THE DEAD AMERICAN (The Inspector Samuel Tay Novels Book 3) (31 page)

In the empty hours it was this army of the dispossessed that took control of Sukhumvit Road.
Tuk-tuks
, little three-wheeled motorcycle taxis, flew up and down the street most of the night ferrying carousers between the two clumps of go-go bars that anchored the neighborhood: Nana Plaza on the west and Soi Cowboy about a mile to the east. They were all there: the lonely, the frightened, the guilty, the depressed, and the psychotic. Soaked with sweat, they rushed back and forth from one bar to another, reeking of that peculiarly sour, metallic odor habitually given off by the emotionally overmatched and underachieving. It was this floodtide of the lost and abandoned that owned Sukhumvit Road after midnight.

“So what do you want from me, Big Jack?” Nata asked.

“Whatever you can find out for me about Barry Gale. If I’m going into Indian country tonight, I want to go well-armed.”

Nata raised an eyebrow at me.

“Metaphorically speaking,” I added quickly.

Nata thought about that for a moment, her face a blank, then turned back to her keyboard and pushed a few keys. Boxes began appearing on one of the big screens in front of her. I watched her type Texas State Bank into a space in one of them and after ten or fifteen seconds a list rolled up on the other screen. She typed Barry Gale into another box and waited until a second list replaced the first. Then she typed something that appeared on the screen as nothing but a row of asterisks, hit the Enter key twice, and waited.

After a few seconds an index of news stories appeared back on the first screen, each entry providing a headline, a newspaper’s name, a date, and the first few sentences from the story. Nata started working her way methodically through every item, calling up the full text of some of the accounts. By the time she had been at it for ten or fifteen minutes, we knew pretty much everything the press had reported about the death of Barry Gale.

Barry had been at the bank’s North Dallas guesthouse for several weeks while preparing the Texas State directors for their formal meetings with the federal banking examiners. The examiners were awfully curious as to exactly how millions of dollars of the bank’s deposits managed to wander away without anyone noticing, and they were ready to ask the directors a lot of tough questions.

It was a Thursday afternoon when Barry told everyone he was exhausted and was going to knock off and go to Acapulco for a few days, so no one really wondered very much why they hadn’t heard from him until he failed to turn up for a conference with some Treasury Department people the following Wednesday. Then on Thursday, exactly a week after Barry had last been seen, a maintenance man found the body in a lap pool behind the guesthouse off Preston Road.

“Your ghost was right on the money,” Nata pointed out. “No useable fingerprints and the corpse’s face was too badly smashed up to get an ID except with dental records.”

“Was there an autopsy?” Darcy asked Nata. I had apparently been relegated to the roll of a silent observer.

“If there was,” Nata said consulting her screens again. “there’s nothing about it here.”

“That manhole cover looks like a pretty big loose end,” Darcy mused. “What do those suckers weigh? They’d have to go at least seventy-five, maybe a hundred pounds, wouldn’t they?”

Nata nodded absentmindedly, still studying one of the screens.

“Staggering around with a cast-iron manhole cover, using barbed wire to tie it around your neck, and then leaping into a swimming pool sounds looks to me like a pretty hard way to commit suicide,” Darcy said. “At least, it is if you’re doing the committing entirely on your own.”

“It sounds like the Russians,” Nata nodded. “Those guys love stuff like that.”

Darcy bent forward, reading a
Dallas Morning News
story over Nata’s shoulder. It concerned the unexplained disappearance of another director of the Texas State Bank about the same time Barry took the big swim, a guy named Harold Wilkins. The stories about Wilkins were pretty sketchy since Barry Gale’s drowning was so much sexier, but there was enough to work out the gist of what had happened. Darcy pointed to the monitor.

“Wilkins had been buying currency futures for a year or more before he disappeared. He was running all the positions himself using an account in the name of Westmoreland Oil and Gas, which was apparently a real oil trader in Dallas.”

“How could he do that?” Nata asked. “Wouldn’t somebody have started asking questions?”

“Not necessarily,” I offered.

Darcy and Nata both looked at me as if they had just remembered that I was there.

“If Westmoreland had been reasonably active in the foreign exchange markets hedging their exposure on future deliveries like most oil traders do, it would have looked normal enough. And I’m sure Wilkins would have been smart enough to route all the dummy accounts to himself. If he was, Westmoreland would never have noticed anything and there would have been nobody else to blow the whistle.”

Darcy and Nata took that in, glancing at each other, then all three of us went back to reading silently through the rest of the story. As we read, the rest fell into place. Wilkins had been using accounts he had set up in Westmoreland’s name to conduct his trading operations all right. He was buying and selling futures contracts in a half-dozen different currencies for what on the surface appeared to be routine hedging of exposure on crude oil deliveries that provided for payments in Japanese yen and Singapore dollars. When the market turned on Wilkins, however, his losses quickly began to pyramid.

He kept ahead of them for a while—mostly by running hard, shuffling papers fast, and doubling up his losses—but when the magnitude of the debacle became so large that he couldn’t hide it any longer, the entire mess collapsed in a heap. That was when Wilkins disappeared without a trace. He left his house to drive to the bank one morning and stepped right off into the twilight zone.

Two weeks later, Barry Gale—or someone—was found at the bottom of the swimming pool at the guest house. His suicide was quickly attributed to the working relationship between Gale and Wilkins. There was even some speculation that Barry Gale could have been the real mastermind behind the whole currency futures scam and that he might have been using the less experienced Wilkins as a front man; but with one man dead and the other missing, following up the speculation would have been difficult.

In the end, apparently no one even bothered to try.

LAUNDRY MAN

WHEN NATA FINISHED READING
the story, she looked at Darcy. “Maybe this guy Gale really
is
still around,” she said.

“Then who was the stiff in the pool?” Darcy asked.

No one said anything since the answer was pretty obvious. If Barry Gale was still alive, Wilkins was the prime candidate for the Esther Williams role. Moreover, that opened the possibility that Barry might have had something to do with arranging the casting.

“You think this guy might be indexed somewhere with EDGAR?” Darcy asked Nata.

“Who’s—” I started to ask.

“Never mind,” Darcy interrupted, and obediently I fell silent.

Nata typed briefly and then slid her hand over a trackball sitting next to the keyboard. As she rolled the cursor around one of the screens and clicked here and there, both she and Darcy leaned in closer. After a moment I saw them exchange a look and then Darcy leaned over Nata’s shoulder and typed a few keystrokes. After that they both watched the other screen in silence.

“That’s pretty amazing,” Nata finally said, more to herself than to Darcy or me.

She clicked the left mouse button on the trackball twice, looked at the screen for a long time in silence, and finally rotated her chair until she was facing me.

“I don’t know what to tell you, Jack.”

Up until then I thought we had been doing just fine.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I found the name Barry Gale in a keyword search of EDGAR’s primary data index,” Nata explained. “But when I went to the locations referenced in the search, there was nothing there. All the references came up as invalid entries.”

“Does that happen a lot?”

Darcy glanced at Nata for a moment and then shook her head. “Never.”

“What are you saying?” I asked, looking from one to the other.

“There are a couple of possibilities, I guess,” Nata took over again. “Three, really. Mistakes in data paths can occur. Maybe this is just the result of a simple input error.”

“But you don’t think so.” I was sure, at least, of that much. Nata’s face made it plain. “What else?” I asked.

“The references may have been there once, then deleted for some reason and the index entries were overlooked.”

“I didn’t think database entries were ever deleted, just updated.”

“Right. Usually they’re not.”

“So then what’s the third reason?” I asked.

Nata hesitated, glancing at Darcy, who nodded once.

“The entries may be encrypted with a unique key that we don’t have,” she said. “That’s never happened before either, but theoretically I suppose it’s possible.”

“And what would that mean?”

“There’s generally a turf battle of some kind going on in Washington, Jack. It might just be that one agency has something going and it’s taking particular care to make sure that another agency can’t find out about it. It could be that sort of thing.”

“Could
be?”

“Look, Jack, we’re good, but we’re not perfect. Some of the really big hitters can bury stuff so deep we can’t get to it. To tell you the absolute truth, it hasn’t happened before, but it
is
possible.”

“Really big hitters? What are you telling me? What kind of database is this anyway?”

Nata felt silent, then glanced toward Darcy again. Darcy sighed and folded her arms.

“Don’t put me in a bad spot here, Jack. Let’s just say that it is a comprehensive summary of…” Darcy paused, weighing her words, “nonpublic U.S. intelligence data concerning foreign organized crime activity. If there was any real connection between your man, the Texas State Bank, and the Russian mob, it would be in here.”

“In other words,” I said, “you’ve hacked the FBI.”

“If we had, you wouldn’t want us to tell you, would you?”

I had always thought the expression about someone’s eyes twinkling was pure poetic exaggeration, but right at that moment Darcy’s actually did.

“So what
can
you tell me that won’t get me twenty to life?”

“My gut says you’re about to step into it here, Jack,” Darcy said. “I’d back off and let it go if I were you.”

That wasn’t exactly what I had been expecting to hear.

“Don’t you think that’s sensationalizing this thing a little, Darcy? How can it hurt just to meet a guy at Foodland and talk to him?”

“He may tell you something you’re better off not hearing,” she said.

What the hell was
that
supposed to mean?

“Do you want some help?” Nata asked.

“Help? Doing what?”

“If you’re really going to meet this guy, it might be a good idea to have somebody throw a loose net over you. That way you’d pick up on any surveillance that might be on you or any other funny business that might be going on.”

“I don’t like the sound of this very much.”

“You asked for our advice and I’m giving it to you.”

“Look, if there’s really something nasty going on here, the last thing I want is to get you two involved.”

“Oh, not us,” Darcy jumped back in. “You know my policy about avoiding operations. But we could find somebody to cover you without much trouble.”

“How about Mango Manny?” Nata asked, looking at Darcy.

“That’s a good thought,” she answered. “You know him, Jack?”

“I don’t think so. I imagine I’d remember meeting anybody with a name like Mango Manny.”

“His real name is Emmanuel Marcus. He’s a Brit. Used to be a top hitter in London, but he made a couple of silly mistakes and had to relocate on short notice.”

“Mistakes?”

“Oh, you know. Hit the wrong people a couple of times. That sort of thing.”

Darcy made it sound like the fellow had done nothing worse than misdirect a few Federal Express packages.

“Manny’s been in Bangkok… oh, four or five years now, I think. He owns Q Bar, that place on Soi 11 where the hipper-than-thou crowd hangs out. You’ve been there, haven’t you?”

“Nope. Too expensive for me. I’m more a Cheap Charlie’s kind of guy.”

“Manny’s very well connected. Plays golf with all the right generals and government ministers. But the important thing is that he’s got a really first-class organization.”

“You mean at his bar?”

“No, not that. Manny brought the marijuana business here into the twenty-first century. Really made it fly, so to speak.”

“He’s a
drug dealer?”

Darcy looked down and kicked her toe at the carpet. “He’s more of a… management consultant. Besides, he won’t touch anything but grass. The man’s not a criminal, Jack.”

I took a deep breath.

“Just let me be sure I understand what you’re telling me here,” I said. “Just because you can’t find a couple of references to Barry Gale in your magic machine, you’re seriously proposing that I get some screw-up cockney hit man turned godfather to the Thai marijuana trade to work security for me when I go to the Foodland tonight to meet a dead guy. Have I pretty much got it?”

“Manny’s not a cockney,” Darcy said. “He went to Cambridge.”

“Oh well, that changes everything.”

“He’s really a pretty good guy,” Nata put in. “I think he just watched too many Bob Hoskins movies when he was young and never got over it.”

There was a little silence then and Darcy and Nata both watched me expressionlessly. In the quiet, I thought I could feel something stirring around me. I didn’t know what it was, but it felt large and unpleasant.

“What do you think I should do, Darcy?” I finally asked.

Darcy placed one hand gently on my back. She had the sort of look on her face I imagined a mother might give a son who was going off to war, a look that said there wasn’t a thing she could do but wish him luck and hope for the best.