THE DEAD AMERICAN (The Inspector Samuel Tay Novels Book 3) (12 page)

“Well… that’s all I know. I came home one day and I could tell my apartment had been searched. They tried to be careful so that I wouldn’t notice, but I did. I could tell.”

“Was anything taken?”

“I don’t think so. But a few of my clothes had been folded in different ways. They must have taken everything out and then put it back.” Betty looked from Tay to Emma and back again to Tay. “Who was it? Why would anyone want to look through my clothes?”

“Had Tyler ever left anything at your apartment?” Tay asked.

Betty’s mouth opened and her hand flew up to cover it. “Oh my God,” she stammered. “I never thought of that. You think that’s what it was? They were looking for Tyler’s stuff?”

“Tyler had stuff at your apartment?”

Betty nodded.

“What had he left there?”

“Just a few clothes. Not many. Two shirts and a pair of shorts. Something to change into when he came over. And that computer thing.”

“What computer thing?”

“It was a little box. He connected it to my Wi-Fi. I’m not sure how it worked, but he said he could use the internet to put backup copies of important documents on it.”

Tay and Emma exchanged glances.

“Were any of Tyler’s things disturbed when your apartment was searched?” Tay asked.

“They weren’t in my apartment when it was searched. I couldn’t bear to see his stuff around so I had taken it all out.”

“Where did you take it?”

“I put it in my locker. I didn’t know what else to do. I couldn’t throw his stuff away, could I?”

“Your locker?”

“My locker here.”

Betty pointed across the courtyard to one of the entrances into the hotel.

“All the hotel’s employees have lockers. I don’t use mine much because I’m a hostess and I’m usually dressed for work when I get here. I thought that was a good place to put Tyler’s stuff since I wouldn’t have to see it very often.”

Tay was almost afraid to ask the only question that mattered now. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Emma was holding her breath.

“DO YOU STILL
have Tyler’s things?”

Betty nodded.

“In your locker here at the hotel?”

Betty nodded again.

“Do you mind if we have a look?”

Betty didn’t respond right away. She looked to Tay like she had drifted away somewhere, and he wondered where that might be. Then abruptly she blinked twice and brought her eyes back to his.

“Have a look at what?” she asked.

“The things Tyler left with you.”

She thought for a moment and then shifted her gaze to Emma.

“Are you really going to write about T
yler’s death?”

Emma nodded.

“Are you going to say he committed suicide?”

“I’ll say that if he did, but I don’t know yet whether he did or not.”

“And if he didn’t, what are you going to say?”

“I don’t know. I’ll say what’s true. Whatever it is.”

Betty pursed her lips and studied Emma’s face. Tay knew they would learn soon enough if she found there whatever she was looking for.

“Would you show me what you write before it’s published?” Betty asked.

Emma hesitated. “Why would you want me to do that?”

“Because I want to know what you say about him before anyone else knows.”

“I won’t agree to change it if you don’t like what you read.”

“I wouldn’t ask you to do that. I just want to know what you’ve written.”

“Okay,” Emma nodded. “Then I can do that.”

Betty thought for another moment or two, then she nodded back.

“I’ll get Tyler’s things for you,” she said.

Tay and Emma sat quietly as Betty crossed the courtyard and disappeared through a doorway into the hotel. The bar had closed and now all the other tables were empty. The only sound in the courtyard was the click of Betty’s heels against the brick pavers.

A few minutes later, Betty came out the same doorway and walked back across the courtyard to where Tay and Emma were waiting. She placed a white plastic carrier bag on the table and sat down.

Tay smiled when he saw it. The bag was printed with a large green apple and the words
Cold Storage
. It was the name and logo of the supermarket where Tay did his shopping.

“May I?” Tay asked Betty.

She nodded.

Tay pulled the bag toward him. He reached inside and removed a blue T-shirt, a black T-shirt, and a pair of khaki shorts. He stacked them on the table, then he reached back into the bag and removed a small white box about the size of an iPhone but at least three times as thick. He placed it on top of the clothes and shifted his eyes back to Betty.

“Is this all there was?” he asked.

Betty’s eyes were fixed on the small stack of clothing on the table. She said nothing. She just nodded again.

Tay picked up the white box and turned it over in his hands. Its exterior was smooth plastic, and it had no markings he could see. There was only a single place to connect a cable to it. Tay knew very little about such things, but the connector looked to him like it fit a USB cable.

“It’s a disk drive,” Emma said.

Tay was glad she knew since he didn’t.

“Was there a cable plugged into this?” he asked Betty.

“Isn’t it in the bag?”

Tay picked up the plastic bag and turned it inside out. A short, black cable with USB connectors on both ends fell out and clicked against the table.

“Tyler had it plugged into the thing that broadcasts my Wi-Fi signal,” Betty said. “I don’t know what you call it.”

Tay didn’t know either, so he said nothing.

“That’s probably your router,” Emma put in, and Tay looked at her.

“Have you checked to see what’s on the drive?” Tay asked Betty.

She shook her head. “I wouldn’t even know how to do that.”

Tay didn’t either.

“You just can plug it into any laptop with that USB cable,” Emma spoke up again. “Then you mount it on your desktop and access it like you would any other drive.”

Tay looked at Emma as if she had begun speaking in tongues.

“What?” she asked. “It’s just standard computer stuff.”

Tay shook his head and began returning everything to the plastic bag. He still had the stack of clothes in his hand when he looked up at Betty.

“Can we borrow all this for a couple of days?” he asked. “I’d like to examine it more carefully.”

“Will it help you show that Tyler didn’t commit suicide?”

“I don’t know,” Tay said. “Maybe there’s something here, maybe there’s nothing here. I promise you’ll get everything back undamaged.”

Betty sat for a moment without speaking, and then she nodded.

“Can I go now?” she asked. “I’m really tired.”

Tay and Emma stood, and Betty pushed back her chair and stood, too. Emma offered her hand.

“Thank you for doing this. I know it was hard for you. I promise to be fair and honest in everything I write about Tyler.”

Betty said nothing. She just shook Emma’s hand, nodded at Tay, and walked slowly away across the courtyard.

They stood there watching her until she had passed through the doorway into the hotel and disappeared. Tay was disappointed in himself for not saying something comforting to her before she turned away. He simply had no idea what it might have been.

The courtyard was quiet and dark. Tay looked at his watch. It was just after eleven.

“Let’s walk for a while,” he said, and Emma nodded.

They left Raffles through a back entrance next to the Long Bar and emerged on North Bridge Road. Tay offered Emma a Marlboro and she accepted it without hesitation. He took one for himself, lit both their cigarettes, and they strolled slowly along the east side of the street.

Tay loved nothing more than walking the streets of the city late at night. They were right in the middle of the city, on one of its busiest thoroughfares, and yet there was very little automobile traffic and no foot traf
fic at all. Singapore went to bed early. Sometimes Tay thought that was one of the best things about it.

There was something almost unbearably romantic about Singapore when it was quiet and empty. Off to their left, the floodlit columns of the old general post office building gleamed in the night like a movie set lit up and waiting for the actors to appear. Beyond it, the huge Singapore Wheel looked like a full moon rising over the city. It all somehow conspired to put Tay in a strangely forgiving and deeply sentimental mood, which profoundly irritated him.

At night, the city felt haunted to Tay. Not by the spirits of the dead, but by the presence of a whole culture that had been systematically ground into dust by people claiming to speak for the future. What did exchanging old buildings for new ones do to the soul of the city? All that was left now was the spirit of the life that had once been lived in them, and on nights like these, when the silence was deep and the breeze was soft, Tay was certain he could hear that spirit whispering to him still.

“That was an interesting conversation,” Emma said.

“I wouldn’t make too much of it.”

Emma turned her head toward Tay and waited.

“I just meant it doesn’t sound like Tyler told her all that much,” he said.

“He told her he had discovered something about the company. He told her it frightened him. That sounds like quite a lot to me.”

“I’m not sure how much of that he actually said and how much she was reading between the lines. Did you notice she said nothing about going back to California with Tyler?”

“Maybe he didn’t ask her.”

“Exactly.”

Emma puffed a couple of those smoke rings she did so well.

“And something else,” Tay continued. “She said she only saw him once or twice a week and she had never heard him mention any friends he went out with when she wasn’t around. A twenty-something guy sitting around his apartment in Singapore doing nothing five or six nights a week? I don’t think so.”

Emma took a long, deep draw on her cigarette and exhaled slowly.

“So, Sam, what do
you
do five or six nights a week?”

“That doesn’t have anything to do with it. I’m not twenty-something.”

“You could have fooled me.”

They crossed over North Bridge Road and walked past the National Library Building. Tay had always hated the National Library Building. It looked to him like a capable and creative architect had started out to create a truly iconoclastic cultural monument out of a traditional building, but then a committee of government bureaucrats had taken over, dumbed down the design, and turned it into… well, neither one thing nor another. What Singapore had ended up with was a building that looked like it couldn’t make up its mind.

“Are you saying you didn’t believe her when she told us Tyler had found out something about the company that frightened him?”

“I believe that’s what she thinks she heard him say. I’m just not certain he really told her that, at least not in exactly those words.”

Emma pointed at the plastic bag Tay was swinging in his left hand as they walked.

“Maybe something on that drive will clear it up. If Tyler went to the trouble to set up a wireless backup drive outside of his apartment, he must have wanted to make copies of something important enough to store in a secure place. If he did find something that frightened him, I’ll bet you it’s on that drive.”

“I don’t think it’s going to be that easy.”

“Probably not. Tyler was a computer security guy. I’m sure the drive is encrypted. Maybe he even put other kinds of security on it. We’re going to need somebody who knows about stuff like that to get into it.”

“Can’t you do it?”

“Look, Sam, I know enough to keep my own gear doing what it’s supposed to do, at least most of the time, but crack an encrypted disk drive? Forget it. Don’t you know somebody here? Surely the cops have a few computer security experts on their books.”

Tay didn’t know anybody who could crack an encrypted disk drive. Sam Tay and technology were not pals. They weren’t even on speaking terms.

“I think my sergeant might know somebody,” Tay finally said, mostly because he couldn’t think of anything else to say. “Robbie handles most of the computer stuff around our office.”

Tay had no idea if Robbie Kang knew a computer security guy or not, but he was the only person Tay could think of to ask.

They both finished their cigarettes at about the same time. Emma flicked her butt into the gutter and Tay winced. No one littered in Singapore. No one even
thought
about littering in Singapore.

Tay quickly glanced both ways up and down North Bridge Road to see if anyone had noticed her doing it. He saw no one and, remarkably, the world looked exactly as it had before she did it. Emma had tossed a cigarette butt into the gutter and nothing happened. The sky had not fallen.

Tay thought about that for a moment. Then he flicked his own cigarette butt away and it came to rest right next to Emma’s. Tay contemplated the sight of those two cigarette butts just lying there in the gutter on North Bridge Road.

It was exhilarating.

“Why are you doing this, Sam?”

“Why not? It’s a nice night for a walk.”

Emma laughed that throaty laugh that had so enthralled Tay the first time he heard it, and he felt exactly the same way all over again.

“I wasn’t talking about the walk, Sam. I was talking about you helping me look into Tyler’s death. You said you wouldn’t do it, but you’re doing it anyway. What happened?”

It was a beautiful night, he was with a beautiful woman, and they were walking the empty streets of the city where he had grown up. Tay could not remember when he had felt more comfortable and relaxed.

So, before he realized what he was saying, it just slipped out…

“My mother told me I ought to help you.”

“Does your mother live here in Singapore?”

Oh Christ, why did I say that?

Emma stopped walking when she saw the stricken look on Tay’s face.

“What’s wrong, Sam? Did I say something I shouldn’t have?”

“No,” Tay stammered. “It’s not that. It’s more like…”

Tay trailed off. He didn’t have the slightest idea where to go from there.

“You certainly look very disturbed about something.”

Perhaps, Tay thought, he could simply tell Emma the truth. They were getting along well. She seemed comfortable with him, even perhaps to understand him a little. And it wasn’t as if having an occasional conversation with your dead mother was all that big a deal, was it?

Oh for Christ’s sake, I can’t tell Emma I talk to my dead mother. She’ll think I’m a complete nutter.

“Is it difficult for you to talk to your mother?” Emma prodded gently.

Okay,
Tay abruptly decided,
the hell with it.
So he took a deep breath and he just told her.

“Yes,” Tay said, “it’s difficult. Because my mother is dead.”

Tay held his breath. He had no idea how Emma would react to that. He was pleasantly surprised that she didn’t seem to react at all. She just looked, at most, slightly thoughtful.

“I’m not absolutely sure what you’re telling me, Sam.”

“My mother died three years ago.”

“And a few days ago she told you to help me?”

“Yes, that’s what I said.”

Emma nodded her head slowly a couple of times.

“Can I have another cigarette, Sam?”

Tay didn’t know what he expected Emma to say but it hadn’t been that. He pulled the box of Marlboros out of his shirt pocket so quickly he almost dropped it. He held the box out to Emma, took one for himself as well, and lit both cigarettes.

Crossing North Bridge Road, they walked west behind the Intercontinental Hotel. They had reached Victoria Street and turned north before Emma spoke again.

“My mother died when I was seventeen,” she said. “But I talked to her almost every day until I was at least twenty-five. I still talk to her now and then. When I need to.”

Tay glanced at Emma. Was she making fun of him?

“We talk to whoever we need to make sense out of our lives, Sam.”

“I felt very foolish when I blurted that out.”

“You needn’t have.”