all right. There were some things that smart guys didn’t really want to know.

  But I did tell him about all the American Express receipts from Phuket I’d found in Dollar’s garbage and the package of property transfers that Darcy thought were fakes.

  “It might mean that Dollar was using a property development scam in Phuket to launder money through the Asian Bank of Commerce and that Barry was hooked into it,” I said. “So maybe one or both of them have gone to ground somewhere down there.”

  Manny didn’t say anything.

  “It’s pretty thin,” I admitted.

  “Bugger thin. It’s fooking transparent.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s all I got.”

  Manny’s eyes shifted off mine and were still for a long moment before he spoke again. “You know, you’re the second bloke today who’s come around asking me about these tossers,” he said, still not looking at me.

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “I look like Mr. Bean to you or what, mate?”

  “Sorry, Manny, just a figure of speech.”

  I waited for him to go on, but he didn’t say anything else.

  “So who else was looking for them?” I finally prompted.

  Manny said nothing. I gathered I was asking him to break his personal code of ethics, and I also gathered that he wasn’t going to do it.

  “Then what can you tell me?”

  Manny looked pained. “I hear there’s a shooter looking for your boys.”

  “Both of them?”

  Manny nodded.

  Somebody was looking for both Barry and Dollar, presumably to kill them? Who the hell could that be?

  I couldn’t imagine that Jimmy Kicks would want Dollar dead — as far as I knew, Jimmy didn’t even know who Dollar was — and it seemed equally unlikely he would want Barry dead, at least not yet. Jimmy hadn’t found out where the ABC’s money had gone yet and he would certainly want to know that before he said goodbye to Barry.

  It seemed just as unlikely to be the Chinese. Archie Ward had said they were unhappy that their money had disappeared, of course, but they probably wouldn’t be trying to kill anyone yet either. With Howard already gone, if they killed Dollar and Barry, too, then the only person left alive they might figure could find their money for them would be…

  “Son of a bitch,” I muttered when I suddenly saw where that line of reasoning was going to take me.

  Manny didn’t say anything. He just scraped back his chair and stood up.

  “You had your dinner yet, mate?”

  Without waiting for me to answer, he turned and walked away. Shortly after that the waiter brought me another Corona, a plate of rice, and a pungent dish of garlic squid in a rich, black bean sauce. I gathered that might be the last I would see of Manny that evening, and it was.

  By the time I finished eating, Q Bar was jammed with the late-night crowd and I had already become bored with watching the beautiful people preen for each other. All the women were too dazzling and blasé for me and all the men were too gay. Or maybe it was the other way around. I couldn’
t decide for sure.

  I worked my way through the thick crowds down to the first floor and walked back across the street to where I had parked the Volvo.

  Maybe Manny would decide to help me find either Barry or Dollar, or maybe not. Maybe I was right and one or both of them were holed up in Phuket, or maybe not. Wherever Barry Gale had gone to ground, I would bet my last dollar he was close by. Dollar, on the other hand, might be another matter altogether. I was certain he would turn out to be an awful lot further away.

  It was a nice night, clear and comfortable. I threaded my way among the Mercedes, Jaguars, and BMWs crammed into Q Bar’s parking lot and I was only a few yards away from the Volvo when another car turned in. Its headlights swept across the lot and for just a moment they showed the silhouette of somebody waiting for me in the Volvo’s front passenger seat. I stopped dead.

  Sliding into the shadow of a van parked next to a Mercedes, I watched for several minutes but it was too dark to see anything very clearly and no other lights hit the Volvo at the correct angle to light up the interior again. Eventually, of course, my curiosity overcame my caution. I edged away from the van and worked my way toward the Volvo keeping in what I hoped was the car’s blind spot. I moved around to the passenger side and crept toward the door in a half crouch.

  It never occurred to me that it might be Dollar there in the front seat of my Volvo until I got up to the door and got a good look through the window.

  And it certainly never occurred to me that Dollar might be dead until I opened the passenger door and his corpse shifted and fell out onto the ground.

  THIRTY FIVE

  THERE WERE NO visible wounds on Dollar’s body, at least none I could see when I bent over him, and no blood at all, which made him look kind of spooky just lying there. I touched his neck without expecting to find a pulse, and of course there wasn’t one. While I was certainly no expert on such things, I guessed he must have been dead for quite a while. He was very pale, his skin almost transparent, and the body was cold.

  It was obvious that Dollar had been killed somewhere else and then deposited in the front seat of my locked car as a message, just as leaving Howard dangling underneath the Taksin Bridge had undoubtedly been a message, too. With Howard, I had no idea who the message was for. With Dollar however—try as I might to conjure up some comforting ambiguity—the intended recipient was obviously me. I still wasn’t absolutely certain what the message actually was, but I was beginning to get a pretty good idea.

  At least discovering Dollar’s body propped up in the front seat of my Volvo had made one thing abundantly clear. The only choice I had left was to find Barry Gale.

  I HAD NEVER realized before how much crime scenes in real life look like the ones on television. Of course, I couldn’t remember ever being at a real crime scene before, and maybe the Thais watch a lot of television, so perhaps that explains it.

  Yellow tape was strung across the parking lot’s entrance and blue bubble lights rotated lazily on the two police cars parked just in front of it. A half-dozen policemen in tight brown uniforms, high boots, and white helmets stood around not doing much and another half-dozen people in civilian clothes, mostly short-sleeved shirts and dark trousers, were bunched up around Dollar’s body peering down at it. Little knots of people stood here and there in the street watching the action beyond the yellow tape and tongues of color from the bubble lights on the police cars flicked back and forth across them. Every so often the blue light would catch someone’s face and for a moment a pale and ghostly image would hang there in the night air.

  Someone had set up three mercury vapor floodlights on tall aluminum stands and their illumination made everyone in the parking lot look waxy and artificial, almost dead. Everyone, strangely enough, except Dollar. The wan, yellowish light made him look more alive somehow, and I almost expected any minute to see him get up off the ground, brush off his suit, and walk over to ask me for a cigar.

  Instead it was Jello who walked over.

  I was leaning on a concrete block wall at the back of the parking lot. I hadn’t seen Jello since that Saturday morning at Dollar’s office, although I was anything other than surprised to find him here now. Jello took up a post against the wall next to me and nodded slightly. I nodded back. Both of us stood there without talking and kept our eyes on the parking lot.

  For my part, I was watching people I couldn’t identify walk around doing things I didn’t understand. I didn’t know what Jello was watching. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to.

  A tall woman in a dark brown uniform circled Dollar’s body firing off photographs from various angles. When a flash of her strobe light caught me squarely in the eyes, I blinked and looked away.

  “I don’t know what to say, Jack.”

  “How did it happen?”

  “Broken neck, they think.”

  Broken neck. Just like Howard. What a surprise, huh?

  “How long ago?”

  “Probably four to six hours.”

  I did the math while I watched the tall woman with the camera circle Dollar’s body again. I had parked in the lot around eight and come back to the car just before ten. It was now almost eleven. If Jello was right, that meant Dollar had been killed about the time I was deciding to drop in on Manny.

  I hadn’t even known where the Volvo was going to be until nearly eight. Had someone been following me, just hauling Dollar’s body around town and looking for a chance to stuff it into my car? Or was there another locator device somewhere in the Volvo? Maybe I had only found the one they meant for me to find. If that was the case, then whoever was watching me could just have sent somebody over to where the little red dot had stopped on their map, popped open the passenger door, and jammed Dollar’s corpse inside. I felt sick running through the possibilities.

  “I want to find out who did this, Jack.”

  I looked at Jello’s eyes and saw something else.

  “No, you don’t,” I said. “You just want to find out what Dollar was up to because you think it would look good in your intelligence files.”

  “I don’t have to find out. I know exactly what he was up to.”

  “Bullshit you do.”

  A stout, middle-aged Thai in a long-sleeved white shirt buttoned at the cuffs stood looking down at Dollar’s body with his hands on his hips. Then he glanced up abruptly and stared straight at my face, almost as if he was comparing it with Dollar’s and trying to decide why Dollar was lying there on the ground instead of me. Finally, the man jammed his hands in his pockets, turned, and walked away in the direction of the yellow tape.

  “Dollar and Howard were laundering money all right, Jack.” Jello’s eyes flicked around the parking lot as he talked. “That much of what I told you was true. But it wasn’t drug money.”

  “So what was all that crap you gave me about Burmese drug dealers?”

  “I was afraid Dollar and Howard were going to ask you to help them without telling you what they were really doing. I thought if I gave you the drug-money story, it would scare you off.”

  “So what were they really doing?”

  Jello ignored my question.

  “I imagine you know by now that the guy you found in Dollar’s office wasn’t really FBI,” he said instead.

  I just looked at Jello and said nothing.

  “He works out of the American Embassy. We’ve met a few times, but I don’t know who he really is. He carries FBI ID, but I think he’s probably CIA.”

  “Imagine that,” I said.

  “Look, Jack, you weren’t supposed to be there so what the hell did you expect me to do?” Jello sounded exasperated. “Say, ‘Hey, Jack, let me introduce you to a man I think is a CIA case officer investigating the murder one of American intelligence’s favorite money launderers right in the middle of an operation?’ You think I should have done something like that?”

  “Maybe that would have been a good idea.”

  Then I realized what Jello had just said.

  “W
hat kind of an operation?” I asked.

  “Fuck, Jack, just forget I ever said it. Shit rolls downhill here like every place else. Local boys like me are nothing in this kind of deal. I fetch files and I pass along native wisdom. They don’t tell me anything. You think I like that, man?”

  “Nobody makes you do it.”

  “You don’t think so?” Jello’s anger sounded genuine. “If you think nobody makes me do it, you’ve got a lot to learn about power, Jack.”

  We went back to watching the festivities in the parking lot and let the tone of anger and resentment dissipate.

  “There’s something else,” Jello said quietly after a while and I was anything but surprised. “Some of the money Dollar and Howard were moving is missing.”

  “Yeah?”

  I made an effort to sound disinterested. It wasn’t all that hard.

  “The rumor is that fifty or sixty million dollars is unaccounted for.”

  If Jello expected me to be impressed, he must have been surprised. I had dealt with numbers like that too long to wet my pants just because somebody mentioned a huge amount of money.

  “Is that what this is really about, Jello? Some money?”

  “Shit, Jack.” Jello sounded disgusted, although whether at my question or at himself I wasn’t sure. “That’s what it’s always about.”

  There was a rustle of movement near the street and several uniforms trotted toward the opposite side of the police cars that were parked across the driveway. Jello saw them and pushed himself away from the wall.

  “Be right back,” he said.

  I watched the yellow waves ripple across his Hawaiian shirt as he walked away. How much did Jello really know, I wondered? He had just admitted to a few tidbits, of course, but confessing to what you think someone else already knows hardly amounts to a particularly impressive demonstration of candor, even if people who did it usually tried to make it look that way. Maybe he was stumbling around in the dark nearly as much as I was.