LAUNDRY MAN (A Jack Shepherd crime thriller) Read Free Page A

Lyndon Merchant was an Aussie and mostly he ran the organization out of Perth. He called it a private international merchant bank, but I had never met anyone who could figure out exactly what that crafty assembly of buzzwords was actually supposed to mean.
    What the company actually did was equally difficult to divine. It did deals, of course, as the players liked to say back when the expression was still socially acceptable if not exactly laudable, but there was no consistent quality to them. It bought random companies all over the world, mostly with money borrowed from gullible and greedy bankers whose primary interest was in pumping up their reported profits with fat fees; then it either flipped the companies quickly for a fast profit, generally to some sucker lined up in advance, or it cut the companies up, pulled the valuable assets out, and dumped what was left.
    When Stassen & Hardy sent me out to Bangkok to fish around in the wreckage of the Merchant Group to see if anything was left for our clients to claim, it wasn’t long before I was up to my butt in a morass of untraceable fund transfers and funny-money loans involving shell companies headquartered in places like the Cook Islands, Vanuatu, and Tonga. The gamy odor of the whole sordid mess was unmistakable, but I couldn’t develop any solid connections between the Merchant Group’s operations and the usual suspects in international scams of that sort: the intelligence agencies, drug traffickers, and arms brokers who were generally skulking somewhere in the shadows. Dollar, as I recalled, seemed to find the whole muddle more amusing than sinister, and working that case with him turned out to be the finest graduate seminar in Asian commercial skullduggery I could ever have wanted.
    Dollar was right in the middle of telling my students a few stories about the Merchant Group, winging his way to the considerable amusement of the class through some of the wilder conspiracy theories, when he suddenly looked up at the back of the hall and cut me a wink that was impossible to miss. A few of the kids twisted around in their seats to check out my reaction. I reflexively returned a half-smile, but Dollar’s gesture left me a little unsettled. The wink seemed to imply that Dollar and I shared some secret concerning the Merchant Group that he couldn’t impart to the class. If that’s what he thought, I couldn’t imagine what that secret was supposed be.
    I was still thinking about that when the class started to applaud and I realized that Dollar had finished. The kids gathered their stuff, slid out of the narrow rows of theater-style seating that were tiered up off a center aisle, and began to make their way down to the main floor and out of the hall.
    By the time I reached the bottom of the steps, the hall was almost empty and Dollar was leaning on the lectern at the front of the room waiting for me.

FOUR
    “WAS THAT WINK supposed to mean something to me?”
    “You’re getting kind of Canadian in your old age, Jack. Anybody ever tell you that?” Dollar eyed me for a moment and then he shrugged. “A kiss is just a kiss; a smile is just a smile; a wink is just a wink. Like that.”
    I knew Dollar wasn’t normally one for empty gestures. Regardless, he obviously wanted to let this one slide, so I didn’t press the point.
    “Anyway, forget that,” Dollar said. “I’ve got something I need to talk to you about.”
    “Maybe we should move this outside, Dollar.”
    The man’s voice came from behind me, and when I turned I saw John Hanratty slouched down in a seat in the front row right next to the entrance to the lecture hall. I hadn’t noticed John come in and I wondered what he was doing there. John wasn’t a lawyer, not as far as I knew anyway, although he worked for Dollar’s law firm in some capacity. I had never been absolutely certain what John actually did for Dollar’s firm, but I gathered he functioned as a sort of greeter for out-of-town clients