New Bridge Road led Tay straight into Chinatown, which was a place where he particularly enjoyed the occasional stroll. He had always been slightly bemused that an essentially Chinese city like Singapore had a neighborhood called Chinatown, but then he assumed that had been done mostly to attract tourists.
If it had, it certainly worked. Singapore’s Chinatown was thronged year round with camera-wielding crazies of what Tay thought to be extraordinary girth and uncertain origins. For that reason, he generally avoided Temple Street with its rows of preserved shophouses, the ground floors of which all seemed to be filled with Chinese restaurants that Tay assumed sold sweet and sour pork by the barrel. Instead, when he went out for a walk he generally turned left on Pearl Hill Terrace and climbed slowly up the slight hill between the People’s Park Complex and Pearl Hill Park.
While he made the climb this time, he thought about what he had so far, and what it meant.
***
First of all, of course, he had a dead man who looked to be in his sixties, and the dead man had a key to a safety deposit box stuck up his ass. In the safety deposit box, Tay had found the accounts with his father’s initials, and that had led him to search his father’s old things and discover the photograph of his father with the dead man, apparently taken in Saigon just before the city fell to the North Vietnamese.
John August had taken one look at the picture and identified his victim as an old-time smuggler everyone called Johnny the Mover, a man who apparently worked for decades for some branch of American intelligence — maybe all the branches, for all Tay knew — and who had presumably retired years ago.
But even John August couldn’t identify the third person in the photograph: the umbrella man. At least he had told Tay he couldn’t. Tay didn’t know whether to believe him or not.
Tay’s father had been dead nearly forty years now. And Johnny the Mover had been found on the floor of a shabby apartment in the Woodlands, just as dead, barely a week ago. The only person Tay could identify who had worked with his father was dead as well. The accident sounded suspicious as hell to Tay, but what did it mean even if he was right about that? Was he really thinking somebody had killed his father, then a year later had killed Mrs. Zimmerman, and then forty years later had killed Johnny the Mover? Good Lord, what sense did that make?
It was beginning to feel like a long shot to Tay that the umbrella man, whoever he was, was still alive. It was beginning to feel like no one involved this case was still alive.
Tay dropped his cigarette, ground it out with the toe of his shoe, and kicked the butt into the gutter. That was probably against the law in Singapore — almost everything else was — but right at that moment he truly didn’t give a damn. He turned around, jammed his hands in his pockets, and started walking slowly back to the Cantonment Complex.
***
There was a connection of some kind between Tay’s father and the dead man. Tay had no doubt of that. But what kind of a connection was it? And had Tay ever met the victim? He had no idea. None. Even if he had met him once when he was a child, what good would that do him now in trying to figure out who had killed him forty years later?
Then there was the other feeling Tay had, and it was what was really driving him.
Johnny the Mover was somehow connected to the bombings.
Tay had absolutely nothing to support his feeling, but the sudden appearance of ISD in his office accompanied by an American spook had left him with no doubt that it was true.
It certainly seemed more than possible. The man had been killed at about the same time the explosions were ripping apart the Marriott, the Hilton, and the Hyatt. His body had been found in an apartment near the border a few days later, one that lay on the most direct route out of the country.
Tay was so startled to realize where that line of reasoning was taking him that he abruptly stopped walking. An elderly Chinese woman ran into him from behind with her shopping basket and started muttering what Tay took to be curses in some obscure Chinese dialect. He muttered his apology and stepped out of the woman’s way.
Tay lit another Marlboro and thought some more.
If he was thinking Johnny the Mover was somehow connected to the bombings, and his father had known Johnny the Mover, then was he thinking his father was somehow connected to the bombings, too? No, that was nonsense. Just because his father had known someone forty years before, and then that man had done something terrible forty years later, it didn’t mean his father had any connection with it. Well, not really. His father did have a connection, he supposed, in the broadest sense of the word, but certainly not in the sense of sharing any degree of responsibility for what Johnny the Mover had done. If he had done anything.
All that brought Tay right back to where he had started. He knew of only one person who might understand what the connection actually was. That was the umbrella man. And Tay didn’t have a damned clue how to figure out who the umbrella man was.
So what was Tay’s very best idea at the moment?
He was thinking of asking the daughter of a woman who used to work for his father if she had known either Johnny the Mover or the umbrella man, which really didn’t make that much sense since, when the woman’s mother died, she had been about the same age Tay had been when his father died. He was already up to his ass in dead people and children who didn’t know anything about them. What good was one more going to do him?
Still, it was all he had, wasn’t it?
Tay dropped his cigarette, ground it out with his foot, and started walking briskly back to his office to retrieve the page of notes Kang had given him. It sounded crazy, even to him, but he was going to call Laura Anne Zimmerman and arrange to talk to her. He would ask her what she remembered about the people her mother had worked with, including his father.
If she remembered nothing, she remembered nothing. But he had no other ideas at the moment, so why not ask?
TWENTY-FIVE
“HELLO?”
Laura Anne Zimmerman’s voice was soft, and Tay thought he heard a cautious note in it, too.
“Mrs. Zimmerman, this is—”
“It’s Miss.”
Tay hesitated. “I’m sorry?”
“It’s Miss Zimmerman. Not Mrs. Zimmerman.”
Then Tay remembered Kang telling him the woman had never been married, but did women really care these days about what prefix people put in front of their names? He had no idea.
“I apologize, Miss Zimmerman,” Tay said, trying and probably failing to inject at least a modest amount of remorse into his voice. “My name is Inspector Tay. I’m with the Criminal Investigation Department of the Singapore Police. I need to ask you a few questions.”
“About what?”
“About your mother.”
“My mother? You can’t be serious. Who is this, really?”
“Miss Zimmerman, I am exactly who I told you. I am Inspector Samuel Tay of Singapore CID.”
“Why would you want to ask me about my mother? My God, she’s been dead for—”
“Yes, I know. It’s a little complicated to explain. May I come to your house? I can be there in just a few minutes.”
“Come to my house? What’s this all about?”
“It is about your mother. It really is. If you will give me just a few minutes of your time, I can be more specific.”
There was a silence on the other end of the telephone. The woman was obviously skeptical, but now she was clearly curious as well. Tay could imagine how she felt. If someone had suddenly phoned him asking about his father, he would have felt exactly the same way.
“Can this wait? My mother’s been dead for thirty years. Surely there can’t be any hurry.”
“I’m afraid there is, Miss Zimmerman. I won’t keep you long.”
“I was just leaving for work. I really can’t wait for you.”
“Then I’ll be happy to meet you at your place of work. This is important, Miss Zimmerman. I need to show you some pictures.”
“Pictures? Of my mother?”
“Where is it that you work, Miss Zimmerman?”
There was another silence. Tay could almost hear the woman weighing caution against curiosity, then making up her mind.
Curiosity won.
“I’m the front office manager at the Marine Bay Sands. Give me a couple of hours to deal with the shift change and then come there and ask for me at the reception desk.”
Tay glanced at his watch. “Shall we say twelve noon?”
“Yes,” Laura Ann Zimmerman said, sounding a little relieved. “Twelve o’clock will be fine.”
***
The Marina Bay Sands was probably the most recognizable building in Singapore. Its three slim towers set along Marina Bay were capped with a dramatic structure called the Sky Park that spanned all three towers at the fifty-fifth level. The Sky Park was curved on one end and squared off on the other and had always looked to Tay like a huge surfboard unaccountably abandoned across the tops of three blue and white skyscrapers.
Tay took a taxi home and had the driver wait while he went inside and removed some of the photographs from his father’s albums and placed them in a brown manila envelope. Then he took the same taxi to the Marina Bay Sands. At exactly twelve o’clock he presented himself at the reception counter and asked a smiling young man with an Indian face to tell Laura Anne Zimmerman that Inspector Samuel Tay was there to speak with her.
While he waited for the woman to appear, Tay folded his arms, leaned back against the counter, and inspected the lobby of the hotel. It was undeniably spectacular, but far too outsized and over-scale for Tay’s taste. He assumed it must have been purposely designed to be architecturally intimidating, but exactly who was trying to intimidate whom was unclear to him. In keeping with the vast open space, everything in it was huge. Huge plants, huge pots, huge lamps. Human beings were reduced to ants scurrying for safety across the gleaming marble floors.
The interior of each tower was an open atrium rising the full height of the buildings, which had to be at least six hundred feet. All too frequently the police were called to collect the scattered pieces of a guest who had lost more than he could bear in the huge casino adjoining the hotel. How desperate did someone have to be, Tay often wondered, to jump to his death inside a hotel that he couldn’t afford to stay in anymore? Leaping from the Golden Gate Bridge or the Eiffel Tower he could almost understand. At least he could see the poetry in something like that. But jumping to one’s death inside a hotel that had little to recommend it apart from its cost seemed to Tay to be an unbearably sad thing for anyone to do.
“Inspector Tay?”
So absorbed had Tay been in contemplating the mysteries of human behavior that he had not noticed the woman walk up beside him. When she spoke and he turned his head, his first thought was how hard it was for anyone to be that absorbed.
Laura Anne Zimmerman was well over six feet tall and so thin she called to mind photographs Tay had seen somewhere of prisoners just freed from concentration camps. Her reddish-colored hair was cut very short and lay tight against her head. She was wearing a bright green dress that ended a good way above her knees. The woman’s skin was an unhealthy looking ivory color and her facial features were so sharp they looked as if you could cut your hand on her nose. Still, the whole effect was extraordinary and striking. Laura Anne Zimmerman could not have been described by anyone as a beautiful woman, but Tay had no doubt she was noticed and remembered by everyone she met.
“Is there somewhere we can talk privately, Miss Zimmerman?”
She led him across the lobby and into some kind of cocktail lounge that had not yet opened for the day. They sat at a table far enough into the lounge that people passing through the lobby couldn’t overhear their conversation. Tay took out his warrant card and placed it on the table between them. The woman barely glanced at it.
“What is this about my mother, Inspector?”
Tay returned his warrant card to his pocket and replaced it on the table with one of the photos he had taken from his father’s album. The photograph included three women standing in a straight line in front of a desk on which could be seen an old-fashioned adding machine with a big handle on its side. There were three names penciled on the back of the photograph and one of those was Ethel Zimmerman. Since two of the women in the photo had Chinese faces, Tay assumed it was fairly obvious which one Mrs. Zimmerman was.
“Is this your mother?”
Laura Anne Zimmerman broke into a smile as soon as she saw the picture, and Tay thought it was a very nice smile indeed. It seemed to him to come from somewhere deep within the woman, not just from the surface muscles of her face, and it made her unexpectedly interesting to Tay.
“Where did you get this?” she asked. “I’ve never seen it before.”
“So one of these women is your mother?”
“Right there.” She reached out with her forefinger and it hovered over the woman in the photograph who was Caucasian. “That’s my mother.”
“What can you tell me about her?”
“Not much. I was only ten or eleven when she was killed. Why do you want to know about her?”
Tay told her. At least he told her some of it.
He told her about her mother working for his father, that some old accounts with his father’s initials had turned up in the course of another investigation, and that he was trying to locate people who had worked with his father in an effort to figure out what the accounts might actually mean. To be honest, Tay didn’t think his explanation sounded like it made all that much sense, but maybe the story was better than he thought it was since the woman didn’t question it.
“My mother worked for your father?” she said. “How incredible. Is your father still alive?”
“He died the year before your mother.”
Tay saw the woman thinking about that. She was no dummy, he could tell. She immediately worked out that it was a little odd both her mother and his father had died within a short time of each other and now a policeman was asking her questions.
“Are you saying their deaths were somehow connected?” the woman asked, picking her words carefully.
“I thought your mother died in an automobile accident.”
“She did, only…well, I’ve always wondered a little what really happened since there were apparently no witnesses. Is that what this is about?”
Instead of answering, Tay removed from the envelope the picture of his father, Johnny the Mover, and the umbrella man and placed it on the table in front of the woman.
“Do you recognize any of these men?”
The woman examined the photograph, seemed to study it a minute. Then she answered without any sound of doubt in her voice, “No, I don’t think so.”
Then Tay took out the rest of the photographs and dealt them out onto the table one by one like a blackjack dealer. After looking at each of them, the woman shook her head.
“I’m sorry I can’t be of more help,” she said when Tay was done and began to return the photos to the envelop. “I just don’t remember much about my mother. She was a bookkeeper for somebody, but I don’t even know who. And I certainly don’t remember ever meeting anyone she worked with.”
They made small talk for a while after that. Tay knew he had all he was going to get and was mostly keeping the conversation going just because Laura Anne Zimmerman was a striking woman who was interesting to be with. Tay wondered if perhaps he should be pitching himself to her a little bit, but then she was so much taller than he was that they would make a ridiculous-looking couple, wouldn’t they? No woman wanted to go out with a man who made her look ridiculous. So what point was there in that?
“Inspector, I think there’s something else I ought to tell you.”
Tay said nothing.
“I’m not entirely insensitive to men,” the woman continued. “I do occasionally know what men are thinking and…well, I have this feeling right now you’re trying to make up your mind whether to ask me out.”
/>
Tay glanced away, embarrassed. Was he that transparent? He supposed he must be. Good Lord, was he ever going to stop being so clumsy.
“So let me tell you this now and get it over with,” she smiled. “I’m gay.”
***
Tay’s first instinct, of course, was to bolt.
He successfully fought down that impulse, if only because he imagined it would make him appear even more foolish than he already did to be seen frantically fleeing the lobby of the Marina Bay Hotel. So he smiled and nodded and continued making conversation until a decent enough interval had passed for him to end the conversation with some shred of dignity still intact.
“I’m sorry I can’t remember any more about my mother, Inspector,” the woman said as they shook hands at the hotel’s entrance. “If my father were still alive, I’m sure he could have been of much more help.”
“Has your father been gone long?”
“Oh yes. Ten, maybe twelve years now.”
The woman stopped talking and seemed to be thinking back to something.
“You know it’s funny now that I talk about him, but…” She trailed off with a slight chuckle and shook her head. “Never mind.”
“Go on,” Tay said. “You never know what might be helpful.”
“Well…it just came to me that my father and I were going through some old family pictures right before he died and a lot them were of my mother. My father said…”
She stopped talking again and shook her head. “No, that’s too silly. I have no idea what he meant.”
“Meant about what?”
“About my mother.”
Tay said nothing. He knew she wanted to tell him what she had just remembered and if he waited her out she would eventually.
“He looked at this one picture of my mother for a really long time,” she went on after a moment just as Tay had known she would. “When he put it down, he said to me, ‘You know, your mother wasn’t really a bookkeeper at all.’”
Umbrella Man (9786167611204) Page 14