The Marriage Tree

by Christopher G. Moore

  Colonel Pratt nodded as one of the medical examiner’s assistants unzipped the body bag to expose the entire body. Her designer tracksuit had been removed and sent to the lab for processing: prints, DNA, hair, stains, blood—the full schedule of keys that might unlock the mystery of who this woman was and how she died.

  Colonel Pratt and the medical examiner had a private moment in the corner. Calvino stood in front of the tray with Jane Doe’s remains.

  Someone is waiting for you, thought Calvino. Missing you, wondering where you’ve gone Someone who will grieve for you.

  Another thing about the body had caused some confusion.

  “It looks like she was sexually violated,” said the medical examiner. “Our preliminary examination found tears inside her vagina, consistent with rape.”

  “Drugged and raped and pregnant. The press won’t find this of any interest,” Calvino said, joining their circle.

  Colonel Pratt sighed and shook his head as he looked at the body.

  “You understand the situation,” he said.

  Calvino understood, for example, the extra juice he’d received during the rough-and-tumble interrogation. A young, beautiful, pregnant woman raped and killed would have the reporters circling police headquarters asking why the police hadn’t arrested the culprit.

  Calvino’s eyes stopped at the right ankle of the deceased. A small blue tattoo of three capital letters spelling “JAI.” She’d had running shoes and socks on when he’d found her body.

  “Pratt, you see the tattoo on the ankle?”

  Colonel Pratt leaned over and examined the slender ankle.

  “It means heart in Thai,” said the Colonel.

  “Why would a Thai use the Roman alphabet for a Thai word?” said Calvino.

  “You’re assuming she’s Thai.”

  “You’re assuming it means heart in Thai. If she’s not Thai, why those letters, and could they mean something other than heart?”

  “Farang know ‘jai’ means heart,” the Colonel said.

  “In all-capital letters?” asked Calvino.

  “What do you think the tattoo means, Vincent?”

  “I hear music in a morgue that no one else hears. I wouldn’t be asking what I think J-A-I means.”

  “A crazy idea can turn out to be the most sane explanation,” said Colonel Pratt.

  Calvino had begun to adjust to the cold. He rubbed his hands, blew on his fingers.

  “Her boyfriend’s initials. That’s what I’m thinking. Look at her. Someone’s been paying a small fortune for plastic surgery. You put that much money into creating a woman who has no flaw, maybe your next step is to have your initials tattooed on her ankle. A reminder each time she puts on her shoes that she is owned.”

  “You think the tattoos are the initials of her patron? A branding like the American cowboys did in the nineteenth century?” said Colonel Pratt. “It might have a double meaning.”

  “The word ‘patron’ has a funny ring, looking at her. Where is he? Does he know his treasure is in the morgue with his kid inside? Or was he the one who made the arrangements for her to end up here?” asked Calvino.

  He’s definitely warmed up now and no longer heard the music.

  “There are many questions. We can’t answer them now. All we can do is wait until a suspect we have talks,” said Colonel Pratt. “And he will.”

  One by one Calvino’s police officer escorts slowly drifted out of the morgue—the last place anyone wanted to celebrate Songkran. Two senior officers nodded at Colonel Pratt as they passed. It was one of those gestures exchanged by brother officers. Calvino watched them, standing tall and proud and certain in their rank and authority. Not one of them acknowledged him on their way out. Their minds were on Saturday, the first day of the Songkran water festival celebration of the living, of family and of friends. A time of “water heart”—the little gestures to ease a stranger’s life. Colonel Pratt said nothing as the last officer left. The initial investigation had wrapped up.

  While one of the assistant medical staff zipped Jane Doe’s body back into the body bag, another one helped her push it back into cold storage. Jane Doe vanished into the closed drawer.

  Calvino and Colonel Pratt were now left alone in the morgue. Each waited for the other to say something first. The Colonel started but then stopped before he had uttered a sound.

  “You had to let them do it,” said Calvino. “You didn’t have a choice.”

  Colonel Pratt worked his hands into a fist, clenching the handle of the drawer. Calvino’s words made him uneasy.

  The truth was Calvino understood why Colonel Pratt had been forced to stand down. The Colonel was his friend, and Thai friendship came with a promise of protection, but it could never be absolute. No shield could ever be impenetrable. Over the years the Colonel’s protection had been sufficient to ensure that Calvino avoided the worst abuses of authority. There had been a time when a farang who was a close personal friend of a Thai police colonel had some leverage. But now the old agreements and ways were fading away. The old relationships were dying too. In the new reality Calvino’s interrogation was bound to run its normal course despite his friendship with the Colonel. That would have never happened a decade earlier. The new regime in the department expected Colonel Pratt to change with the times and show that his first loyalty was to the force. No shield would be allowed to protect a foreigner. Outsiders could no longer rely on such shields and had to fend for themselves as best they could.

  If the Colonel had tried to intervene, Calvino realized, then the two of them wouldn’t now be standing together in the morgue alone.

  “The good news is no more small interrogation rooms and telephone books,” said Calvino.

  “We’ve arrested a suspect, Vincent.”

  Calvino raised an eyebrow.

  “Yeah? So why the batting practice with me for the last three hours?”

  “They had information that connected you to the suspect.”

  Calvino, caught off guard, wrapped his arms around his chest.

  “Who is he?”

  “An Indian national found hiding at the scene. An illegal migrant who sells nuts on Soi Cowboy.”

  He showed Calvino a photo of the suspect.

  Calvino cocked his head to the side, looked at the face. Now the face suddenly had a context. Calvino recognized him. He’d seen the face walking along Soi Cowboy with a tray of nuts, stopping at each bar that had customers out front, trying to make a sale. Calvino had once paid him for information in a missing person case.

  “You’ve got a confession from him?”

  “Not yet, but it’s a matter of time. We believe he was camping out not far from where you found the body. He admitted to knowing about the spirit house next to the canal.”

  “You’re saying the case is already closed, is that it?”

  “We have some solid evidence.”

  “Did this Indian tell you the dead woman’s name?”

  “He said he didn’t know it. But he knew your name.”

  “My name? Did he really? Or did the cops tell him my name?”

  Calvino looked at Colonel Pratt for a full minute, trying to read what was going on behind the official policeman’s expression. They’d been friends for years, but that never stopped them from hitting a wall that protected suspicions, uneasy feelings and doubts. The cops would have put the Indian through a process that made Calvino’s interrogation look like a walk in the park.

  “Why would he use my name?” Calvino said, testing exactly how much Colonel Pratt knew.

  “He says you paid him for work on a case last year. Akash Saru.”

  Calvino looked away, closing his eyes, trying to see past a lot of wreckage that the last year had left. Paying informants was like buying a lady drinks—a man lost track after a year.

  “And he’s right. I did pay him.”

  “So why were the two of you on the Tobacco Monopoly Land together?”

  “I was jogging. Pratt, the question
is, what was Akash doing there at that time of morning?”

  He hadn’t remembered the nut vendor’s name. The bargirls had shortened Akash Saru to Ack, a guttural, half-spit sound.

  “Going for a walk. That’s his story,” said Colonel Pratt.

  “Finding Akash in the area doesn’t mean that he killed the girl.”

  “Forensics lifted a set of his prints from her body.”

  “I’m sure they found a set of my prints too. And I sure as hell didn’t kill her.”

  He’d hired Akash Saru one night on Soi Cowboy. Calvino had been looking for a twenty-two-year-old man named Chuck who had gone missing in Bangkok. He’d been last seen with a dancer who worked at the Midnite Bar. He’d not been the first twenty-something to vanish into thin air after his first bar fine. Five days later, after the dancer slipped back from a cozy little holiday in Koh Chang, the Indian nut vendor had phoned. Calvino talked to the girl. That evening he took her back to her room in an old building filled with service girls. Chuck was watching TV in his shorts and eating popcorn when Calvino walked in. He wondered how many other missing persons were sitting around in their underwear in a squat on Petchaburi Road, waiting for their loved one to return from her last short-time.

  The name of Chuck’s bargirl had been Pizza. Calvino smiled now, remembering how he’d told Chuck’s father he’d found his son living with Pizza. It had taken a couple of minutes to clarify that Pizza was her name and not to be confused with the food. And no, he’d told McPhail at the time, she didn’t come with double cheese, and no, she wasn’t necessarily two slices short of a super deluxe. Ed McPhail was one of the survivors of the scene at Washington Square, now demolished, and one of the few old-timers that Calvino could rely on to watch his back or find information no one else could. Over the years, their two livers had become best friends.

  Calvino needed to know who she was, this pregnant dead woman he’d found on a Wednesday morning. The name Jane Doe didn’t suit her. Had his nut vendor informant raped and killed a stranger? In Bangkok it seemed that, unless the laws of physics were violated, if it could possibly happen, and it was plausible, then it must have happened somewhere.

  “After you finish with Akash Saru, I’d ask one favor.”

  “Name it, Vincent.”

  “While the cops were putting me through the wringer, the Indian was in the next room getting the work-over, right? They must have broken him. That’s why I’m here and he’s in the lockup. Let me have a talk with him, Pratt.”

  “You’ve got nothing to say to him. And he’s got nothing to say to you. Listen to me, as a friend. Don’t get involved in this case. This is an active investigation that will be all over the papers by tomorrow. How do I explain allowing a foreigner to talk to the accused?”

  “He did me a favor a year ago. I owe him. He’s entitled to hire an investigator who is also a lawyer to advise him. It’s called access to counsel. He has a right.”

  “And he’s going to pay you in peanuts?”

  “He wouldn’t be the first client to shell out in nuts.”

  “Why get involved, Vincent?”

  “You said yourself that I should get back on the job, that I’ve had too much time to brood, and I’m thinking you’re right. A new case would be good therapy.”

  Colonel Pratt sometimes forgot that Calvino had been a lawyer. Sometimes he filed things away in his memory until the right moment presented itself. This was one of those moments. The Colonel felt the trap of logic catch both legs.

  “Do you ever think about going back to New York?”

  The Colonel asked Calvino this question a couple of times a year. It was his signal that he’d run out of ammunition.

  “Yeah, Pratt. I’d like to go back to my old New York every day if I could—for two hours,” Calvino said, smiling, and Colonel Pratt tried unsuccessfully to suppress a grin. “We could go back together. See a Yankees game. Sit in the front row at the Blue Note. Breakfast at a diner in the East Village.”

  “That’s more than two hours,” Colonel Pratt said.

  The Colonel paused, shook his head.

  “Find another case, Vincent.”

  “I like this one. It’s a puzzle. It has a mysterious woman. She’s a fairy-tale princess, young and beautiful. No ID. How is it that a pregnant teenager is raped and killed and dumped in the middle of Bangkok, and nobody sees anything? And she doesn’t have a scratch on her—not a mark anywhere. Her fingernails are clean. No evidence of a struggle tells me there was no physically violent sexual assault. And the killer took the risk of dumping the body on the Tobacco Monopoly Land? What the fuck is that about? Why there? There are thousands of places to hide a body. That’s not one of them.”

  Colonel Pratt smiled.

  “If your Indian informant drugged her and she was unconscious during the act, she wouldn’t have been able to resist, would she?”

  “You’ll have to wait for the toxicity report,” said Calvino. “If she has no drugs in her blood, you’ve got nothing to hold my client.”

  “His fingerprints. And there’s the matter of his culture. Indian men’s attitudes about women differ from ours. Rape is tolerated in India. We can’t let that happen in Thailand.”

  Emotions can lead even the best cops to ignore solid evidence that doesn’t support a gut feeling of guilt. Colonel Pratt had a wife and a daughter, and every day for weeks Thai newspapers had hammered the public with a series of stories of rape victims in India. Graphic stories detailing gang rapes by small groups of Indian men. One woman had been gang-raped on an Indian bus after her boyfriend had been beaten unconscious. A week later another woman had been brutally raped and murdered. The press had the ability to turn two unrelated cases into a vast, out-of-control crime spree of rapists waiting for victims on every corner. It didn’t take much imagination to find a link between the dead girl found on the Tobacco Monopoly Land and an Indian nut vendor who’d been living there illegally. The public would accept the police’s case as it fit the profile—all Indian men were dangerous rapists, and their evil would infiltrate Thailand unless stopped by the firm, quick action of the Thai police.

  NINE

  ONE OF THE worst sins in Calvino’s world was to act out of sentimentality. It blurred judgment and made men stupid and women careless. Calvino hadn’t insisted on seeing Akash because of some misguided sentimental attachment. Akash had been compensated for his information about the bargirl named Pizza who’d slipped back to her spot on the stage, clutching the chrome pole in a Soi Cowboy bar. Sooner or later Calvino would have tracked her down on his own. How many Pizzas worked on Soi Cowboy? Unlike other fast food commodities, Pizza had been consumed but reassembled and was back on the shelf for a new customer. She worked at one of the largest takeout menu joints in the world. Akash’s report that she’d come back only accelerated the inevitable. The two men had been square. Neither owed the other anything. That said, they had a history, a connection, enough thread for the police to weave into a conspiracy story.

  Calvino had no illusion about the risks an outsider faced in Thailand if he involved himself in a murder case. There were other illusions he had yet to deal with, but understanding what he was up against wasn’t one of them. He knew that parking himself inside an open murder investigation was a little like walking into a dark room with a dozen cobras, stretching out and spending the night on the floor. The cops had decided Akash was the guy to take the fall. They wanted the Indian’s blood. They needed to wrap up the case before the press played up the race card. Even Colonel Pratt was circling wagons with his colleagues and soon the majority of the population would join them. The hounds would bay for blood, and the cops would give them what they wanted. Anyone who piped up asking about human rights or evidence would find the wrath of the mob turned on them.

  Given a library’s worth of reasons to let the police deal with Akash in any way they chose, Calvino decided to help Akash. He doubted the Indian had killed Jane Doe. But he might have. Calvino’s motive was less abo
ut Akash than it was about the dead girl he’d found. This wasn’t some newspaper report he’d read. He’d found the body. He wanted the killer caught and castrated, if possible by a mean street dog. But there was more to his decision to investigate the murder. Another murdered woman floated into his consciousness—the one called the Black Cat, Mya. She had died in Bangkok seated next to her cousin as a bomb exploded under their Benz. That murder case had never been solved. Jane Doe was a surrogate case for the one that had defeated him.

  It was now Friday morning, the day before Songkran. Akash sat with his legs shackled. The chains looked huge around his skinny legs, while handcuffs bit into his skin on his wrists. The Indian looked dazed, dejected, his head lowered. He slowly lifted his head, his watery eyes staring into the middle distance. The guard nudged him with a baton and said in Thai, “Someone is here to see you.”

  A look of amazement flashed hot in Akash’s large brown eyes—puffy and bruised. He looked like he might cry.

  “Khun Vinny!” he said. “You remember me, my friend? I am so happy to see you. This terrible thing has happened. They say I murdered a young woman, that I had sex with her.”

  “Did you?” asked Calvino.

  Akash’s face clouded, his teeth biting his lower lip as he shook his head—a performance Calvino suspected had been used on the police.

  “No, of course not! I did not kill her! I did not have sex with her!”

  His excited voice echoed down the noisy corridor.

  “The police took a set of your prints off her body. Why would they have found your prints there? Tell me the truth or I can’t help you.”

  Akash reached out in supplication, tears running down his cheeks.

  “Please, Khun Vinny, you must believe me. I would never harm a girl like that. I saw her in the grass. I was camping nearby. I thought it strange that a girl would be sleeping with the sun already bright. She lay beside a path I used to walk home. I swear, I touched her only to find a pulse.”