THE DEAD AMERICAN (The Inspector Samuel Tay Novels Book 3) (27 page)

AUGUST STEPPED OUT
of
the shadows and made a beckoning gesture. Tay walked into the parking area, and August leaned back against the Mercedes and folded his arms.

“I guess there’s no point in asking what you’re doing here,” Tay said, dropping his voice to a whisper.

August looked amused.

“You don’t have to whisper,” he said. “No one’s going to hear you.”

“You mean Goodnight-Jones isn’t in there?”

August shook his head. “Not now.”

“But he was.”

“Oh yeah,” August said. “He was here for at least a couple of days.”

“When did he leave?”

“Just a few minutes ago.”

Tay thought about that. “I didn’t hear a boat.”

“Go in and look around for yourself,” August shrugged.

Tay realized August’s suggestion wasn’t exactly responsive, but he thought nothing of it. August often wasn’t very responsive.

He walked back to the front door, pushed it open, and stepped inside. August came in behind him, flipped on the light, and closed the door. They were standing in the long, rectangular entry hall tiled in a black and white checkerboard pattern that had a grand looking staircase at the end. On one wall was a high chest painted in bright swirling colors and on the other was a large mirror in a thick gold frame that could have been stolen from the Louvre. It was the same look as the room he had seen through the back windows. International bland.

“Up the stairs and to the right,” August said.

As Tay mounted the stairs, he sensed something in the air around him. He felt like a man swimming upward into dirtier and dirtier water.

At the top of the steps he turned right toward an open door at the end of the hall. Light spilled out of the room and illuminated the hallway. It was clearly the light he had seen from outside behind the drapes on the second floor.

Tay could see more and more of the room as he neared it. From the bookcases along the far wall and the red leather chair just past the door, he decided it must be a study.

By the time he got to the room and walked inside, he had pretty well worked out what he was going to see.

Zachery Goodnight-Jones was in a chair behind an enormou
s carved oak desk at the far end of the room. He was seated in a high-back red leather chair and was slumped forward, his head resting on a black leather desk pad with both his arms flung out across the desk.

He could have been asleep, but of course he wasn’t.

There was a gun in his right hand, and blood and brain matter was sprayed all over the desk.

Tay walked to the desk and bent down. He peered closely at the gun, being careful not to touch it. It was a Glock 26, usually called a Baby Glock. Of course it was.

He made a slow circle around the desk, examining the body from every angle. Goodnight-Jones was wearing a dark blue suit, a white shirt, and a pearl gray cravat. Oddly, the cravat wasn’t neatly knotted inside his shirt collar as it had been on the other occasions Tay had seen him. It was looped around his neck and tied with a clove hitch. Like a noose.

When Tay was done he looked up at August, who was leaning against the doorjamb with his hands in his pockets.

“It’s not much of a suicide scene, John.”

“Hell, Sam, it looks pretty good to me.”

“He didn’t shoot himself with this gun. And he didn’t strangle himself with this cravat.”

“He would have hung himself if I could have found a rope.”

Tay said nothing.

“You think maybe the cravat was too much?” August asked.

Tay shrugged.

“I liked the irony,” August said, “but maybe you’re right.”

Tay didn’t say anything. He just stood by the desk looking down at Goodnight-Jones’s body remembering what he had told himself out in his garden.

Justice is a tricky thing. Most of the time justice is more about appearances than anything else. People are arrested, pictures of them in handcuffs appear in the newspapers, and eventually they stand before a court and go to jail. But it doesn’t always work that way. The simple truth is that sometimes people are punished in public, and sometimes they are not. Sometimes people are arrested and tried, and sometimes they are not. Sometimes people who screw over the justice system end up having tragic accidents. They might be shot to death by a mugger one dark night, or maybe they’re driving and run off a bridge into a concrete abutment. Sometimes they even commit suicide.

Tay walked across the room and sat down in the red leather chair in front of the bookcases. August sat on the matching couch and threw his feet up on the coffee table.

“Have you started doing a little clean up work for the Chinese on the side, John?”

August grinned a little sheepishly and shook his head.

“So I guess that means Goodnight-Jones wasn’t working for the Chinese either, was he?”

August said nothing.

“The Future was never a Chinese army operation, was it? That was just a load of horseshit you fed me.”

August said nothing.

“Come on, John, at least tell me the truth now. What is The Future really? An NSA front company? Another cockamamie CIA operation run amok?”

August said nothing.

“What were you Americans trying to do that you fucked up so badly you crashed a commercial airliner killing two hundred and thirty-nine innocent people? Who made such a mess that they needed for you to come in and bury it?”

“I don’t really know, Sam. I’m just a working stiff like you. I’m told to clean something up, and I do. I don’t get involved in the
whys
. Just in the
hows
.”

“I deserve a better answer than that.”

“Yes, you do, but you’re not going to get one. What do you care anyway? Goodnight-Jones got what he deserved. Isn’t that justice enough for you?”

“What about the people who ran him, the ones who told him to do what he did? What about a little justice for them?”

August shook his head. “That’s not going to happen. It never does.”

“So… they just walk away? This one guy takes the fall and everyone else is absolved of sin?”

“That’s the way it usually works, Sam.”

“Maybe I can change that.”

“I doubt it. There are things you can do, and there are things you can’t do. You've got to live with that just like the rest of us.”

“Do you know who was behind Goodnight-Jones?”

“Come on, Sam. Why do you keep asking me things you know I won’t tell you?”

“Because one of these days I figure you might just tell me the whole truth about something.”

“It won’t be this time, Sam. Certainly not this time.”

Tay turned his head and looked back at the body sprawled across the desk.

He had to admit August was right about the irony. It appealed to him, too.

“You ready to get out of here, Sam?”

Tay took a deep breath, but then he nodded.

“I don’t know about you," August said, "but I haven’t had any dinner and I’ve worked up one hell of an appetite. You want to get something to eat?”

Tay’s eyes drifted away from Goodnight-Jones and he looked back at August. He nodded for a second time.

“Great!” August jumped to his feet. “There's a place out off Orchard Road that makes terrific burgers. You know Dan Ryan’s?”

“I’ve been there,” Tay said.

“You could ride with me on my bike,” August asked, “but my guess is you’d rather drive that fancy Audi you parked next door.”

“I’ll take the Audi, John.”

“Thought so.”

August winked, turned on his heel, and strolled out of the study.

Tay pushed himself to his feet, took a last glance at Goodnight-Jones, and followed.

As he passed through the doorway, he reached over and flipped off the light. Then he closed the door quietly behind him.

THE END

On June 24, 2012, Shane Todd, a young American electrical engineer working in Singapore for the government-controlled Institute of Micro Electronics, was found hanging from the bathroom door in his apartment. The Singapore police said Shane had committed suicide. His family said he had been murdered, probably because of something he knew about IME and its relationship with a Chinese company then under scrutiny by American intelligence for attempting to penetrate American communications systems for the Chinese government.

By and large, the press ignored the case in spite of the suspicious circumstances. Reuters, the New York Times, and many other international news organizations have a shameful history of kowtowing to the Singapore government and issuing groveling apologies anytime the government is unhappy with the coverage it receives. It was almost eight months after Shane Todd’s death before the Financial Times broke the story open and exposed what was nothing less than a long-running media blackout of the case. I commend to you that excellent piece of investigative reporting by Raymond Bonner and Christine Polar published in the Financial Times on February 15, 2013.

This novel is
not
a fictionalized account of the death of Shane Todd. I have borrowed a few details about his death and incorporated them into the death of Tyler Bartlett, but Tyler Bartlett is not Shane Todd and the lives and deaths of the two men are entirely different.

What
is
 largely the same in both stories is the Republic of Singapore.

Singapore is a tiny city state on the tip of the Malaysian peninsula that is ruled by a small group of 
smug and self-satisfied
 men who have perpetuated themselves since the country's very first day of independence through 
relentless 
censorship and the 
ruthless 
suppression of effective dissent. Yet all the while, Singapore struts the world stage claiming to be a modern liberal democracy, a beacon of freedom in Asia.

This is the same country that arrested a seventy-six year old British great-grandfather for writing that the courts in Singapore were sometimes politically influenced. Singapore charged the writer, Alan Shadrake, with ‘scandalizing the judiciary.' That is apparently a crime in Singapore since they sent Shadrake to prison for it.

Singapore 
largely 
succeeds in what ought to be regarded as a laughable masquerade because a docile international press is more concerned with not making enemies than it is with telling us the truth. It is more than an embarrassment that most of the press refused to report on the obviously suspicious death of Shane Todd for fear of offending Singapore and the men who rule over it. 
It is an everlasting stain on the honor and professionalism of journalists everywhere.