Laundry Man

There appeared to be only one file on the CD, but the name of it was BACKUP and I thought that was pretty encouraging. I double-clicked on the icon above the file name to see what was in it, but I was disappointed when nothing appeared on my screen other than a dialogue box inviting me to tell Windows what program it should use to open the file.

“If I knew what program to use, I’d have used it in the first place, wouldn’t I, you moron?” I muttered at the laptop. “You’re supposed to be the computer here. You tell me.”

My laptop didn’t say anything, of course, so more or less at random I tried a few of the programs that the dialogue box suggested-Word, Excel, even Internet Explorer-but nothing worked. That pretty much brought me to the limits of my technical expertise, and I just sat there staring at the useless little icon for a while. All at once, however, it dawned on me what the problem was.

The computer I had seen in Dollar’s bedroom had been a Mac, hadn’t it? So if this CD actually did contain a backup of documents that Dollar had copied off his home computer, then what I had here were Mac files and that was a format that Windows couldn’t read. The utter incompatibility between Macs and PCs had always struck me as one of the more peculiar idiocies of what was supposed to be a brave new high-tech world; but regardless, I was now left with absolutely no idea what to do next.

I fidgeted for a while, but when no course of action likely to resolve the technical conundrum occurred to me I closed the laptop and turned my attention to the garbage bag instead. At least garbage seemed like something I ought to be able to handle. Pulling it around in front of me, I emptied the contents out onto the floor.

The first thing I did was to arrange everything by category. Amex receipts in one pile, telephone and utility bills in another, and then securities trading confirmations, brokerage account statements, and correspondence each in their own piles. I also found a bunch of documents that I hadn’t noticed before. They looked very official, but I couldn’t be certain what they were since they were written entirely in Thai, which I couldn’t read a word of. I set all those aside in a separate stack, and then I pushed back in the chair, folded my arms, and contemplated where to begin.

The Amex receipts looked easiest, so I gathered them up and shuffled through them, looking for patterns. At a glance, they covered exactly the sort of travel and entertainment expenses that I would have imagined Dollar had been incurring for decades. About half of them were for charges in Thai baht and the rest were in an assortment of United States dollars, Japanese yen, Hong Kong dollars, UK pounds, and Australian and Singapore dollars. Maybe Dollar had just been cleaning out some old files and had decided to toss his out-of-date receipts like most all of us did from time to time.

Taking it another way, I sorted all the receipts into their own separate categories-restaurants, hotels, airlines, merchandise, and those I couldn’t figure out-but that didn’t suggest any pattern either. Then I tried sorting them by currencies and had a look at them that way. Still nothing.

Then, just to touch all the bases, I sorted the receipts by the localities where the purchases took place. The Bangkok stack was the largest, closely followed by a stack for Phuket, then a much smaller one for Hong Kong. After that, the receipts were all over the place, so I gave up.

Okay, so Dollar lived in Bangkok-I knew that, of course-and he liked to get away to Phuket as often as he could. Didn’t we all? What did that prove?

With a sigh I pushed the Amex receipts aside and began to work my way through the telephone bills, the confirmations of the securities trades, and the brokerage statements. Thai telephone bills contained no details about numbers that had been called, so that was a dead end, but I got a pad and made notes of the names of the securities firms and the people whose names appeared in Dollar’s correspondence. Then for good measure I went back over the Amex receipts again and made lists of the hotels and restaurants were Dollar had been doing most of his charging. It was probably all a waste of time, but if Dollar didn’t turn up pretty soon, I was going to have to start looking for him somewhere.

When Anita eventually came in around ten, the living room of our apartment was largely buried under a layer of receipts, documents, letters, and notes.

“Good God, Jack! What in the world are you doing?”

I tried to tell her, but since I wasn’t altogether certain, it wasn’t easy.

Anita gently lowered herself into an empty space on one of the couches. Her face reflected her bewilderment.

“And you think this stuff will tell you where Dollar’s gone?” she asked.

“Well… maybe.”

“But why does it matter? Dollar’s a grown man. Surely he’s entitled to go anywhere he wants without you snooping through his garbage to try and figure out where he is.”

“Something’s wrong, Anita. One of Dollar’s clients has been murdered in a very public way; Dollar is apparently in hiding himself; and his house has been ransacked by somebody who must have wanted to find something pretty badly.”

“Even if that’s all true, Jack, it’s got nothing to do with you.”

“Yes, it does.”

“What?”

“I don’t know yet. That’s why I’m looking through all this crap. I’m trying to find out.”

“Well, have you allowed for the possibility that you might be wrong, that you’re not involved in whatever Dollar is up to?”

“I am, Anita, somehow. I’m absolutely sure of it. I can feel it.”

“Maybe it’s only gas you’re feeling, my darling. What did you have for lunch?”

“That wasn’t very helpful.”

“I wasn’t trying to be helpful. I was trying to show you how ridiculous all of this looks. Dollar may well be doing something that you don’t understand, but why must you understand it?”

Anita had a good point, I knew, so I said nothing.

“You have absolutely no business getting involved in any of this, Jack. No business at all.” Anita’s hands motioned vaguely in the air. “You never think of how these upheavals you’re always getting yourself involved in affect me, do you? We’re trying to be a sort of a family here, and yet you still act like you’re a man without a responsibility in the world except for yourself. You go running off on your little crusades without giving the first thought to me.”

She turned to look out the window and then almost immediately glanced back.

“Your stupid curiosity is going to be the end of us some day. Maybe you’re one of these men who’s just not meant to be married.”

“I don’t know what to say to that.”

“Neither do I, Jack. Neither do I.”

I took a long breath and slowly let it out.

“This really isn’t fair,” I said.

“No, I suppose from your point of view it isn’t, but as a great man once said, ‘Fuck fair.’“

“Anita, please try-”

“I’m going to bed now, Jack. Feel free to play with your little scraps of paper as long as you like.”

Anita turned around and walked out of the room and I looked out a window so I wouldn’t have to watch her go. Even after she was gone I kept looking out that window. I just sat there for a long time with my arms folded and stared out at the lights of the city.

I could have dismissed everything Anita said as simple petulance. Maybe she’d had a bad day at her studio and was just taking it out on me. But I wasn’t willing to let it be that easy. There was something she had said that hit a nerve, something I couldn’t shake off by blaming it on her. Maybe I really was the wrong kind of guy for a woman to share a life with. Maybe being that kind of guy was a God-given talent-something like being able to sing opera or throw a ball through a hoop-and it was a talent I just didn’t have. Anita didn’t seem to think I had it, and I supposed she knew me about as well as anyone.

I walked around the living room after that collecting all of the stuff I had gotten out of Dollar’s garbage and dumped it all back in the garbage bag except for the Thai-language documents I had set aside earlier. Then I removed the CD from the drive in my laptop, put it in a manila envelope together with those documents, and took