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

by Jake Needham

  Goh shot a sideways look at Tay. “You probably could, given enough time. But you’re not. Because I’m not going to let you.”

  “I don’t see how you can stop me.”

  “Goddammit, Tay. I’ll Section 55 your ass if I have to and dump you into Changi.”

  Section 55 was a reference to Singapore’s Internal Security Act under which people could be jailed in Singapore simply by declaring them a threat to national security. No charges. No hearing. Not even a public announcement. Just one day… poof. They were gone.

  And by dumping him into Changi, of course, Goh didn’t mean the airport. He was referring to Singapore’s notorious prison that shared the same name.

  Goh might have the authority to do that, but Tay knew he wouldn’t. The government used Section 55 only against the powerless, and a senior member of CID, even one on temporary suspension, was a long way from powerless.

  “Can’t you get it through your thick head, Tay, that I’m doing this for your own good?”

  “It sounds to me more like it’s for your own good. You’re the one who’s trying to cover up something, not me.”

  “I’m not trying to cover up shit, Tay.”

  “Oh you’re trying, all right. You’re just not doing a very good job of it.”

  “You may not believe it, but you and I are on the same side here.”

  “You’re right.”

  “Then I’m glad you understand at least that much.”

  “What I meant was you’re right that I don’t believe you.”

  Abruptly Goh swung off the East Coast Parkway and drove into the park alongside the Straits of Singapore. They were just east of Jumbo Seafood when Goh pulled to the side of the road and shut off the engine.

  “Get out,” he snapped.

  Then he opened the driver’s door, walked across the grass to a wooden bench facing the Strait, and sat there with his arms folded.

  When Tay sat down next to him, Goh said, “It’s come to Jesus time, Tay.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means I’m going to show you mine and you’re going to show me yours.”

  “If you get three clichés in a row, you win a teddy bear.”

  Goh let the wisecrack wash over him.

  “Then after we talk, Tay, you’re going to shut the fuck up, go back to your job at CID, and live happily ever after.”

  “How did you know they offered me my job back?”

  “I’m the Internal Security Department. I know everything.”

  Goh shrugged off his jacket and folded it over the back of the bench. It was warm even there in the shade of a small grove of coconut palms, and Tay thought about doing the same thing. Then he remembered the .38 clipped to his belt and decided it was probably better to keep his jacket on. He wasn’t sure what Goh would have to say about him carrying a weapon while on suspension, and he didn’t want to find out.

  Tay felt his jacket pockets until he found his Marlboros. He reflexively offered the box to Goh, but Goh shook his head. Tay lit one, cupping his hand around the match to shield it from the light breeze off the sea, and waited for Goh to tell him what they were doing sitting there on that bench. He knew if he waited long enough, Goh would.

  And then he did.

  “How did you get sucked up in this mess, Tay?”

  “You already know the answer to that.”

  “Pretend I don’t.”

  “Emma Lazar was writing a piece for the Wall Street Journal about the death of Tyler Bartlett. She didn’t think he killed himself. She thought he was murdered and the police covered it up.”

  “What did you think?”

  “I didn’t think anything. I knew nothing about the case. I was on suspension, remember?”

  “So why did she come to you?”

  “She needed someone to help her look into the case, someone who knew the local scene, she said,” Tay shrugged, “so she asked me.”

  “But why you?”

  “A source of hers had apparently raised my name and told her where to find me. She knew all about my suspension and she must have figured I had nothing better to do. Which I didn’t.”

  “Who was the source?”

  “No idea.”

  Tay smoked quietly and waited for Goh to go on. When he didn’t say anything else, Tay glanced sideways at him. Goh was sitting there grinning at him idiotically.

  “You know who her source was?” Tay asked him. “Is that what that stupid grin is supposed to mean?”

  Goh didn’t say anything. He just kept grinning.

  And suddenly Tay got it.

  “You were Emma’s source, Goh. You sent her to me.”

  Goh winked at Tay. “You really are a detective, aren’t you?”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “I figured she needed somebody just like you. A stubborn asshole just dumb enough to get involved in a mess that didn’t concern him, but smart enough to figure it all out.”

  “I don’t see you doing anybody a favor, Goh. Not unless there was something in it for you. So what was it? What did you get out of sending Emma to me?”

  Goh linked his hands together behind his head and stared out to sea.

  “There’s strange shit going on here, Tay. The Future and that creep Goodnight-Jones aren’t what they appear to be. I want to know what they really are.”

  “You don’t think they’re writing software for cars?”

  “Probably. But they’re doing something else, too.”

  “What do you think—”

  “I don’t know what else they’re doing, but I think that boy found out at least part of it. And that’s why somebody murdered him.”

  “Then why did the police close the case as a suicide?”

  “Goodnight-Jones has a lot of friends in high places. I ought to know. I’m one of them.”

  “You’re telling me the police covered up a murder, you knew it, and you did nothing about it?”

  “Oh for Christ’s sake, Tay. That’s not how things work in Singapore. You know it as well as I do. You rock the boat, and pretty soon you’re thrown out of the boat.”

  “So you thought you would let me rock it for you.”

  Goh went back to grinning.

  “Something like that, pal. I figured if I wound you up and stuck you in there, you’d pound on the bastards until you shook something loose.”

  “Then why did you have those two goons drag me into your office so you could warn me not to help Emma?”

  “Those two guys weren’t goons. You want real goons, man? I can send you real goons.”

  “You still told me not to get involved with Emma, Goh.”

  “Of course I did, you stupid shit. That’s what I was supposed to do, so I did it. You didn’t pay the slightest attention to me and I knew you wouldn’t. Hell, all you really wanted to talk about was whether ISD had you under surveillance. ISD doesn’t give two craps about you, Tay. We’ve got important stuff to handle.”

  Tay took a final pull on his cigarette, dropped it on the ground, and pushed it into the dirt with the toe of his shoe.

  Goh made a clucking sound with his tongue. “That’s littering, Tay. I could bust you for that.”

  Tay watched two seagulls sitting side by side on a dark green picnic table at the edge of the water. The gulls pecked at each other and screeched, but after a while they both rose from the table in near perfect synchronization and flew out to sea together.

  Maybe that’s exactly what he and Goh ought to do. Maybe the only way to get to Goodnight-Jones and find out why Tyler Bartlett and Emma Lazar were murdered was for them to stop pecking and screeching at each other and work together.

  “You going to pick up that cigarette butt before I arrest you, Tay?”

  Or maybe not.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  AFTER HE GOT home, Tay did what he always did when he needed to think. He made coffee and took it and his cigarettes out to the garden.

  The haze was back, but it
was wispy enough to be tolerable. Tay could even see the sky. Well… almost. He unclipped the .38 from his belt and put it and his telephone on the table. Then he sat down, lit a Marlboro, and propped his feet up in another chair.

  Even when he wasn’t certain of the question, Tay had long ago learned the correct answer was always the same: coffee and cigarettes.

  This was Friday, and on Tuesday morning he was supposed to return to CID. Tay understood full well that getting his job back was the quid for his pro quo in no longer making a nuisance of himself over the murders of Tyler Bartlett and Emma Lazar. It was a bribe. Simple as that.

  But if he had already learned who had killed Tyler and Emma before Tuesday… well, what difference would the bribe make? He would be finished anyway, and a bribe wasn’t a bribe if he did nothing in return for it. At least, that was the moral bargain Tay had made with himself, and he was sticking to it.

  The problem was what he would do if he hadn’t learned who killed Tyler and Emma before Tuesday. He really didn’t want to think about that, but perhaps he should since it was looking more and more like that was how the cards would come down. He might as well decide right now what he would do if he hadn’t broken the case by Tuesday. Go back to his job and try to work on the case secretly in his spare time? Keep his word to his boss and let it go? Or maybe he would just tell them to shove the job and do whatever he could to make the truth about the cover-up public.

  He didn’t know what he would do. He really didn’t.

  Tay had been confident he could make Goodnight-Jones angry enough to shake something out of him. He generally had no problem at all pissing people off so much they started speaking in tongues. He was gifted that way. But this time his ploy had gotten him exactly nowhere. Goodnight-Jones just smiled at all of Tay’s best efforts to provoke him and he learned next to nothing. Well… he supposed he had learned one thing. Goodnight-Jones was a supremely confident and utterly evil asshole who thought he was untouchable by someone as insignificant as Tay.

  Then there was that strange conversation he’d had with Philip Goh. He had of course been surprised to learn that Goh was the one who had sucked him into all this in the first place, but he didn’t see what difference that made now. He had also learned that Goh also thought something about Goodnight-Jones and The Future smelled. Big freaking deal. How was that going to help him? Now he wasn’t the only one who thought something was wrong there. So what? What he needed was somebody who knew what was wrong there. He wasn’t looking for personal validation. He was looking for answers.

  Tay’s phone began to buzz. He watched it dance toward him on the tabletop and caught it just before it slid over the side.

  “Hello?”

  “This is Julie, Inspector. I have something off that disk drive for you.”

  Tay stubbed his cigarette out in the ashtray and smiled.

  That was the way it generally went for him. At the very moment he decided he was at a dead end with whatever he was chasing, something always happened. He got a telephone call, a witness he was interviewing gave him an answer he didn’t expect, someone produced a lost piece of evidence. It came about in different ways, but something always happened and then he would be off again. It felt… well, downright mystical. Of course he steadfastly refused to think of it that way. It was bad enough to know that he had begun talking to his dead mother. Admitting that there was an element of mysticism in his work? Who knew where that would end up?

  “I’ve finished with four of those files you flagged,” she said.

  “That’s just great, Julie.”

  “Not so fast. Maybe it’s not really all that great after all. I’m not absolutely sure the files are decrypted.”

  “I don’t understand. Isn’t it obvious whether what you’re looking at is encrypted or not?”

  “It’s only obvious if what you’re looking at is recognizable. Something like a photograph or a text document. These four files aren’t either of those things.”

  “What are they?”

  “Numbers, mostly. Just numbers. There’s recognizable computer code between most of the groups of numbers, but not enough to make any sense out of it. The code seems to be a series of commands, although I can’t tell you what the commands do.”

  “Are all four documents the same?”

  “The structure is the same, number groups with code commands between them, but the numbers are different and the commands are… well, they’re only slightly different and a few are simply repeated over and over.”

  “And you have no idea what any of it means?”

  “None. I couldn’t even speculate. For a computer programmer, it’s the way looking at a bunch of random words pulled out of a dictionary would be to a writer.”

  Tay started wishing he hadn’t been so quick to stub out his cigarette.

  “I think you need to look at these files for yourself,” Julie continued. “Give me your email address and I’ll send them to you.”

  “Couldn’t you just print them out and send them to me by courier?” he asked.

  “Print? Why would you want the files printed?”

  Now Tay knew he shouldn’t have stubbed out his cigarette. This was going to be embarrassing.

  “I want them printed because…”

  Tay hesitated. This was going to be really embarrassing.

  “… I don’t have an email address,” he finished quickly.

  Julie went silent for a long moment, then said, “I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t use email.”

  “You don’t use email?”

  “No.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously.”

  In the silence that followed, Tay felt older than he had ever felt in his entire life, which was really saying something. Here he was talking to a young woman who was beautiful and smart, and the truth was he would very much like her to think well of him. Yet he had just admitted to her that he was such an old fart that he didn’t even use email. How humiliating.

  “Okay,” Julie went on with a businesslike crispness in her voice, “here’s what we’ll do. I’ll load these four files to a spare laptop I’ve got here and get somebody to bring it to you. I’m also going to set you up with an email address on our server and I’ll email you the other files as I finish with them. How’s that?”

  Relief and amazement washed over Tay in equal measures. Relief that Julie didn’t seem particularly put off by him not using email, and amazement that she hadn’t made any comment about him being an old fart. He was an old fart, of course, but it was still no fun when people reminded him of it.

  “Thanks,” Tay said.

  “You’re welcome,” Julie replied.

  And that was all she said. Tay was pretty sure he could hear a smile in her voice. He liked that.

  “Give me an address,” Julie went on, “a street address. I’ll have somebody there with the laptop in an hour.”

  When he hung up, Tay suddenly felt hungry for the first time in days. Julie had said an hour, hadn’t she? And an hour was really all he needed to go out and grab a quick bite to eat.

  He thought about leaving his .38 at home. After all, what were the chances that someone would come after him in the middle of the crowds up on Orchard Road? But he knew if he did leave it at home, the next time his mother made an appearance she would complain that he never listened to her. It was easier to carry the damn thing than to argue with his mother. He clipped it on his belt, put his jacket back on to cover it, and headed for the Alley Bar.

  The Alley Bar was no more than a hundred yards from Tay’s house. It wasn’t exactly in an alley, but the description was close enough. It was at the very bottom of Emerald Hill Road where the street was closed to automobiles so no traffic passed the bar’s open front other than people on foot. Late at night, the trendy and vacuous took over the place, but in the early evening hours the Alley Bar was less stylish, and Tay had always found it to be a pleasant place for a quick meal.

  He
particularly liked sitting at the black terrazzo bar in the long, narrow front room that was paneled like a library in dark, slightly scarred wood. The room felt both intimate and airy to him at the same time. It had a very high ceiling topped with skylights, and they were only slightly smudged by the excretions of the local bird population.

  Tay thought the room would have been just about perfect if they still allowed smoking there, but he realized that was not a widely held point of view. He imagined it was illegal even to think about smoking in any bar in Singapore now. Actually taking out a pack of cigarettes and putting it down on the bar would probably become a capital offense almost any day now.

  Tay settled himself at the end of the bar and ordered fish and chips and a Tiger draft. The beer came first and, while he sipped at it and waited for his food, he thought about what Julie had said. If the files she had decrypted didn’t make any sense to her, what good would it do him to look at them? Still, it was something, he supposed. When he looked at the decrypted files, he would be looking at the work Tyler had thought was important enough to save on his secret backup drive. All Tay had to do would be to figure out what the hell he was looking at. Sure, no problem. Piece of cake.

  A movement beyond the open front of the Alley Bar caught Tay’s eye, and he glanced over in time to see two men walk quickly past heading in the direction of Emerald Hill Road. Because of the heat, people in Singapore generally walked at a pretty relaxed pace. People who walked fast had to be tourists. That was probably what had caught his attention.

  But maybe not. Tay also had a sense there had been a third man in front of the two he had seen, and that he had recognized the man. He turned the feeling around in his mind for a while, but he couldn’t make it into a tangible thought. Soon it slipped away altogether.

  A petite and attractive woman who was far too young delivered his fish and chips. Tay began to eat and allowed his thoughts to drift back to Tyler’s disk drive. Since the files meant nothing to Julie, perhaps he should show them to someone else. Robbie Kang was the only candidate he could come up with, so he thought he would do that. Maybe the files would mean something to Kang.