LAUNDRY MAN (A Jack Shepherd crime thriller) (26 page)

At least discovering Dollar’s body propped up in the front seat of my Volvo had made one thing abundantly clear
.
The only choice I had left was to find Barry Gale.

I HAD NEVER
realized before how much crime scenes in real life look like the ones on television. Of course, I couldn’t remember ever being at a real crime scene before, and maybe the Thais watch a lot of television, so perhaps that explains it.

Yellow tape was strung across the parking lot’s entrance and blue bubble lights rotated lazily on the two police cars parked just in front of it. A half-dozen policemen in tight brown uniforms, high boots, and white helmets stood around not doing much and another half-dozen people in civilian clothes, mostly short-sleeved shirts and dark trousers, were bunched up around Dollar’s body peering down at it. Little knots of people stood here and there in the street watching the action beyond the yellow tape and tongues of color from the bubble lights on the police cars flicked back and forth across them. Every so often the blue light would catch someone’s face and for a moment a pale and ghostly image would hang there in the night air.

Someone had set up three mercury vapor floodlights on tall aluminum stands and their illumination made everyone in the parking lot look waxy and artificial, almost dead. Everyone, strangely enough, except Dollar. The wan, yellowish light made him look more alive somehow, and I almost expected any minute to see him get up off the ground, brush off his suit, and walk over to ask me for a cigar.

Instead it was Jello who walked over.

I was leaning on a concrete block wall at the back of the parking lot. I hadn’t seen Jello since that Saturday morning at Dollar’s office, although I was anything other than surprised to find him here now. Jello took up a post against the wall next to me and nodded slightly. I nodded back. Both of us stood there without talking and kept our eyes on the parking lot.

For my part, I was watching people I couldn’t identify walk around doing things I didn’t understand. I didn’t know what Jello was watching. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to.

A tall woman in a dark brown uniform circled Dollar’s body firing off photographs from various angles. When a flash of her strobe light caught me squarely in the eyes, I blinked and looked away.

“I don’t know what to say, Jack.”

“How did it happen?”

“Broken neck, they think.”

Broken neck. Just like Howard. What a surprise, huh?

“How long ago?”

“Probably four to six hours.”

I did the math while I watched the tall woman with the camera circle Dollar’s body again. I had parked in the lot around eight and come back to the car just before ten. It was now almost eleven. If Jello was right, that meant Dollar had been killed about the time I was deciding to drop in on Manny.

I
hadn’t even known where the Volvo was going to be until nearly eight. Had someone been following me, just hauling Dollar’s body around town and looking for a chance to stuff it into my car? Or was there another locator device somewhere in the Volvo? Maybe I had only found the one they meant for me to find. If that was the case, then whoever was watching me could just have sent somebody over to where the little red dot had stopped on their map, popped open the passenger door, and jammed Dollar’s corpse inside. I felt sick running through the possibilities.

“I want to find out who did this, Jack.”

I looked at Jello’s eyes and saw something else.

“No, you don’t,” I said. “You just want to find out what Dollar was up to because you think it would look good in your intelligence files.”

“I don’t have to find out. I know exactly what he was up to.”

“Bullshit you do.”

A stout, middle-aged Thai in a long-sleeved white shirt buttoned at the cuffs stood looking down at Dollar’s body with his hands on his hips. Then he glanced up abruptly and stared straight at my face, almost as if he was comparing it with Dollar’s and trying to decide why Dollar was lying there on the ground instead of me. Finally, the man jammed his hands in his pockets, turned, and walked away in the direction of the yellow tape.

“Dollar and Howard were laundering money all right, Jack.” Jello’s eyes flicked around the parking lot as he talked. “That much of what I told you was true. But it wasn’t drug money.”

“So what was all that crap you gave me about Burmese drug dealers?”

“I was afraid Dollar and Howard were going to ask you to help them without telling you what they were really doing. I thought if I gave you the drug-money story, it would scare you off.”

“So what were they really doing?”

Jello ignored my question.

“I imagine you know by now that the guy you found in Dollar’s office wasn’t really FBI,” he said instead.

I just looked at Jello and said nothing.

“He works out of the American Embassy. We’ve met a few times, but I don’t know who he really is. He carries FBI ID, but I think he’s probably CIA.”

“Imagine that,” I said.

“Look, Jack, you weren’t supposed to be there so what the hell did you expect me to do?” Jello sounded exasperated. “Say, ‘Hey, Jack, let me introduce you to a man I think is a CIA case officer investigating the murder one of American intelligence’s favorite money launderers right in the middle of an operation?’ You think I should have done something like that?”

“Maybe that would have been a good idea.”

Then I realized what Jello had just said.

“What kind of an operation?” I asked.

“Fuck, Jack, just forget I ever said it. Shit rolls downhill here like every place else. Local boys like me are nothing in this kind of deal. I fetch files and I pass along native wisdom. They don’t tell me anything. You think I like that, man?”

“Nobody makes you do it.”

“You don’t think so?” Jello’s anger sounded genuine. “If you think nobody makes me do it, you’ve got a lot to learn about power, Jack.”

We went back to watching the festivities in the parking lot and let the tone of anger and resentment dissipate.

“There’s something else,” Jello said quietly after a while and I was anything but surprised. “Some of the money Dollar and Howard were moving is missing.”

“Yeah?”

I made an effort to sound disinterested. It wasn’t all that hard.

“The rumor is that fifty or sixty million dollars is unaccounted for.”

If Jello expected me to be impressed, he must have been surprised. I had dealt with numbers like that too long to wet my pants just because somebody mentioned a huge amount of money.

“Is that what this is really about, Jello? Some money?”

“Shit, Jack.” Jello sounded disgusted, although whether at my question or at himself I wasn’t sure. “That’s what it’s
always
about.”

There was a rustle of movement near the street and several uniforms trotted toward the opposite side of the police cars that were parked across the driveway. Jello saw them and pushed himself away from the wall.

“Be right back,” he said.

I watched the yellow waves ripple across his Hawaiian shirt as he walked away. How much did Jello really know, I wondered? He had just admitted to a few tidbits, of course, but confessing to what you think someone else already knows hardly amounts to a particularly impressive demonstration of candor, even if people who did it usually tried to make it look that way. Maybe he was stumbling around in the dark nearly as much as I was.

Across the parking lot Jello talked briefly to one of the uniforms, then he reached down with one big hand and lifted the yellow tape for someone. He turned around and started back to where I was waiting, and I saw Just John walking next to him, hands jammed deep in his pockets.

“Been away, John?” I asked when they got to where I stood in the shadows against the wall. “Incidentally, have I told you what a bang-up security job you’re doing for Dollar? Keep up the good work, man.”

“Why are you so cranky, Jack?”

“I can’t imagine.”

John settled into a comfortable lean on the wall right next to me.

“Maybe there’s nothing I can do for Dollar anymore, Jack, but there’s something I can do for you,” he said.

“Oh please, tell me you’re not about to run the good-cop-bad-cop routine on me.”

“I’d be happy to spell everything out for you,” John said, “You want to hear it?”

I looked away from both of them, but I nodded slightly.

“Two guys bagging money for a major national security operation both get themselves whacked within a week. The only live connection either Jello or I can find between these two guys is a business school professor whose hands are so clean you could lick sugar off them. That doesn’t make any sense to us. That make any sense to you, Jack?”

“I’m not the only guy around who knew both Howard and Dollar.”

“That’s not the connection we’re talking about and you know it.”

Just John shook his head. I thought he was trying way too hard to get something like regret and even a little sadness into the gesture. It ended up just looking silly.

“We’re here to help you work this thing out, Jack, but you keep feeding us dog turds and calling them Twinkies.”

I took a breath and looked toward where two elderly men, one very short and the other very tall, were wheeling a metal gurney in the direction of Dollar’s body. As it rattled and knocked across the gravel, several dozen pairs of eyes silently tracked its progress toward where Dollar lay sprawled just outside the open door of my Volvo.

“We know about Barry Gale,” Just John said, his voice flat. “We know that both Howard and Dollar were dealing with him. Are you dealing with him, too, Jack? What’s your connection with Barry Gale?”

“We were partners in the same law firm once. Other than that, I don’t have a connection with him.”

“Under the circumstances, that’s pretty hard to swallow.”

“Yeah? And what circumstances are those?”

“Look at it from our point of view, Jack. Barry Gale shows up here in Bangkok. He has a quiet little meeting with you. A week later, two guys who were using his bank to front a major intelligence operation are dead and the money they were responsible for is gone. I suppose that’s just a coincidence, is it?”

“What are you saying, John?” I snapped. “That I helped Barry Gale set up Dollar and Howard in order to steal that money? Or maybe you’re saying
I
killed Howard and Dollar and took the money all by myself.”

John didn’t answer me, but then I hadn’t really expected him to.

The gurney clattered to a stop beside my Volvo. The policemen who had been grouped around Dollar’s body stepped back and the two old men with the gurney stepped forward. What was left of Dollar Dunne was in their hands now. The rest of us could only stand there and watch.

“WHO DO YOU
work for, John?” I asked, my eyes still on the gurney that was there to carry Dollar away. “Do you really work for the White House? Or are you just some bored little spook with a cubicle in Langley who’s way over his head in something he doesn’t understand?”

One of the men spread a bright orange body bag on the ground next to Dollar and pulled open the zipper. The sound scraped across the parking lot like a sharp object being pulled over glass.

“Ultimately we all work for the White House, Jack.”

I started to say something, but John held up one big hand.

“Let’s get back to the main point here, can we? Neither Jello nor I can figure out how you got in the middle of all this, Jack. We need to know exactly what your role really is. We really need to know right now.”

“I don’t have a role.”

“Yes, you do, Jack. Yes, you do.”

I expected the two men to lift Dollar’s body into the bag, one holding the shoulders and the other the legs, but they didn’t. Instead they went around to the same side of the body, gave it a push, and rolled it over on top of the bag. Then one of the men bent down and yanked the sides of the bag up around the body, wiggling it until Dollar was completely inside. The other man grasped the zipper and walked it closed, causing the same awful scraping sound to echo across the parking lot for a second time. After that, the two men moved to opposite ends of the bag, hefted it, and dumped it onto the gurney.

“This happened because of some bullshit CIA scheme you’re running, didn’t it, John? This happened because the CIA was using Dollar and Howard to funnel tens of millions of dollars to corrupt Chinese officials to keep them spying for you, didn’t it?”

Just John looked surprised in spite of what I gathered was his best effort not to.

I winked at him. “Gotcha.”

John gave a little snort and looked down at his shoes. “Stanley Ratikun must have told you about the NSC thing. Did he tell you the Chinese story, too?”

I didn’t say anything, but of course I didn’t have to. Just John knew he was right.

“What else did he tell you?” John asked me after a moment.

“Not much.” I thought back briefly over the conversation I’d had with Stanley. “Not anything really.”

All three of us watched silently as the gurney rattled away toward the street. When it reached the edge of the parking lot, one of the brown uniforms lifted the crime-scene tape and the two attendants wheeled the gurney under it. Then they turned left behind a white Toyota van and disappeared from sight.

Just John pushed at the gravel with the toe of his shoe.

“This happened, Jack, because $43,600,000, plus change, is unaccounted for.”

“Christ, you guys go first-class, don’t you? What did you think you could get for $43,000,000? Mao’s body?”

Just John gave me an imitation of a smile. “That’s not my point.”

“Then what
is
your point?”

“Dollar and Howard knew where that money went.”

“Well, my guess is you’re going to have one hell of a hard time sweating it out of them now.”

“You still don’t get it, do you, Jack? That’s why somebody stuck Dollar’s body in your car. They think you know where the money is.” John leaned close to my ear. “And they wanted to remind you that they know where
you
are.”

“For Christ’s sakes, John, I’m just a college teacher!”