THE DEAD AMERICAN (The Inspector Samuel Tay Novels Book 3)

by Jake Needham

  Was it really possible that ISD was watching who came and went at his house? His guess was that a Wall Street Journal reporter sent to Singapore to investigate Tyler Bartlett’s death would be on ISD’s radar. And Emma had come to his gate so, if ISD were watching his house, they would already know he had talked to her, wouldn’t they?

  Thinking about that also brought to mind the hole he had found running from Tyler Bartlett’s apartment to the apartment next door. Could that have been ISD’s work? Was it possible that Tyler Bartlett was under ISD surveillance and that they had planted cameras or other electronic devices in his apartment? The hole struck Tay as a little crude for ISD work, but he supposed it was possible. And if ISD had been watching Tyler, maybe that was what tied all this together. ISD had an interest in Tyler Bartlett for some reason and, when Emma had visited Tay as part of her investigation, alarm bells had gone off out at New Phoenix Park and they started watching him, too.

  That was when it occurred to Tay that Emma had been wearing a white-gauze breathing mask that covered most of her face when she came to his gate, and she had put it on again when she left. It seemed to him that she would have been unrecognizable even if the watchers had known her face, so maybe they didn’t know she had come to see him after all.

  Either way, what was he going to do now? Call Emma and ask her to come back to his house. Then say, By the way, don’t forget to wear your mask?

  No, if he wanted to ask Emma about what Tyler was doing in Singapore in person rather than over the telephone, it would be better to go to her. Just in case.

  The Ritz-Carlton was part of a massive shopping complex on Marina Bay that boasted a half-dozen large international hotels and another half-dozen office towers studding more acres of retail space than Tay could walk in his lifetime. It was a stretch to think that he might personally be under surveillance even if his house was being watched, but he guessed it was at least possible. He’d had his problems with ISD before, and they were relentless in rooting out anything and anyone who might threaten the government in Singapore. Tay was hardly an enemy of the state but, as far as ISD was concerned, asking embarrassing questions of the wrong people amounted to more or less the same thing.

  If somebody were following him, Marina Bay would be a nightmare for them. He could enter it through any of several hundred entrances, walk through the lobbies of one huge hotel after another, go up and down elevators of a dozen different office towers, and lose himself in the crowds at Millenia Walk before crossing the pedestrian bridge over Raffles Boulevard and slipping into the back door of the Ritz-Carlton. ISD would need at least a dozen bodies to cover him there, even more to be certain they did it right, and there was no chance he was important enough to merit anything like that much manpower.

  Should he call first and make sure Emma was at the hotel? Tay thought about that for a moment, but decided not to. The idea of surprising her appealed to him. Sometimes he learned entirely unexpected things when he surprised people. And so what if she wasn’t there? It wasn’t as if his dance card was all that full, was it? What else did he have to do today that was important?

  Tay slapped the table and jumped to his feet.

  This might even be fun, he thought.

  Then he went inside to change into something appropriate for strolling the high-priced corridors of the Ritz-Carlton.

  CHAPTER TEN

  WHEN TAY LEFT his house, he glanced around as unobtrusively as possible, but he didn’t see any obvious signs of surveillance. Then again, if ISD were watching him, he wouldn’t, would he?

  He still didn’t really believe ISD was cataloging his comings and goings, but he supposed it was at least possible. ISD was interested enough at least to talk to Robbie Kang about him, and he didn’t believe for a moment they would do nothing more than ask Kang a couple of questions and be done with it. That wasn’t how they worked. Tay had attracted their attention for some reason, and he knew he needed to be cautious until he worked out what that reason was.

  Out on Orchard Road he raised a hand and a taxi stopped right away. He had it drive him to the main entrance of the Pan Pacific Hotel on Raffles Boulevard. He walked across the hotel’s lobby and took the staircase down the first level where there was access from the hotel into the vast Millenia Walk shopping mall. Using an escalator to get up to the second floor of the mall, he paused for a minute at the top and then took another escalator back down again. He felt silly doing it, but he did it anyway.

  Back on the main floor he followed the crowds through the pedestrian walkway above Raffles Boulevard and into the Marina Square Mall on the other side of the street. As soon as he reached it, he reversed directions, crossed behind the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, headed in the direction of the food stalls, and slipped in the back door of the Ritz-Carlton.

  He had seen nothing unusual during his meanderings around the shopping malls and hotels, and he was as certain as he could be that no one was watching him. The problem was that most of what Tay knew about detecting surveillance came from reading spy novels, and he had no doubt his attempts were pretty amateurish. It was possible he had missed something. If he had, then he had. He had done the best he could.

  Tay found a house phone in the lobby of the Ritz-Carlton and asked the operator to call Emma Lazar’s room. He was in luck. Emma answered the phone on the first ring. It was almost as if she were standing over it waiting for him to call.

  “Inspector! What a nice surprise. Are you calling to say you will help me look into Tyler’s death?”

  The straightforwardness of American women frequently made Tay uncomfortable. He personally preferred a bit of subtlety, maybe even some good old-fashioned beating around the bush.

  “I’m simply calling to say I would like to talk to you again, Emma. I’d like to ask you a few more questions.”

  “Of course, Inspector. Back at your house? When would you like me to come?”

  “Could we talk right now? I’m downstairs in the lobby.”

  There was a small silence. Tay fancied he could hear things in silences if he listened hard enough, but this silence told him nothing at all.

  “You surprise me, Inspector, but now is fine. Why don’t you come up to the club lounge? It’s on the top floor. Shall we say ten minutes?”

  “Ten minutes in the club lounge. I’ll be there.”

  Tay hung up the house phone and crossed the vast, high-ceilinged lobby to the elevators. As he walked, he tilted back his head and examined the massive sculpture suspended high above him. It was at least fifty feet long and made of some sort of grayish-white material that spiraled off in all directions like an undulating mass of tentacles. It looked to Tay like a giant squid, but he was pretty sure it wasn’t. Why would a Singapore luxury hotel hang a sculpture of a giant squid over its lobby?

  Tay stepped into the elevator and pushed the button for the top floor. Nothing happened. He squinted at the elevator panel to work out what he was doing wrong and noticed the little sign that said a key card coded to permit access to the upper floors of the hotel was necessary to activate the elevator.

  He stepped out again, crossed back under the giant squid, and walked over to the reception desk. A middle-aged woman who looked to Tay to be Malaysian started beaming at him when he was still a good thirty feet away so he walked directly to her and explained that Emma Lazar was expecting him in the club lounge. The woman tapped briefly at a computer keyboard and bent forward to peer at a screen.

  Tay hadn’t decided yet what to tell the receptionist if she asked for his name. Giving her a fake name would make him feel ridiculous, but he thought it was probably the right thing to do since it was better for his visit to be kept anonymous. Whatever name he used, he certainly wasn’t going to say he was a detective with Singapore CID. He knew what hotbeds of gossip hotels were, no matter how dignified they might appear to their guests, and a Singapore police inspector calling on a writer for a prominent international newspaper would be too good a tale not to retell. If it were, that
wouldn’t be helpful either to him or to Emma.

  Tay started thinking about what name he would give the receptionist. He had always wanted to tell someone his name was Sigmund Freud, but perhaps that was a little too eccentric under the circumstances. Perhaps he could say he was… well, how about Robbie Kang? That would be fun.

  But the receptionist didn’t ask his name. She merely walked around the desk, gestured Tay toward the elevators, and escorted him up to the club lounge on the thirty-first floor without another word. He was almost disappointed.

  The Ritz-Carlton club lounge was decorated with exactly the bland good taste Tay had expected. It was all done out in blond wood and beige upholstered modern furnishings organized in groupings spread across a thick, blue and gold carpet. Floor-to-ceiling windows made up the two outside walls of the long, narrow room.

  Even with a light layer of haze still hanging over the city, the view from there on the thirty-second floor dominated everything else about the lounge. To the right, the narrow channel of the Singapore River emptied into Marina Bay beside the pillared Greco-Roman structure that had once been the general post office but was now the luxurious Fullerton Hotel. Directly in front, the towers of the Central District faced the bay arranged in a series of concentric arcs like a chorus about to burst into song. To the left, the triple towers of the Marina Bay Hotel were tied together by the huge Sky Garden that always made Tay think of an enormous surfboard laid out on top of three skyscrapers. Beyond the Marina Bay Hotel, out in the Singapore Straits, he saw hundreds of ships of all descriptions riding at anchor, waiting to load or unload cargo.

  Tay’s escort showed him to a small table with two upholstered chairs and left him there with a polite nod.

  “Good afternoon, Inspector.”

  Tay stood and turned, and then he froze. He hoped he wasn’t gaping, but he was pretty sure he was.

  Emma Lazar was dressed all in white. White blouse, white pencil skirt, white jacket, and white ankle-strap high-heeled shoes. The only thing that wasn’t white was an oversized pair of round-lensed glasses with heavy black frames, the temples of which disappeared under her tight helmet of very short blonde hair. She looked smart, tough, and sexy.

  When she offered her hand, Tay couldn’t take it quickly enough. He didn’t trust himself to try to say something charming or, God willing, even witty, so he merely stammered out a good afternoon and gestured toward the table. As soon as they seated themselves, a young Chinese-looking woman wearing a yellow sarong materialized beside them and asked what they would like to drink.

  “It’s nearly five, Inspector, so I hope you don’t think me having a glass of wine is too outrageous.”

  “Of course not. I’ll have one, too.”

  Tay didn’t drink wine very often because he didn’t much like it, but under the circumstances it seemed the gracious thing to do.

  “Two glasses of wine then,” she said to the young woman with the Chinese face. “White, I think.”

  Tay smiled and nodded. He hated white wine.

  “So, Inspector, are you satisfied now?”

  “Satisfied about what?”

  “That Tyler was murdered, of course.”

  Tay took a deep breath and let his gaze drift back to the view. This woman certainly got straight to the point, didn’t she? American women were like that, he knew, but he still didn’t much care for it.

  “I’ve seen a copy of what I’m told is the final police report,” he said, looking back at Emma. “There are several inconsistencies in it, but none of those inconsistencies prove that Tyler was murdered, even if the police work was not as carefully done as it should have been.”

  Emma smiled. “Are you always so circumspect, Inspector?”

  “I think a certain amount of circumspection is usually a good thing.”

  “And now you sound defensive.”

  Tay was losing control of the conversation, if he had ever had control of the conversation. So he went straight to the first question he wanted answered before things got any more out of hand.

  “Why would anyone want to kill Tyler?” he asked.

  “It seems to me that’s obvious.”

  “It’s not obvious to me.”

  “Then let me make it obvious. They wanted to shut him up.”

  Just then the young woman with the Chinese face returned with white wine in two very long-stemmed glasses and arranged the glasses on the table in front of them. Tay was glad for the interruption since it gave him time to regroup. When she had gone, he cleared his throat.

  “Who wanted to shut Tyler up, Emma? And about what?”

  “I don’t know. That’s what I’m trying to find out. That’s what I want you to help me find out.”

  Tay took a sip of his wine. It tasted awful, thin and bitter. Did all white wine taste like this? If it did, he couldn’t imagine why anyone drank it.

  “You said Tyler told his parents he had discovered something through his job. Do you have any idea what it was?”

  She shook her head slowly. “He just said it was something that had made him afraid.”

  “Afraid of who? Or what?”

  Another slow shake of her head. “I’d like a cigarette, Inspector. Wouldn’t you like a cigarette?”

  Tay studied the woman. He wondered if she was avoiding his question. Or maybe she did just want a cigarette.

  She stood up and smoothed her skirt with her hands. “Since we can’t smoke in here, let’s take a walk.”

  Tay read spy novels now and then. He knew it was a plot convention in many of them when two characters were about to talk about something particularly sensitive for somebody to say, Let’s take a walk.

  Emma using exactly that phrase right now was probably a coincidence. Or maybe it wasn’t.

  Either way, Tay didn’t mind at all having a cigarette, so he stood, followed Emma to the elevator, and awaited developments.

  He didn’t have to wait very long.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  IT WAS STILL at least an hour before sunset when they stepped out the front doors of the Ritz-Carlton and walked down the circular driveway to Raffles Avenue. The haze had reduced the sun to not much more than a giant orange sitting on the shelf of the western horizon, and lights were speckling the towers in the financial district.

  No one jaywalked in Singapore, so they waited obediently for the light to change before they crossed the road to the edge of the bay. Tay offered Emma one of his Marlboro Reds. He took one himself and lit both their cigarettes, and then he blew out the match and tucked it back into the matchbox. No one littered in Singapore either.

  “Why did we have to come outside to talk about Tyler’s job?” Tay asked after they were across Raffles Avenue and walking along the bay.

  “I wanted to have a cigarette.”

  Emma tilted her head at Tay.

  “Did you think…”

  She saw his earnest expression, and laughed.

  “You thought I wanted to come out here because someone might be listening to us up in the lounge?”

  “No, of course not,” Tay said a little too quickly, and Emma laughed again.

  “What in the world is that?” Emma asked, pointing up ahead of them.

  Tay followed her finger and saw she was pointing at the Helix Bridge, a pedestrian bridge that arched over a neck of Marina Bay to make it possible to walk from Marina Square to the Marina Bay Sands. The bridge was silver and shaped like a slightly corkscrewed tube made out of woven filaments of aluminum. It curved both up and sideways for no reason at all Tay could see other than because it could. He had walked across it once and had felt like he was sliding down a giant fallopian tube. He wondered if he ought to try to explain what it was called and how the shape connected to the name, but he didn’t care enough to make the effort.

  “It’s a pedestrian bridge,” was all he said. “You can use it to walk to the Marina Bay Sands where the casino is.”

  “You have casinos in Singapore?”

  “Two le
gal ones,” Tay shrugged. “And a bunch of others that aren’t.”

  “How exciting,” Emma said, but Tay didn’t think she looked excited at all.

  When Emma started walking toward the Helix Bridge, Tay didn’t see that he had much choice but to follow. He had lost control of the conversation again, but this time he wasn’t going to struggle to get it back again and end up feeling silly. This time he was just going to drift with the current and see where it took him.

  It took him to a little platform about halfway across the Helix Bridge that he gathered was there so people could stand and admire the view. He didn’t care about the view, but he had decided he would wait Emma out until she told him whatever it was she thought important enough to bring them out here. The little platform with the nice view was as good a place to do it as anywhere.

  Tay did not think he was naturally a patient person, but he had learned patience and he had practiced its moves until he had them down perfectly. Patience was a skill like any other. Learning patience was like learning to fire a pistol into the center of a target or to shoot a sixteen-foot jump shot. It was something you worked out how to do, then you practiced over and over until it was etched into your DNA.

  He and Emma stood side by side at the railing, smoking quietly, adding their own personal pollution to the greater whole that plagued Singapore. They watched the lights coming on in the towers of the financial district on the other side of Marina Bay, and Tay noticed that each of the brightly colored neon signs on the tips of the soaring structures seemed to trumpet the name of a different bank. International banking was Singapore’s lifeblood, Tay understood that, but he still wondered if there would come a day when Singapore was nothing but one enormous bank. It wasn’t a prospect he liked to consider.

  The water was so smooth it looked like a sheet of pewter-colored glass. Tay felt like he could crack it with a pebble. If he had a pebble. Which he didn’t.