The Ambassador's wife ist-1

by Jake Needham

  “I understand that perfectly, sir.”

  All at once, as if he had just thought of something far more important he had to deal with, the OC leaned forward and scribbled a note on a pad that was in front of him. When he was done, he glanced up.

  “That’s all, Sam. You can go now.”

  IT had been easy enough for Sergeant Kang to find out when DeSouza returned to Singapore and equally easy to find out where he lived. Over the weekend Kang quietly recruited five other CID-SIS detectives and organized the six of them into two-man teams. The first team picked up DeSouza on Monday morning when he left home to go to the American embassy. All six men continued working their other cases as usual, but in their off-hours they threw a blanket over DeSouza, covering him in twelve-hour shifts.

  For nearly a week, DeSouza did absolutely nothing of interest to anyone.

  And then he did something that interested everyone.

  FORTY-ONE

  “Yeah?” Tay mumbled. It was hardly the most courteous way to answer a telephone, and certainly not the most articulate, but it was the middle of the fucking night and he figured it would do.

  “Sir? Is that you?”

  “Robbie?”

  “Yes, sir. Did I wake you, sir?”

  “What time is it?”

  “About one, sir.”

  “Does that answer your question?”

  “Sorry?” A pause. “Oh, I see. Right.”

  Sergeant Kang cleared his throat.

  “I’m sorry to bother you, sir, but I thought you should know DeSouza’s on the move and we’re not sure what to make of it.”

  Tay sat up. He rubbed at his eyes with his free hand and swung his feet to the floor.

  “Talk to me, Robbie.”

  “Well, sir, Danny Ong and Sergeant Lee are with DeSouza tonight and Danny just called me. A taxi picked DeSouza up at his house about midnight and took him to the Hard Rock Cafe, but instead of going inside he walked up Cuscaden Road to Orchard. When he got to Orchard, he crossed over and-”

  “I don’t need a fucking travelogue, Sergeant. Just tell me where DeSouza went.”

  “To Orchard Towers, sir.”

  Tay struggled to get his mind around that piece of information, but right off the top of his head it suggested nothing significant to him. “The office building?” he asked after a moment.

  “Well, sir, it’s not exactly an office building, at least not at night. You know what I mean, don’t you, sir?”

  “Not really.”

  “Seriously, sir?”

  “For fuck’s sake, Robbie. It’s the middle of the goddamned night and I’m not in the mood for games.”

  “Yes, sir. Orchard Towers, sir. The first few floors are a shopping center during the day, but at night there are bars there that mostly tourists go to. Sometimes they call it Four Floors. It’s across the street from the Hilton-”

  “I know where Orchard Towers is and I know what it is. But what did you just call it?”

  “Four Floors, sir. That’s short for Four Floors of Whores. Some people call it that.”

  “Well, I don’t call it that. I call it Orchard Towers.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Tay thought for a moment, perhaps a bit more slowly than normal given the time of night, but in a way that at least bore some resemblance to normal brain activity.

  “How long did he stay?” Tay asked.

  “He’s still there, sir. Been inside about a half-hour.”

  Tay chewed at his lip as he thought about that.

  Okay, so DeSouza likes girls and he’s making the rounds of a few bars where a good number of them are available for rent. So what? Still, up until now DeSouza hasn’t done anything but go to work at the embassy and back to his house. He doesn’t seem much like a party boy and, if he’s not, then what is he up to?

  “Are either of your men inside with him, Robbie?”

  “No, sir. One is covering the front and the other is covering the back. They’re afraid if they go inside they might lose him. The building has four floors-”

  “So I gather.”

  “The bars in there are all so packed with tourists that the prime minister could be in there and you wouldn’t see him unless you just happen to stumble over him.”

  Maybe DeSouza has made the surveillance and is trying to shake it. Orchard Towers certainly sounds like a good place to do it. On the other hand, maybe he’s meeting someone and wants to surround himself with enough hubbub to make it unlikely anyone will spot them.

  “What should we do, sir?”

  “Give me a moment, Robbie. I’m thinking as fast as I can at one o’clock in the morning.”

  There was another possibility, of course, and it was the one that gave Tay the most pause.

  Maybe DeSouza had killed all three women himself. Maybe he had found out that he liked killing women. Maybe he was a budding serial killer out trolling for his next victim.

  “Can DeSouza get out of the building without your men picking him up?”

  “I don’t think so, sir. As far as I know, there’s just one front entrance and one back entrance and we’ve got both covered.”

  “Right then. Leave your men where they are, but you get over there yourself and get inside. See if you can find DeSouza and see what he’s up to.”

  There was a pause. “Me, sir?”

  “Yes, Robbie. You.”

  There was another pause, longer this time.

  “Yes, sir,” Kang muttered.

  Tay ignored Kang’s unhappiness. “Where are the men you have outside the building?” he asked.

  “Danny’s covering the front. He’s at a table at the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf right across from the main entrance.”

  “Who’s at the back?”

  “Sergeant Lee. He’s in a place called 3 Monkeys. It’s a little cafe right by the back steps.”

  Tay’s eyes searched for and eventually found the clock on his bedside table. Ten minutes after one in the morning. Good Lord. He was getting way too old for this kind of thing.

  “I’ll be there in twenty minutes. At the back entrance. Let Lee know I’m coming.”

  “What do you think DeSouza’s up to, sir?”

  “I have no idea, Robbie. No goddamned idea at all.”

  Sergeant Kang had been inside Orchard Towers exactly twice before. The first time was on the night of his twenty-first birthday and the less said about that the better. The second time was four or five years ago when his best friend from school moved to Australia and gave himself a going-away party. Come to think of it, perhaps it would be better to forget about that occasion as well.

  Orchard Towers was not a place where Singaporeans customarily went. It was a place for foreigners, and even then only male foreigners. All those foreign men went to Orchard Towers looking for Singaporean women, of course, but what they found instead was almost every other kind of woman on earth. Thai women, Filipino women, Cambodian women, Vietnamese women, Malay women, Indonesian women, Chinese women, Japanese women, and even a few Russian and Latin American women. They also found not a few women at Orchard Towers who looked a whole lot better than most of the others but weren’t actually women at all. Singapore had been famous for that sort of thing for generations.

  Orchard Towers was not large, but its focus was single-minded. Every floor was lined with narrow bars bearing names like Naughty Girl, Bongo Bar, Club Romeo, and Queens Disco. Throngs of men drifted from one bar to another and, as the doors opened and closed, the clashing sounds of different music flooded the atrium with a painful din.

  Sergeant Kang rode the escalators from the front entrance on Orchard Road all the way up through the atrium to the fourth floor to get his bearings. At the top, Kang stuck his head into a bar called the Crazy Horse. The place looked like a half-darkened school hall. Several women danced on a small stage at one end and there was a pool table at the other. The rest of the room was in darkness, but there was enough light for Kang to see the place was packed with people. A
t a glance it looked as if the women outnumbered the men, but most of the men were middle-aged Caucasians and Kang could see he would never find DeSouza in a crowd like this unless he ran straight into him.

  He glanced at his watch. One forty-five. Who the hell were all these people? Didn’t they sleep at night like everybody else?

  Kang backed out of the Crazy Horse and circled the atrium until he found a dead spot in the uproar and leaned back against a pillar. Pulling out his phone, he dialed Tay, who answered on the first ring.

  “I’m here, Robbie. With Lee in the cafe at the back.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You find DeSouza yet?”

  “Uh…no, sir. It’s a mob scene in here.”

  “At two o’clock in the morning?”

  “Wall-to-wall people, sir, and all of them who aren’t women look more or less like DeSouza. Even some of them who are women look like DeSouza.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It was just a little joke, sir.”

  “I see. You told a joke.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Tay didn’t say anything else. Kang thought about waiting him out, but he knew that would be a waste of time.

  “I’ll start going through these places one by one, sir,” Kang continued, “but unless I get awfully lucky, there’s not much hope.”

  “I don’t want to lose this guy, Robbie. And you really don’t want to be the one to lose him for me.”

  “Regardless, sir, I doubt I’m going to find him in here. Your best bet is to sit on both exits until DeSouza comes out and pick him up then.”

  Then Kang heard another voice speaking from the other end of the phone.

  “Where?” Tay said to whoever it was.

  The voice spoke again and after a pause Tay responded, “I see him.”

  “Robbie,” Tay spoke quickly, “where is your car?”

  “In the car park, sir. The one just beside the building.”

  “Get it. DeSouza just came out.”

  FORTY-TWO

  “He’s going to the taxi stand, sir,” Sergeant Lee said.

  “Yes, I see him,” Tay nodded. “He’s with that tall woman in the red dress.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Of course he is. I can see him plainly. He’s with that woman.”

  “No sir, what I actually meant, sir, is…well…”

  “What the hell are you trying to say, Sergeant?”

  “That’s not a woman, sir.”

  Tay glanced briefly at Sergeant Lee, then back at the person with whom DeSouza was walking. She was wearing a dark red, kneelength skirt with a matching red bolero jacket, a white blouse, black stockings, and expensive-looking red pumps. Her dark hair was cut short and frosted with silver highlights, and when she glanced over her shoulder for a moment, Tay saw the face of an attractive and elegant woman who looked to be in her late twenties.

  “You’re out of your fucking mind,” Tay said after his inspection was complete.

  “Uh…no, sir. That’s a bapok. A shim.”

  “A what?”

  “Shim, sir. A she-him. Orchard Towers is where most of them hang out.”

  Tay took another look, but saw nothing that caused him to change his mind. “That can’t be a man, Sergeant.”

  “It is, sir. Really, it is.”

  Tay thought of asking Lee why he was so sure, then decided he might not want to know.

  “So DeSouza’s gay?” Tay asked instead.

  “No, sir. He wouldn’t be gay.”

  Tay shot a sharp look at Sergeant Lee. “Didn’t you just tell me that’s a man he’s leaving this place with?”

  “Yes, sir. But gay men aren’t attracted to shims. Gay men are attracted to men. The men who go with shims are straight men. They like shims because they’re so feminine.”

  Tay was having difficulty getting his mind around what he was hearing. Lucinda Lim told him that Elizabeth Munson wasn’t gay regardless of the fact that she slept with other women. Now Sergeant Lee was telling him that men who picked up other men — other men who dressed like women, to be sure, but still men — weren’t gay either.

  Tay accepted that very few things in this world were certain. Still, the division of the human species into males and females and the separation of human sexual attraction into gay and straight seemed to him to be clear enough. Were there actually shades of gray in both matters that he had completely missed? Surely not. Surely, even in a world apparently turned enthusiastically relativistic in nearly all matters of belief and conviction, at least this single principle of physiological, if not moral, certainty still held true. There were men and there were women, and there were straights and there were gays. And that was that.

  Or perhaps not.

  DeSouza and his companion joined the line at the taxi stand and Tay continued to study them. He still thought Sergeant Lee was probably pulling his leg, but he resolved to start thinking of whoever that might be with DeSouza in gender-neutral terms just in case. There were a dozen or more people in front of them in the taxi line and not many taxis at that hour so it looked as if they might have to wait for a while. That was a break for Tay, since all at once he had a great deal to think about and very little time in which to do it.

  If DeSouza really was the stone-cold murderer of three women, Tay could hardly let him pick up somebody in a bar and just walk off into the night with them, could he? Of course, Tay didn’t have any real evidence that DeSouza had killed anyone, and this person with whom he was walking away into the night might not be a woman. Still, did DeSouza know he might not have picked up a woman and, if he didn’t know, how was he going to react when he found out? Tay really couldn’t work out where any of that left him.

  There was another possibility Tay couldn’t ignore either. This might be the very break they had been waiting for. Perhaps DeSouza wasn’t a killer trolling for his next victim. Perhaps he had chosen this way to make contact with someone who could tie the whole case together for them. After all, there was the chance that both Munson and Rooney had been gay, wasn’t there? That might take the case in all sorts of directions and to all sorts of places where Tay’s apparently limited experience with human sexuality left him on very shaky ground. Couldn’t this woman, or man, with DeSouza somehow be connected with the case he was trying to build? Perhaps she, or he, could.

  But then maybe none of this had anything to do with Tay’s investigation at all. Maybe DeSouza was just a lonely, middle-aged man out looking for sex on a dull Tuesday night and this was the companion he had chosen. If that were the case, it was absolutely none of Tay’s business who, or what, it might be, was it?

  His head was starting to hurt. The punch line of a joke he had once heard came to mind.

  What I really want is a one-armed lawyer. That way the bastard can’t say, “On the one hand, that might be true; but on the other hand, it might not be.”

  Tay was still trying to decide which hand to go with when his telephone rang.

  “I’ve got the car, sir,” Kang said. “Look to your right and you’ll see me.”

  Tay glanced over and saw Kang’s Toyota at the curb. Then he looked back to where DeSouza and his friend were working their way closer to the front of the taxi line. They were in luck. Kang’s car was facing the right direction. Whether DeSouza’s taxi went straight ahead down Claymore Road toward Orchard or made a U-turn and went the opposite direction, Kang could pull out and get behind it. Thank Christ for small favors.

  “Let’s go,” Tay said to Sergeant Lee and bolted for the Toyota.

  The sergeant dropped some bills on the table and took off right behind him.

  Tay would have preferred to circle around the building and approach the Toyota from the opposite direction, but there was no time and he was pretty sure that DeSouza wouldn’t spot him anyway. Still, he was careful to keep his face turned away from where DeSouza waited in the taxi line.

  “Did he see me, Robbie?” Tay asked as he slid into the passe
nger seat of the Toyota.

  “No, sir,” Kang said. “Too wrapped up in his girlfriend. God, that one’s a looker, isn’t she?”

  Tay was just trying to decide whether or not to say anything to Kang when Sergeant Lee caught up and slid into the back seat.

  “They’re getting into a taxi, sir,” Kang said from the driver’s seat as the door closed.

  Tay decided any discussion with Kang of modern sexuality in Singapore could wait for a more convenient time.

  “Don’t lose him, Robbie.”

  “No, sir. I won’t.”

  Tay leaned back in his seat as Sergeant Kang pulled away. He still didn’t have the first idea how to play this, but he supposed not much would happen as long as DeSouza and his friend were in a taxi. There wasn’t anything he could do now but wait and see where they went.

  THEY went to the Hoover Hotel on Balestier Road, not very far from Orchard Towers.

  When the taxi stopped at the hotel’s entrance, Kang pulled to the curb about fifty yards away and cut his lights. Tay and the two sergeants watched in silence as DeSouza and his companion got out of the taxi and went into the hotel.

  “A lot of the girls live there, sir,” Sergeant Lee said.

  Tay twisted around and looked at him in the back seat. “Girls?”

  “Well…” the sergeant hesitated. “It’s the term most people use for them.”

  “What are you talking about?” Kang asked.

  “DeSouza’s friend,” Tay told him. “She’s a chim.”

  “Shim, sir,” Lee corrected him.

  “What friend?” Kang asked.

  “The one he just went into the hotel with,” Tay said.

  Sergeant Kang’s face slackened. “You’re joking,” he said.

  Kang looked from Tay to Lee and back again, but neither of them said a word.