Chasing the Monkey King

by D. C. Alexander

  “Oh, no—how embarrassing,” Holloman said as he loped through the open door with a slight slouch, wearing common khakis, a plain linen shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and clearly unfashionable eyeglasses. He wore no watch at all.

  “Pardon?” Severin said, as he and Zhang rose to shake Holloman’s hand.

  “As I came in, I saw that you were looking at what I call the Wall of Me. A collection of every meaningless award and accolade I’ve ever been given.”

  “It’s impressive,” Severin said blandly.

  “It’s distasteful and ostentatious,” Holloman replied. “But clients—and more importantly, potential clients—seem to love that stuff.”

  “You meet with clients in your office instead of a conference room?” Zhang asked, still hung up on something Severin thought utterly irrelevant.

  “Not all that often. But sometimes it’s necessary. So my Wall of Me is what I have instead of Yelp reviews. I guess it makes a certain amount of sense,” he said, taking a seat behind his massive hardwood desk. If they don’t already know you personally, they’re looking for any clues as to your quality as a lawyer. It’s like buying a bottle of wine because you like the label. But in all honesty, it embarrasses me. I’ve never felt comfortable with the necessary evil of self-promotion. It’s all just feels so, I don’t know, silly.”

  Severin was surprised at Holloman’s self-deprecation. “Highest honors and Order of the Coif? There’s nothing silly about that.”

  “You’re very kind. To me, that diploma is more of a daily reminder of the fact that I’ll be paying off student loans until I’m almost 50 years old.”

  “I thought state schools were supposed to be cheaper.”

  “Ah, but I didn’t grow up in North Carolina, so I had to pay non-resident tuition. No, sir. I am pure Central Florida white trash.” He took a sip from a coffee cup that had been sitting on the desk when they were first shown in. “Really, I shouldn’t gripe. Most of the people in this firm went to places like Stanford, Princeton, Harvard, and so on. Their loans make mine look like peanuts.”

  “I can imagine,” Severin said.

  “The funny thing is that I really wanted to go to Duke. Got admitted too. But there was just no way I was going to be able to afford private school. In retrospect, from a financial standpoint, I suppose I’m lucky that I couldn’t. Ended up in the same place as all those rich kids anyway.”

  Severin thought he’d detected the slightest hint of bitterness, of envy, when Holloman mentioned the Ivy League credentials of his colleagues. It could have been his imagination.

  “Anyway, I’m sorry to have kept you both waiting, and I hope I can be of help.”

  “We appreciate your time,” Zhang said.

  “So, my secretary said that Kristin Powell’s family hired you to try to find out more about what happened to her. Is that right?”

  “It is,” Zhang said. “The State Department report isn’t very thorough.”

  “They issued their report?”

  “You haven’t seen it?”

  “No. I didn’t even know they’d released it,” he said, clearly irritated. “You’d think they’d at least let me know, or even send me a copy. I mean, I spent time with those folks. I had a relationship with them. You can’t help developing a sort of emotional bond, even where the situation is somewhat adversarial with respect to our work.” He shook his head. “I suppose it doesn’t surprise me that it wasn’t very thorough though. I got the impression the State Department wanted the whole thing to go away. Probably because of the soybean agreement negotiations.”

  “So we’ve been given to understand,” Severin said. “We were hoping you could flesh out the report of your interview a bit.”

  “Sure. If you have it in your folder there, I can look over it and let you know if they left out anything important.”

  “That would be very helpful,” Severin said, handing him a copy.

  As he removed his glasses and polished them with a small cloth, Holloman said, “A couple of the State Department’s special agents came by and interviewed me about a week after I got home, and I told them everything I knew. Talked to them for an hour or so. They were pretty coy, by which I mean it was an irritatingly one-way street with respect to the flow of information. Aside from those two, I had a Washington Post reporter calling to request an interview. But because of the sensitivity, I declined, thinking the Post would be able to get hold of anything State thought was appropriate to release to the public once the report came out. I’m assuming State didn’t solve the crime. Or the family wouldn’t have hired you to learn more.”

  “The State Department theorized that it was a random abduction and killing for money. That the investigators missed their flight to Shanghai, then caught the wrong cab to take them to the Shangri-La Hotel in Qingdao.”

  “I suppose that’s possible, if hard to believe,” Holloman said. “It’s a generalization, but I don’t think of Chinese cab drivers as being particularly dangerous folks.”

  They waited as Holloman read State’s report of their interview of him. It didn’t take him long, as it was barely a page long. An hour of transcript whittled down to just the information State considered relevant.

  Holloman took a breath, removed his glasses, and looked up from the page. “They don’t even mention the company driver,” he said, sounding exasperated.

  “Company driver?”

  “Their van driver. He ferried us back and forth between the factory and the small hotel in Yinzhen where we all stayed, and also to and from Qingdao. I never got his name. But I mentioned to the State Department investigators that I thought he was acting a little bit funny. This was just my gut feeling now. And to be honest, even though I work with them all the time, I have a hard time reading the Chinese. Interpreting their facial expressions and body language and so forth. No offense,” he said, glancing at Zhang. Zhang shrugged, seeming unconcerned. “At any rate, I emphasized to the State guys that the van driver seemed unusually tense. He was normally about as emotional as a cup of yogurt. But the day we drove back to Qingdao from Yinzhen, he was noticeably tense. Of course, he could have just been rattled by the heated argument between the Commerce Department people.”

  “Wait—heated argument? Maybe we should back up a bit,” Severin said.

  “Yeah. If this is all you know of all the testimony I gave the State guys, then we should definitely back up.”

  “How about if we go over the whole day?”

  “I only have about 15 minutes before my next meeting, but I’ll do my best. The day started out well enough. It was a Monday. Everybody was in good spirits because we were almost done with the on-site phase of the investigation of YSP, and everyone had had a nice time at Laoshan Mountain the day before.”

  “Laoshan Mountain?” Zhang asked.

  “We’d taken Sunday off. One of the Commerce investigators was all fired up about visiting this place called Laoshan, up along the coast, past the big naval base just north of Qingdao. It’s a mountain with ancient and quite famous Taoist temples carved out of exposed stone on its slopes. Stuff dating back to the Song dynasty. It was only a couple of hours drive from Yinzhen. And the investigator’s description and excitement had gotten me interested too, so I arranged for YSP to give us a car and driver to take us up there for a little day-off excursion. It was a different driver, by the way. Not the van driver. Anyway, we headed up there, even making a quick stop at the famous Qingdao a/k/a Tsingtao brewery on the way.” Holloman grinned, then gave a little chuckle.

  “What?” Zhang asked.

  “Nothing. Silly memory.” When Severin and Zhang sat silent waiting for more, he went on. “We got stuck in a bit of traffic after touring the brewery. The same investigator who’d suggested we go to Laoshan had consumed so much beer that he had to urinate. Said he couldn’t hold it.”

  “I assume you’re talking about Bill Keen,” Severin said.

  “Yes. We had to let him out on the side of the road along the co
ast there, between Qingdao and Laoshan, so that he could hike up over a little knoll to relieve himself. Must have had an abnormally small bladder.” He smiled wider. “I was half worried he’d get arrested because we were practically on the perimeter of the big navy base up there. That would have made for a good story, right? Chinese Navy base perimeter patrol arrests lanky, white U.S. government employee for pissing on their hill, sparking international incident.” He shook his head. “Anyway, Laoshan turned out to be a beautiful place. Little ancient temples all over the forested mountainside. Sweeping views out over the Yellow Sea. Like something from a dream.” Holloman was staring off into space, clearly lost in a pleasing memory. Then he snapped out of it, his eyes returning to Severin and Zhang. “That probably isn’t what you came to talk about.”

  “No worries.”

  “Anyway, it’s back to business Monday morning in Yinzhen, and we’re all hoping to finish up. The YSP people and the Commerce investigators met me for breakfast in the hotel restaurant. Strange, antiquated little place. Lousy food. As usual, the van showed up around nine to take us to the factory to continue with the investigation. The factory is on the periphery of the town. We’d been working in their little conference room, going over the accounting records, discussing the company’s history and sales practices with their officers and accounting staff. Things had been going well enough. But on that day, one of the investigators figured out that something was fundamentally wrong with one of the monthly accounting ledger books he was examining. The invoices, sales slips, the monthly totals—none of it matched what had been previously reported to Commerce in YSP’s investigative questionnaire responses and data submissions. It took quite a while to figure out what had happened. But in brief, the YSP people had mislabeled the account book with the wrong year. It took them a long time to locate the right one. I won’t dress it up. Trying to sort it out was a mess. Company minions running this way and that way, shouting at each other, trying to find the right records. And because it was the last scheduled day of their visit, the Commerce team didn’t really end up having time to look at it. It caused a lot of confusion. A lot of angst for YSP. We had to manually reorganize a bunch of records on the spot. Match the right invoice and voucher books to the accounting ledgers. Double-check that the monthly figures totaled up properly. A pain. And in all honesty, I don’t know how Commerce would have ruled once the investigators got home.”

  “What do you mean?” Zhang asked.

  “I mean Commerce has the discretion to penalize a company for being so disorganized that they submit the wrong information to the investigative record. If they’d wanted to, it might have been within the Commerce Department’s authority to conclude that, in screwing up the presentation of their accounting records, YSP quote-unquote failed to cooperate to the best of its ability. In that case, Commerce would have hit YSP with a crushing tariff.”

  “But that didn’t happen,” Severin said.

  “No. Because the investigators disappeared, they never had a chance to file the report that could have led to that. So in the tragedy of their disappearance, YSP may have dodged a bullet.”

  “Are you saying it may have been in your client’s interest to make the investigators disappear?”

  “If this were a Hollywood movie, sure. But in reality, the YSP people are a pretty docile bunch. They really are. Most of them are aging farmers who saved their pennies and put them all together to buy this little tin can of a factory out in the countryside. I can’t picture them hurting anyone.” He shrugged his shoulders. “But, then again, I suppose anything is possible. I’m sure it would have put them out of business if Commerce had put a punitive tariff on their sorghum. At the same time, it’s just as possible—probably more so—that Commerce would have chalked up the accounting book errors as an innocent mistake and let YSP off the hook. In fact, that’s exactly what I told the YSP people, to reassure them. Anyway, I only mention all this because I think the intensity of the last day, workwise, left us all a bit tense, a bit tired. It might have contributed to the way things went later.”

  “What happened later?” Severin asked.

  “We wound things up at the factory and went back to the hotel to pack. The van was going to take us back to Qingdao. The Commerce team was going to try to catch the last flight from Qingdao to Shanghai. Their flight back to the U.S. originated in Shanghai the next evening, so they figured it would be smart to try to get there that night to have a little more buffer of time to catch their plane home. I was going to debrief the company officials at their freight forwarder’s office that evening in Qingdao and then fly to Beijing the next morning to meet with a potential new client. But after I packed and came downstairs to the lobby, I was surprised to see Kristin Powell’s husband, Wesley. Apparently he was supposed to investigate another sorghum company down in Jiangsu Province the following week, but flew in a couple of days early to attempt a surprise rendezvous with his wife. And when I say surprise, I mean she clearly had no idea he was coming. It was a huge surprise to me. I mean, this town, Yinzhen, is out in the middle of nowhere. It’s miles from any major city. I don’t even know how Wesley got himself there, but it must have taken some serious motivation. At any rate, his appearance on the scene was flat-out weird.”

  “How so?” Severin asked.

  “I don’t know anything about the Powells’ relationship, and I don’t know what had been going on just before I arrived in the lobby. But it would be an understatement to say that things were suddenly quite tense. Clearly, Wesley was expecting the team to be there another night. But when he found out they’d finished up and were headed to Qingdao in an attempt to catch the last flight to Shanghai, he asked if he could ride along. I told him that would be fine. We were in two vehicles. The company’s president and accountant and the Commerce team’s interpreter rode in the president’s private car with his personal driver. All three Commerce employees rode with me in the company van. So we’re out on these back roads, zig-zagging through farmland, and everybody’s mood seems to be darkening as quickly as the twilight sky. I’m up front with the driver, trying to think about the things I needed to debrief the YSP company people on that evening. In the back, the Commerce people have been engaged in awkward, forced-sounding small talk, when suddenly Wesley demands to know why his wife didn’t return any of his calls. I can only assume he’d tried to contact her several times from the States. Keen jumped to her defense, explaining that she hadn’t been feeling well and had been going to bed right after dinner each evening. This was news to me, which is to say it wasn’t entirely accurate. I saw her up late at least half the nights we were there, usually out walking the town with Keen or having a beer with him in the hotel restaurant. Regardless, Wesley’s voice shoots up 20 decibels as he tells Keen to keep out of it. Then he really lays into his wife. Why hadn’t she returned any of his calls? Did she have any idea how disrespectful that was? Did she have any idea how worried he’d been? I’ll spare you the cuss words. Suffice it to say it was vitriolic. And I gathered from the argument that, unable to get Kristin on the phone, Wesley had called Keen on several occasions, asking that he find her and have her call him back. So he was also ticked that Keen hadn’t gotten her to call home. Things kept getting uglier. Kristin was in tears. Then Keen finally exploded, calling Wesley crude names and threatening to beat the tar out of him if he didn’t quiet down and leave Kristin alone. He used a number of expletives that I’ll leave to your imagination.” Then Holloman grinned a weak grin. “He even told Wesley that he needed therapy. I was of more than half a mind to voice my concurrence. Finally, Wesley demanded to be let out of the van.”

  “Out on some country road?” Zhang said.

  “Exactly. Out in the middle of nowhere. Not even in the tiny town of Yinzhen anymore. We were out on some lonely road between farm fields. At this point, I intervened, asking everyone to please stop talking and cool off. I would have just had Wesley transfer to the other vehicle. But they were out of sight somewhere ahead of us,
and we were in an area with no cell phone coverage, so I had no way of getting them to stop. I told Wesley that we weren’t going to abandon him in the middle of nowhere as it was getting dark. That his request was ridiculous. He told me … .” Holloman paused, his face flushed with seeming embarrassment. “He said some indecent things to me and demanded, once again, to be let out of the van. I’m embarrassed to say that my anger got the better of me. I figured, okay, this jerk speaks enough Chinese to get by. And he managed to get to Yinzhen on his own. It’s summer, so he isn’t going to freeze to death. He’ll probably be able to flag down a passing vehicle and pay them to drive him out to the nearest highway where he could catch a bus or something. So to hell with him, right? Worst case scenario, he could follow the road back to Yinzhen. I had the van driver pull over, and we let him out. I don’t know what his plan was or where he was headed, and by then I really couldn’t have cared less. I wasn’t his number one fan to begin with.”

  “You already knew Wesley?”