LAUNDRY MAN (A Jack Shepherd crime thriller) (17 page)

When I got to Soi Sarasin and made a right in the direction of the financial district, I involuntarily glanced toward the spot where I had parked the Volvo that morning while I was running in Lumpini Park. The blue van was gone and presumably the man in the sunglasses and baseball hat had gone with it. I wondered briefly if I ought to take that as a good omen, maybe even a sign that everything would start getting back to normal and in a few days I would be laughing. No, that was going way too fast. This morning I’d settle for just getting through breakfast without squinting suspiciously at the waitress.

After parking in the United Center garage I walked downstairs to the Délifrance. I went through the short line and selected a plate of hard rolls and cheese, picked up a
café au lait
, and then took everything to a table outside on the tiny front terrace. I watched the morning traffic while I carved slivers of cheese onto the crusty bread and sipped at my coffee. When I was done with both, I went back inside, got another coffee, and sat quietly over it for a long time, thinking.

Jello’s story about Dollar still seemed ridiculous to me; but in an entirely different way, so was Dollar’s tale about being mugged leaving his office with Howard the Roach. I was sitting right where it had supposedly happened. The blue-and-white canvas umbrella under which I was drinking coffee might have been the very one Dollar claimed to have knocked over in the struggle. I could scarcely believe something like that had happened to them at all, let alone right here in the heart of Bangkok’s financial district. But if it hadn’t happened, if Dollar had made up the story, why had he done that?

As I thought about it all and sloshed the coffee around in my cup, a scene from an old movie suddenly popped into my head.
Three Days of the Condor
was one of those CIA conspiracy films that had been so popular right after Watergate when a lot of Americans decided they could believe anything about the kind of people who were running the country. In the movie Robert Redford was the honorable man sucked by accident into an intricate government plot to do something that no one really understood, but that in any event required the killing of a bunch of other honorable people to achieve some obscure end for someone—maybe the CIA, and maybe not. Redford was the hero of the movie, of course. He was cool. He was steady. And he projected a steely determination not to let the bad guys get away with it. Whatever
it
was.

I had stumbled across the movie on HBO one night a couple of weeks earlier. Watching it again for the first time in more than twenty years, it was my own reaction that surprised me, not the film itself. Redford no longer seemed to me to be the hero of the story. On the contrary, his unyielding determination to do
right
even if it put him or the other people around him in danger seemed tired and dated.

The real star of the film for me now was a character actor named John Houseman, a sort of benighted Santa Claus figure wearing a rumpled blue suit and speaking with a British accent. Houseman’s character was a lot older than Redford with a view of the world that was both wearier and less hopeful that wrongs could be righted just by the conviction they should be. He was the director of the CIA, and while you were pretty sure he wasn’t one of the bad guys, you weren’t absolutely sure he was one of the good guys either.

There was a moment in the movie when Houseman was reminiscing to one of his subordinates, a stiff-necked young bureaucrat played by Cliff Robertson, about the early days of the American intelligence community when he had been one of Alan Dulles’s boys, a crusading young hotshot battling the Nazis in World War Two. Robertson listened politely to Houseman’s recollections, as we all do sometimes to old men who may have told the same stories a few too many times, and when Houseman was finished, Robertson just sat there, not quite certain as to how he was supposed to respond. Finally, Robertson asked Houseman politely, “So, do you miss the action now, sir?”

Houseman seemed to consider that possibility as if for the first time, and slowly and deliberately he began to formulate a reply.

“No, I miss…”

Houseman paused, searching for exactly the right word, and you hung there while the old man rolled the possibilities around in his mouth until he found just the one he was looking for.

“… the clarity. What I miss is the clarity.”

He drew the word out…
clar-i-tee
…and Robertson nodded, but you could tell he didn’t understand what the hell Houseman was talking about. I wasn’t sure that I understood back then either. But I did now.

No, I didn’t miss the action any more than Houseman did. I didn’t miss the action one damned bit. I missed the clarity.

Clarity was what had brought me to Bangkok in the first place, and clarity was what I had found. If I let it slip away, one day I would end up just like that: living in the past, reminiscing to some young dunce who didn’t know what I had lost or care much one way or the other how I had lost it. I thought I had managed to creep quietly out of the big ocean and slide undetected into my small pond without anyone really caring I had gone, but all of a sudden I was getting more attention than a Hezbollah float in the Rose Parade.

Oh Lord, don’t do this to me. Don’t take it all away.

I LOOKED AT
my watch. It was a little before ten-thirty. Since Dollar and I weren’t supposed to meet until eleven, I still had half an hour to kill, maybe a little more if Dollar showed up as late as he usually did.

If Howard and Dollar really were up to something, there would almost certainly be some hint of it in Howard’s case files. I could probably find it if I looked carefully, at least I could now that I knew what I was looking for, and there was time to look before Dollar showed up. What could it hurt?

In the lobby of the United Center a gray half-light illuminated a sleepy-looking security guard flipping through a newspaper behind a wooden desk. I walked to the elevators and pushed the button, but the guard never even glanced at me. Like most Thai security guards he probably wouldn’t have bothered to look up if I had ridden an elephant into the building.

On the fifteenth floor, I walked to the glass doors at the end of the hall where the big gold letters were dramatically backlit against a stark white wall:

D
UNNE,
A
NDERSON,
L
ORD &
A
MPORNPHAKDI
I
NTERNATIONAL
A
TTORNEYS
AND
C
OUNSELORS
AT L
AW

I did work fairly regularly for Dollar’s firm and I kept a tiny cubbyhole of my own there to avoid dragging client files back and forth to my office at Sasin, so I had a key. I took it out, bent down, and turned it in the floor lock. When I did, for a moment I thought I heard voices coming from somewhere inside.

It seemed unlikely anyone was there unless Dollar had shown up early after all, and that seemed really unlikely. When the lock snapped over I stood and pushed the door open and waited silently for a moment, listening, but I heard nothing else. I decided I must have been mistaken. I closed the door behind me and relocked it.

My office was the first door down the hallway to the left, just past the black marble counter manned during the workweek by two receptionists. It was a tiny windowless cell situated in the inside portion of the hallway ring, an area mostly set aside for toilets, storage, and a kitchen. I flipped on the lights and settled into my chair, swiveling around and pulling open the bottom drawer of the big cabinet file behind my desk where I kept my working files.

I flipped quickly through the drawer, and then I went back and checked it methodically again from front to back. At first I thought that perhaps I had just overlooked them, but I hadn’t. All of Howard’s files were gone.

Had I returned them to the file room? I was reasonably sure I hadn’t, but then it had been a while since I had last looked at any of them and I supposed it was possible.

The main file room was a few doors down the corridor from my office, but when I turned the handle I discovered it was locked. I pulled out my office master key and pushed it into the deadlock. It didn’t turn. I jiggled it a couple of times, pulled it out and put it in again, but clearly it wasn’t going to open the door no matter how many times I tried.

I was certain that I had never found the file room door locked before, at least not during office hours, but then I never came in on weekends so I couldn’t say for sure whether it was normally locked then. Regardless, my key was supposed to be a master—presumably it fit every lock in the office—so I made a mental note to ask someone on Monday why I couldn’t get into the file room.

Walking back down the corridor I was just opening my office door when I heard a noise in the distance. This time I was certain. It was a voice.

I followed the sound across the darkened reception area and toward the opposite corner of the building. It led me straight to Dollar’s office. Dollar must have shown up early after all. That was out of character for him, I mused, so whatever our meeting was about, it had to be something that was making him anxious.

Dollar’s door was standing slightly ajar and I had my hand on the knob before it registered that it wasn’t Dollar’s voice I heard inside. I stopped and listened quietly. I couldn’t tell who it was or make out what the voice was saying, but it sure as hell wasn’t Dollar. He must have someone else with him, I decided. With a sinking heart I realized that it was probably Howard the Roach.

Dollar hadn’t told me Howard would be here or I might not have turned up. I still hadn’t decided whether to tell Dollar about Jello’s suspicions, but with Howard also here that was going to be even more difficult to do. It appeared that Jello was going to get his way. His trap was about to snap shut on me with a bang.

I knocked lightly. Then I pushed the door open and stepped inside.

I WAS SURPRISED
to see that there was just one man in the office after all. I was even more surprised to see that man was neither Howard the Roach nor Dollar Dunne. It was someone I had never seen before, and he was sitting in the chair behind Dollar’s desk talking on the telephone. He glanced at me and immediately hung up.

The man was a well-built westerner with big ears, the lean face of a chain-smoker, square shoulders, and an even squarer haircut. He was wearing an inexpensive-looking blue suit with a crisp white shirt and a red and blue striped tie neatly secured in a Windsor knot and he had an unblinking stare, rather like a stuffed owl it occurred to me.

“Who the fuck are you?” he snapped. His accent was American with a trace of rural twang in it, too.

For a moment something seemed terribly familiar about the man and I just stared at him. Then I realized what it was. He looked like George Bush on steroids.

“I said who the
fuck
are you?” the man repeated.

“I work here,” I answered, feeling lame and defensive in spite of myself. “What are you doing in Dollar’s office?”

The man studied me carefully, but he didn’t say anything.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll call the police and they can deal with you.”

“Not necessary,” he said, and then he held up something in his right hand. It was a small black folder with an ID card on one side and a gold badge on the other. I stepped closer and looked at the card: Special Agent Franklin D. Morrissey, United States Federal Bureau of Investigation.

I was still taking that in when I heard the sound of rapid footsteps in the hallway and Dollar burst into the office. He saw the man in his chair before he saw me and nodded slightly to him, but then he realized I was standing there and stopped dead, staring at me.

“What the hell are you doing here?”

Dollar looked awful, like a man who hadn’t slept in days. His eyes were cloudy as if they couldn’t quite focus properly and he was pale underneath his golfer’s tan. I had never seen him like that before.

“You asked me to come in for a meeting at eleven.”

“About what?”

“I have no idea. Probably something about Howard, if I had to guess.”

“Howard?” Morrissey spoke up. “Howard Kojinski?”

I looked at Dollar, not sure what to say, and I saw him staring steadily at Morrissey.

“What the hell is going on here?” I asked, but nobody answered me.

Dollar jammed his hands in his pockets and flopped down on a leather sofa off to the side of his desk. He swung his feet up onto the coffee table, crossing them at the ankle, and looked at Owl Eyes.

“You may as well tell him,” Dollar said.

Morrissey snorted slightly at that, but he nodded. “The local cops found Howard a little before seven this morning,” he said.

I sat down slowly in one of the chrome and leather chairs in front of Dollar’s desk. I had no doubt at all what was coming next.

“You’re saying he’s—”

“Yep,” Owl Eyes finished for me. “Deader’n shit.”

“Where did they find him?”

“He was hanging from a girder underneath one of the bridges over the river, the Taksin Bridge.”

That took me by surprise and I’m sure it showed.

“Suicide?” I asked.

Owl Eyes blinked for what couldn’t have been more than the second time since I had found him sitting in Dollar’s chair.

“Nope,” he said, “the mechanics don’t work. He had help.”

“Then you’re saying Howard was murdered?”

Owl Eyes nodded.

“And hung off a bridge over the river?”

“
Under
a bridge. He couldn’t have got there by himself. The little shit didn’t jump.”

I said nothing. I didn’t know what to say.

Dollar asked me to wait in the reception area while he talked to Morrissey, which seemed odd to me, but it was Dollar’s office, so I did. After a few minutes Morrissey came out and sat down on the other couch opposite me.

“Somebody on a ferry spotted the body just after dawn this morning and called the cops,” he told me.

“Was that when it happened?”

“Could have been anytime last night.”