Street Music Page 12

  But Rafferty stays where he is, looking down and hearing his heart pound in his ears. The fluorescents have brought the floor into sharper focus, and now he sees the rust-brown drops of what could only be blood. He rubs his eyes, hoping the image will go away. When it doesn’t, he follows the drops visually, eight to ten feet to the spot where Ratana stands, a conventional metal key in her hand, in front of a door numbered 124.

  “One-two-four,” she says. “Adds up to Bob’s lucky number, he told me. Seven. He said he’d take the apartment even before I put the key in the lock.”

  Rafferty says, “Speaking of that, I mean, putting the key in—”

  “I know, I know.” She’s shaking her head. “I just don’t want to—here.” She extends the hand holding the old-fashioned key. “You do it.”

  He says, “Look at the floor.”

  “I know,” she says, “it’s terrible, so ugly. I’ve been meaning to replace it for—” She stops, staring downward, arm still outstretched, and he watches her eyes track the path of the droplets until she steps quickly away from the door, which is inescapably where they either begin or end. She says, “Hurry,” and extends the key again.

  Thinking of the baby, thinking of everything that’s happening at home, Rafferty says, “Maybe the cops would be a better—”

  “Who’s going to pay the cops?” she says. “There’s no money in this for them. He’s an old farang in a cheap—I mean, budget—apartment. All they’ll do is try to shake us down, say maybe we were the ones who . . .” She puts her hand, the one with the key in it, over her mouth.

  “I have a friend who’s a cop,” Rafferty says. “It might be better to . . .” He runs out of steam. “We don’t even know whether these drops are coming or going.” Hearing what he’s just said, he reaches out for the key and says, “Right. He might be hurt in there.”

  As little as he wants to go in, the key turns as though the lock has been oiled. Midway through pushing the door open he senses something and takes a couple of involuntary steps back. The apartment is dark, and he can’t see anything but vague shapes, so when the door begins to swing closed again, he has to jump forward to stop it, which means that he’s standing dead center in the doorway as his eyes become accustomed to the dimness. He says, “Oh, no.”

  “No what? No—is he . . . ?”

  “No, no, no. I mean, I don’t know yet. Not really, not yet.” He reaches around the edge of the doorway to his right, locates the wall switch, and snaps it up with his knuckles. Another flickering yields to a cold fluorescent light that brings everything into indifferent, merciless relief.

  From where Rafferty stands, the apartment seems to be what the Thais call a studio, essentially one room broken into three areas: the sleeping area, which is right in front of him with its stained, unmade bed and its night table, a fat book sitting on it, and a sort of sitting area along the wall to his right, marked by a sagging couch, a rough wooden coffee table, and a couple of folding chairs that probably originally stood at the near side of the table. The wall behind the couch has a doorway that almost certainly leads to the third area, a shallow space that gives the resident access to the bathroom and, probably, the balcony. The first thing he’d glimpsed had been the bedsheets, the top one ripped most of the way off the mattress and stained in the same rust brown he’d seen in the hallway. Now, with the light on, he registers other details to his right: the cushions torn off the couch and standing upright, leaning drunkenly against the wall and one another at the couch’s far end. One of the folding chairs, lightweight aluminum with the seat and back made from that woven plastic that Rafferty has always ranked as the ugliest fabric ever created, is on its side on the table, half-collapsed, all acute aluminum elbows and sagging bright orange plastic. Above the couch is a big framed something that had been covered in glass until, he guesses, the partially collapsed chair hit it and broke it, showering the couch with shards of glass and tearing the picture, whatever it is, jaggedly down the right side. There’s a long arc of blood droplets on the wall between the edge of the front door and the couch, as though the source of the blood had somehow been swung through the air.

  “Bathroom at the back?” Rafferty calls. He’s gone only a step or two past the doorway, but he can already smell the blood.

  “Yes,” Ratana says, staying where she is. “What is it? What’s in there? Is Bob—”

  “I don’t know yet, but there’s blood. Stay out there for now, okay?”

  “No problem. Be careful.”

  “Yeah.” He draws three deep breaths and steps all the way into the room.

  The top sheet is relatively clean except for a spattered fringe along the right edge, but the bottom sheet caught a lot more blood, two now-dry pools of it, six to eight inches across, over which some flies are circling. Rafferty hates flies, and there’s nothing he hates more about them than the way they buzz over blood. He keeps his eyes on the floor, seeing the trail of blood droplets that followed the bleeding person either into or out of the apartment.

  A closer look at the bed tells him nothing new except that the bottom sheet has been cut with something sharp that went straight through the fabric and put a short, ragged, deep-looking incision in the mattress. Averting his eyes from the surprising violence of the sheets, he sees the book again and, since there is virtually no circumstance under which Rafferty won’t take a look at a book, he does so now, but without picking it up. It’s Once Upon a Distant War, by William Prochnau, a deadly serious nonfiction comic-opera about a bunch of inexperienced kid reporters in Vietnam, describing to their editors back home a war that had nothing in common with the one American politicians were selling to their constituents. The Halls of Power put the question directly to the New York Times and several other national outlets: “Who you gonna believe? You gonna go with the secretary of defense and the president hisself, or are you gonna go with some rookie, wet-behind-the-ears reporter barely out of high school?” The Times and the others went with the reporters. Rafferty wonders what Campeau thought—thinks—about Prochnau’s book. Like a lot of the Vietnam vets Rafferty knows, Campeau seems to hate equally the government that had sent him there and the people who had challenged the government—and by extension, the war. It was their war, the soldiers’ war, many of them seemed to say: If you weren’t there, who cares what you think? Just keep your fucking mouth shut. The cloud of flies over the bed has thickened and Rafferty realizes that he’s avoiding going into the bathroom. He turns his back on the buzzing and takes the six or eight steps that put him beside the long, cigarette-scarred wooden coffee table, also speckled here and there with blood. The couch once pretended to be leather but age and wear have revealed its vinyl heart, and Rafferty once again feels a pang at how Campeau was—is—living. His own apartment in college was better than this.

  The torn picture is a photograph, head and shoulders, of a Thai woman in her early twenties, fine-boned and slight of build, with huge, luminous eyes. She’s wearing a T-shirt and a big, almost comically clunky necklace, most likely big plastic beads trying to pass themselves off as amber, and she’s looking straight into the camera and laughing. An out-of-focus jumble of buildings carve up the space behind her, not modern urban structures but the softer lines of low-hanging canvas awnings that obscure the buildings behind them, which were probably modest one- and two-story wooden structures, each set up a step or two from the unpaved street to thwart the annual floods. When the picture was taken, though, the street was dry and dusty and swarming with motorcycles. A village, then, a lot like Rose’s village, maybe a little more prosperous if the sheer number of motorbikes clogging the street was any indication.

  This must be Malee. Or maybe not: Bob’s tone when he talked about her hadn’t suggested that he had her picture hanging where he’d see it first thing every morning. But if this is Malee, this is probably the village with the ghost house in it. She could look directly and fondly at Bob, Rafferty thinks,
and laugh like that when she was in the process of swindling him out of everything he had in Thailand. And Campeau has her picture on the wall? Or maybe it’s not—

  “You are all right?”

  Her voice startles him; he’d forgotten about Ratana for a moment. And he has to face the fact that the bathroom is waiting for him.

  “I’m fine,” he says. “Checking the rest of the place now.”

  He turns to his left and walks the few yards to the space at the rear of the apartment, which is broken by a couple of small curtained windows and a flimsy-looking door. There’s a waist-high refrigerator against the short wall to his right. It has a small bouquet of sagging flowers on it, jammed into a water glass too long ago; the water is yellowish and malodorous, and petals litter the floor. He pulls open the door in the back wall and finds himself looking at a balcony that’s all of seven feet long and three deep. A clothesline has been strung there, and from it, secured with old wooden clothespins bleached white by the sun, dangle two pairs of jeans and three of the drab T-shirts, mostly dark gray and brown and olive, that Campeau rotates all year long. Rafferty regards them for a moment; he’s seen these garments on Bob so often it’s almost spooky to see them hanging there empty, as though Bob had evaporated while wearing them. He pushes the notion away and opens the door wide to let in the little remaining light; there’s no ceiling fluorescent here. Reluctantly, he looks to his left. The door to the bathroom is open a few inches. He sees nothing behind it but darkness.

  But the blood spatters beneath his feet are bigger here, suggesting a faster flow in this area. So just do it.

  He feels a strong aversion to the notion of touching the bathroom door. Instead, he positions himself, lifts a leg, and pushes the door with the sole of his shoe, gently because he also finds that he dreads either banging it against the wall or hitting something soft when it’s partway there. It opens most of the way, unimpeded, and he hears more flies. He takes a very deep breath and holds it, and then puts his arm through the doorway and pats the wall to find the switch.

  Brightest room in the place, by far. And, since tile doesn’t absorb liquid, some of the blood in here is still a deep heart-wringing red. There’s a pool of it on the floor and more, but not much more, in the sink. It doesn’t look as though any effort had been made to clean it up. At the far end of the tiny bathroom an opaque plastic shower curtain hangs all the way to the floor. Once again, Rafferty comes up against a deep reluctance to touch anything, so he uses his foot to slide the curtain aside. Empty and clean. No one is dead in the shower, and no one bled in there, either. And he finds that it doesn’t really make any difference. He feels, all the way to the soles of his shoes, that he needs to get out of that apartment.

  “I don’t know,” he says. They’ve claimed a booth in a small, mostly empty restaurant around the corner from the Queen’s Mansion. The place smells of burned fat. “He wasn’t in there and there was only one blood trail in the hall, so my guess is that whatever happened, it happened in the apartment and he was still bleeding when he left. Tell me, as exactly as you can, what his neighbor said.”

  “I told you. Shouting—”

  “Shouting? One voice or two? Male or female? Things banging around?”

  “She didn’t say anything about the voice or voices she heard. Things banging around, yes. But she’ll be back tonight. I’ll have her call you.”

  “She speaks English?”

  She smiles. “Sort of. Do you speak Australian?”

  “No one can speak it except Australians. But I can understand it, most of the time.”

  “She’s very young,” Ratana says. “Maybe twenty-two or twenty-three. She’s having an adventure, she says. She’s teaching English in a high school.”

  A waitress puts a foam-topped glass of beer in front of Ratana and yet another cup of coffee just to Rafferty’s right.

  “You don’t drink?” Ratana says. When they got to the booth, he’d slid in first and she’d started to sit beside him, but he’d stopped her by saying he was right-handed and didn’t want to elbow her. She’d given him a short, moderately amused look and then taken the seat opposite.

  “Not much. And Toots stopped serving me beer after the baby was born, almost two weeks ago. I think it was a hint that my character needs improving.”

  “You have a new baby? Boy or girl?”

  “Boy.”

  “Girls are more fun.”

  “You seem to be alone in that opinion. Everyone else in this city votes for boys.”

  “I only met you an hour or so ago, but it doesn’t seem to me that your character is in urgent need of improvement.”

  “Toots has had years to form a judgment. You’re just getting started.” He sits back and lets his eyes wander over the little restaurant. The waitress, now back behind the counter, is laughing at something the cook has just said over the pass-through. He feels a sigh coming on but bottles it up. He knows the smart thing to do would be to make his excuses and leave, but the time for that would have been before he raised her hopes by following her all the way over here, and before he saw that bloodstained, fly-infested apartment. And though he’s never thought of Campeau as a friend, the two of them have been exchanging nods, grunts, and even words for eight years, and the things he’d said about Miaow the previous evening had come from the heart. So he draws a deep breath and dives in. “You seem to know, personally, the woman who lives next to Bob. How many tenants do you have? Do you know them all?”

  “Oh, no. I only know her because she took the place next to Bob, and I wanted to be sure she wouldn’t bother him too much. There are hundreds of tenants at this point. I own five buildings now and I’m working on my sixth. My husband says I sneeze gold, although ‘sneeze’ isn’t the word he uses.”

  “Lucky him. Does he sneeze gold, too?”

  “No. But he appreciates that I do. Actually, that should be appreciated. We’re no longer together.” She gives him a moment to reply and then lifts her glass. “So I’ll have her call you. Then what will you do?”

  “Depends on what she says. I’ll either phone my friend on the police force or start talking to people who know Bob. I might do that anyway, no matter what the neighbor tells me.”

  “What do you think happened?”

  “I have no idea. Toots said he was drinking a lot last night. Maybe he came home and threw a fit, looked at his life, and tossed some stuff around. Then maybe he went into the bathroom and slipped, hit his head on the edge of the sink, hard enough to open it up. Cuts to some parts of the head bleed like fountains. Maybe yelled some more and went to a hospital.”

  Regarding him, resting her chin in one hand, Ratana says, “Or?”

  “Or maybe he was so drunk he picked up the wrong person. Bob’s got a mean side, but he’s not very big. Maybe they argued over money or maybe she never meant to do anything but steal from him in the first place and they had a fight, maybe she cut him—someone seems to have stuck a knife into the bed—and she got out of the room. Maybe he followed her. The one thing we can be pretty sure of is that he left the room, because there’s all that blood in the bathroom and on the bed, but only one trail of drops outside the apartment. So he wasn’t bleeding when he went in.”

  She puts her other elbow on the table, both hands supporting her chin and her fingers framing her face. It’s a good look. “Toots said you were a writer.”

  “I am.”

  “You don’t think like a writer.”

  Rafferty lifts his coffee cup and tilts it to her in a toast. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  12

  Joot

  By the time he gets back to Patpong, a few of the less gaudy bars are open, the night-market vendors have turned on their million-watt lights, and the street looks—briefly, at least—like a family destination, if for rather odd families. And sure enough, Rafferty spots a scattering of adults lea
ding jet-lagged looking children from stand to stand, Mom spouting a bright stream of chatter to interest the kids in the merchandise while Pop and, perhaps, an older boy or two keep at least half an eye on the open doorways filled with lightly dressed, suspiciously friendly-looking women.

  Toots glances up at him, eyebrows raised expectantly, as he comes through the door. He takes a seat at the bar, as far as possible from the Campeau contingent (now numbering three), leans toward her, knowing it’s an aggressive attitude, and says, “I want a beer, and it’s your fault that I want one, so don’t give me any bubble water or I’ll pour it on the bar.” She regards him, her mouth pulled down at the corners, and then shakes her head and gets him a bottle of Singha. He knows Singha is probably not on the beer snobs’ list of the world’s great brews, but it’s been the taste of Bangkok for him ever since he came here to write his third book, Looking for Trouble in Thailand, the one that, until recently, had paid his family’s bills.

  “What happen?” she says as she puts the beer on a paper coaster. It’s in front of him, but he’ll have to reach all the way across the bar to get it, and he has a distinct feeling she’ll slap his hand. So he ignores the beer and says, “Well, we went into the apartment, and . . .” and then he stops talking and glances around the bar. “You know what you need? A jukebox or an mp3 dock or whatever it’s called now. Liven the place up. What do you think?”

  “Inside the apartment, what?”

  He looks at the bottle.

  She narrows her eyes, moves it an inch or two in his direction, and crosses her arms.

  “Yup,” he says, nodding in agreement with himself. “A jukebox. Lots of, I don’t know, ABBA and Kanye, Maroon 5, see who runs screaming into the street first. You could rename the place, call it the Endurance Test, ban earplugs, go after the masochist market, give the fetish bars a run for their money.” He shakes his head. “Boy,” he says, “that apartment.”