LAUNDRY MAN by Jake Needham

Author:Jake Needham [Needham, Jake]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: 03 Thriller/Mystery
Publisher: Half Penny Ltd (Hong Kong)
Published: 2011-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

THIRTY

I TOLD STANLEY almost everything. I told him about my telephone call from Barry Gale and I told him about what had happened afterwards. Nothing I said seemed to surprise Stanley very much. He did lean forward once and steeple his fingers. The gesture came about the time I was describing the man in Dollar’s office who had claimed to be an FBI agent named Frank Morrissey, and I thought I saw a flicker of something like dismay cross his face at the same time, but I might have been mistaken.

All I left out was the part about my ferry ride with Archie Ward in Hong Kong and Archie’s intimations that the Asian Bank of Commerce had been a front for Chinese bribe money rather than the Russian mob operation that Barry had claimed it was. I didn’t think I had the right to drag Archie’s name into whatever was going on here, and more to the point, I wasn’t absolutely sure I really believed him. To do that I would also have had to believe Barry either didn’t know the Chinese were involved with the ABC or had made up the whole business about Jimmy Kicks just to mislead me, and neither of those possibilities made any sense at all.

I wound up by telling Stanley about the reference I had found in Dollar’s address book to the Asian Bank of Commerce and the notation next to it of the name on Barry’s phony Hong Kong ID. Then I fell silent.

Stanley’s only response was to purse his lips slightly. “That’s it?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said, not bothering to hide my disappointment. I had just told Stanley what I thought was one hell of a story and he was sitting there like I had strolled into his office and asked to borrow a cup of Nescafé.

Stanley got up and walked to the window and stood with his back to me for a time. Eventually he turned around and leaned against the sill, his arms folded in front of him.

“I don’t see how any of it explains why this client of Dollar’s was killed, even if everything you say is true, Jack.”

“I think Howard stumbled over something he shouldn’t have. Maybe it involved the ABC and maybe it didn’t, but I think whatever it was scared him badly enough to make him tell someone about it. And I think the person he told was Dollar.”

Stanley’s face was impassive.

“If Howard started talking to Dollar,” I continued theorizing, “maybe that’s why he was killed. It would certainly explain why Dollar looked so shaken up when Howard’s body was found and why he went to ground so fast after that.”

“So you’re saying that Jello was right, Jack? That this man Howard was laundering money for the Burmese and that Dollar was helping him?”

“Howard might have been doing something like that, but not Dollar. Dollar plays it fast and loose, but I know him. He’s not someone who would work for a bunch of drug producers just for money.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.