Jake Needham - Laundry Man

“Nope,” Bar responded cheerfully. “Living in Thailand’s made me a happy convert to the church of creative ambiguity.”

Bar walked up to the glass, put his hands around his face to block the glare, and briefly studied the interior of Dollar’s house.

“Man,” he said, puckering his lips as if he were lining up a particularly difficult putt. “They did a good job of making it look like a burglary, didn’t they?”

“What are you talking about?” I asked. “You don’t think this is a burglary?”

Bar glanced at me. It was plain he relished my puzzlement. Then he started back around the house toward the front. Not having any better idea, I followed.

When Bar got to the big teak doors, he rattled the brass handles with both hands, but they were securely locked. I reached past him toward the doorbell, but Bar gave me such a look of disdain that I pulled my hand back without touching it.

Bar dug in his trouser pocket and pulled out his pipe tool. Flipping from it what looked like a stainless steel toothpick about three inches long, Bar slid the pick into the keyhole above the handle on the right hand door, bent forward slightly from the waist, and began to jiggle it gently between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, chewing on his lower lip in concentration.

I burst out laughing. “You’ve got to be joking.”

Bar didn’t answer, but after a few seconds I heard a soft click and he didn’t have to. He straightened up and turned the knob with his left hand while retracting the pick and pocketing the silver tool with his right.

“Okay,” I said. “Maybe you weren’t.”

As soon as we got inside it was obvious that the whole house had gotten the same treatment as the living room. Whoever had turned the place over had clearly done a thorough job of it. I followed Bar silently from room to room. Nothing seemed to have escaped unscathed.

“Very professional,” Bar said with a note in his voice that sounded almost like admiration. “Really very professional.”

I didn’t know what to say. The house just looked like a mess to me. I would have to take Bar’s word for the fact that it was a professional mess.

“What makes you think this wasn’t just a burglary?” I asked.

Bar gave me a disgusted look and started down a hallway that looked like it led to the bedrooms.

“Holy Christ,” I murmured softly when I got to the end of it and looked around.

The master suite consisted of a huge bedroom with a line of walk-in closets on one side and a small study with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on the other. The king-sized bed was in the middle of the room, its headboard a futuristic-looking rack of reading lights and telephones shuffled together with an elaborate collection of video and sound equipment. The whole setup faced a curtain of glass that overlooked the river and I glanced involuntarily toward the ceiling. I was a little surprised not to find a mirror up there.

The room had been spectacular once, but now it looked like a garbage dump. Clothes, shoes, papers, framed pictures, files, and books were heaped in a massive pile at the center of the room. The place looked like someone had begun to build a bonfire, but had been interrupted before they could ignite it.

Bar crossed the room to the walk-in closets and shoved aside a long chrome and glass table overturned in front of them. He checked the first closet, then pushed his head into each of the others and examined them as well. When he had finished, he turned to me and delivered his verdict.

“Dollar’s on the run.”

“Christ, Bar. I’d be halfway to Madagascar by now if I came home and found that someone had worked my place over like this.”

“No, that’s not it. He took off before any of this happened.”

“And this you know exactly how, Sherlock?”

“His luggage is gone.”

Dollar was a big fan of Halliburton bags, a line of outrageously expensive suitcases made of silver-colored magnesium favored by airline pilots, people in the oil and gas business, and guys who delivered drug money in old episodes of Miami Vice. Dollar even carried a Halliburton briefcase, a flashy companion that had no doubt cost him more than the university paid me every month. He always said his Halliburtons were indestructible, but it never even occurred to me that he carried them because they were practical and long lasting. Dollar just liked their style.

“Maybe whoever hit the place took the luggage,” I said.

Bar shook his head. “This wasn’t just some kids cored on amphetamines. Anyway, they’d take pillow cases, not a matched set of expensive luggage that’s easy to ID and hard to get rid of.”

“Yeah, the stuff is indestructible,” I said.

“What?”

“Never mind.”

While Bar squatted and probed at the papers and clothing piled in the middle of the bedroom, I walked into the study area and righted a black leather swivel chair that had been pushed onto its side. I wheeled it around behind Dollar’s desk and sat down.

The desk had been thoroughly ransacked, too, yet whoever had done it had left it looking a little neater than the other things in the room. Dollar’s computer had been pushed off to one side, but it looked intact and all the pieces seemed to be connected in the usual way. I hit the power-on button just to see what would happen. I heard a musical chord and a light blue background appeared on the screen.

Dollar’s computer was a Mac, not the Windows PC I would have expected him to have. I wasn’t much of a computer guy, and I knew absolutely nothing at all about Apple stuff, so I just sat and watched the screen while it filled with icons and windows popped open displaying file names and application titles that meant nothing at all to me.

Bar heard the chord and came over and stood behind me where he could see the screen.

“We’ve got Macs at the Post,” he said. “I can probably figure this out.”

When the computer’s start-up routine was done he leaned across me, cupped his right hand over the mouse and scooted it around, selecting something from the bar of commands that ran across the top of the screen. He clicked the mouse button and all the icons immediately changed. Then he clicked it for a second time, and they changed again. Although the names of the files remained the same, each little folder now had on top of it a small cartoon figure which was decked out in the uniform of a Hollywood-style spy-dark glasses, fedora pulled down low, and a belted trench coat that was an odd electric blue color.

“Crypto shit,” Bar snorted. “PGP, I think.”

Bar might well have lapsed into Turkish. “What does that mean?” I asked.

“Dollar’s encrypted all his files, probably using a program called Pretty Good Privacy. It’s supposed to be uncrackable. Without his password, you can’t read anything.”

Bar abruptly lost interest in the computer and began examining an answering machine that was near it on the desk.

“Why would Dollar encrypt the files on his home computer?” I asked, not ready to give up yet. “Doesn’t that mean he’s got something pretty important on it?”

Bar grunted. “It’s no big deal. Any ten-year-old can get PGP on the Internet for nothing, and they say it’s almost as good as what the CIA uses. Anyway, Dollar’s too smart to leave anything that really matters just lying around on a computer in his bedroom, even if it’s encrypted.”

Without taking his eyes off the answering machine, Bar gestured vaguely in the direction of the computer. “All that’s probably nothing. Anyway, forget it. Without knowing the password, you’ll never get in.”

The answering machine was a digital model without any tapes in it. Bar put it down on the floor, plugged it in, and turned it on. When he pressed the play button, there was a brief silence, the sound of a dial tone, and then a beep.