Umbrella Man (9786167611204) (6 page)

The SAC lifted his index finger and pointed
it at Tay. “Watch it, Sam. I know you’ve just been through a major
trauma, and generally I give you a lot of latitude because you’ve
been around here so long, but I will not tolerate disrespect.”

Tay was so angry he couldn’t contain himself.
He stood up and pointed right back at the SAC.

“Why are you doing this to me, Chief?”

It’s not
me
, you idiot. It’s—”
Abruptly, the SAC stopped talking and looked away. “You’ve made a
lot of enemies, Sam.”

“Who are you talking about, sir?”

“This came straight from the Minister of Home
Affairs. You’re not to have any part in this investigation.”

“The minister? Why does he care about me one
way or another?”

“It’s not just him. He’s —” Again the SAC
stopped talking. He stood up and turned until he was facing the
windows with his back to Tay. Then he clasped his hands behind him.
“It’s the Americans, too, Sam.”

“What have the Americans got to do with
this?”

“We need their help with the forensics, and
we need access to the intelligence they have. They’re all over this
investigation. The American ambassador told the Minister of Home
Affairs they didn’t want you involved in any way.”

“He did?”

“Yes.”

“And the minister agreed to that?”

“Yes. He did.”

When Tay had led the investigation of the
American woman whose nude body had been found at the Singapore
Marriott, he knew he hadn’t made any friends at the American
embassy, but he hadn’t thought that mattered very much. It was his
job to solve crimes, not to make friends, certainly not out of a
bunch of fat, overpaid American government employees. And he had
solved that murder just like he had solved so many before, even
when it was obvious a lot of people didn’t want him to solve it. He
had figured the acrimony would blow over soon enough. Apparently he
had been wrong.

“I’m sorry, Sam. My hands are tied.”

Tay said nothing. He didn’t think the SAC
looked all that sorry actually, but he decided he wouldn’t
accomplish anything by saying so.

“So what’s it going to be, Sam? Do you want
to take a few weeks off. Or do you want me to assign you and
Sergeant Kang to that body at the Woodlands HDB estate?

THE WOODLANDS HDB estate is on the far north
edge of Singapore right up against the narrow Jahor Strait that
separates Singapore from Malaysia. The jungle is so thick monkeys
emerge from it and sit by the side of the road waiting to be
fed.

Singaporeans have an expression for those
parts of their tiny island state that are like the Woodlands,
places far removed from the tourist and financial districts most of
the world recognizes. They call them the heartland. Tay had never
liked the expression very much. He always thought it sounded
patronizing.

Tay looked out the window and thought about
the distance between where they were going and where he lived. It
took less than an hour to drive to the Woodlands from Emerald Hill,
but it was really a lot further away than that.

A government agency called the Housing
Development Board has been relentlessly throwing up pre-planned,
pre-packaged villages all over Singapore for as long as Tay could
remember, and every one of them looks more or less the same.
Identical apartment towers are designated by block numbers and
clumped into groups with community facilities between them. Every
estate has a mosque, a Chinese temple, a Christian church, a
community club, a coffee shop, a mini-mart, and a school.

Everything is immaculate. The buildings are
all freshly painted and the landscaping is perfectly trimmed,
mostly by Indian and Bangladeshi workers permitted into the country
on short-term work visas to do the manual labor Singaporeans won’t
do.

Well planned and perfectly maintained, Tay
thought the make-believe villages of the heartland had nearly
everything, everything that is except a heart. They were
storehouses for people, not real places where the daily messiness
of bona fide human life was found. Tay hated them.

***

Sergeant Kang turned off Woodlands Avenue at
the Shell Station onto Woodlands Street. He followed it to
Woodlands Drive, then turned into Woodlands Circle. A few hundred
yards up, he pulled to the curb behind a blue and white fast
response car parked at one of the apartment buildings.

The building was about a dozen stories tall
and looked absolutely identical in height, color, and design to all
the other buildings Tay had seen from the car window over the last
ten minutes. The concrete facade was painted in alternating colors
of gray, yellow, and green, the color of each level having been
chosen at what appeared to be random, but if the idea behind either
the colors or the apparent randomness of their distribution was to
try to make the buildings appear more cheerful, Tay thought that
was stupid. It was laughably typical of what he would expect from
the sort of people who seemed to plan everything in Singapore these
days.

“Where are we going?” he asked Sergeant
Kang.

“There, sir.”

Kang pointed to the building closest to them.
On the fourth level at the corner was a large sign that said 374.
That was the block number of the building and Tay wondered if that
meant there were at least 374 identical apartment buildings in the
Woodlands. He certainly hoped not, but he knew it was at least
possible.

Tay got out of the car and stood for a moment
waiting for Sergeant Kang to lock up. They were parked in a circle
surrounded by eight identical high-rise buildings. There were half
a dozen cars and a few motorcycles parked on the street, but there
was no sign of human activity anywhere. No music on the breeze, no
conversation in the distance, no flashes of movement. The place was
as barren and sterile as anywhere Tay could ever remember being. If
it hadn’t been for the laundry drying on a few of the metal poles
extending horizontally above each balcony, Tay would have wondered
if anyone lived here at all.

If the heartland has a heartland
, he
thought,
this is it.

***

Two uniformed patrolmen were waiting outside
the door to the seventh floor apartment. One had a notebook and pen
and appeared to have been allotted the responsibility of
maintaining a list of everyone attending the scene. That couldn’t
have been a very difficult task since Tay heard no sound from
beyond the doorway to indicate anyone else was there. The other
patrolman had an even easier job. His role was to keep the curious
away from the crime scene, but since the hallway contained not
another soul, curious or otherwise, he didn’t have anything to do
either.

Tay reminded himself they didn’t actually
know yet whether this was a crime scene at all. Perhaps some poor
bastard had simply arrived at the end of his allotted time on earth
exactly as everyone eventually did. He supposed he would find out
soon enough.

“Who discovered the body?” Tay addressed the
question to the air about halfway between the two patrolmen and
allowed himself a moment of private speculation as to which would
respond.

“Two kids, sir.”

It was the one on the left holding the
notebook who answered his question. Tay had guessed wrong.

“Kids?”

“Yes, sir. They live down there.” The
patrolman point at another apartment near the end of the hall.
“They said they were playing out here and found the door open. So
they went in. Their mother called us when they told her what they’d
found.”

“They just went in?”

The patrolman shrugged. “Kids. What can you
do?”

“Have you interviewed the mother?” Kang
asked.

“Yes, sir. She phoned it in after her kids
told her what they’d found. She hasn’t been in the apartment.”

“Does she know who lives here?”

The patrolman glanced at his notebook. “She
says it’s owned by a man named Ching Wo Hin. He’s
eighty-three.”

“Which probably explains why he passed
away.”

“It’s not Mr. Ching in there, sir. At least
not according to the woman down the hall. She says his wife died
about a year ago and he’s been staying with his daughter in Los
Angeles ever since. The daughter had all his personal things packed
and shipped to LA. The neighbor says the apartment is empty.”

“Apparently not,” Tay said. “Has Forensic
Management Branch been here yet?”

“No, sir.”

Tay reached out and took the patrolman’s
notebook. He glanced at the page where he had listed all the people
who had attended the crime scene so far. It was blank.

“
No
one
has been here?”

“No, sir. You’re the first.”

Tay handed the notebook back to the
patrolman.

“What time did the call come in?” he
asked.

The patrolman flipped back a page in his
notebook. “I’m not sure, sir, but we got the radio call at 8:08
am.”

Kang immediately looked at his watch. Tay
didn’t bother.

“Good Lord, sir,” Kang blurted, “that was
almost two hours ago.”

The second patrolman, the one who had yet to
speak, cleared his throat. “It’s the bombings, sir. There’s nobody
left for things like this but us. Everybody who’s important has
been thrown into that case.”

Then the young cop realized what he had said.
He fell silent and examined his shoes.

“I’m sorry, sir,” he mumbled, “ I didn’t
mean…well, I wasn’t saying that—”

“Never mind, patrolman,” Tay interrupted.
“You’re absolutely right, of course. No reason to be embarrassed
for saying it out loud.”

Tay looked at Kang. “Okay, let’s see what
we’ve got here.”

***

The apartment was a small, shabby, and
sparsely furnished one-bedroom. Tay’s first thought was it was a
sad place to die, but then his second thought was there probably
wasn’t a happy place to die.

Opposite the front door just underneath the
windows, two worn easy chairs upholstered in some kind of rough
brown fabric faced each other over a low wooden table that was
empty. On the left wall was a sagging couch upholstered in a
matching fabric with two small wooden tables in front of it which
were duplicates of the table between the two chairs. The couch
faced a black metal television stand across the room, and on the
stand was an old-fashioned tube-type television with a coil of
black cable snaking its way to a plug in the corner.

The room had been searched. Tay had no doubt
about that. He could feel it in the air. But there wasn’t much
there and whoever had done it hadn’t spent much time at the job.
Maybe they found what they were looking for right away and didn’t
need to take any longer. Or maybe they just weren’t very good at
searching a room.

The bedroom door was next to the television
and opposite the couch. Tay eyed it warily.

It was well known around CID that Tay avoided
dead bodies whenever he could, which was an uncommon trait among
men who investigated homicides. Tay’s distaste for encountering
corpses had embarrassed him for many years, but he had discovered
to his surprise that aging came with at least one worthwhile
benefit: he didn’t give much of a toss what anyone thought about
him anymore. Tay had seen all kinds of dead bodies during his more
than twenty years in CID and he couldn’t stand to look at them
anymore. It was just that simple. The sight of dead bodies made him
nauseous.

Tay stood for a moment looking at the door to
the bedroom. It was closed and God only knew what was beyond it.
Sergeant Kang waited quietly and said nothing. He knew exactly what
Tay was thinking. They had been at a lot of crime scenes together
and Tay had thought pretty much the same thing at every one of
them.

Were they about to confront some new horror
that would finally master him, Tay wondered? Would this be the day
his nausea would finally overcome him and he would endure the
embarrassment of throwing up right there at the crime scene?

He should have asked the patrolman to tell
him the state of the deceased. At least then he wouldn’t be
suffering like this wondering what he was about to see. But then he
had been so annoyed at the truth of what the young patrolman had
said about everyone who was important having been assigned to the
bombings that he forgot. And he could hardly turn around now and go
back outside and ask, could he? No, of course he couldn’t.

Inspector Tay took a deep breath, stepped
over to the bedroom door, and pushed at it with the knuckles of his
right hand.

He and Kang stood quietly as the door swung
open.

TAY DIDN’T SEE a body at first, but the
rancid smell of death in the air left no doubt there one was in
there somewhere.

There was something else in the air, too, and
Tay couldn’t immediately put a name to it. It was like a buzzing
sound too distant to hear but close enough for the vibrations to be
felt. Whatever it was, it produced in Tay a vague pricking on the
skin. He felt as if he was about to put his hand close to a flame
he could not see.

The bedroom was as sparsely furnished as the
living room. The double bed had no headboard and was covered in a
brown bedspread with odd tufts of yarn sticking out in no
discernible pattern. It looked lumpy and uncomfortable to Tay and
he doubted anyone had slept on it for some time. There was a table
next to the bed with a lamp on it, and against the wall nearest the
door was a bureau with a mirror mounted above it. Both the bureau
and the bedside table were made of some kind of dark brown wood and
looked old fashioned and beaten up.

In the wall to his right there were two
doors, both closed. Tay assumed one was a closet and the other was
the bathroom. Between the doors there was a single straight-back
wooden chair with a light-colored cane seat.