Jake Needham - Laundry Man

“Stand.”

It was a man’s voice, and I felt the knees move and the weight lift off my back.

I pushed myself up slowly and dusted off with a show of casual deliberation. It was a childish gesture of defiance, but I did it anyway.

When I eventually lifted my eyes, I saw two Thai men a few paces in front of me watching with blank faces. One was the man who had opened the gate and the other might have been the guard I had watched through my glasses patrolling the compound, although I wasn’t sure. Both of them were armed, but their weapons dangled casually at their sides. That seemed to me to be a good sign.

“Nice jacket, Mr. Shepherd.”

It was a woman’s voice from behind me.

“I like the inside-out thing,” she added. “Very subtle.”

When I turned around, Beth was holding my.45. She had taken it from the holster, but unlike the men’s rifles, it wasn’t pointed at the ground. It was pointed right at my belly. So much for good signs. Next to her was one of the men I had seen that day in Lumpini Park, the big one. He was holding my wallet, keys, and the extra clips, so I gathered it was probably his knees that had just been in my back.

“What were you going to do with this thing, Mr. Shepherd?” Beth wiggled the.45. “Shoot Barry?”

“I doubt it, Beth. But you never know.”

Beth laughed just like she had laughed that morning we were running around the lake in Lumpini Park and even in this bizarre and secret place it still had the sound of a happy child in the park on a sunny morning.

“Jeez, that would have come as a real surprise to all of us. Particularly Barry.”

I tried to read the expression in Beth’s eyes, but now they were cop’s eyes and I couldn’t.

“Did you come here alone tonight, Mr. Shepherd?”

“What does it look like to you, Beth? You see an army somewhere out there behind me?”

She smiled with her mouth, but I could see her eyes doing calculations as she did. I wondered if she believed me, and what difference it might make if she didn’t.

Beth just stood and looked at me for a while, then all at once her body relaxed and she dropped the muzzle of my.45 until it pointed to the ground.

“Barry’s in the main house. He’s anxious to see you.”

“I’ll bet he is.”

“I’ll keep your sidearm and extra clips, Mr. Shepherd. You can get them back when you leave.”

At least Beth seemed to think I would be leaving. That was encouraging. I just hoped she and Barry were on the same page.

The big man standing with Beth gave her the clips then tossed my wallet and keys across the gap between us. I caught them both in the air, which pleased me unreasonably under the circumstances, and shoved them back into my pockets.

The big man walked to the gate and closed it again, securing it with quick, economical movements. Beth gestured me toward the entrance to the main house and fell into step behind me still carrying my.45.

“Just don’t shoot me in the ass,” I muttered.

The green marble floor of the foyer was polished to the sheen of a frozen lake and the walls were painted with kitschy scenes of what life was presumably like a few hundred years ago in Phuket, at least for the white guys. A band of dark-skinned, laughing local girls, naked except for a few strategically draped palm fronds here and there enthusiastically serviced visiting sailors who were sprawled on the beach in varying stages of intoxication. It was just the right sort of stuff to go with the big brass torches outside.

“Straight through,” Beth said from behind me.

I crossed the foyer and we walked at a stately pace single file along a wide, gallery-like corridor. Through a pair of open doors at the far end I could see part of a large room furnished with comfortable-looking couches and chairs arranged in front of a stone fireplace surrounded by an elaborately-carved marble mantelpiece. Improbably enough for Thailand, there was a wood fire blazing away in the fireplace. It was a scene that suggested Barry Gale had to be standing somewhere just out of sight, probably wearing a burgundy silk smoking jacket with a wide black sash and stroking the head of an Irish Setter.

The gallery was lined with oil paintings in heavy, old-fashioned gilt frames and at a quick glance they seemed to be a spectacular collection. I was no art expert, but a couple of the paintings looked a lot like Gauguins, another appeared to be a Monet, and a large canvas that had been carefully lit by concealed pencil-spots might have been a Rembrandt.

“These aren’t real, are they?” I asked Beth.

She didn’t say anything, but I heard her grunt softly. I wondered if that meant that the paintings were real or that she thought any idiot ought to know they weren’t.

When we reached the big room at the end of the gallery, Beth pointed at one of the couches by the fireplace, then turned away and walked back toward the front door without a word. Neither Barry Gale nor the Irish setter were anywhere in sight, so I settled back on the couch and looked around.

The room could have been a Ralph Lauren store, crackling fire and all, an American fantasy of what British manor houses were supposed to look like but never actually did. I would bet some decorator from New Jersey had ripped a few pages out of an old Harpers amp; Queen, copied as much of them as he could, and then just made the rest of it up from there. In California the result might have been funny. In Phuket it was downright scary.

“What do you think of my place, Jack?”

Barry had come into the room from somewhere behind me, but I didn’t turn around.

“Pretty terrific, huh? You see the names on those pictures out there?”

He walked past the couch and settled into a red leather wing chair that was just in front of the fire, crossing his legs at the knee and stretching his arms out along the rolled arms of the chair. He was wearing slacks that looked like black linen, a matching long-sleeved shirt, and black loafers without socks. He looked tanned and rested, not at all like a man on the run.

“So who’d you buy the place from?” I asked him. “Donald Trump?”

“That’s a pretty good one,” he chuckled.

I chuckled, too. So far we were having a hell of a time.

“Nah,” he said after he was done chuckling, “the bank took it off a couple of locals. Two old queens who were part-time politicians, part-time real estate developers, and full-time fuck-ups. They only thought they were Donald Trump.”

Barry chuckled one more time for good measure.

“How about your girlfriend outside? Another foreclosure?”

“Beth has worked for the bank…” Barry paused to think about it, “oh, almost two years now. I brought her in myself. She doesn’t know anything about the heavy lifting, of course. Just the routine stuff.”

“Yeah, I can understand how that works. Heck, I’m the trustee for this whole setup here and up until a few hours ago I didn’t even know it existed.”

Barry smiled benignly at me. He was apparently enjoying this a lot.

“Okay, Barry, you got me.” I tossed out my best shrug. “I’ll just sit here until you feel like telling me what the hell’s going on. I really don’t know what else to do.”

Barry glanced over my shoulder, then suddenly stood up and walked past me. I twisted around and saw Beth standing just inside the gallery. She and Barry exchanged a few words that I couldn’t hear and then Barry walked back and resumed his seat by the fire.

“Came here by yourself tonight, did you, Jack?”

“That’s what they say.”

“I had it all worked out for you to show up eventually, of course, but I got to be honest with you. I didn’t think you’d manage it quite this fast.”