Laundry Man

The girl gave me a shy smile, bobbed her head, and slipped quietly away.

I had polished off most of the plate of salad and was halfway through the Heineken when I glanced up and spotted a familiar face eating alone at a table across the room.

Bar Phillips was a columnist for the Bangkok Post, and probably had been since just after the invention of moveable type. His column was called ‘Bar By Bar’ and it had been a weekly staple in Bangkok for longer than anyone now alive could remember. The kind of stuff Bar wrote about was badly out of style now, even a little distasteful to some people, but that apparently had had no effect on him at all. He merely continued doing what he had done for decades: chronicling his rounds through the city’s go-go bars and massage parlors, reporting the comings and goings of the city’s legion of foreign saloonkeepers, and generally holding forth on anything else that took his fancy about Bangkok’s legendary nightlife.

Bar and I first met not long after I had joined the faculty at Chula. He had apparently come into a bit of money somehow and since we had some friends in common-not surprisingly, since Bar seemed to know everybody in Bangkok-he had approached me for help with setting up and operating a string of bank accounts outside Thailand. I never really knew where his money came from or exactly how much of it there was. Bar offered vague explanations, mostly starring the usual panoply of dead relatives, but I didn’t believe him and I don’t think he expected me to. On the other hand, I didn’t sense anything ominous about his money’s origins either so I had been happy enough to help him out. I hadn’t really see that much of him since then, but I was always happy to run into him. He loved me like a son.

When I walked over to Bar’s table carrying what was left of my Heineken, he glanced up at me without expression.

“What the fuck do you want? Can’t you see I’m trying to eat?”

Loved me like a son, he did.

I sat down anyway and between trips back and forth to the buffet tables over the next hour Bar and I made small talk. After he polished off the last of a large bowl of bread pudding, he bent down and took a package of tobacco and a pipe out of a plastic shopping bag on the floor by his feet. Packing the bowl of the pipe, he tapped the tobacco down with a metal tool, then struck a match and puffed away until he got it going. It all looked like an awful lot of trouble to me. Maybe that’s why I smoked cigars.

Slumping forward on his forearms, Bar took several long draws on his pipe and the aroma of cherry wood blended with the odor of garlic, fish sauce, and chilies. It smelled better than it sounds.

“You got something on your mind other than food, don’t you, Jack?” he said.

Bar drew on his pipe again and exhaled an enormous cloud of smoke. He didn’t appear to care whether I told him what it was or not, but he probably assumed I would anyway. And I did.

“You heard about the man they found hanging under the Taksin Bridge?”

Bar nodded so I told him about my encounter with Jello and the FBI agent at Dollar’s office. He listened without expression.

When I finished, Bar crooked a finger at a passing busboy, muttering something to him that I missed, then folded his arms and went back to puffing on his pipe as if he was sitting all alone at the table. I was just on the verge of asking him what that had all been about when the boy reappeared with a copy of the Bangkok Post and handed it to Bar. He flipped through it until he found what he was looking for, and then he folded the paper over and laid it in front of me.

The story he pointed to was short, not more than six column inches, and it was down at the bottom of an inside page. The headline was ‘American Tourist Found Dead.’ But it was the subheading that got my full attention: ‘Police Call It Suicide.’

“The reporter must have screwed up the story,” I said. “Howard was certainly no tourist, and the FBI agent said it was a murder. He said it would have been impossible for Howard to have hung himself.”

“Who was this guy?” Bar asked. “One of the local legats?”

Most American embassies had at least one FBI agent assigned to them, sometimes more if it was in a country like Thailand where criminal investigators could find a lot to do. To keep from offending the host country, FBI agents were always technically referred to as legal attaches, legats in State Department talk.

“I don’t know. I assumed he was with the embassy. What else would he be doing here?”

“What was the guy’s name?”

“Frank something.” I thought a moment. “Frank Morrissey.”

Bar dipped back down into the plastic shopping bag and produced a mobile phone, one of those old green Motorola’s that was about the size of a World War II walkie-talkie.

“Who are you calling?” I asked him.

“The American Embassy.”

“Isn’t it closed on Sunday?”

“Not to me.”

I watched as Bar finished dialing and hoisted the huge handset to his ear.

“Duty officer, please,” he said after a moment.

There was a wait, apparently first for his call to be switched and then for it to be answered.

“Hey, Barney. It’s Bar Phillips.” Bar listened for a couple of beats. “Uh-huh.”

While Bar listened some more, I studied his expression, but it gave nothing away.

“No problem, pal,” he eventually said, “but I need a favor in return. There’s an FBI guy named Morrissey who is either attached to the embassy or in town on some kind of temporary duty. You know him?”

He listened for a moment, then said, “Yeah, that’s right. His first name is Frank.”

Bar glanced at me and I nodded quickly.

There was a pause, then Bar said, “No shit,” followed by a long, low whistle. “Hang on a second Barney.”

Bar lowered the telephone, slipped his hand over the mouthpiece, and looked at me.

“He says Frank Morrissey used to be one of the legats all right, but he’s been retired for three or four years. Lives somewhere in Florida, he thinks.”

“So what’s he doing back here now?”

Instead of answering my question, Bar asked me one of his own.

“What did this man in Dollar’s office look like?”

I described the man as well as I could, including his natty dress and cool demeanor.

Bar lifted the headset back to his ear. “Barney, let me ask you something. Is Frank Morrissey a middle-aged guy of average size and weight who’s a sharp dresser and comes across as serious and intense?”

I could hear the laughter coming from the other end of the telephone without Bar taking it away from his ear.

“I see,” he said after listening for a moment longer. “Well, I’m sure it’s all some kind of mistake. Thanks a lot, pal. I owe you one.”

Bar pushed the disconnect button and lowered the heavy headset to the table.

“He says Frank Morrissey is probably older than I am. He also says he’s a fat slob who looks like an unmade bed and never stops talking shit.”

“This guy showed me his ID, Bar. And both Jello and Dollar knew him. He had to be legit.”

Bar sat impassively, saying nothing.

I pointed to the telephone. “You’ve probably got a secret weekend number for Jello, too. Call him. He’ll tell you.”

Bar shook his head. “Not a good idea.”

“Why not?”

Bar shook his head again and looked away.

“Oh, come on, Bar,” I said. “Tell me you’re not about to say there was a conspiracy between Dollar and Jello to pass this fellow off as an FBI agent just to fool me.”

“Okay. Then I won’t tell you that.”

I was starting to get a headache.

“Look, Jack, think about it. Somebody doesn’t just kill this poor bastard you knew, they dangled his body off a prominent landmark where all sorts of people could see him twisting up there in the wind. Now doesn’t it strike you as a pretty clear message of some kind?”