THE GIRL IN THE WINDOW (The Inspector Samuel Tay Novels Book 4)

by Jake Needham

  The entrance to the building was unlocked. The double glass doors were scratched and pitted and they opened into a small and dreary lobby with a black-and-white tiled linoleum floor and several dozen black metal mailboxes on the wall opposite a staircase.

  There was no elevator so Tay trudged up the stairs to the third floor. By the time he passed the second floor, he was already short of breath. He kept telling himself he had to get some exercise, maybe lose a little weight, but it was only at times like this he really thought about it seriously. Was fifty too old to start exercising? It probably was. Diet and exercise programs were meant mostly for young people, weren’t they? Maybe he ought to just stop walking up staircases instead.

  The third floor hallway was floored in the same black-and-white linoleum as the lobby. The walls had once been white, but the paint had yellowed into a sickly looking color that caused Tay to think of things he would rather not have thought about. The lights along the middle of the ceiling were surprisingly bright and they showed every crack and chip in the walls.

  Tay stood still for a moment orienting himself. The third-floor corner window in which they saw the girl had to be at the end of the hall to the left, he finally decided. The apartment door all the way at that end was whiter and cleaner than the hallway walls, but not by much. The two brass numerals screwed into it at eye level said 62. How could apartment number 62 be on the third floor? Tay had no idea. He knocked on the door and it opened almost at once.

  “What you want?”

  The man was short and heavy and wore baggy brown pants and an undershirt that barely stretched over his belly. He had a Chinese face framed by a few wisps of white hair and a pair of gold-rimmed glasses low on his nose. His feet were bare.

  Tay held out his warrant card, but the man didn’t even glance at it.

  “What you want?” he asked again.

  “I’m Inspector Tay from Singapore CID.”

  The man closed the door.

  Tay stood there a moment feeling like an idiot. The old man had just closed the door in his face, but what could he do about it? Arrest him? Not bloody likely. He would have considered shooting him, but he had left his gun at home. He settled for pounding hard on the door with his open hand.

  Once again the door opened almost immediately.

  “You come to wrong place. I no call police.”

  “I know you didn’t call the police. I want to ask you a few questions.”

  Tay thought the old man was going to close the door for the second time so he pointed at him with his index finger.

  “If you do that again,” he said. “I’ll kick it down and shoot you.”

  The man looked unimpressed by Tay’s threat, but the door stayed open.

  “Who lives here with you?” Tay asked.

  “Nobody. Just me here.”

  “I’m looking for a young woman. Perhaps thirty, European looking?”

  The old man snorted, but he didn’t say anything else.

  “We saw her.” Tay gestured into the apartment. “Through the window.”

  “No woman here. Only me. You not hear me say first time?”

  “Perhaps she was here when you were out.”

  “You think this woman break in when I gone and stand in front of window?” The man snorted again. “You stupid.”

  “Listen to me, sir. We saw this woman in your apartment. We need to understand what she was doing here. It is necessary for you to tell me the truth.”

  “Fuck off!” the old man shouted. “No woman here! No woman break in when I gone!”

  Tay put his hand on the old man’s shoulder, gently moved him aside, and walked into the apartment. He went directly to the window on the opposite wall, raised the shade, and looked out.

  He was at the end of the building furthest away from Serangoon Road, not the end closest to it. He had turned the wrong direction in the hallway.

  He was in the wrong apartment.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  TAY WAS MORTIFIED and mumbled an apology as quickly as he could. The old man just stared at him and said nothing.

  Tay walked to the other end of the hall and found the correct door. It was indistinguishable from the first door he knocked on other than for the brass numbers reading 13 instead of 62. He was still baffled at the numbering system in the building, but he had more important things to think about.

  He knocked and no one answered. He put his ear to the door and heard nothing. He knocked again. Still no answer. He tried the knob, but of course the door was locked.

  What should he do now? He certainly wasn’t going to kick the door down. He wished for a moment he had brought Lee with him. Maybe she could do that trick with her warrant card that had opened the hotel manager’s apartment.

  Tay still had his own warrant card in his hand from having shown it to the old man in the other apartment. He tentatively pushed it into the crack between the door and the jamb right next to the lock, but of course nothing happened. He thought back to what he had seen Lee do and tried to imitate it. Leaning against the door, he applied as much pressure as he dared and bent the warrant card to the left up against the lock. He thought he could feel the card slide past something, but he wasn’t sure. Perhaps that was just wishful thinking. He jiggled the card up and down a few times and then snapped it back in the opposite direction just as he had seen Lee do, all the while keeping pressure on the door with his shoulder.

  There was a click, and the door swung open so abruptly Tay almost fell into the apartment.

  “Hello?” he called out. “Anyone here?”

  He got no response and knew he wouldn’t. He could feel the emptiness. He stepped quickly inside and closed the door behind him.

  Tay crossed the room to the window, raised the shade, and looked out. He had the right apartment this time. He was looking across Serangoon Road directly at the metal shutter on the front of the vegetarian restaurant from which he and Kang had seen the girl in the window.

  This window.

  It took Tay only a few minutes to search through the apartment. He was pretty sure he would find nothing, but he did it anyway. The apartment consisted of a living room a bit longer than it was wide, a Pullman kitchen, a dingy bedroom, and a tiny bathroom. The bedroom had only a stained and lumpy looking mattress sitting on a frame. No sheets, no pillows, no blanket. The bedroom closet was empty, as were the drawers of the chest. There was nothing at all in the bathroom.

  Except for a smell.

  It took Tay a moment to put a name to it, but then he did. It was disinfectant. Probably bleach.

  He stepped back out into the bedroom and sniffed the air. The smell was fainter there, but now that he knew what he was looking for it was unmistakable. Could the landlord have just given the place a thorough cleaning, preparing the apartment for the next tenant? In a building like this? Not likely.

  The floors, the furniture, everything had been scrubbed with disinfectant. This apartment hadn’t simply been cleaned; it had been sanitized. Somebody had intentionally obliterated all traces of whoever had been in it.

  Tay went back to the window. Down and to the left he had a perfect view of the entrance to the Fortuna Hotel. The emergency exit from which Suparman’s sister had fled into Serangoon Road was also clearly visible. It was the ideal surveillance location. There was no better place than this window to monitor everyone who came and went at the Fortuna Hotel.

  But who had the Fortuna Hotel under surveillance? And why?

  Tay glanced around the apartment again. He saw nothing he had not already seen and let himself out.

  He knocked again on the first door he had gone to and the same elderly Chinese-looking man again jerked it open almost instantly. Tay wondered if the old man spent his entire day just standing behind the door waiting for someone to knock on it.

  The man looked at Tay without saying anything. Tay had always thought the description of Chinese faces as inscrutable was an awful cliché, but he was beginning to reconsider his opinio
n.

  “Who do I contact about the apartments in this building?” he asked.

  At that, the man unaccountably perked up and his face took on a glimmer of life.

  “You want apartment?” he asked Tay.

  “I want to know who I talk to about renting an apartment here, yes.”

  The old man was almost smiling now. He stepped aside, gestured Tay into the apartment with little pulling motions of both hands, and pointed to a chair. Tay sat down and glanced around. The apartment was nearly identical to the empty one at the other end of the hall. Same layout, same shades on the windows, even the same furniture.

  The old man sat down opposite him. “When you want move in?” he asked.

  “I don’t want to move in. I only want some information about who rented the apartment at the other end of this floor.”

  The old man stopped smiling.

  “You no rent apartment?”

  Tay shook his head.

  The man shot to his feet, took three surprisingly nimble steps across the room, and jerked open the door to the hallway. Tay smiled politely, but he didn’t move.

  “Who owns this building?” he asked in what he thought, under the circumstances, was an exceedingly restrained and civil voice.

  The man said nothing.

  “I am prepared to sit here all day,” Tay said. “I want to know who the owner of this building is and how to contact him and then I will leave. But I am not leaving until you tell me.”

  Tay could see the old man thinking about that. He leaned back and crossed his legs in a gesture he hoped would underline his willingness to remain sitting exactly where he was until he got answers to his question.

  The man said nothing for a long while. Finally he closed the door, turned toward Tay, and folded his arms across his chest.

  “Me,” he said.

  It took Tay a moment to realize what the man was telling him, and even then he didn’t quite believe it.

  “You own this building?”

  The man replied with a single jerk of his head.

  “The entire building?”

  Another jerk.

  “And you manage it, too? You rent out the apartments?”

  A third jerk of the head.

  “In that case,” Tay said, “please sit down. We are going to have a conversation whether you want to or not.”

  The old man looked sullen, but he walked back to the chair he had previously occupied and sat down.

  “I need to see everything you have about whoever has been renting the apartment at the other end of this hall, number 13.”

  The old man’s eyes flicked from side to side, and Tay had no doubt he was thinking about how he could lie and get away it.

  “Have nothing.”

  Tay sighed. “Okay, let’s take this one step at a time. Who rents apartment number 13?”

  “Nobody rent. Empty.”

  “But it has been rented to somebody, hasn’t it?”

  The old man shrugged.

  “Who was it last rented to?”

  “Man.”

  “When did he leave?”

  The old man shrugged again. “Went to collect rent today. Apartment empty. Very clean. He gone.”

  “You don’t know when he left?”

  The man shook his head.

  “When did he rent the apartment?”

  “Two month ago. Pay two month in advance and deposit.”

  “How did he pay you?”

  “How you think?” the old man snorted. “I take cash. No check, no credit card. Only cash.”

  “Did he fill out a rental application?”

  The old man snorted again.

  “So you don’t have a name or an address for him?”

  A shake of the head.

  “You can at least describe him, can’t you?”

  “All foreigners look same.”

  “He was a foreigner?”

  “What I just say? Foreigner, yes.”

  “What kind of foreigner?”

  “How I know? Maybe English. Maybe American. Maybe anything. White people. All look same.”

  Tay continued pushing the old man for another ten minutes, but he learned nothing else of any use. A white man, neither young nor old, had paid the old man cash to rent the apartment two months ago. The old man had no idea who he was, and he hadn’t seen him again. When we went to the apartment to collect another month’s rent, he found it empty and clean.

  It was obvious someone had rented the apartment to use as an observation post for watching the Fortuna Hotel, but who would have known two months ago that the Fortuna Hotel was worth watching? And why had they cleared out so fast? Were they spooked by the ISD dustup that left Suparman wounded and both the woman and Robbie Kang dead? That must have been why they had not only cleared out, Tay concluded, but also gone to great pains to erase any trace of whoever had been in the apartment.

  Okay, so who had rented the apartment to watch the hotel? Not ISD. If ISD had a surveillance post in the apartment, he and Kang would almost certainly have seen some interaction between it and the men who took Suparman into the hotel. The ISD men hadn’t even known the surveillance post was there. He was sure of that.

  Did the surveillance post belong to some branch of the Singapore Police? That didn’t make any sense either. If the Singapore Police had set it up, they wouldn’t have sent a white man out to rent the apartment. Besides, he would have heard something by now if the police had a surveillance post anywhere near the Fortuna Hotel.

  So who did that leave? He had no idea.

  All he knew for sure was that the people who used the apartment were professionals who didn’t want to be identified, not even by accident. But professionals at what? And professionals working for whom?

  Tay took the stairs down to the lobby. He hadn’t found out enough to be ready to leave, but he didn’t know what else to do. There was nothing left to look at and nobody left to talk to.

  At the bottom of the stairs, Tay reached to open one of the glass doors. He was halfway out when he stopped, turned around, and came back. He stood in front of the wall filled with mailboxes and looked at them. It took him a moment, but eventually he located box number 13 in the center of the bottom row.

  When he pulled it open, all he saw was the usual litter of supermarket circulars and food delivery menus. He scooped it all out and shuffled through it hoping to find something which pointed to whoever had rented the apartment. He didn’t have the slightest idea what he was looking for, but he looked anyway and hoped a flash of genius would strike him.

  But a flash of genius didn’t strike him, and neither did anything else.

  Tay finished going through the junk in the mail box and was just about to cram it all back in when the sharp corner of what looked like a postcard slid out from between the folds of one of the food delivery menus and poked him in the hand. He clamped the postcard between his thumb and forefinger and held it up to take a look at it.

  It wasn’t a postcard at all, but an advertising flyer printed on a heavy piece of glossy cardboard touting a girly bar. On one side there was a garish photograph of about a dozen attractive young girls wearing red bikinis and high heels and swinging from polished chrome poles on some sort of elevated platform. On the other side was the name and location of the bar. It was called Baby Dolls, but it wasn’t in Singapore. It was located in a shabby beach resort in Thailand called Pattaya.

  Tay almost laughed out loud.

  He shoved the rest of the mail back into the box and slammed the cover closed. He jammed the card in his pocket and pushed out through the lobby doors to Serangoon Road in search of a taxi.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  THE TAXI DRIVER was a middle-aged man who looked Indian or perhaps Pakistani. Tay slid into the back and pointed to the radio which was emitting sounds he gathered were considered music by some, but not by him.

  “Would you cut that off, please?”

  The driver rotated his head just far enough to see Ta
y out of the corner of one eye. He looked as if he were about to say something, but apparently thought better of it and reached out and pushed a button that blessedly enveloped the interior of the taxi in silence.

  Tay gave the man his home address and automatically recited the short explanation he gave all taxi drivers of the best way to get there. Emerald Hill Road was in central Singapore and within shouting distance of several prominent landmarks, but the street itself was short and one-way and surrounded by so many other one-way streets that getting to it baffled most taxi drivers. This driver said nothing at all when Tay finished his explanation. He just pulled away from the curb into traffic and Tay assumed he had been understood.

  Leaning against the lumpy backrest, Tay pulled the card for Baby Dolls out of his pocket and examined it again. It wasn’t really an advertising card for a girly bar. Tay had known that from the first moment he saw it. It was a message to him from John August. August wanted him to know the observation post Tay had discovered had been his, and the woman watching from it worked for him.

  But how had August known Tay even realized the observation post was there, let alone that he would come around trying to find out who was watching from it? Tay had learned not to ask questions like that. There were a great many things John August simply knew.

  John August was…well, the truth was Tay didn’t really know who John August was, at least not for sure. August was a ghost.

  He had been introduced to August a couple of years back by a member of the American Diplomatic Security Service, a woman who was then the Regional Security Officer at the American Embassy in Singapore. August was retired, she told Tay then, and he had a retirement gig running a go-go bar called Baby Dolls that was located in Pattaya, a cheerfully seedy Thai beach resort a couple of hours drive south of Bangkok. She was professionally imprecise about exactly what August was retired from, but she left Tay with the impression that August had worked for the United States State Department in some capacity. Tay didn’t think August was really retired at all, and he was even more certain he had never had any connection with the State Department.