Umbrella Man (9786167611204)

by Needham, Jake

  “Which probably explains why he passed away.”

  “It’s not Mr. Ching in there, sir. At least not according to the woman down the hall. She says his wife died about a year ago and he’s been staying with his daughter in Los Angeles ever since. The daughter had all his personal things packed and shipped to LA. The neighbor says the apartment is empty.”

  “Apparently not,” Tay said. “Has Forensic Management Branch been here yet?”

  “No, sir.”

  Tay reached out and took the patrolman’s notebook. He glanced at the page where he had listed all the people who had attended the crime scene so far. It was blank.

  “No one has been here?”

  “No, sir. You’re the first.”

  Tay handed the notebook back to the patrolman.

  “What time did the call come in?” he asked.

  The patrolman flipped back a page in his notebook. “I’m not sure, sir, but we got the radio call at 8:08 am.”

  Kang immediately looked at his watch. Tay didn’t bother.

  “Good Lord, sir,” Kang blurted, “that was almost two hours ago.”

  The second patrolman, the one who had yet to speak, cleared his throat. “It’s the bombings, sir. There’s nobody left for things like this but us. Everybody who’s important has been thrown into that case.”

  Then the young cop realized what he had said. He fell silent and examined his shoes.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” he mumbled, “ I didn’t mean…well, I wasn’t saying that—”

  “Never mind, patrolman,” Tay interrupted. “You’re absolutely right, of course. No reason to be embarrassed for saying it out loud.”

  Tay looked at Kang. “Okay, let’s see what we’ve got here.”

  ***

  The apartment was a small, shabby, and sparsely furnished one-bedroom. Tay’s first thought was it was a sad place to die, but then his second thought was there probably wasn’t a happy place to die.

  Opposite the front door just underneath the windows, two worn easy chairs upholstered in some kind of rough brown fabric faced each other over a low wooden table that was empty. On the left wall was a sagging couch upholstered in a matching fabric with two small wooden tables in front of it which were duplicates of the table between the two chairs. The couch faced a black metal television stand across the room, and on the stand was an old-fashioned tube-type television with a coil of black cable snaking its way to a plug in the corner.

  The room had been searched. Tay had no doubt about that. He could feel it in the air. But there wasn’t much there and whoever had done it hadn’t spent much time at the job. Maybe they found what they were looking for right away and didn’t need to take any longer. Or maybe they just weren’t very good at searching a room.

  The bedroom door was next to the television and opposite the couch. Tay eyed it warily.

  It was well known around CID that Tay avoided dead bodies whenever he could, which was an uncommon trait among men who investigated homicides. Tay’s distaste for encountering corpses had embarrassed him for many years, but he had discovered to his surprise that aging came with at least one worthwhile benefit: he didn’t give much of a toss what anyone thought about him anymore. Tay had seen all kinds of dead bodies during his more than twenty years in CID and he couldn’t stand to look at them anymore. It was just that simple. The sight of dead bodies made him nauseous.

  Tay stood for a moment looking at the door to the bedroom. It was closed and God only knew what was beyond it. Sergeant Kang waited quietly and said nothing. He knew exactly what Tay was thinking. They had been at a lot of crime scenes together and Tay had thought pretty much the same thing at every one of them.

  Were they about to confront some new horror that would finally master him, Tay wondered? Would this be the day his nausea would finally overcome him and he would endure the embarrassment of throwing up right there at the crime scene?

  He should have asked the patrolman to tell him the state of the deceased. At least then he wouldn’t be suffering like this wondering what he was about to see. But then he had been so annoyed at the truth of what the young patrolman had said about everyone who was important having been assigned to the bombings that he forgot. And he could hardly turn around now and go back outside and ask, could he? No, of course he couldn’t.

  Inspector Tay took a deep breath, stepped over to the bedroom door, and pushed at it with the knuckles of his right hand.

  He and Kang stood quietly as the door swung open.

  EIGHT

  TAY DIDN’T SEE a body at first, but the rancid smell of death in the air left no doubt there one was in there somewhere.

  There was something else in the air, too, and Tay couldn’t immediately put a name to it. It was like a buzzing sound too distant to hear but close enough for the vibrations to be felt. Whatever it was, it produced in Tay a vague pricking on the skin. He felt as if he was about to put his hand close to a flame he could not see.

  The bedroom was as sparsely furnished as the living room. The double bed had no headboard and was covered in a brown bedspread with odd tufts of yarn sticking out in no discernible pattern. It looked lumpy and uncomfortable to Tay and he doubted anyone had slept on it for some time. There was a table next to the bed with a lamp on it, and against the wall nearest the door was a bureau with a mirror mounted above it. Both the bureau and the bedside table were made of some kind of dark brown wood and looked old fashioned and beaten up.

  In the wall to his right there were two doors, both closed. Tay assumed one was a closet and the other was the bathroom. Between the doors there was a single straight-back wooden chair with a light-colored cane seat.

  Tay took a few careful steps into the room and moved to his right along the foot of the bed.

  The body was just on the other side of the bed, lying on its back on the floor. It was that of a Caucasian male.

  “My God,” Kang blurted. “What’s a white man doing out here?”

  Tay would have given Kang a disapproving look, but he was too busy wondering exactly the same thing himself. He would have been willing to bet there wasn’t a single Caucasian living within ten miles of the Woodlands. Not one.

  The man wasn’t young. He was probably in his sixties, maybe even his early seventies. A little less than six feet tall, he was dressed in a short-sleeved white shirt he had left hanging out over his waistband, wrinkled khaki pants, and brown loafers with light brown socks. Lying there on his back, his arms stretched down along his sides, the man looked like someone who had unaccountably chosen to sleep on the floor rather than in the bed right next to him.

  But the man wasn’t asleep. He was dead, and he had been dead for a while. His pupils were fixed and dilated, and his skin had a waxy pallor. There was some bloating, but not a lot, and putrefaction wasn’t very far advanced. At a guess, Tay put the time of death at more than one day, but less than two. The air conditioning was running and the room was cold, so perhaps it might have been even longer.

  There was no blood that Tay could see anywhere. That meant there were fewer flies than usual when a body had gone undiscovered for this long. And the rats hadn’t been at the body yet. Thank Christ for small favors, Tay thought.

  Tay and Kang moved around the bed watching carefully where they placed their feet. At least this was one time Tay didn’t have to worry about stepping in blood. He would never get used to walking into a room and thinking about stepping in blood. He could never decide what he was more worried about ruining: his shoes, or his soul.

  Tay had stopped walking and was standing at the corpse’s feet when Kang noticed the odd look on his face.

  “Is this somebody you know, sir?”

  Tay didn’t reply. He just stared at the corpse. Kang shifted his weight from one foot to another, waiting.

  After a moment, Kang repeated the question. “Do you know the dead man, sir?”

  This time Tay nodded slightly.

  “Who is it?” Kang asked.

  “
I don’t know.”

  Kang was puzzled by Tay’s answer, of course, but no more puzzled than he often was by things Tay said. So he just waited.

  “I thought for a minute I recognized him,” Tay added after a short silence. “But now I’m not sure.”

  “Who did you think it was, sir?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Kang just nodded and waited some more.

  “There’s something about him that’s familiar, but…”

  Tay trailed off and pursed his lips, but he didn’t say anything else.

  “Maybe he just looks like somebody you know, sir,” Kang suggested.

  “Probably that’s it,” Tay said.

  But he didn’t think that was it at all.

  ***

  “Call FMB and find out where they are, Sergeant.”

  “But, sir, they’ll just tell me—”

  “Get FMB out here. Threaten them if you have to. Tell them I’ve got dirty pictures of their mothers and I’ll send them to the Straits Times.”

  “Sir?”

  “Just call them, Sergeant.

  Kang nodded slowly, then he took out his cell phone and went to the living room to call FMB.

  When Kang was gone, Tay squatted next to the corpse and examined the man’s face for a long time. Something was tickling the far distant recesses of his memory. He could feel it as surely as if fingertips were fluttering on his forearm. But each time he reached for it, the memory faded away like a dream in the morning sun.

  Did he know this man?

  He was sure he did, although he couldn’t remember who he was or even where he might know him from.

  The man’s eyes had been brown, although the color was already starting to drain out of them, and he had an elongated jaw and a long, patrician-looking nose rounded at the end. It was a weathered face, an old man’s face, but still strong. It was the sort of face Tay hoped he might have when he reached the same time in his life. Which, come to think of it, wasn’t all that far off.

  In spite of the gray pallor and sagging skin, Tay could still see the deep vertical creases and imagine the ruddy tinge on the face of a man who had lived his life with gusto. Yet now here he was, dead, neatly stretched out on the floor of a shabby HDB flat on the far rim of Singapore. Tay doubted the man had ever imagined his life might end like this. He seemed to be someone who was more likely to have envisioned an adventurous, even noble end. But this was the end he got.

  No cause of death was obvious. Maybe it was just a simple unattended death, Tay told himself. The man was certainly old enough for that to be a possibility. A heart attack or a stroke maybe. But even as Tay formed the thought he knew it wasn’t so. No one has a heart attack, then stretches out neatly on the floor with his arms by his sides and just dies.

  Tay carefully ran his hands into each of the side pockets of the man’s khakis. When he found nothing, he rolled the corpse a little first one way and then the other and checked the man’s hip pockets as well. Nothing there either.

  Who walks around with nothing at all in his pockets?

  Tay stood up and his knees cracked so loudly they sounded like gunshots in the silent bedroom. He would be fifty this year. Closer to the end than to the beginning, he knew. Far closer, really.

  When Tay thought about that, which he did increasingly often these days, he was always surprised to realize how dispassionate he felt about dying. He had seen so much death in his lifetime that it had lost its capacity to frighten him. He did not want to die. He imagined very few people wanted to die. But he knew death made its own, sometimes bizarre choices as to when and where it greeted each of us. He simply wasn’t inclined to use up any of whatever days or years he had left on this earth worrying about how many days or years he had left on this earth.

  There were enough things in his life he could do something about. That wasn’t one of them.

  ***

  Tay glanced around the room. It had obviously been searched in the same way the living room had: quickly and not very thoroughly.

  He walked over to the dresser and worked his way through the drawers. Nothing at all in the first two. In the third drawer there were two packs of Nicorette gum and a dog-eared paperback copy of a novel called Private Dancer. Tay had never heard of the book and from the slightly lurid cover he could easily understand why. He picked it up and glanced at the title page. Published in Thailand. No wonder he had never heard of it.

  Nicorette gum he had heard of. It contained nicotine and people who were trying to quit smoking chewed it, didn’t they? Perhaps the man, whoever he was, had a taste for pulp fiction, was trying to quit smoking, and had just arrived in Singapore from Thailand. At least it was a theory, wasn’t it?

  “FMB says they’re pretty busy, sir.”

  Tay glanced up and saw Kang in the doorway holding his cell phone in his hand.

  “They told me they’d try to get somebody out here in a couple of hours.”

  Tay nodded. “Go down and talk to the kids who found the body and to the woman who phoned it in. See if the patrolmen missed anything. I’ll take a look around the apartment again and then we’ll get out of here.”

  As soon as Tay had said the words, he realized how badly he did want to get out of there and as far away from that apartment as he could.

  He could feel the air quivering all around him. He had no idea what it meant, if it meant anything at all, but it scared the bejesus out of him.

  NINE

  TWO DAYS PASSED without Tay making any progress at all in finding out who the dead man at the Woodlands HDB estate was, let alone figuring out who killed him. He stayed in his office, mostly, leaving the matter of getting an ID on their corpse largely to Sergeant Kang. He simply didn’t want to encounter his colleagues who were working the various aspects of the bombings when he wasn’t.

  As nearly as Tay could tell, he and Kang were the only investigators not working the bombings. After more than twenty years in CID and fifteen in its elite Special Investigations Section, being pushed to the curb was a humiliation Tay could not bear. He was angry and embarrassed in equal measures, and from moment to moment first one emotion and then the other took control of him. So he stayed in his office, talked to no one but Kang, and shuffled papers without much of any idea what the papers he was shuffling actually were.

  Tay spent a lot of the time thinking about resigning, of course. He had thought about quitting the police force several times before, but never that seriously. He certainly didn’t need the job. His father had left him comfortably off and he was working only because he wanted to do something that mattered.

  Tay had been twelve or thirteen when his father died on a business trip. He was an accountant, a careful man who had insisted his family live modestly, and his death had been entirely unexpected. Tay’s mother had been shocked at his father’s death, but even more shocked to discover she and her son had inherited a small fortune in real estate. Now Tay’s mother was dead, too, and her share of his father’s estate had passed to him, too. He had more money than he knew what to do with, so why was he still doing this job?

  He was doing it because it was what he did. This was the only vocation Tay knew. It was sometimes stupid, frequently meaningless, and always utterly compromised, but it was a job he did as well as he could regardless of that. There were days when he felt everything slipping away. There were times when he felt his place in the world was somewhere he had never intended to be. But through it all, he kept doing his job.

  It was just that simple, really. Tay was a policeman. That was who he was.

  Sergeant Kang didn’t appear to mind their banishment from the bombing case as much as Tay did. Robbie Kang was a man who did mostly what he was told and hardly ever thought much about it. That was what made him such a good Singaporean. It was because of people like Robbie Kang that Singapore worked. They didn’t care much about what their government was doing, so it just did whatever it wanted and the Robbie Kangs of the world went on living. They got marri
ed, picked out cars, had children, borrowed money, bought apartments. They left the rest to others.

  Tay was one of the others.

  ***

  There was a rap on Tay’s half-open door and Sergeant Kang’s head appeared around it.

  “Am I disturbing you, sir?”

  Tay looked startled, and probably a little embarrassed. It was almost as if Kang had been standing outside listening to his thoughts.

  Kang seemed to sense something was wrong and started to close the door.

  “No, it’s fine,” Tay said quickly. “I was just thinking about something. Come in.”

  Kang sat down in one of the straight chairs in front of Tay’s desk. “It’s about the FMB report on the apartment at the Woodlands, sir.”

  “They found something?”

  “Not really, sir. There were some hair and fibers and some prints, but the prints were mostly partials and we didn’t get a match on any of them, and the hair and fibers are pretty useless until we have something to match them to. Their best guess is the place was carefully cleaned.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Just one thing that seems a little odd. They found traces of flour on the shoes of the deceased.”

  “Flowers?”

  “No, sir. Flour. Like from a bakery. There wasn’t much. Just some spoors in the treads of his shoes. He could have simply walked across a kitchen where someone had once spilled some flour. It probably doesn’t mean anything.”

  Tay thought about that for a moment and decided Kang was probably right.

  “How about the ID on the deceased?” he asked. “Are you getting anywhere with that?”

  “Not really, sir.”

  “Have you found the owner of the apartment?”

  “We’ve confirmed that Mr. Ching actually is in LA. There wasn’t supposed to be anyone living there.”

  “Who knew that?”

  “I’m not sure, sir. Probably at least some of the neighbors knew, but the daughter says she hadn’t talked to any estate agents yet so it’s hardly public knowledge.”