“Well… maybe.”
“But why does it matter? Dollar’s a grown man. Surely he’s entitled to go anywhere he wants without you snooping through his garbage to try and figure out where he is.”
“Something’s wrong, Anita. One of Dollar’s clients has been murdered in a very public way; Dollar is apparently in hiding himself; and his house has been ransacked by somebody who must have wanted to find something pretty badly.”
“Even if that’s all true, Jack, it’s got nothing to do with you.”
“Yes, it does.”
“What?”
“I don’t know yet. That’s why I’m looking through all this crap. I’m trying to find out.”
“Well, have you allowed for the possibility that you might be wrong, that you’re not involved in whatever Dollar is up to?”
“I am, Anita, somehow. I’m absolutely sure of it. I can feel it.”
“Maybe it’s only gas you’re feeling, my darling. What did you have for lunch?”
“That wasn’t very helpful.”
“I wasn’t trying to be helpful. I was trying to show you how ridiculous all of this looks. Dollar may well be doing something that you don’t understand, but why must you understand it?”
Anita had a good point, I knew, so I said nothing.
“You have absolutely no business getting involved in any of this, Jack. No business at all.” Anita’s hands motioned vaguely in the air. “You never think of how these upheavals you’re always getting yourself involved in affect me, do you? We’re trying to be a sort of a family here, and yet you still act like you’re a man without a responsibility in the world except for yourself. You go running off on your little crusades without giving the first thought to me.”
She turned to look out the window and then almost immediately glanced back.
“Your stupid curiosity is going to be the end of us some day. Maybe you’re one of these men who’s just not meant to be married.”
“I don’t know what to say to that.”
“Neither do I, Jack. Neither do I.”
I took a long breath and slowly let it out.
“This really isn’t fair,” I said.
“No, I suppose from your point of view it isn’t, but as a great man once said, ‘Fuck fair.’“
“Anita, please try-”
“I’m going to bed now, Jack. Feel free to play with your little scraps of paper as long as you like.”
Anita turned around and walked out of the room and I looked out a window so I wouldn’t have to watch her go. Even after she was gone I kept looking out that window. I just sat there for a long time with my arms folded and stared out at the lights of the city.
I could have dismissed everything Anita said as simple petulance. Maybe she’d had a bad day at her studio and was just taking it out on me. But I wasn’t willing to let it be that easy. There was something she had said that hit a nerve, something I couldn’t shake off by blaming it on her. Maybe I really was the wrong kind of guy for a woman to share a life with. Maybe being that kind of guy was a God-given talent-something like being able to sing opera or throw a ball through a hoop-and it was a talent I just didn’t have. Anita didn’t seem to think I had it, and I supposed she knew me about as well as anyone.
I walked around the living room after that collecting all of the stuff I had gotten out of Dollar’s garbage and dumped it all back in the garbage bag except for the Thai-language documents I had set aside earlier. Then I removed the CD from the drive in my laptop, put it in a manila envelope together with those documents, and took everything down to the Volvo. The envelope went on the front seat and the garbage bag into the trunk.
Even if Anita was right about me, especially if she was right about me, maybe I was better off focusing on what I could do than worrying about what I couldn’t; so I started the car and drove to Darcy’s place.
I had no doubt that Darcy and Nata could tell me what was on the disk and in the Thai-language documents. I was certain that both were important to me somehow. I just needed to know if I was right.
And yes, Anita, I will admit it to you honestly, I wanted to know.
TWENTY NINE
I left the envelope with Darcy and Nata and slipped away quickly, pleading fatigue. Back at the apartment I took the coward’s way out and slept in the guest room, then went to my office early on Monday morning. Barely halfway through my first cup of coffee, Darcy called.
“Nothing all that dramatic after all,” she said when I answered the telephone.
It was unnecessary, of course, for Darcy to tell me what she was referring to.
“I’ve emailed you a copy of what was on the disk, but you’re probably going to be disappointed. It was a backup all right, but it was just an address book. Nothing else. Might be something there for you, but…” Darcy trailed off.
“Was it encrypted?”
“Yeah.”
“So how’d you open it?”
“I used the password.”
“But how did you know what Dollar’s password was?”
“People are pretty predictable. When they pick a password, they always use something they won’t have any trouble remembering. That’s why nearly everyone picks just some ordinary word, or maybe a phrase that’s pretty well known. Either that, or they pick a combination of numbers that represent a date or something they can easily remember.”
I listened, making a mental note to change my ATM code as soon as we hung up.
“First we tried a random number crack of four through eight digits. When that didn’t work, we ran the file against English, Thai, French, Spanish, and Italian dictionaries and then for good measure against a database of a few hundred thousand proper names, places, and phrases that people sometimes use for passwords. It only took about twenty minutes to crack Dollar’s password.”
“What was it?” I asked.
“Berghof. That mean anything to you?”
“Doesn’t it have something to do with World War II?” I thought about it briefly. “That’s what Hitler called his vacation house in the Bavarian Alps, isn’t it?”
“That’s right. It seems an odd choice of password for Dollar. Was he a World War II fanatic?”
“Beats me,” I shrugged. “How about those documents I gave you, the ones in Thai?”
“Those might be a little more useful to you. They were property transfers.”
“For what?”
Darcy hesitated, and from something in the way she did it I knew I wasn’t going to like whatever it was coming next.
“You really can’t tell very much from a Thai title deed until you compare the property description with a detailed map of the area where the transfer took place but, as nearly as I can tell, these transfers all involved large tracts of land in Phuket.”
That might explain all those American Express receipts Dollar had from Phuket, it occurred to me.
“Maybe Dollar was working on a hotel development there,” I said. “Who were the transfers made to?”
“They were all corporate, and all the names looked to me like shelf companies. It’ll take a while to find out who’s really behind them. You know that better than I do.”
“But I still don’t see why Dollar would throw title deeds away. Whoever the property was transferred to, the title deeds themselves are still important documents in Thailand.”
“These weren’t originals. They weren’t even complete. My guess is that they were just copies that were attached to something else he was working on, probably as exhibits of some kind just to prove that the transfers had actually taken place.”
“I still don’t see it, Darcy. A man who’d go to the trouble of encrypting his address book wouldn’t just toss copies of transfers like that into the trash. There’s too much information on them. He’d shred them first.”
“He would if they were real.”