While I was waiting for someone to answer, I reached down and rested my hand on the handle of the little door within the drive gate. As I touched it the door drifted open, propelled by nothing more than the weight of my hand. The motion was so smooth and silent that it was a little eerie, but I pushed the door the rest of the way open and stepped inside.
The front of Dollar’s house was a solid wash of white stucco without a single window or opening other than a big pair of dark teak doors that Dollar swore he had personally taken from a Khmer temple near Angkor Wat. Naturally I had never believed that for a moment and I doubted anyone else had either. I knew that the other side of the house, the side that faced the river, was exactly the opposite in style. It was an unbroken curtain of glass that opened the whole house to a sweeping view of the Chao Praya River with its constant traffic of longtails, rice barges, tourist boats, ferries, and ambiguous vessels whose real tasks you hesitated to guess.
I started up the walkway to the front, but finding the door in the gate open and seeing no sign of life made the whole scene feel a little spooky. On impulse I angled off across the grass and circled around to the back. It wouldn’t hurt to have a quick look around before I just blundered up and rang the bell.
As I rounded the northeast corner of the house, Dollar’s spectacular view of the river captured me just as it always did. For a moment I stood absolutely still and watched a long train of teak rice barges, tethered nose to tail like a column of elderly circus elephants, wallow noiselessly downriver toward the Gulf of Thailand. So peaceful was the sight that when I finally turned back toward Dollar’s house and glanced inside through the glass curtain wall it took several moments for me to register what I was looking at.
The living room was in shambles. It looked like a bulldozer had run through it from one end to the other. Lamps were broken, chairs overturned, tables smashed, and every book pulled from the long shelves flanking the fireplace and dumped into piles on the floor. Two once-plush couches lay on their backs with their bases toward the windows. The rich blue of their silk upholstery had been sliced into ribbons as if some maniac had attacked them with a broadsword.
I stood and stared, rooted to the spot by the appalling yet still mesmerizing magnitude of the destruction.
“Looks like a real messy burglary, doesn’t it?”
Startled, I jerked my heard toward the sound of the voice and was confounded to see Bar Phillips standing with his arms folded across his chest looking into Dollar’s house alongside me.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
Bar’s eyes searched around as if he might find the answer inscribed on the sky.
“I figured you might be coming out to see Dollar,” he finally said.
“What’s that got to do with you?”
He lifted his arms and let them flop back to his sides in a gesture that combined bewilderment with exasperation. “Well… I thought maybe someone ought to watch your back.”
“The hell you did. You’re a reporter and you smelled a story.”
Bar made a face at that and fished his pipe out of his shirt pocket.
“You flatter me, boy. All I write anymore is a load of shit. Nobody’s thought of me as a real reporter in thirty years.”
“Then why the sudden concern about my welfare? If you thought I was walking into trouble, you could have just told me back at the Marriott. You didn’t have to follow me all the way out here.”
Bar stuck the pipe in the corner of his mouth and chewed on it without any indication that he planned to light it anytime soon.
“I always do what I can for my friends. But I only do what I can, not what I can’t.”
I took a long breath and let it out slowly. “Does that mean anything?”
“Nope,” Bar responded cheerfully. “Living in Thailand’s made me a happy convert to the church of creative ambiguity.”
Bar walked up to the glass, put his hands around his face to block the glare, and briefly studied the interior of Dollar’s house.
“Man,” he said, puckering his lips as if he were lining up a particularly difficult putt. “They did a good job of making it look like a burglary, didn’t they?”
“What are you talking about?” I asked. “You don’t think this is a burglary?”
Bar glanced at me. It was plain he relished my puzzlement. Then he started back around the house toward the front. Not having any better idea, I followed.
When Bar got to the big teak doors, he rattled the brass handles with both hands, but they were securely locked. I reached past him toward the doorbell, but Bar gave me such a look of disdain that I pulled my hand back without touching it.
Bar dug in his trouser pocket and pulled out his pipe tool. Flipping from it what looked like a stainless steel toothpick about three inches long, Bar slid the pick into the keyhole above the handle on the right hand door, bent forward slightly from the waist, and began to jiggle it gently between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, chewing on his lower lip in concentration.
I burst out laughing. “You’ve got to be joking.”
Bar didn’t answer, but after a few seconds I heard a soft click and he didn’t have to. He straightened up and turned the knob with his left hand while retracting the pick and pocketing the silver tool with his right.
“Okay,” I said. “Maybe you weren’t.”
TWENTY SEVEN
As soon as we got inside it was obvious that the whole house had gotten the same treatment as the living room. Whoever had turned the place over had clearly done a thorough job of it. I followed Bar silently from room to room. Nothing seemed to have escaped unscathed.
“Very professional,” Bar said with a note in his voice that sounded almost like admiration. “Really very professional.”
I didn’t know what to say. The house just looked like a mess to me. I would have to take Bar’s word for the fact that it was a professional mess.
“What makes you think this wasn’t just a burglary?” I asked.
Bar gave me a disgusted look and started down a hallway that looked like it led to the bedrooms.
“Holy Christ,” I murmured softly when I got to the end of it and looked around.
The master suite consisted of a huge bedroom with a line of walk-in closets on one side and a small study with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on the other. The king-sized bed was in the middle of the room, its headboard a futuristic-looking rack of reading lights and telephones shuffled together with an elaborate collection of video and sound equipment. The whole setup faced a curtain of glass that overlooked the river and I glanced involuntarily toward the ceiling. I was a little surprised not to find a mirror up there.
The room had been spectacular once, but now it looked like a garbage dump. Clothes, shoes, papers, framed pictures, files, and books were heaped in a massive pile at the center of the room. The place looked like someone had begun to build a bonfire, but had been interrupted before they could ignite it.
Bar crossed the room to the walk-in closets and shoved aside a long chrome and glass table overturned in front of them. He checked the first closet, then pushed his head into each of the others and examined them as well. When he had finished, he turned to me and delivered his verdict.
“Dollar’s on the run.”
“Christ, Bar. I’d be halfway to Madagascar by now if I came home and found that someone had worked my place over like this.”
“No, that’s not it. He took off before any of this happened.”
“And this you know exactly how, Sherlock?”
“His luggage is gone.”
Dollar was a big fan of Halliburton bags, a line of outrageously expensive suitcases made of silver-colored magnesium favored by airline pilots, people in the oil and gas business, and guys who delivered drug money in old episodes of Miami Vice. Dollar even carried a Halliburton briefcase, a flashy companion that had no doubt cost him more than the university paid me every month. He always said his Halliburtons were indestructible, but it never even occurred to me that he carried them because they were practical and long lasting. Dollar just liked their style.