by Jake Needham
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
TAY CLOSED HIS front door and stood wrapped in the comforting darkness of his living room. He tried to remember the last time he had been there. Was it really only this morning? Surely not.
He had been a policeman for nearly twenty-five years and for fifteen years he had been the senior investigator in the Criminal Investigation Department of the Singapore Police Force. He had seen almost a thousand homicides in his career and every single one of them had one thing in common: they had all made him sick to his stomach. In his darkest moments, Tay saw the onset of dementia as something almost inevitable when he grew old, but he also looked at that in one way as a blessing. At least then he would forget what he had seen.
He had seen people shot, people stabbed, people slashed, people beaten, people mangled, people bludgeoned, and people broken. He had even once seen a corpse that had been torn apart by a pack of Dobermans.
But there was one thing he had never seen.
He had never seen the body of a friend lying dead on the dirty carpet of a cheap hotel.
Now he had.
Robbie Kang dead in the second-floor corridor of the Fortuna Hotel.
Robbie Kang shot by…well, by whom?
Tay shook his head and flipped on the light. He walked into the kitchen and filled a glass with water from the tap. After he drained the glass, he put it in the sink, kicked off his loafers, and walked barefooted across the living room, through the French doors, and out into his little garden.
The air was hot and heavy, but the brick pavers felt chilly against his feet and the living room lights cast a pale and calming glow out through the panes of the French doors. He walked to the teak table where he drank his coffee in the mornings, pulled out one of the chairs, and sat down. Then he pulled another chair over and swung his feet up into it. He fished a pack of Marlboros and a box of matches out of the front pocket of his shirt and put them on the table next to the big glass ashtray.
Smoking wasn’t much more than a habit for most people, but for Tay it was an undertaking filled with ritualistic meaning. Each cigarette he smoked offered a few moments of escape from the indifference of a pitiless world.
Or maybe it wasn’t anything nearly that metaphysical. Maybe he just enjoyed smoking.
He did like unwrapping the pack, feeling the cellophane between his fingers, and listening to the crinkle as he rolled it between his thumb and forefinger. He loved the sudden whiff of tobacco he got when he slit the package with his thumbnail and tore back the top. It pained him that the busybodies who gloried in telling everyone how to live and what to do had stripped the simple act of smoking of all dignity. The more difficult the smug, self-righteous nannies made it for Tay to smoke, the more determined he was to continue doing it.
He would quit smoking soon. Of course he would. Everybody who smoked was going to quit smoking soon. But with all the crap he already sucked into his lungs every day just from breathing the air in Singapore, he couldn’t see any advantage to doing it right away. He sure as hell wasn’t going to do it tonight.
Tay struck a match, touched it to the cigarette, and felt the first rush of nicotine do its usual fine job of constricting his vascular system and filling body and soul with a sensation of wellbeing. He exhaled and watched as the smoke spiraled away in the darkness until it became part of the darkness, too.
What the hell had really happened at the Fortuna Hotel?
It wasn’t the first time Tay had asked himself that question, of course. He had thought of little else while the ambulance crew was taking Kang’s body away, while he gave his initial statement to the responding officers, and while he sat in the fast response car as they drove him home. He had thought of little else, but he still didn’t know how to answer that question. He knew he would be expected to answer it as well as other questions people would ask tomorrow and the day after and for many days to come, but he had no idea what he was going to say to any of them.
Did Suparman kill Robbie Kang? Somebody had. And as much as Tay wanted to blame ISD, that didn’t make sense to him.
Robbie must have come out of the stairwell into the hotel corridor, reacted to the crowd of men there, maybe even recognized Suparman, then turned to retreat and wait for Lee to catch up. And that was when he was shot. Tay couldn’t accept the ISD men he saw there in that second floor hallway at the Fortuna Hotel had coolly shot a CID sergeant in the back of the head when he was turning away.
God help him, but he believed Bruce Willis when he said Suparman killed Robbie. He believed him because of the process of elimination if nothing else. There was no one in that corridor but ISD people and Suparman. If ISD hadn’t shot Robbie, who else could it have been but Suparman?
Then who shot Suparman? Bruce Willis claimed it was Suparman’s sister. That was also hard to believe, but again that was where the process of elimination took Tay. No one else was present but ISD men and Suparman’s sister. Either ISD shot him, which made no sense at all, or his sister had. Unless, of course, the woman wasn’t really Suparman’s sister at all.
There was another thing about the whole scene that bewildered Tay. He had gotten a sense during those few minutes in the upstairs corridor at the Fortuna Hotel that Suparman wasn’t in the custody of ISD at all, but rather that he was somehow under the protection of ISD, which is also what Bruce Willis had told him, more or less.
But how could that be? ISD set an elaborate trap at the Temple Street Inn to lure Suparman out of hiding. If ISD already had Suparman, what was the point of that? And if ISD did have him, why would they be treating him like an important figure for whom they were providing security rather than one of the world’s most hunted terrorists?
Tay got up and went in to the kitchen. He poured two fingers of Powers Irish whiskey into a heavy cut-glass tumbler, hesitated for a moment and added a bit more. Then he took his drink back out into the garden and lit another cigarette.
Robbie Kang had been his friend, and he didn’t have many friends. As much as it unsettled him when Kang had asked out of nowhere for him to become the godfather to his unborn child, he had also been profoundly touched. But he hadn’t told Robbie that. He hadn’t even really admitted that to himself. Thinking back on the conversation now, his failure to do either almost made him weep.
Why hadn’t he said something? All he had to do was thank Robbie for asking him and tell him he was honored by the invitation. He supposed he had been unnerved by the subject of the relationship between parents and children coming up and he simply didn’t know what to say. He had never married and had no children, so parents and children was something he knew very little about. He had parents, of course, but he hadn’t learned very much about the subject from them either.
Tay was the only child of an American-born Chinese man and a Singaporean-born Chinese woman. His father was an accountant, a careful man who insisted his family live modestly and who died of a heart attack on a business trip to Saigon in 1975. Tay’s mother had been shocked to discover she and her son had inherited a small fortune in real estate. She hadn’t even known her husband had for decades been buying properties, let alone that his investments would leave her and her son quite comfortably off for the rest of their lives.
Within a year, however, she appeared to adjust to the concept very nicely. She moved to New York and acquired what she described to Tay as a Park Avenue duplex although Tay noticed the address was on East 93rd Street. When his mother married a widowed American investment banker who was a senior partner at some investment firm, Tay was at university. He hadn’t gone to New York for the wedding. He couldn’t really recall being invited, but he supposed that was beside the point. He wouldn’t have gone, he told himself, even if he had been invited.
By the time Tay graduated from university, he had chosen to his mother’s horror to make his career in police work. Looking back on his decision now, Tay couldn’t for the life of him remember why he had made it. Still, he was a brighter-than-average recruit and suitably conscien
tious so he rose in the department until he reached the Criminal Investigation Department. It was there that he found his calling. Many times over the years he had been offered further promotions, but he had turned them all down and that puzzled most people who knew him. Why wouldn’t someone want to advance in his chosen profession, reaching higher and higher ranks and attaining greater and greater levels of power and prestige? Wasn’t that everyone’s aspiration, no matter what his profession?
Perhaps it was for some, even most, but it was not for Tay. His refusal to accept promotion had marked him as an oddball to most of his colleagues, but he simply didn’t care. He had a reason to stay right where he was. Whether or not it made sense to other people, it made sense to him, and that was all that really mattered.
It was Tay’s great good fortune to have stumbled relatively early in his life into a profession for which he perfectly suited. Tay was in his soul an investigator, someone who solved human puzzles. He was not a leader of men and he did not wish to be. He did what he did and he did it best on his own. He was a craftsman whose greatest pride was his individual craft. At first an investigator had been his profession. Now it was who he was.
Tay felt now as if his whole life had been leading him to this particular moment. His friend, perhaps his only real friend, had been murdered. And now it was up to him to use his craft to bring his friend redress.
Was that seeking justice, or was it merely looking for revenge? The more Tay thought about, the less it seemed to him to matter. Call it what you wanted, whoever had taken Robbie Kang from his wife and unborn child—and, yes, from Tay—was going to pay for it. And Sam Tay was going to be the man who made him pay for it.
Tay finished his cigarette and stubbed it out in the ashtray. He stood up and stretched, picked up his glass, and took it back into the kitchen. He had drunk only about half the whiskey, but he didn’t want any more. He dumped the rest into the sink and rinsed out the glass.
He felt so tired. He could never remember ever feeling so tired before. All he wanted to do was sleep and crash into the depths of a blackness where no one could find him. He went upstairs, brushed his teeth, and got into to bed, and almost at once he fell into exactly the kind of sleep he wanted.
But someone found him anyway.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
WHEN TAY OPENED his eyes, his first thought was to wonder what had disturbed his sleep. Everyone has similar thoughts when they are roused in the night, and in the blank space of the empty hours the explanations that crawl from our imaginations are seldom explanations that soothe us.
Had there been a sudden noise or an unusual burst of light? Tay sat up in bed and looked around. The watery glow behind his bedroom drapes looked exactly as it always did. He held his breath and strained his ears, but he heard no unexpected bump or creak. He glanced at his telephone lying on the nightstand next to him. It was not lit up with an incoming call.
Once he had eliminated the usual list of temporal events as possible causes for waking, that left only one explanation, and it was one he did not like.
For nearly a year his mother had been offering all sorts of unsolicited advice. Sometimes it concerned his personal life and sometimes it concerned the cases on which he was working. He would not have considered that remarkable since mothers had been giving their sons unsolicited advice more or less since the beginning of time, but the circumstances here were a little unusual. More than unusual, actually. They were downright creepy.
Tay’s mother had died a little over year ago.
“Please leave me alone tonight, Mother,” Tay called into the darkness. “I’m depressed and tired and I’m certainly in no mood for a conversation with you.”
When his mother was alive, they hardly ever talked. In fact, after she moved to New York and remarried following his father’s death, years had gone by without any contact at all between them. Since his mother had passed away, however, she simply couldn’t shut up. She appeared quite regularly to him now, always at some God-awful hour in the middle of the night, and gave him all sorts of advice about whatever he might have on his mind at the time. It was driving him mad.
On the first few occasions his mother appeared, he was convinced he was simply being victimized by a particularly acute case of indigestion, but eventually he began wondering if there were not more to it than that. Perhaps in the silence of the night his subconscious was making itself heard. And if that were true, he probably ought to be listening more carefully. As a detective, he had always counted on his intuition to show him the way through the forest, and his subconscious coming to him in his dreams was nothing more than a tangible expression of intuition.
At other times, however, he viewed the whole phenomenon less happily. Those were the times when he wondered if he wasn’t simply lonely. He had always been a solitary man and he was generally happy to be one, but he had to admit honestly it was also true that he was sometimes lonely. He thought of his loneliness as a faint and distant ache, like a bruise on the back of his hand. It was not a thing he noticed until he banged it into something, but when he did it hurt like hell.
What else could these imagined manifestations be but his subconscious or his loneliness? After all, he certainly was not a man who normally fraternized with ghosts. He did not see spirits in the street or anywhere else. In the whole of his life, he had only encountered one ghost: that of his mother.
What bothered him a bit, however, was that his mother’s occasional appearances did seem…well, terribly real. Tay was not a spiritual man, but sometimes her presence felt so authentic that he wondered in spite of himself if her presence might not actually be real.
Still, he could say with absolute certainty that he did not believe in ghosts. When he sat in the garden on a sunny morning with a cup of coffee in his hand and thought about his mother, the idea that she was manifesting herself from beyond the grave to give him advice seemed laughable. In the darkness and the loneliness of his bedroom, however, the idea was far less amusing. Of course, that changed nothing. Daylight was reality. Darkness was not.
When it seemed as if he were speaking to the ghost of his mother, Tay understood perfectly well he was not. No matter how real the conversation might feel, he knew he was simply looking in a mirror and speaking to himself. There was no other rational explanation.
Except, of course, the possibility he wasn’t looking into a mirror at all, but through an opening of some sort into a spiritual dimension so profoundly unfathomable that it called into question everything he understood, or thought he understood, about the whole phenomenon of human existence. But Tay was not a spiritual man, so he knew that could not be.
To be entirely fair, he did have to admit his mother’s advice sometimes proved quite useful. Tay had once read a magazine story about the American actor, Jack Nicholson, in which Nicholson said something that summed up Tay’s feelings on the whole matter quite nicely.
I know the voices in my head aren’t real, but they have such damn good ideas I listen to them anyway.
Tay fell back against his pillow and closed his eyes. He knew it wouldn’t do him any good, but he did it anyway. He had tried more times than he cared to remember simply to ignore his mother’s appearances, but it never worked. She wasn’t the kind of woman who tolerated being ignored.
“Go away, Mother. Please go away.”
“I don’t know why I even bother sometimes, Samuel.”
Tay knew that if he opened his eyes he would see a light glowing somewhere in his bedroom. His mother’s voice generally emerged from a light. At least it did most of the time. Occasionally his mother appeared to him in human form sitting at the end of his bed and she would chat to him in the way he vaguely remembered she had back when he was a small child. But that didn’t happen very often. Generally it was just a light, or perhaps several lights.
Tay had never been able to work out the connection between his mother’s messages and the manner of her appearance. He thought it stood to reason the way in which she
manifested herself had something to do with the message she delivered, but he had never been able to nail down the correlation.
Who was he kidding? Why would he assume a ghost would behave like a rational human being when it was neither rational nor a human being?
“Open your eyes, Samuel. You’re being childish.”
Tay said nothing and he clenched his eyelids even more tightly together.
“You know you’re going to open your eyes eventually, Samuel. You always do. Just do it now and save us both a lot of wasted time and effort.”
“Why can’t you ever show up at a civilized hour, Mother? Why must it always be at some God-awful hour when I’m exhausted?”
“I come when you need me most, Samuel. That is my job as a mother, to be here when you need me.”
“I don’t need you tonight, Mother. I really don’t.”
“Oh yes you do, son. Now open your eyes and sit up.”
Tay cracked one eye open in the direction from which his mother’s voice was coming and saw her sitting on the end of his bed. She was wearing a black dress of no style to which he could put a name and a round hat he thought was called a pillbox, also black. Her legs were crossed at the knee and her hands were linked around her knee with her fingers interlocked.
So instead of the conventional light show, this was a night for full body manifestation. That couldn’t be good.
“Do you have any idea how much effort is required for me to make these little appearances, Samuel?”
“No, Mother, but I get the feeling you’re about to tell me.”
“It’s not as if I can casually drop in on you anytime I feel like it. Arrangements are required.”
Tay was intrigued by that in spite of himself. He sat up, both eyes now open, and jammed his pillow behind him to support his back against the headboard.
Was his mother telling him there was some sort of spiritual travel agency through which she had to book passage when she came over to the other side? So what was travel like for a ghost? Did they need to deal with passports and visas and other kinds of paperwork like the sort that was required for temporal travel? Did they have to take off their shoes and put them through an X-ray machine along with their carry-on luggage?