I dumped it out onto the ground and used my foot to stir through the contents. At a glance it seemed to be nothing more than the usual accumulation of office trash, but since I’d come this far I squatted down and began to sift methodically through everything. There were piles of American Express vouchers, a lot of mobile phone bills, statements from several different banks, and bundles of correspondence. Opening one of the bundles, I sat on the ground and began to read. In less than five minutes I knew what I had found.
Nothing.
The stuff was just a bunch of correspondence going back a number of years between Dollar and some investment managers in London. Other than confirming Dollar had a bit of money put away, which I already assumed, and that he kept a close eye on it, which I could have guessed, none of the correspondence told me anything at all. I flipped through a second bundle and found more of the same. A third was mostly contract notes confirming securities trades as well as a few monthly position statements for some brokerage accounts. I had pretty much given up the idea finding anything interesting and had begun tossing everything back into the trashcan when a CD slid out of one of the bundles I hadn’t bothered to look through and fell to the ground. I picked it up and examined it. It looked new, but there was no label on it. I thought back to the Mac in Dollar’s bedroom. Did it have a CD burner in it? I couldn’t remember.
I turned the disk around in my hands. Was it a backup copy of some of Dollar’s important personal files? Or was it just a pirate copy of some computer game he had bought at the night market and then discovered didn’t work?
Maybe there was more here that I thought. Apparently I needed to look more carefully. I set the disk to one side and piled everything else back in the trashcan. When I finished, I picked up the disk, then I grabbed the handle of the trash can with my free hand and carried both of them around to the front of the house. I placed the CD gently on the Volvo’s front seat and dumped the complete contents of the can into the trunk.
Howard the Roach was dead and now Dollar Dunne seemed to be on the run. I still had absolutely no idea why, but there was no doubt in my mind of at least one thing: whatever the reason, and whatever this thing really was, it was getting closer and closer to me. I figured I had better find out exactly what was going on before some asshole showed up at my door to tidy up loose ends and I discovered one of those loose ends was me.
I would have hoped for a more dignified way to do that than digging through garbage. Still, I had to start somewhere, didn’t I?
TWENTY EIGHT
Anita was still at her studio when I got home so I found a big trash bag under the kitchen sink, took it down to the garage, and scooped all of Dollar’s garbage out of my trunk. After I had lugged everything back upstairs to the apartment, I got out my laptop and settled down in one of the leather chairs in front of the windows to look at the CD I had found in Dollar’s trash.
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.