THE GIRL IN THE WINDOW (The Inspector Samuel Tay Novels Book 4)

by Jake Needham

  “Anything on the cause of death?” Tay asked.

  “It’s early days.”

  Tay gestured at the river. “Do you at least know if he was dead before he went in, or did all the shit in that water poison him?”

  “He was probably dead before he went in.”

  Tay nodded.

  “I’m reasonably certain the gunshot wound in the back of his head would have been fatal.”

  Tay was just taking a puff on his Marlboro and he choked on the smoke.

  “Gunshot wound?” he coughed.

  “Nine millimeter, I think. I can’t be certain until I get him back to Block Nine and open him up, but I don’t think there’s much doubt about it.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “You said that the last time I brought you a gunshot wound,” Dr. Hoi smiled. “I feel like we just keep having the same conversations over and over again, Sam.”

  Tay and Dr. Hoi had a case together once before that involved a gunshot wound. At first, Tay hadn’t believed her then either because firearms were rarely used in homicides in Singapore. He had seen hundreds of stabbings and beatings, but in his entire career he had seen less than two dozen gunshot deaths. Guns simply were not part of the culture in Singapore.

  “I didn’t expect that,” Tay said.

  “Neither did I. Somebody shot and dumped in the Singapore River? That’s one for the books.”

  Tay’s eyes drifted away to the young patrolman who had recognized him when he arrived. The boy looked so young and eager, and Tay couldn’t help but wonder how many misshapen lumps of flesh he would have to encounter before all the freshness was gone from his eyes. With his thumb and forefinger, Tay flicked his cigarette butt into the river.

  “Shame on you, Inspector Tay,” Dr. Hoi said. “That’s exactly why the river is so dirty.”

  “With all the crap that’s already in there, one more cigarette isn’t going to make any difference.”

  “I expected you to be a big supporter of improving Singapore’s environment, Sam, knowing your strong social consciousness.”

  Tay sneaked a look at Dr. Hoi’s face. Surely she was joking, but he couldn’t tell for sure so he said nothing.

  Dr. Hoi dumped her own cigarette butt into what was left of her coffee and Tay listened to it sizzle as it hit the liquid. He stared at the surface of the river, struggling to wipe from his mind the image of that mangled lump of flesh inside the blue plastic tent not twenty feet away.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THEY CLEARED THE crime scene quickly since it wasn’t really a crime scene. Nothing had really happened there. Somebody dragged the man’s body out of the river by the Alkaff Bridge, but he hadn’t been killed there. It seemed unlikely the body even went into the river there. Almost certainly it had drifted for a distance before it became wedged underneath the bridge, but they had no idea yet how far.

  The location to which they had been called was only a place where a lump of flesh almost unrecognizable as a human being lay on a patch of straggly grass underneath a blue plastic tent. Tay hated looking at it like that, but that was simply the way it was.

  When they got back in the car, Kang took Mohamed Sultan Road out to River Valley Road

  “Where to, sir?” he asked as they pulled up to the corner.

  The hard white light of Singapore was beginning its daily metamorphosis into the gentle twilight that was Tay’s favorite time of day to sit in his garden and smoke a Marlboro or two. His desk was reasonably clear, and what could he do about the body in the river with whatever was left of today anyway? Until they knew who their corpse was, or at least who their corpse used to be, he couldn’t do much of anything. Would the autopsy turn up something to help with the identification? It seemed doubtful, at least not without a major stroke of luck. Tay pictured the corpse’s fingertips gnawed away by crabs and shuddered slightly. Without fingerprints, it was going to be a struggle, and he doubted Dr. Hoi would produce an autopsy report for a day or two anyway.

  The more he thought about it, the more obvious the answer to Kang’s question became. Shuffling papers back at the Cantonment Complex would be even more pointless today than it usually was. And it was almost always completely pointless.

  “Drop me at home, Robbie. Then go home yourself. I don’t see what else we can do today.”

  Kang nodded and turned left.

  They drove in silence for a while, but then Kang shot a glance at Tay and cleared his throat.

  “There’s something I want to talk to you about, sir. It’s…uh, personal.”

  Tay shifted his eyes toward Kang. This didn’t sound like anything he wanted to hear. It really didn’t.

  “You see, sir…well, it’s like this. Lar and I are having a baby.”

  For a moment, Tay had absolutely no idea what Kang was talking about. He heard all the words Kang said, of course, but he couldn’t immediately arrange them in any way that made sense. Then he suddenly remembered: Lar was what Kang sometimes called his wife whose real name was Laura.

  They were having a baby? Why was Kang telling him about it?

  Kang had been Tay’s sergeant for eight or nine years now, but Tay knew next to nothing about Kang’s personal life. He had only met Laura once, or was it twice? How long had she and Kang been married? Tay had no idea. Did they have children already? He was pretty sure they didn’t, but he wasn’t absolutely certain.

  Tay liked Robbie Kang, and he relied on him and trusted him, but he couldn’t honestly say they were close friends. Well…he supposed the truth was that he didn’t have any close friends. He attached no significance to that. He certainly didn’t feel like it was a personal failing. It was just the way his life had worked out.

  “And here’s the thing, sir,” Kang rushed on before Tay could decide how he was expected to respond to Kang’s announcement. “Lar thinks our baby should have a godfather and…well, I was wondering, sir, if you would do that.”

  “Do what?” Tay asked, baffled once again as to what Kang was talking about.

  “We’d like you to be the baby’s godfather, sir. That is…if you’re willing.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You can’t be serious, Robbie.”

  Tay flinched at how clumsy he had been to put it like that and was immediately embarrassed. He shot a quick look at Kang.

  “What I meant, Robbie, is I can’t think of anybody on earth less suited to being a godfather than I am. It’s very nice of you to ask me, but surely you can find someone who would be a much better choice.”

  “I don’t think so, sir. We think you’d be great.”

  “Robbie, you’re forgetting I don’t like children. And children don’t like me.”

  “I think you’re exaggerating a little there, sir. And besides, you don’t ask someone to become a godfather to play with your kid. A godfather is someone a child can rely on as it grows up, someone you know your child can count on no matter what happens to you. And there isn’t anyone we would trust more with our child than you, sir. Lar and I both feel that way.”

  Tay was speechless. He had always been awkward in dealing with praise, not that he’d really had all that much practice at it, and Kang’s sudden declaration that he wanted to entrust his child to him left Tay totally flummoxed.

  He just stared out the window and said nothing. He really didn’t know what to say.

  “Sir?” Kang prompted after the silence had stretched out to a point at which it became awkward. “Will you do it?”

  “No one has ever asked me to do anything like this before, Robbie, and I just don’t know what to say.” Tay cleared his throat. “Let me have a day or two to think about it, will you?”

  “Take all the time you want, sir. I just want to say Lar and I would be honored if you would accept.”

  They rode in silence after that. Tay couldn’t imagine what Kang was thinking, but he hoped his hesitation hadn’t caused any offense. Tay simply didn’t know what to make of any of
this.

  When they were out on the street going about their business as police officers, Tay trusted Kang absolutely, but beyond that how well did they really know each other? They had certainly never reached the point where they confided in each other in a personal sense, and Tay knew they never would. That wasn’t Robbie’s fault; it was his. He simply wasn’t someone who felt comfortable confiding in other people.

  What’s more, he really couldn’t picture himself as the godfather to some little kid. What if he didn’t even like the kid? Or the kid didn’t like him? What would he do then?

  He would think about it for a couple of days, but he really couldn’t see it. He just couldn’t. He didn’t want to hurt Kang’s feelings when he turned him down so he would have to come up with an excuse of some kind. Maybe he could tell Kang he was dying of some horrible disease. No, that was clearly a stupid idea. Still, it was a step in the right direction.

  Tay looked around to see where they were. From here, Kang would have to take the long way around to get into the part of Emerald Hill Road where he lived. Tay loved his neighborhood, but sometimes the warren of one-way and dead-end streets that protected it from the rest of the city was a real nuisance. The only way in to Emerald Hill Road from the south was either to drive far to the north and circle back or to walk in from Orchard Road.

  When Tay was coming from this direction in a taxi he usually told the driver to drop him off on Orchard Road. It was less than a hundred yard walk from there through Peranakan Place, up into the bottom of Emerald Hill Road, and straight to his front gate.

  “No need to go the long way, Robbie. Just drop me on Orchard Road.”

  “It’s no bother, sir.”

  “I have to go to the Cold Storage anyway. I’ll only need to walk back later.”

  Tay had tossed out the business of going to his local market as an excuse so he wouldn’t have to argue with Kang about where to drop him off, but the moment the words were out of his mouth he remembered he had nothing at home for dinner and he certainly didn’t feel like going out to a restaurant. He was still carrying around in his head the image of that mangled mass of tissue and bone lying in the little blue tent, and now he needed to figure out how to extricate himself gracefully from this godfather business.

  With those two things banging together in his head, he would far rather be at home eating alone in his garden than out at some restaurant surrounded by people he didn’t know and probably wouldn’t like if he did.

  CHAPTER SIX

  IT WAS TOO late for the housewives and too early for the after work crowd so the Cold Storage Market wasn’t very crowded.

  Tay squatted down to reach the bottom shelf in aisle four and picked up a jar of Skippy Creamy Peanut Butter in one hand and a jar of P28 High Protein Peanut Spread in the other. He had barely begun pondering their respective merits when images of the corpse hauled out of the Singapore River began coming back to him again.

  Most people who lived in Singapore had no idea what went on in this city. Singapore was clean; Singapore was orderly; Singapore was safe; Singapore was a nice place to live. At least that’s what you said if you didn’t know what the cops knew. If you did know what the cops knew, you would have to take a shower about three times a day.

  Tay supposed the truth was that most people didn’t want to know what the cops knew. They complained about all the things people who lived in most cities complained about, but they didn’t want to think about what lived under the rocks. Under the rocks was where the maggots were, and the maggots were every working cop’s life, day in and day out.

  Why would Kang and his wife want to bring a child into this sort of world? It was none of his business, Tay knew, but he couldn’t help but wonder.

  Tay sometimes thought that was why he had never married. Never even had a real girlfriend, not really. He would go out to dinner with a woman and try to find a way to tell her he had almost been stabbed that afternoon, and she would be talking about all the trouble she was having getting her apartment repainted. A guy tries to sink a six-inch knife into your chest, and in the evening his dinner date wants to talk about how difficult it is to get exactly the right shade of green.

  Tay gave up thinking about it and went back to contemplating the two jars of peanut butter he was holding.

  The P28 High Protein Peanut Spread looked as if it were something he ought to try. Protein was good for him, wasn’t it? So surely high protein would be even better for him. He had regular conversations with himself about the benefits of exercise. Maybe that extra protein would be just what he needed to spur himself on to do something other than have those conversations.

  He did ride a bicycle for a few months. Well, to be entirely truthful he had ridden it two or three times and those two or three times were spread out over several months. Even that had been a while ago now and the only exercise he got these days was carrying his shopping home from the Cold Storage. He should be exercising a lot more, he told himself, but every time he thought about exercise he got a mysterious urge for a cigarette. And after he sat for a while and smoked his cigarette, the idea of engaging in vigorous exercise inevitably struck him as entirely inappropriate.

  Tay shifted his gaze to the Skippy Creamy Peanut Butter in his other hand. He had bought Skippy for years and never noticed it to be lacking in protein. A peanut was a peanut, wasn’t it? All that stuff about high protein on the P28 label was probably just bullshit. These days every food product was high-something or low-something. He didn’t understand half of it and was sure nobody else did either.

  Tay glanced at the prices on the two jars, saw that Skippy was half the price of the P28, and that settled it. He shoved the P28 High Protein Peanut Spread back on the shelf, lurched to his feet, and heard his knees crack. He had turned fifty not long ago and sometimes he felt every year of it. Getting old was shit.

  He selected a loaf of bread, a quart of vanilla ice cream, a couple of steaks, and packages of frozen carrots and peas. Then, overcome by guilt, he went to the produce section and picked out a head of iceberg lettuce, a few tomatoes, and a cucumber. Having a salad with his steak would be good for him, wouldn’t it? Of course it would, he told himself, so he grabbed the first bottle of dressing he saw and headed for the checkout counter. He didn’t even bother to read the label.

  Walking home with his groceries, Tay passed a bar called Number Five that was just down the road from him. It had a scattering of tables out front and as the last of the day drained into twilight it looked like such a pleasant place to sit and have a drink that he considered stopping.

  Before he had made up his mind, two women and a man, all of whom appeared to be in their twenties, swept past him and took over the last empty table. The women wore shorts and sandals with skimpy tops and they laughed loudly and talked with her hands and tossed their manes of long, shiny black hair while the guy nodded and smiled, no doubt amazed at his luck in being the object of both women’s attention.

  Enjoy it while it lasts, kid, Tay thought to himself. Because I’ll bet you it doesn’t last very long.

  Tay lived on Emerald Hill Road, a quiet dead-end street in a sleepy neighborhood of classic row houses. It was an area steeped in dignity and tranquility, yet it was barely a hundred yards from busy Orchard Road. Tay’s house was a three-story structure with a tiny front garden surrounded by a high wall of white-painted brick. In the back, through French doors from his living room, was another garden, this one surrounded by an even higher brick wall.

  When Tay got home, he dumped his groceries in the kitchen and got a bottle of John Powers Irish whiskey out of his small liquor cabinet. He had developed a taste for Irish whiskey a year or so back at the same time he developed a taste for a Dublin-born woman he met while standing in line at a bank. He no longer had a taste for the woman, but he still had a taste for the whiskey.

  He poured a couple of fingers into a heavy glass tumbler, added a little water from a pitcher in the refrigerator, and went looking for his cigarettes. When
he found them, he kicked off his loafers, walked out through the French doors in his stocking feet, and settled down at the teak table where he ate when the weather wasn’t too hot.

  Tay took a slow pull on his whiskey. When he shook a Marlboro out of the pack and lit it, he tilted his head back and watched the smoke rise in the air. The evening was still and the smoke lingered around him like the breath of banished ghosts.

  Tay had always loved dusk. It enveloped him in a calm as velvety as the nuzzle of a cat’s nose. Out over his garden wall, just above the roof of his neighbor’s house, he watched the green lights winking from the top of the Orchard Gateway Building to the south. After he reread The Great Gatsby a few years back, those green lights took on new meaning for a while, but it hadn’t lasted. It was simply too difficult to coax the same romance out of aircraft warnings lights on the roof of an office building that Scott Fitzgerald had coaxed out of that green light at the end of Daisy’s dock.

  Perhaps, Tay thought, that was why he was such a misfit in the modern world. He treasured stillness; he sought tranquility; he glimpsed eternity in the mundane. Yet he lived in an age that had little regard for any of those things. Perhaps he should have become a Buddhist monk instead of a policeman, but what could he do about that now?

  One thing he could do was sit and enjoy his cigarette and his whiskey in the twilight without fretting over the sorry state of mankind.

  And that was exactly what he was doing some fifteen minutes later when the bell at his front gate rang.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  SHE MADE TWO trips to the bathroom and once she got up to get herself another bottle of water and a PowerBar, but other than that she had been sitting almost immobile in the same straight chair for nearly eight hours now. She had been shifting her eyes continually back and forth between the entrance to the lobby of the Fortuna Hotel and the emergency exit on Serangoon Road, but she had seen nothing of any value to them.