Crime Scene: Singapore

by Stephen Leather

  The more difficult part of this case was how we were going to close it. I knew we couldn’t kill him in any obvious manner. If he ended up clearly murdered, suspicion would fall immediately on Glenda. She’d have to go through long periods of police interrogation, court appearances, all that crap. Though she was an admirably hard bitch, I didn’t know if she could withstand a heavy police grilling. Also, the insurance companies might balk on paying out, maybe draw things out in court even longer.

  No, we had to make this truly look like an accident, or death by natural causes. Luckily, Mr Wee was old enough to suddenly keel over without causing people to hoist their eyebrows too high. We just had to find the way to make it all look unsuspicious.

  Over the next two weeks, I tracked Stanley Wee frequently, figuring out where he went, how he did things. I also discussed his health with Glenda, usually while in bed. I wanted to see what conditions he might have, what sort of sudden illness he might be prone to. If Wee was going to pop off just like that, it had to be from something his doctor had warned him about. And then, I had to find a way to help him pop off from that condition.

  Which is why I found myself doing all sorts of research. I burrowed through more arcane reading material than in that last semester before I dropped out of law school. I had to find a good, believable accident that we could stage or some fatal health blip that we could arrange.

  If I had been this determined when I was at uni, I probably would have finished, taken my degree in law and become a lawyer. And then I’d probably be defending some fool like me, I told myself in an aside.

  I did a lot of the research at this Internet café across from Raffles City. I didn’t want to take any chance of the authorities being able to connect the dots between me, that research and the sudden departure of Stanley Wee.

  But even in the cocoon of anonymity that those Internet cafés promise, I had to be careful. This is Singapore after all, and I suspect that a flashing light goes off somewhere if you go in and google ‘Ways to kill someone and make it look like an accident’. So I went through all sorts of twists and leaps to find what I wanted. Some of my research I did at the National Library. A few times, I would spend two hours at the café and the next three hours in the stacks of the Nat.

  I’d quickly scratched the all too obvious solutions, like making hubby a hit-and-run victim as he crossed the street. These are the sort of deaths that arrive gift-wrapped at the door of police with a tag reading ‘Highly suspicious’. But the first one I did scribble down as a possibility was a variation on another old standard: the tumble down the steps.

  The way I had it, we would grease up some steps, have him do a Humpty Dumpty, then use a syringe to shoot some alcohol down his gullet. Later, we’d clean off the greased step. This would not be my first choice, but I thought it was nice as an option, a possible back up. Still, I needed to come up with some better options.

  One afternoon while I was doing my library detail and really tired, about to call it a day, suddenly a short paragraph pretty much leaped off the page at me. I read it a second time, then a third, and other threads of possibilities started coming together in a grand weave. Here was the perfect solution: it brought together a great way to stage a fake fatal accident and a plausible method for making it look like a natural, health-related death.

  Now I just needed to assemble the various elements to make it totally possible. And I found that easier to do than I thought it would be.

  Let me say I was proud as hell of myself for coming up with this plan and contacted Glenda almost immediately. I said I had something important I had to show her. She suggested we hold off for a few days, until her husband flew off to Taiwan on a business trip. Then she wouldn’t have to worry about contacting him or being home by any specific time. I started getting horny just hearing her mention that last bit.

  Three days later, at 10.16 in the morning, she called. We arranged to meet near my place. About nine hours later, she climbed into my car and we went back to my apartment.

  She looked so fucking irresistible that evening. She had on a dark blue dress with a white, frilly collar. She was made up beautifully. I started telling her about all my research and my practical assembly of the goods, but halfway through my Tuesday doings, she suddenly stretched her hand out and put it to my lips. ‘I want you,’ she whispered. ‘I’ve been wanting you so bad these last few days. Let’s make love. We can talk about all these other things later. They’ll wait.’

  She didn’t get a big fight with me on that proposal. A minute later, we were in the bedroom, two minutes after that in the bed, naked. And it was fantastic. I felt like I was the luckiest stiff on the planet. Yes, pun intended.

  A half an hour later, we were back in the kitchen nook having coffee and going over what I was sure was a brilliant plan. I brought out my jacket, pulled out a shadow-blue handkerchief, unfolded it and carefully spread it out on the table between the coffee cups and the sugar bowl.

  ‘What’s this?’ she asked, not unexpectedly.

  ‘It’s the instrument we use to wipe up this whole matter.’

  She kept staring down at it, as if there was something there in the cloth itself she was missing. ‘What? You’re going to strangle him with that? Or stuff it down his throat and choke him to death?’

  ‘Nothing so difficult.’ I filled the pregnant pause with a big grin. ‘But we also need this to finish the matter.’ I had pulled out a small green vial and placed that next to the handkerchief.

  ‘And this is …?’

  ‘A very potent chemical compound. It’s called … well, I need a pronunciation guide just to come up with an approximation. The only thing we really need to know is that when Stanley inhales it for just maybe ten seconds, he will go into something resembling a coronary or a seizure. Something not at all unlikely for a guy of his age and ruthless disregard for his own wellbeing. Now the seizure itself would not necessarily be fatal, but we will see to it that he has it while close to a heavy piece of furniture.’

  ‘Like one of those horrendous, macho desks he has in his office.’

  I nodded. ‘Precisely. He will then fall backwards, hit his head hard against said piece of macho furniture and it’s all over. Stanley rolls out the final credits, and you are free of him forever. Death will have done you part. And it’s all natural causes.’

  Glenda sat up straight and gave me this big, high-beamed smile. ‘We’re really going to be able to do this, aren’t we? We’re really going to get rid of him?’

  This made me stop for just a moment and reconsider. The last week and a half, it had all been a kind of game, like those video games kids play. Now I had to face up to the fact that what I was planning was a murder. A murder. I was really going to be accomplice to a most serious crime, ending the life of another human being. Accomplice, hell; I was going to be the main perpetrator.

  ‘We are going to do it, aren’t we?’ She then slid her leg all the way under the table and ran her foot up my leg, from the ankle to the knee. She then ran it back down again, stroking the leg in a wonderful near-masturbatory manner. And she accompanied this with a pleading look, like a child asking whether she was going to get that very special Christmas present this year. I couldn’t say no.

  I couldn’t say yes either, so I just nodded. I then looked more deeply into those alluring eyes than I’d ever done before and nodded again, resolutely. The eyes led the rest of her face in regaining the smile. ‘Thank god! I’m going to be rid of him. I think I may just fall in love with you!’

  I didn’t need to hear that, but it sort of sealed the deal.

  I smirked proudly: this fall-and-head-slam against the furniture seemed like a perfect arrangement, especially as Glenda had once explained that her husband’s taste in furniture ran towards strong, heavy desks and tables.

  ‘And where did you get the chemical?’ she asked as she shifted her chair and grabbed me around the elbow.

  ‘A chemist I know from another case. He works for one of these
big pharmaceutical places. Very smart guy. And I did him a really big favour once.’

  ‘What? You discovered his wife was cheating on him?’

  I paused and swallowed. ‘No. I didn’t discover that he was cheating on her, even though I caught him in the act.’ She gave a frown of confusion. ‘I decided to let him off with a warning.’ I shrugged. ‘He was a nice guy. I didn’t think it was right to serve up his genitals on a plate, especially since his wife was part of the problem.’

  I thought Glenda would be annoyed to hear this; you know, female solidarity and all that crap. Instead, she gave me this nice, warm smile. It probably proved to her that I had a feel for moral ambiguity and sometimes placed something else above duty and money.

  Anyway, back to dispatching Stanley Wee. Now we just had to fall back into watchful waiting. We had to spring a couple of traps and see which one the rat went to first. But somehow, I had to meet up with him at his place of real business, then overpower him, force the handkerchief soaked with chemical compound against his mouth and nose, then slam his head hard against the desk. And it had to be done right. No forensics team would buy the tale that he had slipped once, tried to get up, slipped and slammed his head a second, and then maybe a third time.

  I finally got in touch with Wee’s office (from an untraceable landline phone) and arranged a meeting for three evenings later. He set it up for his second office, the one at the edge of Chinatown. Perfect spot for a murder, I thought. I was starting to feel really good about this project.

  A half an hour before our scheduled meeting, I was parked on Club Street, keeping an eye on Mr Wee, who was in a bar building up some vigour for our assignation. Clouds were pulling in from the east and it looked like a nasty rain coming. Not before the murder, I was hoping, as it’s a pain in the butt tailing someone in a heavy rain. OK, we had that appointment, but that didn’t mean he would show up.

  I was sitting there too nervous to even put on my audio book. I again checked to see that the vial was secure in its box, up straight, stopper in tight. I reached over, folded and unfolded the handkerchief for about the fifth time that evening.

  Staring out my window, I started cursing Wee for not coming out and heading back to his office a little bit early. I wanted to get on with this. I had to admit … I was scared about what I was about to do, terrified really. I mean, I was bigger than Wee, stronger than him and about twenty years younger than him. But things can always go wrong. You never know with these older, flabby types. He might go into panic, start flailing wildly, and land a lucky jab to the ribs. Or poke to the balls. Sometimes that flab can pack a lot of force. I had to be careful and good.

  Then it struck me: as scared as I was about anything going the least bit wrong, I felt so … so incredibly alive. And that’s when it truly sank in: The money, the sex with Glenda, all that was great … but the hook that sank deep in my soul and pulled me in, made me love this assignment, was that fantastic charge I got from it.

  Before Glenda, my work had become one long stream of chronic boredom, relieved by some laughs and amusement. I was truly burnt out before she entered my life. The fact that she was the most gorgeous women I’d ever met just made everything that much better, that much easier. But it was the return of the thrill, the thrill I got in the first months, maybe the first year of my career as a private eye. That was now back; back stronger than I’d ever remembered it, in fact.

  Sitting there, I finally grasped this quintessential truth: I was going through with this insane mandate because it made me again know what it meant to be alive and to love what I was doing, and to know how long I had missed those feelings.

  When I peeked quickly into the rearview mirror, I saw that there was this jowl-to-jowl smile slapped on my face. But then I noticed something else, and I was slapped back to reality. I had been so hopped up by this adrenaline surge lately that I had let my usual caution slip. And that was a foolish thing to do, especially as I was pursuing this case solo. It struck me that I’d been ignoring one of the prime rules of private detectives: I hadn’t been watching my own back.

  I hauled out my pocket mirror and started looking down the street in the other direction, behind me. And that’s when I saw a very familiar scowl-grey Honda parked on the other side of the street, about four cars down. I peered harder into the sideview and I knew I was right: it was Damien Ong, my main competitor, but somebody who was so way behind me in skills, expertise and experience. So what the hell was he doing in an obvious stakeout on the same street as me?

  I looked closer, as close as I could. This was really a great coincidence: Singapore’s two best private eyes on two different cases on the same night, on the same street. And then the painfully obvious hit me over the head: this wasn’t two different cases. We were both there at the same time because our cases were intimately connected.

  It was one of two possibilities at play here: either Glenda had hired Ong too, because she didn’t quite trust me to do the job right … or Ong was there trailing me. I was leaning towards the former explanation, as that was the easiest to live with. But I needed to get a better idea what was going on here.

  I first reached up and loosened my car light so that it wouldn’t flick on when I opened the door. Then I slipped down in the seat, slid over to the other side, opened the passenger’s door and slowly crawled out. I closed the door behind me and, still crouched down low, started making my way back down the street. When I was about twenty metres behind Ong, but on the other side, I scurried across the street to his side. As I started to make my way back up, luck gave me another big pucker: I saw Ong slide over to the passenger side of his car and start looking intently at something on the other side of the street. I knew immediately what his problem was: he couldn’t see his prey—i.e., me—any longer.

  I had carefully made my way to the car in back of his when Ong, obviously concerned, suddenly opened the door and slipped out. He took a few sneak-steps in the direction of my car and started twisting his neck, trying to see what had happened to me without being all too obvious.

  He was so absorbed with finding his missing target that he didn’t notice someone slipping up behind him until I was there right in back of him. I loved that moment, and every second of the next few minutes to follow.

  I tapped him on the shoulder. ‘Excuse me, sir, can I be of some help? You look like you’ve lost something.’ He spun around with a look of absolute shock on his face. I returned that look with a big, triumphant smile. ‘Hi, Damien. How’s tricks?’

  He looked and at first sounded like he’d just swallowed a small animal. After he got over the initial shock, he tried to cover up everything. ‘Hey, Robert, what do you know! What a coincidence seeing you here.’

  ‘You think?’ I said. He pushed out a smile that hung limply to one side. Now I knew that I was absolutely right. This was no fucking coincidence. He was there on the same track as I was or he was tracking me. I still leaned towards the first theory and was suddenly as pissed off as I could be: he knew that I was out tracking Stanley Wee, but that bitch Glenda never let me know that there were two of us on this case.

  He then threw out a few lame explanations about why he was there, but I couldn’t even listen to what he was saying because I knew it was all lies. The one thing I was sure of was that tonight’s big finale was postponed indefinitely. I suddenly stopped his babble by telling him I had to go see a sick friend, then turned, trotted back to my car and took off.

  * * *

  When I turned the corner, I saw a dark KIA swing out of a parking spot and speed up till it was about a car’s length behind me. I knew this was one of Ong’s assistants, but I also knew that he used incompetents so as to save money. A quick U-turn at a traffic light about to turn red, then a quick swing down a side street and I was all alone again. Ong’s scout was probably sitting back at that light with his dick up his ass.

  I drove straight to Glenda’s office because I knew that’s where she’d be. (Yeah, she had her own office in Bukit T
imah, though she didn’t conduct any business there except trying to look busy.) On the way, I phoned and asked her to stay there so as to dispel all later suspicions. She promised me she would. I told her I’d call her as soon as I had some big news.

  When I got to her office and knocked on the door, she was there. ‘Just a minute,’ she called out. She probably thought it was the police or some medical personnel come to tell her that her husband had had a terrible accident. When she opened the door and saw me, she looked stunned. I pushed my way in and strode over to her desk. I plopped my ass on the shiny top and folded my arms tightly. Meanwhile, she closed the door and rushed over to me. But seeing my crossed arms and cross expression, she stopped about a foot away.

  ‘What is it, darling? What happened?’

  I think that was the first time she ever called me ‘darling’, but far from making me feel good, it only pissed me off more. ‘Mrs Lee, I would like to know just what the hell is going on here. And I want to know exactly what game you’re playing.’

  She looked baffled, so I explained about seeing Ong and confronting him, and being tailed by one of his associates, and … I said something nasty, which I now regret.

  Her look quickly passed from baffled to shocked. She swore she’d never heard of this guy Damien Ong and certainly had never hired him to do any work for her. I stared at her for about ten seconds, then realised she was telling the truth. Plus, it suddenly registered how shocked she was to see me there at the door. If Ong had also been working this case for her, he would certainly have phoned her to say I had suddenly shot off without waiting for her hubby to emerge and was probably on my way back to her.

  This was bad. This was worse than the first possibility. After apologising, I explained what this meant: that Ong was trailing me because somebody wanted me followed. She then asked if it was possible that anyone I knew would set Damien on me. I answered with a sour nod.