by Jake Needham
August selected a chair and sat down. Cally took the one to his left and Tay the one to his right. Almost immediately, August slipped out of his loafers, peeled off his socks and shoved them inside his shoes, then reached back and pushed them underneath the chair. He stretched his long legs and wiggled his feet into the sand. When he had them exactly the way he wanted, he leaned back in the chair, knitted his fingers together behind his head, and closed his eyes.
Tay looked across at Cally. She appeared to be studying the ocean and didn’t look as if she were going to break the silence. Tay was on the verge of saying something himself just to get the conversation back on track again when August, his eyes still closed, spoke up.
“You don’t like me, do you, Sam?”
Tay’s first instinct, of course, was to lie politely. Then he considered the possibility of retreating into euphemism. Neither choice was particularly appealing to him and that didn’t leave any alternative he could think of offhand, except of course the truth.
“No,” he said. “Not really.”
“You got any idea why?”
That seemed a strange thing for August to ask and Tay didn’t quite know how to respond. As it turned out, it wasn’t really necessary for him to respond since August seemed quite happy to continue the conversation without his involvement.
“Because, if you don’t, I can tell you. You think that Cally and I—”
“Now boys,” Cally interrupted, “don’t be that way.”
Tay shifted his eyes to her. She looked like a lonely sea captain’s wife searching the far horizon for her husband’s ship to return. He glanced back at August, but August’s eyes were still closed.
It seemed unfair to Tay that he was apparently the only person taking an active interest in the conversation so he leaned back, folded his arms, and began counting the palm trees. He had gotten up to nine when Cally abruptly grabbed her chair with both hands and turned it until she was facing both of them. Then she leaned forward and rested her forearms on her knees.
“If you two boys want to have it out, why don’t you both just unzip and do it. I mean, just go on ahead and whip them out. I’m sure I must have some kind of measuring device in my purse and we ought to be able to settle this once and for all right here and right now.”
She looked from one man to the other.
August kept his eyes closed. Tay kept counting trees.
“Come on guys. Who’s going first?”
When the silence continued, Cally came out with a snort so resonant that Tay wouldn’t have thought she had in her.
“A couple of real pussies, aren’t you? Well, if neither of you have the balls to step up to the plate, let me suggest an alternative. Just shut the fuck up about me and let’s get back to what really matters here.”
August cleared his throat, but he didn’t say anything. Tay had long since run out of trees to count, but he didn’t say anything either.
“Tell us what you know, John,” Cally went on. “You’ve got something, I don’t have the slightest doubt about that, but I’m not going to beg for it. I want you to tell us because telling us is the right thing to do. If you don’t, and more women die, it will be on your head.”
“This has nothing to do with me,” August said.
August hadn’t spoken in so long that the unexpected sound of his voice startled Tay.
“I can make it have something to do with you, John. You know I can, but it really doesn’t have to be that way.”
August suddenly opened his eyes and pitched forward, his face close to Cally’s.
“Don’t threaten me, darling.”
“Oh, John,” Cally waved a hand dismissively. “Skip the melodramatic horseshit. I’m way too old for that these days.”
Tay could see August’s jaw working, then abruptly his face relaxed into something that must have been a smile. Just as suddenly as he had leaned forward, he leaned back again and roared with laughter.
“Damn, girl. You’ve turned into a real pistol, haven’t you?”
“You don’t know the half of it, John. You really don’t.”
August lifted his hands above his head. “Okay. Enough. I give up.”
“Good,” Cally said. “Now what have you got that I can use?”
The breeze had moved around while they were sitting there and now it was coming off the ocean. It smelled of brine and fish and made Tay think about places he had never been and probably would never go.
“Your lady ambassador was gay,” August said.
Tay suddenly stopped thinking about the breeze and sat up a bit.
“Are you sure?” Cally asked. “I’ve never heard anything like that.”
“Of course you’ve never heard anything like that,” August said, and then he closed his eyes again. “If the ambassador had been a man, the rumor mill would have had him cruising schoolyards years ago. But you’re all so fucking careful now that nobody wants to be the one to hang an ugly rumor like that on a woman, even if they’d collar a man with the same story before breakfast.”
“What’s ugly about it, John? Are you saying there’s something wrong with being gay?”
August rolled his head until he was facing Cally and opened his eyes.
“Not unless you want to get to the top of the State Department or the CIA or even the FBI. No, nothing at all, little girl. Some of my best friends are…” August chuckled instead of finishing his sentence.
There didn’t seem to be a great deal of humor in the chuckle, at least not that Tay could hear, but maybe that was because he was listening to something else now, something he was remembering from a few days before.
There were rumors that Elizabeth Munson was having an affair with a woman and that she was going to leave her husband, Lucinda Lim had told him.
Elizabeth Munson was gay? he had asked her.
Gay? Samuel Tay, I told you nothing of the sort. I said there were stories that she was having an affair with a woman. A lot of women have affairs with other women at various points in their lives. It doesn’t mean they’re gay.
Tay looked at Cally and at August, but they seemed to have forgotten he was there.
“What’s any of that got to do with Susan Rooney’s murder, John? Are you saying it was some kind of hate crime because she may have been gay?”
“Not may have been. She was. Gay, dyke, lesbo, kiki, carpet muncher. Take your pick.”
“You’re disgusting, John.”
“Look, darling, you asked me to give you something and I did. You don’t like it? Give it back. Makes no difference to me.” August closed his eyes again. “Anyway I’m retired. Remember?”
“Yeah,” Cally snorted. “Right.”
“I really am, darling. You should believe that. Still…” August paused and wiggled his bare feet in the sand. “If things get a little too hairy for you, send up a flare and Uncle John will come running to save your beautiful butt just like he always has. You hear me, girl?”
Cally stared at August in silence for what must have been a minute or more, which Tay thought was quite a long time to stare at somebody without saying anything. Then she did say something.
“I don’t need you for that anymore, John.”
Cally took a deep breath and exhaled heavily. Then without another word she stood up and walked away. When she reached the sidewalk along Beach Road, she stomped the sand off her feet, turned left, and kept walking. Not knowing what else to do, Tay stood up and followed.
The breeze was freshening and the light had turned gray and murky. A thick bank of clouds had formed off in the distance and just as the sun slid behind it the wind rose from the south and the palm trees began to bend and whip against each other with a sound that reminded Tay of something, although he couldn’t remember what it was.
But it was going to rain. That much, at least, he knew for sure.
TWENTY-EIGHT
IT didn’t rain. Instead the breeze vanished and a dense, soggy haze settled over Pattaya, a cloud of ripened m
oisture and carbon monoxide that glowed with a filmy yellow light for reasons Tay didn’t even want to think about.
They left around noon. The traffic was light and Cally quickly found her way back to the motorway and turned toward Bangkok. Tay noticed that she was driving far more sedately than she had on the trip down. Imminent levitation of the Volvo no longer appeared likely. Cally didn’t talk much and Tay gathered she was probably still thinking about August, although exactly what she was thinking about August was another question altogether.
It didn’t matter really. Cally’s silence suited him just fine since he had enough of his own thoughts to deal with. Half a world away his mother was about to be put in a hole in the ground and here he was riding around Thailand in a fucking Volvo as if he didn’t have a care in the world. It didn’t seem right. It just didn’t. If he had only tried harder to get in touch with Rosenthal before his mother died then perhaps…well, no, he didn’t have the slightest idea what might have happened. In the rational part of his mind he understood that, but still the question stayed with him and he couldn’t banish it no matter how hard he tried.
Was it possible that he could have at least talked to his mother one more time? Maybe, but what would he have said if he had? What could he possibly have said that might have brought comfort to her in the last hours of her life? He had no idea at all.
There was an even more pressing question right at the moment, of course. Was he going to drop everything and fly to New York for his mother’s funeral? At least Tay thought he had the right answer to that one. No, he wasn’t. What difference would it make to anyone anyway? Certainly, it would make none at all to his mother. He would just be undertaking a journey halfway around the world as an empty gesture, a gesture that would accomplish nothing for anyone.
Worse, going to New York now would take him away from something that did have meaning. Two women were dead. There might soon be more. It was his job to make sure that did not happen. Not just his job, his moral responsibility. That was what he did. That was who he was.
Tay watched the Volvo’s hood slicing into the smog like the prow of an ocean liner cutting through a dingy sea. He was amazed how hard the death of his mother had hit him and he examined the emotion with caution. Was it grief? He wasn’t sure. He wasn’t certain he knew what grief felt like.
Even if it was grief, was it grief for the loss of his mother, he wondered, or was it really just another manifestation of his own endless self-absorption? Perhaps that was all it really was, just more grief for the unrelenting emptiness of his own life. No brothers or sisters, no wife, his father long dead, and now his mother gone, too. He was alone. If he had ever doubted that before, he could doubt it no longer. He was alone and, worse, he was now at the head of the line to leave this earth. He would be next.
Just past Chonburi, still some thirty miles from Bangkok, they finally broke out of the grimy haze. In the hard white light of the swampy coastal plain, the city lay before them like a spread-eagled tart on a rumpled bedspread. A few pockets of commercial decay and residential rot were the only breaks in the monotony of the drab land through which they ran. With an intense and colorless sun remorselessly pounding the countryside, it looked as bleak as any place Tay had ever seen.
He tilted his head back and closed his eyes against the glare. Within minutes he was asleep and his mind was poking through tunnels of memory too subterranean for him to have had any conscious awareness they even existed. When he woke a short time later, he did so abruptly and without any sense that he had ever been asleep.
“I want to see where the body was found,” he said to Cally as he sat up in his seat.
Cally turned her head slightly and looked at him out of the corner of her eye. A yellow-and-white bus blew past them in the inside lane. The driver leaned on his air horns and Cally shifted her attention back to the road.
“You really know how to sweet-talk a girl, don’t you, Sam?” she said, smiling faintly.
“What?” Tay asked.
He was fully awake now.
“I said that you really know how to sweet-talk a girl.”
“What do you mean? Did I just say something to you?”
Cally glanced over at Tay and realized that he was completely serious. “You said you wanted to see where the body was found. I presume you meant Ambassador Rooney’s body.”
Tay didn’t remember saying anything of the sort but, regardless, it sounded like a good idea to him.
“Can we?”
“Sure.”
“Now?”
“Yeah.”
“How long will it take to get there?”
“An hour or so,” Cally said. “Depends on the traffic. Maybe a little longer.”
Tay didn’t ask where they were going or what sort of place it was. He would find out soon enough.
“Fine,” he said.
Then he tilted his head back against the seat and closed his eyes again.
IT was not at all what he expected.
When he saw the building the first word that came to mind was squalid, but perhaps that was a little harsh. The structure was five stories high, red tile with grimy concrete trim around the windows that was cracked and pitted from the accumulated moisture. It sat on a narrow road directly across from a doubtful-looking grocery store and a tattoo parlor. An asphalt parking lot covered the whole of the ground level except for a small windowless room built of concrete blocks that had apparently once been painted white or something close to it. The blockhouse appeared to function as a lobby for what Tay assumed were apartments above it.
Cally drove all the way through the parking lot without stopping and parked behind the building. They got out and Cally locked the Volvo.
“Where are we?” Tay asked.
“Pretty much the middle of Bangkok.” Cally pointed off to the south. “The American embassy is about a mile over there.”
“These are apartments?” Tay asked, looking up at the building.
“Yes. Mostly for locals.”
“Foreigners, too?”
Cally looked up at the building. “Not likely.”
“What about the apartment the ambassador was found in? Who lived there?”
Tay noticed a look cross Cally’s face before she could chase it away. He didn’t understand what it meant so he said nothing.
“I don’t know yet,” Cally said. “It’s a company rental. Somebody at the embassy is working on finding out who’s behind it.”
Tay nodded at that. He didn’t believe Cally, but he let it go for now and continued studying the building.
“What was happening when you got here yesterday?” he asked.
“There were a lot of Thai cops standing around with some people from the embassy. They had asked the Thai police to leave the scene intact until I got here so nobody was doing much of anything except waiting for me. I went upstairs and…” Cally shrugged. “You saw the photographs I took. That pretty much covers it.”
“Then the Thai police had finished processing the scene before you got here?”
“Look, Sam, things don’t work the same way here they do in Singapore. Things aren’t quite as …” Cally paused, searching for a word, “exacting.”
“Did the Thais do any forensics at all?”
“They went through the motions, but … not really.”
“Did your embassy people do any?”
“We’re not equipped for it.”
“So what you’re saying is that you don’t have anything at all from the scene that you can use.”
“Nothing at all.”
Cally kicked at the ground without looking at Tay.
“So,” she said. “You want to go in now or just stand out here for the rest of the afternoon?”
Tay reached for his Marlboros, but before he could either answer Cally or light one up Cally opened a metal door in the blockhouse and disappeared through it. Tay put the Marlboros away with a small sigh and followed.
The space inside was quite a
bit larger than he expected. There was actually a small apartment sandwiched between the elevator and the alleyway, or at least he gathered it was probably an apartment since the number 1 was painted on the wooden door in black. Cally knocked while Tay stood just behind her. She had to knock a second time before anyone opened the door and by then she had taken her State Department identification out of her purse and was holding it open directly in front of her.
“Dichan yak ja doo apartment eek tee na kha,” she said to the old man who opened the door. He had a face like a fish, big ears, and a bad haircut. Dressed in a dirty, white undershirt and gray shorts, he looked so thin he was nearly cadaverous. A half-burned cigarette hung from his lower lip.
“Haam kao na krap,” the man mumbled.
Tay watched in fascination as the cigarette jerked up and down with every word.
“Kao pai dai kha,” Cally went on in a firm voice that seemed to Tay to brook no nonsense. “Ma jag sa tarn tood.”
The old man appeared unimpressed.
“Mai dai krap!” he barked, his voice rising to a high-pitched squeak. “Pom pen khon doo ti ni na krap!”
Cally said something else Tay couldn’t hear and the man mumbled his reply, which he couldn’t hear either. Tay didn’t understand a word of Thai anyway so he would have had no idea what they were talking about even if he had heard them clearly. When Cally reached into her purse and handed the man a couple of red banknotes, however, Tay got the gist of the conversation.
The old man held the bills in his open palm for a moment, staring down at them as if he wasn’t entirely certain what they were. Eventually he shrugged, pushed the bills into one pocket of his shorts, and pulled a handful of loose keys from the other pocket. He sorted through them for a moment and then handed one to Cally.