by Jake Needham
“You’re not joking,” he said. “Oh man, I would never have believed it.”
“Most of the shims come in from Thailand on tourist visas,” Lee said. “They work for a couple of weeks, then leave before their visas expire so they won’t have any trouble getting back in again. The money’s so good here they want to keep straight with the immigration people.”
“You mean we can’t do this kind of thing ourselves here in Singapore?” Tay asked. “We have to import them?”
“We’ve got some,” Lee shrugged, “but all the best-looking ones are Thai.”
“Why do you suppose that is?” Sergeant Kang asked.
“Gentlemen,” Tay said, “if it’s all the same to you, could we drop the subject? It seems to me that we’ve got our hands full here without trying to interpret the mystery of human sexuality at the same time.”
“Right, sir,” both sergeants responded almost in unison.
There was a small silence as the three men contemplated the front of the Hoover Hotel.
“What do you want to do now, sir?” Kang finally asked.
“I don’t know, but I’m worried about what DeSouza is up to. If he did kill Munson and Rooney…” Tay left the thought unfinished.
“You don’t have enough to bust in on them, sir,” Kang said. “You don’t have anything really. And if you do bust in, you’ll have to admit to the unauthorized surveillance and we’ll all be-”
“The implications have indeed occurred to me, thank you, Robbie.”
“Maybe they’ve just gone in there to talk anyway, sir,” Kang added, nodding toward the hotel.
Tay and Lee just looked at him.
“Well,” Kang muttered, “it’s possible, isn’t it?”
Tay scratched at his ear as he studied the hotel’s entrance.
“Anybody got a camera?” he asked.
“There ought to be one in the glove box,” Kang said. “What are you going to do with it?”
Tay opened the glove compartment. Rummaging around he found a small Minolta digital camera. He turned it on and Kang watched while he fiddled with the controls and made sure the battery was charged.
“You’re not thinking about going in there and taking pictures of those two together, are you, sir?” he asked.
“There are all sorts of things in this life I’d rather not see, Sergeant, and Tony DeSouza having sex with a man in a dress is definitely on that list.”
Taking the camera with him, Tay got out of the car and crossed the street to the opposite sidewalk. He made certain the flash was turned off and then he took several shots of the front of the hotel from different angles. After that he stood quietly in the shadows, thinking.
The main road had no pedestrian traffic at that hour at all, but Tay saw several people on the street that ran along the side of the hotel. Was there another access to the hotel over there? He lifted the camera again and squeezed off three more exposures that included the side street in the frame, although he had no idea what good that would do him.
When he returned to the Toyota, he bent down next to the open driver’s window and handed the camera to Sergeant Kang.
“Can you get some prints of these made first thing in the morning?”
“Right, sir. But why-”
“I don’t know,” Tay interrupted. “Just do it.”
Tay straightened up and fished a Marlboro out of his shirt pocket. Cupping a match carefully in his hand to block the frame, he lit it and leaned on the roof of the car with his forearms while he smoked.
Kang was right, of course. He had nothing on DeSouza but his instincts. If he went charging into the Hoover Hotel and just found two people having sex, whatever their respective genders actually were, the whole surveillance operation would unravel. He was willing to take responsibility for what he was doing. That wasn’t the problem since, after all, he was responsible. The difficulty was that Sergeant Kang and the other six men would share the responsibility with him. They didn’t deserve to be punished for their loyalty to him.
Tay smoked quietly for a few minutes. His every instinct told him DeSouza hadn’t taken his companion into the Hoover Hotel to commit another murder. Was he just rationalizing his unwillingness to move on DeSouza or did he really believe that? He supposed it didn’t really matter. If he turned out to be wrong and DeSouza was committing another brutal murder inside the Hoover Hotel right at that moment, he would live the rest of his life knowing he could have stopped it and didn’t.
Tay was just putting the Marlboro to his lips again when he saw DeSouza come out of the hotel’s front door. He quickly bent down behind the car and dropped the cigarette into the gutter.
“Bloody hell,” Kang whispered. “He’s done already?”
Tay glanced at his watch. DeSouza had been in the hotel less than ten minutes. Ten minutes might be long enough to murder someone, but it wasn’t long enough to clean up and stage a crime scene. And DeSouza wasn’t carrying anything out of the hotel with him. On the other hand, ten minutes wasn’t long enough to have sex either. At least, not if you were doing it right. So what in the world was going on?
“What do you want us to do, sir?” Kang asked.
“Keep him covered. This doesn’t change anything.”
“How about the girl?” Lee asked.
Tay looked at Sergeant Lee. The terminology was still giving him a lot of trouble.
“What about…” Tay hesitated, “her?”
“I meant, sir, do you want us to follow her when she comes out, too?”
Tay thought for a moment. “Who was the man covering Orchard Towers with you?” he asked Lee.
“Danny Ong, sir.”
“Right. Get out of the car here, Lee. Call Ong and have him come over and pick you up. When the girl comes out, you take her. Sergeant Kang can stay with DeSouza.”
“But, sir,” Kang asked, “don’t regulations require a female officer to deal with female suspects?”
“Sergeant Lee will explain that one to you, Robbie,”
Lee grinned and slid out of the back seat, joining Tay on the sidewalk. Tay glanced back toward the Hoover Hotel and saw DeSouza getting into a taxi. He slapped the Toyota’s roof with his open palm.
“Don’t lose him, Robbie.”
“What are you going to do, sir?” Kang asked.
“I’m going to go home,” Tay said.
Then he walked off into the night to look for a taxi.
FORTY-THREE
Tay woke early the next morning. He lay quietly for a while watching the watery light seep in around his bedroom drapes and listening to the thunder rumbling off in the distance.
He realized after a while that he had woken at such an unusual hour because of a thought that had been born in his mind while he slept. There, in the gray half-light of the beginning of the day, Tay examined his thought with the caution of a bomb squad cop inspecting an abandoned package.
Eventually he got up and opened the curtains. It had rained in the night and moisture gleamed from the long, drooping leaves of the banana trees outside his bedroom window. The sky was dull and gloomy, sucking up the morning light as quickly as the sun produced it.
A bird, Tay did not know what kind, sat on top of the brick wall at the back of his garden. The bird seemed to be looking straight at him, turning its head very slowly back and forth as if waiting for him to do something. But he did not know what he was supposed to do. Finally, the bird flew away, apparently bored with Tay’s indecisiveness. Tay knew exactly how the bird felt.
He put on a robe and went down to the kitchen to make some coffee. He wondered if his new-found thought would shortly fly away just like the bird, bored to death by his failure to act on it. But it did not fly away. So he drank a cup of coffee and examined it some more. Then he made two pieces of toast, buttered them, and ate both while standing over the sink and drinking another cup of coffee.
After he finished the toast and coffee, he realized nothing had changed. The thought remained clear in h
is mind and was beginning to burgeon into a fully-grown idea. It even seemed as if it had taken on a life separate from his and was watching him to see what he would do. He thought again of the bird on his garden wall and how it had been watching him when he opened his curtains.
Going back upstairs, Tay shaved, showered, and dressed. He walked up to Orchard Road and almost immediately found a taxi. Asking the driver to take him to the Cantonment Complex, he sat back and watched the city come to life around him. It was then, while he stood solitary watch over his city, that he at last allowed himself to contemplate his idea plainly. When he did so, when he reflected honestly on the enormity of what he was thinking, he was amazed to discover how little weight it placed on his soul.
And that, right there, told him all he really needed to know.
TAY had never been happy to be in his office early in the morning. In fact, in his entire life, he could not remember ever being happy to be anywhere early in the morning, other than of course at home in bed with the duvet pulled over his face.
This day, however, was different. Tay was glad to be in his office regardless of the hour. He could feel his adrenalin rising. He was coming to the end of the story, although he was far from certain what that end would turn out to be.
Closing his door, he made a few calls and left a few messages. There was not much more he could do until Sergeant Kang came in, so he leaned back in his chair and swung his feet up onto his desk. Stifling a yawn, he turned his head toward the window and contemplated a gray-brown patch of hazy sky. It was a posture he could only hope would somehow aid in the production of constructive thoughts.
He was still sitting there an hour or so later in exactly that same way when someone brought him a cup of coffee and a copy of the Straits Times. He had no interest in reading a newspaper and the coffee tasted terrible. Regardless, he sipped at it occasionally to break the monotony while he waited to see what might become of the telephone messages he had left.
It was nearly ten before his telephone buzzed. He took the call and had been speaking only briefly when Sergeant Kang knocked softly and stuck his head into the office.
“Sorry, sir. Didn’t realize you were on the phone.”
Tay covered the mouthpiece with his free hand. “Where did DeSouza go last night?”
“Straight home, sir. Didn’t leave again until this morning.”
“And the…girl? What happened with her?”
“Sergeant Lee said she came out about an hour after you left, sir. Went to another hotel over in Geylang where he found out she’s been living. She was alone.” Sergeant Kang hesitated a moment. “Should I be saying he or she, sir?”
Tay ignored Kang’s question.
“Why would she do that?” he asked instead. “A hooker and a john go to a hotel. The john leaves in ten minutes, but the hooker stays another hour. Does that make any sense to you?”
“Not really, sir. No.”
Tay sat for another moment, his hand still covering the telephone mouthpiece.
“Have you printed out those photographs from last night yet, Robbie?”
“I didn’t realize you were in any hurry, sir.”
“I didn’t realize I had to tell you to do it right away.”
Kang started to say something else, then thought better of it and merely bobbed his head and closed the door. When he came back twenty minutes later with eight 4x6 color prints, Tay had finished his telephone conversation and returned to contemplating the patch of sky outside his window.
“Here you go, sir,” Kang said as he put the photographs down on Tay’s desk. “This is all there were in the camera.”
Tay turned away from the window and picked up the photographs. Kang remained standing in front of the desk and tried his best not to yawn since he hadn’t gotten nearly enough sleep the night before. Tay slowly shuffled through the photographs once, and then he did it again, going more slowly the second time.
Kang couldn’t imagine what Tay was doing. There was nothing in any of the pictures that he could see other than the outside of the Hoover Hotel looking as dim and cheerless as it no doubt always looked in the middle of the night.
Tay made a third careful inspection of the eight photographs, then selected two and held them out to Kang.
“Can you do these over for me, Sergeant? I need them bigger, and can you brighten them up a little at the same time?”
“I imagine so, sir.”
Kang took the pictures and glanced at them. They were just as he had remembered: nothing but the outside of the Hoover Hotel. Both the front entrance and the side street were visible in the two photographs. There was even what looked like a dark and indistinguishable human figure walking next to the hotel, but nothing else.
“Our printer here can do up to 8x10s,” Kang said. “Will that be large enough, sir, or would you like me to send the camera to the lab and-”
“That’s fine. One copy of each please.” Tay handed Sergeant Kang the other six photographs. “Then get rid of these. I don’t want them left lying around.”
“Yes, sir. Anything else?”
Tay just shook his head and went back to studying the sky.
FORTY-FOUR
“This is the best I can do with them, sir,” Kang said when he returned fifteen minutes later. He put the two photographs down on Tay’s desk. “If you like, I could get one of the computer guys to take a look. They know a lot more about this stuff than-”
“No, I don’t want anyone else involved.”
Tay turned away from the window and picked up the photographs. He examined them carefully, comparing one to the other, and then he put them back on the desk.
“They’re fine,” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
“One other thing. Please thank the men for me and terminate the surveillance on DeSouza.”
“But, sir, I thought-”
“Do it immediately, please, Robbie. I want everyone pulled off right now.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Thank you. That’s all.”
Kang paused, but Tay said nothing else.
“Sir?”
Tay glanced up. “Yes?”
“What is this all about, sir?”
“What is what all about?”
“You know. These pictures, sir. They’re just pictures of the outside of a cheap hotel. What do they prove?”
Tay stirred slightly in his chair, but he remained silent.
“And now you’re telling me to stop the surveillance on DeSouza. We’ve all put a lot into this, sir, and we haven’t gotten anything yet.”
“We have enough.”
“What, sir? What do we have? And what did you mean about not involving anyone else? Involve anyone else in what, sir? I think I’m entitled to know.”
Tay shifted in his chair again. His eyes wandered the room for a while until, finding nowhere else to go, eventually came back to Kang.
“Sit down, Robbie. You’re right. You are entitled to know.”
Kang sat down, folded his arms, and waited. Tay leaned forward, resting his hands on the desk.
“I don’t want you to take any of the responsibility here, Robbie. I’m doing this on my own. It has to be that way.”
“Doing what, sir?”
“Look, Robbie, DeSouza’s the key to all this. Either he killed Munson and Rooney himself as well as Cally, or he knows who did. If I can get to him, I can find out which it is.”
“You’ve got no way to do that, sir.”
“I do now.” Tay tapped the photographs of the Hoover Hotel with his forefinger. “If I show him these, he’ll deal for the others.”
“What others? Where did you get other pictures?”
“I didn’t. There aren’t any other pictures.”
“Then you don’t have anything to deal with.”
“DeSouza won’t know that. I’m going to tell him that hooker was a plant, that I set him up and she…” Tay hesitated. “Or he, depending on how you want to look at it, took DeSo
uza to a rigged room. And now I’ve got photos.”
“He’ll never believe you.”
“He won’t be sure. He can’t be. But he’s not going to take any chances either. Pictures of him in bed with a man wearing a dress would end his FBI career. Worse, it would make him a laughing stock.”
“And just because you tell him you have those pictures you think he’ll tell you who killed the American ambassador’s wife? He may not even know.”
“He knows. And if he thinks there’s even a chance I really did set him up, that I actually do have pictures, he’ll deal for them. He can’t afford not to.”
Kang’s eyes widened noticeably, and then he swallowed once. “That’s blackmail, sir.”
“No, it isn’t. I don’t actually have any pictures.”
“Oh, come on, sir. It’s the same as.”
“Why does it matter?”
“You can’t blackmail a witness, sir. You’re a police officer.”
“Then enlighten me here, Robbie. What, in your opinion, is the job of a police officer?”
“It’s to make sure people obey the law by obeying the law ourselves.”
“Do you think obeying the law is more important than ensuring justice is done?”
Kang looked uncomfortable. He shifted his weight in the chair and cleared his throat.
“I’m no philosopher, sir. I just know this isn’t right.”
“I’m no philosopher either, Robbie, but somebody murdered three women. I’m going to find out who it was. DeSouza knows and I’m going to make him tell me. It’s just that simple.”
“What if he killed them? You don’t really think he’s going to confess just because you wave a couple of pictures of the Hoover Hotel at him, do you? That’s crazy.”
Tay didn’t say anything. He’d already had the same thought and pushed it aside.
“Look, sir-”
“What would you suggest I do then, Robbie? If you don’t like the way I’m going to play this, tell me what you’d do.”
“Well, sir, we could stay on DeSouza for a while longer. Maybe we’ll turn something up yet.”
“Like what?”
“Well…” Kang took a deep breath and let it out with a sigh. “I don’t know exactly, but something. If he knows who it was, maybe he’ll take us to them.”
