The Marriage Tree

by Christopher G. Moore

  “Did you find one?”

  Akash shook his head, rattling his chains.

  “She was dead.”

  “Why didn’t you phone the police?”

  Akash shook his head again.

  “I have no papers. I am what the Thais call a khaek, a visitor. The Thais look down on people like me. Dark skin, no good, they say. We smell bad, they say. Every day I see disgust on their faces as I pass. We are repulsive to the Thais. How can a poor man like me report the death of a beautiful girl to the police and not have a problem?”

  He searched Calvino’s eyes for an answer. He didn’t anticipate what was on Calvino’s mind.

  “Why did you tell the police that I was at the scene? You told them that I’d I vouch for you. Put things right.”

  “Mr. Vincent, the police told me you also saw the dead woman and then asked me whether I knew you. I was very much relieved to learn this. I said, ‘Yes, Mr. Vincent is my friend.’ You look angry. Why? Did you wish for me to lie to the police?”

  Calvino finally had his answer about the size of the wall Colonel Pratt had hit in trying to stop the cops from interrogating him. There was no way the Colonel could have done anything but stand aside and wait.

  “If you’re lying to me, Akash, you will have big trouble. Do you understand?”

  Akash’s head, bobbing like a pendulum in an over-wound grandfather clock, said, “Mr. Vincent, I swear what I’ve told you is true. What I told the police is the truth. Akash is a truth teller. Ask anyone. Finding that girl was Allah’s will. And I pray that it is the Prophet’s will for you to rescue me from prison for something I did not do. This is a truly terrible deed. I give you my solemn oath, in the name of the Prophet, that I did not kill the girl.”

  TEN

  LATER THAT FRIDAY McPhail walked along a narrow clear path inside Calvino’s office. Calvino’s back was turned to the door. He’d been expecting McPhail, who was an hour late for their appointment.

  “You should fire your maid,” said McPhail. “You’re working in one of those Bangladesh fire hazards. One lit match and whoosh, baby, everything goes up in flames.”

  He looked at the long ash on his cigarette and smiled.

  “You’ll find an ashtray under the stack of newspapers on my desk.”

  McPhail lifted the newspapers, tapped the ash into the glass ashtray and then looked around for a place to sit.

  Calvino stood up, gesturing toward the next room with a newspaper clipping. The photograph showed uniformed police beside the burnt-out hulk of a Benz.

  “Ratana, I found it,” he shouted to his secretary.

  Ratana had searched for the clipping earlier in the morning, before he’d arrived.

  “I knew you would,” she said.

  She walked in carrying a lacquered tray with Chinese fire dragons. It held two glasses of ice water.

  “The fire department’s emergency response team has arrived. And just in time,” said McPhail, taking one of the glasses.

  “Sit down, Ed.”

  “Sit where?”

  Ratana removed a stack of file folders from a chair.

  “Thanks, Ratana,” he said.

  Calvino watched his friend puff on the cigarette as he sat down.

  “You want a little pick-me-up with the water?” he asked.

  McPhail smiled.

  “I wouldn’t mind.”

  Calvino walked behind his desk, sat down and, leaning forward, opened a desk drawer. He removed his bottle of Johnnie Walker Black, unscrewed the top and poured a long shot into McPhail’s water glass.

  McPhail sipped the water and whiskey and smacked his lips, still eyeing the clutter of the office.

  “All you’re missing are thirty feral cats.”

  “It’s called research, Ed.”

  “What happened to your right eye?”

  “I was looking up cat shops when the phone book suddenly slapped me.”

  McPhail shook his head and lit another cigarette.

  “The cops worked you over pretty good.”

  Calvino handed him the newspaper clipping with its photograph of two uniformed police officers. The story underneath explained how they’d been disciplined for misplacing evidence in the bombing case.

  “They got some payback.”

  It was the same two officers, Ice and Fire, who had interrogated him about the dead girl.

  “You hit your head on that wall for months,” said McPhail. “No wonder it made you crazy.”

  McPhail looked around the office again, shaking his head.

  “But from what I can see, nothing’s changed.”

  Calvino decided not to mention the music in the morgue. Only crazy people heard music that no one else heard. Were you crazy if you questioned your own sanity? Calvino worked through an answer as McPhail drank his whiskey.

  Ratana appeared and hovered around Calvino’s desk. She looked nervous, as if her boss might still be unwell. She’d had no warning. He’d phoned just half an hour before he’d showed up, saying he was back on the job. That he’d just left the prison and had found a new client there. His decision to accept a new case had confused her. As far as she was aware, he had no active clients and had informed everyone he was taking on no new cases.

  She looked him over without making it obvious and waited for him to ask for messages. Well, not messages, as people had stopped calling him at the office. There could be something that he wanted. He looked normal enough, sitting his chair, the computer on, checking his email and telling McPhail that he’d run into a phone book. She didn’t fully understand, but that was often the case when she attempted to track the conversation between McPhail and Calvino.

  She cleared her throat and sighed.

  “If you need anything...” she said, pausing.

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “I’ll let you know.”

  “That’s good. You’ll let me know. You can phone or just call out. Whichever works.”

  She lingered a moment longer before slipping out of the office.

  “I’m fine, Ratana,” he called after her.

  After she’d left, McPhail finished his whiskey and water.

  “That was good.”

  He surveyed the stacks of papers piled in neat rows.

  “What are you going to do with all of this shit?”

  “I’m organizing it.”

  He followed McPhail’s gaze around the office, trying to see it through a different set of eyes.

  “It doesn’t look like you’re using the Dewey Decimal System.”

  The office walls, Calvino’s desk, the table and the floor were exactly as he’d left them more than three months before—blanketed with photographs, some he’d taken himself, and newspaper clippings from the Bangkok Post, The Nation, Matichon, Thai Rath and half a dozen Thai crime magazines. It was the longest stretch he’d ever spent away from the office. He’d followed Dr. Apinya’s order for a furlough, and her order had remained in force until he’d decided an exception could be made for Akash, as he wasn’t a new client. It was a lawyer’s distinction. Every so often the old instinct for splitting hairs became irresistible.

  What really mattered was the fact he’d returned to his office, a place he’d avoided for months. He had work to do. Akash’s case would distract him from the wreckage he still carried around from Rangoon. Looking around his office, Calvino felt in a perfect state of harmony as he took in his entire body of material evidence, random clues, speculations and wild imaginings—it was a space where all of these possibilities combined into half a dozen plausible explanations to account for the car bombing. How things had happened the way they had, who had ordered the hit and the reason for killing Mya and Yadanar, two musicians from Rangoon, on their way to perform in New York.

  On every surface—tables, desk, chairs and floor—he’d stacked hard copies of data, graphs, charts, information and more information connected to the car bombing. In his mind he saw an organic beauty unfolding like a film that came alive
from his day-to-day storyboard, drawing on news sources, handwritten interview notes, digital photographs Ratana had printed out on A4 glossy paper, police photographs from the crime scene and so on.

  Every high-profile murder had an MO. The cops had sifted through the debris, trying to make sense of what had caused the Benz to be reconfigured in that particular arrangement of pieces. Some of the pieces had been tampered with. Some had disappeared. The results of the official investigation had left the main questions of motive and opportunity inconclusive, and the case had been quietly shelved. The unofficial investigation had pointed a long-nailed finger at one influential figure named Thanet, chief executive officer of the Diamond Flagship Import and Export Ltd. This CEO sat atop a powerful family empire, with substantial business interests and high-level political connections. He’d come up the shady backstairs of the system two steps at a time, as if he’d been a New York investment banker in his last life.

  Thanet was forty-two years old and enjoying the fruits of being on top of the mountain.

  Nearly a year had passed between the murder of Mya and her cousin Yadanar and the dead girl he’d discovered on the backwater patch of the Tobacco Monopoly Land. Nightmares, delusions, voices—visitations, he called them—had gradually left him stranded in a no man’s land where real and unreal boundaries dissolved.

  Calvino had memorized the elaborate timeline from the moment the two musicians had left the stage of the jazz nightclub on Sukhumvit Road to the time of the explosion. Now it was as if some stranger had drafted the timeline. As if Calvino were seeing something new in it.

  “What are you staring at, Vinny?”

  Calvino’s eyes glazed over as he stared at a series of A3 color photos of what had been left of the blown-up Benz. Every angle of the wreckage. The broken glass, twisted metal and human body parts with numbered tags as they lay in the street. He’d seen the same image a hundred times on the TV news, a hundred more times in newspapers and thousands of times on the Internet. There were other photos of the emergency team who’d arrived on the scene of the blast and filled half a dozen body bags, stuffing in a leg here, an arm there, a foot and Mya’s head. The dual killing had been major news for a week, with brief reports on progress for another few days.

  Calvino thought of crimes as time sequences, blocks of time populated with conversations, telephone calls, whispers, planning, secrets, cooperation and opportunity. But usually, unless someone broke down and supplied the missing links, or there was CCTV footage, filling in the timeline was an exercise in frustration.

  “Sometimes,” he said aloud, “when you get stuck figuring out a problem, you set it aside and find a similar one and see if you can learn something new. You ask yourself, ‘What am I overlooking?’”

  “What are you overlooking?”

  Calvino smiled.

  “If I knew, I wouldn’t be overlooking it. I’m thinking about the young woman I found on the Tobacco Monopoly Land. She was dead, but she looked like an angel sleeping. So beautiful you wanted to weep. Not anything like what happened to Mya.”

  “Man, you’ve got to let go of the Black Cat.”

  Calvino nodded, thinking everyone said the same thing—McPhail, Ratana, Colonel Pratt... Even old man Osborne, who had sent Calvino to Rangoon to find his son and now lingered on, fighting cancer in the final stages, made a daily ritual of “letting go.” The father no longer mourned Rob, his son who’d died in Rangoon. Osborne had slipped into the space of mourning for himself.

  “Forget about the dead, Calvino,” Osborne had said. “The problems of the living are enough to keep anyone occupied.”

  Calvino had spotted the old man standing on a corner, smoking, holding a glass of single malt in the other hand and shaking his head in disapproval.

  “You can’t forget the dead,” said Calvino. “They won’t let you.”

  McPhail looked around.

  “Man, who are you talking to?”

  “I’m thinking out loud.”

  Ratana rushed into the office.

  “Let me drive you back to your condo.”

  “The Thais believe that when someone is violently killed, their spirit hovers in the air at the crime scene, waiting for justice,” said Calvino. “Ask Ratana. Isn’t that right?”

  Her hands rose to cover her mouth. She lowered her eyes and nodded.

  “I know,” said McPhail. “Thais think ghosts of murdered people stick around like they’re in a first-class Thai airport lounge waiting for their flight to be called. Only their flight is delayed, and they get upset and they want revenge. Right, Ratana?”

  “Like most things you say, Ed, there’s a fingernail of truth chewed off and spit on the floor,” said Calvino, answering for his secretary.

  McPhail was happy Calvino had intervened.

  “But I know for a fact, Vinny, that you don’t believe in ghosts,” McPhail continued. “You told me so years ago. You don’t just one day wake up and say you’ve converted to the church of ghost believers. You gotta believe that kind of shit from the time you’re a kid or you never will. Right, Ratana?”

  “You need to grow up with it,” said Ratana.

  “See, what’d I tell you? You didn’t grow up believing in ghosts.”

  “New York is nothing but ghost believers,” said Calvino. “My grandfather was a high priest of ghost believers.”

  “Ratana, now he’s lying.”

  “Are you ready for another shot?”

  Calvino unscrewed the whiskey cap and leaned forward to refill McPhail’s glass.

  “Okay, you can give me a shot,” McPhail said, using his finger to measure along the side of the glass. “But way, way above the line, if you don’t mind.”

  Ghosts or no ghosts, the fact was that no one had been arrested for the killings of Rob Osborne in Rangoon or Mya and Yadanar in Bangkok. The police spokesperson in Bangkok had issued a press release that translated into the banal—our investigators continue to examine leads into the car bombing. If there really were leads, no one mentioned what they were. Once the public were assured the crime hadn’t been politically motivated, interest quickly faded. In reality the evidence was inconclusive, except to confirm it had been a professional job; there were no loose ends, no leads that led anywhere. No magical Phillips screwdriver that the police could use to reassemble the steel, glass and limbs.

  “Look at this,” Calvino said, handing McPhail a photograph of Jane Doe.

  “She’s dead?”

  “Dead.”

  McPhail showed the photograph to Ratana.

  “She was killed? Who could have done something like that to this girl?” said Ratana.

  “The police say a man named Akash killed her.”

  “An Indian did this?” said McPhail.

  “I hope they execute him,” said Ratana.

  Calvino held up his hand.

  “Wait. The suspect didn’t kill the girl. He says he’s being framed.”

  “If the Indian didn’t do it, who did?” she asked.

  It was hard to know how any justice system ever worked when most people, including the cops, shared Ratana’s point of view—if not the khaek, then who could have done it? Calvino had a list of names.

  “My job is to show there is no evidence that Akash killed her.”

  McPhail said, “Then you’d better find someone to take his place on the ball-cutting bench.”

  Defending a murder case usually meant exactly what McPhail said—you found someone else to put in the murderer’s chair. To get your client out of the chair, you’d better bring a replacement. That had been the problem in the car bombing case: the chair had remained empty, falling into a shadow and disappearing into a warehouse of forgotten furniture.

  Murder cases tended to end up in cold storage, like the young woman in the morgue. After just a couple of days, the local newspapers already had a couple of murdered farang stories to sell and more would follow. A Jane Doe could have come from anywhere. Mystery, beauty, youth and pregnancy would
have staying power for someone with an identity, but Jane Doe was nameless, stripped of family, region and education. Her death would easily be bumped as old news, one more unsolved Bangkok murder case that had held people’s interest for forty-eight hours. Afterwards, she’d be forgotten as attention switched to the latest kidnapping, rape and murder charges filed in separate cases involving foreigner victims. She’d been found early Wednesday; by Saturday the news of Jane Doe’s death would be fading. The police hadn’t released the fact she was pregnant. Their excuse was that the autopsy report was needed to confirm the medical examiner’s finding. By the time that emerged, Jane Doe would be old news.

  And so it went. Jane Doe’s murder didn’t make the cut when it came to the news-value rankings. Competition against the latest victim was always tough. It was the same for a private investigator. But for Calvino this new case imparted the passionate feeling he might unlock the world of ghosts and find a way to be rid of them. His mind had been laboring to match the initials JAI to any foreigners working and living in Thailand. A Thai would have likely used Thai script but a smart, rich foreign educated Thai might have used the Roman alphabet. Calvino concluded the clue to solving Jane Doe’s identity was locked in her ankle tattoo.

  ELEVEN

  THE FIRST PERSON on Calvino’s list whose initials were JAI was an American lawyer named James Arthur Innes. Innes was from Chicago but had been in Bangkok for eight years. McPhail tagged along with Calvino as backup. They arrived together for the appointment at Innes’s office in a modern high-rise off Silom Road.

  Innes opened the door to his office himself. He had no secretary. He wore a tan suit jacket.

  “Mr. Calvino, I’ve been expecting you.”

  As Innes reached out to shake hands with Calvino, an exposed cufflink displayed his initials. McPhail looked him over. This guy, he thought, is the first on Calvino’s list to interview? It could get interesting.

  “This is Ed McPhail, my associate,” Calvino said.

  “You have an associate?” said Innes. “The private investigations business must be doing well.”