“Finch,” Campeau says, “Larry Finch.”
“Right. Do you know how to get hold of him?”
“Louis does, I think.” Louis is the Growing Younger Man.
“Where is he?”
“Sheesh,” Campeau says. “Guy’s got a life. What do you think, we all just sit around here waiting for you all the time?”
“Of course not.”
“We got lives,” Campeau says reproachfully.
“Is your adorable daughter,” the guy with the hair declaims, “still thinking about trying out for that play?”
“Yes, I mean, yeah. Yeah, she is.”
“The accent,” the guy with the hair says, putting quite a lot of himself into the word “accent,” “will be an obstacle.”
“Yes, it will,” Rafferty says. “A life lesson, as it were. But, you know, behind every drop of—”
“Hold on,” Campeau says. He’s fiddling with a phone the size of a man’s shoe. “Can’t hear myself think.”
“Think louder,” the guy with the hair says, apparently making a serious suggestion. Rafferty has never heard him talk so much, so he takes a closer look and sees that the man is squinting at his hands, folded in front of him on the bar, as though guessing how far away they are. He’s absolutely poached, a conviction that’s reinforced when Toots plunks down in front of him a glass of something amber and served straight, shaking her head in disapproval. To Rafferty he says, “Do you believe we think in words?”
“I have no—”
“Or, perhaps, pictures.” After a moment he nods, as though he’s been waiting for a simultaneous translation of what he said, and it just arrived via his earphones. “Or,” he says, leaning in to emphasize the word in a way that suggests it’s the most interesting thing anyone will say all day, “something between words and pictures, something, something . . .”
“Wictures,” Rafferty suggests, not very kindly. “Or maybe purds.”
“Poke,” Toots says reproachfully.
“Or maybe they are images, like the ones in dreams,” Rafferty says, “but tied up in little bitty hyperspace knots so they take up less space and arrive faster. Dreams are supposed to be really short, you know. A dream that seems to take hours happens in a couple of seconds. Maybe that’s what we think in. Loops.”
Toots blows air between her lips to make a rude sound.
The guy with the hair thinks for a moment and then says, “Huh.” He blinks slowly, his eyelids coming down at different speeds.
Campeau says into his phone, a bit sharply, “Yeah, now. You telling me you got something more important to do? ’Cause if you do, I’d like to know what the hell it—”
Raising his voice to be heard over Campeau, the guy with the hair says, “What’s all that wet paper?”
“It’s . . . um, it’s the play, Miaow’s play. I’m going to try to help her with the accent.”
“You’re a good father,” the man with the hair says.
There’s a moment of silence that Rafferty devotes to a silent expression of contrition.
“Okay,” Campeau says, putting his antique phone down with a clunk. “Louis gave me the number for Larry Finch. A little later I’ll call Larry and ask him to call you.”
“Why don’t you call him now?”
“Because I don’t feel like it.” He taps the side of his glass. “Busy, you know?”
“Great,” Rafferty says. “Great.” He puts some money on the bar and gets up, saying to Toots, “Let me buy this round. One, make it two, all around.”
“The accent,” the man with the hair says as Rafferty opens the door. “It’s going to be an obstacle.”
19
Lala
The house, like a lot of newer, upscale Bangkok homes, seems to have been assembled from chunks of several other aspirational houses, a kind of structural Reader’s Digest: classical columns, arched windows, and roofs on several levels, the slanting edges of which, in a nod to the traditional Thai house, bend inward a little toward the middle to create a curving, inverted V at each apex. The whole thing, phantasmagorical enough to serve as the setting for an urban production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, is, up close, made from stucco and has been further anchored in the real world by being painted a color that falls in some industrial workaday spectrum between gray and taupe. From where he’s standing, outside the gate, it seems to Rafferty that in addition to their many other plagiarisms the builders have borrowed one brilliant idea—from, of all places, the Parthenon—creating a false perspective that makes the structure look taller by narrowing the whole building slightly as it rises.
He has purposely arrived fifteen minutes before the time Clemente is scheduled to meet him and about twenty before he figures Edward will get home from school. He wants to take a look at the house’s security, searching for the way Edward said the housebreakers got in. It’s not that he doubts the boy, but he’s not in a frame of mind to trust assumptions.
So there’s a forbidding wall, about seven feet high, broken by a double-wide gate at the street end of the driveway. The gate is made of wavy diagonal lengths of black metal, about four inches apart, that create a watery impression. Easy to see through but difficult to get through or over. He tugs it toward him and then pushes it away. Locked. There’s a buzzer with a microphone beside it. Thinking there’s a chance Auntie Pancake might have come back, he presses the button, but there’s no responding voice or buzz.
To his left the wall makes a ninety-degree turn to follow the property line between Edward’s house and the place next door, a sort of Rubik’s Cube variation on this one but with even more glass, much of it mullioned. That house has no wall, so it’s open lawn the entire way, and Rafferty can’t imagine that the thieves just strolled over the grass, in front of all those fancy windows, so he heads right.
Since the house stands on a corner, the wall that surrounds it hangs ninety degrees left to parallel the junction of the streets. About fifteen yards after he turns the corner, he sees, like a transplant from Tuscany—almost the only place on earth the builders hadn’t already borrowed from—a gate made of rough-hewn natural wood held together by bands of black wrought iron, dimpled irregularly with little ornamental dings from a ball-peen hammer. It obviously swings inward, because it’s standing about four inches ajar.
He pushes it the rest of the way open, surveys the backyard for a count of ten or so, and goes in. No lock, not even a catch, on the inside of the gate. It’s consistent with the lax approach to life he’s come to associate with Edward’s father. He cuts across the yard toward the big mango tree where, according to Edward, a nail has been driven into the trunk above eye level with a key hanging from it. The nail is there, devoid of the key. Ahead of him are the driveway and the corner of the house, so he follows the paved surface, hot even through the soles of his shoes, to the rear door and sees unpainted putty, obviously fresh, surrounding a new and heavily fingerprinted window that’s probably never been washed.
Everything just the way Edward described it. Poke relaxes a little, and he’s surprised to realize he’d felt any doubt.
Compared with the apartment he’s just been thinking about, this is a mansion. He and Rose and Miaow are crowded together, living happily—most of the time—in one another’s pockets, while here, in this space of perhaps four thousand square feet, are three people who, according to Edward, don’t even like one another very much, each with volumes of empty space separating him or her from the others, each revolving in his or her own solitary orbit: the unwanted kid, the auntie who’s anxious about being exiled from the palace, and the father who doesn’t seem to have deep feelings for anyone. Poke wonders for a moment how his own family would do in a place like this and decides they’d probably all wind up in the kitchen.
He’s ambling along the driveway, trying to picture Miaow here, when the gate grinds into motion. It swings toward him
, and there’s Edward eyeing him, wearing the white shirt and dark pants his school favors. Behind him, looking slightly disconcerted, is Clemente.
“Your friend said you might have gone in,” Edward said. Over his shoulder Clemente gives Rafferty the small, private shrug of a conspirator.
“No lock on the wooden gate. Not exactly a challenge.”
“Did everything check out?” He seems a little irritated at being doubted.
“Just wanted to look around it. Hot, isn’t it?”
“When isn’t it hot? I guess we might as well go in. I think I forgot to ask why you were coming.”
“We wanted, Officer Clemente and I—sorry, this is Officer Clemente—to let you know where we were on the investigation and what we were doing.”
“And to go through your father’s things, if we could,” Clemente says in her best English, which, while accented, is as functional as Rafferty’s. “Ask you a few questions.”
“Well, thanks for trying.” Edward steps aside to let Clemente precede him. “Let’s get inside. I think the only reason it’s not raining is because the water evaporates on the way down.”
“Nothing jumps out at me,” Edward says. “At least not yet.”
They’re in the room Edward’s father uses as an office, a medium-size space with a big picture window and a highly polished wooden desk that has a laptop sitting on it. In the corner beside the desk, bolted to the floor right through the beige wall-to-wall carpeting, stands a safe the size of a big microwave oven. Its door hangs open. There’s also a leather couch, and Rafferty, who’s gradually getting stuck to it as he pages through Edward’s dad’s bank statements and, noting contact numbers and balances on the backs of the damp pages of Pygmalion, is wondering why anyone buys a leather couch in this hot, humid climate. Every time he sits forward, pulling his wet back from the cushions, he makes a dull smooching noise that draws Clemente’s eyes. Edward is occupying his father’s swivel chair, tilted back against the desk’s edge with Clemente’s tablet on his knees, skimming the columns of the spreadsheet. Clemente sprawls on the floor with her notebook on her knee and the pulled-out desk drawers surrounding her, happily rooting through them. Rafferty is working on a beer, since it’s a little after four, and the others are drinking some kind of iced tea that’s scented vaguely with cinnamon.
“You’ve got a lot of stuff here,” Edward says, scrolling down on the tablet.
“It’s the kind of work I like,” Clemente says, peering inside an envelope and putting it aside. “Repetitive, meaningless, and boring, until suddenly it’s not. If you’re lucky.”
“Doesn’t seem boring to me,” Edward says. “Sort of like hunting for game.”
Clemente gives him a quick glance, looks back down, and says, “How do you mean?”
“Everybody leaves tracks,” Edward says as though it were the most obvious thing in the world. “You’re looking for the places where they overlap, right?”
“That’s very good,” Clemente says. “You’re not—What’s that thing,” she asks Rafferty, “about pretty faces?”
“Not just a pretty face,” Rafferty volunteers, and is somewhat relieved to see Edward hunch down a little bit. He’s never sure about handsome boys, about how aware they are of their impact. The teenage dreamboat who stole his girlfriend dropped her a week or two later, and Rafferty eventually came to believe that the boy had broken two hearts simply to stay in practice. That memory is the main reason Rafferty has been uneasy about Miaow’s infatuation with Edward.
To Clemente, Edward says, “Give me a break.”
Clemente comes up with a piece of paper that’s been folded diagonally, like a napkin, and opens it. To Edward she says, “Put the entries in the number column into numerical order and then look for a phone number that begins with 318.”
The boy expertly slaps the screen around for a moment and says, “What’s the next number?”
“Seven.”
“Nope. Two that start with 318, but no 7.”
“Oh, well. Take this number down in the second column, and over in the right-hand column put the number four.”
“Why?” But he’s keying in the number.
“I’ve partially searched three boxes, which are sources one through three. This house is source four.”
Edward hits the keys and says, “Three boxes of what?”
Clemente looks over at Poke, her eyes wide.
“Effects,” Rafferty says, choosing the most remote word he can find.
“You mean . . . from, umm . . . ?”
“Yes.”
Edward looks up from the tablet’s screen at Clemente and then back at Poke. He says, “People who . . .” And then he says, “Oh.” He drops his eyes to the screen again, clearly not seeing it, and then picks up his glass of tea and drinks it with his eyes closed.
“The thing is, they have to go on honoring his checks,” Rafferty says into the phone. He’s just finished reading the names and phone numbers of Edward’s father’s banks, plus his account numbers, while Arthit wrote them down. “None of your guys in the field has come up with anything, so we have to take this possibility, the canal possibility, seriously. Sooner or later the people who have Buddy Dell will walk in with a check that would overdraw the account. If whoever it is gets a bounce . . . well, that’s not going to be good news.”
“But what can I do about an overdraft?” Arthit says. “If I tell the bankers they have to honor it, they’re going to ask me who’s going to cover the money. I can’t run down and make a deposit.”
“I actually think the first time they get a bounce—” Rafferty says, and he breaks off as he feels Edward’s eyes swivel to him. “I think . . . I mean, I think—”
“They’ll kill him,” Edward says. “Maybe they’ll try another bank first, but if that bounces, too . . .”
“It won’t end well,” Rafferty says. To Arthit he says, “Isn’t there some way the police can guarantee that the overdraft—”
“Not at my level,” Arthit says, “and I’m not eager to make the case to Thanom.”
“No,” Rafferty says, “not Thanom.” Thanom, Arthit’s superior, has never forgiven Arthit for saving his ass four or five months earlier.
“Mr. Rafferty,” Edward says.
“Hang on, Arthit.”
“I can write checks on two of my father’s accounts. My signature is on them. As long as there’s money in those two, I can get to the other banks and make a deposit to cover whatever the overdraft is.”
“Did you hear that, Arthit?”
“What if those accounts are the ones that—”
“Jesus,” Rafferty says, “one thing at a time.”
Edward is waving his hand in the air.
“I’ve got a credit card, too,” he says. “It’s got a high limit, six or seven thousand US. It’s an emergency card—Dad calls it my ‘get out of jail card’—but I guess this qualifies as an emergency.”
Arthit is silent for a moment, and then he says, “I wouldn’t mind having a kid as quick as that.”
“I’ll tell him you said so. Do you think you can do it?”
“I can try. I’ll call the banks, give them an alert. They’re to call me if someone cashes a check and see if they can get whoever it is on video without being obvious about it. If it’s an overdraft, I’ll tell them it’ll be covered within . . . within how long?”
“Edward,” Rafferty says, “how fast do you think you can make a deposit if you have to?”
“An hour or two? The problem is school. By the time I’m out of school, if traffic is bad—I guess I could stay home for a few days.”
Arthit says, “I never heard a better excuse.”
“Edward,” Clemente says. She’s got a piece of pink paper in her hand. “Edward.”
Rafferty says to Edward, “Do you think it would help if Arthit call
ed the school?”
“I don’t know. It would cause kind of a ripple, and people would worry about me. Notice me. Maybe Miaow could get my assignments, just tell my teachers I’m sick or something.”
Arthit says, “Ask him if he wants a job on the police force.”
Clemente says “Edward” a third time. She’s waving the piece of paper at him. “Look at the column with the names in the second—”
“I’ll start making calls,” Arthit says.
“—and see if you find ‘Lala,’” Clemente says.
“Okay,” Rafferty says. “I’ll give you a ring if we—”
“L-a-l-a?” Edward says. “I don’t even have to look. That’s not a name I’d—”
“Hang on a minute,” Rafferty says to Arthit.
“It’s here somewhere. Right . . . here.” Edward holds up the tablet.
“I think we’ve found something,” Rafferty says.
“Then try this phone number,” Clemente says. The enormous eyes are on fire. She reads the number and waits, one foot bouncing rapidly.
“Oh, boy,” Edward says. “Twice. But one of them is in a row that doesn’t have ‘Lala’ in it.”
Clemente says, “Jackpot.” To Rafferty she says, “Give the colonel this number and tell him—I mean, ask him—to check the reverse directories.”
“Four sources, three hits,” Clemente is saying, loudly enough for Arthit to hear. “Two victims, one of them Edward’s father, wrote down ‘Lala,’ probably close to the time they disappeared, since one of them had only been here for a month. Edward’s dad and one other wrote also down the number.”
Rafferty says, “How far apart in time are they, the ones who wrote either the name or the number?”
“Because—oh, right,” Clemente says, “Lala’s age. If it’s even the same Lala, that sounds like a name that could get passed around. Hold on a minute, all I have to do is get the dates off the death certificates.”
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