Jake Needham - Laundry Man

“Then you just do that. It’ll be good practice for you.”

“What’s this all about, Jack?” Dollar asked. “It won’t do any harm to let them look around.”

I thought about just blurting out what Jello had told me right there, but I didn’t. Dollar had no way of knowing he was the real target of the search, and he seemed so shaken by Howard’s murder that I couldn’t bear to pile that on him today.

“Please take my word for it, Dollar. It’s a really lousy idea.”

Dollar just nodded as if he hardly cared, then he sank down on a couch and stared off toward where the uniforms stood waiting outside. The same unfocused look he had worn when he first walked into his office was back in his eyes.

“Where’s Just John, Dollar?” I asked, squatting down next to him.

“John?” Dollar raised his head slowly. “Just John?”

“Yeah. Can I call him? Do you know where he is?”

“I think he’s…” Dollar paused. “I don’t know where he is. I think he’s out of the country.”

Morrissey looked at Dollar as if he was going to say something, but I bounced up and held up my hands.

“Don’t,” I said to him. “Don’t say a word. Just get the hell out of here.”

The cops out beyond the glass doors had stopped talking to each other and were now watching me standing there with my hand out like some demented traffic cop. Morrissey looked at me for a moment, then he shrugged slightly and opened the door.

“Come on, Jello,” he said. “It’s no big deal.”

“Jack…”

Jello started to say something, but then he just trailed off and stood there in silence until with drooping shoulders he turned away and followed Morrissey out the door. When he was outside, Jello stopped and looked back through the glass at me. I kept my face blank, and finally he gave a shrug and turned and walked with Morrissey toward the elevators.

After Jello, Morrissey, and cops were all gone, I walked around the office turning off lights to have something to do while I gave Dollar a chance to pull himself together, but when I got back to the reception area he was still sitting the same wayI had left him, just staring off into space. I watched for a minute, but he never moved or spoke. He just sat there in exactly the same lifeless way.

No matter how hard I might try to explain it in some other way, I had no doubt at all what I was seeing on Dollar’s face and in the slump of his body. It wasn’t surprise, and it certainly wasn’t grief. It was fear. Dollar was a man who had seen a sign, and he was terrified by it.

As I stood there watching Dollar, I asked myself why I was being so fiercely protective of him. I had known him for a long time, of course, but the truth was I really didn’t have the slightest idea what his real connections with Howard might have been. I didn’t even know who Howard the Roach really was.

I thought about it a while, but I still couldn’t come up with an answer that made any sense. That was probably my own kind of sign, a sign that it was time for me to go home. Dollar would have to finish this on his own. I turned away, pushed through the glass doors, and left.

The rest of Saturday I just hung around the apartment with the telephone unplugged and the answering machine shut off. Anita had gone to her studio to paint and I didn’t do much except look out the window and think about Dollar and Howard. It wasn’t grief over Howard’s death or dismay that Dollar may have been involved in some shady deals that had suddenly drained the life out of me. It was my growing conviction that all of this had something to do with me. I just couldn’t figure out what it was.

After breakfast on Sunday, Anita went back to her studio again and I sat drinking coffee and looking out the window some more. A rainstorm was coming in from out over the river to the west and thinking of the river caused me to picture Howard the Roach dangling above it from under the Taksin Bridge. Suddenly I wanted to see that bridge; I wanted to see where they had found Howard.

I put on some jeans and a polo shirt, slipped into a pair of old Topsiders, and went down to the Volvo. By the time I got on the road most of the rain had stopped, but I kept the top up since the wind was still shoving clouds of fine mist over the city. I got on the expressway and drove west.

I didn’t know that part of town very well and the only place that came readily to mind where I might be able to park and look at the Taksin Bridge was a Marriott that was on the river not far from it. When the Marriott appeared on my left, I turned in. I parked in front of the hotel, got out of the car, and walked around to a sort of garden that was on one side of it. Through a line of bare flagpoles that lined the walkway along the bank of the river, I could look directly at the Taksin Bridge.

I walked slowly over the edge of the river, sat down on a low concrete wall, and stared at the bridge. Now that I was here, I couldn’t imagine why I had come. What did I expect to find? The rope from which Howard had dangled still hanging over the water? A banner draped over the superstructure with the name of Howard’s killer written on it?

A light breeze rose from the water and the empty pulley ropes began to swing against the aluminum flagpole above my head. The impacts clanked out mournful little chords, hollow sounds, like tin drums tapping out a clumsy cadence for Howard’s passage to the other side. The simple truth was that Howard was dead, somebody had killed him, but it had nothing to do with me. That was all there was to it.

Suddenly the only thing I could think about was how hungry I was, which I took to be a pretty good sign, so I stood up, dusted off my pants, and went into the Marriott to find someplace to eat. I wandered around inside for a while until I stumbled on a large, sunny room with big windows overlooking the river where there was a Sunday brunch buffet. The place was only about half full so I settled myself at an empty table by a window and ordered a Heineken. I got a plate and helped myself to some mee krob and peek kai from the salad table, then loaded on a couple of pieces of tuna sashimi and two sticks of chicken satay for good measure. I got back to my table just as a slight young girl in a black uniform and a white apron was pouring my Heineken.

“Korp khun krap,” I said. Thank you.

The girl gave me a shy smile, bobbed her head, and slipped quietly away.

I had polished off most of the plate of salad and was halfway through the Heineken when I glanced up and spotted a familiar face eating alone at a table across the room.

Bar Phillips was a columnist for the Bangkok Post, and probably had been since just after the invention of moveable type. His column was called ‘Bar By Bar’ and it had been a weekly staple in Bangkok for longer than anyone now alive could remember. The kind of stuff Bar wrote about was badly out of style now, even a little distasteful to some people, but that apparently had had no effect on him at all. He merely continued doing what he had done for decades: chronicling his rounds through the city’s go-go bars and massage parlors, reporting the comings and goings of the city’s legion of foreign saloonkeepers, and generally holding forth on anything else that took his fancy about Bangkok’s legendary nightlife.

Bar and I first met not long after I had joined the faculty at Chula. He had apparently come into a bit of money somehow and since we had some friends in common-not surprisingly, since Bar seemed to know everybody in Bangkok-he had approached me for help with setting up and operating a string of bank accounts outside Thailand. I never really knew where his money came from or exactly how much of it there was. Bar offered vague explanations, mostly starring the usual panoply of dead relatives, but I didn’t believe him and I don’t think he expected me to. On the other hand, I didn’t sense anything ominous about his money’s origins either so I had been happy enough to help him out. I hadn’t really see that much of him since then, but I was always happy to run into him. He loved me like a son.