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 walclass="underline"
DUNNE, ANDERSON, LORD amp; AMPORNPHAKDI
INTERNATIONAL ATTORNEYS AND COUNSELORS AT LAW
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.
TWENTY FOUR
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.”
“Then you don’t really know what happened.”
“We don’t know jack shit. There’s a Pepsi bottling plant just upriver from the bridge. Anybody who had been watching from there could probably have seen who strung the little bastard up, but it was the middle of the night, so-”
Morrissey stopped talking and spread his hands.
I was still trying to get a grip on Morrissey’s story when the glass doors from the hallway opened and Jello came in trailed by four cops in skin-tight brown uniforms with white Sam Browne belts and big guns riding high on their hips.
“What are you doing here, Jack?”
Jello’s rumbling voice had an edge in it and right then it rubbed me the wrong way.
“I just found out a friend of mine was murdered last night,” I snapped.
Jello’s face softened. He looked embarrassed and for a moment I almost regretted being so harsh.
“I know,” he said. “That’s why I’m here.”
Jello gave Morrissey a long look. “Would you mind letting me have a minute here, Frank?”
Owl Eyes shook his head and walked back down the hallway in the direction of Dollar’s office. Jello waved the uniformed cops outside, then he came over and sat down next to me. I looked at Jello when he didn’t say anything right away.
“Why the scout troop?” I asked, indicating the cops waiting beyond the glass.
Jello seemed embarrassed again.
“I want to look around and see if there’s anything here that might be connected with the murder,” he said.
Now I could see why he looked embarrassed.
“Uh-huh,” I said. “And maybe while you’re at it you’ll see if you can dig up anything to prove that bullshit story you gave me about Dollar laundering drug money for some Burmese drug lords. Is that what you had in mind?”
“Look, Jack-”
I was on my feet and pointing toward the front doors before Jello could say anything else.
“To hell with you, man! Fuck you and the little elves who rode in with you! Get the hell out of here.”
Then I turned and shouted down the hallway.
“Hey, you back there! Special Agent whoever-the-hell-you-are! You get out, too!”
Morrissey reappeared so quickly that I wondered if he had been standing just around the corner listening to what Jello and I were saying. Dollar was right behind him.
“You’ve got no authority here,” I snapped at Morrissey.
“Don’t make any difference. I can get as much as I need.”
“Then you just do that. It’ll be good practice for you.”
“What’s this all about, Jack?” Dollar asked. “It won’t do any harm to let them look around.”
I thought about just blurting out what Jello had told me right there, but I didn’t. Dollar had no way of knowing he was the real target of the search, and he seemed so shaken by Howard’s murder that I couldn’t bear to pile that on him today.
“Please take my word for it, Dollar. It’s a really lousy idea.”
Dollar just nodded as if he hardly cared, then he sank down on a couch and stared off toward where the uniforms stood waiting outside. The same unfocused look he had worn when he first walked into his office was back in his eyes.
“Where’s Just John, Dollar?” I asked, squatting down next to him.
“John?” Dollar raised his head slowly. “Just John?”
“Yeah. Can I call him? Do you know where he is?”
“I think he’s…” Dollar paused. “I don’t know where he is. I think he’s out of the country.”
Morrissey looked at Dollar as if he was going to say something, but I bounced up and held up my hands.
“Don’t,” I said to him. “Don’t say a word. Just get the hell out of here.”
The cops out beyond the glass doors had stopped talking to each other and were now watching me standing there with my hand out like some demented traffic cop. Morrissey looked at me for a moment, then he shrugged slightly and opened the door.
“Come on, Jello,” he said. “It’s no big deal.”
“Jack…”
Jello started to say something, but then he just trailed off and stood there in silence until with drooping shoulders he turned away and followed Morrissey out the door. When he was outside, Jello stopped and looked back through the glass at me. I kept my face blank, and finally he gave a shrug and turned and walked with Morrissey toward the elevators.
After Jello, Morrissey, and cops were all gone, I walked around the office turning off lights to have something to do while I gave Dollar a chance to pull himself together, but when I got back to the reception area he was still sitting the same wayI had left him, just staring off into space. I watched for a minute, but he never moved or spoke. He just sat there in exactly the same lifeless way.
No matter how hard I might try to explain it in some other way, I had no doubt at all what I was seeing on Dollar’s face and in the slump of his body. It wasn’t surprise, and it certainly wasn’t grief. It was fear. Dollar was a man who had seen a sign, and he was terrified by it.
As I stood there watching Dollar, I asked myself why I was being so fiercely protective of him. I had known him for a long time, of course, but the truth was I really didn’t have the slightest idea what his real connections with Howard might have been. I didn’t even know who Howard the Roach really was.
I thought about it a while, but I still couldn’t come up with an answer that made any sense. That was probably my own kind of sign, a sign that it was time for me to go home. Dollar would have to finish this on his own. I turned away, pushed through the glass doors, and left.