Laundry Man

going to take me.

Manny didn’t say anything. He just scraped back his chair and stood up.

“You had your dinner yet, mate?”

Without waiting for me to answer, he turned and walked away. Shortly after that the waiter brought me another Corona, a plate of rice, and a pungent dish of garlic squid in a rich, black bean sauce. I gathered that might be the last I would see of Manny that evening, and it was.

By the time I finished eating, Q Bar was jammed with the late-night crowd and I had already become bored with watching the beautiful people preen for each other. All the women were too dazzling and blase for me and all the men were too gay. Or maybe it was the other way around. I couldn’t decide for sure.

I worked my way through the thick crowds down to the first floor and walked back across the street to where I had parked the Volvo.

Maybe Manny would decide to help me find either Barry or Dollar, or maybe not. Maybe I was right and one or both of them were holed up in Phuket, or maybe not. Wherever Barry Gale had gone to ground, I would bet my last dollar he was close by. Dollar, on the other hand, might be another matter altogether. I was certain he would turn out to be an awful lot further away.

It was a nice night, clear and comfortable. I threaded my way among the Mercedes, Jaguars, and BMWs crammed into Q Bar’s parking lot and I was only a few yards away from the Volvo when another car turned in. Its headlights swept across the lot and for just a moment they showed the silhouette of somebody waiting for me in the Volvo’s front passenger seat. I stopped dead.

Sliding into the shadow of a van parked next to a Mercedes, I watched for several minutes but it was too dark to see anything very clearly and no other lights hit the Volvo at the correct angle to light up the interior again. Eventually, of course, my curiosity overcame my caution. I edged away from the van and worked my way toward the Volvo keeping in what I hoped was the car’s blind spot. I moved around to the passenger side and crept toward the door in a half crouch.

It never occurred to me that it might be Dollar there in the front seat of my Volvo until I got up to the door and got a good look through the window.

And it certainly never occurred to me that Dollar might be dead until I opened the passenger door and his corpse shifted and fell out onto the ground.

THIRTY FIVE

There were no visible wounds on Dollar’s body, at least none I could see when I bent over him, and no blood at all, which made him look kind of spooky just lying there. I touched his neck without expecting to find a pulse, and of course there wasn’t one. While I was certainly no expert on such things, I guessed he must have been dead for quite a while. He was very pale, his skin almost transparent, and the body was cold.

It was obvious that Dollar had been killed somewhere else and then deposited in the front seat of my locked car as a message, just as leaving Howard dangling underneath the Taksin Bridge had undoubtedly been a message, too. With Howard, I had no idea who the message was for. With Dollar however-try as I might to conjure up some comforting ambiguity-the intended recipient was obviously me. I still wasn’t absolutely certain what the message actually was, but I was beginning to get a pretty good idea.

At least discovering Dollar’s body propped up in the front seat of my Volvo had made one thing abundantly clear. The only choice I had left was to find Barry Gale.

I HAD NEVER realized before how much crime scenes in real life look like the ones on television. Of course, I couldn’t remember ever being at a real crime scene before, and maybe the Thais watch a lot of television, so perhaps that explains it.

Yellow tape was strung across the parking lot’s entrance and blue bubble lights rotated lazily on the two police cars parked just in front of it. A half-dozen policemen in tight brown uniforms, high boots, and white helmets stood around not doing much and another half-dozen people in civilian clothes, mostly short-sleeved shirts and dark trousers, were bunched up around Dollar’s body peering down at it. Little knots of people stood here and there in the street watching the action beyond the yellow tape and tongues of color from the bubble lights on the police cars flicked back and forth across them. Every so often the blue light would catch someone’s face and for a moment a pale and ghostly image would hang there in the night air.

Someone had set up three mercury vapor floodlights on tall aluminum stands and their illumination made everyone in the parking lot look waxy and artificial, almost dead. Everyone, strangely enough, except Dollar. The wan, yellowish light made him look more alive somehow, and I almost expected any minute to see him get up off the ground, brush off his suit, and walk over to ask me for a cigar.

Instead it was Jello who walked over.

I was leaning on a concrete block wall at the back of the parking lot. I hadn’t seen Jello since that Saturday morning at Dollar’s office, although I was anything other than surprised to find him here now. Jello took up a post against the wall next to me and nodded slightly. I nodded back. Both of us stood there without talking and kept our eyes on the parking lot.

For my part, I was watching people I couldn’t identify walk around doing things I didn’t understand. I didn’t know what Jello was watching. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to.

A tall woman in a dark brown uniform circled Dollar’s body firing off photographs from various angles. When a flash of her strobe light caught me squarely in the eyes, I blinked and looked away.

“I don’t know what to say, Jack.”

“How did it happen?”

“Broken neck, they think.”

Broken neck. Just like Howard. What a surprise, huh?

“How long ago?”

“Probably four to six hours.”

I did the math while I watched the tall woman with the camera circle Dollar’s body again. I had parked in the lot around eight and come back to the car just before ten. It was now almost eleven. If Jello was right, that meant Dollar had been killed about the time I was deciding to drop in on Manny.

I hadn’t even known where the Volvo was going to be until nearly eight. Had someone been following me, just hauling Dollar’s body around town and looking for a chance to stuff it into my car? Or was there another locator device somewhere in the Volvo? Maybe I had only found the one they meant for me to find. If that was the case, then whoever was watching me could just have sent somebody over to where the little red dot had stopped on their map, popped open the passenger door, and jammed Dollar’s corpse inside. I felt sick running through the possibilities.

“I want to find out who did this, Jack.”

I looked at Jello’s eyes and saw something else.

“No, you don’t,” I said. “You just want to find out what Dollar was up to because you think it would look good in your intelligence files.”

“I don’t have to find out. I know exactly what he was up to.”

“Bullshit you do.”

A stout, middle-aged Thai in a long-sleeved white shirt buttoned at the cuffs stood looking down at Dollar’s body with his hands on his hips. Then he glanced up abruptly and stared straight at my face, almost as if he was comparing it with Dollar’s and trying to decide why Dollar was lying there on the ground instead of me. Finally, the man jammed his hands in his pockets, turned, and walked away in the direction of the yellow tape.

“Dollar and Howard were laundering money all right, Jack.” Jello’s eyes flicked around the parking lot as he talked. “That much of what I told you was true. But it wasn’t drug money.”

“So what was all that crap you gave me about Burmese drug dealers?”

“I was afraid Dollar and Howard were going to ask you to help them without telling you what they were really doing. I thought if I gave you the drug-money story, it would scare you off.”

“So what were they really doing?”

Jello ignored my question.