For the Dead

by Timothy Hallinan

  Hwa says, “Wasting time, you wasting time here.”

  “Yeah.” Rafferty wipes both hands over his face like someone who’s just waking up. Neeni sucks the energy right out of him; ten minutes with her, and he’s exhausted. “But look,” he says. “Neeni’s probably still got a daughter. Treasure is somewhere in Bangkok. What happens if—”

  “What happen.” It’s a scoff: Hwa’s lips are curled, the corners pulled down. “Maybe Treasure burn too bad, maybe die somewhere else.”

  “I don’t think she was burned,” Rafferty says. “I think Treasure ran straight through that house and into the yard and that room she made in the hedge. At least, I hope so. The hedge wasn’t burned.”

  “House—boom,” Hwa says.

  “Treasure’s little room was fine.” Rafferty glances to Dr. Ratt, looking for support. “You saw it.”

  “I did. Of course, the fact that the room was intact doesn’t mean she was in there.”

  Head cocked on one side, Hwa says, “You see room?”

  “He took me,” Dr. Ratt says.

  “Soft heart,” Hwa says to Rafferty, and it doesn’t sound much like a compliment. “But, you know—this girl crazy.”

  “A gift from her father. But yeah,” Rafferty says, feeling like he’s admitting something he hasn’t wanted to acknowledge, “it’s hard to imagine her making friends.”

  Hwa puts her hands near her ears and makes scrabbling motions with her fingers. “Crazy. If she not dead, maybe live near river. In hole, like animal. Before, at house, she catch things every night. She baba-bobo”—Vietnamese slang for “crazy.”

  “The issue,” Rafferty says, hearing the total hopelessness of it in his ears, “if she’s alive, I mean, is what happens if we find her. Whether she can be helped. I’m keeping money for her to get help—the money I took from Murphy’s. But the question is, does she still have a mother?”

  “That woman?” Hwa says, lifting her chin toward the apartment several stories above them. “You see. What you think?”

  “But if she goes home, to the village. Maybe you could go—”

  “No.” Hwa’s face softens. “Cannot, you know. Cannot help everybody. Neeni will drink. Treasure crazy. Sometime—” She makes a gesture, a fluttering, falling leaf, with one delicate hand. “Must to let go.”

  Dr. Ratt says, “She’s right.”

  “I know she’s right,” Rafferty says. “Fucking hell, I know she’s right. I just hoped—keep Neeni here, let Hwa help her, maybe she’ll—”

  Hwa says, “No.”

  “Right.” Rafferty scuffs his shoe over the pavement. “Can you take her home?”

  “Can,” Hwa says. “Then I go my house.”

  Rafferty says again, “Right. What about the money?”

  “You give me.”

  “I mean, for her. I’ve got, I don’t know, a lot that really belongs to her.”

  “A little at a time,” Dr. Ratt says. “Give her too much, she’ll be dead in days.”

  “I’ll work it out. A hundred a week or something.”

  “Give the rest of it away,” Dr. Ratt says. “Give it to Father Bill.” Father Bill Chandler runs a school and shelter for Bangkok’s street children.

  “Maybe,” Rafferty says. “But I should keep it for Treasure.” He rattles the five-baht coins in his pockets without even hearing them. “Treasure,” he says. “Who the hell knows.”

  “I’LL SET UP the money,” Rafferty says after Hwa has gone back upstairs to see whether Neeni is trying to smoke the sofa. “Hwa can make the travel arrangements.”

  “Hwa can do just about anything,” Dr. Ratt says. “They should make her prime minister.”

  “I had really hoped …” Rafferty’s voice trails off.

  “Life goes on,” Dr. Ratt says. “Even when it doesn’t.”

  “Speaking of that,” Rafferty says, feeling the lift in his heart, “speaking of life going on, Rose is pregnant.”

  “No. What can I say?” Dr. Ratt is not normally a demonstrative man, but he spreads his arms. “Come here.” He hugs Rafferty, American-style, and then lets him go. “Is this her first?”

  “Jesus,” Rafferty says. “If it’s not, I don’t know it.”

  “I’ll have Nui call her. She’s had three in her spare time. Nui can be her guide. Where’s Rose’s mom?”

  “Isaan. They’ve been on the phone all day.”

  “Well, until her mom arrives, she can talk to Nui. Nui will love it. I’m so happy for both of you. Does Miaow know?”

  “That’s sort of the problem,” Rafferty says.

  Dr. Ratt sorts through the ring of keys in his hand. “I’ve been through it. Our first one was six when Nui got pregnant with her little sister. She went completely nuts, breaking things, threatening to run away.” He chooses a key and pushes a button, and something chirps behind Rafferty.

  “What did you do?”

  “We made her part of it. Nui didn’t want stretch marks, so Lala got to put lotion on her mother’s stomach. We put her in charge of Nui’s naps. She drew signs to keep me quiet.” He turns to go. “But the most important thing we did was to let Lala name her. That made the baby Lala’s, too.”

  “And it worked?”

  “She was seven when Sorn was born, and she was that baby’s second mother. Even now, eight years later, she’s Sorn’s best friend and substitute mother.”

  “Let Miaow name her,” Rafferty said. “That’s great.”

  “Have you told Arthit?”

  Rafferty says, “Ummmmm,” and his cell phone rings. He pulls it out and sees ARTHIT. With a certain amount of foreboding, he says, “In the darkness fate moves its heavy hand.” He shows the phone to Dr. Ratt, and says, “Hello.”

  “Poke,” Arthit says. “You need to come down to the station, now. You need to come get your daughter.”

  20

  And a Few Who Want to See It Worked Out Wrong

  “SHE GAVE THEM my name,” Arthit says. He and Poke are in an empty office: metal furniture, last year’s calendar, a linoleum floor. There’s a circular smear of hair oil, like a permanent halo, on the wall above the office chair behind the desk. Arthit is sitting on a corner of the desk behind a couple of official-looking forms, and Rafferty is fidgeting just inside the door, which Arthit left ajar behind them. “The moment they took her into the station, she told them to call me. I had them bring her up here.”

  “What happened?”

  “She ran in front of a motorcycle cop. There was a guy chasing her into the street, and another one on the other side of a fence. What she says is that she and her—companion, I guess—”

  “Andrew.”

  Arthit glances at one of the forms, but not long enough to read anything, so it’s just discomfort, the same discomfort Rafferty feels. “Andrew Nguyen.”

  “Boyfriend.”

  “Really.” Arthit’s eyebrows go up, and even in his agitated state, Rafferty feels a sense of loss. In the old days—seven, eight weeks ago, before Anna—he and Arthit would have talked about Andrew for hours. “Well, what Miaow and Andrew say is that the men chased them through the Indian section, and the kids hid out in the old Indra Siam hotel but when they came out, the men grabbed them. The men were trying to get the kids over the fence and into a car when they got away. Your daughter, according to Andrew, stabbed the men who were hanging onto them with his hypodermic needle. Andrew’s a diabetic.”

  For a split second, Rafferty feels like he’s going to grin. Instead, he says, “She hasn’t lost it.”

  He sees his suppressed grin appear in Arthit’s eyes. “Not only that. She led them into the hotel in the first place because she knew an escape route through the ventilation ducts.”

  Rafferty says, “And she’s still as fragile as glass. What about the men?”

  “Gone. The one outside the fence took off in a car driven by a third man. The other ran back toward the hotel. They had plenty of time. Our cop was trying to keep Miaow from charging straight into traffic
since he had no way of knowing she can probably run between raindrops, and Andrew—to my personal surprise, now that I’ve seen him—came back to see whether she needed help.”

  “That’s right,” Rafferty says. “He probably would, despite the way he looks. I forgot that you hadn’t met him.”

  “No,” Arthit says, lining up the forms side by side. “Haven’t had the pleasure.”

  In a brisker tone, Rafferty says, “Why were the men chasing them?”

  Arthit says, “The simple answer is, an iPhone. Andrew apparently lost an iPhone 5 his father bought him, and his father is, I have to say, a hard-ass of the old school. So your daughter, like a good street child, showed him where to buy a stolen one until they could come up with an explanation for Andrew needing a new SIM card.” He eases himself off the desk and sits in the chair behind it. “Sometimes I regret not having children, and sometimes I’m delighted.”

  “So? So they bought a phone. Who was chasing them, and why?”

  Arthit swivels the chair right and left. “This is where it gets complicated. I’m not sure I can tell you everything.”

  “What you’re not sure you can tell me, Arthit,” Rafferty says, just barely not between his teeth, “is it the explanation for why those men were chasing my daughter? Is my not knowing likely to put her in danger again?”

  Arthit’s mouth tightens at Poke’s tone, but he closes his eyes for a moment, and when he opens them, he takes a slow breath and forces a smile. “I doubt it. We should be releasing the news that we’ve got the phone later today, and that will take the heat off.”

  “Releasing the news,” Rafferty says slowly. “That the police have recovered a stolen iPhone. A bulletin to the breathless millions. What have I missed? Are we in a news-free week?”

  “Andrew had left the phone at home. The men were going to force him to take them there. Miaow says she thinks they were going to kill everybody in the apartment once they had the phone.”

  “Kill four or five people for a phone.”

  “It obviously wasn’t the phone,” Arthit snaps. “It’s what was on it.” He rubs his eyes, draws a long breath, and says, “You don’t know any of this, not from me.”

  Rafferty thinks about it for a second and says, “Okay.”

  “Close the door.” Arthit waits until he hears the latch click and says, “You remember Sawat?”

  “Sure. The cop who was running an expensive murder ring. In the police department, no less. He just got killed.”

  “Fat Thongchai?”

  Poke has to rummage for a minute. “The lower-ranking guy who tried to cover for Sawat.”

  “Thongchai was killed yesterday morning, although we haven’t released that yet. Same way as Sawat, shot and burned. Same guy.” Arthit wipes his palm over his forehead as though he’s perspiring, although the office is cool. “Both victims’ pictures,” he says. “They were on the SIM card in the iPhone Andrew bought.”

  “Two murdered guys,” Poke says. “Why would their pictures be on the phone?”

  “This is conjecture,” Arthit says. He looks past Rafferty to the door for a moment, then comes back to him. “To be precise, it’s my conjecture. Both Sawat and Thongchai were photographed without their knowledge. On sidewalks, mostly. They never saw the photographer. There were several pictures of each of them, and then two of a couple of men in a hotel room. My conjecture is that it was murder for hire, which has a certain poetic symmetry to it, and the phone was given to the killers, maybe the men in the hotel room, so they’d shoot the right guys.”

  “The phone Andrew bought.”

  “Yes. And my guess is that the murderer was supposed to toss the phone into the river but looked at it and thought, here’s another few thousand baht, and sold it.”

  “It wouldn’t connect him to the murders?”

  Arthit shakes his head. “The last two pictures taken, of the two men in a hotel room, were probably taken by the third murderer, as Shakespearean as that sounds, and he was the one who sold the phone. There might be prints, but there might not be, too. Or there are but they’re not on record. Or they’re on record in some dirt-road station where our computers aren’t connected. Other than that, there’s no reason the phone would incriminate him. He certainly didn’t buy the phone or the SIM card and he’s not in the pictures. There weren’t any outgoing calls, and all the incoming calls come from anybody-phones, the ones you buy for eight hundred baht in cash. I’d say he felt free as a bird when he sold the phone.”

  “But then,” Rafferty says.

  “But then his friends went to give the phone back to whoever hired them, as they’d undoubtedly been ordered to, and he didn’t have it. So they went back to the booth to get it, and they were there when Miaow and Andrew arrived.” He spreads his hands. “Bad break.”

  Rafferty says, “I should really go talk to Miaow.”

  “Let her wait,” Arthit says. He leans back. “This might as well be a learning experience.”

  “Then can I have that chair?”

  Arthit says, “Sure. I was just sitting in it.” He gets up and wheels it around to the side of the desk.

  “I need it more than you do,” Rafferty says, sitting. “So, Andrew and Miaow buy the phone and all of a sudden these guys are chasing them.”

  “No,” Arthit says, reseating himself on the desk. “It’s much stupider than that. Andrew lost his own phone yesterday morning. That’s when they bought it.”

  “Skipping school,” Rafferty says. “That’s why they were late.”

  “And Andrew went through the shots on the phone in the cab on the way to school. Yesterday afternoon, he saw Sawat’s picture in the Sun, and he did what any good citizen would have done. He took the paper to your apartment and showed it to Miaow.”

  “My daughter,” Rafferty says, “is not boneheaded enough to play amateur detective.”

  Arthit says, “Boneheaded?”

  “I do not play amateur detective.” He realizes he has leaned forward and uses his feet to push the chair back a few inches. “Or if I do, it’s because I have to because the professional detectives are either not disposed to help or are, umm, constrained—”

  “That’s a nice way to put it. Constrained, as opposed to corrupt or scared of running up against someone bigger than they are who might sympathize with—or be on the payroll of—the other side.”

  “It’s hard to be a cop here,” Rafferty says. “An honest one, anyway.”

  The two men look at each other across a few years of shared history, and the moment makes Rafferty ache. Arthit breaks the silence. “So Andrew was going to be a hero. Go back this morning and find out whether the men in the pictures were the ones who sold the phone in the first place. And then he was going to go to you with Miaow at his side and give you the phone to give to me, along with this red-hot clue. And that would make his father ease up on his heroic son for having lost the phone in the first place.”

  “It’s enough to make you cry.”

  “But the bad guys are right there, and you have the chase and the hotel and all the rest of it.”

  Rafferty says, “And the murderer?”

  Arthit says, “Pardon?”

  “The one who killed Sawat and Fat Thongchai. You said they were hit by the same person. That suggests to me that you have a visual of that person. Was he one of the men chasing Miaow?”

  “I don’t know that. Not for sure.”

  Rafferty holds his friend’s gaze.

  Arthit puts up a hand and leans back, breaking the connection. “Look, here’s what you’re really asking. Is the murderer, the murderers, likely to come back for them? Think about it. Until they chased the kids, no one had seen them. The phone was the only visual link. But now a dozen people, including a Bangkok cop, can ID them. They can’t kill everybody.”

  Rafferty spins the chair around.

  “Listen,” Arthit says, “if I get any sense at all that I’m wrong about any of this, although I can’t imagine how I could be, I’ll
see that Miaow’s covered night and day.”

  “She got a really first-class look, didn’t she?”

  “Poke. They wanted the phone, the pictures of themselves. We have those pictures now. We have surveillance video—you didn’t hear this from me—of the one who did the killings. The world will learn all of that tomorrow morning, so there’s no need for them to go after Miaow and Andrew again. It would expose them to risk for nothing.”

  Rafferty says, grudgingly, “Okay.”

  “And I can tell you that for some people in this department, figuring this whole thing out is the most important item on our agenda. You’ve got to remember that Sawat and Fat Thongchai were a disgrace to the department. This building, all our buildings, are packed with people who need to see this worked out, and worked out right.”

  “And a few,” Rafferty says, “the ones who covered for Sawat, who probably want to see it worked out wrong.”

  Arthit says, “I’m going to talk to you like a cop for a change, Poke. Stay out of this.”

  “And I’m going to answer you like a father, Arthit. I need to know that my daughter isn’t in danger.” He gets up. “Where is she?” Arthit stands, too. “I’ll take you down there.” He puts his hand on the doorknob but doesn’t turn it. “Tomorrow is Sunday,” he says. “She doesn’t go to school. Keep her home, keep an eye on her. Give me tomorrow to think about it. If I decide you’re right, or if something happens here that seems, I don’t know, off-color, I’ll think about putting someone on her. Anand or someone, someone too young to have had anything to do with the original case.”

  Poke says, “Thank you, Arthit.”

  Arthit says, “We should have a drink some time.”

  Poke says, “We will.” He hears the hollowness of the reply and sees Arthit hear it, too.

  Turning away, Arthit says, “You can take her home. We don’t need to talk to her any more.” He opens the door, and Poke follows him down the corridor, seeing for the first time the stiffness in his friend’s back. The weariness in his shoulders.