by Ovidia Yu
But this evening he saw at once Aunty Lee had perked up. Her eyes were as bright as they had been before her fall, and he had not seen her so animated and full of life since last analyzing a new dish or old murder.
“Shall I get dessert forks from the kitchen?”
“No, don’t go in the kitchen! I mean, why don’t we use back the same plates and forks—we are supposed to be having an indoor picnic, right?”
Commissioner Raja was glad he had not forgotten his desserts. And he could tell that even if Aunty Lee was not hiding anything from him, she was definitely hiding something.
Knowing Rosie Lee well, he had brought a copy of the menu. She liked to read about any innovations she was sampling so she could have Nina look up ingredients and recipes later. The mid-autumn Moon Cake Festival was coming. Though celebrated by Chinese people worldwide, in Singapore this festival was celebrated by anyone with children and anyone who made, bought, or ate moon cakes. Traditional moon cakes were heavy palm-sized baked pastries containing lotus seed paste and often a salted egg yolk. But Commissioner Raja (thanks to an office party) had discovered snow skin moon cakes, ice-cream moon cakes, and mini jelly moon cakes, small and light enough to be swallowed in two mouthfuls.
He had picked up a selection from that last category: pandan jelly moon cakes; chrysanthemum honey and goji berry moon cakes; and osmanthus, chrysanthemum, and plum konnyaku jelly moon cakes. Nothing too heavy, as he proudly said. Indeed, these might even be considered healthy offerings.
Aunty Lee’s little espresso spoons were soon abandoned as she adopted Raja Kumar’s more efficient finger-pick method. She was fond of jellies as well as of moon cakes and almost forgot the murders in her delight at their sweet and slightly tart taste, their firm yet smoothly elastic texture. “To work as moon cakes, the jelly has to be both firm and elastic. I wonder whether Cherril has tried these.” Food purists would scream of course—but that only heightened Aunty Lee’s pleasure in the little treats.
“I can make shark fin jelly instead of shark fin soup for New Year’s. One big bowl shape and you can see all the ingredients, thick in the jelly. Much better for our climate here, right? And serve it with warm vinegar. Of course cannot use real shark fins nowadays. I can use agar-agar or konnyaku . . .”
“Shark fin is banned in Singapore now? I didn’t know.”
“Banned by Mathilda. For me that is same as banned by Singapore. And nowadays vegetarians and animal lovers won’t come to your restaurant if you sell shark fin, you know. But first tell me what happened to the vet girl. I don’t even know how she died. Usually murder is not so hush-hush, right? Government ministers having affairs or church leaders stealing money—that I can understand must be hush-hush. But this is just murder, right? Why cannot tell people how she died?”
“You haven’t found out yet? Not even Inspector Salim would tell you anything?” Commissioner Raja teased with a straight face.
“I’ve got this thing stuck on my leg, how can I find out anything?” Aunty Lee thumped her cane on the floor with exaggerated frustration and then (more gently) on her ankle-stabilizing cast. She had phoned the police post several times but had been politely told they knew nothing. As far as Aunty Lee was concerned, nothing worked as well as pinning down someone in person and making them tell you all they knew. If only she could get about on her own, she was certain she could have gotten it out of a member of Salim’s staff by now.
“So how long do you have to keep the cast on your foot?” Raja segued away from the murder. “How long until you’re back to walking normally?”
“Actually this is just to keep the ankle stable. I can walk already. You know they wanted to keep me in hospital longer for observation? They said at my age must be careful. I told them I cannot sleep in hospital; I can sleep better, recover faster at home. I already took their MRI, nothing wrong they said. Very expensive you know, these tests, but didn’t find anything.”
Raja Kumar nodded without admitting he had already seen her medical reports. “Best thing is if it was a waste of money, because you don’t want them to find anything. They probably just wanted to make sure there is no risk of you falling again.”
Aunty Lee popped a whole jelly cake into her mouth and said around it, “So how was the vet killed? You think the same person who killed the puppy killer killed her, right? Her sister is staying with me so she is my responsibility and you should let me know. Her sister thinks those Animal ReHomers people killed them both.”
He nodded. This was not news to him.
“Must try putting sweet fungus in the goji berry jelly cake,” Aunty Lee murmured. But she was only temporarily diverted. “Josephine said Allison Love was the kind of person that would poison herself to show you how bad your food is.” Aunty Lee looked at her friend hopefully. “Was Allison poisoned? I thought she was strangled. They wouldn’t let us see her neck. They pulled down the cloth from the top to her chin, and then when I asked to see more they pulled it up from the bottom to show her legs. Did she hang herself? Her head looked like somebody hit her very hard in the face. I thought her sister was going to faint or vomit.”
“Did Josephine really say that? Josephine DelaVega?”
“She wasn’t talking to me but I heard. Could that Allison woman have set this up? Maybe she found out she was dying of incurable cancer or something, so she came back and killed herself in such a way that the Animal ReHomers would be blamed. Her lawsuit against them was probably just her excuse to come back to Singapore. Nobody here would take it seriously, right?” The plump old lady paused, looking at Commissioner Raja with all the eager anticipation of a puppy that has just laid a precious dead frog on its master’s foot. “Could Allison Love have killed herself? And then gotten somebody to come and hit her in the head after she was dead? Because that only happened after she died, right? That was not what killed her.”
“What makes you think so?” Commissioner Raja asked impassively. Even after so many years he could not tell whether Aunty Lee was stating a fact or fishing for one.
“The meat on her face—I mean the flesh. The way it looked. There’s a difference in how the meat looks if you hit a pig to stun it before killing and if you hit it after killing for tenderizing.”
Aunty Lee pushed the little tray of unfinished jellies away from her. She fully acknowledged the need to kill in order to eat, but she suddenly no longer felt like eating. “If your hospital pathologists did not tell you that, then you go and tell them I said they don’t know their stuff!”
“She didn’t kill herself, Rosie. I’m only telling you this because I don’t want you going and getting involved in something that may turn out to be dangerous—no, listen to me. This is not some poisoning case that you can solve by finding out who has been using bad meat.”
Aunty Lee’s lips pursed at this but she continued, refusing to be distracted. “I want to know how she died because I don’t want to get blamed for poisoning people again. The last time you people blamed my special buah keluak dish and shut me down when it was nothing to do with me.” It could not hurt to remind Commissioner Raja that Aunty Lee had not only been wrongly blamed but had also helped apprehend the real killer.
“And you know I won’t tell anybody. Except Nina. But telling Nina is like outsourcing my brain. With other people I just tell them enough small gossip to keep their brains occupied so that they don’t notice I’m not telling them the big thing.”
Her convolutions would likely have knotted up Raja’s brain if he had tried to unravel them. So he didn’t.
“Allison Love was hit in the face with something like a fire extinguisher. Very likely the fire extinguisher from the hallway outside her hotel room. And yes, the forensic report suggests it happened after she died.”
“‘Very likely’?” Aunty Lee took all kinds of liberties with the English language, but she knew it well enough to know Raja Kumar did not.
“We have to wait for confirmation of the samples sent to the lab.”
“Jus
t in case it was used to bash somebody else in the same hotel who you haven’t found yet. Hiyah.” Aunty Lee accepted the need for professional caution but could not help a sigh of exasperation. “So how was she killed?”
“There was also a cable tie pulled tight around her neck to suffocate her. It was a loop of two cable ties, actually. There would have been no way to get it off without cutting once it was pulled tight. That would have been enough to kill her, but it looks like the killer panicked because he thought she was not dying fast enough and went out to the hallway to get the fire extinguisher. She was already dead when he came back with it, but he hit her with it just to make sure.”
It was not a pretty picture. Aunty Lee winced slightly. “Not a very experienced killer.” She had seen enough animals killed to prefer a calm, experienced killer to a sympathetic, clumsily shrieking one. But she had no sympathy at all for people who ate meat without acknowledging it came from dead animals. That honesty was one of the things about her that made Commissioner Raja trust her.
“The blows suggest great rage or great panic. I would say some kind of emotion that goes beyond sanity.”
Aunty Lee shivered slightly. It was always easier to deal with the greedy than the crazy, because you could follow their reasoning even if you didn’t share their values.
“Vallerie’s really upset, but I still feel she is hiding something. I can tell that she is really frightened. But I don’t see why any animal activists would attack Dr. Kang after she apologized publicly for euthanizing the dog. You remember she also donated two months of her salary to the Animal ReHomers. And just days ago she was one of the heroes who saved all the animals during that clinic fire. Couldn’t her death be just a coincidence or an accident or even a suicide?”
“We are quite certain that Allison’s killer also killed the vet because they were both strangled by cable ties. That incidentally establishes that Mike Fitzgerald is unlikely to be Allison’s killer since we had already located and were keeping an eye on him when the vet was murdered.”
“And unlikely to be Vallerie also. She cannot even tie up her own hair, how to strangle somebody with cable ties? Was the vet also whacked on the head?”
“No. The only thing that links them is the cable ties.”
Cable ties? Aunty Lee thought about the sturdy nylon tie wraps that locked irreversibly once their pointed tips were pulled through the ratchet case teeth. Once through, they could be pulled tighter but not released. Aunty Lee used cable ties for everything from hanging up waxed ducks and smoked sausages to holding up Christmas and New Year decorations and fastening flower arrangements to invisible supports. Cable ties were indispensable, but she would never look at them the same way again.
It was difficult to think of cable ties as a murder weapon. Cable ties had come into the news in Singapore when it was revealed that they were used to secure rail claws on the island’s Mass Rapid Transit lines after some major line disruptions. They had subsequently fallen into disfavor with the subsequent report that rail claws on the MRT’s rail network continued to dislodge despite the cable ties. But that would be nothing compared to a revelation that cable ties had been used in the murder of a British tourist and local veterinary surgeon Samantha Kang.
“Are you officially ruling out suicide in the vet’s case? Because if you don’t have anything to cut them with, strangling yourself with cable ties sounds like a good way of committing suicide.”
“She didn’t.”
Aunty Lee accepted that. “I wish there was some way to find out about Allison’s state of health in England, state of her mental health also.”
“I’m sure Salim already has someone looking into that,” Commissioner Raja said. “How is the sister doing, by the way?”
“Holding up very well, all things considered.”
“Rosie, just between us, your having the woman’s sister staying with you makes things a lot easier for us. Feed her, look after her, listen to her. And I want you to let me or Salim know everything the sister tells you, even if it doesn’t sound important. And if anybody contacts her, I want you to let Salim know immediately. I’m not asking you to spy on your guest”—he held up a hand to forestall the percolating objection—“I am asking you to help us keep her safe. You will be my undercover operative, how about that?”
“Undercover operative.” Aunty Lee turned the words over on her tongue. “It makes it sound like I am doing illegal operations. I can be your undercover cook. But why is Salim in charge of this case? It is not his district, what.”
“I asked Inspector Salim Mawar to take it and he agreed,” Commissioner Raja said. “Officially anyway. After all, Allison Love’s only appointment in Singapore was in your café, and that is in his district.”
“And unofficially?”
“Salim asked if he could look into it. He’s got experience in this sort of thing and he’s got more time to look into it than the guys in town—tourist season, you know what that’s like.”
Aunty Lee did know. As tourists flocked into Singapore with money to spend, many others came to relieve them of it via cheating, stealing, or sex acts. Processing their victims’ complaints occupied a great deal of manpower, let alone following through on them.
“Vallerie feels responsible for what happened to her sister,” Aunty Lee said. “She says that just by coming to Singapore with Allison she was responsible. If she had refused to come, if she had broken her leg or didn’t want to leave home for some reason and Allison didn’t want to make the trip without her, then Allison wouldn’t have come and she wouldn’t have gotten herself killed.”
“Whoever wanted to kill her could have killed her somewhere else.”
“And that would be sad for her. But she wouldn’t have been killed here and it wouldn’t have been our business.”
Commissioner Raja studied Aunty Lee. “So you’re saying this is our business? And if she had been killed anywhere else it wouldn’t matter?”
Aunty Lee jumped in to answer. “Of course it matters, what. It’s just not our business. Every day women are being killed in Gaza, in Ukraine, in airplanes getting shot down, and we say, ‘Aiyoh, so terrible,’ and think about what are we going to eat for dinner tonight. Allison Love is Singapore’s business because she died in Singapore. Bad for Singapore’s reputation if people come here and get killed. Her sister is my business because she is staying in my house. And, of course, Josephine DelaVega is your business as well as my business because she is a Singapore girl who grew up here. This Vallerie is going around telling everybody that Josephine hired somebody to kill Allison so that she can marry Allison’s husband.”
“Josephine is Jojo and Constance DelaVega’s youngest?” Raja had made a point of not seeing Josephine himself and not taking calls from the DelaVegas till he understood more about the case. They were old friends and he understood their reaching out to him. Parents always believed their children either innocent or justified. As an old friend he sympathized with them, but as a police officer he could offer no comfort.
“Yes. She’s one of the people Allison came to Singapore to sue for breaking up her marriage.” Aunty Lee shook her head. “Crazy woman. Husband already left you, you think that acting more crazy will make him come back?”
To her surprise the commissioner did not agree immediately. “That puppy killer business must have been a terrible experience for Allison and her whole family. There were tens of thousands of people signing on to the ‘Justice for Lola’ page online and crying for her blood. It’s mob justice. Many people don’t feel responsible for their behavior when they are part of a mob because they see everyone around them doing the same thing. And the Internet amplifies this because you don’t see your target’s reactions, so there are fewer social inhibitions. It can get really ugly.”
It did sound frightening. Aunty Lee felt the first stirrings of real sympathy for the dead woman. “But nobody actually attacked her, right? All she had to do is not go online and read what people were saying about her lor!
”
“Given she was an expat wife far away from family and friends, that wouldn’t have been easy. The puppy killer story went viral. It was shared over a thousand times on Facebook even before the full story and facts were established. Because they feel anonymous, online people post things they may not say in person. Mob vigilantes post things that make other people even angrier. Tensions really boiled over and it got really ugly. Maybe they were taking it out on her because she was a rich white expat, I don’t know. One of those sociologists will be able to explain it. And the online community was doxing her—‘doxing’ short for ‘document tracing.’ They found out where her husband was working and sent e-mails to the company asking for him to be fired and sent home. They posted photographs of the house she was living in and photographs of her with her children with comments on how she looked and what should be done to her. The vet and the clinic also got some hate mail, but Allison got it the worst. Probably because she insisted that she had not done anything wrong.”
“If she said sorry like that vet did, maybe people wouldn’t have been so angry.” Aunty Lee remembered how angry and upset Mathilda had been. “But she was behaving like Japan after the Occupation ended. Instead of saying, ‘Sorry we invaded you and killed your fathers and brothers and raped your mothers and sisters,’ they pretended it never happened and said, ‘You shouldn’t have dropped the bomb on us.’”