Umbrella Man (9786167611204)

by Needham, Jake

  It was coming back clearly to Tay now why he found doctors so annoying. Why couldn’t they just say what they meant in words he could understand? Why did every conversation with a doctor have to turn into an extended game of Twenty Questions that seemed designed primarily to prove how smart they were and, by contrast, how dumb he was?

  “That picture is a close-up of the anterior portion of the skull of the deceased,” Dr. Hoi continued pointing at the phone Tay was holding. “His neck was broken manually after he was rendered unconscious by the blow that caused the fracture you’re looking at. Obviously by someone who was very strong and who knew exactly how to break a man’s neck.”

  “Obviously,” Tay muttered, feeling ridiculous for just having mistaken the dead man’s skull for a china plate.

  “That’s not why I’m showing you this.” Dr. Hoi waved a hand dismissively and Tay felt another stab of annoyance. “I thought you might be interested in what caused the blunt force trauma.”

  “Do you know?”

  “Well…not exactly, of course. But I have a theory.”

  Now Tay saw where this was going. Dr. Hoi wanted to play detective and naturally she wanted to do it off the record. Normally that would have annoyed him, but since he didn’t have much going for him right then anyway, he was more than happy to let her speculate as much as she wanted.

  “You see how nicely shaped that compression is?”

  Tay looked back at the color photograph displayed on Dr. Hoi’s iPhone. Now that he knew what he was looking at he didn’t see anything about it he would consider describing as nice, but he nodded anyway and waited for Dr. Hoi to get to the point.

  “I think he was struck with something round and heavy, an inch and a half to two inches in diameter. It would have been swung upward in a tight arc…”

  Dr. Hoi shaped her hands as if they were gripping a pole, twisted her torso, and mimed a swing at the back of Tay’s head.

  “Which would explain the point at which the blow landed and the direction of impact.”

  She lifted one hand and tapped her forefinger on the base of Tay’s skull about three inches above his neck.

  “So what was it?” Tay asked. “Something like a hammer?”

  “No, not a hammer. Have you ever seen an American baseball bat?”

  Tay nodded. “But that seems pretty unlikely to me,” he said. “There can’t be all that many American baseball bats in Singapore.”

  “I agree. Pretty unlikely. And that’s where my theory comes in. I thought about what was like an American baseball bat: round, heavy, long enough to be gripped with two hands and swung with force. And you know what occurred to me?”

  Tay didn’t, of course, so he waited for Dr. Hoi to tell him.

  “A flashlight,” she said. “One of those big black ones that—”

  “Patrolmen carry in the back of their fast response cars,” Tay finished. “Maglites, they’re called.”

  “Exactly.”

  “You’re saying a policeman killed this man?”

  “No, of course not, Sam. I’m saying a heavy flashlight like a Maglite might have been the source of the original trauma. I’ve done a little research and there’s a six-cell model that’s almost two feet long and weighs over three pounds. The barrel is almost exactly two inches in diameter.”

  Dr. Hoi reached over and tapped the photograph on her phone.

  “That’s a perfect fit for that fracture.”

  “So you are saying a policeman might have killed this man.”

  “How would I know who swung the Maglite? It might have been a policeman. It might even have been you. I just do autopsies and come up with possibilities. You’re the detective.”

  Tay thought about that for a moment. “You didn’t put this in your autopsy report, did you?”

  Dr. Hoi smiled. “I knew you hadn’t read it.”

  Tay didn’t know what to say to that so he said nothing.

  “No, it’s not in my report. I’m not completely stupid. This is just for your ears, Sam.”

  Dr. Hoi leaned forward and retrieved her phone with one hand. With the other, she rubbed Tay’s right knee as if it were a small animal of which she was exceptionally fond.

  ***

  Tay reached for his cigarettes and automatically tipped the pack toward Dr. Hoi. He was surprised when she nodded and took one. His movement had been a reflexive gesture of courtesy as deeply engrained in Tay’s muscle memory as opening a door for a woman. Gestures like that seemed old-fashioned now, stodgy even. Tay couldn’t remember the last time a woman had actually accepted a cigarette from him.

  “I didn’t know you smoked,” he said.

  “There’s a lot you don’t know about me.”

  That was true enough, but Tay figured the conversation could go nowhere good if he responded, so he didn’t. Instead he lit both their cigarettes and they sat quietly on the bench together and smoked.

  “Do you have an ID on the deceased yet?” Dr. Hoi eventually asked, breaking the silence.

  “No. Nothing.”

  “The fingerprints didn’t get a hit?”

  “Not locally. We’ve sent them to Interpol, but God knows how long it will take to hear from them.”

  “Nobody in the area knew him?”

  “The apartment is owned by an old man who’s gone to live with his daughter in LA. Nobody was supposed to be in it.”

  Dr. Hoi said nothing, but she shook her head slightly.

  “So I’m looking for anything, really,” Tay continued. “Anything at all that might point me in the right direction. I’m not sure if this business about the Maglite helps, or if it just makes everything more complicated.”

  “Well…” Dr. Hoi began, then trailed off.

  “Yes?”

  “There is something else.”

  “Something else you didn’t put in the report?”

  “Well…” she trailed off again.

  This time Tay just waited.

  After a moment or two of silence, Dr. Hoi removed a clear plastic envelope from the pocket of her lab coat and handed it to Tay. Inside the envelope was a silver key. The key was narrow and flat on both sides with big, rectangular teeth and no grooves. Tay didn’t have a bank safety deposit box, but he had opened bank boxes before when they were connected with an investigation and he knew immediately that this was almost certainly the key to one.

  Tay shifted his eyes from the plastic bag to Dr. Hoi, but he said nothing.

  “This is a little gift to you from the dead man at the Woodlands.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “He had it when he died.”

  Tay remembered going through the corpse’s pockets as it lay on the floor of that sad little apartment in the Woodlands. He didn’t understand how he could he have missed something as important as this.

  “Not in his pockets,” Dr. Hoi said as if she knew what Tay was thinking.

  Tay didn’t get it.

  So he mulled it over for fifteen seconds. Maybe twenty.

  Then he did get it.

  “It was in his rectum,” Dr. Hoi said just as Tay was thinking that was exactly what she was going to say.

  Tay had to beat down an overwhelming urge to drop the bag. He succeeded, but his fingers involuntarily shifted around until he was holding it by the barest corner.

  Dr. Hoi noticed and smiled.

  “Not the whole bag,” she said. “Just the key.”

  Tay’s eyes flicked back to the shiny metal key tucked between the two layers of clear plastic. Registering the large, rectangular teeth on its shaft, Tay felt his anus constrict.

  ***

  Tay laid the plastic envelope carefully on the bench between them.

  “Why did you leave this out of your report?”

  “Normally it would have been in there, of course, but since you’re the investigating officer on the case…well, I figured I’d tell you about it first and see what you thought.”

  Tay looked at the plastic envelope
and said nothing.

  “So what do you think?” Dr. Hoi asked when she got tired of waiting.

  “I think it’s a key to a safety deposit box, but as far as…well, I really don’t know. Why would anybody shove a key to a safety deposit box up the poor old guy’s ass?”

  “No one did.”

  Dr. Hoi drew on her Marlboro, then tilted her head up and exhaled. The gesture reminded Tay of Lauren Bacall in some black and white movie from the forties.

  “But I thought you said you found it in—”

  “I think he did it himself.”

  Tay felt his anus twitch again.

  “There were no contusion on the rectal wall,” she added. “No abnormal stretching in either the internal or the external sphincters. And I found what I think are traces of lubricant on the lining of the upper anus, but I won’t know for sure until the lab reports come back.”

  Dr. Hoi reached out and tapped on the key with her forefinger.

  “My guess is he just lubed himself up and shoved that little sucker right up his own butt.”

  ***

  Tay was too embarrassed by the whole subject to make eye contact with Dr. Hoi, so he focused his full attention on finishing his cigarette while he thought about what she was telling him.

  The old man had pushed a safety deposit box key up his own ass before he was killed? Was he just trying to conceal it, or did he know he was about to die and wanted to leave it for someone like Tay to find? Either way, whatever was in that box had to be pretty damn important, at least to the dead man, so maybe it would help Tay figure out who the guy was.

  “So…” Dr. Hoi cut into his reverie, “what do you want me to do about putting the key in my report?”

  “Can you give me a few days?”

  “You want to find the box and see what’s in it first, don’t you?”

  That was exactly what Tay wanted to do, but he hated to be so transparent so he said nothing. He just dropped his cigarette butt on the ground and pushed it into the dirt with the toe of his shoe.

  Then he picked up the plastic bag and slid it into his pocket.

  FOURTEEN

  WHEN TAY GOT back to his office he called Sergeant Kang in and explained Dr. Hoi’s theory about the blow to the dead man’s head having come from a Maglite. But he didn’t tell Kang anything about the safe deposit box key.

  Tay wasn’t absolutely sure why he didn’t mention the key. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Kang — he did — but there was just something about the dead man that was still making his skin tingle. He was sure he had some connection with the man. He just couldn’t figure out what it was. And if the old man did something like that so he could pass the key to Tay, or someone like Tay, he didn’t feel right about sharing it with anyone else. At least not yet.

  “She thinks a policeman killed this guy?” Kang’s voice was doubtful.

  “She thinks the blow from behind might have been struck with a Maglite. And policemen have Maglites.”

  “So do a lot of other people.”

  That was true enough so Tay let it go.

  “One other thing, Robbie. Do you know how to link a safe deposit box key with the box it goes to?”

  “By the number on it, I suppose, sir. Usually the box number is on the key, isn’t it?”

  “No, I mean, how do you tell what bank the box is in?”

  “You can’t remember which bank your safety deposit box is in?”

  “It’s not for me, Sergeant. A…uh, friend asked me.”

  Kang didn’t say anything, so Tay improvised a bit more.

  “A woman I know found some safety deposit box keys in her mother’s things when she died, but she doesn’t know where the boxes are.”

  Close enough for government work, Tay figured.

  “Can’t she just check the banks he has account statements from?” Kang asked. “People usually keep their boxes at the same banks where they do the rest of their business.”

  Tay ignored Kang’s question and tried again.

  “Doesn’t the key somehow indicate which bank the box is in?”

  “I don’t think so, sir. I never heard of it. If you have the key, you’re supposed to know where the box is.”

  That wasn’t good news. Tay’s eyes shifted involuntarily to the center drawer of his desk where he had put the plastic bag with the key inside it. Maybe he should tell Kang about it after all. There had to be some way to match the key to the box it opens, but Tay knew nothing about bank safety deposit boxes and didn’t see how he would go about working out something like that.

  Kang might be able to figure out how to do it, but Tay could hardly produce the key now and ask Kang for his help, could he? What was he going to say?

  Oh, Sergeant, I forgot to mention our dead guy had a safety deposit box key up his butt when he was murdered. Yes, I know Dr. Hoi left it out of her report, but then she left out her Maglite theory, too.

  Yeah, right. Kang was such a Singaporean straight arrow that he would no doubt pee himself at all the stuff Tay and Dr. Hoi were hiding. Worse, Kang would naturally ask why he and Dr. Hoi were keeping the key and the Maglite secret and he just didn’t have the slightest idea what to tell him.

  “All right, Sergeant. Thank you. Let me know when you make some progress on the ID. And keep knocking on doors in your spare time.”

  “Right, sir.”

  ***

  After Kang was gone, Tay opened his desk drawer and removed the plastic envelope. He laid it gently in the center of his desk blotter, then he bent toward it and examined the key without touching it.

  He peered closely at the head of the key and read the numbers engraved there. In spite of what Kang had just said, he thought surely there had to be some way of identifying the box from the engraving on the key. Otherwise, what sense did it make to have engraving on it in the first place? It had to mean something. He made a mental note to ask someone to help him who couldn’t link his curiosity about the key with the Woodlands investigation.

  And making that mental note caused Tay to sit and think about what else he had so far in the Woodlands case.

  It didn’t take him all that long.

  Because he had nothing. Nothing at all that pointed to anything.

  He had a dead white guy lying on the floor of a presumably unoccupied apartment in a housing estate where the presence of a white guy should have been noticed by hundreds of people, yet no one had noticed him.

  He had a dead white guy who had nothing in his pockets that could be used to identify him and whose prints weren’t in the system as either a citizen or a resident of Singapore.

  He had a dead white guy who may or may not have been hit over the head with a Maglite before his neck was broken, but he had no suspects and no motive.

  Of course, he did have a key to a safety deposit box that the dead white guy had shoved up his ass at some point before he was killed, but he had no idea what was in the box or even where the box was.

  Tay stood up and walked to the window. Off in the distance he could see a hole in the city skyline that the bombings had made. Orchard Road had once been a solid line of luxury hotels and massive shopping malls that stretched for miles. Now it looked like a jack-o-lantern with a bunch of missing teeth. The only home he had ever known, the city of his birth, had had its heart cut out by a band of mad men who left hundreds of dead bodies blown apart in its streets. And what was Tay doing to right that monstrous wrong?

  Not a goddamned thing.

  Instead, he and Sergeant Kang had been assigned to identify a single murdered Caucasian male, and then — assuming he could even eventually find out who the corpse actually was — figure out who killed him.

  His mother might think those two things were both equally important, but he didn’t.

  He scooped the plastic bag with the key off his desk and pushed it deep into his right-hand trouser pocket. Then he got up from behind his desk went out to lunch without telling anyone where he was going.

  FIFTEEN
>
  TAY DIDN’T KNOW either of the two men who were waiting for him when he came back to his office after lunch.

  “Inspector Tay?” one of them asked when Tay opened his door.

  Tay didn’t answer. He didn’t like finding anyone in his office other than Sergeant Kang. He was old fashioned enough to believe you only went into another man’s office when you were invited.

  So Tay said nothing. He walked around his desk, sat down, and looked at his visitors with his face blank.

  He had no doubt the man who had spoken was a Singaporean. He had a square Chinese face and black, badly cut hair. His most prominent feature was a scar that started somewhere inside his hairline just above his left ear, meandered more or less diagonally across his cheek, and then disappeared just below his jaw. It look liked the sort of dueling scar actors in old black and white movies had when they played German aristocrats, but in Singapore people didn’t duel with swords anymore, they dueled with money. And money generally left scars that were deeper than just a discolored welt across the cheek.

  Tay’s first thought was the man was probably a policeman, but he didn’t remember ever seeing him before so that seemed fairly unlikely. Before Tay could take his speculation any further, the man held out an identification card.

  “I’m Philip Goh. ISD.”

  The Internal Security Department. That would explain both the bad haircut and, probably, the scar. It would also explain why these jokers were in his office without an invitation. In his experience, ISD didn’t care much about invitations. They went wherever they wanted.

  Tay’s eyes shifted to the second man, who plainly was not a Singaporean. He was Caucasian, and so big that the straight chair in front of Tay’s desk seemed to be struggling to contain him. The man’s face was slightly discolored as if it had once been burned and the new skin grafted to the old had taken on a slightly different coloration. Or perhaps the grafts had been less than perfectly done. When you looked at the man, all you saw was his size and the huge pink blotches on his face. The whole effect was downright scary.

  Were the ISD guys going around with hired muscle after the bombings? No, that was silly. Even if they were, their hired muscle certainly wouldn’t be Caucasian.