KILLING PLATO (A Jack Shepherd crime thriller)

by Jake Needham

  I went into the kitchen and fished around in the refrigerator until I found a cold bottle of Corona and popped the top. Then I wandered into my study, turned on the lamps there, too, and flopped down in the big chair behind my desk.

  After taking a long hit on the Corona, I pulled out my telephone and punched the speed dial for Anita’s studio. I listened to the number ringing for a while, then pushed the disconnect button and tried the speed dial for Anita’s cell phone. After two rings her voice mail kicked in and I hung up without leaving a message.

  That was odd. Anita hadn’t said anything about going anywhere tonight, at least not that I could remember. And even if she had gone somewhere, I couldn’t imagine why her telephone would be off.

  On top of that, something else was making me uneasy. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but it wasn’t the surprise of Anita’s unexpected absence or even the residual effects of my meeting with Karsarkis that I was feeling. It was something completely different, something like a disturbance in the air around me.

  I mulled it over while I sat there drinking my Corona, but I couldn’t grab onto anything solid. Finally, I put the bottle down, reached for my laptop, and swung my feet up onto the desk. After I lifted the lid to wake it from standby, I waited the usual couple of seconds for the screen to spring back to life, but it didn’t.

  Wonderful, I thought to myself. Now my laptop is screwed up. What the hell else can happen today?

  After the obligatory muttered curses, I took a closer look and almost immediately discovered the problem.

  The laptop was shut down rather than in standby the way I usually left it. I pushed the power button and immediately heard the reassuring whir of the hard disk spinning up. I almost never shut the thing down and I couldn’t remember doing it when I last used it, but I supposed I must have. God, I sighed to myself as I watched the Windows logo flash up and then disappear again, I must be getting forgetful in my old age.

  When the log-on screen came up, I had to stop and think for a moment since I’d just changed my password a few days before, but then I typed in the new password and waited for the desktop to appear. It didn’t. Instead of the usual display of colorful icons against a restful blue background, I found myself contemplating a dialog box with an angry-looking red border around it.

  WARNING, it said in big letters across the top. Then below that, in somewhat more restrained type, it announced: THERE HAS BEEN AN ATTEMPT TO ACCESS THIS COMPUTER WITHOUT PASSWORD AUTHORIZATION. FOR FURTHER INFORMATION PLEASE CLICK INFO BELOW.

  What the hell?

  I clicked the button with INFO on it.

  AT 1937h ON 23 APRIL AN UNSUCCESSFUL ATTEMPT WAS MADE TO ACCESS THIS COMPUTER. AFTER THREE INCORRECT PASSWORD ENTRIES, IT WAS SHUT DOWN AND LOCKED. PRESS OK TO CONTINUE.

  At least that explained why the laptop was shut down rather than in standby, but the explanation paled into insignificance next to the new question it raised.

  Who the hell had been trying to get into my laptop?

  I glanced at my watch. It was twenty minutes after nine. 1937h was 7:37 pm in actual people time. At 7:37 pm I had been with Tommy at Plato Karsarkis’ hideaway off Sukhumvit Road.

  Had Anita been fiddling with my laptop? That seemed unlikely since she wasn’t in the apartment now. Would she have been here a couple of hours ago, tried to use my laptop, and then left again? Surely that couldn’t be right. Besides, Anita wasn’t very fond of computers and seldom even used her own. She had never touched mine at all as far as I knew. Why would she to start now?

  On the other hand, if not Anita, then who? The maid was a sixty-four-year-old woman from a tiny village up on the Laotian border who left promptly at six every evening to go back to her daughter’s house across town. Even if she had still been here at 7:30, she wouldn’t have thought of trying to use a laptop computer anymore than she would have taken a whack at piloting the space shuttle.

  I hit OK and the familiar Windows desktop filled my screen just as it always did.

  I glanced through the files on my hard drive. Everything looked just as I had left it. Of course, that was the way it ought to look. The laptop had locked up when the password wasn’t entered correctly and no one could have accessed the hard drive anyway. Or could they?

  What was going on here? Had someone been poking around in my study while I was out at Karsarkis’ hideaway? As improbable as that seemed, there didn’t appear to be any other explanation unless of course my security software had all of a sudden gone around the bend on its own, which I suppose was possible. The feeling of unease I’d had before, the sense of a disturbance in the air, was becoming distinctly more tangible.

  Still, I asked myself, why would anyone have wanted to look at the files on my laptop? There really wasn’t much in them. I had the usual stuff most people did—some personal correspondence, a lot of pointless emails, a list of credit card numbers, some old tax returns, spreadsheets for my brokerage accounts, and a few other bits of personal information. It was hardly the sort of thing that would have held much interest for a cat burglar.

  I looked closely at the surface of my desk, but nothing appeared to have been disturbed. Then I got up slowly and walked over to the lateral file cabinet on the opposite wall. I stood there a moment contemplating it warily.

  When I pulled open the top drawer I guess I half expected to find a dead body inside. What I actually found, of course, were my files, and they looked pretty much the way they always looked. I ran my hand over the forest of manila tabs that stuck out above the dark green suspension folders. Then I pulled a couple out and glanced at their contents. Nothing struck me as out of the ordinary, so I put them back and closed the drawer again.

  I was still standing there wondering if I ought to check out the other drawers and closets around the house—and exactly how far I would get before sheer embarrassment at my own foolishness would cause me to abandon the effort—when the doorbell buzzed.

  My state of mind at that moment beinat wn g what it was, the sound of it scared the unholy crap out of me.

  TWENTY FOUR

  SO ABSORBED WAS I in my outbreak of paranoia, I had forgotten for a moment that Jello was coming around. Opening the door I saw he had dressed for the occasion. He was wearing a lemon-yellow Hawaiian shirt with a chorus line of topless hula dancers strung out across the considerable width of his chest. The shirt hung out over a pair of baggy khakis and the cuffs of the khakis flopped onto a shiny pair of silver Air Jordans with black laces. For Jello, this was dressing.

  I led him into the study and he paused next to the straight chair in front of my desk, examining it as if he wasn’t quite sure what it was. I had to admit it looked a little dainty next to him. A lot of people doubted Jello was a Thai since he was so big. Rather than possessing the wiry, whippet-like physique usually associated with Thais, Jello was build more like a sumo wrestler. A big sumo wrestler.

  “You got something I won’t break?” he asked, pointing at the chair.

  I sat back down behind my desk and waved him into the chair without saying anything. He settled gingerly onto it. Remarkably, it held.

  “You get some bad sushi for dinner or something, Professor?” Jello studied my face as he laid the red accordion file he was carrying in his ample lap. “You don’t look too good.”

  I tapped my fingers on the desk and avoided Jello’s eyes. How much should I tell him?

  The last conversation I had with Jello had ended with ominous warnings from him not to have anything to do with Plato Karsarkis. If I told him I had just been hanging out with Karsarkis while somebody was breaking into my apartment and checking out my laptop, he would have looked at me pretty strangely. I could hardly blame him. Shoot, I was looking at me pretty strangely.

  “Well…” I paused, but Jello didn’t say anything to help me out, so I made a snap decision to stick strictly to the mystery of the moment and leave Plato Karsarkis out of it. “It looks like somebody’s been messing with my laptop, but there’s nobody here who
could have.”

  “Anita?”

  “No, she’s out and it happened just a couple of hours ago.”

  Jello leaned forward and tossed the file he’d brought me onto the desk, then he folded his arms and looked at me.

  “Go on,” he said.

  I told him what I knew about what had happened, which wasn’t much, so it didn’t take long.

  “Is there anything on the laptop anybody might want?” he asked when I was done.

  “Not really. My class preparation stuff, a little personal financial data. Like that.”

  “No client files?”

  “No…well, nothing important. Certainly nothing anybody would want to break into my apartment for.”

  “You think this was a break-in?”

  “I don’t know what I think. Maybe the damned software is all fucked up. You asked me why I looked a little strange and I told you. Now lay off. Don’t grill me about it.”

  I looked at Jello for ten or fifteen seconds and he looked back, but he never said a word. Then abruptly he stood up and began to wander around the sn="jtudy, apparently aimlessly, examining the framed memorabilia hung on the walls.

  “Any signs of forced entry?” he asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “Anything missing?”

  “I don’t think so. Somebody just tried to get into my laptop, that’s all.”

  “So you’ve checked everything?”

  “No,” I admitted. “ I’ve looked around in here. Not in the other rooms.”

  Jello nodded very slowly as if I had somehow just confirmed all his deepest suspicions.

  “You piss anybody off recently, Professor?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “How about the stuff you’re working on now. You involved in any flaky shit I ought to know about?”

  I apparently took a beat too long to respond because Jello shot me a dead-eyed look over his shoulder and then went back to examining the hangings on my walls with considerably more care than I thought they merited.

  “Look, could we just drop this?” I asked as Jello scrutinized the elaborately engraved certificate attesting to my good standing with the United States Supreme Court. “It’s probably nothing. You’re making me wish I hadn’t told you.”

  Jello worked his way around the wall to the low filing cabinet. All of a sudden he hopped on top of it with such astonishing agility for a big man that I just sat and stared, too dumbstruck to do much else.

  Jello reached up and ran the fingertips of his left hand lightly back and forth over the wide molding that joined the wall and the ceiling. Then a small penknife materialized in his right hand and, after feeling around a bit more with his left, he pressed the point into the soft wood and twisted it into the molding with a corkscrewing motion.

  “Jello, what in Christ’s name—”

  He waved me into silence without turning around. Digging something out of the molding with the blade, he closed the knife and cradled whatever it was in his palm, examining it, but his body blocked my view and I couldn’t tell what it was. Jello’s body was so big he could have been holding a small automobile and I wouldn’t have been able to tell what it was.

  “Look, man, what the hell are you doing?” I asked. “What’s that?”

  Jello turned around and hopped off the filing cabinet, then walked over and gently placed what looked like a nail on my desk blotter. I stared at it for a moment and then looked up.

  “Okay, it’s a nail,” I said. “So what?”

  “Not a nail.”

  Jello picked up the thing that still looked to me like a nail and held it right in front of my face, rotating it between his thumb and forefinger. Then he cupped it in his hand and closed his fingers around it, burying the head in his palm.

  “It’s a wireless transmitter,” he said. “Short range, maybe three hundred yards, but pretty reliable over that distance. The main drawback to this model is its internal power only lasts for about seventy-two hours. After that you have to replace it.”

  “You’ve got to be shitting me.”

  “I shit you not, Professor. I shit you not one little bit.”

  I stared at Jello’s closed fist and tried to envision the device he had cupped inside it.

  “Oh, come on,” I shook my head at him again. “Surely it’s not really…”

  “Very sophisticated stuff, too. Almost looks like one of ours, although it isn’t.”

  “You mean somebody’s listening to us right now?” I asked.

  “Not as long as I’ve got the business end blocked like this.” Jello wiggled his fist at me. “But somebody has been listening to everything that’s been said in this room.”

  “For how long? Three days?”

  I began frantically trying to remember what might have been said in this room during the last three days.

  Jello shook his head. “Not necessarily.”

  He carefully reseated himself on the fragile looking chair in front of my desk, keeping the listening device closed up inside his big hand.

  “I said this thing was good for about three days,” he said. “That doesn’t mean it’s been here three days. Maybe whoever was looking at your laptop put it in. Maybe it wasn’t here until tonight. On the other hand, maybe they were replacing one they had put in before and its battery was gone. No way to tell.”

  “Why would anyone want to stick a bug in my study?”

  Jello shrugged. “Why would anyone want to look at whatever you have on your laptop?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  Jello looked unconvinced.

  “Look, Jack, you’re going to have to tell me what you’re into here. Otherwise, I don’t see what help I can be.”

  I was still trying to make up my mind whether to tell Jello about Tommy and the meeting at Karsarkis’ apartment when he leaned forward, used his free hand to pick a pen out of the cup on my desk, and began to write on a legal pad lying next to it.

  “Anyway,” he said as he continued to write, “your bug is dead now.”

  Then abruptly he rotated the yellow pad and pushed it toward me.

  On it Jello had scrawled it may not be the only one.

  I held Jello’s eyes across the desk until I was sure he wasn’t joking around.

  Then I took the pen and wrote what do I do?

  “Look, Jack, you can tell me what you’ve got yourself into here or not.” The whole time Jello was talking, he was writing again. “I don’t really give much of a damn either way.”

  Walk across the street to McDonalds, he wrote, then he looked at me and raised his eyebrows.

  I nodded.

  Take your phone into the upstairs toilet.

  I would have laughed right out loud, but it hardly seemed the thing to do under the circumstances.

  “Look, Jello,” I said instead, over-enunciating like a bad actor, “I don’t really know what to tell you here.”

  Then call me, he finished writing. He popped the pen back into the cup and pushed the pad over to me.

  “Okay, Jack, suit yourself. I just came to drop off these incorporation papers.” Jello stoodo; cup and p up and pocketed the bug. “But I can see this isn’t a good time. If you change your mind about telling me what’s going on, let me know. I’ll try to help.”

  I picked my phone up off my desk and pushed it into my pocket.

  “Okay, Jello. I understand. I’ll do that.”

  We walked to the front door together in silence.

  “Maybe I’ll go downstairs with you,” I said as I opened it for him. “I might go out and get something to eat.”

  “Suit yourself,” he shrugged.

  Neither of us spoke again until the elevator had come and we were inside.

  “Look, Jello—” I started to say, but he shook his head before I got any further than that.

  “Not yet.”

  We stepped into the lobby and walked outside. Jello turned toward the visitors parking area without the slightest indication th
at he even remembered the notes we had traded upstairs.

  “Night, Jack,” he said, and gave a little wave over his shoulder.

  “Night, man.”

  I turned the other way and walked through the building’s main gate and out to Soi Chidlom. There was a huge two-story McDonalds on the other side of the street, and its red, yellow, and green neon outlines looked incongruously cheerful among the other buildings in the neighborhood that were mostly dark at that hour.

  A nearly unbroken river of cars, trucks, buses, and motorbikes still flowed south along Soi Chidlom toward Ploenchit Road about half a mile away. While I stood there waiting for enough of an opening to dart across without ending up as a hood ornament on a Mercedes Benz, Jello’s nondescript white Toyota pulled out of Chidlom Place and turned right into traffic.

  He drove right past me. If he even noticed me standing there on the curb, he didn’t let on.

  TWENTY FIVE

  “WHY EXACTLY AM I sitting on a toilet in McDonalds talking to you on my cell phone, Jello?”

  I looked around. The inside of a bathroom stall didn’t have a great deal to recommend it as a place to carry on a telephone conversation, but then I could probably have guessed that if I had ever thought about it before, which I hadn’t.

  “I was hoping you’d tell me,” he said. “What have you gotten yourself into this time?”

  “I’m not into anything, man.”

  “Oh, I see. Then I guess that little bug I found in your apartment must have been put there by mistake. You figure?”

  “Why didn’t we just have this conversation outside the apartment?” I asked.

  “Shotgun mikes are pretty effective. Your friends could have had one on us from a hundred different places and we’d never know it.”

  “So why don’t you come on back here and I’ll buy you a Big Mac. Then we can sit at one of those nice red plastic tables downstairs and talk this whole thing through. If there are any people in here tonight with shotgun mikes, I’m sure we’ll spot them right away.”