The Corruptionist

by Christopher G. Moore

  THIRTY-ONE

  THE INTERIOR OF the morgue had the chilled smell of death—chemicals that preserved bodies, doctors’ washed hands, cleaning fluid used to scrub the doors and floors gathered like a force of nature, blending into an invisible cloud that stung the eyes and nose. It wasn’t much different from any big-city morgue, except in the corner stood a platform with a Buddha statue, flowers, and incense sticks—the last of these functioning to appease the spirit of the place and fight a losing battle against the smell of death.

  Colonel Pratt watched as an attendant opened the coldstorage locker door and pulled out the trolley on gunmetalcolored rails. Calvino stood at the foot of a body covered with a white sheet. Colonel Pratt nodded, and the attendant pulled back the sheet. Brandon’s eyes were almost closed—tiny slits remained, exposing slivers of white. His head tilted to the left, and his hair was spiked like a punk’s. Anyone who said the dead looked as if they were sleeping had not seen dead people in a morgue, thought Calvino. Brandon’s lips were blue and swollen, black-rimmed. Four or five other uniformed police stood around waiting for Calvino to make the identification. None of them looked too happy at being called to the morgue at that time of morning.

  Most of the time, merely looking at the body wouldn’t reveal the cause of death. A bullet hole in the forehead or a knife sticking out of the back being the exceptions that proved the rule. Calvino quickly examined Brandon’s body, looking for signs of bruises, scratches, or abrasions.

  “Heart attack was the cause. But there’s not been a full autopsy,” he said.

  “It’s the preliminary cause of death.”

  Calvino pulled the sheet back to the waist. A whiff of whiskey came from the body. Brandon had already filled his tank drinking at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, and afterward he’d poured a great deal more down his throat. His blood-alcohol content had been way over the limit before he’d died. Calvino noticed on Brandon’s chest two dark marks eight inches apart, one on each breast. Calvino leaned closer. They might have been love bites, but the indentations had slightly puckered ridges.

  “What are these?” He wrinkled his nose. “Smells burned.”

  “Bite marks. Marks from kinky sex.”

  “If kinky sex caused a heart attack, Brandon would have been dead years ago.” The marks didn’t look as though teeth had caused them.

  “A man’s lifestyle catches up with him sooner or later.

  People age, Vincent. You can smell the liquor.”

  “Where they’d find him?”

  “A bar on Sukhumvit called Lost Horizon. The owner called it in.”

  Calvino knew the bar owner, an American ex-cop from Ohio named Larry. He still had his old badge, which he flashed whenever the cops showed up at his bar looking for a white envelope. Not really a cop but a highway patrol officer, and to hear Larry’s stories, the area he patrolled around Toledo was about as safe as the Mekong Delta in 1968—which happened to be the year Larry was born.

  The cops would smile, but the badge didn’t give Larry any advantage. Calvino had gone to the bar a couple of times, once with Brandon. That’s how he knew that Larry had taken a disability from the highway patrol after the doctors said he was bipolar. That was the right personality for someone renting a shophouse at the back of one of the odd numbered sois on Sukhumvit Road, converting it into a bar. Kangaroo-shaped lights were strung across the soi—the lights flashed in a controlled sequence to give the illusion that the kangaroos were hopping. A few drinks were required until the ’roos morphed into muay Thai boxers performing their preliminary ritual before a bout.

  “I have to formally ask, Vincent Calvino, can you identify the body?”

  Calvino sucked in his breath, “Yes. His name is Brandon Sawyer. He’s an American citizen.” Facing Colonel Pratt, with his back to the other cops, Calvino raised his cell phone to chest level and snapped several photographs, aiming the lens at Brandon’s chest, followed by a couple of full-body shots.

  “What is your relationship to the deceased?”

  “He was a client.” Calvino slipped his cell phone into his pocket. Colonel Pratt said nothing.

  The attendant, after Colonel Pratt gave him the nod, covered the body and pushed the drawer back into the coldstorage locker. They stepped into the corridor as the dawn broke outside. “It’s stopped raining,” said Pratt, glancing out the window. The others who’d been in the morgue had left for their offices or beds.

  “I also asked Tanny to find out what the family wants done with the body.”

  “Practical,” said Colonel Pratt. “Manee is always telling me how much she likes the way you get down to what needs to be done. Organize things. See things through.”

  Calvino tried to guess why Colonel Pratt was handing out compliments that time of the morning. And wondering if Pratt knew that his wife been at the meeting attended by a general’s wife at Government House. It didn’t seem the right time to bring up the subject. “I have two practical suggestions,” said Calvino. “First, you ask the doctor who does the full autopsy about the marks on Brandon’s chest. Was it some sex device or something else?”

  “You said there were two practical things.”

  “What are you doing tonight?” asked Calvino.

  Colonel Pratt looked away from the window and the street below. “I’m playing backup with a band on Soi 26.”

  “Tell you what. I’ll come along and listen. Afterward we can go and have a talk with Larry, who runs Lost Horizon. I know the guy. Maybe he can tell you something useful.”

  Colonel Pratt pulled out a notebook and flipped through it, stopped and read a page, slowly turned through three more pages. “I talked with him already.”

  “Did he tell you Brandon was a regular customer?”

  Pratt folded the notebook. “He left that out.”

  “Maybe he left some other things out.”

  “Thanks for coming down, Vincent.” Pratt had a worried look.

  “Something bothering you?”

  “What are you going to do with the photographs?”

  Calvino sniffed the air. It was stale and smelled faintly of cigarettes, but compared to the morgue it was the Swiss Alps. “Achara ends up in half a dozen body bags and inside the stomachs of two lions. Not two days later his partner ends up dead in a room surrounded by midget dinosaurs. Makes you wonder if there’s some kind of connection or if it’s just another week’s worth of random casualties in the wild kingdom. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. I wanna see what words I can find to fit the pictures I took.”

  There were some words Calvino thought were appropriate to caption the picture of Khunying Tamarine on her perch at Government House. Words he’d like Colonel Pratt to review, just to check if he had seen the picture correctly. A crowded picture that included Manee and Ratana.

  THIRTY-TWO

  LOST HORIZON WAS at the end of a soi that looked like a blighted strip mall featuring a neon salesman’s catalog’s worth of bargain-basement lighting. In the dark spaces between the bars, vendors sold hot dogs on sticks, fried grasshoppers, scorpions, and ears of corn—a wide enough selection of creatures to satisfy about everyone’s taste for Third World food. Mounted flat-screen TV sets blared with European football matches. As they walked down the soi, a hundred eyes from balconies, tables, and stools watched them—a farang and a Thai who looked like a phoo yai, someone who didn’t belong on the soi. If not a cop, then someone close to officialdom. They passed the pizza place, restaurants, and just before the hotel an Arab in a long dark brown kaftan raced past them with one of those carved wooden frogs with a ridged-saw back of dull teeth, and he ran a small stick along its surface, unleashing the eerie sound of a frog in a nearby pond. He laughed hysterically.

  He ignored his large-framed wife, swathed from head to toe in several layers of black. She pushed a stroller, and inside it lay the offspring of this couple, wrapped like a mummy. The wife chased along, nearly striking Colonel Pratt with the stroller as she tried a shar
p turn to keep up with her frog-noise-making, laughing-out-of-control husband.

  “I always wondered who bought those wooden frogs,” said Calvino.

  The laughing Arab ran past again.

  “If he’s trying to lose his wife, he’s not having much luck,” said Colonel Pratt.

  It was the kind of high-pitched laugh that shot out like tracer rounds, punching the night and causing those nearby to flinch.

  The couple disappeared at the end of the soi, swallowed up in the crowd walking on Sukhumvit Road.

  “I’d like to talk to Marshall if he comes to Bangkok,” said Colonel Pratt.

  Calvino nodded, feeling that Pratt had been saving up something. He’d been a little too quiet after they’d left Tokyo Joe’s, where Pratt had played with the band for an hour.

  “What’d you have in mind?”

  Colonel Pratt stood to one side, allowing an elephant and mahout to lumber past.

  “Marshall sends an investigator to Bangkok. She’s been out to Khun Achara’s compound and to Brandon’s house. She keeps her boss informed. Marshall wants to sell the company. Achara wasn’t selling. Neither was Brandon. That’s what you told me.”

  “You think Tanny is involved in their deaths?”

  Colonel Pratt walked a couple of steps before stopping in front of a noodle stand. “What do you think?”

  “Not a chance,” said Calvino.

  “Is that a because-you’re-involved-with-her ‘not a chance’ or a professional opinion?”

  “Marshall’s other companies are caught in a credit crunch. He needs cash. But who in America isn’t in the same position? It’s a stretch to stick a murder rap on someone who only wanted to sell the company.”

  “Murder is almost always a stretch. A person expands the range of possibilities. One option is to remove the obstacles. Murder does that in most cases.”

  When Colonel Pratt took this position, Calvino was never sure whether it was because he was a cop or because he was a Thai cop.

  “Pratt, the Sawyers have business interests in seven countries. It was Brandon’s choice to live in Thailand. If they had reason to kill every time they disagreed on a decision, one of them would have been dead before they hit their teens. Americans are combative.”

  “Combative people are more likely to murder someone. It’s another reason we should investigate,” said Colonel Pratt. That aggressive people committed aggressive acts was a police truism.

  If Marshall could be connected to the death, the collateral benefit was substantial, because it would have let the Thais off the hook—farang killing farang, while bad, didn’t reflect badly on the Thai cops or tarnish the image of the country. If anything, such a murder was a vindication, proving that other nationalities routinely shot, stabbed, drowned, axed, and suffocated each other on a regular basis and that it couldn’t be helped if the bloodletting spilled onto Thai soil. A wrongful farang death attributed to the police during the state of emergency was the last thing anyone wanted. The higher-ups worried that the foreign news would feature the story and connect it to the political unrest. Brandon Sawyer wasn’t some obscure backpacker, but from a prominent East Coast American family. Pratt felt the heat.

  “Brothers murdering each other is something Shakespeare made a living writing about. Brandon and Marshall had differences. Who doesn’t? American courts would be jammed with lawsuits if knocking off your brother was the usual way of settling a business dispute.”

  “I’d still like to talk to the brother,” said Colonel Pratt, giving himself enough space to avoid getting into a pointless argument.

  At the end of the narrow soi, Lost Horizon loomed on the right-hand side. The building was a frenzy of neon glitter—red dragons, jumping tigers, wheels of lights washing the wet street in gaudy shades of red, blue, and green. In the immediate area around the bar, there was less neon and fewer tourists. Calvino and Colonel Pratt walked behind a couple of foreigners. One unexpectedly turned around and asked Pratt if he knew which bar had the best girls. The question caught Pratt by surprise.

  The colonel stared at the farang, wearing a baseball cap backward like a teenager. “The best girls aren’t in the bars,” he said.

  The farang was about to complain when Calvino stepped in front. “You got a problem?” The farang took a swing at Calvino, who ducked and returned a punch hard enough to buckle the man’s knees. Calvino watched him go down, gasping for breath. “Guess not anymore.”

  Colonel Pratt grabbed Calvino’s arm. “Let’s go, Vincent.”

  The man on the ground extended his arm to his friend, who pulled him up. He was unsteady on his feet and winded. He stared at Calvino, took a step forward, and the man stopped, brushing off his trousers. The party mood had evaporated as the two men turned around and shuffled past the yings calling out for ‘handsome man’ to come inside and have a drink. They ignored the yings as the injured one, walking slightly doubled over, brushed off the help of his friend. The one who’d taken the punch pulled his baseball cap back on his head, the distance he’d covered having given him courage enough to flip Calvino the finger and shout, his voice breaking with anger, “Fuck you!”

  “He shouldn’t be aiming so high,” said Calvino.

  Colonel Pratt walked the last few steps in silence. Calvino, two steps ahead, stood holding open the door to Lost Horizon. It was early, and a handful of customers, regular drinkers, the mainstay of bar revenue, bent over their drinks as if sooner or later the effects would allow them to invent a world much like this one only better, where they were featured as heroes. The ying behind the bar told Calvino that Larry was upstairs. The whole time she was looking Pratt over. Her boss had been expecting Calvino and a Thai police colonel. She thought Pratt didn’t look like a colonel.

  They walked up the stairs.

  Larry spent most of his time on the third floor in what he called the “VIP hospitality suite.” The first time Calvino met him, Larry bragged that the suite contained everything, so a customer never needed to leave the floor. He even installed a karaoke nook with speakers hooked up inside two dinosaurs. When Calvino and Pratt entered the suite, it took a minute for their eyes to adjust to the dim light and the soft tone of jungle noises coming from a sound system in a ceiling draped with green vines. About a dozen yings wearing what Larry described as “jungle gear” crowded around them.

  “We’ve come to talk with Larry,” said Calvino.

  “Boss over there,” said one of the yings, tugging at her skirt. Larry never had an answer as to why he chose white tassels as a fringe around the miniskirts and zebra-striped bikini tops. It was his idea of caveman fashion.

  They found Larry in the corner, half hidden by plasticleaved plants. “Larry, how are you doing? This is Colonel Pratt.”

  Larry looked up from his plate, tilting his head as he tried to place Calvino.

  “Hey, Vinny, glad to see someone isn’t afraid of coming in for a drink. You won’t believe the people coming in here asking about the dead farang. I’ve had an endless stream of gawkers, cops, and complete strangers wanting to know what happened. I’m telling you, it’s been pain in the ass.”

  “Brandon would trade places with you,” said Calvino.

  “You’re right. Things can always be worse. So what can I do for you?”

  “I want to know what happened last night.”

  “Get in line,” said Larry.

  A private investigator was just one more person he added to the list of the overly curious. And now that same PI was in the VIP room with a cop in tow. Larry leaned over his food, chewing and shaking his head. This signaled that he’d entered a downer phase and was using food to fight off the depression. He’d gnawed a hole in a large taco. Licking off the melted cheese and tomato sauce, he stuffed the rest of it into his mouth. His fingertips glistened with grease. If food was a weapon, Larry had made a good choice for maximum destructive capability. He nodded, washed the food down with a long swig of beer straight from the bottle. Larry’s caveman-like dinin
g habits were a reflection of his jungle floor featuring stuffed-bear-sized dinosaurs, and yings whose hygiene was common in the early Ice Age.

  “This is Colonel Pratt, Royal Thai Police Department,” said Calvino.

  “I’ve been up to my eyeballs with gators and cops, and I find that gators at least fight with a set of rules.”

  “Didn’t know you had alligators in Ohio,” said Calvino.

  “Don’t be so fast off the mark. Okay, a few baby gators got flushed down the toilets and lived in the sewers. That made us cosmopolitan.”

  “I’d like to ask you some questions about last night,” said Colonel Pratt.

  “I gave a statement about ten this morning. A guy in a uniform sits me down, and I don’t get up for two and half hours. I figure he got hungry or he’d still be asking me something. I don’t remember his name. Something like Somchai, Somkit, Som-enchanted-evening. But if you want to hear the whole story again, no problem. You are the boys.”

  “Pull up a chair. You, too, Colonel.” He took another long hit from the beer bottle before setting it down.

  “Brandon dying here last night isn’t good for business.”

  “You said the place was full of people coming in.”

  “And going back out after a look around. They didn’t buy dick. What do you think that does for the morale of my girls? We want happy campers in our little piece of paradise. Look at them sulking. Not even the dinosaurs wanna be in the same room with them.” He pointed at a fake hedgerow flanked by dinosaurs, and a dozen yings were bunched up in a ball in the corner. “Not to mention that they’re scared shitless. They think Brandon’s ghost is hiding somewhere in the jungle, ready to jump out and grab their ass. They loaded enough fruit on the spirit-house shelf to feed a village school. The stuff’s been falling off the wall platform all day, decomposing on the floor, bugs and rats coming from every nest in Sukhumvit to eat the leftovers. Offerings. That’s what they call it. It’s like an Olympic relay. They take turns lighting candles and incense. Tiptoeing around the spirit house and stacking more fruit for the rats and bugs. It don’t do any good talking to them. They just say, ‘Farang not understand us.’ ”