Jake Needham - Killing Plato

In the first, I was getting out of our rented jeep in front of Karsarkis’ house. In the second, Anita and I were standing at the front door waiting for someone to open it. In the third, I was standing at the top of the steps to Karsarkis’ house waving idiotically into the night. When I had done that on the night of Karsarkis’ dinner party and Anita had asked me why, I told her something about wanting to be certain I hadn’t missed anybody who might be out there watching us. At the time I thought I was joking. Apparently I wasn’t.

I glanced up ju sglahinst in time to see Deputy United States Marshal Clovis Ward reach the sidewalk. I followed him with my eyes as he turned left down Beach Road and walked toward the Holiday Inn. Even when I could no longer distinguish him in the crowd of tourists that filled the sidewalk, I could still see that damned Stetson bobbing just above the flowing mass of bodies. Then I lost sight of it, too, and the man was gone.

I didn’t intend to tell Anita about this guy bracing me after she had left the restaurant, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to tell her about the photographs. I thought the idea of being watched and photographed by the United States Marshals Service might frighten her, particularly since it scared the crap out of me.

Still, not telling her might be a problem, too. Driving back to the hotel in the jeep, we would be together in awfully close quarters and Anita had eerie radar. I wasn’t absolutely sure I could get away with keeping it from her.

I needn’t have worried. Anita had made arrangements with some real estate agent she had found in Patong to look at a house on our way back to the hotel and she talked on and on about the place while we drove. I let her, because it kept me off the hook.

“And guess the best part,” she concluded breathlessly. “Go ahead. Guess.”

“They’re going to give the house to you for nothing.”

“Be serious.”

“I was.”

“Jack, it has a tennis court.”

That gave me pause. I’d always wanted a house with a tennis court and Anita knew it.

“What kind of court?” I asked, trying to keep my voice as disinterested as possible.

“I don’t know. The usual kind, I guess. You know, with a net.”

“I meant what kind of surface does it have, Anita? Hard court? Clay? Grass?”

“I know what you meant. I was just joking. The woman didn’t say.”

“Woman?”

“The agent,” Anita said and gave me a big wink. “I think you’re going to like her as much as you’ll like the tennis court.”

That naturally enough tickled my curiosity and shut me up for a while, exactly as Anita had probably intended it to. The woman had given Anita a map and was going to meet us at the house. I could hardly wait.

Following the route marked on the map in yellow ink, we went south from Patong past the Le Meridien Hotel complex to Karon Beach and then further south to Kata Beach. Just beyond a huge Club Med complex that bore a remarkable resemblance to an abandoned POW camp, the main road turned east, tracing a route over the coastal hills and back to Phuket Town.

According to the map, instead of turning there we were supposed to go straight ahead and follow a smaller road that continued south until we saw a sign just beyond Little Kata Beach that read No drive beyond this point by police order. At that sign, according to the instructions the woman had given Anita, we were to drive straight on. Naturally. Welcome to Thailand.

We located the sign without difficulty and then, about a quarter mile beyond it, we found ourselves on a winding asphalt road that climbed steeply up from the coast into a lush, tropical jungle. It was not long before we were completely engulfed in a jungle vglahid that cliof giant ferns, banana trees, oversize cattails, and coconut palms. Everywhere bougainvillea grew wild, etching red and white veins in the tangle of the rain forest. The temperature dropped so abruptly it felt like someone had turned on a huge air conditioner.

The house we were looking for was at the end of a driveway off the road to the right. The entry was marked with twin rows of rubber trees, their white-splotched trunks glowing like runway lights in the deeply saturated green of the forest. The two rows were so perfect, every tree so flawlessly aligned and utterly identical in height and growth, they looked like a cartoon. I half expected to see Jiminy Cricket skipping along just ahead of us, whistling happily as he showed the way.

The agent’s silver Range Rover was parked at the end of the driveway, right in front of the house. As we pulled up the woman got out and stood waiting, smiling in that particularly servile yet obviously artificial way real estate agents seem to smile the world over. Anita introduced us, but I was too busy looking the woman over to get her name straight. I thought it was Sanilee, or Saralee, or some kind of Lee, but at least I got her nickname. It was Nok.

Nok was tall for a Thai, nearly six feet, and she had the slim figure and bouncing strut of a runway model rather than the more generally compact and inconspicuous way of walking most Thai women employed. She wore a white blouse and a long yellow skirt with a wide belt and high-heeled sandals that taken together were perhaps just a touch too elegant for the occasion. Her long hair was slightly teased up and then swept straight back from her high forehead and her eyes were invisible behind huge tortoiseshell sunglasses. She looked vaguely familiar, although I was sure I’d never met her before. Then in a moment it came to me. She looked as if she had stepped straight out a seventies photograph of Jackie Kennedy and her friends.

“The house was built about three years ago,” she was saying as I eventually tuned into the conversation, “but no one has ever lived in it. We’re selling it for the bank that provided the financing.”

The woman’s right hand held a mobile phone and she was gesturing toward the house with it, using its little antenna as a pointer. I followed it with my eyes and for the first time took a close look at the house.

I had to admit it wasn’t bad. Not up to the standard of Plato Karsarkis’ house, of course, but still very nice. The style was something you would probably call early Hollywood Hills, hardly the sort of thing you’d expect to find in Phuket. Still, I had to admit the whitewashed walls and plain lines went surprisingly well with the green of the rain forest and the streaky blue of the sea beyond.

“What do you think, Jack?” Anita asked.

I mumbled something suitably vague that seemed to satisfy her and then trailed along behind the two women as they started their tour.

As it turned out, the house was impressive and Nok was thorough and professional in her presentation. For twenty minutes or so we paced the huge living room with a stone fireplace that looked somewhat out of place on a tropical island, examined the teak-floored bedrooms, peered at the designer-perfect kitchen, and took in the sweeping views from the hillside westward over the Andaman Sea. The thing that really grabbed me of course was the tennis court, a green-tinted Har-Tru surface carefully laid out along a north-south axis just as it should have been. It, too, enjoyed a spectacular sea view.

When the tour was done, we regrouped by the cars and Nok handed us both business cards and little booklets about the house. I flipped through {ippour was my copy of the brochure while she was talking, but nothing really caught my eye until I got to the last page and saw the asking price. It was eighty-five million Thai baht, nearly three million United States dollars. If this Hollywood Hills house had actually been in the Hollywood Hills, at least on one of the better streets, that probably would have been just about right. But it was in Phuket, and I couldn’t imagine there was any house in Phuket that had ever sold for that much money.