The Marriage Tree

by Christopher G. Moore

  “Look at these. Tell us about the ritual you two made at the spirit house.”

  I could read their game plan easily. One of the officers, Ice, leaned over me, flexed his jaw, his eyes narrowed, his mouth firm, and asked me to repeat again why I’d unzipped the track suit top.

  “It was sexual, wasn’t it?” he asked.

  “I made a mistake,” I said.

  Both cops liked the sound of that admission.

  “Now we’re getting somewhere. Tell us about your mistake, Mr. Calvino,” said Fire.

  “I shouldn’t have stopped. Colonel Pratt was right. I should have just kept on running in a giant circle until I returned to the track around the lake. I should have left it to someone else to phone the police. I’d say that was a serious mistake.”

  “I think you made a big mistake killing the girl. But you don’t want to talk about it,” the tough cop said.

  “There wasn’t a mark on her. How did you kill her?” asked Fire, who did most of the talking.

  “You are going to tell us,” said Ice, just to remind me not to forget him.

  There’s no need to caricature cops like these two. I’m reporting straight up what they said, how they circled me on the stool and how they reacted in their dramatic cop-show way. They were derivative of someone’s movie or TV script. I saw that they were real men, but I also saw that they were hollow and a whole world had been poured down their throats.

  Ice raised his fist to provoke me and expected me to flinch. I’m from New York. I’ve seen fists before. I sat calmly, hands folded on my lap. I gave him no hint of a desire to fight back. Passive resistance inflamed Ice, who was hoping for the natural reflex reaction of blinking, ducking or raising a fist in return. He got none of that out of me. He’d given his best interrogation shot and I’d absorbed it, shaken it off.

  They lit cigarettes, put their heads together and spoke their Thai laced with police slang, glancing over at me. One of Calvino’s Laws is never cause a cop who is interrogating you to lose face. I could see that Ice was thoroughly upset and could have cut my throat and written up the death as a shaving injury. There is no good cop, bad cop routine in those circumstances; there’s only bad and worse. They were getting set to cross the boundary into the worst things in their repertoire. This was the time-tested way to extract data—brute force, then guile, then brute force.

  Ice assumed the Muay Thai part, the intense, pissed-off, menacing cop devoid of sympathy, but keeping open a small window of hope that he might be persuaded to ease off. Fire got typecast as the psycho, violent buddy who looked like he was about to crack a head no matter what I said. Nothing about him suggested persuasion would do any good. Fire slammed a thick telephone book against the wall. In that small room it was like a sonic boom three feet away.

  “Next time, your head gets in the way, understand?” he said.

  Imagine a tick finding itself on a bloodless carcass. Fire’s frustration hadn’t eased. He was just warming up.

  He’d seen that the loud smack against the wall had made me duck like I’d done in the front seat of the SUV in Rangoon. I’d shot two men dead in the backseat. For a moment I wasn’t in the interrogation room; I was back in the SUV and thinking I was a dead man. Ice pushed me in the chest, knocking me off the stool.

  “I thought the physical stuff was your buddy’s job,” I said. “Good cop, bad cop. Good cop doesn’t push the suspect around.”

  They dragged me off the floor and sat me back on the stool. I no longer looked like a downtown businessman in my suit and tie. They’d messed up my clothes to take me down a peg or two.

  “Tell us her name, and how you knew her.”

  After two hours we’d come full circle with the line of questions being repeated. The technique is to get you to say something inconsistent or add a new detail, or better still, give in and start making shit up as the telephone book is raised level with your head.

  “Who helped you kill her? Don’t tell us you acted alone. What’s the name of your accomplice? Tell us and we’ll let the court know you cooperated.”

  Hour three is when they hit you with one of their best gambits—the Prisoner’s Dilemma. The idea is to get you to rat out someone else, so that guy goes to prison and you walk away free. They never said who this mysterious accomplice was. I was supposed to tell them. Later, it was clear that they had a particular person in mind.

  Fire swung away and hit me in head with the telephone book. The force of the blow knocked me from my stool. This time I got up on my own and sat back on the stool.

  “No need for a translator. I understand telephone book in multiple languages.”

  I thought about the two Thai joggers who’d let me use a cell phone to call Colonel Pratt, but I knew those weren’t the accomplices they wanted to hear about. And playing smart with them would give them a good excuse to use their second data extraction tool, the thicker yellow pages listings of all of those businesses run by corporate generals and politicians, and Ice would use it to smack me even harder without leaving a trace. I stared at each one of them, keeping my thoughts to myself. Such as how I couldn’t remember ever reading how the advent of new technology was killing off the yellow pages, making an essential instrument in police interrogations difficult to find.

  At the three-hour mark I told them that if they took me to the morgue, I’d show them why I zipped down the dead woman’s top. Both cops looked worn down. The fury had gone out of their questions. They hadn’t eaten lunch, and the heat of the day blasted through the interrogation room. For a lot of Thais, missing a meal sends them to the edge of hypoglycaemia, blood sugar levels plunging. They’d started to sweat. Anxiety and nausea had kicked in, slowing them down. Sweat poured down my face. My suit jacket had big wet patches under both arms. My tie hung unknotted around my neck. We’d reached a point in the interrogation where their physical resources had been exhausted. It was a question of whose body would give out first. The two cops left the room, talked, had a smoke and returned to tell me that we would be meeting with Colonel Pratt at the morgue later that day.

  I smiled, nodded my head. The cop threw the telephone book against the wall.

  “We’re not done with you, farang.”

  The problem with interrogations is the cops fall into one cliché after another. The last bit of dialogue came from a crappy daytime soap opera where a Thai cop says to the street tough, “We’re not done with you, Lek.”

  And Lek’s eyes would be wild with fear, the right side of his mouth quivering, as he tries to decide whether to laugh in their faces, shout that he wasn’t done with them either or just display the hot-white glow of wordless hatred. I didn’t like any of those script options. I gave my best Forrest Gump smile, the unsettling one that makes people who see it think you are “simple,” a moron or mentally unstable. Ice picked up the phone book and handed it to Fire. I regretted my visual wisecrack. This was another rule not to violate. Don’t wisecrack with the police. Ever. The second smack from the phone book caught me over the right eye. This time Fire put some real arm into it. The blow knocked me off the stool and sent me sprawling. As I started to get back to my feet, Ice laughed as Fire, snarling, gave me a kick in the ribs. The two cops pulled me to my feet and pushed me back onto the stool.

  I was getting worn out from these trips from the stool to the floor and back again. One cop pushed a photograph into my face.

  “This is your friend,” he said. “You know him, right? You two did this together.”

  “Did what?”

  The telephone book hit me at the kidney level on my back as Ice circled around. It was a foul move. Ice was supposed to be the good cop. Obviously they weren’t playing by the rules. Again the picture was shoved in my face.

  “Who is this?” asked Fire.

  Ice continued to stand behind me. I could hear him breathing down my neck. I looked at the picture.

  Tuole Sleng in Phnom Penh had a wall of photographs of men who’d stared into the lens of a Khmer Rouge photo
grapher. The man in the photo had that desperate, hopeless expression, a man defeated and ready to accept his fate. The features of the man in the photograph weren’t Thai. He had dark skin, a long nose, his face blackened by the stubble of a beard, his thick eyebrows knitted and his hair black as night.

  I stared at the photograph. Studied the face. The funny thing was it looked familiar, but I couldn’t place where I’d seen it. You sometimes pass someone on the street and you recognize them, but the context is missing—a bank, a health club, a restaurant or a bar—and the frustration sets in because outside that one place they don’t exist for you. It was a face out of context. The man in the photograph gave me that feeling.

  “Don’t recognize him,” I said.

  “He said he recognized you,” said the cop.

  “Farang all look alike. Isn’t that what Thais say?” I said.

  “He’s not Thai. He’s an illegal from India.”

  Calvino looked up from the journal. He’d come to an abrupt halt, leaving his doctor wondering why. Calvino sat across from her desk, looking at her attempt to disguise her feelings of disappointment. Calvino waited, letting the silence expand in the doctor’s office.

  “Did you know him?” she asked.

  Calvino smiled, “Aren’t you supposed to ask how I felt about the interrogation?”

  Dr. Apinya recovered her composure with a little cough.

  “How did you feel?”

  “You don’t care how I felt. You want to know what happened next. How am I here and not there, in prison?” Calvino said.

  He’d caught her off guard, and she blushed.

  Calvino watched the tide of red wash from her cheeks to her throat, leaving a strange map on her skin.

  “A few hours later I walked into the morgue, where Colonel Pratt and others were waiting for me. The cops had taken my handcuffs off, but why are you smiling?”

  “I remember feeling good, knowing they were going to let me go.”

  He had a great deal more to say. He thought about telling Dr. Apinya about how frail and vulnerable the terror had made him feel—the terror he couldn’t show to the cops in the interrogation room.

  The timer binged.

  A police interrogation might continue for hours and hours, but therapy is a controlled data search and works on a different timetable. He left his narrative hanging at mid-sentence and left.

  “See you next week, Mr. Calvino.”

  Dr. Apinya was incredibly polite in her greetings and leavings behavior; it was only in between that she pumped her clients for information. Calvino thought of her as not that different from a cop—a specialized detective, trained to search the psyche of a patient and disarm any intruders found lurking inside. Unlike his recent session with the cops, he had to pay for Dr. Apinya’s interrogation and keep an appointment for more. He started to miss Ice and Fire, who took no money and threw him out once they couldn’t break him.

  On the way out of the office, Calvino wondered if his doctor had any idea that solving a murder depends on exploiting a small window of opportunity. Catch the killer in forty-eight hours, or chances are he won’t get caught. Calvino knew well that homicide detectives will push themselves into exhaustion trying to find a suspect within hours of a murder because they’ll never have a better chance to nail the killer. Failure to extract a confession will look bad on them. For a good investigator the failure would feel still worse—like a gangrenous leg that needed amputation, but with no one available to do the job.

  A young, beautiful woman had been murdered, and the uncaught killer was wrapped around the necks of the cops like a python. The lack of a suspect was about the worst message a police department could send to the public. That message would be screamed from every media source, online and offline—we know you’re corrupt and don’t give two shits about us, but when a young girl is found dead, it’s time for justice.

  Calvino walked away having left behind a variety of powerful emotions—in Dr. Apinya’s office as in the police interrogation room. This was how the cops interrogated the working class. Their method was meant to terrorize them, make them miserable and hopeless. Leaving the room with a smile on his face had insulted them. He’d bottled his feelings and refused to show them to the cops. What he showed and what he felt were as different as a bottle of Mekong whiskey and a twenty-year bottle of single malt.

  EIGHT

  IT WAS COLD in the morgue. Calvino felt the chill against his skin as he was frog-marched into the room by Ice and Fire, who had changed back into their uniforms. Three other officers wearing jackets followed the parade. They crossed the uneven, cracked tiles between three stainless steel autopsy platforms whose liquid-retaining rims, once shiny, had gone monsoon morning dull. Colonel Pratt, like the other officials in the morgue, wore a coat against the chill. Standing before a wall lined with drawers, he’d been talking with a white-coated medical examiner who was flanked by two assistants.

  “Midnight at the Oasis” played, not the original but Renee Olstead’s version. Calvino shivered as the cold seeped through his sweat-soaked clothes. His teeth chattering, he looked around the morgue for a set of old speakers. They must be cleverly hidden, he thought. Olstead’s mellow, heartfelt voice belted out, “I’ll be your only dancer ... and you can be my sheik.” Had the music been chosen at random? What were the chances of that? The Black Cat had loved that song. One night while on a case in Rangoon, Calvino had ended up inside a bookshop below where Mya lived, and she had sung that song for him. Colonel Pratt was the only person that Calvino had disclosed that piece of information to. Life and death had come and gone since then. Too many things had happened, one after another, since Rangoon, and listening to the song, Calvino caught a glimpse of the Black Cat in the corner of the room, smiling, drawing on a cigarette, keeping beat to the music.

  “Pratt, listen—‘Midnight at the Oasis.’ You told them about it?”

  Colonel Pratt looked at the medical examiner and the cops around Calvino.

  “Vincent, there’s no music.”

  “You’re sure about that, Pratt?”

  “You look cold,” the Colonel said, rubbing his hands together.

  He lifted a jacket from one of the tables and draped it around Calvino’s shoulders.

  “I am cold. It doesn’t mean I’m not hearing that song. You’re telling me that there’s no music?” asked Calvino. “I get it. Cold, beatings, morgue... It’s a mind game to keep the suspect off-balance.”

  He looked at Ice and Fire. They had no idea what he was talking about. The others in the room stared at him. Talking in Thai, the doctors discussed possible diagnoses for someone hearing phantom music.

  “Trust me, Vincent. There is no music in the room.”

  Then why can I hear it, he asked himself. Why can’t I stop shaking?

  “We haven’t identified the body,” said Colonel Pratt.

  “Your colleagues thought an appointment with the yellow pages might jog my memory. Instead they managed to open the jukebox inside my head. They shouldn’t be disciplined, though. They tried their best.”

  The warmth of the jacket dulled the ache of the cold. Calvino took a deep breath and, looking at the two men who’d interrogated him, held out his hand to shake. Checking first with the more senior officers, who gave a nod, they shook hands with Calvino.

  “Nice grip,” said Calvino.

  He walked across the room and joined Colonel Pratt, who had opened one of the drawers and rolled out the metal frame with the young woman’s body on it. Jane Doe’s body was fully covered. It looked childlike inside the body bag.

  “Where’s she from?” asked Colonel Pratt. “Bangkok? Upcountry? Japan? China? She could be from any of a dozen places. We’ve run her fingerprints and found nothing on file in Thailand. We’ve passed copies of the prints on to Interpol. We might get lucky. They might come back with a match. But I doubt it. The report on her DNA sample won’t come back for a week. Again, we might get lucky.”

  In Colonel Pratt
’s experience the unspecified dead turned up in canals, on beaches, in fields, in parks, on roadsides and in back alleys in Thailand by the hundreds every year. Unclaimed, unconnected to any evidence supporting identity, whether they’d died of natural causes or had been murdered, they were all victims with a shared destiny—to wait for a piece of luck to turn up a connection.

  Calvino had taken more than his share of missing-person assignments. Looking for the lost was bread-and-butter business, ensuring a steady, reliable number of new cases every year. Thailand was a sort of hub for people who had disappeared—or had gone into hiding, avoiding relatives, ex-wives and defrauded employers. The lucky ones had a worried parent or spouse anxious about their well-being. Some of those had someone willing to pay a private investigator to find them. In the world of money, using it to find another person is an investment, one that someone believes is eventually going to pay off financially or emotionally.

  “Anyone file a missing person report?” asked Calvino.

  “No. That was the first place we looked,” said the Colonel. Turning to the medical examiner, he asked, “What killed her?”

  “Hypoxia.”

  She’d stopped breathing, but there wasn’t a mark on her.

  “A drug overdose?” asked Colonel Pratt.

  The medical examiner shrugged.

  “The toxicity report will give the details,” he said, “but that’s one possibility.”

  Everything in the universe is possible according to the laws of physics, Calvino thought, but what is probable is another matter. Calvino looked at the woman’s young, unlined face, thinking, why did you stop breathing?

  “Anything else?” asked Colonel Pratt.

  “The deceased was six weeks pregnant,” replied the medical examiner. “It will be confirmed in the autopsy report. What I’m giving you are my preliminary findings.”

  “Looks like you may have found a motive, Pratt,” said Calvino.

  Sometimes a body is physically present but its identity isn’t traceable. Technically this Jane Doe was a missing person. A body with a fetus inside and no ID attached. Death without identity seemed to Calvino to have an unsettling finality, especially when the body belonged to a young woman.