“Maybe whoever hit the place took the luggage,” I said.
Bar shook his head. “This wasn’t just some kids cored on amphetamines. Anyway, they’d take pillow cases, not a matched set of expensive luggage that’s easy to ID and hard to get rid of.”
“Yeah, the stuff is indestructible,” I said.
“What?”
“Never mind.”
While Bar squatted and probed at the papers and clothing piled in the middle of the bedroom, I walked into the study area and righted a black leather swivel chair that had been pushed onto its side. I wheeled it around behind Dollar’s desk and sat down.
The desk had been thoroughly ransacked, too, yet whoever had done it had left it looking a little neater than the other things in the room. Dollar’s computer had been pushed off to one side, but it looked intact and all the pieces seemed to be connected in the usual way. I hit the power-on button just to see what would happen. I heard a musical chord and a light blue background appeared on the screen.
Dollar’s computer was a Mac, not the Windows PC I would have expected him to have. I wasn’t much of a computer guy, and I knew absolutely nothing at all about Apple stuff, so I just sat and watched the screen while it filled with icons and windows popped open displaying file names and application titles that meant nothing at all to me.
Bar heard the chord and came over and stood behind me where he could see the screen.
“We’ve got Macs at the Post,” he said. “I can probably figure this out.”
When the computer’s start-up routine was done he leaned across me, cupped his right hand over the mouse and scooted it around, selecting something from the bar of commands that ran across the top of the screen. He clicked the mouse button and all the icons immediately changed. Then he clicked it for a second time, and they changed again. Although the names of the files remained the same, each little folder now had on top of it a small cartoon figure which was decked out in the uniform of a Hollywood-style spy-dark glasses, fedora pulled down low, and a belted trench coat that was an odd electric blue color.
“Crypto shit,” Bar snorted. “PGP, I think.”
Bar might well have lapsed into Turkish. “What does that mean?” I asked.
“Dollar’s encrypted all his files, probably using a program called Pretty Good Privacy. It’s supposed to be uncrackable. Without his password, you can’t read anything.”
Bar abruptly lost interest in the computer and began examining an answering machine that was near it on the desk.
“Why would Dollar encrypt the files on his home computer?” I asked, not ready to give up yet. “Doesn’t that mean he’s got something pretty important on it?”
Bar grunted. “It’s no big deal. Any ten-year-old can get PGP on the Internet for nothing, and they say it’s almost as good as what the CIA uses. Anyway, Dollar’s too smart to leave anything that really matters just lying around on a computer in his bedroom, even if it’s encrypted.”
Without taking his eyes off the answering machine, Bar gestured vaguely in the direction of the computer. “All that’s probably nothing. Anyway, forget it. Without knowing the password, you’ll never get in.”
The answering machine was a digital model without any tapes in it. Bar put it down on the floor, plugged it in, and turned it on. When he pressed the play button, there was a brief silence, the sound of a dial tone, and then a beep.
“Hang up,” Bar observed.
After a few moments, a disembodied voice issued from the machine in a slightly spooky cadence.
“That… was… your… last… message,” the voice intoned.
Then the machine clicked off.
“I hate it when answering machines do that,” Bar said. “It sounds like they’re telling your fortune.”
I looked at Bar without saying anything. He ignored me and poked with his foot at the mound of debris in the middle of the bedroom.
“Whoever tossed this place either took what he was looking for or didn’t find anything,” he said. “Either way that still doesn’t leave anything for us to look for.”
I stood up from behind the desk and dusted my hands off on my jeans. “I guess you’re right. We ought to call the cops.”
Bar twisted his head around and looked at me as if I had suddenly begun to speak in tongues.
“Why in Christ’s name would you want to get the cops involved?”
“Dollar might be in some kind of danger.”
“Bullshit, Jack. He’s probably shacked up in Monte Carlo with a couple of French chickadees by now. Besides, Thai cops couldn’t find Santa Claus at the North Pole.”
He was right about that, of course, but then I thought back to the look I had seen on Dollar’s face the morning after Howard’s body had been found and I was less sure that Bar had the part about Monte Carlo right. Regardless, the thought about calling the cops had been an American’s reflex. In Thailand nobody ever called the cops.
“I’ll make some calls,” Bar said. “Somebody’s got to know something.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Let’s keep this between ourselves for now,” Bar added. “Maybe it’s something we shouldn’t know about.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
Bar just shook his head and walked back up the corridor and out the front doors. When we left, I made sure the button on the back of the front door handle was pushed in so that the doors would lock behind us. It was a silly gesture perhaps, but it just didn’t seem right to walk out and leave Dollar’s house unlocked no matter what condition it was in.
After Bar had gotten into his old Toyota and driven away, I started to get into my car, too, but then the thought occurred to me that perhaps I ought to make a quick circuit of the wall surrounding Dollar’s house and make sure everything was secure. It was a gesture as pointless as locking the front door, but it still seemed to me to be the least I could do for Dollar under the circumstances.
About a hundred feet south of the big gate, Dollar’s whitewashed wall joined his neighbor’s black stone wall. That left me nothing much to see in that direction so I turned around and walked back the other way. At the north end of the property, I found a narrow gap between Dollar’s wall and his neighbor’s. It was a small area where both houses stored their trashcans and all of the cans were the aluminum kind with rigid sides and heavy lids that you hardly ever saw anymore. The way the cans were arranged told an obvious story.
Two small cans had been drawn up against two large ones to form a staircase right up the side of Dollar’s whitewashed wall. I stepped up on the first can, climbed onto the second, and found myself standing just below the top of the wall. From there, swinging over it and dropping down the other side would have been a piece of cake. I had no doubt that Dollar’s visitors had come in this way and then left by opening the gate from the inside.
When I turned to climb down, the lid on one of the larger cans popped loose and inside it I spotted some files that looked just like the ones that Bar and I had found scattered over the floor of Dollar’s bedroom. But why would whoever ransacked Dollar’s place put files in a trashcan? Plainly they wouldn’t, so that could only mean that Dollar must have thrown out all this stuff sometime before his unexpected visitors arrived.
That could be pretty interesting, I thought, so after I got down I pulled the lids off the other cans as well to see what else I could find. All of those appeared to contain nothing but the usual kind of household garbage-old newspapers, empty Coke cans, plastic milk bottles, and unidentifiable organic matter emitting seriously unappetizing odors. None of those things looked nearly as interesting as the files in the first can, so I closed up the other trashcans and gave my full attention to the one that had caught my eye in the first place.