Big Mango (9786167611037) (22 page)

Eddie and Winnebago met Bar in the Thai
restaurant on the Stardust’s second floor. After he ordered
paad
thai
and Carlsbergs all around, Eddie took in the expensive
furnishings, the fresh-cut flowers, the wood-paneled walls, and the
subdued lighting, but his eyes lingered longest on the elegant
hostesses who seemed to be everywhere. After their drinks arrived,
Bar pointed to a wide staircase suitable for a remake of ‘Gone With
the Wind.’

“There’s another dining room on the third
floor. Very plush. Serves what Thais think French food is supposed
to be. Then there’s a karaoke bar on the fourth floor, and a
barbershop, a steam room, and a massage parlor downstairs.”

“Sounds real good to me,” Winnebago
nodded.

“Yep,” Bar wiggled his eyebrows. “I’ll bet
this is the only place in the world where you can eat escargot,
have your hair cut, sing ‘Feelings,’ and get your dick sucked—all
at the same time.”

While Winnebago was still trying to work out
what to say to that, their food arrived. Bar wolfed down half his
plate in a few bites, belched in satisfaction, and then waved his
spoon around. “I like this place a lot better than the restaurant
upstairs.”

“Yeah, I guess Thai food in Bangkok must be
pretty hard to beat,” Eddie agreed.

“Food’s got nothing to do with it.” Bar
chewed thoughtfully on a noodle. “Charlie insists on having men
wait the tables up there. He thinks it’s more sophisticated or some
crap like that. Look around here.”

The women working the floor of the restaurant
were all dressed in silk sarongs. They glided effortlessly from
table to table, placing their high-heeled feet as gracefully as
ballet dancers. Their inky-black hair glistened in the light and,
as they turned this way and that, their waists looked so small
Eddie thought it had to be some kind of an optical illusion.

Bar kept one eye on the door watching for
Chuck and his guy to turn up while Eddie and Winnebago finished
their food and eyed the hostesses. When Chuck finally did make his
appearance, Bar was surprised to see he was with a woman rather
than a man.

That was a problem with Thai nicknames, Bar
knew. Many of the most common ones—names like Lek—were used
interchangeably for both sexes, and there were even quite a few
nicknames that also covered people who fell somewhere between the
generally accepted definitions of the two sexes, people that Bar
was certain could be found nowhere else but in Thailand.

Bar picked up his Carlsberg and shook it at
Eddie and Winnebago to get their attention. They followed his eyes
and watched Chuck McBride and his companion cross the room.

The woman wasn’t much more than five feet
tall, and she was very slight and looked very young. Like so many
other local women, however, she appeared at first glance a decade
or two younger than she really was and, as Chuck and the woman came
closer, Bar decided she was more likely forty than twenty.

“This is Lek.” Chuck looked Eddie and
Winnebago over as he pulled out chairs for himself and the woman.
“Which one of you is Dare?”

Eddie lifted his right hand and wiggled his
fingers.

“Should have known,” Chuck grunted.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Winnebago
asked, leaning forward.

Chuck ignored him and addressed Eddie. “So
you say you’ve been hired to find out what happened to this guy
Austin, huh?”

“That’s right.”

“Who hired you?”

“If I knew, I probably wouldn’t tell you. But
I honestly don’t.”

“Bullshit.” Chuck fixed Eddie with an
unblinking gaze. “Lawyers don’t get involved in things without
knowing who they’re working for, even if they won’t tell you when
you ask them.”

“I didn’t intend to. It just worked out that
way.”

Chuck nodded a few times, but Eddie knew it
had nothing to do with signifying agreement.

“Bar told me a cock-and-bull story about you
meeting some guy after you got here who claims to be a general,”
Chuck said. “He’s supposed to be this mysterious client of
yours?”

“Yes, that’s right.” Eddie figured that was
stretching things only slightly.

“You had lunch with him in a private dining
room on the top floor of the Regent?”

“Uh-huh.”

“That’s a crock.” Chuck leaned back and laced
his fingers behind his head. “Look, Dare, I know this shithole as
well as any white man ever could, and let me tell you something.
There ain’t no dining rooms on the top floor of the Regent, private
or otherwise. There’s nothing up there but regular rooms and a
couple of suites.”

“Then I don’t know what to tell you. That’s
where I had lunch with the man who paid me to find out what
happened to Harry Austin.” Eddie tried to return Chuck’s stare, but
now Chuck was looking off across the room and he couldn’t catch his
eye. “You’re a real hard on, aren’t you, McBride?”

Chuck just grunted again.

“I read your column every Saturday, Mr.
Phillips.” Lek spoke in a voice so soft that at first Bar wasn’t
absolutely sure she had spoken at all. “And so did Harry.”

Bar gave Chuck a long look, but he was still
staring across the room and didn’t seem to notice.

“Did you know Harry Austin well?” Bar asked
Lek.

“Reasonably well,” she nodded. “He was my
husband.”

Bar just bobbed his head a little and sipped
at the dregs of his Carlsberg as if he knew she was going to say
that. Winnebago cut his eyes at Eddie, but Eddie was watching
Lek.

“I said I’d bring somebody who could tell you
about Austin, and like Mandrake the fucking Magician, I bring you
his wife.” Chuck made a little two-handed flourish in Lek’s
direction.

“Widow,” Eddie corrected.

“We’ll get to that later. Anyway, I think a
little gratitude is in order here.” Chuck pointed at Bar’s empty
Carlsberg. “One of those will do fine for me. I’m a cheap date.”
Chuck looked at Lek and raised his eyebrows and she nodded. “And
one for Lek, too. But she’s certainly
not
a cheap date.”

Bar raised a hand at one of the waitresses,
nodded toward his empty bottle on the table, and made a whirling
motion in the air with his index finger. He had never figured out
exactly what the hell that gesture was supposed to mean, but it
always seemed to get more drinks brought to the table so he kept on
doing it.

Bar gave Chuck a weary smile. “So you’re
suggesting we need to juice up the grieving widow with a little
cash before this goes any further?”

“No, Mr. Phillips,” Lek spoke in a much
stronger voice now, one with a clear edge. “He is
not
saying
that.”

Bar made a gesture with his hands that he
thought was appropriately apologetic, but he didn’t say
anything.

“I’m not surprised you assume that I am just
a bargirl who met Harry a few times and is now trying to make some
quick cash. I’m not surprised, Mr. Phillips, but you are quite
mistaken.”

Bar had, of course, assumed exactly that.

“I’m sorry if I offended you,” he said.

“You didn’t offend me, Mr. Phillips. Thai
women are used to it. Men always seem to think with their peckers
around us, don’t they?”

She had him there, Bar knew, so he just
bobbed his head noncommittally and leaned back to await
developments.

“Where did you meet Captain Austin?” Eddie
asked. He hadn’t taken his eyes off Lek since she sat down at the
table.

“We met when I worked in the international
section of Bangkok Bank. My job was to coordinate operations with
our international correspondent banks.”

Bar flipped his eyes toward Chuck who
returned his glance with an insufferably smug smile.

“Harry had quite a lot of money invested with
us. Mostly term deposits in various currencies and some other very
conservative stuff. Something was always getting fouled up and I
helped him sort things out several times.” She stopped for a
moment. “Anyway, the rest of the story is really none of your
concern. The point is that eventually we fell in love and got
married. After that, Harry insisted I quit working at the
bank.”

“Tell them why,” Chuck prompted
encouragingly.

“Harry worried about me. He said there were
people who would eventually come looking for him because they
wanted something he had. He said as long as I worked at a bank it
would look like I knew about it and I would be in danger.” She
hesitated again, selecting her words with care. “He never told me
exactly what he meant, but I thought it was obvious it had
something to do with where his money came from.”

Chuck glanced at Eddie. “Did Bar showed you
the picture?” he asked. “The one the motorcycle guy gave him?”

Eddie nodded.

“Austin was the guy in the chair, wasn’t
he?”

Chuck made a question out of it, but Eddie
didn’t bother to answer. They both knew it was true.

“What the fuck’s going on here?” Winnebago
snapped in exasperation. “If you got this all figured out, man,
just tell us, huh?”

Chuck slowly shook his head. “I’ve been
trying to put the pieces together for a long time. Harry Austin was
one piece, and now I seem to have found me some others. You guys
probably know better than I do what kind of picture they make.”

“Harry didn’t die in any accident,” Lek broke
in. “I’m sure of it. Somebody killed him.”

Winnebago pushed back in his chair. “Oh,
Sweet Jesus.”

“Who identified the body?” Eddie asked
Lek.

“I don’t know. I didn’t find out what had
happened until the
wat
called asking for a donation to pay
for his cremation.”

“The ‘what’?” Winnebago asked.

“
Wat
, not ‘what,’” Bar explained.
“It’s the Thai word for a Buddhist temple.”

“Who made the cremation arrangements?” Eddie
watched Lek closely.

“I guess the police must have. I didn’t.”

Eddie started to ask her if she had ever
heard of the Little Princess, but something made him hesitate and
he was still thinking about it when Chuck took over the
conversation again.

“Forget all that shit.” Chuck was smiling and
Eddie wasn’t sure he liked that. “Here’s where I’m going with this.
Harry told Lek very little, but she gathered from one thing and
another that everything was connected with the time he spent in
‘Nam.”

Bar raised his eyebrows a notch, wondering if
he was overlooking something obvious. “I thought you were
investigating Austin. How was it you came to be such a close friend
of the family and all?”

Chuck shrugged off the implication. Eddie
noticed he didn’t even flinch and made a mental note that Bar’s
suspicions about Chuck and Lek were probably off the mark. If there
had been any personal involvement between them, Eddie would bet he
could have seen it in Chuck’s face when Bar popped him with that
jab.

“We didn’t turn anything up on Harry, so I
just called him one day and introduced myself,” Chuck went on. “He
thought it was funny as hell we had him down as a possible dealer
and we hung around some after that.”

“When Harry died, I called Chuck,” Lek said.
She had gone back to speaking softly again and the four men leaned
toward her, straining not to miss anything. “Harry gave me a key to
a safety deposit box just before he died. It was at the Hong Kong
& Shanghai Bank on Silom Road. He asked me not to open the box
unless something happened to him but, if anything did, to destroy
what I found in it. When I saw what it was, I knew Harry hadn’t
died in an accident so I took everything to Chuck.”

All four of them watched Lek as she pulled
several sheets of paper from her purse. Eddie noticed that the
purse was a Chanel. At least he thought it was. The fakes they sold
in Thailand were so good he was never sure if things like that were
real or not.

Lek was an attractive woman and she had that
combination of confidence and vulnerability Eddie had always been a
sucker for. As she fumbled in her purse, she shifted in her chair
and her short, straight skirt slid further up her thighs. Eddie’s
eyes traced her slim, bare legs all the way down to what may have
been the sexiest, most feminine ankles he had ever seen in his
entire life. What could a guy married to a woman like this be doing
at a massage parlor? Maybe it was just a coincidence that Austin’s
body had been found outside the Little Princess.

Straightening up, Lek put the papers on the
table, squaring up their edges in an unconscious gesture that
caught Eddie’s eye. “These were in the box,” she said.

Picking up the sheets of paper, Eddie scanned
them while Bar and Winnebago leaned over and tried to see them,
too. The first two pages were a list of names, some with addresses
and telephone numbers next to them and some without. Eddie’s name
and Winnebago’s were on the first page, along with both of their
San Francisco addresses.

The last five pages were photocopies of
snapshots.

Two pages showed different views of Austin
and about seven or eight other men in off-duty fatigues clowning
around a bar somewhere. Eddie didn’t remember ever seeing the place
before, but it was obvious he must have. In the first photograph he
was standing about ten feet from Austin, his arm around a cute
little girl with hair down below her waist. In the second, he was
sitting at a table resting his chin on one fist and looking at the
camera with empty eyes. The last three pages were photocopies of
the two photographs that had been mailed to Eddie and the one given
to Bar by the motorcyclist, all with the same circles drawn around
the same heads.

“Oh, God,” Eddie groaned.

“Yeah, first this…” Chuck waved at the papers
Eddie was holding, “and then Bar comes strolling into my office
with the original of one of these and a wild story about the other
two winding up with you guys in San Francisco.”

“Yeah,” Winnebago said. “And they were mailed
from here in Thailand.”