by Jake Needham
As a rule Tay did not like reading newspapers in the morning. He thought their everlasting recitations of the tragedies, atrocities, and scandals that had occurred while he slept were a poor recommendation for the coming day, the one just past having turned out so revoltingly. If he read a newspaper in the morning at all, he tried to stick strictly to the sports pages and the supermarket ads. He found they passed the time without awakening his sense of foreboding.
This morning however, he had something specific on his mind. Public Affairs had told The Straits Times that the woman at the Marriott was probably a suicide and had asked them not to make too much of it and embarrass the hotel unnecessarily. There was nothing on the front page and Tay perked up. Apparently, the paper had bought it. Thank Christ for small favors.
Tay kept turning the pages until he eventually found the story. It was the third item in the Case File section, played after a piece about a policeman who had been using a hidden camera to take pictures up women’s skirts and another piece about a raid on a night club in Mohamed Sultan Road that resulted in twenty-three kids being arrested on drug charges. Well, that explained it. Who wanted to dig into something as mundane as a suicide at the Marriott when there were so many more interesting things going on around town? He refolded the paper, put it down, and let his eyes drift while he finished his espresso.
For the first time Tay noticed a woman at a table in the back. She was reading a copy of the International Herald Tribune and sipping from a large takeaway cup without a lid. She wore a black suit that looked expensive and small gold-rimmed glasses pushed halfway down her nose. As he watched her, she uncrossed her long legs and then re-crossed them in the opposite direction. He allowed his eyes to linger long enough to register three things. The woman was extraordinarily attractive; she was young enough without being too young; and perhaps most important, she was alone.
Tay instinctively began a more detailed assessment of his prospects, but before he could get very far, the woman lifted her gaze from the IHT and looked straight at him. Their eyes met and, following a brief moment of appraisal, she smiled. It appeared to be a genuine smile, even warm, but it caught Tay completely off guard. To mask his embarrassment, he glanced quickly around the room as if he was looking for someone, then put down his cup, stood up, and walked quickly away. After he was safely out on the sidewalk, he began almost immediately to wonder why he had done such a thing. Surely returning the woman’s smile wouldn’t have been unreasonable, would it? Particularly not since the woman had smiled at him first.
You’re a damned idiot, Sam Tay. Pass up too many opportunities like that and one of these days there won’t be any more.
Shaking his head at the depths of his own foolishness, Tay crossed Orchard Road to a 7-Eleven where he bought another disposable lighter, a blue one this time, and a fresh pack of Marlboro Reds. Then he walked about a hundred yards back up Orchard Road to the nearest taxi stand. The line was blessedly short and within ten minutes he was in the back seat of a Comfort taxi on his way to the Police Cantonment Complex on New Bridge Road.
Tay suddenly realized that the taxi was exactly the same shade of blue as the lighter he had just bought and he wondered for a moment about the coincidence. In spite of the healthy sugar and caffeine buzz he was carrying, he really couldn’t see what significance that fact might have, so he stopped thinking about it as abruptly as he had begun. Settling back against the seat and shutting his ears to the music blaring from the driver’s radio, Tay watched the streets and sidewalks slide by and tried very hard to think about nothing much at all.
AS soon as Tay got to his desk, he began work on the investigation papers for the dead woman at the Marriot. The investigation papers in every case were ultimately the responsibility of the designated investigation officer, although most IOs treated the job as the police equivalent of manual labor and assigned it to the first junior officer they saw who wasn’t fast enough to get out of the way.
Tay didn’t look at paperwork that way at all. He really didn’t mind dealing with the IP on his cases himself. To tell the truth, he rather enjoyed it. He sometimes thought he had the soul of an accountant rather than that of a policeman.
Tay even found dealing with the IP himself brought with it a sort of sense of personal redemption. Holding the progress of an investigation right there in his own two hands was both a symbolic and a practical act. It was symbolic in that it reminded him he was accomplishing something, and it was practical in that it prevented him from thinking he was accomplishing any more than he actually was.
Tay worked on the IP in silence for nearly an hour, methodically filling out the investigation diary with the details of his observations at the crime scene. He wrote until he was interrupted by a knock at his door. When he looked up, Sergeant Kang was leaning in.
“In a little early this morning, are we, sir?”
Tay had never understood how people who rose early could lay claim to such moral superiority over those who didn’t. Yes, Kang was usually in the office by eight and Tay seldom made it until nine-thirty or even ten; but then Tay was usually still in the office at six or seven, and there wasn’t a chance in hell that Kang could be found there after five. And yet Kang could still position himself as the zestful one and Tay as the lazy bastard who came in late. It hardly seemed fair.
“I brought your mail, sir.”
Kang dumped a small stack of something into Tay’s in-tray, but Tay was still thinking about Kang’s dig over his working hours and didn’t bother to look at it.
Didn’t his late evenings count for as much as Kang’s early mornings? They bloody well ought to; but where arriving early at the office was taken as the mark of an energetic man, staying late at the office was merely the indication of a man with no better place to go. It was all just so goddamned unfair.
“Did you get an ID on the woman at the Marriott yet?” Tay asked Kang, covering his annoyance.
“No hit from the prints in the local database, sir. It looks like she was a visitor.”
“What does Immigration say?”
“They’re generating a list of all the female entries during the last thirty days who haven’t exited yet. They ought to have it to us by this afternoon.”
“How many will there be?”
“No idea, sir.”
“When you get the list, I want you to check everyone on it by tomorrow. If there’s anyone you can’t account for, I want to know it by six o’clock.”
“I’m not sure I can do that, sir. There’ll probably be hundreds of names. I won’t have enough-”
“The Chief has already authorized whatever resources we need,” Tay interrupted. “I want that list checked by tomorrow. Get the men you need and get it done, Sergeant.”
Kang bobbed his head and started to close the door.
“And one other thing,” Tay added.
“Sir?”
“Get her prints into the Interpol system. Maybe they’ll get a hit.”
“How much detail do you want me to include?”
Tay thought about that, tapping the cap of a felt-tip pen against his teeth with an audible clicking sound.
“Can you just send the prints without any details?”
“Well, sir, if we don’t give them any reason we’re looking to match them, the priority will drop pretty low.”
“Yeah, you’re right.” Tay thought some more. “Just tell them they’re unidentified prints from a crime scene.”
“Perfect prints from all ten fingers? Nobody will believe that, sir.”
“Just do it that way and let’s see what happens.”
Kang shrugged. “Right, sir.”
“What about Forensic Management Branch? When are we going to get their report?”
“Tomorrow, probably late, but it won’t say much.”
“FMB didn’t get anything?”
“There wasn’t much to get. They’re running the samples from the vacuum and the wipe-downs now, but they say they’d be surprised to fi
nd anything. The killer cleaned up pretty thoroughly. It almost looks like he knew exactly what he was doing.”
“No prints either?”
“A few partials from the back of the headboard and a couple of other places, but nothing good enough to return a match.”
Tay nodded at that and returned his attention to the IP on his desk. Kang took that as a signal that he was dismissed and closed the door quietly behind him.
Tay started back to work on the IP. Then, suddenly remembering the mail Kang had brought in, he put the file down, pulled his in-tray across the desk, and peered into it. There wouldn’t be anything but junk, of course; there never was. Still, each time he flipped through a new mail delivery, some combination of curiosity and hope always flared within him.
To his surprise, right on top of the pile there appeared to be an actual letter. He picked it up curiously and took a closer look. It was an airmail envelope with a metered stamp that carried the return address of a law firm in New York City. He checked to make certain the letter was actually addressed to him. It was.
Tay held the envelope for a moment without opening it. Perhaps he was being sued. He had never been sued and didn’t know what he would do if he was. But surely that couldn’t be what the letter was about. If he were going to be sued for something, it certainly wouldn’t be by anyone in New York. He had never even been in New York.
Eventually Tay opened the envelope and took out the letter. It was only a single sheet of paper. He read it, and then, not quite believing what he had just read, he read it again from the beginning.
The letter was from a man named Rosenthal whom Tay had never heard of. He said he was a lawyer representing Tay’s mother and wanted to notify Tay that his mother had had a stroke and was in Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York. She was expected to recover, but the prognosis was uncertain as to whether she might have permanent brain damage. That was all the letter said. Nothing else at all.
“My God,” Tay murmured to himself.
He had not spoken to his mother in…Tay thought about it, but he couldn’t remember for sure. Three years? Perhaps four?
There wasn’t any significance to that, not really. They certainly weren’t angry at each other. They had just somehow slipped out of each other’s lives. His mother had lived in New York for nearly twenty-five years now. She was married to someone he had met only a couple of times. Their lives no longer had anything to do with each other. It was just that simple. Was it really possible for someone to actually lose track of his own mother? He knew the answer to that. It was very possible indeed. It was one of those things that happened in life when you weren’t paying attention.
Tay looked at his watch. What time was it in New York now? He tried to work it out, but he wasn’t certain. And what was he going to do anyway? Telephone his mother and ask how she was? That didn’t seem like a very good idea. If she had had a stroke, perhaps her speech had been affected. He briefly considered calling her husband, but he hardly knew the man and hadn’t talked to him in ten years. He supposed he could always call this fellow Rosenthal who had written the letter, but what would be the point of that? Presumably he had already told Tay all he knew.
Maybe he should just go to New York and find out what the hell was going on, but that was out of the question, too, wasn’t it? He was responsible for finding the killer of a dead woman who had been viciously brutalized. Murder investigations didn’t wait around until you found a convenient time to fit them into your schedule. Tay would have to transfer the case to someone else if he went to New York. He didn’t really want to do that and, besides, flying halfway around the world on the basis of a half-page letter from someone he didn’t even know really made no sense at all.
Tay leaned back in his chair, swung his feet onto the desk, and shifted his gaze out the window. From his office on the fifteenth floor of the Cantonment Complex, he had a glorious view of the city. Straight ahead across the Singapore River lay the green patch of Fort Canning Park and off to the right were the glass and steel towers of the financial district. If Tay stood up and walked to the window and looked off to the left, he could even see the Marriott somewhere in the middle of the long line of luxury hotels scattered along Orchard Road. But then he wasn’t about to do that.
Tay made a pocket of air in one cheek, shifted it to the other, and then blew it out in one long stream. A feeling about this case was taking root within him and, as he threaded it back and forth through his mind, examining it first from one direction and then from the other, he saw at least one thing with unmistakable clarity. This case was going to turn into a real son of a bitch, a shit storm of the first order.
He didn’t know how he knew that, he just did. And now there was this, too. His mother was in a hospital in New York and there was a letter on his desk from somebody he didn’t know telling him she might have brain damage. Well, goddamn it all to hell, what in Christ’s name was he supposed to do about that? Was he supposed to drop everything and fly to New York and sit there holding his mother’s hand until they found out? His mother hadn’t held his hand for forty years. For all he knew she had never held his hand.
Tay had no life other than his job, a job his mother had always hated, and now she was trying to ruin it for him. At the precise moment when he was needed the most, she wanted to take him away from his job. Or maybe she didn’t. If she’d had a stroke and was now suffering brain damage, then she probably didn’t know what she wanted, did she?
Tay knew he was going around in circles and not making a great deal of sense, not even to himself. He tried to stop thinking about any of it and clear his mind altogether, but he couldn’t.
It might be a few days before they could even get an ID on the murdered woman, he thought. All he was doing right now was waiting. Waiting for the immigration list to be checked; waiting for Interpol to respond to the fingerprint request; waiting for the FMB report; waiting for the autopsy. None of that was going to happen for a few days. Maybe he could make a quick trip to New York and get back before any of it did happen, he thought to himself. But even as he did, he knew that was complete nonsense.
What he was actually waiting for was something else altogether, and he knew perfectly well what it was.
He was waiting for this whole fucking case to swoop down and take a humongous dump all over his sorry ass. In every fiber of his body he could sense it circling above him, and he would be goddamned if he would be sitting in a half-darkened hospital room in New York doing absolutely nothing useful for anyone when it finally let loose.
Yesterday he had so little to do he was spending his lunch hour browsing through the paperbacks at Sunny’s. Today there was a bloody goddamned maelstrom howling around him and his mother was in a hospital room halfway around the world with possible brain damage.
Jesus H. Christ on a motherfucking crutch. Good night, Irene. Put out the lights, will you?
SIX
On Thursday morning Inspector Tay tried to telephone the number on the letter from New York and got no answer. After thinking about it for a few minutes and counting back and forth on his fingers, Tay realized that he had miscalculated the time change. The International Date Line was a real bastard. He would have to call at night, Singapore time, in order to get through during business hours in New York, so he made a mental note to try again when he got home that evening.
The rest of Thursday was no more productive for Tay than had been his effort to call New York. The FMB report was put over until Friday and Sergeant Kang’s men continued working their way through the list of female visitors Immigration had provided without finding anyone who was missing. Tay could feel the case going dead around him and it wasn’t even forty-eight hours old. He was going to have to do something to get it moving, but what? Without knowing who the woman was, the investigation wasn’t going to go anywhere, and how were they to identify her with no papers, no clothes, no jewelry, nothing at all to work with? All they had was a set of fingerprints and so far they couldn’t match them t
o anyone.
Hoping to clear his head and start thinking about the case from a new perspective, Tay left the Cantonment Complex about five o’clock and walked up New Bridge Road all the way to the Singapore River. He cut through the Merchant Court hotel and found a table alongside the river at the Brewerkz where he had two gin and tonics and some kind of chicken dish, but he was unable to conjure up even a single novel idea as to how to identify the murdered woman at the Marriott. He sat for a while after he finished eating and drank two cups of coffee. Then he took a walk along the river and very slowly smoked three Marlboros, one after another. When night came on as suddenly as if a blanket had been dropped over the city, he found a taxi and went home.
A couple of hours later, just after nine, Tay remembered he had intended to call the lawyer in New York that evening, but then he realized he had left the man’s letter in his office and didn’t have the telephone number. Awash in his own foolishness and his failures of the day, Tay turned on the television and sat staring at it for two hours with only the dimmest realization of what he was seeing. Then he turned it off, brushed his teeth, and went to bed.
Tomorrow, he promised himself, would be a better day.
Or maybe it wouldn’t.
ON Friday morning Sergeant Kang brought Tay a copy of the FMB report. Just as Kang had predicted, there wasn’t a thing in it of any use.
“Any progress on the ID, Sergeant?”
“We’re almost through the visitor list, sir. Nothing at all yet.”
“This woman didn’t parachute in. If she’s not a local, she’s a visitor. There are no other possibilities.”
“Maybe she was in some kind of special group and isn’t on the regular visitor list.”
Tay thought about that. “What kind of group would that be?”
“I don’t know, sir. It was just an idea.”
“Well, I doubt that’s the answer, but maybe you’d better ask Immigration if that’s possible.”