LAUNDRY MAN (A Jack Shepherd crime thriller) (6 page)

“I didn’t see any danger in going tonight or I wouldn’t go, Anita.”

“You didn’t see any danger in going to a dangerous part of town and waiting for some nut who called out of a clear blue sky claiming to be a dead man? You really don’t see any danger in doing that in the middle of the night?”

“It’s not a dangerous part of town, it’s a supermarket. And midnight isn’t really the middle of the night.”

“Don’t pull that lawyer crap on me, hot-shot.”

“Look, Anita, when was the last time you heard of a foreigner being assaulted by anyone in Bangkok?”

“The week before last.”

“What are you talking about?”

“That French photographer. It was in all the papers.”

Come to think of it, Anita was right. A couple of weeks before, a motorcyclist had shot to death a middle-aged Frenchman walking back to his apartment after an evening spent drinking at the Crown Royal in Patpong. The foreign community had fretted about that for a few days, but the whole incident quickly slid off their radar when the
Bangkok Post
reported that the Frenchman’s Thai wife and her nineteen-year-old Thai boyfriend had hired the shooter.

“I figured I’d be safe,” I said, “since you were out of town.”

“Ha, ha, ha, ha.”

“Look, Anita, I wouldn’t go if I’d thought it was dangerous. And besides, I promise to be very careful.”

Anita folded her arms again and drew her mouth into a tight line.

“If it’s not dangerous, why are you going to be careful?”

She had me there. Never argue with an Italian woman who was born in France, I reminded myself for not the first time.

“I’m very tired,” Anita suddenly announced in a voice that made it clear my sins would not be forgiven anytime soon. “I’m going to take a shower and go to bed. Good night, Jack.” And with that she stood up and left the room.

I still had a couple of hours to kill before I had to go out to meet Barry Gale. With no prospect of peace on the horizon, I got another beer and went back to watching the Redskins.

ABOUT TWO DOZEN
high-backed wooden stools with gray seat cushions faced the narrow, L-shaped counter. I slid onto an empty stool and looked around. A small vase of flowers sat on the counter next to a stainless steel water pitcher and a bottle of chili sauce. The flowers were plastic, but somehow they still looked tried and bedraggled. I knew just how they felt.

Took Lae Dee is really nothing more than a little food-service counter stuck up at the front of an all night Foodland where a lot of foreigners shop. Its name translates from Thai as “cheap and good.” At least, it does if you pronounce it right. Since few foreigners struggling with Thai can manage the tones, Took Lae Dee sometimes comes out with a rising rather than a falling tone, turning the translation of its name into “sorrowful and good.” Took Lae Dee is a major hangout for the Bangkok nightshift so I always thought those two dueling translations framed the place pretty accurately.

Behind the counter a Chinese-looking woman in a white cap scraped fried rice from a wok onto a plate. A plastic ID badge with a tiny picture was clipped to her apron and made her look more like someone employed in a defense plant than a counter girl at an all-night diner. Another cook was showing off, flipping a wok full of noodles into the air and then slapping the wok smartly with a long-handled ladle before catching them again. When he saw me watching him, he flashed me a big grin and bowed slightly from the waist.

On the other leg of the counter three Arabs in white robes sat drinking tea and whispering quietly among themselves. Beyond them, two sweating, middle-aged men spoke German to each other and halting English to their young Thai companions. The older of the two men was with a girl who was round and dark with a pleasant face and a nice smile, probably not long out of some upcountry rice field. The other had a stunner draped all over him.

The stunner was tall and slim with skin like poured honey and a cascade of glistening black hair hanging around her shoulders. Stylishly dressed in a short, red leather skirt, white blouse, black spike heels, and a matching belt with a heavy silver buckle, she was a real showstopper. The guy looked like he was about to have a stroke from all the attention he was getting from such a gorgeous creature. I suspected he might very well, not right at the moment perhaps, but almost certainly a little later when he got down to business and discovered his dazzling companion was actually a
katoey,
a man. The guy was about to learn the most fundamental rule for hitting the streets after midnight in Bangkok. Very little is ever what it seems to be.

“Help you, sir?”

The girl who walked up behind me was young, not more than eighteen probably, with big eyes and a slightly dumpy air about her. I wondered what she saw when she looked at the Germans and their companions for the night.

“Gafair dam.”
Black coffee.

The girl bobbed her head and scribbled briefly on a thick pad before walking away. A few moments later a different girl, one of those who was scurrying around behind the counter, put a white ceramic mug down in front of me. I watched her pour the coffee and nodded in acknowledgement of her slight smile. I was jumpy enough already and really didn’t need the caffeine, but I lifted the mug anyway and reflexively sipped at the thick, bitter brew. With my free hand I pushed myself around on the stool and warily checked out what I could see of the interior of the supermarket.

I spotted the man almost immediately. He was half obscured by a tall stack of Diet Coke cans, looking me over without trying to hide it. I saw him glance at a woman standing next to him and place his hand on her arm. Then she followed his eyes and examined me too.

The man was a westerner about my age. He was wearing khaki shorts, an expensive-looking golf shirt hanging over his belt, and dark loafers without socks. Either he was completely bald or he had shaved his head cleanly and his scalp gleamed in the light. Oddly, he had a thin rim of neatly trimmed gray beard that ran all the way from ear to ear. The overall effect was to make his oval face look almost upside down. At a glance the man was largely interchangeable with the lean, tanned, middle-aged Western guys you could find around any of the five-star hotels in town favored by visiting executives. Well off, poised, cocky almost.

The woman was another story. I doubted she was interchangeable with anybody.

She was probably in her twenties and looked Chinese, except that she was at least six feet tall. Slim, graceful, and feminine in spite of her height, she was dressed in loose, dark slacks and a man’s white shirt. Her dark eyes looked tranquil, yet something gave her a quality of vigilance. She made me think of a cat lazing in the shade of a summer’s day, ready to spring into motion at the first sign of a pigeon.

I was already willing to bet this was the guy who had called me; and since the woman looked as if she was standing guard over him, I wondered briefly if that meant
I
was going to turn out to be the pigeon.

The man gave a little tug on the woman’s arm and they started toward me. When they were still fifteen or twenty feet away, she moved slightly to one side and leaned back against the chrome railing separating the store’s grocery section from the counter where I was sitting. Her posture remained relaxed and she cupped her hands around the top rail and stretched her legs out in front of her, crossing one ankle over the other. When she did, I couldn’t help but notice that they were very nice ankles indeed.

The man slid onto the stool next to me. “I didn’t think you’d recognize me,” he said.

But he was wrong. I did recognize him.

I had no earthly idea how it could be. It made no sense at all. But there was absolutely no doubt in my mind. This was Barry Gale.

I took another sip of my coffee just to have something to do and studied Barry over the rim of the cup. He was leaner than he had been back in Washington and his facial features appeared to have been scrambled up somehow, although I realized it might have been the absence of hair and the addition of the beard that gave me that impression. He looked different, but he looked the same, too.

“You’ve changed some,” I finally said.

“That was the idea, Jack. That was the whole idea.”

Barry’s eyes went away from mine, sought out the woman leaning against the chrome railing, and then came back to me.

“I had some redecorating done.”

“Redecorating? You had plastic surgery?”

“I guess I should have asked them to make me look more like Keanu Reeves and less like Jerry Ford, but I didn’t give it enough thought at the time. We were in a hurry.”

“Who’s ‘we’?”

Barry ignored my question and looked away at a thick-legged blonde woman who might have been Russian pushing through one of the checkout stands with a white plastic bag. She was holding the hand of a tiny Thai girl who didn’t appear to be more than twelve.

Suddenly Barry dug down into his baggy shorts and produced what looked like a card of some kind, thrusting it out and wiggling it at me.

“They fixed me up with a whole new life, Jack. Look here.”

At first I thought the card was a driver’s license, but when I took it from Barry I saw it was actually a Hong Kong identity card. It certainly looked authentic enough, although I was certainly no expert on such things, and had what was probably supposed to be Barry’s picture laminated onto it. As with most ID cards, however, the photograph had a vaguely generic look to it and I wouldn’t have sworn an oath that it was the same man who was sitting in front of me right now. The name on the card was Arthur Daley.

“Stupid fucking name they picked for me though. Can’t imagine where they got it. Normally I wouldn’t give a rat’s ass, but I ask you, could I ever be somebody who’s called Arthur Daley, Jack? Could I?” Barry took the ID card back from me and shoved it into his pocket again. He shook his head. “Shit, man, no way.”

“For Christ’s sake, Barry, what the hell is going on here?”

“I’m not sure I know, Jack.”

Barry spoke quickly, furtively, his eyes rolling around the room.

“I’m living in a dark place and I don’t know how to get out of it. God help me, but I think you might be the only guy who can do anything to help me.” He turned his head and looked at me as if he could hardly believe things had come to that.

Since I didn’t know what to say, I said nothing. Instead I glanced away and ran my index finger around the rim of my coffee cup.

“Let’s walk a little, Jack. Sitting in one place for too long makes me real nervous these days.”

Barry stuffed a red hundred-baht note into the wooden cup that held the check for my coffee and stood up, taking my elbow and tugging on it. I did nothing to resist and we left the store in silence. Threading our way through the jam of empty
tuk-tuks
and parked motorcycles, we turned right and walked out to Sukhumvit Road.

When we got there Barry stopped and glanced cautiously in both directions. The usual late-night groups of foreigners were still trolling the sidewalks for action, but they were pretty well thinned out to the hardcore. Even the traffic on Sukhumvit was starting to move at something like a normal speed rather than crawling along bumper-to-bumper as it did for most of the day. As far as I could tell, there was nothing going on that should make Barry nervous.

Barry apparently agreed with my assessment. He shoved both hands into the pockets of his shorts and turned east, walking slowly with his head down. I followed, waiting for him to say whatever he wanted to say, but he just stared intently at the rough concrete of the sidewalk as if he might be trying to divine some message that had been left for him there.

I shot a quick glance over my shoulder and saw that the tall woman was following us at a discreet distance. However much Barry might have drifted off into his private reverie, she was more than making up for it with her concentration on both of us. I caught her eyes full on when I turned back, but she didn’t look away—didn’t even blink—and after a moment I did both.

Barry cleared his throat tentatively as if he didn’t know exactly what to say. Then abruptly he started talking anyway.

“Okay,” he said. “Here’s the whole thing.”

“HOW MUCH DO
you know about what happened at Texas State Bank, Jack?”

“A little bit. I did some research after you called.”

“Then you know who Harold Wilkins is?

“The other director. The one who disappeared.”

“Harold Wilkins had been fronting for Russian mobsters for years. At first it was just some nickel-and-dime money laundering, but eventually Harold started thinking bigger and somehow he managed to cut a deal with Jimmy Kicks. Jimmy had a soft spot for banks in crappy, middle-sized shitholes like Dallas because he didn’t like dealing with sophisticated people. He always figured that sophisticated people were the most dangerous, and yokels were the greediest. Me, I’m not so sure. It might be exactly the other way around.”

I just listened and kept my mouth shut.

“Jimmy’s mules delivered bags of cash to Wilkins from the big Russian drug operations in the Northeast. Then Wilkins would see that all the money was booked to legitimate bank depositors, companies whose names he’d used to set up dummy accounts without them knowing anything about it. He always picked companies that were big cash operations, of course. Pawn shops were his favorite, but he liked restaurants and motels, too.”

“A lot of people like motels.”

Maybe Barry didn’t get the joke or maybe he didn’t think it was funny. Either way, he ignored me and went on talking.

“After the deposits were booked and a decent interval had passed, Wilkins would start funneling them out of Texas State and into Jimmy’s foreign bank accounts in a series of small transactions so they wouldn’t attract any attention.”

Two backpackers, a boy and a girl in their twenties who looked Scandinavian, passed us on the sidewalk. They were trudging doggedly in the opposite direction, bent forward under the weight of two massive yellow and black nylon packs. Barry fell silent until they were both out of earshot, then he went on talking.