The Ambassador's Wife (36 page)

“That’s fine. One copy of each please.” Tay handed Sergeant Kang the other six photographs. “Then get rid of these. I don’t want them left lying around.”

“Yes, sir. Anything else?”

Tay just shook his head and went back to studying the sky.

FORTY-FOUR

“THIS
is the best I can do with them, sir,” Kang said when he returned fifteen minutes later. He put the two photographs down on Tay’s desk. “If you like, I could get one of the computer guys to take a look. They know a lot more about this stuff than—”

“No, I don’t want anyone else involved.”

Tay turned away from the window and picked up the photographs. He examined them carefully, comparing one to the other, and then he put them back on the desk.

“They’re fine,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

“One other thing. Please thank the men for me and terminate the surveillance on DeSouza.”

“But, sir, I thought—”

“Do it immediately, please, Robbie. I want everyone pulled off right now.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Thank you. That’s all.”

Kang paused, but Tay said nothing else.

“Sir?”

Tay glanced up. “Yes?”

“What is this all about, sir?”

“What is what all about?”

“You know. These pictures, sir. They’re just pictures of the outside of a cheap hotel. What do they prove?”

Tay stirred slightly in his chair, but he remained silent.

“And now you’re telling me to stop the surveillance on DeSouza. We’ve all put a lot into this, sir, and we haven’t gotten anything yet.”

“We have enough.”

“
What
, sir? What do we have? And what did you mean about not involving anyone else? Involve anyone else in
what
, sir? I think I’m entitled to know.”

Tay shifted in his chair again. His eyes wandered the room for a while until, finding nowhere else to go, eventually came back to Kang.

“Sit down, Robbie. You’re right. You are entitled to know.”

Kang sat down, folded his arms, and waited. Tay leaned forward, resting his hands on the desk.

“I don’t want you to take any of the responsibility here, Robbie. I’m doing this on my own. It has to be that way.”

“Doing
what
, sir?”

“Look, Robbie, DeSouza’s the key to all this. Either he killed Munson and Rooney himself as well as Cally, or he knows who did. If I can get to him, I can find out which it is.”

“You’ve got no way to do that, sir.”

“I do now.” Tay tapped the photographs of the Hoover Hotel with his forefinger. “If I show him these, he’ll deal for the others.”

“What others? Where did you get other pictures?”

“I didn’t. There aren’t any other pictures.”

“Then you don’t have anything to deal with.”

“DeSouza won’t know that. I’m going to tell him that hooker was a plant, that I set him up and she…” Tay hesitated. “Or he, depending on how you want to look at it, took DeSouza to a rigged room. And now I’ve got photos.”

“He’ll never believe you.”

“He won’t be sure. He can’t be. But he’s not going to take any chances either. Pictures of him in bed with a man wearing a dress would end his FBI career. Worse, it would make him a laughing stock.”

“And just because you tell him you have those pictures you think he’ll tell you who killed the American ambassador’s wife? He may not even know.”

“He knows. And if he thinks there’s even a chance I really did set him up, that I actually
do
have pictures, he’ll deal for them. He can’t afford not to.”

Kang’s eyes widened noticeably, and then he swallowed once. “That’s blackmail, sir.”

“No, it isn’t. I don’t actually have any pictures.”

“Oh, come on, sir. It’s the same as.”

“Why does it matter?”

“You can’t blackmail a witness, sir. You’re a police officer.”

“Then enlighten me here, Robbie. What, in your opinion, is the job of a police officer?”

“It’s to make sure people obey the law by obeying the law ourselves.”

“Do you think obeying the law is more important than ensuring justice is done?”

Kang looked uncomfortable. He shifted his weight in the chair and cleared his throat.

“I’m no philosopher, sir. I just know this isn’t right.”

“I’m no philosopher either, Robbie, but somebody murdered three women. I’m going to find out who it was. DeSouza knows and I’m going to make him tell me. It’s just that simple.”

“What if he killed them? You don’t really think he’s going to confess just because you wave a couple of pictures of the Hoover Hotel at him, do you? That’s crazy.”

Tay didn’t say anything. He’d already had the same thought and pushed it aside.

“Look, sir—”

“What would you suggest I do then, Robbie? If you don’t like the way I’m going to play this, tell me what you’d do.”

“Well, sir, we could stay on DeSouza for a while longer. Maybe we’ll turn something up yet.”

“Like what?”

“Well…” Kang took a deep breath and let it out with a sigh. “I don’t know exactly, but something. If he knows who it was, maybe he’ll take us to them.”

“And what if he doesn’t?”

“Sir?”

“I said what if he doesn’t take us to them? What if DeSouza just keeps going to work and back home again? What if he takes us to nobody? What would you do then? Just walk away and forget everything?”

“We wouldn’t have much choice that I see, sir.”

“Well, fuck that.
I
have a choice, Robbie, and I’ve made it.”

“You just can’t—”

“Elizabeth Munson was brutalized and murdered by somebody and we’ve done nothing since except try to avoid responsibility of finding out who it was. Ambassador Rooney was brutalized and murdered exactly the same way—”

“But that’s not our case, sir.”

“Dead is dead. After dead there is fucking nothing. Who stands with the dead if we don’t, Robbie?”

“That isn’t our case, sir,” Kang repeated doggedly.

“How about Cally Parks?”

“That isn’t our case either, sir.”

“Fine. You may be off the hook because she was murdered in Thailand, but I’m not. Cally Parks got a bullet in the head because I did nothing to help her.”

“What could you have—”

“And then, Robbie, while these women were being murdered, while I was doing fuck all about it, my mother up and dies on me. My own
mother
, Robbie. She dies while I’m still trying to make up my mind whether or not to go to see her again. She dies when I haven’t even found the resolve in myself to say good-bye. Bloody hell, I’m nearly fifty years old and I look at myself in the mirror and what do I see? A timid, fearful little man who can’t make up his mind about a fucking thing.”

“Don’t make this about you, sir. Everybody dies.”

“This
is
about me. I’m
sick
of doing nothing, Robbie. I’m sick of just showing up. I’m sick of myself.”

“You keep talking about justice and fine ideas like that, sir, but that’s not what all this is about anymore, is it? It’s personal with you now.”

“I hope so. I really do hope so.”

Kang raked a hand through his hair.

“It’s not going to work, sir.” He couldn’t look Tay in the eye. “And it’s not right.”

“Look, Robbie, you asked me to tell you what I’m going to do because you deserve to know. You do deserve to know, so I told you. But you have not been invited to lecture me on what is right and what is wrong. Do I make myself clear?”

Kang folded his arms tightly. “Completely, sir.”

“I expect the surveillance on DeSouza to be withdrawn immediately. Do you have a problem with that?”

“We’re only there because you asked us to be, sir.”

“Right. And now you’re done.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Thank you, Sergeant. That’s all.”

“Yes, sir.”

Kang stood for a moment in the doorway. He knew there was more to say, but he wasn’t entirely certain what it was and didn’t in any event know how to say it. After a few seconds, he gave up and left Tay alone in the office, closing the door softly behind him.

AT
about four, Tay went downstairs, checked out a car from the pool, and drove home. Slipping off his shoes, he stretched out on the couch and almost instantly fell into a deep and dreamless sleep from which he did not wake until nearly eleven that evening. When he did wake, he felt as refreshed as if he had just returned from a week’s vacation.

He walked out into the garden in his stockinged feet and lit a Marlboro. He smoked quietly until the cigarette was finished and then flicked away the butt. Upstairs he went to the toilet and washed his face, and then he changed into a pair of khaki chinos and a blue denim work shirt and left the tails hanging out over his trousers.

Tay kept his service revolver in the top drawer of the bedside table. It was an old-fashioned wheel gun, a Smith and Wesson .38, five shots with a two-inch barrel. Uniformed officers and some of the younger detectives these days mostly carried big Taurus revolvers chambered for a .44 magnum. Tay had never even bothered to qualify with one so he just stuck to his little .38. It’s a great weapon if you ever get into a gunfight in an elevator, his colleagues joked, but he almost never carried a gun anyway so it didn’t particularly matter to him what it was. To tell the truth, he was such a lousy shot he figured that one gun was pretty much as useless to him as another.

He took the .38 from the drawer, unsnapped the safety strap on the holster, and slid it out. He lifted the hammer and spun the cylinder to make certain it was fully loaded, and then he carefully lowered the hammer and returned the gun to its holster. Snapping the strap and slipping the holster onto his belt, he slid it around until it was nestled in the small of his back. Then he pulled the tails of his shirt down and smoothed them over it.

Tay stood there for a moment feeling the uncomfortable lump of the .38 against his back. Carrying a gun at all made him uneasy and the physical discomfort just made it worse. He hoped he would be able to keep the damned thing in its holster where it belonged, but he didn’t know whether he would or not.

If it really did come to something like that, would he have the courage? He didn’t know. He would just have to see.

There was nothing else to think about. It was time to go.

Tay picked up the two pictures that Kang had printed out for him and was slipping them into a manila envelope when something in them that he had not noticed before caught his eye. He held the two photographs under his bedside reading lamp side-by-side to get a better look.

The figure walking alongside the Hoover Hotel in both photographs was in such deep shadow it was unrecognizable. Tay could not even tell if it was a man or a woman. Still…what was there about it? Something tickled his memory. The figure reminded him of something, or someone. Tay pushed the photographs closer to the light, turning them first one way and then the other, but nothing came to him that made the slightest sense.

Eventually he gave up. He pushed the photographs into the envelope. Then he picked up his cigarettes, put them in his shirt pocket, and turned out the reading light.

Tay had parked the car he checked out from the Cantonment Complex up on Hullet Road and he walked the two blocks to it quickly, listening to his footsteps echo hollowly in the empty street. Lighting another Marlboro, he started the car and turned west.

FORTY-FIVE

TAY
had never been to DeSouza’s house before, but from the surveillance reports he knew exactly how to find it. It was one of the classic old bungalows up Ridley Park Road just behind the Tanglin Park Condominiums.

He also knew from the surveillance reports that DeSouza lived alone. It was a pretty ritzy address. What was a single man doing living all by himself in a big house in an expensive neighborhood instead of in a condominium? All at once it occurred to Tay that he was a single man and he too lived all by himself in a big house in an expensive neighborhood instead of in a condominium. Did that mean he was like DeSouza in some way? No, that was not possible. He was not like DeSouza in
any
way.

The further Tay got from Orchard Road, the more traffic thinned and by the time he passed the darkened windows of the Tanglin Mall it pretty well disappeared altogether. Tanglin was not a neighborhood in which people drove around late at night. The tree-lined roadways, the neatly trimmed lawns, and the widely spaced street lamps gave the whole area an aura of order to the point of artificiality. He hoped Sergeant Kang had pulled the surveillance off DeSouza as he had told him to. If anyone were still watching DeSouza’s house, Tay would have a hard time explaining what he was doing driving by it in the middle of the night.

Just beyond the British High Commission, Tay started watching the street signs. The Chinese embassy appeared and disappeared in the darkness and his headlights swept the neatly trimmed lawns of the elegant low-rise condominium complexes that lined Tanglin Road. When he saw the sign for Ridley Park Road, he turned right.

A hundred yards beyond the Tanglin Park Condominiums, Ridley Park narrowed into two lanes. The trees closed in and the vegetation thickened, but Tay could still see houses far up the circular driveways behind big iron gates. The houses all looked more or less alike: two stories tall with white walls, black-painted beams, red tile roofs, grassy green lawns, and wide front porticos. The area made Tay think of a deserted stage set for some play based on a Henry James novel.

Tay knew from the surveillance reports that DeSouza’s house was on the corner just around the curve he was approaching. He slowed and scanned the road cautiously. To his relief, he saw no evidence of surveillance. When he made the curve, he spotted the house immediately.

There was a black iron gate suspended between two white brick pillars and beyond the gate a short driveway crossed a tightly trimmed lawn to a covered portico at the front of the house. There was a light in the portico and lights in several upstairs windows. At a glance Tay thought all the downstairs windows were dark, but he couldn’t be certain without examining the house carefully. He didn’t want to make himself conspicuous, at least not yet, so he drove on.