Inspector Zhang And The Dead Thai Gangster (a short story)

by Stephen Leather

  “Nice to meet you, Mr. Clare,” I said. Mrs. Clare smiled and offered me her hand. It was a child’s hand, milk-white skin with delicate fingers as brittle as porcelain. “Mrs. Clare,” I said, shaking her hand as carefully as possible. I went and sat behind my desk and flashed them a reassuring smile. “So how can I help you?” I asked.

  “Matt Richards at the embassy said that you might be able to find our son,” said Mr. Clare, dropping back into his chair. It creaked under his weight.

  I nodded. Matt Richards was an attaché at the US Embassy. He was an acquaintance rather than a friend, someone I bumped into from time to time on the cocktail party circuit. He was an affable enough guy but hard to get close to. I kind of figured he was a spook, CIA or maybe DEA. Whatever, he was cagey enough never to let his guard down with me and I never really cared enough to do any serious probing. It wasn’t the first time he’d sent along people who needed help that the embassy couldn’t – or wouldn’t - provide.

  I picked up a pen and reached for a yellow legal pad. There were a whole host of questions that I’d need answering, but from experience I’d found that it was often better just to let them get it off their chests as quickly as possible. “I’m listening,” I said.

  Mr. Clare looked across at his wife and she nodded at him with raised eyebrows. He was twice her size but I got the feeling that she was the one who ruled the roost in the Clare household. “We’re Mormons,” he said, slowly. “From Salt Lake City. Utah. I’m telling you that because I want you to know that Jon Junior is a God-fearing boy who has honored his mother and father since the day he was born. He’s not a boy to go wandering off without telling us where He’s going and what He’s doing.”

  Mr. Clare reached inside his suit jacket and slid a colour photograph across the desk. I picked it up. It was a graduation photograph, Jon Junior grinning at the camera with an all-American smile, his wheat-coloured hair sticking out from under a mortarboard, his blue eyes gleaming with triumph, a diploma in his hand.

  “Second in his class,” said Mr. Clare proudly. “Scholarships all the way. A man couldn’t ask for a better son.”

  “The apple of our eye,” said Mrs. Clare, nodding in agreement.

  “How old is he?” I asked.

  “Twenty-one,” said Mr Clare.

  “Twenty-two next month,” added his wife.

  Mr. Clare handed me a sheet of paper. “We have a photocopy of Jon Junior’s passport. We also told him to photocopy all his important documents. You can never be too careful.”

  “Indeed,” I said.

  “We’ve already got his birthday present,” said Mr. Clare. “A digital camera. State of the art.”

  Mrs. Clare reached over and held her husband’s hand. He smiled at her with tight lips.

  “And He’s in Thailand?” I asked.

  “He came two months ago,” said Mr. Clare. “He wanted to take some time off before joining me in the family business. Janitorial supplies. Cleaning equipment. We’re one of the biggest in the state. There’s barely a hospital or school in Utah that doesn’t have our soap in its dispensers.”

  I decided it was time to cut to the chase before I got the complete Clare family history. “And when was the last time you heard from Jon Junior?” I asked.

  “Three weeks ago,” said Mr. Clare. “He phoned us every week. And wrote. Letters. Postcards.”

  “Do you remember when exactly he phoned?”

  Mr. Clare looked over at his wife. “March the seventh,” she said. “It was a Sunday. He always phoned on a Sunday.”

  “And when did he fly in?”

  Mr. Clare looked over at his wife again. “January the sixteenth,” she said.

  “Did he apply for a visa in the States?” I asked.

  “Why does that matter?” asked Mr. Clare.

  “If you apply for a tourist visa overseas then you get sixty days, which can be extended for a further thirty days,” I explained. “If you arrive without a visa, immigration will give you thirty days in which case Jon Junior will have overstayed.”

  “Is that bad?” asked Mrs Clare.

  “It’s not too serious,” I said.

  And in the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t.

  Mr. Clare was nodding. “He applied to the Thai Consulate in Chicago. He had a visa.”

  I made a note. “And which airline did he use?”

  “Delta,” said Mr. Clare. “He flew through Seattle.”

  I made another note, then looked up, smiling reassuringly. They seemed less worried now that I was asking for specific information. “The letters that Jon Junior sent, do you have them?”

  Mr. Clare nodded and looked across at his wife. She clicked open a small black handbag and handed me half a dozen airmail envelopes. I put them down next to the photograph.

  “And since the phone call, you haven’t heard from him?”

  The Clares shook their heads. “Not a word,” said the father. “And we’ve spoken to our bank in Salt Lake City and he hasn’t used his credit card since he spoke to us.”

  “What sort of phone did he have? Did he use a local Sim card? With a Thai number?”

  Mr. Clare nodded. “He bought it soon after he arrived. We’ve called it several times. The first time it was answered by a Thai man but since then it’s been switched off.”

  I pushed a notepad towards him and asked him to write down the number.

  “What about emails?” I asked. “Did he email you?”

  “We’re not big fans of emails,” said Mrs. Clare. “I also say that if it’s important enough to write, then it’s important enough to put down on paper.”

  “He did have an email account, but that was just for friends,” said Mr. Clare. “With his mother and me, he wrote or phoned.”

  I asked him to write down the email address. “He came here as a tourist, right? He was just here on vacation?”

  “He was a tourist, but he said he was going to get a job teaching English,” said Mr. Clare.

  I sat back in my chair. “I thought you said he was just taking a break before joining you in the family firm.”

  “He changed his mind. He said he’d fallen in love with the place.”

  “With the place? Or with someone?”

  Mr. Clare frowned. “What are getting at?”

  “He might have met a girl. Or a boy.”

  “Our son is not gay, Mr. Turtledove,” said Mrs. Clare, icily.

  “I bet he could have teamed up with a guy he’d met. Maybe gone up country, trekking with the hill tribes. It’s easy to lose track of time when you’re in the jungle. Or maybe he met a girl. Thailand is full of beautiful women.”

  “Our son is a virgin,” Mrs. Clare said. “He is a virgin and will be on his wedding day. He has promised us that.”

  I tried not to smile but I figured that any red blooded twenty-one-year-old male would have a hard time clinging on to his virginity in Thailand.

  “I am serious, Mr. Turtledove,” said Mrs. Clare. “Our son believes in the Bible as the word of our Lord. Besides, if he had met a girl, he would have told us. Our son tells us everything.”

  “How many children do you have?” I asked.

  “Six,” said Mr. Clare. “Three girls. Three boys. Jon Junior is the oldest.”

  “And has he been in touch with any of his siblings?”

  Mr. Clare’s brow furrowed. “I told you, he hasn’t been in touch since the last phone call.”

  “You said you hadn’t heard from him. That doesn’t mean he hasn’t been in contact with his brothers and sisters.”

  “They would have told us,” said Mr. Clare. He folded his arms and sat back in his chair and glared at me as if daring me to contradict him.

  I doodled on the notepad. “How was your last conversation with Jon Junior?” I asked.

  His glare darkened. “Now what are you suggesting?”

  I kept looking at the pad. The doodle was turning into an angel with spreading wings. “Jon Junior came out here on a holid
ay, then he calls you to say he wants to work here. He’s your eldest boy and you were expecting him to work in the family firm, so it must have come as a shock.”

  “A surprise, yes.”

  “So did you argue with him?”

  “We had an exchange of views.”

  “And you weren’t happy about his career change?”

  Mr. Clare tutted. “He wanted to throw away his education to live in the Third World, in a country which hasn’t even opened itself up to the Lord.”

  “It’s a Buddhist country, but there are Christians here. And churches.”

  “That’s not the point,” said Mr. Clare. “I didn’t want him throwing away the opportunities he had worked for.”

  “So you did argue?”

  “I don’t like what you’re suggesting,” said Mr. Clare. “You’re making it sound as if I chased him away. I didn’t, Mr. Turtledove. We discussed his plans, and we agreed that he should give it a go. If he wanted to be a teacher, that was up to him. But yes, I made my feelings clear on the subject, of course I did.”

  Mrs. Clare patted her husband on the shoulder. “Teaching is a noble occupation, and we told him so,” she said. “We suggested that if he wanted to teach, he should come back to Utah. He said he wanted to teach in Thailand, for a while at least, and we gave him our blessing. We said that he should try teaching in Thailand for a year.”

  “Then he would come back to Utah,” said Mr. Clare. “That’s how we left it.”

  “We have also taught our children to follow their own path, but to use the Lord as their guide,” said Mrs. Clare.

  “When he said goodbye, he said he loved us and that he’d call again in a week,” said Mr. Clare. “That was the last we heard from him.”

  I looked down at the doodle again. I’d drawn horns on the angel and I flipped over the page before the Clares could see what I’d done. “Do you have an address for him?”

  “He was staying at a hotel in Sukhumvit Road but when we spoke he told us that he was checking out and moving into an apartment. He said he’d write to us with the address.”

  I asked him for the address of the hotel and wrote it down.

  “We’ve already been there,” said Mrs. Clare. “So have the police. He checked out, just as he said he did.”

  “You’ve spoken to the police?”

  Mr. Clare shook his head. “The embassy said they’d spoken to them. And they said that they had checked all the hospitals.”

  I nodded and smiled but didn’t tell them that in Thailand what people said they had done didn’t always match up with what had actually happened. More often than not you were told what you wanted to hear.

  “Did he tell you where he was going to be teaching?”

  “A small school, not far from his new apartment,” said Mr. Clare. “I don’t remember if he told me the name.”

  “Did Jon Junior have any teaching qualifications?” I asked.

  Mrs. Clare shook her head. “Not specifically,” she said. “But he did help tutor at a local school some weekends.”

  “Did he mention anyone he’d met here? Any friends?”

  “No one specifically,” said Mr. Clare.

  “Do you think you can find our son, Mr. Turtledove?” asked Mrs. Clare, her hands fiddling in her lap.

  “I’ll do my best,” I said, and I meant it.

  She looked at me earnestly, hoping for more information and I smiled as reassuringly as I could. I wanted to tell her that doing my best was all I could promise, that whether or not I found him would be as much down to luck and fate as to the amount of effort I put into it. I wanted to explain what it was like in Thailand, but there was no easy way to put it into words and if I did try to explain then they’d think that I was a few cards short of a full deck.

  When a crime takes place in the West, more often than not it’s solved by meat and potatoes police work. The police gather evidence, speak to witnesses, identify a suspect and, hopefully, arrest him. In Thailand, the police generally have a pretty good idea of who has committed a crime and then they work backwards to get the evidence to convict him. Or if the perpetrator has enough money or connections to buy himself out of trouble, then they look for evidence to convict someone else. The end result is the same, but the approach is totally different. What I really wanted to tell Mr. and Mrs. Clare was that the best way of finding where Jon Junior had gone would be to find out where he was and if that sounds a bit like Alice in Wonderland, then welcome to Thailand. But I didn’t. I just kept on smiling reassuringly.

  “Do you think we should stay in Bangkok?” asked Mr. Clare.

  I shrugged. “That’s up to you. But I can’t offer any guarantees of how long it could take. I might be lucky and find him after a couple of phone calls. Or I might still be looking for him in two months.”

  “It’s just that my cousin Jeb is minding the shop, and when the good Lord was handing out business acumen, Jeb was standing at the back of the queue playing with his Gameboy.” He held up his hands. “Not that money’s an issue; it’s not. But Mr. Richards said there wasn’t much that Mrs. Clare and I could do ourselves, not being able to speak the language and all.”

  I nodded sympathetically. “He’s probably right. You’d only be a day away if you were back in Utah. As soon as I found anything, I’d call you.”

  “God bless you, Mr. Turtledove,” said Mrs. Clare, and she reached over and patted the back of my hand. She looked into my eyes with such intensity that for a moment I believed that a blessing from her might actually count for something.

  “I would say one thing, just to put your minds at rest,” I said. “If anything really bad had happened, the police would probably know about it and the embassy would have been informed. And if he’d been robbed, his credit card would have been used, here or elsewhere in the world. If it had been theft, they wouldn’t have thrown the card away.”

  “You’re saying you don’t think that he’s dead, that’s what you’re saying?” said Mrs. Clare.

  I nodded and looked into her eyes and tried to make it look as if my opinion might actually count for something.

  Her husband was leaning forward, his eyes narrowing as if he had the start of a headache. He looked like a man who had something on his mind.

  “Is there something else, Mr. Clare? Something worrying you?”

  He looked over at his wife and she flashed him a quick, uncomfortable smile. Yes, there was something else, something that was painful that they didn’t want to talk about.

  “We read something in the paper, about a fire,” said Mr. Clare. “In a nightclub.”

  “Jon Junior wouldn’t be in a nightclub,” said his wife, quickly.

  Too quickly.

  The nightclub they were talking about was the Kube. Two hundred and eighteen people had died. A lot had been foreigners. Most of the bodies still hadn’t been identified.

  I nodded and tried to look reassuring. “That was last week,” I said.

  March the thirteenth, to be exact. A Saturday.

  “We wondered…” said Mr. Clare. “We thought…” He shuddered and Mrs. Clare reached over to hold his hand.

  “Jon Junior doesn’t go to nightclubs,” said Mrs. Clare. “He doesn’t drink. He doesn’t like the music.”

  “If…” said Mr. Clare, but then he winced as if he didn’t want to finish the sentence. I tried an even more reassuring smile to see if that would help. To my surprise, it did. “If Jon Junior was by any chance involved…in the fire.” He rubbed his face with both hands. “Would they tell us? Would they even know? They said that the bodies…” He shuddered.

  Burnt beyond recognition. That’s what they’d said.

  The more salacious Thai newspapers had run pictures of the aftermath of the fire and it wasn’t pretty. I could see why the Clares wouldn’t want to talk about the possibility of their son being among the dead.

  “I really don’t think that’s likely,” I said, and I meant it.

  “But they haven’t iden
tified all the bodies,” said Mr. Clare, happier to talk about it now that I’d downplayed it as a possibility. “And there were a lot of foreigners. More than fifty they said in the Tribune.”

  “That’s true. But there are other considerations.”

  “Considerations?” echoed Mrs. Clare.

  “If Jon Junior had been living in Bangkok and had been in the nightclub, his friends would have noticed. Or the people he lived with. Or the people he worked with. Some one would have realised that he wasn’t around.”

  “That’s what I said,” said Mr. Clare, nodding. He patted his wife’s hand. “That’s exactly what I said.” He flashed a tight smile at me as if to thank me for the reassurance. “But you will check, right?”

  “Of course I will.”

  “And how much do you charge?” asked Mr. Clare.

  “That’s difficult to say,” I said. “I’m not a private detective, I don’t charge by the hour.”

  “You sell antiques, Mr. Richards said,” said Mrs. Clare.

  “That’s my main business, but I’ve been here for almost fifteen years so I have a fair idea of how the place works. I’ll ask around and I can try a few leads that the police wouldn’t necessarily think of.”

  “He said you used to be a police officer.”

  “In another life,” I said.

  “In the States?”

  I smiled thinly. “It’s not something I talk about, much.”

  Hardly at all, in fact. Too many bad memories.

  “I understand,” said Mr. Clare. “Mr. Richards said you were a good man. And reliable.”

  “That was nice of him,” I said, though I figured what Matt Richards was really doing was getting the Clares out of his hair as quickly as possible. “I’ll start by making a few calls, see if I can find out where he was planning to live and work, and take it from there. I’d expect you to cover any expenses, and then when I’ve finished I’ll let you know how much work I’ve done and you can pay me what you think that’s worth.”