The Godfather of Kathmandu (34 page)

It’s around midnight when I finally decide to call Sukum to get the names of Moi’s surviving ex-husbands. Then I take a cab to the station to dig out the report from the nerds who hacked into Frank Charles’s computer. Then I take a cab to his penthouse on Soi 8.

It’s about two in the morning, and most of the action is finished for the night at Nana Plaza when I pass. There is a drunken
farang
who has to hold on to the wooden guardrail of one of the bars in order to stand up, and a
katoey
who is trying to get him to his hotel. A bunch of whores are crossing the street to the Nana Café, where it is possible to hang out until dawn, hoping a customer will show up. There is a line of taxis, too, ready to take stray jet-lagged
farang
to those unlicensed bars where you’re scrutinized from behind a spyhole before they let you in (you don’t have to be white, just foreign), and where you can drink and play with girls for as long as you have the dough. Soi 8, also, is very quiet but still carries the signs of a party neighborhood: girls with
farang
sitting on iron seats outside a closed bar; a Westerner in his late twenties singing to himself on his way home (an ancient European Cup song to the tune of “Blue Danube”:
Vienna are shit, shit-shit shit-shit);
a couple of cops standing by a lamppost, chatting.

At the apartment building they are surprised to see me and not too keen to let me into Charles’s suite—can’t it wait till morning? I’m in no mood for diplomacy, though, and opt for arrogance as a means of getting their attention. Now I’m sharing the elevator with a sulky receptionist who
opens the door to the penthouse and shrugs. She doesn’t have the time or the patience to hang around, so she closes the door behind me and returns to reception. All alone in the silence of his death—which, I now realize, has quietly penetrated every aspect of his home—I decide to pause, trying to commune with his spirit.
Were you murdered after all?
I ask the bust in the Jacuzzi.
If so, why?
The response is ambiguous; I sense a kind of relief, even amusement, on the part of the deceased’s ghost, while I check out the Windows address book on the PC.

It takes less than a second to find the name, address, and telephone number of Robert Witherspoon, Moi’s American ex-husband. Interesting that Frank Charles had found the need to keep the coordinates on his computer. Still more interesting that Witherspoon is located in Hawaii. When I dig a little further into the computer’s secret chambers, I find a Skype account with Witherspoon’s name and photograph: a square-jawed, balding blond in his midforties, wearing a black T-shirt, is attached to the address book by means of a mug shot. I click on the glyph, and the monitor comes alive with the Skype home page. I double-click on Witherspoon’s mug shot. The program tells me my request to speak to him has been sent. My heartbeat seems to have doubled, and I’m clutching the edge of the desk when Witherspoon himself appears on the screen. Now I realize I don’t have a microphone or computer camera—but Charles must have owned such items to go with the Skype account. I rummage frantically in the drawers under the desk; a plug-in mike/headphone set and camera are in the bottom drawer. I plug them into the front of the PC, don the headset, and say in a rush, “Good morning—is it still morning in Hawaii? My name is Detective Jitplee cheep of the Royal Thai Police. A few days ago I think you sent a DVD to my home?”

A long pause, during which I imagine my words and image finding their way across the globe to Hawaii. Then: “Yes, it’s still morning in Hawaii. What took you so long?” Witherspoon says.

“I’m half Thai,” I explain.

Witherspoon blinks into the computer cam as if he is trying to see me more clearly. “Are you?”

“Didn’t you know that?”

“I don’t know scat. This guy, this Hollywood director, calls me out of the blue one day and asks me to tell him all I know about my ex-wife, the world-class witch named Doctor Mimi Moi. So I told him, which wasn’t
much. We got chatting. We must have Skyped each other about ten times, so we’re bonding in a way. He asked me to do him a favor. I said,
What?
He said,
I’m gonna send you a little package with an address on it. Just keep the package until you hear that I’m dead—then send it to the address that’s written on it.”

“That’s it?”

“Pretty much. Look, I’d love to talk more, but I’m due to go on vacation in about twenty minutes with my new girlfriend and I don’t want to screw this one up. How about you call me in about a week?”

I say, “Huh?” Somehow, what with the excitement of the chase, the last thing I expected was a key witness on vacation. “Where are you going?”

Witherspoon lets me have a wry grin. “New girl, buddy, I’m being spontaneous. Speak to you.” He Skypes off.

On Bangkok murder squads, inspiration and paranoia are Siamese twins joined at the hip for life; some of us theorize they are the same thing. I’ve got it now, the insight into the devious workings of an exceptionally twisted and gifted criminal mind—but whose? I’ll find out. I’m 100 percent certain I’ve finally got a handle on the Fat
Farang
Case, and for the first time I’m slightly irritated with myself that I’ve promised Sukum he can have all the glory. This may be a good sign: maybe I’m returning to egocentric normality, thereby rehabilitating myself as a card-carrying citizen of the twenty-first century? Whatever, I am unashamedly pleased with myself this fair morning when I am on the phone to Virginia. The FBI listens to me in attentive silence, then says, “You’re a genius, Sonchai, there’s no other word for it—I’ve been racking my brains about your case, but I never would have thought of the solution. You’re just amazing.”

“There’s nothing I can do until you get me some fingerprints, or, even better, DNA samples,” I say, not for the first time.

“Don’t worry, honey, we’ll get them. In the meantime you might try his apartment.”

“I’m onto it—but the place was very clean. Any fingerprints or hair samples are likely to be from cleaners or the forensic people—it was never the crime scene, so we weren’t too careful.”

“What about his car?”

“Yes, I’ll try it.”

I get the keys to Frank Charles’s Lexus from Sukum and take a cab
over to the building on Soi 8. Charles’s penthouse owns three parking spaces underneath the building, and it takes about a minute to find the metallic-gray sedan parked in one of them. Best bet for prints, always, is to dust the gear stick and steering wheel. I dust both and lift the prints. Even in the rough I think I can see one set of prints repeated over and over again. I also pick up a selection of fiber rubbings from the front seat, pop them into a bag, rush them over to forensics—and even though it’s only three in the afternoon, I’m so exhausted from having been up all night I decide a massage is called for. I go to the massage shop at the corner of Soi 39 and Sukhumvit, mostly because of the sense of religious silence that prevails there after lunch when most of the customers have gone back to work and most of the girls are fast asleep.

So here I am, prone and submissive under a muscular girl who is all of five feet tall and in the process of delivering the most delicious torture to my mind-ravaged body, when—of course—my cell phone rings. I fish it out of my pants, which are hanging by my side, to check the identity of the caller. I only deal with emergencies during massage, but when I see it is the FBI I signal to the girl to hold off with the torment for a moment while I take the call.

“Got it,” the FBI says, “it was an amazing piece of luck. I just happened to be making some casual checks on the Net, using Frank Charles as a keyword, and guess what? He was in some kind of paternity dispute with a Thai woman here in the U.S. a few years ago. It seems she was trying to tap him for dough on the assumption he wouldn’t fight the claim for child support, but he did, and the DNA test came out in his favor—it wasn’t his kid. So I got hold of the file and now we not only have prints, a mouth swab, and some hair follicles, we have the DNA chart. We already have his DNA profile, in other words. I’m sending it via e-mail, you’ll have it in roughly ten seconds.” She hangs up.

If I was a cooler kind of cop I’d let the girl finish with the massage, but I’m not. I apologize and give her an extra big tip, and now I’m on a bike on my way back to the station. Sure enough, when I arrive I see the FBI has already sent me the file. Now I don’t need the prints and fiber from the Lexus. I print out the DNA chart and hold it to my heart for a moment, while expressing profound thanks to the Buddha that I have not
totally lost my touch or my luck or my mind. In fact, I’m wondering why I was so slow to catch on. Even Frank Charles’s obesity makes a sinister kind of sense: who was ever going to doubt the victim was him, the morbidly obese giant with the long hair, fat face, and gray beard? But all those things—the beard, the obesity, the long hair—have the capacity to diminish individual traits. Somehow, Charles found a willing substitute—such things have been known—who was prepared to die a few years earlier than expected (with that kind of weight no one lives long; maybe the proxy was terminally ill?), in return, perhaps, for a generous payment to his dependants? With the corpse mutilated in exactly the way portrayed in the movie, no one was going to doubt the identity of the victim—it was a brilliant device, depending more on illusion than anything else: the one thing no sane person was going to doubt was that the victim was
the
Frank Charles. Amazing! It was only the unexpected revelation that the death scene in the movie was faked that put me on the right track. Now everything is clear and obvious and I’m kicking myself for not working it out before. For some reason, Frank Charles wanted to disappear—why? I don’t know. When I call Doctor Supatra, she tells me she’ll have a DNA test done using the victim’s blood and get back to me. It will take a couple of days.

Isn’t it awful when the glorious rediscovery of your innate genius and street smarts turns out to be a delusion? That’s the trouble with relentless optimism: it leads to suicide. Right now I’m thinking maybe I really have lost it totally; okay, it was a reasonable hypothesis that if the movie was faked, it was to provide Frank Charles with a way of finally liberating himself from an identity which had become a burden. In Thailand it is not unusual for someone with the means to buy a new persona in some other province, or, as often as not, across the border in Cambodia, where the bribes are lower and enforcement rarer—but in the case of a rich
farang
, his refuge could have been just about anywhere in Southeast Asia. I had visions of turning up uninvited and unexpected on some five-star beach, maybe in the Philippines, or Malaysia, or Vietnam, or—my first bet—Sihanoukville, Cambodia, with the bad news that I had come to arrest the fat bearded guy who had only recently bought a beach property in an obscure spot where he had planned on living out the rest of his days in peace and anonymity. Wrong.

Supatra just called with the astonishing news that the deceased really is—was—Frank Charles: his DNA matches perfectly the DNA chart the FBI provided from the paternity action in California. Now I’m scratching my head. Have you ever heard of such a thing yourself,
farang?
A guy takes the trouble to record his suicide message about a year before the event, goes through with it all on film to the last gory detail—except he fakes it. Then, next thing you know, he turns up dead in the same sordid
flophouse where he filmed his fake suicide, and not only that, he dies in exactly the way he pretended to die in the movie? Amazing. Maybe you’ve worked it out already,
farang
, after all, you have the full genetic complement necessary for this conundrum. Myself, I’m only half Western, and I just don’t get it.

For the moment, I’m working on the psychologically sound hypothesis that he chickened out the first time, then brooded and dared and cursed himself to the sticking point where he was actually able to go through with it; that’s why we have a fake suicide followed by a real one. This is by no means unusual in the self-annihilation community: so often someone is talked down off a high ledge where they were coyly waiting for attention, only to jump under a train a month later. You can’t stop human will. I’m uneasy, though; this case has levels all the way down to caverns measureless to man, and my doubting mind is already finding holes in my new hypothesis. If he finally decided to do himself in, why imitate the movie? Why go to that ridiculous amount of trouble when a simple overdose would have done it? There was a case in Soi 11 of a Belgian john who paid the owner of the Twenty-Four Bar for nonstop servicing by not less than two girls at a time for a twenty-four-hour period while he worked his way through a box of Viagra and a bottle of vodka. In his sixties, he died of a heart attack a few days later—it’s the kind of ending I would have expected of Frank Charles. Yep,
uneasy
fairly describes my state of mind. I seek relief in doodling on a Post-it sticker, then, feeling somewhat primitive, I decide instead to avail myself of the Internet for its infinite distractions. How about keying in a few names and playing chase-the-clues-across-the-planet? One name holds a particular sonority.

In less than five minutes I have the webpage of one Robert Witherspoon, a Hawaii-based gemologist. It’s a professional sort of page, uncluttered, elegant, with no extraneous advertising and a
CONTACT ME
panel small enough to ignore. There is no way to order his products online. You get the feeling this is not a beginner who recently graduated from gem school after giving up day trading in pork bellies. Either Witherspoon does not need an army of Internet customers, or he figures discretion is the best marketing device for the global 2 percent he wants to attract. There are no pictures of his stones set in flattering filigree silver or gold. In fact, there is only one picture on the whole page: a beautiful gem cut perfectly with facets to catch and break light from all directions. It dominates
the monitor like a beacon and is only half explained by the caption, which reads,
A perfect Padparadscha Sapphire will be orangey pink in color
.