Jake Needham - Laundry Man

“Hang up,” Bar observed.

After a few moments, a disembodied voice issued from the machine in a slightly spooky cadence.

“That… was… your… last… message,” the voice intoned.

Then the machine clicked off.

“I hate it when answering machines do that,” Bar said. “It sounds like they’re telling your fortune.”

I looked at Bar without saying anything. He ignored me and poked with his foot at the mound of debris in the middle of the bedroom.

“Whoever tossed this place either took what he was looking for or didn’t find anything,” he said. “Either way that still doesn’t leave anything for us to look for.”

I stood up from behind the desk and dusted my hands off on my jeans. “I guess you’re right. We ought to call the cops.”

Bar twisted his head around and looked at me as if I had suddenly begun to speak in tongues.

“Why in Christ’s name would you want to get the cops involved?”

“Dollar might be in some kind of danger.”

“Bullshit, Jack. He’s probably shacked up in Monte Carlo with a couple of French chickadees by now. Besides, Thai cops couldn’t find Santa Claus at the North Pole.”

He was right about that, of course, but then I thought back to the look I had seen on Dollar’s face the morning after Howard’s body had been found and I was less sure that Bar had the part about Monte Carlo right. Regardless, the thought about calling the cops had been an American’s reflex. In Thailand nobody ever called the cops.

“I’ll make some calls,” Bar said. “Somebody’s got to know something.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Let’s keep this between ourselves for now,” Bar added. “Maybe it’s something we shouldn’t know about.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

Bar just shook his head and walked back up the corridor and out the front doors. When we left, I made sure the button on the back of the front door handle was pushed in so that the doors would lock behind us. It was a silly gesture perhaps, but it just didn’t seem right to walk out and leave Dollar’s house unlocked no matter what condition it was in.

After Bar had gotten into his old Toyota and driven away, I started to get into my car, too, but then the thought occurred to me that perhaps I ought to make a quick circuit of the wall surrounding Dollar’s house and make sure everything was secure. It was a gesture as pointless as locking the front door, but it still seemed to me to be the least I could do for Dollar under the circumstances.

About a hundred feet south of the big gate, Dollar’s whitewashed wall joined his neighbor’s black stone wall. That left me nothing much to see in that direction so I turned around and walked back the other way. At the north end of the property, I found a narrow gap between Dollar’s wall and his neighbor’s. It was a small area where both houses stored their trashcans and all of the cans were the aluminum kind with rigid sides and heavy lids that you hardly ever saw anymore. The way the cans were arranged told an obvious story.

Two small cans had been drawn up against two large ones to form a staircase right up the side of Dollar’s whitewashed wall. I stepped up on the first can, climbed onto the second, and found myself standing just below the top of the wall. From there, swinging over it and dropping down the other side would have been a piece of cake. I had no doubt that Dollar’s visitors had come in this way and then left by opening the gate from the inside.

When I turned to climb down, the lid on one of the larger cans popped loose and inside it I spotted some files that looked just like the ones that Bar and I had found scattered over the floor of Dollar’s bedroom. But why would whoever ransacked Dollar’s place put files in a trashcan? Plainly they wouldn’t, so that could only mean that Dollar must have thrown out all this stuff sometime before his unexpected visitors arrived.

That could be pretty interesting, I thought, so after I got down I pulled the lids off the other cans as well to see what else I could find. All of those appeared to contain nothing but the usual kind of household garbage-old newspapers, empty Coke cans, plastic milk bottles, and unidentifiable organic matter emitting seriously unappetizing odors. None of those things looked nearly as interesting as the files in the first can, so I closed up the other trashcans and gave my full attention to the one that had caught my eye in the first place.

I dumped it out onto the ground and used my foot to stir through the contents. At a glance it seemed to be nothing more than the usual accumulation of office trash, but since I’d come this far I squatted down and began to sift methodically through everything. There were piles of American Express vouchers, a lot of mobile phone bills, statements from several different banks, and bundles of correspondence. Opening one of the bundles, I sat on the ground and began to read. In less than five minutes I knew what I had found.

Nothing.

The stuff was just a bunch of correspondence going back a number of years between Dollar and some investment managers in London. Other than confirming Dollar had a bit of money put away, which I already assumed, and that he kept a close eye on it, which I could have guessed, none of the correspondence told me anything at all. I flipped through a second bundle and found more of the same. A third was mostly contract notes confirming securities trades as well as a few monthly position statements for some brokerage accounts. I had pretty much given up the idea finding anything interesting and had begun tossing everything back into the trashcan when a CD slid out of one of the bundles I hadn’t bothered to look through and fell to the ground. I picked it up and examined it. It looked new, but there was no label on it. I thought back to the Mac in Dollar’s bedroom. Did it have a CD burner in it? I couldn’t remember.

I turned the disk around in my hands. Was it a backup copy of some of Dollar’s important personal files? Or was it just a pirate copy of some computer game he had bought at the night market and then discovered didn’t work?

Maybe there was more here that I thought. Apparently I needed to look more carefully. I set the disk to one side and piled everything else back in the trashcan. When I finished, I picked up the disk, then I grabbed the handle of the trash can with my free hand and carried both of them around to the front of the house. I placed the CD gently on the Volvo’s front seat and dumped the complete contents of the can into the trunk.

Howard the Roach was dead and now Dollar Dunne seemed to be on the run. I still had absolutely no idea why, but there was no doubt in my mind of at least one thing: whatever the reason, and whatever this thing really was, it was getting closer and closer to me. I figured I had better find out exactly what was going on before some asshole showed up at my door to tidy up loose ends and I discovered one of those loose ends was me.

I would have hoped for a more dignified way to do that than digging through garbage. Still, I had to start somewhere, didn’t I?

Anita was still at her studio when I got home so I found a big trash bag under the kitchen sink, took it down to the garage, and scooped all of Dollar’s garbage out of my trunk. After I had lugged everything back upstairs to the apartment, I got out my laptop and settled down in one of the leather chairs in front of the windows to look at the CD I had found in Dollar’s trash.

There appeared to be only one file on the CD, but the name of it was BACKUP and I thought that was pretty encouraging. I double-clicked on the icon above the file name to see what was in it, but I was disappointed when nothing appeared on my screen other than a dialogue box inviting me to tell Windows what program it should use to open the file.