Paying Back Jack (10 page)

“I am involved. The local cops still think I killed her.”

“They've changed their minds.”

“Maybe they'll change them again.”

The Colonel said his goodbyes to the Pattaya police and watched them take the elevator down to the lobby. They'd seemed surprised when he hadn't gotten into the elevator with them. He waied them and waited until the door closed, then pushed the up button and waited with the hotel manager, whom he'd asked to stay behind.

The manager let them into Nongluck's suite. The first thing Calvino noticed inside room 1542 was the cloying smell: a mix of perfume, soap, and powder. The scent of a woman. On the table was a wine bottle. Beside it was a corkscrew with the cork screwed deep, the metal tip sticking out at the bottom. A glass with two fingers of wine was next to the bottle. Beside the French wine were some playing cards wrapped with a rubber band. “Doesn't look like she was playing with a full deck,” said Calvino, reaching for the minideck on the table.

“Don't touch them,” said Colonel Pratt. The cards looked fairly new. Calvino was right; it was only a few cards. Pratt pulled off the rubber band and turned over the first card: the ace of hearts. He worked through the eight of diamonds, the six of clubs and the six of spades. The last four cards were the queen of hearts, the six of hearts, the five of hearts, and the nine of spades. He slipped the rubber band back on the cards, looked away and palmed the cards, slipping them in his pocket. Calvino pretended not to see Pratt take the playing cards.

“Any idea what happened to the rest of the deck?” asked Calvino, looking around as if they might be elsewhere in the room. He walked over to the closet and pulled back the door.

“They didn't evaporate,” said Pratt, kneeling down level to the wine glass on the table and examining the lipstick on the rim.

Calvino looked back from the closet. “Cards don't evaporate, Pratt. That's not the right English word.”

Pratt raised his hands covered by surgical gloves. “In Thailand many things can evaporate, Vincent. That includes money, reputation, and life. Subtracting a few cards from the list, I am certain you will agree, does no permanent harm to the English language.”

A suitcase had been slipped into the closet. A couple of dresses, some underwear, bras, T-shirts, jeans, and three pairs of shoes were also in the closet. Calvino remembered the blue dress. Nongluck had worn it when she'd made her offering at the spirit house.

“Looks like no one has tossed the room,” said Calvino as Colonel Pratt slid the balcony door open and stepped outside onto the tiled floor.

“That includes us. Housekeeping was told to not enter the room, but if they had to go in, then to not touch anything,” said Colonel Pratt, standing at the railing. It was the most Thai of instructions.

Calvino followed the Colonel outside, disappointed about the restrictions on inspecting the room. He looked straight ahead at the beach and sea, holding onto the railing. He glanced down at the street. Fifteen floors was a long way to fall. It was more likely an eighteen-story drop to the street by the time the lobby and mezzanine levels were factored in. She'd had a few final seconds of consciousness—what had gone through her mind, knowing that she was going to die, knowing that nothing she could do, say, or think could save her? His stomach churned, and he turned away. He hated heights and couldn't understand why people spent huge sums of money to climb mountains only to fall into a crevice or die of frostbite. How anyone could sum the courage to jump off a balcony fell in the same category of wonderment. He pulled away from the railing, feeling shaken. Turning his back to the ocean view, he tried to clear his mind of the flood of disturbances racing through it. Then he walked from the balcony into the sitting room. The suite was cookie-cutter identical to his own.

The sheets of the bed had been neatly pulled back and the pillows bunched into a pile at the center with a book nearby. It was a self-help book on relationships with a smiling, confident woman on the cover who looked like a beauty-contest winner.

Colonel Pratt closed the balcony door and walked across the room. He took photographs of the table, the closet, and the bed. “Early this
morning, I went to the house where Nongluck's parents live. They were still asleep when I arrived. They invited me inside. I told them about their daughter's death. The mother broke down and cried, but the father didn't look surprised. He said she'd had problems in her personal life. Of course, what they meant was she had a problem with a boyfriend. The mother confirmed that a series of boyfriends had caused her nothing but anguish. She wailed that she'd killed herself over a man, but she didn't say who he was. That can wait for later.”

“Was there any connection between the family and Apichart?”

Colonel Pratt shook his head. “They'd never heard of him.”

Calvino, frustrated by the answer, walked into the bathroom and examined, without touching, Nongluck's shampoo, soap, and cosmetics, neatly arranged in rows along with the standard hotel toiletry items. A bottle of Opium perfume was open. That seemed strange. A woman as tidy as Nongluck wouldn't be leaving her prized perfume open to the elements. He called to Colonel Pratt, who'd been taking more photographs.

When the Colonel stepped inside the bathroom, Calvino was on his knees looking at the bathtub. “You'll need to get the hairs out of the drain. Hairs and skin from the sink, too. And check the lid on the toilet. It was up when I came in. Women always keep the lid down. They shouldn't flush the toilet until lab guys have swabbed down the inside. And look at the perfume bottle. It's open. She doesn't strike me as someone who'd leave it like that.”

“Where did you come up with all of this?” asked Colonel Pratt.

Calvino smiled, looked over his shoulder. “I study investigative techniques.”

“Sounds like you saw that program on National Geographic about bathtub murders.”

Calvino's cheeks flushed two shades short of a red light. “It was a good show. Mao and Noriega watched it with me last night.”

A couple of seconds passed before Pratt registered that Calvino was talking about the two policemen who had stayed overnight in the room. He'd been joking about the TV forensic show; Calvino apparently hadn't taken it as such.

“You watched that bathtub murder investigation with the police?”

Calvino nodded as if it was the most natural way to spend time with two cops. “During a commercial break, Mao went into my bathroom and swabbed it down.”

“In this case, a woman died. The police want to know why. The local politicians may try to make something of it.”

The election campaign had made Pratt cautious about what was possible. The daily cycle of mudslinging, lies, rumors, and vilification had exhausted him. Everyone was treading water, waiting to see who won.

“I'd like to have talked to her,” said Calvino.

Pratt had already gathered from the parents the background of the dead woman: her name, age, occupation, marital status, hometown, history of mental problems, and conflicts with family, neighbors, or friends. The police lab report said there were small traces of alcohol in her blood. But her blood tested negative for drugs. There was no evidence of a struggle in the room. And so far there was no evidence that anyone other than Nongluck had been in the room. Hotel rooms were like working girls; they had many customers, people with no connection to each other, coming and going over a short period of time, making it more difficult for investigators than a room in a house or an office.

It was only after they left room 1542 that Calvino began to enjoy his release from house arrest. When he turned up at the reception desk with the Colonel, they had his invoice prepared. The concierge in the far corner stared at him without a smile. As he checked out, everyone behind the reception desk seemed relieved to see him, with his suitcase and case of whiskey at his feet. The bill for room service ran to two pages. Calvino studied it, clicking his tongue like a Bantu warrior on the eve of battle. Colonel Pratt asked to see it. He glanced through the steaks, the fries, the ice cream, the pasta, the vodka, the Russian food with names he couldn't pronounce; he flipped the page and read through the various delivery charges and expenses. He did the sums in his head. Vincent had managed to run up about a week's worth of room service charges in one night. The owner would be satisfied; General Yosaporn would not lose face. Colonel Pratt handed the invoice back to the clerk and told him that the owner's friend, General Yosaporn, had arranged Calvino's stay.

The clerk stared at the desk. A colonel in full dress uniform had spoken.

“No problem, sir,” he said.

The hotel staff shuffled and looked at their hands. None of them were willing to push for cash in the circumstance of a colonel supporting a farang. If anything, they were relieved to see Calvino leaving, and the manager who had been hovering behind the desk slipped away into his office. The matter was settled. With the invoice cleared, Colonel Pratt asked who had been on duty at the front desk the day before. After talking with a couple of hotel staff, he found the receptionist, who remembered checking in Nongluck. She had checked in, alone, at 2:10 p.m. the day before her death. They had made a photocopy of her Thai ID card. She had gone to her room and only later returned downstairs to pay for her room and Calvino's upgrade. She had used fresh one-thousand-baht notes. She had said the upgrade was a gift, and no one should tell the farang. Let it be a surprise. There had been nothing out of the ordinary about her that afternoon. She had smiled and counted out the cash, slid it across the reception desk, and watched as the clerk counted it again.

On the day of Nongluck's death, the receptionist recalled, she had worn a blue dress and carried a Prada handbag and a plastic Siam Paragon shopping bag with a bottle of wine inside. A bellhop remembered watching her walk out the front entrance an hour later and stop in front of the spirit house, where she'd lit incense sticks. A few minutes later, she had returned to the lobby, waited for the elevator, and returned to her suite. No member of the staff remembered seeing her leave the hotel after that. Could someone have gotten past security and slipped into her room without even passing another guest? No one at reception admitted that this could have happened.

Calvino suggested checking the security downstairs, on the way out of the hotel. The two of them found the garage security guy who'd been working the day shift on the day of the death. Lots of cars had come and gone during the day.

“Did you see anything unusual yesterday afternoon? Maybe a car that you remember?” asked Colonel Pratt.

The guard remembered a Thai arriving in a red sports car the previous afternoon. It had been a beauty, a European two-seater, polished, not a scratch on it, tinted windows. No, he didn't remember
the license plate number; he was too busy looking at his own face reflected in the high sheen of the car. But he thought it might have been a Bangkok plate.

“Why do you think that?” asked Colonel Pratt.

The guard told him that if it had been a local car, he'd have recognized it. He'd have known who owned it. A car like that wouldn't be a secret for long in a small town like Pattaya. It was flashy like a car from the movies, a car built and sold to attract attention, the attention of women in particular. It wasn't a family car the guard described. And it wasn't the kind of car you'd drive to commit a murder, thought Calvino. A professional hit man would have driven a plain vanilla Honda.

Whomever the driver of the sports car was, Calvino had a good idea he hadn't planned to kill anyone. But maybe things turned out in a way he hadn't anticipated. Something unexpected might have come up—a surge of anger, the wrong word or look—and Nongluck could have found herself airborne.

TRACER REALIZED THAT it felt good to be back in Bangkok. He stretched his arms and turned up the music as he glided through the early morning traffic on Sukhumvit Road. The rain slanted against the windscreen, the wipers working overtime. The city roads were wet and slick, and traffic from the motorway had started to build. He passed the Emporium Shopping Mall and Benjasiri Park, then turned into Washington Square. Taking a parking ticket, he drove on until he eased the S-Class Mercedes in a parking space in front of the Bourbon Street Restaurant. He sat in the car, leaving the air conditioner on, listening to Muddy Waters's “Got My Mojo Workin'” and keeping the beat on the steering wheel. He touched the small leather pouch he wore under his shirt. He didn't go anywhere without his mojo bag with the pinch of spices, herbs, a snake tooth, and the dead body of a mean motherfucker of a black widow spider.

He didn't object when his friend and fellow LRAS employee Alan Jarrett had suggested the restaurant in Washington Square because it was a good place to sit, wait, let the power rise up inside, get strong. And it was around the corner from a short time hotel where Jarrett had planned to spend the night. Time stops when a man is in touch with his mojo. Six in the morning and Tracer was ready to go to work. Mooney's men had stored the .308 in the trunk. And Jarrett was all set, he thought.

He sat in the car as the security guard came around with an umbrella and opened his door. Tracer got out of the car, locked the
door, ducked his head under the umbrella, and walked up the steps to the front door. The girls behind the counter gave him the early-in-the-morning once-over. A man at that time of the morning was in the neighborhood to order himself some coffee, bacon, and eggs. The security guard, who had folded up the umbrella, followed Tracer through the door and told the waitresses that the black man had arrived in a Benz with embassy plates. The yings looked at Tracer, thinking he was a diplomat, someone they had to treat real nice. Not many African diplomats rolled into Washington Square at six in the morning on a rainy day, or, for that matter, any time, any day, rain or shine. Tracer turned right, walked over to the bar, dropped the car keys on the counter, and ordered a coffee.