Street Music

by Timothy Hallinan

  “Boy or girl?” the corporal asks in English.

  “Boy. I guess that’s supposed to be better.”

  “Boy is better,” the corporal says, glancing at the sergeant as though to make sure this is a permissible opinion.

  “You don’t work,” the sergeant says, making it sound like an accusation.

  “I work at home. I write books. Tell you what. Fon, can I ask you to make these gentlemen either some tea or some of your excellent coffee while I put some clothes on?”

  Fon nods without moving, not bothering to make it polite. Women who work or have worked in Patpong have no affection for the police. She stays where she is just long enough to make her point, then steps aside to let them enter and shuts the door loudly enough to make the corporal start.

  “Not quite as strong as what you gave me this morning,” Rafferty says. “These gentlemen are armed and we don’t want them to get jumpy.”

  The sergeant says, “We don’t need anything. But we do need to talk.”

  “Give me a minute to pull some pants on, and we’ll get right to it.”

  “He’ll go with you,” the sergeant says, tilting his head toward the corporal.

  Rafferty feels sudden anger wrap its fingers around his throat. “Like hell, he will. I have an apartment full of women, my daughter, and a new baby. You think I’m coming out with a machine gun? What do you want with me?”

  “Just to talk. A few minutes, maybe five or ten.”

  “Well, good, then we can do that right here. The ladies will go in the other room, won’t you, ladies? You, too, Miaow. We’ll cancel the coffee and tea, stop pretending to be buddies, and have our chat, and if my sheet slips, well, don’t let it distract you. Come over to the couch. It’s lumpy, but if I can stand it, so can you.” He precedes them so he can snatch the bottom sheet off the lumps and toss it next to the wall. Then he sits on the hassock, demurely crossing his legs. In a few seconds the three of them are alone, although neither bedroom door has been closed and Rafferty knows they have an avid audience. He says, “So, what can I do for you?”

  The corporal suddenly has a notepad and pen in his hand. The sergeant reaches into his shirt pocket and pulls out a rectangle of paper housed in a small, transparent plastic envelope with a snap to hold it closed. The sergeant says, “What can you tell us about this?”

  He knows what it is before he reaches for it, and it feels like the apartment has started to tilt and spin, but he keeps his hand steady, gives it a quick look, breathes in and out and in again, and says, “It’s one of my business cards.”

  “Do you give out many of them?”

  “I’ve only had them six months or so. I’ve given out, I don’t know, forty or fifty.” He smiles as though amused by the notion of having to explain. “That’s what you do with them, you give them out.”

  “Who do you give them to?” the corporal asks.

  “Whoever asks for one. I’m a writer.” He swallows, wishing he could take it back because he knows it’s a giveaway, and says, “Magazine and newspaper people, book publishers, novelists who want some kind of expertise, occasional foreign investors. I’ve advised on a couple of movies.”

  “Have you given any out recently?”

  “I give them out all the time, but why recently?”

  “Look at the card. It’s clean, it’s not wrinkled—”

  “I don’t know about you,” Rafferty says, the intentional interruption a way of reminding them they’re on his ground and, so far, by his sufferance, “but when someone gives me one of these things I slip it into my wallet until I either need it or stumble across it at the end of the year when I’m cleaning all the crap out. If you had let me put my pants on, I could probably show you three or four right now, most of them from months ago, and they’d all look like they were printed this morning.” He readjusts the sheet, telling himself he’s showing so much leg it borders on rudeness, but then he figures fuck it and just dives in. “Why don’t we try this the other way around? Why don’t you tell me why you’re asking me about it? Start with who had it.”

  The corporal looks at the sergeant with the silent-movie hair, who nods, and Rafferty sees the division of labor. The corporal will talk to him and take notes and the sergeant will watch him. The corporal says, “Have you given any of these to street people?”

  Rafferty says, feeling his heart sink, “Street people.”

  “Homeless. Beggars. That kind of—”

  “One. A woman who sometimes begs on Patpong and Silom.”

  “How old?”

  “Hard to say. She could be forty or sixty. She’s kind of beat up.” He’s suddenly overwhelmingly aware that Miaow is certainly listening to all of this in her room. “I give her a little money now and then.”

  “And your card?” the corporal says, eyebrows raised.

  “Not long ago I was chatting with her when she spotted a kid picking the pocket of a Japanese tourist, and she yelled ‘Thief’ loudly enough to be heard in Phnom Penh. The kid ran without getting the wallet and the Japanese guy didn’t get his trip ruined. So, yeah, I thought I’d give it to her. Someday when she’s hungry, I thought, she might find a way to call me.”

  The two cops look at him so expressionlessly that they might be waiting for a punch line. He knows it’s supposed to make him uncomfortable, so he asks his own question. “How did you come to have it?”

  The corporal says, “When did you see her last?”

  “Why?”

  “Please answer the question.”

  “Last night.”

  “Where?”

  He chooses the place where the largest number of people probably saw them together. “On Silom, maybe nine o’clock. I passed her on the sidewalk and asked how she was, and she said she was hungry, and I said something like, ‘If you could eat anything in the world, what would it be?’ She said a banana, so I took her into the Baskin-Robbins that’s right there and bought her a banana split. Actually, two. We talked for a while.”

  The corporal glances at the sergeant, whose attention is entirely on Rafferty. Rafferty leans forward and asks the sergeant, “What’s this about? Has something happened to her?”

  The sergeant says, “I think we should continue this conversation at the station.”

  “That’s all you’re going to tell me?”

  “We’re asking,” the sergeant says. “You’re telling.”

  “Well,” Rafferty says. He’s having difficulty keeping his face blank; whatever happened to her has to be very bad indeed. “Hang on a second.” He gets up and goes to the pile of clothes and slips his wallet out of the hip pocket of his jeans. “No gun,” he says. “But here, have a look.” He fishes through a thin stack of cards and hands one to the sergeant. “I’ve had it for months, and it still looks new.”

  It actually is relatively new; it’s Arthit’s card, the one that celebrates his promotion a few months earlier to full colonel, which puts him right outside the door that opens directly into the smoky, greasy Nirvana of the top cops, from whom all authority flows downward and up to whom all graft rises. He hands the card to the corporal, who glances at it, his eyes widening, and hands it to the sergeant so quickly it might be too hot to touch.

  “While I get dressed,” Rafferty says, “you can call him and tell him you’re hauling me to the station. He’d want to be informed.”

  “You know him?” the sergeant says.

  “He’s my adopted daughter’s—the one you just met?—he’s her godfather. I’m his adopted daughter’s godfather; in fact, I introduced him and his wife to the child they adopted. We’re sort of godfathers-in-law. I’d call him myself, but I thought I should let you pay him a courtesy by telling him you’re pulling me in; maybe explain the situation to him in your own words, give him the opportunity to be there and ask some questions of his own.” He pulls on his trousers and then drops
the sheet as he zips up. He bends to pick up his T-shirt, looks at it, and says, “I’ll just get another shirt.”

  “No, no,” the sergeant says. “Wait.”

  “I’ve been wearing this shirt for days,” Rafferty says. “I think people should always be interrogated in a clean shirt. A gesture of respect for law and order.”

  “No one is going to interrogate you,” the sergeant says. “In fact—” He shifts his weight to pull a little notebook from his hip pocket, opens it, licks a finger, makes a show of leafing through it, and ponderously nods his head. “Yes, I’m right. We’ve asked you every question on my list.”

  “Well, then,” Rafferty says, “since I’m no longer useful to you, I’ll just slip into the bedroom and get a clean shirt.”

  “Oh, certainly,” the sergeant says heartily. “Certainly.”

  “Right back,” Rafferty says. He goes into the hallway, seeing Miaow take a quick step back into her room, her face rigid, and then turns into the bedroom, where he gets a round of soundless applause, hands not actually meeting, from the women. He makes a little bow, pulls a T-shirt from the second drawer in the dresser he and Rose share, and slips his arms in. He’s just finished pulling it over his head as he gets back into the living room to find the cops standing at the door to the outside hallway, eager to escape.

  “So,” he says, “why do you know she had one of my cards in her pocket? What’s happened to her?”

  “She’s dead,” the sergeant says. “Foul play. We didn’t suspect you, of course. We just wondered whether you could tell us something that would help us to—”

  “Where did you find her?”

  The cops meet each other’s eyes for a moment. “In Lumphini,” the sergeant says. “Near the lake.”

  “Right, right.” He can’t think of anything to say, so he says what’s actually on his mind. “Last time I saw her, she was finishing a banana split, and then she, ummm—” To his surprise, the room ripples and he realizes he has tears in his eyes. He blinks them away and says, “She had such a rotten life.”

  “We’re so sorry to have bothered you,” the sergeant says, in a tone that’s the verbal equivalent of licking Rafferty’s bare feet. “Thanks for all your help.”

  “My pleasure, I guess.” He opens the door. “Wait a minute. Killed how?”

  The corporal looks at the sergeant, and the sergeant says, “Knife.”

  Rafferty says, “Jesus. She didn’t deserve that. Well, good luck catching whoever did it.”

  “We will,” the sergeant says.

  Rafferty closes the door and says, “In a fucking pig’s eye.” He pulls his phone out of his jeans and hits the speed dial for Arthit. On his way to the couch, he sees Miaow standing just outside the door to her room, staring at him as though she’s forgotten who he is. He disconnects and puts the phone away. “Sorry about the language. You, umm, you heard, right?”

  Miaow steps forward, glances into the bedroom, undoubtedly seeing a panorama of wide eyes, and quietly shuts the door. Then she comes the rest of the way into the room and takes her usual seat on the hassock. She’s studying the floor as though she might have dropped something on it. Just as he’s about to repeat the question, she says, “Yes. I heard.”

  He says, “I’m sorry.”

  “Why? You didn’t do anything to her.” Her left foot is jiggling up and down, and she regards it for a moment and then gets up and goes to the couch, where she pulls her knees up against her torso and wraps her arms around them, making herself, at least in Rafferty’s eyes, as small as possible. He stays where he is, unwilling to intrude on her even by moving. A very slow minute or two goes past.

  “I sat like this all the time,” she says at last. “It’s one of the things I remember. I was always sitting on the floor and I had my knees up like this. And my back was against a wall.”

  He waits, and when she lets her head droop so that she seems to be studying her lap, he says, “Why?”

  “So they wouldn’t notice me.”

  “Did they hurt you?”

  “Not with their hands.” She’s rocking, very slightly, back and forth.

  “Were you . . . afraid of them?”

  She says, “I’m not afraid of anything. Just stupid things, like the play or people not liking me.”

  “But you didn’t want them to . . . notice you.” He crosses the room and takes the seat she vacated in the hassock.

  A pause, so long he thinks she might get up and go back to her room, but instead she says, “My father . . .” She swallows. “My father didn’t like me. He never said anything nice to me. I don’t think he ever held me, never so much as picked me up. Even when I was in a corner, I felt like I was in his way. Except for that, I mean except for the way I felt about him, I don’t remember him much. What I do remember is that he had really big hands and he smelled dirty. Sometimes my mother smelled dirty, too. What it felt like to me, what it smelled like to me, was that they stayed up all night and never cleaned themselves. When it got really bad, I used to think about how nice everyone had smelled at Sonya’s.”

  “Sonya’s.”

  “A place they used to leave me when I was little. I pretended for years that Sonya was my real mother and that she didn’t know where I was so she couldn’t come and get me. And then, when I was on the street, I smelled even worse than my father had. That bath you were talking about, I was trying to scrub off a whole layer of skin.” She puts her head back and closes her eyes and says, “A knife, huh?”

  “So it seems.”

  She sits there hugging her knees, folded as tightly as a paper clip, staring up at the ceiling. She grabs a deep breath, and he thinks she’s going to say something, but instead she shrugs her shoulders as high as she can, practically to her earlobes, and keeps them there, then lets them drop. She blows the air out slowly and says, “Knives. It was a knife that Boo used when he came and got me, when he took me away that day.”

  He says, “Yes?”

  “Yes, what? You know the rest.”

  He starts to reply and stops dead. Should she know this or not? He doesn’t know how she actually feels about Hom’s death, and he doesn’t want to give her a reason to grieve any more than she might already be mourning. On the other hand, the deepest wound is the desertion, being thrown away like that. He says, “She followed you. That day. She hid where you couldn’t see her, and she followed you.”

  Miaow brings her head up so quickly that he sits back. She looks enraged. “Did she say that? Liar.”

  “She described the place. Saw Boo, saw the other kids.”

  “Liar,” Miaow says, “liar, liar, liar,” and then she’s up on her feet and actually running around the corner to the hallway. He hears the door slam.

  He sits there, weighing options, and the best one seems to be giving her some time. He’s punching the speed dial for Arthit when the door to the big bedroom opens and Rose looks out. He said, “You heard?”

  “Yes. I’ll talk to her.”

  As Rose goes down the hall, Arthit picks up and says, “The new father. Getting any sleep yet?”

  “Not that you’d notice. Listen, I just had some of your colleagues here.”

  “Friendly visit?”

  “Not exactly. Seems like somebody, a homeless woman, was murdered in Lumphini last night, and she had one of my business cards on her.”

  “A homeless woman? Do you know a lot of—”

  “I know, I know. I’ll tell you about it sometime. What I want to know is how seriously they’ll look into this.”

  “Off the top of my head, unless she turns out to be related to somebody who matters and who might make a stink, I’d say that going to see you was probably the whole investigation.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Rafferty says. “No money, no media interest, no brown envelopes stuffed with cash. Tow her away and forget about it.
” He turns and walks to the balcony at the far end of the living room. When he turns back, he sees a line of women crossing the hall to Miaow’s room.

  Arthit says, “Is this important to you? Is there something you’re not telling me?”

  “No, no. I’m not involved, and it doesn’t really concern me, I just gave her some money from time to time, and I thought you should know that I was briefly a—what’s the phrase?—a person of interest.”

  “Then I’d say it’s over.”

  “So, uhhh, the cops said she was found in Lumphini. Do you know—which is a way of asking, can you find out—where in Lumphini?”

  “Poke,” Arthit says. “There’s something you’re not telling me.”

  “No, don’t be silly. I just liked her, that’s all. But, you know, she’s not likely to have a funeral, I just thought I’d go pay my respects to her spirit. I promise not to get involved. Listen, I’ll tell you about it later, but can you have someone call me, tell me where it happened?”

  “I probably can,” Arthit says, “although that means I’ll need to have someone talk to the cops who talked to you.”

  Rafferty says, “The sergeant’s name tag said Theeravet.”

  “A prince among men,” Arthit said. “Must have been disappointed you didn’t slip him a few thousand baht. Someone will get back to you.”

  “Thanks.”

  He rings off and looks around the room, thinking how odd it is that, in all their years there, they’ve never tried to make it more comfortable. He squeezes himself into his work chair and gives himself a moment of silence as he tries to figure out what’s next. Rose comes out of Miaow’s room, herding the women into the big bedroom. She gives him the big eyes that mean, Are you just going to sit there? and then she follows her retinue.

  He rubs his face with his hands and swivels in the chair for a minute, which makes it squeak. Then he tugs a few pieces of blank paper out of the printer and centers them on the desk. He thinks better with paper in front of him. The jar full of ballpoints and dried-up felt-tips is at the far corner of the desktop and he pulls it toward him and chooses a pen. He’s drawing spirals with it to make sure it doesn’t skip when Miaow says, “What are you going to do about it?”