A long pause, during which I imagine my words and image finding their way across the globe to Hawaii. Then: “Yes, it’s still morning in Hawaii. What took you so long?” Witherspoon says.
“I’m half Thai,” I explain.
Witherspoon blinks into the computer cam as if he is trying to see me more clearly. “Are you?”
“Didn’t you know that?”
“I don’t know scat. This guy, this Hollywood director, calls me out of the blue one day and asks me to tell him all I know about my ex-wife, the world-class witch named Doctor Mimi Moi. So I told him, which wasn’t much. We got chatting. We must have Skyped each other about ten times, so we’re bonding in a way. He asked me to do him a favor. I said, What? He said, I’m gonna send you a little package with an address on it. Just keep the package until you hear that I’m dead-then send it to the address that’s written on it.”
“That’s it?”
“Pretty much. Look, I’d love to talk more, but I’m due to go on vacation in about twenty minutes with my new girlfriend and I don’t want to screw this one up. How about you call me in about a week?”
I say, “Huh?” Somehow, what with the excitement of the chase, the last thing I expected was a key witness on vacation. “Where are you going?”
Witherspoon lets me have a wry grin. “New girl, buddy, I’m being spontaneous. Speak to you.” He Skypes off.
42
On Bangkok murder squads, inspiration and paranoia are Siamese twins joined at the hip for life; some of us theorize they are the same thing. I’ve got it now, the insight into the devious workings of an exceptionally twisted and gifted criminal mind-but whose? I’ll find out. I’m 100 percent certain I’ve finally got a handle on the Fat Farang Case, and for the first time I’m slightly irritated with myself that I’ve promised Sukum he can have all the glory. This may be a good sign: maybe I’m returning to egocentric normality, thereby rehabilitating myself as a card-carrying citizen of the twenty-first century? Whatever, I am unashamedly pleased with myself this fair morning when I am on the phone to Virginia. The FBI listens to me in attentive silence, then says, “You’re a genius, Sonchai, there’s no other word for it-I’ve been racking my brains about your case, but I never would have thought of the solution. You’re just amazing.”
“There’s nothing I can do until you get me some fingerprints, or, even better, DNA samples,” I say, not for the first time.
“Don’t worry, honey, we’ll get them. In the meantime you might try his apartment.”
“I’m onto it-but the place was very clean. Any fingerprints or hair samples are likely to be from cleaners or the forensic people-it was never the crime scene, so we weren’t too careful.”
“What about his car?”
“Yes, I’ll try it.”
I get the keys to Frank Charles’s Lexus from Sukum and take a cab over to the building on Soi 8. Charles’s penthouse owns three parking spaces underneath the building, and it takes about a minute to find the metallic-gray sedan parked in one of them. Best bet for prints, always, is to dust the gear stick and steering wheel. I dust both and lift the prints. Even in the rough I think I can see one set of prints repeated over and over again. I also pick up a selection of fiber rubbings from the front seat, pop them into a bag, rush them over to forensics-and even though it’s only three in the afternoon, I’m so exhausted from having been up all night I decide a massage is called for. I go to the massage shop at the corner of Soi 39 and Sukhumvit, mostly because of the sense of religious silence that prevails there after lunch when most of the customers have gone back to work and most of the girls are fast asleep.
So here I am, prone and submissive under a muscular girl who is all of five feet tall and in the process of delivering the most delicious torture to my mind-ravaged body, when-of course-my cell phone rings. I fish it out of my pants, which are hanging by my side, to check the identity of the caller. I only deal with emergencies during massage, but when I see it is the FBI I signal to the girl to hold off with the torment for a moment while I take the call.
“Got it,” the FBI says, “it was an amazing piece of luck. I just happened to be making some casual checks on the Net, using Frank Charles as a keyword, and guess what? He was in some kind of paternity dispute with a Thai woman here in the U.S. a few years ago. It seems she was trying to tap him for dough on the assumption he wouldn’t fight the claim for child support, but he did, and the DNA test came out in his favor-it wasn’t his kid. So I got hold of the file and now we not only have prints, a mouth swab, and some hair follicles, we have the DNA chart. We already have his DNA profile, in other words. I’m sending it via e-mail, you’ll have it in roughly ten seconds.” She hangs up.
If I was a cooler kind of cop I’d let the girl finish with the massage, but I’m not. I apologize and give her an extra big tip, and now I’m on a bike on my way back to the station. Sure enough, when I arrive I see the FBI has already sent me the file. Now I don’t need the prints and fiber from the Lexus. I print out the DNA chart and hold it to my heart for a moment, while expressing profound thanks to the Buddha that I have not totally lost my touch or my luck or my mind. In fact, I’m wondering why I was so slow to catch on. Even Frank Charles’s obesity makes a sinister kind of sense: who was ever going to doubt the victim was him, the morbidly obese giant with the long hair, fat face, and gray beard? But all those things-the beard, the obesity, the long hair-have the capacity to diminish individual traits. Somehow, Charles found a willing substitute-such things have been known-who was prepared to die a few years earlier than expected (with that kind of weight no one lives long; maybe the proxy was terminally ill?), in return, perhaps, for a generous payment to his dependants? With the corpse mutilated in exactly the way portrayed in the movie, no one was going to doubt the identity of the victim-it was a brilliant device, depending more on illusion than anything else: the one thing no sane person was going to doubt was that the victim was the Frank Charles. Amazing! It was only the unexpected revelation that the death scene in the movie was faked that put me on the right track. Now everything is clear and obvious and I’m kicking myself for not working it out before. For some reason, Frank Charles wanted to disappear-why? I don’t know. When I call Doctor Supatra, she tells me she’ll have a DNA test done using the victim’s blood and get back to me. It will take a couple of days.
43
Isn’t it awful when the glorious rediscovery of your innate genius and street smarts turns out to be a delusion? That’s the trouble with relentless optimism: it leads to suicide. Right now I’m thinking maybe I really have lost it totally; okay, it was a reasonable hypothesis that if the movie was faked, it was to provide Frank Charles with a way of finally liberating himself from an identity which had become a burden. In Thailand it is not unusual for someone with the means to buy a new persona in some other province, or, as often as not, across the border in Cambodia, where the bribes are lower and enforcement rarer-but in the case of a rich farang, his refuge could have been just about anywhere in Southeast Asia. I had visions of turning up uninvited and unexpected on some five-star beach, maybe in the Philippines, or Malaysia, or Vietnam, or-my first bet-Sihanoukville, Cambodia, with the bad news that I had come to arrest the fat bearded guy who had only recently bought a beach property in an obscure spot where he had planned on living out the rest of his days in peace and anonymity. Wrong.