The Corruptionist

by Christopher G. Moore

  “Can you show me the room where Mr. Sawyer was found?” asked Colonel Pratt.

  Larry pulled a length of toilet paper from a plastic holder, wiped his hands and mouth, and rose from the table. “I’m familiar with law enforcement,” he said. “I was on the highway patrol for almost eight years. I know something about murder. This guy died of a heart attack.”

  Larry’s conclusion pleased Colonel Pratt. He nodded, even started to like Larry.

  “You a doctor, too?” asked Calvino.

  “You sound like a smart-ass lawyer. Always questioning, suspicious,” said Larry, figuring Colonel Pratt might be worth having as an ally down the road.

  “Did he have a girl with him when he died?” asked Colonel Pratt.

  Larry nodded, snapped his fingers, and when that didn’t work, he shouted out Nit’s name. “Nit! Get your ass over here!”

  After a long pause, one of the yings unknotted herself from her group. She yawned, uncoiled like a cat, extended her arms, cracked her knuckles one at a time, before getting up, walking over, and leaning against the staircase. She wore one of those “me Jane, you Tarzan,” outfits, giving off a wild, untamed look. A look and an outfit that played better in one of the short-time rooms. “Nit, who did Khun Brandon bar-fine last night?”

  Nit, who in normal times would have looked good sitting on a woolly-mammoth-skin rug inside any cave, now looked terrified. The blood had gone out of her hands, and they were ice cold as she touched Calvino’s hand. “No, he’s not a customer. At least not tonight, he’s not,” said Larry, winking at Colonel Pratt. “And this man is a policeman. He can talk to you in Thai.”

  “Were you with the farang when he died last night?” Colonel Pratt asked her in Thai.

  The tune from the movie Shaft boomed from the junglethemed floor. “Yes, I was with the farang. But not when he died. He asked me to go downstairs and bring back a bottle of whiskey. I go. I order the bottle. I talk with my friend, then a customer, and when I got back to the room, he was dead.”

  This matched what she had told the investigating officer, Major Somsak, a name that translated as “worthy of honor.” No Thai expected a farang to remember Thai names and certainly had no expectation they had any idea of the names’ meanings. When they reached the door to the short-time room, Larry took out a fistful of keys, selecting the one to fit the lock. He turned the key and opened the door.

  He leaned his head in and flicked on the light. The ceiling was webbed with vines and Christmas-tree lights—the tiny flickering bulbs floating over the bed in the shape of a heart. The decor was early Jurassic—plastic and canvas fabric appeared to have been used to make the dinosaurs and foliage. It looked like a firetrap, one short in the wiring away from an inferno. The kind of building violation for which an inspector would likely have given it a pass in return for a white envelope and a bottle of Black.

  As they filed inside, Larry walked over to a table and picked up a remote control and flipped on CNN. “We’ve got cable,” he said, pride filling his voice.

  “No need ever to leave the cave, except for a pizza,” said Calvino.

  “Did he take another girl besides you to the room last night?” asked Colonel Pratt.

  Nit shook her head, wrapping her arms around herself as they formed a circle around the bed. “When you came back, was the door open? Or was it closed?”

  She squeezed her eyes shut, twitched her nose, as if thinking hard. “Closed,” said Nit.

  “Was there anyone else inside?” asked Colonel Pratt.

  She shook her head once more.

  “Did you see anyone leave the room?” the colonel asked.

  She sighed, shaking her head yet again as if she’d lost her tongue.

  “When you went inside, what happened next?”

  Nit’s face was passive, expressionless, like the doomed, like a peasant facing a firing squad. “I pour him a drink. I ask if he wants ice. He didn’t say anything. I set the glass down. Then I go over to the bed and slide down and massage his shoulder,” she said.

  “And then what happened?”

  “He didn’t move.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I look at his face. I touch him, and he feels cold. I am scared something is wrong. I run downstairs and tell mamasan.”

  “Thank you, Khun Nit,” said Colonel Pratt.

  As far as he was concerned, the case was closed. Brandon Sawyer had died of a heart attack.

  “When you came into the room, was anything different?” asked Calvino.

  She shrugged, lips down turned as she stared at the pattern on the striped mattress. The pillow had also been removed.

  “Funny smell,” she said.

  “Why funny?”

  “Smell like steak.”

  Larry had been quiet for about as long as was humanly possible for a man whose main job was talking to customers.

  “We don’t serve steak,” he said, an elbow resting on the head of a dwarf sauropod.

  “Did Brandon bring any food into the room?”

  Nit slumped down on the edge of the bed. “No, he only drink. Drink too much.”

  “When you came back, he was on the bed. Right? Was he undressed?”

  She looked confused.

  “What was he wearing when you came in?” asked Colonel Pratt in Thai.

  “Shirt and pants. No socks or shoes.”

  No crime-scene tape had been used to seal off the room.

  “Who else had access to the room before the police arrived?” asked Colonel Pratt. He was looking at Larry, waiting for a reply.

  “I wasn’t here when it happened,” said Larry. “But I’d say it’s safe to assume all the girls came in for a good gawk. You know what it’s like. Thais love looking at dead bodies.”

  “I don’t,” said Colonel Pratt, waiting a beat before adding, “like looking at the dead.”

  “Okay, some Thais. Most Thais. The ones from upcountry who can’t speak English. A dead body turns them into natural spectators. Nit, you saw the body. What was the first thing you thought? I bet it was, ‘My friends gotta see this. Dead farang. What’s his birth date? Gotta buy a lotto ticket.’ ”

  “How crowded was the bar last night?” asked Calvino, cutting off Larry’s rant.

  “It was fucking packed,” said Larry. He saw the look of disbelief on Calvino’s face. “I know, every bar owner says his place is loaded with customers. In my case it’s true. But where else can you drink in a jungle surrounded by dinosaurs and lovely native girls?”

  “Was it packed in the VIP area?”

  Larry nodded. “Yeah, it was.”

  “ ‘Packed’ meaning how many customers?” asked Colonel Pratt.

  “I ran the tab this afternoon. We had a great night.”

  “How many customers do you estimate came to the bar last night?”

  “Fifty, sixty. Maybe more. It’s hard to keep track. They come in, have a look, go. A guy has one drink, doesn’t see anything he likes, and takes off. Others stick around for the night and run up a tab. In and out all night long.”

  “Any of the customers stand out? Someone who looked like he didn’t belong. Not one of the regulars, not a tourist, someone you wouldn’t expect coming into the bar.”

  Larry thought about how extraordinary a man would have to be before he stood out in a crowd. “We get all types. Americans, Irish, Swedish, some Japanese, Koreans, and Chinese. Some Thais.” The last category was said like an afterthought for the benefit of Colonel Pratt.

  Calvino shrugged off the boast as unlikely; most nationalities remained tribal enough to frequent bars where their tribe represented the majority of patrons. Lost Horizon had the feel of an American-run place—a place run by an exhighway patrol officer with a disability pension and a dream of being a big shot in the nightlife. When Calvino had been here before, the clientele had been mostly Americans.

  “Any idea where the smell in the room come from?” asked Calvino.

  Nit pointed at the empty bed. �
��His body. Smell bad.”

  Once they’d finished questioning Nit and Larry, they returned to the top of the soi, Calvino standing next to Colonel Pratt as the traffic passed along Sukhumvit Road.

  “Heart attack,” said Colonel Pratt. “Just like the autopsy report concluded, Vincent. I haven’t heard or seen anything to challenge that result. When someone has a heart attack, they lose control of their bodily functions. That makes a foul smell.”

  “Even in Thailand, shit doesn’t smell like burned steak,” said Calvino. “Did the report say what food was in his stomach?”

  “The Foreign Correspondents’ Club buffet. We got the menu.”

  “That didn’t kill him,” said Calvino, grinning.

  “Did he look ill last night at the club?”

  Calvino tried to remember. He’d sat across from the guest-of-honor table and the podium. Brandon Sawyer hadn’t looked a few hours away from suffering a fatal heart attack.

  “He always looked the same,” said Calvino. “Not quite ill, not quite healthy. He occupied the drunk zone, where being able to lift a glass was considered fit and ready for action. He bitched about a lot of things but never said anything about aches or pains.”

  A taxi stopped as Calvino waved it down. He opened the door and looked back at Colonel Pratt. “What did the pathologist say about those marks on Brandon’s chest?”

  “Inconclusive,” said Colonel Pratt.

  “At the morgue I thought I was looking at burn marks on his chest,” said Calvino, climbing into the taxi. He waved off Pratt, leaving him to return to his car, parked around the corner. He hadn’t wanted Pratt to drive him to the condo. Tanny would be waiting, and Pratt would do what he had to: Question her about Marshall Sawyer. Calvino wanted answers to the same questions, but he wanted to be the first to ask—and alone when he heard what she had to say.

  The problem was that whatever had happened in the room had no witness. There were limitations in working any crime scene, and in one like the Lost Horizon’s short-time room it was like trying to find an insurgent’s fingerprints on a jungle trail during mating season. Larry had mentioned one of the problems—curious onlookers unable to resist touching everything in sight, sifting through pockets for valuables, helping themselves to loose change. The man was dead; what did he need money for? Once the crime scene had been tainted, no forensic staff could hope to find uncontaminated patterns that told the story of what had happened there. What it showed instead were layers of movement by the crowds, circling, picking up, touching, moving, and pushing back most objects in the room, leaving dozens of smudged fingerprints, strands of hair, DNA.

  Colonel Pratt said what mattered was the available evidence, and that was that two men—Brandon and Achara, who had been business partners—had died within the same week. Two back-to-back bizarre deaths. Lions had eaten one; the other had had a heart attack—or, alternatively, had died by electrocution if Vincent Calvino had his way.

  They both had tap-danced around that possibility, but it was apparent Calvino thought it worth exploring the electrocution angle. The method of death in both cases had made Pratt misty for the days when murders were solved by evidence of the entry and exit wounds, and from digging slugs out of the wall behind the victim. It was much simpler to unearth the weapon and, in most cases, trace the gun, hunt down the gunman, and convince him it made sense for him to confess to the crime and get a fifty-percent discount on his sentence. Electrocution could have been part of a sexual ritual. It needn’t have been murder, Colonel Pratt thought.

  If the two men had been murdered, someone had gone to a great deal of trouble to disguise the crimes so that the deaths looked like an accident in one case and natural causes in the other. The timing also troubled Colonel Pratt. Brandon wasn’t whacked on the day his staff went on a temple outing to make merit for the head maid’s birthday, where they got their fortunes told and ate endless bags of sugary khanom, custards, jellies, coconut rolls, dried bananas—and that was only the list of items consumed in the van. The thought of food made Colonel Pratt hungry, and he pointed at a plump, ripe mango, which the vendor skinned and sliced and slipped into a plastic bag.

  Pratt popped one slice into his mouth as he walked to his car. This was the farang world, he thought. All around him were foreign faces of visitors who came from all over the world. People came to his country to have a good time. Some of them never made it back home alive. That’s the way it was. It was their karma to die in Thailand. And if they died wrongfully, it was his karma to find their killer and bring that person to justice. Colonel Pratt slid another piece of mango into his mouth and chewed. One thing troubled him about Calvino’s theory—it didn’t fit the profile of a professional hit.

  If he wanted to kill Brandon Sawyer, he would have had Brandon’s house under surveillance from one of the shophouses located on the outside of the compound but with a view inside. He would have waited until everyone had left for the temple day trip. Then he would have gone inside and killed him. No witnesses. Brandon didn’t die that day in his house. He died in a Sukhumvit Road theme bar, a bar filled with customers, dinosaurs, and bargirls.

  THIRTY-THREE

  A COUPLE DOZEN hungry, bored men sat at the bar of the Lonesome Hawk. The promise of free-food Saturday had drawn them. The word spread among a band of men who pretty much lived off free bar food. Their lives were less a moving feast than a journey from one soup kitchen to the next, living off the kindness of strangers. As for the hardcore regulars who gathered at the Lonesome Hawk, it appeared that drinking was their hobby, but mostly it had become a full-time vocation. Calvino had asked an ex-FBI agent named Mike Scully to meet him. He had a couple of good reasons for choosing Scully.

  Scully had settled down in Thailand after thirty years at the Bureau under his belt. He had married a Thai whom he’d met at the Bureau. Anne—she’d adopted a farang name—had worked as the secretary to a deputy head, and that made getting Scully’s papers through for retirement as easy as buying a lotto ticket. At first his wife had been happy about returning to Thailand, but not so happy once she’d talked to her girlfriends, who warned her about the dangers a wife faced from the local younger ying competition.

  Scully’s pale blue eyes got him lots of attention. Thai yings were suckers for blue eyes, discounting age, money, and just about everything else for the chance to stare at them across a pillow. Anne wasn’t stupid; Scully’s eyes had done her in, and she rightly assumed that her Thai sisters would also find them irresistible.

  Anne nagged Scully to wear his sunglasses each time he left the house. Even when he stayed home, she nagged him for details about whom he’d seen and where he’d gone since the last time he left the house alone. But lunchtime was usually a free pass. Calvino’s call was one of the most important gifts one farang could give to another: A real cover story. Scully had been smiling ear to ear as he talked with Calvino on the phone, his wife listening to the conversation an elbow length way.

  Mike was a detail man. Most retirees in Bangkok couldn’t be bothered to remember faces, including the faces of the women they’d slept with. Others kept systematic accounts for each conquest—photograph, name, height, weight, place of birth, where they’d met, and what specific sexual activities they’d indulged in. Mike kept track, he was organized and still plugged into the law-enforcement grid, and that made him right for the assignment. McPhail couldn’t remember whom he’d slept with the week before last, but he had other skills—like getting people to underestimate him and tell him things that they shouldn’t because they thought he’d forget soon enough.

  Calvino knew that as soon as Mike hung up the phone, he’d turn to his wife and say, “Got a private investigator who needs some expertise on a case. I think I may be able to help. But I might be a little late. Don’t worry.”

  The odd thing about the truth was, it sometimes worked better than lies.

  Sitting across from Calvino at the Lonesome Hawk, Scully couldn’t help but feel grateful and wondered if the
re might be some way to spin out his usefulness.

  Calvino told Scully about the wounds on Brandon’s body. Then he showed him a blowup of the digital photos he’d taken at the police hospital. “The body has those two marks. Here”—Calvino pointed to the picture of Brandon’s chest just above his heart—“and here”—he moved his hand to the right side of Brandon’s chest. “Identical marks.”

  “What did the edges look like?” asked Scully, frowning as he adjusted his reading glasses. The resolution on the marks was less than Hallmark-greeting-card quality.

  “Swollen like a bug bite.” Calvino traced the outer edge of one of the marks on the picture.

  “It’s hard to judge the length.”

  Calvino said, “They were half an inch across.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Look at the skin. It’s torn. Like a fishhook had been yanked out.”

  “The wounds look puffy.”

  McPhail came to the table smoking a cigarette. Calvino slid over, and McPhail sat down across from Scully. “Thought you’d forgotten,” Calvino said.

  McPhail blew smoke. “Who me, forget?”

  “Any smell?” Scully asked Calvino, ignoring McPhail. Calvino removed an envelope from his jacket and, as if this were a perfectly normal gesture, stuck it into McPhail’s shirt pocket. “That’s another strange thing. His ying had gone downstairs for a bottle of whiskey, and when she returned, she said the body was clothed and lying on the bed. She said the air smelled as if someone had cooked a steak.”