LAUNDRY MAN (A Jack Shepherd crime thriller)

by Jake Needham

  Dollar’s computer was a Mac, not the Windows PC I would have expected him to have. I wasn’t much of a computer guy, and I knew absolutely nothing at all about Apple stuff, so I just sat and watched the screen while it filled with icons and windows popped open displaying file names and application titles that meant nothing at all to me.

  Bar heard the chord and came over and stood behind me where he could see the screen.

  “We’ve got Macs at the Post,” he said. “I can probably figure this out.”

  When the computer’s start-up routine was done he leaned across me, cupped his right hand over the mouse and scooted it around, selecting something from the bar of commands that ran across the top of the screen. He clicked the mouse button and all the icons immediately changed. Then he clicked it for a second time, and they changed again. Although the names of the files remained the same, each little folder now had on top of it a small cartoon figure which was decked out in the uniform of a Hollywood-style spy—dark glasses, fedora pulled down low, and a belted trench coat that was an odd electric blue color.

  “Crypto shit,” Bar snorted. “PGP, I think.”

  Bar might well have lapsed into Turkish. “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “Dollar’s encrypted all his files, probably using a program called Pretty Good Privacy. It’s supposed to be uncrackable. Without his password, you can’t read anything.”

  Bar abruptly lost interest in the computer and began examining an answering machine that was near it on the desk.

  “Why would Dollar encrypt the files on his home computer?” I asked, not ready to give up yet. “Doesn’t that mean he’s got something pretty important on it?”

  Bar grunted. “It’s no big deal. Any ten-year-old can get PGP on the Internet for nothing, and they say it’s almost as good as what the CIA uses. Anyway, Dollar’s too smart to leave anything that really matters just lying around on a computer in his bedroom, even if it’s encrypted.”

  Without taking his eyes off the answering machine, Bar gestured vaguely in the direction of the computer. “All that’s probably nothing. Anyway, forget it. Without knowing the password, you’ll never get in.”

  The answering machine was a digital model without any tapes in it. Bar put it down on the floor, plugged it in, and turned it on. When he pressed the play button, there was a brief silence, the sound of a dial tone, and then a beep.

  “Hang up,” Bar observed.

  After a few moments, a disembodied voice issued from the machine in a slightly spooky cadence.

  “That… was… your… last… message,” the voice intoned.

  Then the machine clicked off.

  “I hate it when answering machines do that,” Bar said. “It sounds like they’re telling your fortune.”

  I looked at Bar without saying anything. He ignored me and poked with his foot at the mound of debris in the middle of the bedroom.

  “Whoever tossed this place either took what he was looking for or didn’t find anything,” he said. “Either way that still doesn’t leave anything for us to look for.”

  I stood up from behind the desk and dusted my hands off on my jeans. “I guess you’re right. We ought to call the cops.”

  Bar twisted his head around and looked at me as if I had suddenly begun to speak in tongues.

  “Why in Christ’s name would you want to get the cops involved?”

  “Dollar might be in some kind of danger.”

  “Bullshit, Jack. He’s probably shacked up in Monte Carlo with a couple of French chickadees by now. Besides, Thai cops couldn’t find Santa Claus at the North Pole.”

  He was right about that, of course, but then I thought back to the look I had seen on Dollar’s face the morning after Howard’s body had been found and I was less sure that Bar had the part about Monte Carlo right. Regardless, the thought about calling the cops had been an American’s reflex. In Thailand nobody ever called the cops.

  “I’ll make some calls,” Bar said. “Somebody’s got to know something.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Let’s keep this between ourselves for now,” Bar added. “Maybe it’s something we shouldn’t know about.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  Bar just shook his head and walked back up the corridor and out the front doors. When we left, I made sure the button on the back of the front door handle was pushed in so that the doors would lock behind us. It was a silly gesture perhaps, but it just didn’t seem right to walk out and leave Dollar’s house unlocked no matter what condition it was in.

  After Bar had gotten into his old Toyota and driven away, I started to get into my car, too, but then the thought occurred to me that perhaps I ought to make a quick circuit of the wall surrounding Dollar’s house and make sure everything was secure. It was a gesture as pointless as locking the front door, but it still seemed to me to be the least I could do for Dollar under the circumstances.

  About a hundred feet south of the big gate, Dollar’s whitewashed wall joined his neighbor’s black stone wall. That left me nothing much to see in that direction so I turned around and walked back the other way. At the north end of the property, I found a narrow gap between Dollar’s wall and his neighbor’s. It was a small area where both houses stored their trashcans and all of the cans were the aluminum kind with rigid sides and heavy lids that you hardly ever saw anymore. The way the cans were arranged told an obvious story.

  Two small cans had been drawn up against two large ones to form a staircase right up the side of Dollar’s whitewashed wall. I stepped up on the first can, climbed onto the second, and found myself standing just below the top of the wall. From there, swinging over it and dropping down the other side would have been a piece of cake. I had no doubt that Dollar’s visitors had come in this way and then left by opening the gate from the inside.

  When I turned to climb down, the lid on one of the larger cans popped loose and inside it I spotted some files that looked just like the ones that Bar and I had found scattered over the floor of Dollar’s bedroom. But why would whoever ransacked Dollar’s place put files in a trashcan? Plainly they wouldn’t, so that could only mean that Dollar must have thrown out all this stuff sometime before his unexpected visitors arrived.

  That could be pretty interesting, I thought, so after I got down I pulled the lids off the other cans as well to see what else I could find. All of those appeared to contain nothing but the usual kind of household garbage—old newspapers, empty Coke cans, plastic milk bottles, and unidentifiable organic matter emitting seriously unappetizing odors. None of those things looked nearly as interesting as the files in the first can, so I closed up the other trashcans and gave my full attention to the one that had caught my eye in the first place.

  I dumped it out onto the ground and used my foot to stir through the contents. At a glance it seemed to be nothing more than the usual accumulation of office trash, but since I’d come this far I squatted down and began to sift methodically through everything. There were piles of American Express vouchers, a lot of mobile phone bills, statements from several different banks, and bundles of correspondence. Opening one of the bundles, I sat on the ground and began to read. In less than five minutes I knew what I had found.

  Nothing.

  The stuff was just a bunch of correspondence going back a number of years between Dollar and some investment managers in London. Other than confirming Dollar had a bit of money put away, which I already assumed, and that he kept a close eye on it, which I could have guessed, none of the correspondence told me anything at all. I flipped through a second bundle and found more of the same. A third was mostly contract notes confirming securities trades as well as a few monthly position statements for some brokerage accounts. I had pretty much given up the idea finding anything interesting and had begun tossing everything back into the trashcan when a CD slid out of one of the bundles I hadn’t bothered to look through and fell to the ground. I picked it up and examined it. It looked new, but the
re was no label on it. I thought back to the Mac in Dollar’s bedroom. Did it have a CD burner in it? I couldn’t remember.

  I turned the disk around in my hands. Was it a backup copy of some of Dollar’s important personal files? Or was it just a pirate copy of some computer game he had bought at the night market and then discovered didn’t work?

  Maybe there was more here that I thought. Apparently I needed to look more carefully. I set the disk to one side and piled everything else back in the trashcan. When I finished, I picked up the disk, then I grabbed the handle of the trash can with my free hand and carried both of them around to the front of the house. I placed the CD gently on the Volvo’s front seat and dumped the complete contents of the can into the trunk.

  Howard the Roach was dead and now Dollar Dunne seemed to be on the run. I still had absolutely no idea why, but there was no doubt in my mind of at least one thing: whatever the reason, and whatever this thing really was, it was getting closer and closer to me. I figured I had better find out exactly what was going on before some asshole showed up at my door to tidy up loose ends and I discovered one of those loose ends was me.

  I would have hoped for a more dignified way to do that than digging through garbage. Still, I had to start somewhere, didn’t I?

  TWENTY EIGHT

  ANITA WAS STILL at her studio when I got home so I found a big trash bag under the kitchen sink, took it down to the garage, and scooped all of Dollar’s garbage out of my trunk. After I had lugged everything back upstairs to the apartment, I got out my laptop and settled down in one of the leather chairs in front of the windows to look at the CD I had found in Dollar’s trash.

  There appeared to be only one file on the CD, but the name of it was BACKUP and I thought that was pretty encouraging. I double-clicked on the icon above the file name to see what was in it, but I was disappointed when nothing appeared on my screen other than a dialogue box inviting me to tell Windows what program it should use to open the file.

  “If I knew what program to use, I’d have used it in the first place, wouldn’t I, you moron?” I muttered at the laptop. “You’re supposed to be the computer here. You tell me.”

  My laptop didn’t say anything, of course, so more or less at random I tried a few of the programs that the dialogue box suggested—Word, Excel, even Internet Explorer—but nothing worked. That pretty much brought me to the limits of my technical expertise, and I just sat there staring at the useless little icon for a while. All at once, however, it dawned on me what the problem was.

  The computer I had seen in Dollar’s bedroom had been a Mac, hadn’t it? So if this CD actually did contain a backup of documents that Dollar had copied off his home computer, then what I had here were Mac files and that was a format that Windows couldn’t read. The utter incompatibility between Macs and PCs had always struck me as one of the more peculiar idiocies of what was supposed to be a brave new high-tech world; but regardless, I was now left with absolutely no idea what to do next.

  I fidgeted for a while, but when no course of action likely to resolve the technical conundrum occurred to me I closed the laptop and turned my attention to the garbage bag instead. At least garbage seemed like something I ought to be able to handle. Pulling it around in front of me, I emptied the contents out onto the floor.

  The first thing I did was to arrange everything by category. Amex receipts in one pile, telephone and utility bills in another, and then securities trading confirmations, brokerage account statements, and correspondence each in their own piles. I also found a bunch of documents that I hadn’t noticed before. They looked very official, but I couldn’t be certain what they were since they were written entirely in Thai, which I couldn’t read a word of. I set all those aside in a separate stack, and then I pushed back in the chair, folded my arms, and contemplated where to begin.

  The Amex receipts looked easiest, so I gathered them up and shuffled through them, looking for patterns. At a glance, they covered exactly the sort of travel and entertainment expenses that I would have imagined Dollar had been incurring for decades. About half of them were for charges in Thai baht and the rest were in an assortment of United States dollars, Japanese yen, Hong Kong dollars, UK pounds, and Australian and Singapore dollars. Maybe Dollar had just been cleaning out some old files and had decided to toss his out-of-date receipts like most all of us did from time to time.

  Taking it another way, I sorted all the receipts into their own separate categories—restaurants, hotels, airlines, merchandise, and those I couldn’t figure out—but that didn’t suggest any pattern either. Then I tried sorting them by currencies and had a look at them that way. Still nothing.

  Then, just to touch all the bases, I sorted the receipts by the localities where the purchases took place. The Bangkok stack was the largest, closely followed by a stack for Phuket, then a much smaller one for Hong Kong. After that, the receipts were all over the place, so I gave up.

  Okay, so Dollar lived in Bangkok—I knew that, of course—and he liked to get away to Phuket as often as he could. Didn’t we all? What did that prove?

  With a sigh I pushed the Amex receipts aside and began to work my way through the telephone bills, the confirmations of the securities trades, and the brokerage statements. Thai telephone bills contained no details about numbers that had been called, so that was a dead end, but I got a pad and made notes of the names of the securities firms and the people whose names appeared in Dollar’s correspondence. Then for good measure I went back over the Amex receipts again and made lists of the hotels and restaurants were Dollar had been doing most of his charging. It was probably all a waste of time, but if Dollar didn’t turn up pretty soon, I was going to have to start looking for him somewhere.

  When Anita eventually came in around ten, the living room of our apartment was largely buried under a layer of receipts, documents, letters, and notes.

  “Good God, Jack! What in the world are you doing?”

  I tried to tell her, but since I wasn’t altogether certain, it wasn’t easy.

  Anita gently lowered herself into an empty space on one of the couches. Her face reflected her bewilderment.

  “And you think this stuff will tell you where Dollar’s gone?” she asked.

  “Well… maybe.”

  “But why does it matter? Dollar’s a grown man. Surely he’s entitled to go anywhere he wants without you snooping through his garbage to try and figure out where he is.”

  “Something’s wrong, Anita. One of Dollar’s clients has been murdered in a very public way; Dollar is apparently in hiding himself; and his house has been ransacked by somebody who must have wanted to find something pretty badly.”

  “Even if that’s all true, Jack, it’s got nothing to do with you.”

  “Yes, it does.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know yet. That’s why I’m looking through all this crap. I’m trying to find out.”

  “Well, have you allowed for the possibility that you might be wrong, that you’re not involved in whatever Dollar is up to?”

  “I am, Anita, somehow. I’m absolutely sure of it. I can feel it.”

  “Maybe it’s only gas you’re feeling, my darling. What did you have for lunch?”

  “That wasn’t very helpful.”

  “I wasn’t trying to be helpful. I was trying to show you how ridiculous all of this looks. Dollar may well be doing something that you don’t understand, but why must you understand it?”

  Anita had a good point, I knew, so I said nothing.

  “You have absolutely no business getting involved in any of this, Jack. No business at all.” Anita’s hands motioned vaguely in the air. “You never think of how these upheavals you’re always getting yourself involved in affect me, do you? We’re trying to be a sort of a family here, and yet you still act like you’re a man without a responsibility in the world except for yourself. You go running off on your little crusades without giving the first thought to me.”

  She turned to
look out the window and then almost immediately glanced back.

  “Your stupid curiosity is going to be the end of us some day. Maybe you’re one of these men who’s just not meant to be married.”

  “I don’t know what to say to that.”

  “Neither do I, Jack. Neither do I.”

  I took a long breath and slowly let it out.

  “This really isn’t fair,” I said.

  “No, I suppose from your point of view it isn’t, but as a great man once said, ‘Fuck fair.’“

  “Anita, please try—”

  “I’m going to bed now, Jack. Feel free to play with your little scraps of paper as long as you like.”

  Anita turned around and walked out of the room and I looked out a window so I wouldn’t have to watch her go. Even after she was gone I kept looking out that window. I just sat there for a long time with my arms folded and stared out at the lights of the city.

  I could have dismissed everything Anita said as simple petulance. Maybe she’d had a bad day at her studio and was just taking it out on me. But I wasn’t willing to let it be that easy. There was something she had said that hit a nerve, something I couldn’t shake off by blaming it on her. Maybe I really was the wrong kind of guy for a woman to share a life with. Maybe being that kind of guy was a God-given talent—something like being able to sing opera or throw a ball through a hoop—and it was a talent I just didn’t have. Anita didn’t seem to think I had it, and I supposed she knew me about as well as anyone.

  I walked around the living room after that collecting all of the stuff I had gotten out of Dollar’s garbage and dumped it all back in the garbage bag except for the Thai-language documents I had set aside earlier. Then I removed the CD from the drive in my laptop, put it in a manila envelope together with those documents, and took everything down to the Volvo. The envelope went on the front seat and the garbage bag into the trunk.