Umbrella Man (9786167611204)

by Needham, Jake

  Tay was paying attention. He was fairly sure he was imagining this entire conversation, of course, but he was still paying attention. He didn’t have the vaguest idea what his mother was talking about. If he was talking to her at all. Which obviously he wasn’t.

  “You must find someone to help you,” his mother went on when he didn’t reply.

  “Help me do what, Mother?”

  “Help you to remember, Samuel. That’s what life is really about: remembering. In the end, remembering is all we have left to us.”

  Tay hoped that wasn’t true. There were all sorts of things in his life he didn’t want to remember.

  “Mother, I don’t really understand—”

  “Find somebody to help you. Do you understand?”

  “Who?”

  “For God’s sake, do you expect me to do everything for you?”

  “No, Mother.”

  “Maybe this will help. It will be a woman.”

  “A woman,” Tay repeated flatly.

  “Yes, Samuel. A woman. You do still remember what a woman is, don’t you?”

  “Yes, Mother. I remember what a woman is.”

  “Good. Then what are you going to do?”

  Tay said nothing. Everything he did say just seemed to give his mother another way to take a shot at him.

  “Tell me what you are going to do, Samuel,” his mother prompted.

  Before he could stop them, the reflexes of his childhood kicked in. “I am going to find someone to help me remember,” he responded dutifully. “A woman.”

  Then something suddenly occurred to him.

  “How do you know about the man at the Woodlands, Mother?”

  “Because you know about him.”

  “You know everything I know?”

  “Of course, Samuel. Being dead doesn’t have many benefits, but that’s one of them.”

  That gave Tay pause. His mother now knew everything he knew? Did she know everything everyone knew, or just everything he knew? He paused to formulate a careful question.

  “Mother, does that mean—”

  “Never mind what it means, Samuel. Just do what I tell you to do.”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  “I’ve got to go. I’m almost out of time. For once in your life, do what I tell you to do. It’s important.”

  “Mother, please don’t—”

  “Good-bye, Samuel. Don’t be a stranger.”

  “Mother?”

  Silence.

  “Are you there, Mother?”

  Silence.

  ***

  Tay sat perfectly still and threaded what had just happened back and forth through his mind as if it had been preserved on the spinning reels of an old fashioned tape recorder.

  Had he experienced a psychotic episode of some kind? Most people would say so, of that he had no doubt, and he wasn’t ready to argue with them. Samuel Tay was a rational man above all else, and rational men knew people don’t carry on conversations with the dead.

  Still, he knew what he had heard. God help him, he felt like he really had just talked to his mother, whether he had or not. Perhaps the dead laid greater claim to us than did the living. Perhaps they had found both significance and permanence inside their own demise.

  And what was all this about finding someone to help him remember? Remember what? Who the dead man was?

  Surely he had just imagined the entire conversation. That had to be all there was to it.

  But then again, even if he altogether discarded the possibility of supernatural intervention, what if it had been his subconscious prodding him toward the direction in which he should be going? Perhaps that was what was really happening here.

  Tay was prepared to follow the flashes of intuition that bubbled up in his subconscious every now and then. He was even willing to let the less rational part of his being take flight occasionally and accept the possibly of random intervention from the cosmos. But was he willing to start asking every woman he knew if she could help him remember?

  Well…no, he wasn’t going to do that. They would think he had lost his mind.

  A man had his limits.

  TWELVE

  THE NEXT MORNING Tay woke at his usual time feeling strangely chipper. As he dressed and rummaged around the kitchen making coffee, he realized the odd events of the night before had pretty much disappeared from his mind altogether. Even when he tried to remember them, and he certainly didn’t try very hard, he could recall only a few snatches from the conversation he had — or imagined he had — with his mother. That seemed to him to settle the matter. Most likely, it had all just been the result of a little indigestion.

  Tay got to the Cantonment Complex about ten and found Sergeant Kang waiting in his office.

  “I’ve got the autopsy report on the deceased from the Woodlands, sir.”

  “Anything interesting in it?”

  “Yes, sir. A couple of things. But…well, this was the one that really got my attention.”

  Kang handed Tay a piece of white notepaper that had been folded over once in the middle.

  When Tay unfolded the paper, he saw FROM THE DESK OF DR. SUSAN HOI printed across the top. Below that, someone, presumably Dr. Hoi, had written in black ink Please call me on my mobile, followed by a telephone number.

  Susan Hoi was the pathologist at the Centre for Forensic Medicine who about a year earlier had done the autopsy on the wife of the American ambassador after she had been found naked and brutalized in a suite at the Marriott. Dr. Hoi was a nice woman, and a real looker to boot, but back then she had made her personal interest in Tay so plain he had automatically broken into a trot in the opposite direction.

  They hadn’t seen or spoken to each other since that case, but more than once Tay had found himself wondering if perhaps he had been a little hasty in blowing her off like that. And now there was this note. Was Dr. Hoi using her autopsy report as a matchmaking device? If she was, he didn’t know what to think about that.

  When Tay looked up, Kang was grinning at him. “Are you going to call, sir?”

  “I’m sure Dr. Hoi simply wants to discuss the autopsy,” Tay said.

  “Oh, right,” Kang nodded. “That’s exactly what I was thinking, too.”

  “Can we stick to the subject here, Sergeant? Is there anything in the autopsy report I need to know about?”

  “The dead man had cancer, sir.”

  “Cancer?”

  “Dr. Hoi says it was well advanced. He probably didn’t have more than a few months left to live.”

  Tay took that in although he couldn’t immediately see what it could have to do with the man’s murder.

  “And the cause of death?” he asked.

  “Blunt force trauma to the back of the head and a catastrophic fracture of the atlanto-occipital joint.”

  “In other words, somebody hit the poor cancer-riddled bastard over the head and then broke his neck.”

  “Pretty much, sir.”

  Tay took the report from Sergeant Kang and flipped through it half-heartedly.

  “Any progress on the ID, Sergeant?

  “No, sir. Not really. I’ve sent the prints to Interpol, but God knows how long they will take to get back to us even if they find a match. We have DNA samples, of course, but we don’t have anything to match them against.”

  Tay pursed his lips and glanced back at the report. “A well-nourished Caucasian male in his mid-sixties to mid-seventies,” he read. “Five feet eleven inches in height and approximately one hundred eighty pounds in weight.”

  Kang nodded.

  “That’s all the ID we’ve got?”

  “Yes, sir. For now. But I’m working on it.”

  Sergeant Kang shifted his weight and cleared his throat.

  “Can I ask you something, sir?”

  Tay nodded.

  “What you said on the telephone last night…about investigating the bombings.”

  “What about it, Sergeant?”

  “Well…you weren’t s
erious, were you, sir?”

  “What if I were?”

  “What if you were? You don’t need this job, sir. I do, and I don’t want to lose it.”

  “Why would you lose your job?”

  “I figure I would if we start investigating the bombings when you were specifically told to stay away from them.”

  “I’m only doing it because it’s connected to our murder victim at the Woodlands.”

  “Oh, come on, sir. There’s no connection. You just made that up.”

  Tay briefly considered telling Kang about the conversation he’d had the night before with the ghost of his mother in which she had assured him there was a connection. But he quickly came to his senses.

  “Fine, Sergeant. I don’t want you to do anything you think might harm your career. I’m your superior officer, and I hereby release you from doing anything you don’t want to do. Go with God.”

  “But what are you going to do, sir?”

  “I’m going to do just what I told you last night. I’m going to solve both cases. With or without you, I’m going to solve both cases. After that, maybe I’ll quit.”

  “Maybe you won’t have to.”

  Tay said nothing.

  Kang shook his head. “I don’t know what to do, sir.”

  “It’s not that hard to decide, Robbie. Do whatever makes you comfortable. It’s entirely up to you.”

  “You can’t manage all that by yourself, sir.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. Either way, I’m going to try.”

  Kang sighed heavily.

  “I shouldn’t get involved, sir.”

  “You’re absolutely right. You shouldn’t.”

  Kang sighed again. “What do you want me to do, sir?”

  Tay kept his expression neutral. It wasn’t easy. He was certain Sergeant Kang would come around eventually. He just didn’t think it would be quite this fast.

  ***

  After Kang left, Tay sat drumming his fingers on the autopsy report. Should he call Dr. Hoi or shouldn’t he?

  Perhaps she really did have something to tell him about the autopsy that she didn’t want to put in her formal report. But if she didn’t and she was trying again to warm up their acquaintanceship…well, Tay just couldn’t get excited about a relationship with a woman who spent her days slicing up dead bodies.

  Still, wasn’t it a bit egotistical of him to assume Dr. Hoi had a personal motive for asking him to call rather than strictly a professional one? And maybe this would be a bad time to call her anyway. Maybe she wouldn’t even be in her office. Should he find out when she was likely to be there and call her then, if he was going to call her at all?

  What a lot of nonsense, Tay told himself as he reached for the telephone. When am I going to stop thinking everything to death instead of just going ahead and doing what I want to do?

  To Tay’s surprise, Dr. Hoi answered on the second ring. Somehow when he called people on their mobile phones, he always expected to get their voicemail. To end up actually talking to someone was slightly disconcerting.

  “How are you, Sam? I’ve often wondered how you were surviving.”

  “I’ve been wondering the same thing.”

  There was a pause.

  “I’m not sure I understand,” Dr. Hoi said.

  Tay mentally kicked himself. Two lines of conversation with an attractive woman and he had already caused her to lose the plot.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I guess I’m not making much sense today.”

  “None of us are these days, Sam. The bombings have done us all in. How’s your investigation going?”

  “Uh…I’m not—”

  “You must be working twenty-four hours a day. I’ll bet they’ve put you in charge of the whole bombing investigation, haven’t they?”

  “Look,” Tay hastily put in before this went any further, “that’s not why I’m calling. It’s the autopsy report you sent me. The Caucasian male we found in the apartment at the Woodlands? You put a note on it and asked me to call you.”

  “I was surprised to see your name on that case. Is it really yours?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid it is.”

  “Oh, you poor dear. The bombing investigation and now they give you this one, too. Don’t they have anybody else over there they can trust?”

  “Almost everyone but me, apparently,” Tay mumbled.

  “I’m sorry, Sam, what did you say?

  “I said apparently not.”

  “Well, you should tell them not to work you so hard, Sam.”

  Tay said nothing.

  “Look, Sam, I have something here that’s a little odd.”

  “From the Woodland’s autopsy?”

  “Yes, exactly. When I saw you were the investigating officer, I thought maybe it would be better to leave it out of my report, at least for now, and just tell you about it. I’m not sure what it means, but it is very strange.”

  “The last time you told me something like that, you had found a gunshot wound hidden inside an ear.”

  Dr. Hoi laughed merrily. Tay wondered what kind of personality a woman had to have in order to laugh at the idea of a gunshot wound hidden inside an ear.

  “This is even stranger, Sam.”

  Tay just waited. He assumed, if he waited long enough, Dr. Hoi might even get to the point.

  “I think it would be better if we did this in person,” she finally said when the silence had stretched close to the point of embarrassment. “I need to show you something.”

  Tay had heard that from Dr. Hoi before, too, back when she was doing the autopsy on the woman from the Marriott. She had asked him to meet her so she could tell him something about the autopsy. He had met her after work at a pub called the Penny Black only to discover she had simply made up the whole story to entice him into having a drink with her. Tay was flattered a woman would do something like that to show her interest in him — of course he was — but he was also embarrassed and a little put off and—

  “I know what you’re thinking, Sam,” Dr. Hoi interrupted before Tay had figured out what to say. “But I really do have something important to show you. Can you come to my office? Right now? Does that sound safe enough for you?”

  Tay didn’t know what to say to that last part so he ignored it.

  “Fifteen minutes?” he asked.

  “Fifteen minutes,” Dr. Hoi agreed, and then she hung up.

  ***

  Tay had been to Dr. Hoi’s office only once before, back when she had just completed the autopsy of the American woman found at the Marriott and wanted to show him the gunshot wound in the ear. Her office was at the Centre for Forensic Medicine which was located in a building called Block Nine at the Singapore General Hospital. It was right on the other side of New Bridge Road from the Cantonment Complex, behind the National Heart Centre and no more than a ten-minute walk from Tay’s office.

  The building itself was a nondescript, modern two-story structure that looked to Tay like it could shelter almost any kind of commercial activity. But of course he knew all too well what actually took place inside Block Nine. Equipped as he was with that knowledge, the otherwise unremarkable structure with the aluminum chimney pipes poking out here and there had always looked genuinely creepy to him.

  Creepy building or not, Tay supposed he had no choice but to make the trek across the street to Dr. Hoi’s autopsy laboratory. He took a deep breath, made sure he had plenty of cigarettes and matches, and shut the door behind him when he left.

  THIRTEEN

  DR. HOI WAS waiting in Block Nine’s tiny reception area when Tay came through the door. He had walked as slowly as he could, but he still got there in fifteen minutes. She was wearing a short white lab coat and Tay had to admit it looked good on her.

  “Let’s do this outside,” she said. “You’re going to need a cigarette when you hear what I’ve got to tell you and you can’t smoke in here.”

  That obviously meant at least Tay wasn’t going to be asked to contemplate a collecti
on of disassembled body parts. He liked that. He just didn’t much like the rest of what Dr. Hoi seemed to be suggesting. He wasn’t ready for another surprise. He was already up to his ass in surprises and he had never much liked them anyway.

  They left the reception area and took a path that curved across a lawn mowed as neat and tight as a putting green. The day was hot, and the air was so thick and heavy you could almost feel the moisture draining out of it. A dome of gray clouds hung so low over the city they looked like fog. The morning light, frail and wispy, suddenly seemed to Tay to be filled with foreboding.

  ***

  Dr. Hoi headed straight for a grove of palm trees that rippled and swayed in the light breeze. There was a bench at its center constructed of green wooden slats over a black iron frame. It didn’t look very comfortable, but even from thirty feet away Tay could see the cigarette butts scattered on the ground all around it so he supposed, comfortable or not, the bench served its purpose as a center for social rebellion.

  As soon as they sat down, Dr. Hoi pulled her phone out of the side pocket of her lab coat. She fiddled with it for a moment, pushing buttons, and when she apparently had what she wanted on the screen she handed it to Tay.

  Tay took it and studied the photograph but it meant nothing to him. It looked like a piece of malformed white china, but he didn’t see why Dr. Hoi was showing him a picture of a plate.

  “Your deceased had a depressed fracture of the squama occipitalis,” Dr. Hoi said, “the large bone the forms the base of the anterior portion of the skull. And you’re looking at it.”

  Tay nodded,

  “That was in my report,” she said.

  Tay nodded again.

  “The fracture was caused by a significant blunt force trauma which most likely rendered the deceased unconscious.”

  Tay remembered that much at least. Sergeant Kang had told him the autopsy report identified the cause of death as blunt force trauma and a broken neck. He probably should have read the report for himself before he came to see Dr. Hoi, but he hadn’t and that couldn’t be helped now.

  “So this plate is what was used to break the dead man’s neck?” he asked.

  “What are you talking about?” Dr. Hoi looked irritated. “What plate?”