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The Corruptionist

Page 3

by Christopher G. Moore


  The ying sat back on her haunches and called over to one of the other yings at the card table. Another ying sighed, put her cards down, and, like a good relief pitcher, left for her tour of duty. “Right foot, darling,” he said. “This foot. The one you’re holding is the left. This one is … guess which one it might be.”

  She picked up his right foot, wrinkling her nose.

  “Let me introduce you to Mr. Right.” He wiggled his toes. “Hello, glad to meet you. I am Mr. Right. Who are you?”

  “Baa,” she said, which roughly translated to “crazy.”

  “Totally,” he said.

  As the massage continued, Brandon thought that maybe Marshall wasn’t trying to kill the joint venture—it was too good a deal—but what he wanted was control over it. That meant pushing his younger brother into what the Thais called an inactive position, like inspector-general of sewers, a position at the bottom of a slope, where it was hard to support a certain way of life. There will always be enough money for gin and tonics. But a mansion and servants? He felt sweat forming on his forehead. No more unlimited supply of toy girls to clip his toenails and massage his tired dogs. A line of sweat dripped down, rolling off the tip of his nose. No more expense accounts to entertain as he pleased. Brandon sighed and wiped his face with a tissue. He balled up the tissue and threw it on the floor. He’d have to pick up for himself if that happened. The worst of it was, he was too old to tell jokes in front of a roomful of strangers. The meeting with Calvino and the investigator from New York was part of Marshall’s power squeeze, and that was why Brandon needed Calvino. Damn, where the fuck is he? Maybe Brandon had played it too cool with Calvino, not letting on how miserable and upset he was over the due diligence his brother had ordered. Marshall had said on the phone that sending an investigator hadn’t been his idea; it had been the board that had insisted. An outside director of the company, the prick, had recommended hiring a specialist to check out the books and operations. Kowit’s murder had given Marshall a justification for his move. The air needed to be cleared, as there’d been a suggestion that Achara had been on the possible suspect list. That was a half lie. The suspect list was the size of the Manhattan telephone directory. It gave Brandon digestive problems to think about the idea that Achara’s name had been included.

  He tossed back his tumbler filled with gin and a splash of tonic. The cramp had moved up his right foot to his leg. Brandon wondered if he might be suffering from a heart attack. He sat forward with the empty glass. The maid’s face went on alert, like a retriever who had seen his master throwing a ball. “Massage higher,” he said.

  The ying made a grab for Brandon’s balls. “Not that high. Massage my leg.” He caught her wrist and pushed her hand down to the muscles just above his knee.

  He started to laugh, and that convinced him he probably wasn’t having a heart attack after all. Sawyer rose, stretched, feeling much better, and walked out of the room, down the corridor, and into the expansive entrance, where he opened the door and looked down the driveway as if staring hard enough would cause Calvino to materialize.

  Sawyer’s shoulders slumped as he stepped back inside.

  He stared at his glass, thinking about the boardroom in New York, with his brother occupying the seat at the head of the chrome-and-glass table. Relatives, lawyers, accountants, big shots on both sides of the table sifted through piles of papers. The board never did anything that his brother didn’t agree with. He thought of how his brother Marshall would have looked at those around the table, drilling him with his stare, holding up a newspaper clipping and saying, “This joint-venture partner, Achara. The police connect him to a murder. We can’t let this pass.”

  There was nothing funny about Achara, the deal, or the potential profits involved, which were enormous. But someone had murdered a journalist named Kowit, who left behind a wife and a couple of kids. Widows and orphans made good copy. The story had some legs for a murder, which, like a bribed boxer, was supposed to go down and stay down after the third round. This one kept fighting. And that had been the problem, and why Brandon had brought Vincent Calvino into the matter.

  Calvino’s report cleared Achara. True, in the early stages of the business venture, Achara’s lawyers created a shareholding structure that gave the power to Achara, and Brandon had gone along with the lawyer; Marshall had been told that they’d been forced to work within a set of informal conventions, structuring deals that looked like one thing but were actually something else. Marshall thought Brandon had been sucker punched. Calvino found nothing to link Achara with the murder; Achara, if anything, was an ascetic type, even eccentric, raising lions on his grounds. More than that, Achara had a record of good deeds. Thais would have said he had a “good heart.” In other words, Achara was a fair, honest man, a man of his word who’d locked himself inside a world of ancient Chinese beliefs and rituals. Such a man didn’t go around killing people or ordering someone else to do so.

  After reading Calvino’s report, Marshall had phoned Brandon. Marshall cleared his throat on the other end of the line—it was one of those habits that made one brother want to strangle the other—then explained that no matter what Calvino had found, the fact remained that the journalist had been murdered upcountry, five kilometers from the land with cultivated, genetically modified rice and a wind farm. Kowit’s articles suggested that kickbacks and cronyism were involved in both projects. Each had received government backing, tax write-offs, import-duty concessions, making them sweet but at the same time generating controversy.

  “No one gets something for nothing in Thailand,” said Marshall.

  FOUR

  CALVINO GRIPPED THE steering wheel and made a left turn, but in his mind he was inside Brandon’s enormous lounge, explaining, “Achara’s name had been on a long list of people with a motive to kill the reporter. But that didn’t mean he had anything to do with it.”

  “Of course, not,” Brandon would reply. “Why would he do something so stupid? Achara graduated from Stanford University. Duh. He’s like you or me. Maybe smarter than you. Certainly smarter than me. Smart people don’t shoot reporters in the head. It’s bad for business.” It was the kind of logic followed by a conclusion that a bargirl might make, thought Calvino. Rich, Ivy League–educated people killed but brought more cunning and resources to the job. Since they mostly ran the government, it was usually called an execution rather than a murder. An argument along those lines was pointless with someone like Brandon. Calvino would ignore him and ask for a drink. Without alcohol, a world of Brandons was difficult to bear.

  He wondered what kind of shape Brandon would be in for the meeting, as he tried to get a better reading on Tanny’s intentions. Brandon’s drinking would be something she’d pick up on immediately. Not that Marshall was unaware of his brother’s drinking problem, but having it confirmed in writing wouldn’t be exactly advancing Brandon’s position when it came to retaining power in the joint venture.

  “Running probability analysis, what are the chances Achara was behind the murder?” asked Tanny.

  She was one of those women who had a knack for reading a man’s mind. And after two meetings, he’d concluded that she was likely the kind of woman who didn’t take much flak from anyone and who fought like a rattlesnake when faced with resistance to what she wanted.

  “I said the chances of his being involved were less than twenty percent.”

  “Brandon told Marshall that you said Achara was clean.”

  Calvino wondered if Brandon had said that; “clean” wasn’t a word he ever heard Brandon use. “Eighty percent is as clean as you can get a body in these parts.”

  “The problem is, Marshall saw ‘less than twenty percent’ in your report and knew that Brandon had lied.

  He’d already factored in a thirty-percent risk for doing business in a country known for political instability, street demonstrations, and—to use Marshall’s words—with a reputation for fucking foreigners around, so he recalculated the overall risk, marking
it up to fifty percent.”

  “Meaning it’s fifty-fifty the joint venture could float down the river belly-up,” said Calvino, having some respect for the brother.

  “Doing a deal in Thailand is like buying subprime mortgages. I’ve been sent to see if the joint venture is toxic. Have a look at that twenty percent of baggage. See if we might find a solution.”

  “You came to double-check my work.”

  “That’s one way of looking at it.” Letting the arrow hit flesh and bone.

  “Can you think of another way of looking at it?”

  Tanny thought about other options in silence. There wasn’t any other way of looking at it. They both knew it. Brandon Sawyer liked that, in the distant past, before Calvino became a nobody sneaking around taking pictures of farangs’ cheating bar ying girlfriends in Bangkok, they’d palled around New York together. They had a history. In Brandon’s way of thinking, Calvino understood the cultural bullshit of doing things in Thailand and the rules of the street in New York. That made Calvino, in Brandon’s view, qualified to look into matters that Brandon labeled as of vital interest, and to report back what he found with authority and credibility. “You could’ve saved yourself a lot of trouble if you’d read my report,” said Calvino.

  “Thirty million dollars is a major investment. One report isn’t enough comfort.” She offered a thin smile.

  “If Marshall wants comfort, tell him to put the money in a savings account. Assuming there’s a New York bank left standing,” said Calvino.

  Tanny had read through Calvino’s reports: Who, what, where, and how kind of reports. “Risk, Mr. Calvino. It’s all about risk. And credit. The appetite for risk has vanished along with the credit needed to finance it. Marshall has money at risk in Thailand, and he wants to find a way to eliminate the risk.”

  A number of foreigners Calvino worked for didn’t like making decisions about risk, and hired him to tell them what to do. He included Brandon in that category. It hadn’t taken Brandon long to expand Calvino’s brief, asking him to make recommendations or come up with solutions, shouldering the responsibility for the outcome. Brandon wanted Calvino to predict the future and make the right decision for him. That was dangerous territory; it involved judgment, cash, opportunity, and random bad luck. Calvino told Brandon before Tanny turned up that sometimes there was no clear reason to choose one option over another. And that he was a private investigator, and if Brandon wanted predictions about the future, then book an appointment to see a fortune-teller.

  “You want me to throw a dart? Flip a coin? Is that what you’re telling me are my options?” Brandon had asked as he’d sat in Calvino’s office. It had to be something deep inside his upbringing, decided Calvino.

  “You ever meet Brandon’s mother? I have,” he said, answering his own question. Then he told her the story about meeting Sawyer’s mother in the old days in New York. She wore a white hat, an expensive knee-length leather jacket, and high black lace-up boots. Up close it looked as if a younger woman’s face had been sewed onto her own, leaving her sagging neck as the material evidence of plastic surgery. It had been late October, and she was carrying a Saks Fifth Avenue shopping bag. Brandon walked next to his mother. They stopped briefly on the street for an introduction. She gave Brandon the bag to hold and, flashing her emerald green eyes, she said that she liked Italians... “You meet her or not?” he repeated to Tanny now.

  Tanny’s tongue darted over her lips—moist, large lips, Calvino had noticed. She also had the habit of pushing her tongue against the inside of her cheek. “Yes.”

  Her resolute firmness, her devious, nasty, ankle-biting nature had been passed on to Marshall. But Brandon must’ve had a letter or two in his genetic code scrambled. Brandon got a double shot of the single-malt-whiskey DNA sequence instead. Sawyer’s mother surrounded herself, like a Chinese empress, with a court of professionals, courtiers who gave advice garnished with colorful flow charts. Brandon Sawyer had a court, but they were yings who spoke twenty words of English, sufficient for him to order them around; for business he had come to rely on Calvino’s advice. There’d been something in Calvino’s style and attitude that Brandon liked.

  Brandon leaned back like a good audience of one, holding a single-malt whiskey, and watched Calvino perform; he usually found that it was good entertainment. Wasn’t this act a variation of what his mother had done throughout his childhood? At some point Calvino had rolled over his investigation work into a more general consultancy to the joint venture. Though the revised arrangement had cost more money, that didn’t matter to Brandon, because Calvino had a knack, like some men at poker, and in the end what Calvino saved the joint venture came to vastly more than his fees. It was the way some people got very rich and others, who relied simply on their own talents and brains, just got along the best they could.

  “I wrote two reports for Brandon,” said Calvino.

  Tanny raised an eyebrow, her tongue dancing against the inside of her cheek. She’d seen only one.

  “I saw one of them. It was dated the seventeenth of August.”

  “What about August ninth?” He thought she’d be a terrible poker player. Her tics would have done all but show her hand.

  She mouthed, “No. Didn’t see that one.” Tanny shifted in her seat, sighing. “This isn’t good. How can we move ahead if people here aren’t going to be straightforward?”

  Tanny’s net of “people here” was wide enough to cover Calvino and anyone else within drinking range of Brandon. Had she gone out of her way to insult him when he’d been upfront and when he could have had her running around in circles chasing her own tail?

  “Isn’t that why Marshall sent you?”

  The anger stirred just below the surface of his voice.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be doing your own due diligence? That way you can decide if I’m making stuff up. I can understand Marshall’s concern. The Sawyer family doesn’t know me. Brandon hired me. The family knows Brandon and thought with all that money riding in this business, they’d better get a second opinion,” he said, stopping at a traffic light. Motorcycles filled up the gaps on both side of the car, the riders looking in at Tanny the way lions look at a lamb. The light changed, and the motorcycles shot off.

  She turned and watched him gliding in and out of the traffic.

  “What’s your end of the deal?”

  Calvino shook his head. “I’ve got no end.”

  She shot him a look as if a katoey had stuck her hand into her handbag.

  “You’re doing this just for a fee of a couple grand?”

  By New York standards, he was working for free. “You’re saying I’m a cheap date? That’s okay, too. Why don’t you ask Brandon to throw in another grand a month?” he said, winking at her.

  “Why would I do that?”

  “No reason,” he said. Combat pay was on his lips. Call it the Tanny Craig factor, chauffeuring a woman whose brief was to bust his balls.

  It hadn’t helped that Brandon had considered passing along his reports. Calvino understood why Brandon hadn’t sent Marshall the August report. Calvino found out that Kowit, the dead reporter, had interviewed Achara in January. The police investigation had placed them at a restaurant with tables outside overlooking the street. Kowit and Achara had exchanged wais. Performed the little polite Thai social dance.

  Not once but twice, Brandon, under pressure from New York, had asked Calvino to check out every aspect of Achara’s business, his associates and his family. They were clean; nothing much connected them to the murder. The interview was conducted six months before the murder. One interview was a slender reed to support a murder charge. Kowit had interviewed dozens and dozens of people during the same period. That’s what journalists did; that’s what investigators did as well.

  “The reporter had interviewed Achara half a year earlier,” said Calvino.

  “I feel Brandon should have revealed that. Don’t you?”

  “It was a background story on real-est
ate speculation. Three other people were interviewed for the same story. I checked Kowit’s report. He interviewed sixty-three people before he was shot. So if being interviewed makes Achara a suspect, he needs to take a number and wait, because there’s a monster lineup of suspects.”

  “Do you have copies of Kowit’s newspaper articles?”

  He nodded, a smile spreading across his face. “The clippings are in my office.”

  It had taken Calvino a couple of weeks to assemble a file cabinet of background material.

  “Of course you read Thai,” he said in a flat, matter-offact voice.

  Tanny didn’t read or speak a word of Thai. Calvino decided this was a good time to get that limitation out of way. She’d been sent to investigate a deal in a language she couldn’t read or understand. Only someone from New York would have shrugged that obstacle off as insignificant. Calvino always found it comforting to work with people who underestimated the importance of being culturally fluent. They inevitably fell down an open sewer marked by a sign in Thai.

 

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