The figure on the bed did not move. Joyce froze in horror.
Was she dead?
The young woman started feverishly biting her fingernails, unable to take another step forward. She felt an overpowering urge to back out to the balcony, to disappear and let someone else take responsibility for this problem.
No! she told herself. Every second counts. Gathering her courage in both hands, she forced herself to move closer to the supine body. She passed her hand over the woman’s mouth and was relieved to find her still breathing. Then she waved her fingers over Madam Xu’s open eyes. Gradually, the dilated pupils drifted down and focused on her.
‘Phew! You’re not dead?’
Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed the telephone was off the hook, its handset dangling on the floor. Maybe the Chinese fortune-teller had had a call that had given her a terrible shock.
‘What is it? Have you had some bad news or something?’
Getting no response, Joyce gingerly picked up the handset to see if anyone was still on the line. ‘Hello? Anyone there?’
‘Hello mees. Who arr you?’ said a male voice with a Filipino accent.
‘My name’s Joyce. I’m travelling with Madam Xu. I’m afraid she’s not very well at the moment. Can we call you back?’
‘I guess you can.’
‘So, like—who are you?’
‘Metro Police Chief Deputy Director Danilo de los Reyes.’
‘Oh. Okay. Metro Police—ah. Maybe I’ll get a pen. Hang on a mo —’ She glanced around for paper and something to write with and was pleased to find both on the bedside table. ‘Okay, I gotta pen, can you say it again?’
‘Metro Police Chief Deputy Director Danilo de los Reyes.’
She started to repeat his name back to him as she wedged the handset between her shoulder and ear. ‘Metro. Police. Chief.’
‘Deputy Director Danilo de los Reyes.’
‘Deputy. Di—this pen doesn’t work at all. Sorry.’ She angrily scribbled blank circles on the page. Bloody useless.
‘Maybe I’ll just remember it. Deputy Daniel, Director de Los Angeles—er?’
‘Metro Police Ch—never mind. My men are in a car heading to the hotel. They’ll bring you to me. What’s wrong with Madam Xu?’ Wuss wrong weed Madam Zoo?
‘Don’t know. I think she’s fainted. What d’you say to her? Did you give her really bad news or something?’
‘I suppose I did. I told her that Gloria Del Rosario was found dead last night.’
Joyce gasped and sat down on the edge of the bed. She felt that all the breath had been sucked out of her.
‘Miss?’
‘Geez. That’s—that’s—terrible.’
‘Yes,’ said the police officer. ‘It is, as you say, terrible. Especially since, I understand, your companion Madam Xu and a man named Wong were among the last people to see her. We have her appointments book and they visited her apartment yesterday morning, correct?’
‘Yes, they did. Me too. I’m kind of an assistant. We spent most of the day there.’
‘Fine. Well, I guess I need to tell you not to leave town. We’ll need statements.’
‘We’re supposed to be on a flight at lunchtime.’
‘Cancel it. My men are on their way. They’ll be at your hotel in a few minutes. We’ll want to take you all down to the station for some questions. I’m afraid I can’t tell you how long it will take. But I want you to stay in Manila for a few days. Very important.’
‘How did she . . . ?’
‘Jumped off the roof of the newspaper building early yesterday evening. Goodbye.’
Joyce, too shocked to reply, slowly lowered the phone.
Wong, like Madam Xu, reacted badly to the news, and appeared to be in physical pain. His eyes were screwed up into wrinkled ovals and his whole face had acquired a shar-pei look about it. The fortune-teller was moving in a zombie-like way, breathing slowly and heavily as if she was in a trance.
Joyce was also kind of shell-shocked too—but her reaction was not nearly as dramatic as that of her companions. She was more surprised than upset. She wondered if there was something wrong with her. It was very worrying. I am incapable of feeling emotions. I have been permanently damaged by my upbringing. I need serious therapy. I should have got some chocolate out of the mini-bar.
‘You guys are really shook up, aren’t you?’ she said as the three of them sat in the back of a police car on the way to the station.
Wong bowed his head once in agreement.
‘I know how you feel. It’s kinda weird to spend some time with someone and then to have them like die. It’s just so, like, utterly, totally, utterly . . .’ She was lost for words. Mind you, the truth was that they hadn’t spent much time with Gloria Del Rosario—barely ten minutes. They had met her at the apartment at 11 am the previous day. She had shown them in, given them coffee, and then gone off to work. They had spent the day at the apartment, and left two written reports for her.
‘The end. It’s the end.’
Joyce looked at Madam Xu, who had spoken in a watery croak of misery.
‘End of what?’
The older woman turned sad eyes to her. ‘End of my career.’
‘Oh. Why?’
‘Think about it, young lady. I did a fortune-telling session for a client yesterday. I told her all sorts of things about her future. That very evening she dies. No one will trust me ever again. This is very bad. I have been exposed as a charlatan. I am ruined.’
Wong agreed. ‘Yes. Very bad. For me too, same reason. Very, very bad. Too bad.’
Joyce nodded. ‘I see. A kind of credibility thing. People won’t hire us. If this gets out.’
Wong shook his head in amazement. ‘How come I did not see this? Ho gwaai. Too strange. This is marketing disaster. Maybe we have to change price strategy. Very bad news for me.’
Joyce began to realise that her companions were not remotely concerned about their client, but were worried only about how much damage the death would do to their earning power.
As the police car jerked through the Manila traffic, surprise gave way to a kind of anger: How dare people hold them in any way responsible for what happened! How could they have foretold Ms Del Rosario’s death from a visit to her flat yesterday? All they had done was analyse the influences from various directions and make some adjustments to the placing of furniture in the room. The woman had never actually asked whether she was going to die that night. She had hardly even been there. Had she asked, Wong or Madam Xu could— perhaps—have told her.
Madam Xu opened her eyes. ‘I think I will change my name,’ she said.
‘Gypsy Rose,’ suggested Joyce, although she had no idea where the idea came from.
The interview with the Manila police was painful but mercifully short. The three visitors from Singapore were separated and individually grilled for three-quarters of an hour about all their contacts with their client Gloria Del Rosario—from initial phone calls and faxes, to the time spent in her office, to what they could remember about the conversations they had with her.
Afterwards, Wong and McQuinnie were reunited, given cups of extremely bad coffee and made to fill in several forms. They were informed by one of the officers that Madame Xu had fainted during questioning, and had been taken back to the hotel, where a relative of hers who lived in Ermita had been summoned to tend to her.
They were then summarily dismissed.
But they had walked not more than 50 metres along the shabby third-floor corridor when a young policewoman raced after them, her shoes clattering loudly on the linoleum floor. She summoned them back with beckoning fingers, like someone trying to persuade a cat to come down off a roof. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘The boss wants to see you. Something’s turned up.’
Her shoes still clacking, she led them to a dingy office occupied by the senior officer Joyce had spoken to on the phone.
Metro Police Chief Deputy Director Danilo de los Reyes was a man in a white shirt and
dark tie who seemed much too short for his lengthy name. As they entered, he quickly switched off some music, silencing Rey Valera in the middle of a passion-filled yelp. The officer spun back in his black leather executive chair to greet them.
‘Hello, Mister Wong, Miss McQuinnie, sit down. I just want to ask you a few questions.’
Over the next ten minutes, de los Reyes went over the same material as had the earlier questioners, focusing mainly on Ms Del Rosario’s mood and state of mind the previous day. But certain of his inquiries indicated that he suspected foul play. He asked repeatedly whether she had talked of having enemies, or expressed fears about the future.
He seemed frustrated by the lack of information he received. As he spoke, he squirmed in his chair, which made a series of squeaks. ‘She did have enemies, we know. All journalists who take the kind of risks she took have enemies. She didn’t pull her punches in her columns.’
No reply to this comment came from the visitors. Wong, who answered monosyllabically or not at all, still looked drained and taciturn.
Joyce, who had seen a lot of movies, felt obliged to ask the obvious question. ‘I know what you’re thinking! You’re like, did she jump or was she pushed?’
De los Reyes twirled his thin moustache like a Victorian villain.
‘Could be.’ He spoke carelessly, as if this was just one of a myriad theories running through his mind.
‘Like bizarre, totally.’
‘Look at this.’ The police officer flicked a sheet of paper over to his two guests, who were sitting directly opposite his desk in a pair of low wooden chairs, like a pair of naughty schoolchildren sent to see the headmaster.
‘Here we have the final letter that Gloria sent. Short and sweet, as you can see. “Goodbye Ferdinand. My final, final deadline approaches. It’s been good. See you on the other side.” Ferdinand refers to Ferdinand Cabigon, the editor of the newspaper.’
‘Geez,’ said Joyce. ‘A real live suicide note. Maybe.’
De los Reyes corrected her: ‘A suicide email. Sent on the office intranet minutes before she went up to the top of the building and then, er, descended.’
‘So she did top herself.’
‘That may be what that email suggests. That’s what we were given last night, when we were called to the building after she, er, was found on the ground near the rear entrance. Suicide was our initial thought but we sealed off her office last night, in preparation for a more rigorous examination this morning. We had a team of people going through her things, and we found this other letter a little while ago.’
He held up another piece of paper—this time in a plastic bag.
It occurred to Joyce that Danilo de los Reyes was the only person she had ever met who pronounced the ‘r’ in the word letter.
She leaned forwards to look at a small, handwritten note on lined paper torn from a notebook. She read the words out loud for the benefit of Wong: “You should have just printed a correction, bitch. But you refused. I’m sorry, Glowgirl, but that means you get your comeuppance. You’ve written your last column.”’
She fell back into her seat. ‘Glowgirl?’
‘Ms Del Rosario’s nickname. The envelope was postmarked Thursday, so was likely to have arrived on her desk yesterday. It looks like a threat. Later that night, she was found dead. It may be that the two things are connected.’
Silence returned to the room.
The geomancer coughed, coming to life. He scratched the straggly hairs on his chin. ‘A correction,’ he said, interested. ‘So she wrote some bad stuff about someone. In the newspaper. Someone want a correction. She say no. So someone push her off roof?’
De los Reyes nodded. ‘That may become one of the hypotheses.’ Evidently, he was a cautious man.
‘But why she write suicide note then?’
‘Maybe it wasn’t a suicide note. Maybe she just knew that someone was going to kill her, and it was a goodbye. Or maybe it refers to something else—maybe she was planning to change career or something. Who knows?’
Joyce thought hard. Gloria was a columnist facing threats. She had been involved in some sort of dispute that involved her writings.
‘I got it!’ she said. ‘You just go through all the stuff in her articles for the last few days and see who she really pissed off. Bang—you got him! Easy!’ How well-suited she was for detective work, she thought proudly.
De los Reyes grinned. ‘Ah, to have the sweet confidence of youth,’ he said. ‘For you, life is so seemple.’
Joyce was initially pleased at this comment, but then noticed that his smile was the one adults give to cute, small children. A blush began to form on her cheeks.
‘In real life, it’s a bit harder than that,’ de los Reyes continued, his hand idly straying towards the pause button on his stereo which would enable Rey Valera to finish his yelp. Remembering himself, he withdrew his hand.
‘Ms Del Rosario wrote a sort of daily snippets column, so would regularly insult three or four or five people a day. Given that the column ran six days a week, we are talking about hundreds, if not a thousand aggrieved members of the community a year. And it’s quite possible that someone was taking revenge for something she said about them last year, or the year before.’
Joyce thought about this. ‘Naah,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘I don’t think so.’
The officer stiffened and lifted his eyebrows, as if to say: You’re telling me my job?
‘I know lots of grudgy sort of people,’ continued Joyce, anxious to establish herself as equal to any law-enforcement professional in the room. ‘My dad’s one. He holds grudges against people for years. And sometimes he does get back at them ages later. But if he’s going to take like physical action against them, he does it straight away. He once hit me so hard I flew across the room and hit the wall and broke a tooth.’
Danilo de los Reyes gave her a tentative nod. ‘Not everyone is like your daddy, Miss. But having said that, you’re probably right. People who commit crimes of violence very often are reacting by impulse. They are fired by anger. It is possible, of course, to plan a murder a year or two in advance, but such murders are a small minority of the total universe of murders.’
‘Universe of murders?’ Wong did not like the sound of that phrase.
‘I was using the phrase in the mathematical sense, referring to the group of all murders, which we could then divide into smaller sub-sets, such as planned murders and impulse murders.’
De los Reyes’ eyes strayed back to the stereo. Clearly he felt a desperate need to resume his fix of romantic music. ‘We’d like you two and Madam, er, Zoo, to stay in town, if you can. We may need to call on you again.’
‘Cannot,’ Wong said. ‘Must go home to Singapore. No work here. Plenty work there.’
If we don’t lose it all, Joyce thought to herself.
‘I’m sorry,’ said de los Reyes. ‘You must stay. You can cooperate by choice or we can require you to stay.’
Six minutes later, the two of them stepped out of the police station into a hot, grey, Manila day. The sky was overcast. A tooting, multi-coloured jeepney shot past, over-filled with tired families carrying shopping bags.
The pair stood on the front step of the police station, stunned and indecisive. What to do? Their assignment was over, and Wong and Xu’s careers were at stake—but it was not clear whether there was anything at all they could do about it.
Out of the corner of her eye, Joyce noticed a luxurious red car parked 50 metres down the road start to move. The vehicle, a Ford Fairlane Ghia Sedan, glided along the kerb and stopped almost silently in front of them.
‘Give you a lift?’ said a black-garbed man in sunglasses. His cheeks were pockmarked and there was a scar through his left eyebrow.
Wong glared nervously at him and took a step back.
‘No, thank you,’ Joyce said, instantly haughty at the driver’s cheek.
‘Get in, Mr Wong,’ the driver said. ‘And you, miss. There’s money in it. My boss
needs to consult you about something. We’ll make it worth your while.’ He flicked off his sunglasses, which were the rimless, wraparound type from The Matrix movies. ‘I’m a friend of Gloria’s. Santos is my name.’ He was in his mid-forties, and the hair just above each of his ears was grey.
‘Certainly not,’ Joyce said.
‘How much?’ Wong said.
‘Hundred thousand,’ said Santos.
‘Dollars?’
‘Get real. Pesos.’
Wong’s eyes flickered as he did the maths in his head. ‘Pesos two hundred thousand. For one day consultation.’
Santos appeared to be considering this. ‘Okay, two hundred thousand. But for three days consultation.’
‘Two hundred thousand for two days,’ said the geomancer. ‘Plus expenses. Final offer, best price.’
‘Done.’
To Joyce’s intense disgust, Wong climbed into the stranger’s car and she—strongly against her instincts—found herself with no choice but to follow suit.
The office of the chief executive editor of the Philippine Daily Sun would have been dull and seedy, but was redeemed by the framed newspapers—all with dramatic, banner headlines— that lined the walls.
Wong and McQuinnie were ushered into the room by a tearful middle-aged woman named Baby Encarnacion-Salocan, who introduced herself as the editor’s secretary. Despite her first name, she was at least in her late forties, if not fifties.
‘Please sit down. Mr Cabigon will be here in a minute,’ she said, sniffing. Turning to go, she brushed against the editor’s desk and a pile of papers slumped to the floor. Joyce dropped to her feet to pick them up. ‘I’ll do it.’
‘Thank you dear,’ she said. ‘My eyes are so red I can’t see.’
‘No worries, Ms En—er . . .’
‘You can call me Baby.’
‘Oh! Right! Thanks, er, Baby.’
She went back to her desk outside the office and sat there, quietly weeping.
Joyce watched her curiously, and felt more than ever that she was a freak, somehow born without the ability to feel emotions.
The feng shui master stared at the newspapers on the walls and noticed that none of the headlines made any sense at all.
The Feng Shui Detective's Casebook Page 23
