LAUNDRY MAN (A Jack Shepherd crime thriller) (25 page)

The only real problem was I had no idea at all as to how to go about finding somebody who didn’t want to be found. Fortunately, I thought I had a way to cover that. Someone who was no doubt a lot better at that sort of thing than I was came to mind.

Mango Manny probably had eyes and ears in places most people didn’t even know were places. I didn’t know what Darcy had told Manny about me and I couldn’t guess what he might be prepared to do to help me out, but I figured there was only one way to find out for sure.

When my last student appointment of the day was over I went home and made myself a tuna sandwich and some iced tea. Anita was still at her studio so I polished both of them off sitting alone at the kitchen table and flipping through the
International Herald Tribune.
After that, I showered and changed into khaki slacks, a white shirt with a button-down collar, and a blue blazer. Then I got out the Volvo and drove over to Q Bar.

It might be a little early to check out the action, but it was exactly the right time to find out if a semiretired British hit man with connections to all the wrong people might be willing to do me a little favor.

Q BAR IS
a stylish two-story structure of raw concrete and black glass set off by itself on a quiet back soi in Bangkok’s fashionable Sukhumvit district. Half obscured by groves of gum trees and tall stands of spindly bamboo, it looks less like a bar than the home of a very hip witch nestled away deep in a cartoon forest.

Nevertheless, a bar it is, although hardly just another pedestrian saloon. The place is a shifting kaleidoscope of gorgeous Thai women and flamboyant gay men, flat-eyed Chinese millionaires and hard Israeli hustlers, chubby Arab conmen and twitchy German smugglers, eager American drug runners and expressionless Japanese gangsters. Q Bar is nothing less than a Whitman’s sampler of the international riffraff that Bangkok sucks up like a vacuum cleaner, and by eleven every night it is crammed top to bottom with the beautiful people. Everyone who is chichi enough to count for anything in Bangkok has to turn up at least once a week or risk losing his standing.

It wasn’t yet quite eight o’clock when I bumped the Volvo over the gravel of the parking lot across the street from Q Bar. The lot was almost empty so I parked in a dark corner away back from the street. There weren’t that many Volvo convertibles in Bangkok and I wanted to avoid advertising my presence too blatantly to anyone who might happen to be passing by.

After I locked the car, I walked across the narrow soi and up the walkway that led past a parked rickshaw to Q Bar’s improbably turreted entry. I made my way up the narrow staircase just behind the bar and found a table to myself off on one side of the large outdoor terrace on the second floor. I remembered that the last time I had been there everybody had been puffing cigarettes like it was an entrance requirement and by eleven the interior had become one huge blue cloud. Most of the year, sitting outside in Bangkok’s humid night air wasn’t most people’s idea of a good time, but at Q Bar it sure beat the alternative.

I ordered a beer and waited. Sure enough, in a couple of minutes Mango Manny slid into the chair opposite mine.

He was dressed quite differently from the way he had been at the Polo Club and I wondered if he might have been tweaking the cheeks of the local high society types a bit back then with those gangster duds. Tonight Manny wore a dark gray tropical-weight wool suit that must have cost at least five thousand dollars and a crisp, white-on-white dress shirt without a tie. Then I registered the thick gel coating his hair and the diamond ring on his left pinkie and I decided that Manny still left the same general impression that he had at the Polo Club: a low-fat Marlon Brando with a good tailor.

“What you drinking that Singha shit for?” he muttered as he sat down. “Tastes like fooking horse piss.”

Manny snapped out something to a hovering busboy. I had never heard Thai spoken with a cockney accent before and the combination produced an interesting if utterly unintelligible sound. The boy apparently had no trouble understanding Manny however because he nodded and disappeared. Moments later a white-jacketed waiter materialized. He poured Manny a cup of tea—white, no sugar, in a china cup that looked to me like Wedgwood—and then whisked away my Singha and replaced it with a Corona that had a dewy slice of lime tucked into its long neck. The bottle was so cold that the condensation formed a little pool on the metal table before I even touched it.

Manny took a pack of Marlboros out of the inside pocket of his jacket. He offered it to me, but I shook my head and sipped at my beer while he lit one. When he returned the pack to his jacket and I was certain I had his full attention, I put the Corona down and folded my forearms on the table.

“Darcy told me to come see you if I ever needed help, Manny,” I said. “I need some help.”

He nodded, drawing on his cigarette, then he sipped tentatively at his tea and nodded again in what I took to be a gesture of permission for me to continue.

While I told Manny the story of Barry Gale and the Asian Bank of Commerce, he sat quietly and puffed on his Marlboro, taking an occasional sip of tea. At the mention of Tommy’s nocturnal appearance in my apartment and his parting threat, Manny raised his eyebrows slightly, but he didn’t say anything.

I intended to tell Manny everything. I assumed he knew Dollar since everyone else seemed to, and I was even going to tell him about the apparent connection I had stumbled on between Dollar and Barry Gale, but somewhere in the middle of the telling, I changed my mind. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust Manny—frankly I wasn’t absolutely sure whether I could trust him or not in spite of the weight that Darcy’s endorsement carried—it just seemed to me that keeping a few cards in my hand wouldn’t really hurt anything.

I wound up my tale with a description of the tracking device I had found in my car and I finished talking at exactly the same time Manny finished his Marlboro. He took out the pack back out of his jacket and shook out another, tapping it against the table a couple of times before lighting it. This time he left the pack lying on the table next to his cup. I took that as a good sign.

“All this shit got anything to do with that geezer they found under the bridge?” he asked.

“No.” I bit my lip slightly. “At least, not as far as I can see right now.”

I was prepared to edit the truth a little, but I hated flat-out lying to a man whose help I was asking for.

Manny stared directly at me, his face as flat as a dinner plate, and he continued to watch me while he took a long hit on the fresh Marlboro. He almost looked to me like he was sniffing the air for the scent of danger, and I wondered briefly if he had found it. Apparently not, because before long he shifted his eyes away from my face and focused somewhere out over my shoulder.

“So what you want from me, mate?”

“I need to find either Dollar Dunne or Barry Gale. Darcy says your people have the whole country wired. I was hoping you might be willing to help me.”

“I thought you said you weren’t involved. Now you want to find these buggers?”

“Look, Manny, think about it. I’m right in the middle of something here and I don’t know what it is or how to get out of it. When you start discovering surveillance devices in your car, you know you’re on somebody’s shit list. I can’t think of anybody but Dollar or Barry who can tell me whose list I’m on and how to get off it.”

Manny looked doubtful. The tea had grown cold and he pushed it aside with the back of his hand.

“Where these geezers gone?”

“Nobody knows.”

“Somebody
always
knows.”

“It’s not me. That’s why I’m here.”

“You think they’re together.”

“No, probably not.”

“But you saying you got no idea at all where either one of them might be?”

“Well…”

Many leaned back, folded his arms and waited.

“There’s some other stuff I didn’t tell you about,” I said after a few moments.

Manny nodded. He looked anything but surprised.

“I’ve got a hunch—and this is just a hunch, Manny—that one or both of them might be in Phuket.”

“Little birdie must a told you that, huh?”

I sighed. So much for keeping a few cards in my hand.

I explained to Manny about the connection I had found between Dollar and Barry Gale, and I told him what I had heard about Dollar laundering money for American intelligence. I didn’t tell him where I had heard it or what Stanley had said the money was going to be used for, and I noticed that he didn’t ask. Manny was a smart guy, all right. There were some things that smart guys didn’t really
want
to know.

But I did tell him about all the American Express receipts from Phuket I’d found in Dollar’s garbage and the package of property transfers that Darcy thought were fakes.

“It might mean that Dollar was using a property development scam in Phuket to launder money through the Asian Bank of Commerce and that Barry was hooked into it,” I said. “So maybe one or both of them have gone to ground somewhere down there.”

Manny didn’t say anything.

“It’s pretty thin,” I admitted.

“Bugger thin. It’s fooking transparent.”

“Yeah, well, it’s all I got.”

Manny’s eyes shifted off mine and were still for a long moment before he spoke again. “You know, you’re the second bloke today who’s come around asking me about these tossers,” he said, still not looking at me.

“You’re kidding me.”

“I look like Mr. Bean to you or what, mate?”

“Sorry, Manny, just a figure of speech.”

I waited for him to go on, but he didn’t say anything else.

“So who else was looking for them?” I finally prompted.

Manny said nothing. I gathered I was asking him to break his personal code of ethics, and I also gathered that he wasn’t going to do it.

“Then what
can
you tell me?”

Manny looked pained. “I hear there’s a shooter looking for your boys.”

“Both of them?”

Manny nodded.

Somebody was looking for both Barry and Dollar, presumably to kill them? Who the hell could
that
be?

I couldn’t imagine that Jimmy Kicks would want Dollar dead — as far as I knew, Jimmy didn’t even know who Dollar was — and it seemed equally unlikely he would want Barry dead, at least not yet. Jimmy hadn’t found out where the ABC’s money had gone yet and he would certainly want to know
that
before he said goodbye to Barry.

It seemed just as unlikely to be the Chinese. Archie Ward had said they were unhappy that their money had disappeared, of course, but they probably wouldn’t be trying to kill anyone yet either. With Howard already gone, if they killed Dollar and Barry, too, then the only person left alive they might figure could find their money for them would be…

“
Son of a bitch,” I muttered when I suddenly saw where that line of reasoning was going to take me.

Manny didn’t say anything. He just scraped back his chair and stood up.

“You had your dinner yet, mate?”

Without waiting for me to answer, he turned and walked away. Shortly after that the waiter brought me another Corona, a plate of rice, and a pungent dish of garlic squid in a rich, black bean sauce. I gathered that might be the last I would see of Manny that evening, and it was.

By the time I finished eating, Q Bar was jammed with the late-night crowd and I had already become bored with watching the beautiful people preen for each other. All the women were too dazzling and blasé for me and all the men were too gay. Or maybe it was the other way around. I couldn’t decide for sure.

I worked my way through the thick crowds down to the first floor and walked back across the street to where I had parked the Volvo.

Maybe Manny would decide to help me find either Barry or Dollar, or maybe not. Maybe I was right and one or both of them were holed up in Phuket, or maybe not. Wherever Barry Gale had gone to ground, I would bet my last dollar he was close by. Dollar, on the other hand, might be another matter altogether. I was certain he would turn out to be an awful lot further away.

It was a nice night, clear and comfortable. I threaded my way among the Mercedes, Jaguars, and BMWs crammed into Q Bar’s parking lot and I was only a few yards away from the Volvo when another car turned in. Its headlights swept across the lot and for just a moment they showed the silhouette of somebody waiting for me in the Volvo’s front passenger seat. I stopped dead.

Sliding into the shadow of a van parked next to a Mercedes, I watched for several minutes but it was too dark to see anything very clearly and no other lights hit the Volvo at the correct angle to light up the interior again. Eventually, of course, my curiosity overcame my caution. I edged away from the van and worked my way toward the Volvo keeping in what I hoped was the car’s blind spot. I moved around to the passenger side and crept toward the door in a half crouch.

It never occurred to me that it might be Dollar there in the front seat of my Volvo until I got up to the door and got a good look through the window.

And it certainly never occurred to me that Dollar might be dead until I opened the passenger door and his corpse shifted and fell out onto the ground.

THERE WERE NO
visible wounds on Dollar’s body, at least none I could see when I bent over him, and no blood at all, which made him look kind of spooky just lying there. I touched his neck without expecting to find a pulse, and of course there wasn’t one. While I was certainly no expert on such things, I guessed he must have been dead for quite a while. He was very pale, his skin almost transparent, and the body was cold.

It was obvious that Dollar had been killed somewhere else and then deposited in the front seat of my locked car as a message, just as leaving Howard dangling underneath the Taksin Bridge had undoubtedly been a message, too. With Howard, I had no idea who the message was for. With Dollar however—try as I might to conjure up some comforting ambiguity—the intended recipient was obviously me. I still wasn’t absolutely certain what the message actually
was
, but I was beginning to get a pretty good idea.