Umbrella Man (9786167611204) (43 page)

Tay looked at his watch. He already knew more
or less what the time was, but he looked at his watch anyway.

“Then she was probably killed between noon
and midnight on Monday,” he said.

Kang nodded. “Yes, sir.”

Tay stopped, thought a moment, and then
asked, “What do you make of the curtains?”

“The curtains, sir?”

“They were open in the living room, but
closed in the bedroom. Don’t you think that’s a little odd?”

Kang didn’t really, so he wasn’t entirely
sure what to say.

“Look, Sergeant, if they were in the room
during the day, they might leave the drapes open, but at night
they’d have them closed. Why leave them one way in the living room
and the other in the bedroom?”

“Maybe they came into the room during the day
and then moved into the bedroom after dark.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” Tay said.
“Which would make the time of death somewhere in the range of six
to seven o’clock, wouldn’t it?”

“That makes sense, sir.”

Tay sat for a while after that with his face
perfectly still. He reached for the open box of Marlboros again and
shook out another cigarette.

“Her killer posed her, Sergeant. He posed her
after he was done with her and stripped away her dignity. He wanted
to degrade her. He wanted to tell us just how worthless she
is.”

Tay picked up the lighter and flipped it
open. He watched the flame burn, but he didn’t touch it to his
cigarette.

“How about a drink, Robbie?”

“I’m afraid I can’t, sir. My wife and I are
going out tonight. She organized something with this friend of hers
and if I show up late she’ll murder me.” Sergeant Kang paused and
looked down at his hands. “Sorry, sir. I didn’t mean any disrespect
to—”

“I know you didn’t, Sergeant. Go on home.
We’ll see where we are tomorrow morning. At least we ought to have
the preliminary-report from FMB and maybe we’ll even have an ID on
the body by then.”

“I hope so. Thank you, sir. Good night.”

***

After Sergeant Kang had gone, Inspector Tay
lit the Marlboro and sat smoking it in silence. He watched the
street and the crowds passing on the sidewalk and he wondered not
for the first time what the hell he was doing there with a police
warrant card in his pocket and the stink of death on his
clothes.

The only child of an American-born Chinese
man and a Singaporean-born Chinese woman, Tay had lived the whole
of his life in Singapore. His father had been an accountant, a
careful man who insisted that his family live modestly. When he
died suddenly of a heart attack, Tay’s mother was shocked to
discover she and her son had inherited a small fortune in real
estate. She hadn’t even known her husband had been buying
properties for two decades, let alone that his investments would
leave her and her son quite comfortably off for the rest of their
lives.

Regardless, she had quickly adjusted to the
concept. Within a year, she moved to New York and acquired what she
described to Tay as a Park Avenue duplex, although Tay noticed her
address was actually on East Ninety-Third Street. When his mother
married a widowed American investment banker who was a senior
partner at some investment firm the name of which Tay could never
quite remember, Tay was at the National University. He didn’t go to
New York for the wedding. Actually, he couldn’t quite recall having
been invited to New York for the wedding, but he supposed that was
beside the point. He told himself he would have stayed in Singapore
even if he had been invited.

By the time Tay graduated from university, he
had chosen to his mother’s complete horror to make his career in
police work rather than living the life of the idle well off she
preferred for him. Looking back later on that decision, Tay could
not for the life of him remember exactly why he had made it, but he
had stuck with it regardless. As a brighter-than-average recruit
who was dutiful and conscientious, he was soon promoted, first to
general investigative work, then to the Criminal Investigations
Department, and finally to the elite Special Investigations Section
of CID.

After all this time, Tay thought he should
have become accustomed to carnage and brutality, but he hadn’t.
Each time he was called to a murder scene he still recoiled; and
when he thought about it honestly, he knew exactly why that
was.

It was not the violence Tay saw before him
that caused the bile to rise in his throat at crime scenes. It was
the violence he feared he had not yet seen, the violence that might
even be hiding deep within himself. He had wondered many times if
he could consciously bring about the death of another person and he
had always answered that he could not. But he was not absolutely
certain that was true. Whenever he was in the presence of
unreasoning brutality, Tay found himself driven to examine his own
soul; and he did not much like what he found there. He did not know
exactly what it was, but he was sure of one thing. It made him
afraid.

When Tay was done with his cigarette, he
stubbed it out in the ashtray and pocketed both the box he had been
smoking and the unopened one. On impulse, he left the purple
lighter on the table next to the ashtray. He wasn’t entirely
certain why he did that. Perhaps it was some sort of gesture of
atonement for his weakness.

When Tay got outside he waved away the hotel
doorman and stood for a moment watching a jagged, gray-green cloud
rise in the west. It looked like a mountain range on the move, dark
and dense and frightening. It seemed to be on the verge of
overwhelming the city.

The sun was setting behind that seathing mass
of clouds and it looked to Tay as though it would never come up
again.

THE FIRST AND most important truth about
Singapore is this. It is hot. It is nasty, stinking, sweaty
hot.

Although it was barely six the next morning
when Tay opened his front door and stepped out onto his small
porch, he could already feel the heat rising. The air was so heavy
that the moisture was draining right out of it. Or maybe it was
raining. In Singapore, sometimes it was hard to tell the
difference.

Tay had been born in Singapore and he would
no doubt die in Singapore, but he had never come to an
accommodation with the savage heat and the sadistic humidity. If he
owned both Singapore and hell, he would rent out Singapore and live
in hell. How had people managed to survive there before air
conditioning was invented; and why had they even tried? He had
wondered about that for as long as he could remember and he still
had absolutely no idea.

A storm had hit early in the morning hours
and wakened Tay from a sleep so uneasy he almost welcomed the
intrusion. The thunder made it sound as if massed cannon were
shelling the city and the banana trees in his small garden had bent
back and forth in the swirling winds, swishing over his bedroom
windows like huge brushes against a snare drum. Sometime around six
o’clock he gave up trying to sleep and got up and dressed.

Samuel Tay was not an early riser. He did not
greet the new day cheerfully, anticipating the delights it might
hold in store for him. Instead, he welcomed it warily, resigned to
the new frustrations and the fresh disappointments it would surely
bring.

Coffee generally improved his disposition in
the morning, but this time it was so early that he doubted even it
would help. Nevertheless, he made some anyway and drank two cups
while he watched the BBC news channel on television. When he got
bored with the news and shut it off, he saw that he had been
absolutely right. The coffee hadn’t improved his disposition one
damn bit.

For nearly a half-hour, Tay successfully
avoided lighting a cigarette to go with his coffee, but then he
began to wonder who he was trying to impress with his restraint. He
found the trousers he had dropped on the floor the night before and
fished the open pack of Marlboros out of a front pocket. That was
when it came back to him he had abandoned the lighter in the
Marriott coffee shop in a gesture of moral atonement.

Why on earth had he done an idiotic thing
like that? Exactly whom was he trying to convince of his sincere
remorse and good character? Tay wondered briefly if he had matches
somewhere in the house, but knew he didn’t. He had thrown them all
away along with his cigarettes the last time he had quit
smoking.

He finally gave up, both on the cigarette and
on trying to make himself feel better, and decided just to get
dressed and go to work. Maybe he would even walk part of the way
and stop somewhere for breakfast. Eat a nice greasy banana fritter.
Maybe two. Yes, that sounded good. A sugar fix and another hit of
caffeine. That might be just the ticket.

Standing now on his front porch, he saw the
storm had passed and it had stopped raining. Or maybe it hadn’t.
Tay eyed the sky with mistrust and took an umbrella out of the
stand next to his door. Still, if this was rain, it had none of the
drive, none of the interest it had shown during the night. The
clouds seemed old and tired. Tay knew exactly how they felt.

He walked down to Orchard Road, crossed over,
and followed it west toward the Mandarin Hotel until he came to a
Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf. He bought a double espresso and two
banana fritters and sat down at a table on which someone had
thoughtfully abandoned a copy of that morning’s
Straits
Times
. Taking a long pull on the espresso and biting into the
first of the fritters, he glanced around the room. He was surprised
to see it was almost full.

Four schoolgirls in green skirts and while
blouses giggled and squealed in a back corner as they exchanged
confidences. A darksuited man with a round Chinese face sat at a
small table holding his coffee in one hand while with the other he
methodically emptied his briefcase onto the table and then repacked
it again. Three men and a woman conversed earnestly at a table
covered with files, papers, cell phones, and empty coffee cups. Two
young women came in wearing hip-hugging jeans slung so low that
they threatened, or promised depending on your point of view, to
reveal all at any moment.

What were all those people doing here? Tay
wondered. Were so many people generally up and around Singapore at
this godforsaken hour? Surely not.

Tay finished the first banana fritter and
realized that, against all odds, he was beginning to feel
moderately human. He took another long hit from the espresso, then
started on the second fritter and unfolded
The Straits
Times
.

As a rule Tay did not like reading newspapers
in the morning. He thought their everlasting recitations of the
tragedies, atrocities, and scandals that had occurred while he
slept were a poor recommendation for the coming day, the one just
past having turned out so revoltingly. If he read a newspaper in
the morning at all, he tried to stick strictly to the sports pages
and the supermarket ads. He found they passed the time without
awakening his sense of foreboding.

This morning however, he had something
specific on his mind. Public Affairs had told
The Straits
Times
that the woman at the Marriott was probably a suicide and
had asked them not to make too much of it and embarrass the hotel
unnecessarily. There was nothing on the front page and Tay perked
up. Apparently, the paper had bought it. Thank Christ for small
favors.

Tay kept turning the pages until he
eventually found the story. It was the third item in the Case File
section, played after a piece about a policeman who had been using
a hidden camera to take pictures up women’s skirts and another
piece about a raid on a night club in Mohamed Sultan Road that
resulted in twenty-three kids being arrested on drug charges. Well,
that explained it. Who wanted to dig into something as mundane as a
suicide at the Marriott when there were so many more interesting
things going on around town? He refolded the paper, put it down,
and let his eyes drift while he finished his espresso.

For the first time Tay noticed a woman at a
table in the back. She was reading a copy of the
International
Herald Tribune
and sipping from a large takeaway cup without a
lid. She wore a black suit that looked expensive and small
gold-rimmed glasses pushed halfway down her nose. As he watched
her, she uncrossed her long legs and then re-crossed them in the
opposite direction. He allowed his eyes to linger long enough to
register three things. The woman was extraordinarily attractive;
she was young enough without being too young; and perhaps most
important, she was alone.

Tay instinctively began a more detailed
assessment of his prospects, but before he could get very far, the
woman lifted her gaze from the
IHT
and looked straight at
him. Their eyes met and, following a brief moment of appraisal, she
smiled. It appeared to be a genuine smile, even warm, but it caught
Tay completely off guard. To mask his embarrassment, he glanced
quickly around the room as if he was looking for someone, then put
down his cup, stood up, and walked quickly away. After he was
safely out on the sidewalk, he began almost immediately to wonder
why he had done such a thing. Surely returning the woman’s smile
wouldn’t have been unreasonable, would it? Particularly not since
the woman had smiled at him first.

You’re a damned idiot, Sam Tay. Pass up
too many opportunities like that and one of these days there won’t
be any more
.

Shaking his head at the depths of his own
foolishness, Tay crossed Orchard Road to a 7-Eleven where he bought
another disposable lighter, a blue one this time, and a fresh pack
of Marlboro Reds. Then he walked about a hundred yards back up
Orchard Road to the nearest taxi stand. The line was blessedly
short and within ten minutes he was in the back seat of a Comfort
taxi on his way to the Police Cantonment Complex on New Bridge
Road.