Paying Back Jack (20 page)

After he had looked the place over, Calvino's attention returned to Amy, or whatever her name was, and reached out to touch her hand. He stopped, though, before making contact; it would have interrupted her eye-lock with the guitar player at center stage. He looked like a half-starved bird flapping its wings, jerky on its feet, head moving side to side as he worked the struts on the guitar. Amy sipped her Johnnie Walker Black and raised it to him. He returned her smile. By the end of the second set, three of Amy's friends had arrived, and Amy had written her phone number on a Tiger beer coaster and slipped it to the guitar player.

“Remember the red sports car?” Calvino whispered in her ear.

Amy turned away from her friends, who had helped themselves to the bottle of scotch. “That's him,” she said. “The guy who owns the Mazda.”

She nodded at the guitar player in the middle. Colonel Pratt had gone on stage and stood a couple of feet away while the band played on. Calvino tried to imagine the birdlike creature throwing Nongluck off the balcony of the hotel. He had rarely seen anyone with less muscle tone. But in the heat of an argument it wouldn't take much muscle to toss forty-three kilos off a balcony. It could have happened that way, Calvino told himself.

Colonel Pratt's eyes were closed as he played a Charlie Parker piece, his cheeks puffed out as if floating to the level where dreams are made. On stage with the saxophone strapped around his neck, he didn't look remotely like a cop. He slowly moved the length of the stage, his head bobbing, stopping for a moment, bending his knees, arching his back as he hit a high note. Calvino had seen him play many times before but never quite in a performance like this one.
Pratt's lungs and body had channeled Charlie Parker and inside that envelope of bliss, the Colonel had gone over to some place Charlie Parker was still playing. Whatever world Pratt had been transported to, he carried the audience along with him. He had the Jakarta scout tapping the palm of his hand against the edge of the counter. No one in the crowded room talked; no one took their eyes off Pratt and his saxophone; pure emotion and impulse poured from his instrument.

After the final number, Pratt and the band bowed to a standing ovation. A new band came on as they left. The Jakarta scout signaled a thumbs-up to Colonel Pratt as he walked offstage. The mother with her frilly-dressed daughter came onstage; they were part of the new act. The mother sang; the kid sang and danced. Pratt came back to the counter with the guitar player, who held the beer coaster with Amy's phone number written on it. He looked like a garuda, a mythical bird, swooping down with talons exposed. Calvino looked at the guitar player and then at Colonel Pratt. “He owns the red sports car.” The information had set him back a bottle of scotch.

The guitar player leaned forward, bracing himself against the bar, joking with Amy and her friends. Colonel Pratt asked if he might have a word with him outside. Calvino had gone ahead and was standing by the sports car when Colonel Pratt and the Birdman, also known as Nop, came out the door.

“Nice car,” said Calvino, leaning against the side.

“Were you in Pattaya last Tuesday night?” asked Colonel Pratt.

The Birdman crunched his mouth into a pout, as if he had to think hard to recall where he was on Tuesday. “I might have been. Why are you asking?”

Colonel Pratt showed the Birdman his badge. “What hotel did you stay in?”

“I stayed with a friend,” he said, no longer looking cocky and strutting. Nop was becoming another kind of bird.

“That's not what I asked. What was the name of the hotel?”

“I can't keep them straight. One of the hotels on Beach Road.”

“You stayed with a woman?”

“What if I did?”

“What was her name?”

“I can't.”

“Can't what?”

“Tell you or she'd kill me,” said the Birdman.

“Have you ever killed anyone?” asked Calvino.

The birdman winced. “Man, are you crazy? Why would I kill someone?”

Calvino stretched his arms. “You don't strike me as
panya nim,
” he said.

Being called stupid or soft in the head by a farang wasn't something the Birdman liked, but given the circumstances he had little choice in the matter.

“There's nothing wrong with my head,” he said.

“Khun Nop, we can always go to the station and check that out,” said Colonel Pratt. He was always pleased when Calvino brought a piece of Thai out like a fast right jab, a verbal flurry that propelled his Thai listener against the ropes. In this case the Colonel thought that his friend's assessment of the Birdman was right on the mark. He looked more like a Nop hanging on a thread than a Birdman ready to control an audience.

COLONEL PRATT NEVER ARRIVED at Calvino's office without some small gift for Ratana's baby. Manee, the Colonel's wife, bought clothes, toys, and food, making certain her husband was well-stocked. This time, the Colonel arrived with a hand puppet, a golden-velvet duck with green eyes and a red cloth tongue. Manee had picked it up at Siam Paragon. It had been gift wrapped. He handed it to Ratana before kneeling down beside the playpen and looking through the mesh at the babies. Unlike Calvino, he never had any trouble spotting John-John.

Ratana looked at the heavy silver wrapping paper until Calvino said, “There's something inside.” She slid a letter opener into the end and carefully folded back the paper. She slipped her fingers into the pockets for the upper and lower jaw of the duck. “John-John will love it. Tell Khun Manee I like it very much.” She pulled the puppet off her hand and handed it to the Colonel. “You show him.”

Colonel Pratt moved the duck's head from side to side as the baby's eyes followed the movement. “Have you eaten yet?”

Ratana smiled with delight. The baby's legs kicked and a line of slobber rolled down one corner of his mouth. “He loves it,” she said.

Calvino sat on the edge of Ratana's desk. “She's right,” he said.

But for Ratana, nothing could ever be as simple as pure, spontaneous enjoyment; there had to be some underlying omen expressed in the baby's reaction. “Last life, he rose from his sleep from the
quacking of a duck as the house was on fire. He would have died. But a duck saved him,” she said.

“Or he just likes cute puppets,” said Calvino.

Colonel Pratt removed the hand puppet and gave it to Ratana. “You try it.”

She slipped on the puppet and bent over the playpen. Her son kicked his feet and waved his hands like a turtle trying to right itself. The gravity of motherhood had pulled Ratana into a world where the child was everything; each act, decision, or thought started and finished with the child. Calvino tried not to feel excluded from her new world, but he couldn't help himself. He was happy that she finally had what every Thai woman wished for: motherhood. To become the mother goddess was to have achieved a vindication, to have climbed to a sacred platform and claimed a throne.

“The Colonel's going to the Java Jazz Festival,” said Calvino.

Ratana's eyes widened.

“It's a long shot,” said Colonel Pratt, displaying no emotion.

“That scout loved you. The audience loved you.”

Ratana smiled, “And we love you, too.”

Colonel Pratt walked ahead to Calvino's side of the office and sat down with his briefcase, unfastening the clasp.

“If Casey phones, take a message,” Calvino said to Ratana.

“He's already phoned twice this morning.”

He sighed, looking at Colonel Pratt. “You wouldn't believe this guy.”

Colonel Pratt was prepared to believe just about anything one of Calvino's clients might say or do. The trouble with clients like Casey is that they assume their fee buys the investigator and not just his professional services. Ordering him around fell in that hard place between ego-inflated, know-it-all boss and neurotic father telling a child to finish eating his vegetables or else.

After questioning the Birdman the previous night, the Colonel had gone to his office and done some homework. Now he arranged spreadsheets, photographs, and computer printouts of emails neatly on Calvino's desk. Calvino listened as the Colonel walked him through the chronology. A red sports car had entered the hotel parking lot at 3:39 p.m. and left the following morning at 1:12 a.m., according to
the receipts. Calvino placed himself in bed at the time the red Mazda must have sped out of the hotel parking lot. The attendants had a shift change at 6:00 p.m. But the descriptions of the car and driver given by the two attendants had matched. They'd both remembered seeing a red Mazda RX-8 with Bangkok plates and described the driver as a young Thai male who wore sunglasses and a hat like a movie star. No one got a good look at the driver. The police had shown the witnesses a hundred photos of possible suspects. But there had been no positive identification, and this left the investigation stranded in the zone of nowhere.

The cops, who had polished off the liter bottle of vodka, had flopped down and were fast asleep. Colonel Pratt had emailed a JPEG photo of the Birdman to his friend in the Pattaya police, who'd showed it to the underground parking attendants, who were able to ID the Birdman as the driver of the red Mazda.

“They had no doubt in their minds,” said Colonel Pratt.

“That puts him at the hotel, but not in her room.”

“We're working to find hotel staff who worked the day before you arrived and the night she died.”

“I'd start with the staff who upgraded my room.”

Colonel Pratt smiled. “Where else would we have started?”

Calvino heard the office phone ring. Ratana picked up and told the caller that he wasn't available. He assumed from her chilled, formal tone that she had Casey on the phone.

“Was the Birdman alone in the car?” asked Calvino.

Colonel Pratt nodded. “No one noticed a passenger when he arrived. Or the next morning when he left.” He paused as a realization struck him. “It's hard to miss a passenger in a small car.”

That model of Mazda had enough trunk space for a six-pack of beer, a bag of potato chips, and a few bananas.

Calvino smiled. “There are a lot of small people in this country, in case you haven't noticed.”

“What are you saying?”

Calvino leaned forward and, fingers gliding over the keyboard, typed in a search phrase for the Birdman, and then turned his computer screen around. “This guy gets more action than a starting pitcher for the Yankees.” On the screen were photos of the Birdman with a dozen different women, all of them young and beautiful, with toothpaste-selling smiles and shiny hair.

“Is Nongluck in any of the photos?” asked Colonel Pratt.

Calvino shook his head. “Doesn't look like it. But not every photo of this guy is on the Internet.”

“We questioned him for three hours, Vincent. According to his story, he wanted to get away from the big city. ‘Downtime' is what he called it. A phrase he picked up from a farang. The Pattaya police confirmed that he'd checked in at the Rama Gardens a couple of miles away from your hotel. He parked at your hotel because it was close to the restaurant and the beach. Going to Pattaya alone is strange. He let something slip about a woman, but when I called him on it, he said that he meant he was likely to run into a few fans who wanted to meet him. But that he'd never met Nongluck. He said he had no idea who she was. And as far as Apichart was concerned, he knew him only from the newspapers. There were a lot of people in the hotel that day and night, coming and going. He swore that he'd been on the beach and crossed Beach Road to eat at a restaurant. The people at the restaurant remembered him. He's a celebrity. In the local jazz scene, people know him. And he has no motive.”

“You're saying he's a dead end?”

Colonel Pratt, showing fatigue, feeling a defeat pulling him in a direction he didn't want to go, nodded before he looked away. He searched for the words to explain that a search-and-rescue for a Burmese on a Thai fishing boat had been called off because of a manpower shortage. The men had been reassigned to help with the election. The reality was that law enforcement priorities gave way to political reality. How could he expect a farang, even one who'd been around as long as Calvino, to accept choices that were largely unacceptable but necessary nonetheless?

“There's no apparent connection to Apichart or Nongluck. At least nothing we've found on the surface. I need a reason to dig beyond that. I don't see one. Do you?”

“What he's saying? He drove alone to Pattaya so he could walk on the beach alone and then eat alone? Does that sound very Thai to you? The Thais are social animals; people who do such things alone are sociopaths.”

“But that's his story, and I don't see any holes in it.”

From Ratana's side of the office partition, Calvino heard the squeak of the hand puppet, silence, and then Ratana's official office
voice. The door opened and an aggressive alpha male asked to see Vincent Calvino. Calvino recognized Casey's voice.

Ratana stuck her head around the corner and announced Casey's arrival. Calvino held up two fingers, meaning two minutes. Her kid started crying at the same time. It didn't take long for the other babies to join the wailing chorus, but once she returned to the playpen, the tiny soprano voices shifted from the terror of Wagner to the giggles of Gilbert and Sullivan. Casey must have scared the babies, setting off a panic and distress. He was the quintessential figure that made dogs growl and back up. Calvino felt some sympathy with the kids; something about the enigmatic and angry Casey scared him too.

Colonel Pratt had started to put the documents back into his briefcase.

“What's the baseline? Are they putting Nongluck's death down as a suicide?” asked Calvino.

“It doesn't necessarily mean it's a suicide. It's a wrongful death under suspicious circumstances. Unless we get something more to go on, Vincent, there's not a lot anyone can do.” Nongluck's death was looking more and more like one of those unsolved cases that were swallowed into a black hole called “open and unresolved.” There wasn't much to connect Calvino to the death. Pratt said that finding the sports car in the hotel parking lot wasn't necessarily evidence of the musician's involvement in the wrongful death. The case had splintered into many pieces, and there was no apparent way to fit them together.