by Ovidia Yu
“Knee pain all the time!” Aunty Lee interrupted. “Everybody says the only way is to cut off my whole knee and put in some metal joint I don’t want. If I got robot knees inside me, then every time I go to the airport the metal detectors beep-beep-beep and they arrest me, then how?”
“It won’t be so invasive. Your pain is likely caused by a torn meniscus in your knee. Think of the meniscus as a rubbery cushion that keeps your knee steady. As we grow older the meniscus gets worn and tears easily when you walk or lift things, which leaves the bones of your knee grinding against each other. What I can do is transplant a donor meniscus onto each of your knees. It’s very safe, but it’s not cheap.”
“I got insurance.”
“I’m afraid you can’t use your insurance for this. It’s considered elective surgery,” Dr. Yong explained. “But if you can afford to pay, I can guarantee you will find the results satisfactory.”
“Well, health is the main thing, right?” Aunty Lee said. “But wait, one more thing. Can I meet the person arranging the transplant? Just to be sure the donor is . . .” She leaned closer and whispered, “Chinese.”
“No,” Sharon snapped. “You just have to trust us.”
Aunty Lee could tell that it was just to spite Sharon that Edmond Yong said, “I will see what I can do. I will come round to your place to see you and discuss details, okay?”
Aunty Lee did not miss the look he gave Sharon Sung. Look how well I handled things, it said. But Sharon did not see it. She was watching Aunty Lee and seemed to want to say something.
“Yes?” Aunty Lee said hopefully.
Sharon just shook her head. She was not one to waste words. But Aunty Lee had not given up hope of breaking through to her.
“Sharon doesn’t talk much,” Dr. Yong said. “Sharon’s the sort of lawyer that only talks when she’s paid to talk, right?” He was teasing, maybe even flirting, but Aunty Lee found it offensive. Sharon’s face closed up and she said nothing.
Aunty Lee liked Sharon and felt everyone was picking on her because she had not fallen apart with grief after her mother and brother’s deaths.
“Sometimes the only way to survive a great shock is by giving your brain something else to work on. Otherwise it just goes round and round—who you’ve lost, what you’ve lost, and everything seems pointless. Much better to get on with work and keep yourself busy.”
“Everything other than quantifiable, profitable work is pointless to Sharon,” Dr. Yong said. “And she tries to turn everything into work.”
Dr. Yong reminded Aunty Lee of the Chinese gang she had helped foil. He thought he could intimidate her because she was old and out of touch and frightened by all the things that she did not understand. But like the Chinese gang members, he had underestimated Aunty Lee.
“Thank you,” Aunty Lee said meekly. “Young people these days know how everything works.”
But it was old people who knew how to work the young people.
“Dr. Yong, ah, can I ask you who was that long-haired Chinese woman you were talking to at the Sungs’ house that day?”
“That’s rubbish. I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Dr. Yong said very quickly.
He was a bad liar and got angry too easily to succeed at anything, Aunty Lee thought. Fortunately she was a very good liar. And she knew that sweetened coconut milk could tone down the most fiery chilies.
“Old girlfriend, right? Don’t worry. I won’t say anything in front of your new girlfriend.” She nudged him and tilted her head at Sharon.
Realization and relief and then his old smug look returned. He was flattered and grinned at Aunty Lee. “Cannot kiss and tell, right?”
Sharon looked disgusted.
Aunty Lee knew she had to find out more about the long-haired Wen Ling.
20
Bukit Timah Plaza
Really good cooks probably have dishes that go wrong as often as anyone else. Great cooks have twice as many because they are constantly experimenting with new ingredients and new combinations. Aunty Lee believed she was a great cook, in life as well as in the kitchen. When a dish came out wrong you knew that there was something wrong either with the ingredients or with the way they had been put together. In life, it was people and their personalities who were her ingredients.
Most people cook from set recipes, written down or not. Their dishes are prepared the way their mothers and grandmothers or other cooking idols prepared them, using ingredients as similar as possible.
Aunty Lee often did that too. After all, it was a certain way to get predictable results with familiar dishes. But sometimes it was necessary to work with whatever ingredients were available. In such a case you had to go through your fridge and freezer to examine what you had on hand, what could be best put together to produce a dish at a moment’s notice. And sometimes the result was culinary genius. Aunty Lee suspected that this was how the dish that poisoned Mabel Sung and her son had come about.
Mabel Sung must have been poisoned by one of the people at the party that day. They were the ingredients Aunty Lee would be working with. And the person must have had access to Leonard Sung’s food tray. After exempting herself, Cherril, and Nina from the list of suspects, Aunty Lee was left with:
• Mabel Sung (suicide and mercy killing of chronically ill son?)
• Leonard Sung (suicide to avoid a long-drawn-out death, accidentally or deliberately taking his mother with him?)
• Henry Sung (same motive as wife for killing son; accidentally killing wife. Or killing wife so he could be free to pursue his relationship with Doreen Choo; accidentally killing son?)
• Sharon Sung (same motive as Mabel for killing brother; accidentally killing mother?)
• GraceFaith Ang (no obvious motive. She had hero-worshiped Mabel and believed that Leonard could be cured.)
• Dr. Edmond Yong (no obvious motive. He was well paid by Mabel to take care of Leonard and there was no sign that Mabel had changed her mind about him. If he had been practicing medicine in Singapore for any length of time, there would be someone who could tell her about him. Cherril had met him previously. And she would visit Bukit Timah Plaza, where his clinic had been before the fire. And an old doctor friend of ML’s had a family clinic in Bukit Timah Plaza. Perhaps Professor Koh would remember him?)
• Other members of Sung Law (motive? If any of them had wanted to kill Mabel Sung they need not have waited to do it at a party at her house.)
• Other members of the Sungs’ prayer support group, Never Say Die (motive? Anyone upset with Mabel or Leonard had only to leave the group.)
• Domestic help (motive? Again, why wait till the party to carry out the murder?)
Aunty Lee looked at her list. She felt that she had the makings of a satisfying dish in hand but that a main ingredient—a motive—was missing. Was this an impulse killing? To know this she had to find out more about the personalities of the people; for example, who was always losing his temper with bad drivers, who was most aggressive with queue jumpers who took her spot? But still it came back to needing a motive.
This was a buah keluak killing; the preparation, the risk, the fragrant black paste that only appealed to the initiated. And it was hard to predict who it appealed to. Mark, for example, did not like buah keluak despite his Peranakan roots. But Mycroft Peters with his Anglo-Indian forebears loved the dish. Aunty Lee reminded herself not to make assumptions about the people involved. The problem was she felt she had already done so.
The worst mistakes come from generalizations we don’t realize we are making. Aunty Lee decided she had to go more thoroughly into the personalities, impulses, and motives of the people on her list. And she also wanted to find out more about the people who had turned up unexpectedly. Even if they could not have put the poison into the dish, their presence might have triggered a chain of events that landed it there. She was thinking of the long-haired Wen Ling and Patrick Pang’s friend Benjamin.
Inspector Salim had requested informati
on from other departments but there was no trace of Benjamin Ng in Singapore or Shanghai or anywhere else.
Sometimes it is harder to see the most obvious cause of problems when you know the people involved. This is not necessarily due to partisanship or prejudice but to the blindness that comes with familiarity. It is the daughter you see every day that you don’t notice is growing up and the father asleep in front of the television every night that you don’t realize has grown old.
Aunty Lee took a mental step back. If she did not know all these people, if they were all characters on a television drama, who had the greatest motive to kill Mabel Sung?
Aunty Lee settled on Mabel’s husband. After all, clichés existed because they were so often true. Henry Sung’s motive would be to stop his wife before she lost everything they had. She was on the verge of bankruptcy and Sung Law looked like a lost cause, but with Mabel gone, could he save himself and Sharon? Sharon would have no difficulty finding a job in another company if she did not have her mother and Sung Law weighing her down. And if he sold the house there might be enough left for him to live on. But what about his son? Aunty Lee knew it was far less common for men to kill their sons than their wives. Perhaps Henry had never forgiven his son, Leonard, for throwing away his life and disgracing the family name?
Could Mabel have killed herself and her son? Yes. But Aunty Lee thought she would have done it differently. More decently? No, more privately. Mabel would not have killed herself with her house full of people. But maybe she wanted witnesses to see that she killed herself? She could just have left a suicide note or a suicide video. Or a suicide note like the PRC woman who jumped. Was the closeness in time of the three deaths a link or just a coincidence?
I really wish I could find that long-haired Chinese woman, Aunty Lee thought, but until then she would make the most of her time by visiting Bukit Timah Plaza.
Aunty Lee had not been to Bukit Timah Plaza for some time. The shopping mall was not far from Binjai Park. But it was too far to walk comfortably to yet too close by to be worth getting the car out for. It was not surprising that Aunty Lee had not noticed Edmond Yong’s clinic there. But perhaps someone else had.
Aunty Lee had arranged to meet Professor Koh Heng Kiang, an old friend, at his Bukit Timah Plaza clinic. But first she stopped at a bustling little kiosk on the second level to talk to Cosmo.
Cosmo was part of the third generation of his family to run the little Peranakan deli stall with the best nasi kunyit outside of Aunty Lee’s own kitchen. Rumor had it that Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s chauffeur had been seen queuing for Cosmo’s mee siam. Yes, equality in Singapore meant that even if you were satisfying the prime minister’s craving for rice vermicelli in addictively spicy, sweet, sour, shrimpy sauce, you had to stand in line like everyone else.
“Have not seen you around for a long time, sister,” Cosmo said when he saw her.
“Been busy, lah.” There was a long line and Aunty Lee got straight to the point. “I want to take away some of your kueh. Pack for me about half a dozen, can? I heard there was fire here a while ago? One of the clinics in the medical center?”
“Ah yes. Not that nice Dr. Koh’s side. You take ten kueh, okay? I can pack for you nicely in this box. One of the small clinics on the other side for men who want to look like women and women who want to look like teenagers. You want to try my bubur terigu? Made by my sister following my mum’s recipe.”
“If you can pack for me I want. But ten kueh I don’t know I can finish or not. Here you are always so full there’s nowhere to sit. When was this fire? Whose clinic, do you know?” Cosmo always knew everything going on in Bukit Timah Plaza.
“More than a year ago. Dr. Yong and Dr. Sung’s clinic, I think. See, I pack the coconut milk for you separately. The kueh no need to eat all at once. Can put in the fridge one week. They are attached to some kind of church, I think. Always got people praying outside while they are operating inside. See this oh ku kueh with mung-bean paste, turtle shape for long life, and this green ku kueh, with gula melaka coconut? I give you two each, okay? You see ten in the box, just right.”
“Okay. Anybody died in the fire? How much do I owe you?”
“Yes, one woman. But don’t know who. They said she was a foreigner working as a prostitute on a social visit pass, came for plastic surgery then had heart attack. Nobody claimed the body. Poor thing. Here’s your change. Have a blessed day.”
Professor Koh’s late wife had been one of the women in Aunty Lee’s women’s travel group (so much safer than traveling alone and so much easier to shop when traveling without husbands). Since Eva Koh’s death Aunty Lee had kept Professor Koh on her list of recipients for Christmas and Chinese New Year goodies. Therefore it was only natural that when Aunty Lee whipped up a batch of ayam pongteh, the chicken and potato stew that Malacca-born Eva had loved so much, she should bring a large Tupperware of it over to Professor Koh. That and the cakes from Cosmo would be something for him to share with his eldest son and his family, who Aunty Lee had learned he was now living with.
She had also learned that the retired former head of NUH (the National University Hospital) had been chief of surgery when Dr. Edmond Yong left the hospital suddenly.
Though Professor Koh had refused treatment for colon cancer, he looked well enough, and Aunty Lee said so.
“I am well. I suppose as usual they told you to remind me that there’s a lot more life worth living and I should let them cut me up and microwave me?”
Aunty Lee suspected part of Professor Koh was touched by the attempts of his family, right down to his grandsons and domestic helpers, to try to get him to accept treatment. But the former surgeon was adamant about not pursuing treatment for his stage-two disease, preferring to wait and see how it progressed. More than 70 percent of people diagnosed would be free of cancer five years after even without adjuvant chemotherapy, and Professor Koh said he would take his chances. “If it goes away, I am well. If it doesn’t go away, I see my Eva again sooner.”
“She might not want to see you so soon,” Aunty Lee pointed out. They had been friends long enough for her to know how much Professor Koh enjoyed talking about his late wife, a subject most other people shied away from.
“She might say you better hang around longer, I want you to take photographs of the grandchildren getting married for me to see!”
“We can watch together from up there.” Professor Koh laughed. “But I know you didn’t come to see me just to talk about Eva. How can I help you, Rosie?” There was a touch of professional apprehension in his voice. Though his son-in-law and two daughters now ran what was still known as “Professor Koh’s Clinic,” many older patients preferred to speak to Professor Koh himself when worrying symptoms showed up.
“Do you remember an Edmond Yong? He used to have a clinic around here.”
Professor Koh looked at Aunty Lee as though debating whether to ask why she wanted to know. But reticent good manners won out. He answered her question.
“Edmond Yong. His crowning achievement was getting his medical degree. He just stopped working after that. You can tell the really keen ones. They are the ones who are nonstop investigating new methods, new stats, new ways of handling old problems.”
“So you don’t think much of him?”
“Well, I wouldn’t say he was very promising, but workwise, nothing very disastrous. He got into some trouble at the hospital. A patient complained about inappropriate behavior. Said the boy had touched her and made a suggestive comment when the nurse was not in the room. In such cases it’s very difficult to tell what really happened. Sometimes people genuinely misinterpret or for whatever reason they have some ax to grind. But the problem is, once a complaint is made, the hospital has to investigate. And then even if you are cleared you have to work under a shadow, very unpleasant. In fact I was chairing the board of inquiry for his case.”
“Did it ever happen to you?” Aunty Lee asked, diverting him because she wanted to hear his reflections on th
e case rather than the factual summary that he might automatically deliver. She was certain he had never fallen under this particular cloud. Her old friend seemed too genial about the subject to have ever experienced it himself.
“Oh no, not me. I was one of the fortunate ones. Remember Eva and I got married even before I finished medical school? After that, with my wedding ring on, even in the wards nobody saw me as a man, just as ‘married.’”
That was probably untrue, but the eyes of this man had noticed only one woman since they got together as pre-university classmates, and would not have noticed attention from anyone else. Aunty Lee remembered her late friend and smiled. Professor Koh smiled also, following her thoughts.
“She was always so careful of my health. ‘Don’t work so hard,’ ‘Don’t eat junk food for lunch,’ ‘Nobody is going to die if you take one week off to take your children on holiday.’ We always thought I would be the one to go first. Male life expectancy, you know. And of course the job was taxing. That’s why I always tried to make time for the family. I wanted them to remember me. My brother was only fifty when he got his heart attack. My father, fifty-four. Eva never said so, but after I turned fifty I knew she started worrying. Instead—” He raised a hand and dropped it with a little laugh. Eva had died eight months after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. She had been two days away from her sixty-fifth birthday.
“But you don’t have any doubt that Dr. Yong was falsely accused?”
This time there was a longer pause. All Aunty Lee’s kaypoh receptors were primed and on alert as she watched Professor Koh, waiting for him to speak. He noticed this and laughed at her. But he sobered immediately as he said, “From his past actions, from everything his colleagues said about him, there was no reason to doubt him whatsoever . . .”
“But?”
“But I was uncomfortable. For no good reason, you might say. The nurse had stepped out for a while. It is a rule that there must always be a female nurse present when the doctor is examining a female patient. But in this case the patient had asked for a drink of water in the middle of the examination and the nurse went to get it. She left the door open, which is also a standard procedure, but when she came back with the water it was closed.”