THE AMBASSADOR'S WIFE (An Inspector Samuel Tay Novel)

by Jake Needham

  “They’re going to want to interview you, sir,” Cally said. “That would be standard procedure in any investigation.”

  “Yeah, fine. Whatever.”

  “When would it be convenient—”

  “You work it out,” the ambassador said. “Might as well get it over with as soon as we can. Get the Singapore cops in here and out again and then that will be that.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll take care of it.”

  “Actually, now that I think about it…” The ambassador paused and consulted the ceiling, pursing his lips, looking like a man who was carefully mulling something over. “Here’s what you ought to do. You and Tony agree on a suspect and put together some evidence. Then feed it to the locals bit by bit. That ought to keep them off our ass while we’re sorting this thing out.”

  Oh, Jesus Christ, Marc thought to himself, what did he just say?

  Was the American ambassador seriously instructing the State Department’s Regional Security Officer to mislead the Singapore police about the murder of his wife by keeping from them her connection with the CIA? Then, just for good measure, telling Cally to find a suspect to frame for the murder and serve him up to the locals?

  “Mr. Ambassador,” Marc jumped in quickly, “don’t you think—”

  “I’ve already done my thinking, Marc. Now I’m doing my job. You and Cally do yours and Tony will do his. Then when we find the fuckers who did this, we’ll take care of the problem our own way.”

  Marc shifted in his chair and shot a quick sideways glance at Cally. If anyone in Singapore ever heard about this conversation, it would be a nightmare. Forget Singapore. God, the real fucking nightmare would be for the international press to get hold of it. Jesus Christ, he could see the headline on the front page of the New York Times now: ‘American Ambassador Orders Embassy Staff to Frame Suspect for His Wife’s Murder.’ They would be torn apart and fed to the wolves in tiny pieces. They’d be lucky if they all didn’t do time.

  “Sir, I was wondering—” Cally started to say, but the ambassador waved her into silence.

  “That’s enough for now,” he said. “You two get out of here and get to work. You’ve got a lot to do.”

  FIFTEEN

  TAY was in the bathroom brushing his teeth when he heard a muffled buzzing sound from his bedroom. He shook off the brush, wiped his mouth with a towel, and walked out to see what it was.

  He picked up the alarm clock and sighed when he saw that it wasn’t even eight-thirty yet, but the ringer was off. Not the alarm clock then, so what the hell was that noise? Tay hadn’t had any coffee yet and he was thinking like a man under water. Eventually, in an act of sheer will, he traced the sound to a pocket in the trousers he had thrown over a chair the night before.

  It was his cell phone. He had forgotten to turn the damned thing off again.

  The number in the display was one Tay didn’t recognize and he thought about just ignoring it, but his curiosity got the better of him as it always did and he answered anyway.

  “Is this Inspector Samuel Tay?”

  A woman’s voice, one he didn’t recognize.

  “Yes?”

  “This is Cally Parks, Inspector. I’m with the Bureau of Diplomatic Security of the United States Department of State and I’m assigned to the United States embassy here in Singapore as the Regional Security Officer.”

  “How did you get this number?”

  “Ah…Tony DeSouza, our legal attaché, gave it to me. Is there some problem, Inspector?”

  “This is my cell phone you’ve called.”

  “I see. Is there some other number I should be calling you on instead?”

  Tay closed his eyes and swallowed. He thought about saying that perhaps she shouldn’t be calling him at all, at least not at this hour of the morning, but he didn’t say that. He didn’t say anything.

  “Tony asked me to thank you for the file that you sent to him,” the woman continued without any encouragement on his part, “but he noticed there was no autopsy report in it. He wanted me to ask you what happened to it?”

  “Couldn’t this have waited until I get to the office?”

  “Well, sir, we come in to work here at the embassy around seven and I just assumed that you…”

  The woman trailed off into silence, although whether it was out of embarrassment or irritation Tay wasn’t certain. Regardless, he mentally kicked himself. Why had he admitted to this woman that he was still at home and implied that she shouldn’t be calling him so early? Most Americans assumed that people who weren’t fortunate enough to be Americans were all basically lazy anyway, and here he had just gone and added fuel to that fire.

  Americans seemed to think that getting to work at dawn was the mark of a real man, or a real woman as the case might be, and they never stopped telling you how early they themselves went to work. Tay remembered one detective from New York with whom he had worked a child kidnapping case a couple of years ago. For some bizarre reason the man always insisted on having breakfast meetings to discuss their progress. Breakfast meetings? Trying to hold an intelligent conversation before it was even fully light outside? Were breakfast meetings America’s most significant contribution to the culture of international cooperation? Lord have mercy.

  “The autopsy report didn’t come in until late yesterday,” Tay said. “I’ll have a copy sent to Agent DeSouza when I get to the office.”

  “Anything interesting in it?”

  Tay hesitated. He had no idea who this woman was so he had no intention of telling her anything on the telephone. Actually, who was he kidding? Even if he’d known exactly who she was, he still wouldn’t have told her anything.

  “I was away from the office when it arrived,” he said after a moment. “I haven’t seen it yet.”

  Tay had no doubt the woman had heard his hesitation and knew he was lying, but fuck her. It was too early in the morning for him to care. She and everyone else would find out what was in the autopsy report soon enough.

  “Fine,” she said. “Then let me tell you the other reason I’m calling this morning. The ambassador is back now and I can arrange for you to talk to him if you still want to.”

  The offer caught Tay unprepared. He had told the OC the Americans would work with him if he worked with them, but he wasn’t really sure he actually believed it. Maybe he had been right after all.

  “I thought Tony said you wanted to interview the ambassador,” the woman continued when Tay didn’t respond quickly enough for her. “Did I get that wrong? If you don’t think it’s really necessary, then—”

  “No, that’s right,” Tay said. “I need to interview the ambassador as soon as possible. Today?”

  “Tomorrow would be better for him if you don’t mind.”

  “Yes, okay. Tomorrow.”

  “Here at the embassy then? At, say, eleven?”

  “Fine. Eleven tomorrow. I’ll be there.”

  “I’m afraid we don’t have any parking at the embassy for the general public, but give the security post my name when you do get here and I’ll pass you in. Good-bye, Inspector.”

  Tay briefly considered pointing out that a CID–SIS inspector on official business wasn’t exactly the general public and they could damn well provide him a place to park a car, but then he decided that was just being querulous for no useful reason and let it go.

  “Good-bye, Miss…”

  “Just make it Cally, Inspector. Just plain Cally will do fine.”

  Tay had to admit to himself that American over-familiarity was a little bit less grating when it came packaged in such an agreeable female voice.

  “Cally then,” Tay said. “Good-bye, Cally.”

  He pushed the power button and shut off his cell phone before the damned thing could ambush him again. Then he dropped it into the chair and went back to the bathroom to finish brushing his teeth.

  THE first thing Tay noticed when he got to the office that morning was that the pile of papers on his desk had grown noticeably overnight
. Maybe they were actually breeding in the dark. He rooted around in them until he found the Munson autopsy report, then made a copy of it and put it in an envelope addressed to DeSouza at the embassy. After that he studied each little newborn briefly, just long enough really to find it a permanent home in some file that with any luck he would never open again.

  After the paperwork was cleared away, he opened the Elizabeth Munson file and drank another cup of coffee while he methodically read through it again from beginning to end. Nothing new came to him, so he tilted back in his chair, propped his feet on the desk, and looked out the window at the rain clouds gathering off in the distance. When he got bored with the rain clouds, and purely for the sake of visual variety, he began studying his feet.

  He was wearing a pair of black Gucci loafers that Lucinda Lim of all people had given him back when they first started going out. At the time he had been startled by the idea of a woman giving him a pair of shoes — actually he was pretty startled by the idea of a woman giving him anything at all — but after he wore them a few times to please her he decided he liked both the shoes and the whole concept of a woman giving him a gift. He was still wearing the shoes, but of course no woman had given him a damned thing since.

  That was a depressing thought and he tried to shake it off with a more detailed examination of the shoes themselves, but they were no help. He couldn’t get past a sense that the shoes were staring back at him in gentle reproach, although whether it was for making a mess out of his relationship with Lucinda or his failure to make any progress on the Munson case he wasn’t absolutely sure. Exactly a week had passed since Elizabeth Munson’s body was found and he was floundering. He didn’t have a single lead. If his shoes were disappointed in him, he could hardly blame them.

  Tay figured he had another couple of days at the most before Interpol’s formal identification of Elizabeth Munson got to his boss’s desk. If he still had no alternative motive by then, the Americans’ knee-jerk claim of a terrorist attack would be the only story on the table and that would be pretty much that. He turned his attention back to the file and started through it one more time.

  On the top was a 5x7 color photograph of Elizabeth Munson that Sergeant Kang must have gotten from Singapore Tatler since it looked as if it had been taken at some social function. Mrs. Munson was alone in the picture, although from the way she was holding her head it was obvious she was in conversation with someone who had been cropped out. She was concentrating on the unseen speaker in such a way that he — and Tay somehow knew beyond doubt it was a man Elizabeth Munson was listening to — probably felt he had not only her undivided attention but probably her undying admiration as well.

  In the photograph Mrs. Munson appeared to be in her thirties, but Tay knew her actual age had been forty-four. Was this an old picture? He turned it over and found a date stamped on the back. No, it was only a few months old. It was exactly how Mrs. Munson would have looked on the day she was murdered.

  Elizabeth Munson had been a woman of uncommon beauty, there was no doubt of that. Her dark eyes were wide spaced below a high, unwrinkled brow, and her nose was narrow and, there was no other word for it, regal. She wore little makeup and her black hair was pulled back and rolled in what Tay seemed to remember women called a French twist. She wore a dark, straight dress that looked elegant and expensive, but the lithe, taut body of an athlete, a runner perhaps, seemed to shine through her finish of sophistication.

  Tay lifted the picture out of the file and held it in both hands. He rested his elbows on his desk and sat staring into Elizabeth Munson’s eyes for a long time.

  The Americans had immediately categorized this woman’s death as terrorism, of course, but then the Americans categorized everything as terrorism these days. Regardless, Tay knew that was still the first question he had to answer here. Had this murder really been an attack on America, or had it been an attack on Elizabeth Munson?

  Tay did not think that was a very difficult question to answer. He had seen Mrs. Munson’s brutalized body carefully posed on the bed in room 2608 of the Marriott and that left him with no doubt whatsoever. Whoever killed the American ambassador’s wife may have hated Americans, or they may have loved Americans, but he was absolutely certain they truly despised this particular American named Elizabeth Munson.

  He stared at the photograph, trying to pull himself deeply enough into Elizabeth Munson’s dark eyes to reach the place behind them from where he could see what this woman had seen, the place where he would know what she had known. He often did that with a picture of someone who had died violently. He tried to reach in through their eyes to see what they had seen in the moments during which their life was slipping away. That he might someday manage to do it was poetic nonsense, he knew, but it was something that he thought should be true even if it was not. So he kept trying.

  Fate was a serious business. To seek to understand it through the eyes of a stranger, particularly one whose fate had been so gruesome, caused Tay to tread cautiously. More often than not his explorations all ended the same way. He would stare for a long time into the eyes of a person who had suffered horribly and eventually he would indeed see something real and tangible there. But it was never the glimpse of the victim’s soul for which Tay had been searching. It was only the unmistakable gloom of his own soul peering back.

  Tay had less than twenty-four hours before facing the Americans at their embassy. He was not sure what he would learn by interviewing the ambassador, perhaps nothing at all, but nevertheless it was beginning to look like a great deal would turn on their conversation anyway.

  He could easily imagine how it would all play out. He would not be interviewing the ambassador alone. They would be in the ambassador’s office with the ambassador’s staff surrounding them. DeSouza would certainly be there and probably this woman from the State Department’s security service, whatever it was called. There would be other people, too. He was sure of that, even if he did not know yet who they might be.

  That would be his chance to put some doubt into all their minds that Elizabeth Munson’s death had anything to do with terrorism. If he left the American embassy tomorrow without doing that, it would all be over. Interpol would communicate their identification of Elizabeth Munson, the OC would cede the investigation to the Americans, and he would be out of the case.

  He didn’t want to be out of the case. He wasn’t sure why he cared so much, why he wanted so badly to stay in it, but he did.

  So how was he going to plant that doubt in the Americans’ minds? Perhaps he could start out by saying something like, “Ambassador, do you think your wife was murdered by her female lover?” That would get everyone’s attention, of course, but somehow he couldn’t see it achieving much else. No, he needed a concrete place to start untangling Elizabeth Munson’s life on earth and all he had was this goddamned package of papers and some gossip from an old lover of his own. Not much. Not anything really.

  He put Elizabeth Munson’s picture back in the file, closed it, and then pushed it away. The file slid across his nearly empty desk, teetered a moment at the edge, and then steadied. Tay stood up and walked over to the window. The rain clouds had thickened and spread. The entire city was now wrapped in a dull outlook that matched Tay’s own. He stared for a while at the Marriott’s preposterous-looking green and red roof off in the distance.

  No, he had more than a package of papers. He had a place, a place that had witnessed every horror of Elizabeth Munson’s last moments on earth. He would go back to the Marriott and wring something out of it. He would beat on its goddamned walls and kick down its fucking doors until he found a way to make it give up what it knew.

  He could make it speak to him. He was sure he could.

  SIXTEEN

  SERGEANT Kang was driving when he and Tay left the Cantonment Complex fifteen minutes later.

  As they crossed the Singapore River, Tay watched a small boat at the pier on Clarke Quay loading its customary cargo of camerawielding tourists.
Why was it that tourists in Singapore were always so fat, he wondered? Did the skinny tourists all go somewhere else and leave Singapore with nothing but the fat ones? Or were all tourists everywhere fat? Tay had never really been anywhere as a tourist himself, so he couldn’t be sure. Nevertheless, the thought caused him to sit up a little straighter and suck in his own gut. He was going to have to get some exercise, he knew. Maybe lose a little weight. He really was.

  “When do you expect to be finished with the surveillance tapes, Sergeant?”

  “It won’t be much longer, sir. Tomorrow morning maybe. But I don’t think we’re going to find anything.”

  “The woman must have walked into the hotel. She’s there somewhere.”

  “There are two cameras at the front desk, but we know she didn’t register so those aren’t going to have anything. The other cameras in the lobby are all too high to identify anyone unless you already know how they’re dressed or unless you just get lucky and they look right up into a camera. The camera in the lift lobby would be our best bet since there’s only one set of lifts up to the tower, but it was cutting in and out. There’s not much there.”

  “And that’s it? That’s all the surveillance the hotel has? Nothing at all up on the floors?”

  “On some, sir, but not on others. Nothing on twenty-six. They say it’s an old system they’re replacing soon.”

  Tay could only shake his head. “What about the interviews? Someone must have seen this woman coming into the hotel.”

  “No one that we’ve found yet, sir. Like I said, if we get lucky…”

  Kang stopped talking and gave a little half shrug.

  “But you don’t think we’re going to get lucky.”

  “No, sir. Nothing about this case looks like it’s going to bring anybody any luck, does it?”