‘The glass showed me silver clouds on Friday—but I am wondering whether they were really grey clouds. It is such a small difference to the eye, but of course a huge difference in the interpretation of the subject’s fortune. There were also streaks of colour on the underside of the clouds, as one sees during the sunset. I took them for orange streaks, implying emotional times—but now I wonder whether they were red for danger.’
Madam Xu picked up the print of Del Rosario’s hand. It was an Air Hand: a square palm with deeply etched lines and long, artistic fingers. The overall shape of the hand implied quick-wittedness and deviousness: both good qualities for a newspaper columnist, one would have thought. The Mount of Mercury, the area of the palm just below the little finger, was rather small and flat, implying poor ability at interpersonal relationships, while the Mount of Jupiter, under the index finger, appeared firm and high, indicating a powerful drive for success.
Ms Del Rosario’s head line and heart line were so close that they actually combined into a single line for more than half their length. Such circumstances were notoriously difficult to read. If the lines were truly united, they could indicate a single-minded individual whose heart and mind were in perfect accordance. But more often they indicated something much more negative: an imbalance in which one line swamped the other. But which was dominant?
Madam Xu started at the handprint and sighed. This was a hard decision to make, even when the person’s hand was right there in front of you. To try and examine the question from a palm print—well, it was almost impossible.
What remained undeniable—and it was devastating, however brave a face she put on it—was that she had used all her predictive arts to look at someone’s future, and got it completely wrong.
Wong rose to his feet, having found nothing unusual under the furniture. ‘Very strange,’ he said, picking up Gloria Del Rosario’s natal charts for the seventeenth time. ‘We mess up real bad.’
Joyce marched purposefully into the car park. The words of Boy Santos Jr were ringing her ears. A good reporter never takes no for an answer.
Velma Palumar, the secretary of businessman Jaime Mangila Jr, chief executive of Bagolbagol Industries, had flatly refused to allow any access to her boss. Velma would not take a message, accept a fax, allow written questions, or even agree to send her any written information of any kind.
This had made Joyce depressed, then hostile and finally suspicious. What had these people got to hide? If they were straightforward business people, they should accept straightforward queries from honest members of the media (she was, after all, presenting herself as a reporter working on a feature on behalf of the Philippine Daily Sun). It was all decidedly fishy.
Before leaving the office, she had asked Santos: ‘What sort of word is Bagolbagol anyway? Sounds weird. Sounds like a monster from a children’s book.’
‘I’m not sure,’ the reporter had replied. ‘But remember, this country has lots of languages. As well as English and Tagalog, we speak Ilocano, Pangasinan, Kapanpangan, Bicol and loads of other languages.’
Santos had telephoned a friend, who told him that Bagolbagol was a Cebuano word for ‘Skull’.
‘Phoo! Definitely a baddie or what?’ Joyce said. ‘Who but a MAJOR villain would call their company Skull? He might as well just walk around with a placard saying: I am a baddie or something.’
There had been very little information in the files about Jaime Mangila Jr, although the piece that Gloria had written about him had painted him as very mean indeed—it said that he had been dating a beauty queen while his wife had been in hospital dying of cancer.
Most of the other references to him in the newspaper library had been to deals his company had done, which revealed very little that made much sense to her. In one article, it reported that he had bought twenty-one per cent of a company of which his family had majority ownership. In another, it said that he had used nominee companies controlled by people ‘working in concert’ to shore up his share price and had been censured by a commission overseeing dealings on the Manila stock exchange.
The only article that contained anything about him that stayed in Joyce’s mind was another one of Gloria’s: a piece she had written a year earlier. It was a news feature about car number plates of the rich and famous in the Philippines. Jaime Mangila Jr drove a white sedan with the number JMJ 4444, it said. Joyce knew that the number four was associated with death in several Chinese cultures. This had confirmed the businessman’s Probable Bad Guy status in Joyce’s eyes.
So she had travelled to Mangila’s office to see if she could find his car and catch him going in or out. Santos had explained that such an action was called ‘doorstepping’ in journalistic slang. She had no intention of cornering a possible murderer by herself. She merely wanted access to him. If she could ask him a few questions while he was getting into his car, she might find out something useful—but more importantly, she would surely impress the hell out of the others on the investigative reporting team.
Applying the old adage that a person with a clipboard can penetrate any space, she bought a cheap one from a stationary shop and marched straight into the garage at Consol Towers, where Bagolbagol Inc. was based on the thirty-fifth floor. The guards at the entrance did not give her a second look.
It took surprisingly little time to find Mangila’s car. At the back of Lower Ground Level Two she found a roped-off cluster of long, expensive-looking cars—mostly BMWs and Mercedes-Benzes. But there was one car in the most convenient parking space (right next to a private elevator) which was a white sedan: a Lexus. As she approached, she noted the number plate: JMJ 4444.
Glancing behind her to make sure the coast was clear, she raced over to the car and hid herself behind it, realising that she might have to wait several hours. She placed a newspaper on the ground to sit on, put her CD Walkman earphones into her ears, and started reading some magazines she had bought at the hotel kiosk.
It took Boy Santos Jr four hours to get Joyce out of the holding cell at the Makati police station.
She was livid with the Manila police force and spat fire continuously as the paperwork for her release was completed. Santos tried unsuccessfully to hide his amusement at the girl’s fury.
Joyce knew that to some extent it was her own fault, since she had wanted to namedrop her senior police contact, but could not remember his name and title. And her failure made her even more angry.
The past few hours had been difficult. The driver of Jaime Mangila Jr had discovered her fast asleep behind the car and called security guards and the police. She had explained that she was investigating the tycoon on suspicion of murder. This had resulted in the local patrol officer deciding that she was most probably a backpacking substance abuser high on something. She kept hearing the word ‘shabu’, which confused her, since to her it meant ‘Japanese hotpot’.
‘You shabu?’ the officer had asked her in broken English.
‘Yes—and tempura,’ Joyce had hollered. ‘But what the hell does that have to do with anything? Could we talk about Japanese food later?’
Her explanations that she was on a law enforcement mission were ignored. ‘Daniel something!’ she’d said to the officer who dragged her away. ‘He’ll vouch for me. I’m on an investigation! He asked me to stay a few days. Just look in your staff list. There’s bound to be a Daniel something. He’s short and he likes really sappy music. If you won’t call him, call the Philippine Daily Sun. Ask for the editor.’
Joyce was even more furious when Santos revealed why it took so long to get her out of jail.
First, Ferdinand Cabigon had refused to okay the expense needed.
‘Rotter,’ the young woman said as she and Boy walked down the steps outside the police station.
‘Cabby said the monies that needed to be paid for you to be released had to come out of the two hundred thousand pesos promised to Wong.’
‘Meany. So we had to pay out of our own money?’
‘Well . . .
’ Boy appeared reluctant to answer.
Joyce turned to face him. ‘So what happened?’
‘Well, I’m afraid your boss refused to agree to this.’
‘What?’
At first, anyway. It was only after that old lady—what’s her name?’
‘Madam Xu.’
After she told him that leaving you to languish indefinitely behind bars would mean he would get into trouble with his boss.’
‘Mr Pun.’
‘Yeah. Only when she took that line, did he finally agree to it.’
‘Bastard. Bastard.’
Joyce was further amazed to discover that the cash Santos had to pay was not a bail payment to the police, but a payment to the security company—a subsidiary of one of Jaime Mangila Jr’s firms—which had captured her.
‘It’s not exactly a bribe. It’s a goodwill payment to make them drop the charges,’ he said. ‘Sort of like an out-of-court settlement. Companies here have to make a lot of these informal payments.’
By the time they got back to the offices of the Philippine Daily Sun, Joyce had descended into a state of sullen silence.
Santos led her into a large conference room. She slumped in a corner chair. She decided she would never speak to Wong again for the rest of her life.
The journalist informed her that the investigative reporting team had narrowed the list of likely candidates down to four possibles, in addition to Joyce’s nomination of Jaime Mangila Jr. Their names were Sudang Bueno Sr, Manuel Hernandez, Hamlet Humaynon and Jesus Maria Ramirez, and all were Manila business people.
Santos and McQuinnie were joined in the conference room by Wong and Madam Xu. Joyce looked daggers at her boss and beamed smiles at the fortune-teller. The main editorial conference of the day was about to take place.
At 6:30 pm exactly, twelve senior journalists marched into the room, including the news, features, business and sports editors and various layout and production staff. Baby Encarnacion-Salocan sat slightly away from the table to take notes.
Santos explained in a whisper to Wong that this was the daily meeting at which preliminary decisions were made as to which stories would appear on which pages.
Fashionably late, the brown-suited chief editor appeared, took his seat at the head of the table, and the discussion began.
Santos spoke first, explained that the investigation was proceeding slowly. He said he could come up with some angle that would justify one of the front-page slots for the next day’s paper, but he had no real breakthrough to report. ‘We’ll put in some sort of holding story. We’ve got a nice interview with one of Gloria’s old boyfriends, but that’s about it. She Knew Too Many Secrets: Glowgirl’s Lover. We’re going to need much more time for something meatier,’ he said.
The journalist explained that it would take another two or three days research to produce features on the short-listed suspects which would be interesting enough to print—yet not actually defamatory. And even then, there was no guarantee that they would uncover evidence to identify any particular one of them as Gloria’s likely murderer.
That was when Madame Xu spoke up.
‘We do not need two or three days,’ she said. ‘Why, we barely need two or three minutes.’
‘What do you mean?’ Santos asked.
‘You have done the lion’s share of the work. Now I will do the final part—the thing that only I can do. I will use my psychic powers to find out which of your five candidates did the murder. It will save you a great deal of time. Give me the list.’
Santos looked askance at Cabigon. ‘Is this a good idea?’
The chief editor shrugged his shoulders. ‘Psychic powers,’ he said. ‘Never tried it. Could be a good angle.’
‘Sidebar maybe,’ said Santos. ‘Or a filler we could use at the weekend.’
Cabigon played with his moustache. ‘I don’t know if we can use psychic identification as providing enough proof to even hint at someone being a suspect in print. It’s a bit, you know, unorthodox. Unless we do it as a funny.’
‘What do you mean?’ said Madame Xu, who was irritated that her generous offer to solve the mystery had not been greeted by the ecstatic cries of gratitude she felt it deserved. ‘Surely psychic proof is the one type of proof that cannot be argued against? If I have identified him as the villain, then there are no other options. He must be sent to jail forthwith.’
Editor and staff swapped glances that said: She really is crazy.
‘He has to go to trial, first,’ Santos explained gently.
‘No, I would have to go to trial for libel first,’ the chief editor interrupted. ‘If I printed that some businessman was a murderer because a psychic said so. No. With all due respect, Madame Xu, we need the sort of evidence that can stand up in court. The fact that you think someone did it—with all due respect—is simply not proof.’
The fortune-teller thought about this. ‘If you say so.’
There was silence for half a minute. It was broken by Santos. ‘So we’ll go with Gloria’s boyfriend for tomorrow’s lead and start more detailed investigations into these five, I guess?’
‘Wait a minute, wait a minute,’ said the Chinese fortuneteller. ‘Don’t you want to know who did it?’
Santos looked to Cabigon and then back at Madam Xu. ‘The editor has just said your prediction wouldn’t be enough proo —’
‘Yes, he said that, but wouldn’t you like to know anyway? Just for fun. It would make your investigations much easier and much quicker too, if you already know who did it. Then you could just investigate him only. Save loads of time all round.’
Santos looked at Cabigon. Their eyes continued their earlier discussion: We could humour the old girl.
‘Okay,’ said the chief editor.
The reporter said: ‘We need to be quick. I have a phone interview to do.’
Cabigon looked at his watch. ‘And I have a meeting to go to.’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Madam Xu. ‘No need to be impatient. It’s worth taking a little time over this to get it right.’
She sat down and placed her crystal ball down on the table. Then she put on a pair of reading glasses through which to stare at it. She picked up her little canister of chim and started shaking it. ‘I’m combining methods to go as fast as I can,’ she told the onlookers, as one sliver of engraved bamboo popped out.
She ran her hand over the list of five names. ‘Hmm, interesting,’ she mumbled.
She went back to her crystal ball and gazed deep into it again. ‘This is called scrying,’ she explained. Then she closed her eyes, put her hands on her tilted-back head, and took a series of deep breaths. Once again she opened her eyes and ran her hands over the list of five names.
‘Got it,’ she said. ‘Got it.’
Santos’s gathering boredom lifted. ‘So which do you reckon it is?’
‘It isn’t any of these,’ Madam Xu said. ‘This is a list of innocent people. Well, probably innocent is not the right word for a group of business tycoons, but they are certainly innocent of the crime of which we are accusing them.’
‘That’s not very helpful,’ said Ferdinand Cabigon, suddenly annoyed. He looked at his reporters. ‘Well I still think it was somebody on that list, whatever your spirits say.’
‘Oh it wasn’t just the spirits that told me that the murderer was not someone on that list. They merely confirmed what I learned from another source. My source was flesh and blood. It was, in fact, Mr Wong here.’
All eyes turned to the feng shui master.
The old geomancer looked surprised to be receiving such attention. ‘True that it is not one of the people on the list who did it.’
‘So who did it?’ Cabigon asked impatiently.
And more importantly, have you got some evidence, some proof?’ Santos said, exasperation in his voice. ‘We have a newspaper to fill.’
Wong leaned back in his chair. ‘The murderer of Ms Gloria Del Rosario was very clever,’ he said. ‘Clever in two-three ways. First, he
knows that people will think that someone she insulted killed her. She is a reporter. So killer reinforces this idea by leaving a message that she should have printed correction. So everyone think she wrote something wrong about a man and refuse to print correction.’
Wong intertwined his fingers in front of him. ‘So first thing we realise is that murderer probably is someone she did not write about. He is someone whose name is absent from her column. Murderer wants to send us in wrong direction.’
Joyce forgot that she had pledged never to speak to her boss again: ‘So the note about the correction was a red herring?’
‘Red earring?’
‘Herring.’
‘Don’t understand.’
‘It’s a type of fish. Comes from Norway or something.’
The geomancer nodded. ‘Thanks. But I think no fish involved.’
He pointed to the piles of newspapers on the conference room sideboard. ‘I check through all the gossip columns in all the newspapers. Nearly all have same names at same parties. Same politicians, same business people, same celebrities. I make list of all names which appear in three main newspapers over past six months.’
He pulled out a sheet of paper and pointed to some tiny, tight blotches. ‘This is my list.’
‘It’s very short,’ said the sports editor, a short fat man sitting next to Wong.
‘Yes. It shows seven people who were mentioned at least six times in other gossip columns but not even one time in Gloria Del Rosario’s column.’
Santos started to look interested.
‘I ask intern to do research on these six,’ the feng shui master continued. ‘Find out which companies they involve in, who is shareholders? We find that five out of six are connected some way with man called Billy Valesco Ong. They are on boards together. They are listed in consortiums together. In photographs file, they are at cocktails together.’
The Feng Shui Detective's Casebook Page 25