by Jake Needham
By the time he got to the room and walked inside, he had pretty well worked out what he was going to see.
Zachery Goodnight-Jones was in a chair behind an enormous carved oak desk at the far end of the room. He was seated in a high-back red leather chair and was slumped forward, his head resting on a black leather desk pad with both his arms flung out across the desk.
He could have been asleep, but of course he wasn’t.
There was a gun in his right hand, and blood and brain matter was sprayed all over the desk.
Tay walked to the desk and bent down. He peered closely at the gun, being careful not to touch it. It was a Glock 26, usually called a Baby Glock. Of course it was.
He made a slow circle around the desk, examining the body from every angle. Goodnight-Jones was wearing a dark blue suit, a white shirt, and a pearl gray cravat. Oddly, the cravat wasn’t neatly knotted inside his shirt collar as it had been on the other occasions Tay had seen him. It was looped around his neck and tied with a clove hitch. Like a noose.
When Tay was done he looked up at August, who was leaning against the doorjamb with his hands in his pockets.
“It’s not much of a suicide scene, John.”
“Hell, Sam, it looks pretty good to me.”
“He didn’t shoot himself with this gun. And he didn’t strangle himself with this cravat.”
“He would have hung himself if I could have found a rope.”
Tay said nothing.
“You think maybe the cravat was too much?” August asked.
Tay shrugged.
“I liked the irony,” August said, “but maybe you’re right.”
Tay didn’t say anything. He just stood by the desk looking down at Goodnight-Jones’s body remembering what he had told himself out in his garden.
Justice is a tricky thing. Most of the time justice is more about appearances than anything else. People are arrested, pictures of them in handcuffs appear in the newspapers, and eventually they stand before a court and go to jail. But it doesn’t always work that way. The simple truth is that sometimes people are punished in public, and sometimes they are not. Sometimes people are arrested and tried, and sometimes they are not. Sometimes people who screw over the justice system end up having tragic accidents. They might be shot to death by a mugger one dark night, or maybe they’re driving and run off a bridge into a concrete abutment. Sometimes they even commit suicide.
Tay walked across the room and sat down in the red leather chair in front of the bookcases. August sat on the matching couch and threw his feet up on the coffee table.
“Have you started doing a little clean up work for the Chinese on the side, John?”
August grinned a little sheepishly and shook his head.
“So I guess that means Goodnight-Jones wasn’t working for the Chinese either, was he?”
August said nothing.
“The Future was never a Chinese army operation, was it? That was just a load of horseshit you fed me.”
August said nothing.
“Come on, John, at least tell me the truth now. What is The Future really? An NSA front company? Another cockamamie CIA operation run amok?”
August said nothing.
“What were you Americans trying to do that you fucked up so badly you crashed a commercial airliner killing two hundred and thirty-nine innocent people? Who made such a mess that they needed for you to come in and bury it?”
“I don’t really know, Sam. I’m just a working stiff like you. I’m told to clean something up, and I do. I don’t get involved in the whys. Just in the hows.”
“I deserve a better answer than that.”
“Yes, you do, but you’re not going to get one. What do you care anyway? Goodnight-Jones got what he deserved. Isn’t that justice enough for you?”
“What about the people who ran him, the ones who told him to do what he did? What about a little justice for them?”
August shook his head. “That’s not going to happen. It never does.”
“So… they just walk away? This one guy takes the fall and everyone else is absolved of sin?”
“That’s the way it usually works, Sam.”
“Maybe I can change that.”
“I doubt it. There are things you can do, and there are things you can’t do. You've got to live with that just like the rest of us.”
“Do you know who was behind Goodnight-Jones?”
“Come on, Sam. Why do you keep asking me things you know I won’t tell you?”
“Because one of these days I figure you might just tell me the whole truth about something.”
“It won’t be this time, Sam. Certainly not this time.”
Tay turned his head and looked back at the body sprawled across the desk.
He had to admit August was right about the irony. It appealed to him, too.
“You ready to get out of here, Sam?”
Tay took a deep breath, but then he nodded.
“I don’t know about you," August said, "but I haven’t had any dinner and I’ve worked up one hell of an appetite. You want to get something to eat?”
Tay’s eyes drifted away from Goodnight-Jones and he looked back at August. He nodded for a second time.
“Great!” August jumped to his feet. “There's a place out off Orchard Road that makes terrific burgers. You know Dan Ryan’s?”
“I’ve been there,” Tay said.
“You could ride with me on my bike,” August asked, “but my guess is you’d rather drive that fancy Audi you parked next door.”
“I’ll take the Audi, John.”
“Thought so.”
August winked, turned on his heel, and strolled out of the study.
Tay pushed himself to his feet, took a last glance at Goodnight-Jones, and followed.
As he passed through the doorway, he reached over and flipped off the light. Then he closed the door quietly behind him.
THE END
A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
On June 24, 2012, Shane Todd, a young American electrical engineer working in Singapore for the government-controlled Institute of Micro Electronics, was found hanging from the bathroom door in his apartment. The Singapore police said Shane had committed suicide. His family said he had been murdered, probably because of something he knew about IME and its relationship with a Chinese company then under scrutiny by American intelligence for attempting to penetrate American communications systems for the Chinese government.
By and large, the press ignored the case in spite of the suspicious circumstances. Reuters, the New York Times, and many other international news organizations have a shameful history of kowtowing to the Singapore government and issuing groveling apologies anytime the government is unhappy with the coverage it receives. It was almost eight months after Shane Todd’s death before the Financial Times broke the story open and exposed what was nothing less than a long-running media blackout of the case. I commend to you that excellent piece of investigative reporting by Raymond Bonner and Christine Polar published in the Financial Times on February 15, 2013.
This novel is not a fictionalized account of the death of Shane Todd. I have borrowed a few details about his death and incorporated them into the death of Tyler Bartlett, but Tyler Bartlett is not Shane Todd and the lives and deaths of the two men are entirely different.
What is largely the same in both stories is the Republic of Singapore.
Singapore is a tiny city state on the tip of the Malaysian peninsula that is ruled by a small group of smug and self-satisfied men who have perpetuated themselves since the country's very first day of independence through relentless censorship and the ruthless suppression of effective dissent. Yet all the while, Singapore struts the world stage claiming to be a modern liberal democracy, a beacon of freedom in Asia.
This is the same country that arrested a seventy-six year old British great-grandfather for writing that the courts in Singapore were sometimes politically influenced. Singapore charged the writer,
Alan Shadrake, with ‘scandalizing the judiciary.' That is apparently a crime in Singapore since they sent Shadrake to prison for it.
Singapore largely succeeds in what ought to be regarded as a laughable masquerade because a docile international press is more concerned with not making enemies than it is with telling us the truth. It is more than an embarrassment that most of the press refused to report on the obviously suspicious death of Shane Todd for fear of offending Singapore and the men who rule over it. It is an everlasting stain on the honor and professionalism of journalists everywhere.
BONUS PREVIEW
Have you met Jack Shepherd? He’s an American lawyer who abandoned the savage politics of Washington DC for the lethargic backwater of Bangkok where he became an unremarkable professor at an unimportant university in an insignificant city. Or did he?
Jake Needham has written four books about Shepherd so far. This is the book that introduced him.
LEARN MORE
LAUNDRY MAN
ONE
IT BEGAN EXACTLY THE way the end of the world will begin. With a telephone call at two o’clock in the morning.
“Jack Shepherd,” I croaked.
“Hey, Jack, old buddy. How you been?”
It was a man’s voice, one I didn’t recognize. I sat up and cleared my throat.
“Who’s this?” I asked.
“I’m sorry to call in the middle of the night,” the man said, ignoring my question, “but this can’t wait. I’m really in deep shit here.”
I was still struggling to place the voice so I said nothing.
“I need your help, Jack. I figure I got about a week here before somebody cuts off my nuts and feeds them to the ducks.”
“I’m not going to start guessing,” I said. “Who is this?”
“Oh, man, that’s so sad. You mean to tell me you even don’t recognize your old law partner’s voice?”
“I’ve had a lot of—”
“This is Barry Gale.”
That stopped me cold.
“Surprised, huh?” the man chuckled.
“Who are you?” I repeated.
“I just told you who I am, Jack. This is Barry Gale.”
I hit the disconnect button and tossed my cell phone back on the nightstand.
WHEN IT RANG again, I silently cursed myself for forgetting to turn the damned thing off.
I sat up and retrieved the phone and this time I looked at the number on the screen before I answered. All it said was unavailable. I thought fleetingly of just hitting the power button, but I didn’t. Later, of course, I would wish I had.
“It’s not nice to hang up on old friends, Jack.”
“We’re not old friends.”
“Sure we are.”
“Look, pal, Barry Gale’s dead. I know it and I’m sure you know it. So unless you’re Mickey the Medium with a message from the other side, you can cut the crap. What do you want?”
“What makes you think I’m dead?” the man asked.
“Barry made a pretty flashy exit. It got a fair amount of attention.”
“You talking about the body they found in that swimming pool in Dallas?”
That was exactly what I was talking about. I said nothing.
“As I remember, and I’m pretty sure I do remember, that body had been in the water nearly a week before anybody found it so they couldn’t get fingerprints. Also I hear the guy’s face was too badly smashed up to recognize. Nobody thought it was worth bothering with DNA, and the ID was made from dental records.”
“So what? The dental records matched Barry’s, didn’t they?”
“Of course they did. They would, wouldn’t they?”
“Are you trying to tell me the body in the swimming pool in Dallas wasn’t Barry Gale’s?”
“Not likely, Jack. Not likely at all. Particularly not as we’re talking to each other on the telephone other right now.”
I tried it another way.
“Look, buddy, I’m a reasonably approachable guy. Why don’t you just tell me who you are and what you want and then I can go back to sleep?”
There was a brief silence and then the man started talking again in a tired voice.
“Your name is Jonathan William Shepherd, but your father started calling you Jack when you were a kid to keep your mother from calling you Johnny and it stuck. You graduated from Georgetown Law School and you’re admitted to the bar in the District of Columbia and in New York. Stassen & Hardy recruited you right out of law school and it’s the only place you ever practiced law. You and I made partner the same year.”
I said nothing. The man apparently didn’t care.
“Your home address was 1701 Great Falls Road. It was a big white house out in Potomac, Maryland. Regrettably your happy home dissolved when your wife, the lovely Laura, took up with that proctologist out in Virginia. Dr. Butthole, you called him. How am I doing?”
“Very impressive,” I said.
“I’m an impressive guy.”
“Is that it?” I asked. “You recite a few things you’ve found out about me somewhere and now I’m supposed to believe you’re Barry Gale risen from the dead?”
“Hell, Jack, I could go on all night. How about this? Your office at Stassen & Hardy was about as far away from the reception area as it was possible for you to get and still be in the same building with the rest of us. You had a big glass table that you used for a desk. Goddamn, Jack, I’m sure you were the only lawyer in the world with a glass desk. It was like you were trying to look purer than the rest of us. Was that it, Jack? Was that what the glass desk was all about? And, oh yeah, you had that big yellow couch with the deep cushions where you took naps in the afternoon.”
“Look, I still don’t know what this is all about, but—”
“We had a part-time receptionist, a little Vietnamese girl who was going to law school somewhere and worked as the relief girl on weekends. Remember? You fucked her right on that yellow couch one Saturday afternoon and then you admitted it to me a couple of weeks later after you’d sucked up an extra martini one night at the bar in the Mayflower Hotel. You seemed to be all cut up with guilt over it and said you hadn’t told anyone else. Had you told anyone else, Jack?”
In the silence I could hear the guy breathing and I was sure he could hear me, too, except I was probably breathing a lot louder.
Because he was right.
I hadn’t told anyone else.
The man went on before I could figure out what to say.
“You like living in Bangkok, Jack? I hear you’re a teacher now. In some business school. That right?”
“Yes. I teach at Chulalongkorn University.”
“No more lawyering? No more of that big-time stuff we used to do?”
“I don’t practice law anymore if that’s what you’re asking me.”
“Do you miss it?”
“Not particularly. I still do a little consulting sometimes.”
“Consulting, huh? Is that right?” The man barked an abrupt laugh. “You want to consult with me, Jack?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Still a fucking hard-on, are you?”
“I just don’t particularly like being the butt of some clown’s crappy little joke.”
“Oh, this is no joke, Jack. I wish to Christ it was, but it isn’t.”
I said nothing.
“Do you know that place called Took Lae Dee?” the man eventually asked. “The little food counter up in the front of the all-night Foodland on Sukhumvit Road?”
“Yeah. I know where it is.”
“Meet me there tomorrow, around midnight. Just grab a stool and I’ll find you.”
“Midnight?”
“Is that a problem for you?”
“Yeah, that’s a problem for me. What makes you think I’d even consider coming to some damned supermarket at midnight just because a wacko pretending to be a dead guy calls me up and tells me to? I don’t know how you found out all those things about me, but if you think
that’s enough—”
The man started laughing.
“Oh, it’s more than enough, Jack.”
He laughed some more. Thunder rumbled somewhere in the distance and I listened to it without saying anything else.
“I know you, my friend. You’d never pass up a chance to hear a story like this. Never. Especially not when it’s coming from a guy who’s gone to all the trouble I have to make himself dead.”
And with that, the man hung up.
LAUNDRY MAN
TWO
I TOSSED AND TURNED for a while after that, but I knew I wasn’t going back to sleep anytime soon. Eventually I gave up trying altogether and I went into my study and took a Montecristo out of the humidor on my desk. I pulled open the sliding door and walked out on the balcony.
Generally Bangkok’s foreign residents went to considerable lengths to avoid breathing the city’s air until it had been thoroughly dried, adequately chilled, and comprehensively decontaminated. Not only was the stuff hot and soggy, usually it smelled spoiled and a little sour, like it had been breathed by way too many people already. But this was January, the middle of winter in Thailand, and the southernmost edge of a large dome of Siberian air had slipped down from China and momentarily broken Bangkok’s muggy heat. The air had turned pleasingly cool, even sweet, and it was richly thickened with the syrupy fragrances of frangipani, jasmine, and gardenias.
I cut and lit my cigar and I stood there smoking and looking out over the city for a long time.
When people in Washington first began to hear that I was leaving to live in Bangkok and teach at Chulalongkorn University, a few of them jumped to the conclusion I was making a point of some kind, abandoning the land of my birth for reasons that were probably political and no doubt wacky. Others who heard what I was doing—and I noticed this group seemed to be composed mainly of women—attributed my change of address to middle-aged male angst fueled by overly moist fantasies of slim, submissive Thai women serving me brightly colored tropical drinks with little umbrellas in them. Most people, of course, fell into neither of those categories. Most people just assumed that I had lost my damned mind.