by Jake Needham
THEY STEER A tight ship in squeaky-clean Singapore. No dissent, no opposition, no criticism. It’s like an entire country run by Walt Disney. Disneyland with the death penalty, somebody once called it.
A young American software engineer hangs himself in his Singapore apartment. At least that’s what the police say happened. Emma Lazar, a writer for the Wall Street Journal, thinks otherwise. She thinks Tyler Bartlett was murdered to keep him quiet and the Singapore police are covering it up.
Emma Lazar asks Inspector Samuel Tay to help her investigate the young man’s death. Tay is a senior inspector in the elite Special Investigation Section of Singapore CID. He’s pretty much the best investigator the Singapore police have, but Tay’s father was an American and from him Tay inherited a strong streak of American individualism that has made him an outsider in relentlessly regulated and tightly wound little Singapore. That’s mostly why Tay has been placed on leave. Tay shot a man and everyone knows it was self-defense, but Tay’s enemies have seized on the incident and are trying to get rid of him once and for all.
Tay really doesn’t want to get involved in helping Emma Lazar with her story. It certainly won’t help him get his job back to challenge the government’s official narrative about the death of Tyler Bartlett. But the writer’s determination tickles his curiosity, and… well, the truth is he’s bored and she’s beautiful. So he does it anyway.
Learning that Tyler Bartlett’s death was no suicide is easy enough for Tay. What is far more difficult is finding out what the young man knew that made him worth killing. When Tay realizes both his superiors on the police force and the faceless men of the Internal Security Department are working behind the scenes to keep him from finding out, he becomes more determined than ever to discover what, and who, is really behind Tyler Bartlett’s murder.
Of course, there’s a problem there. If Tay does find out, won’t that make him worth killing, too?
WHAT THE PRESS SAYS
“In his raw power to bring the street-level flavor of contemporary Asian cities to life, Jake Needham is Michael Connelly with steamed rice.” – The Bangkok Post
“Jake Needham is Asia’s most stylish and atmospheric writer of crime fiction.” – The Singapore Straits Times
“Jake Needham’s books have been successful in seriously irritating the powers that be in Singapore to the point where his newest books are no longer available there. In general, if a government openly or surreptitiously bans a book or a writer it means that they are probably worth reading. It really is a very strong BUY THIS signal.” – Libris Reviews
“Jake Needham is a man who knows Asia like the back of his hand.” – The Malaysia Star (Kuala Lumpur)
“Needham certainly knows where a few bodies are buried.” – Asia Inc.
“Jake Needham has a knack for bringing intricate plots to life. His stories blur the line between fact and fiction and have a ‘ripped from the headlines’ feel…Buckle up and enjoy the ride.” – CNNgo
“Mr. Needham seems to know rather more than one ought about these things.” – The Wall Street Journal
“What you will not get is pseudo-intellectual new-wave Asian literature, sappy relationship writing, or Bangkok bargirl sensationalism. This is top class fiction that happens to be set in an Asian context.” – Singapore Airline SilverKris Magazine
“For Mr. Needham, fiction is not just a good story, but an insight into a country’s soul.” – The New Paper (Singapore)
THE DEAD AMERICAN
An Inspector Samuel Tay Novel
by
Jake Needham
eBook edition published by
Half Penny Ltd.
Hong Kong
Contents
BEGIN READING
Bonus Preview of LAUNDRY MAN
THE JAKE NEEDHAM LIBRARY
MEET JAKE NEEDHAM
TABLE OF CONTENTS
COPYRIGHT
This is for Aey.
I tried being reasonable.
I didn’t like it.
— Clint Eastwood
CHAPTER ONE
SAMUEL TAY STOOD in his tiny garden and squinted at the sky. The sun was a flickering smudge and the caramel-colored air smelled of earth and rot. Singapore, the diminutive island state known for its blue skies, dazzling sunlight, and green environment, was drowning in crap.
According to Channel News Asia, the Singapore Pollutants Index stood at a record high. Schools were closed, the armed forces had stopped training, and McDonald’s was suspending delivery service. When Tay heard that last part, he knew this was really serious.
Before now, Tay had no idea Singapore even had a pollutants index, but for weeks now it had been the only thing anyone talked about. Every television channel was broadcasting warnings that breathing the air was hazardous to health. Were they telling him not to breathe at all, Tay wondered, or merely urging him not to breathe any more than absolutely necessary? Unless it was one or the other, he didn’t see what good the information did him.
Heavy smoke from slash and burn agriculture in Indonesia had plagued Singapore for decades, but this was the dirtiest air Tay had ever seen. Blinking stung his eyes and breathing burned his throat. Yesterday he walked up to a Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf on Orchard Road for breakfast and at least half of the people he saw on the streets were wearing white surgical masks over their mouth and nose. The city looked like it had been taken over by an antisocial cult. Maybe the surgical masks helped you breathe, maybe they didn’t, but Tay thought he would rather choke than join the crowd he saw wearing them.
The bell outside his front gate rang and Tay stopped contemplating the foul air. He also stayed right where he was. A year ago, he wouldn’t have hesitated to go out and open the gate. He was an inspector in the Special Investigations Section of the Criminal Investigation Department of the Singapore police. When his doorbell rang, it was always important. A year ago, he would have answered without a second thought.
But a year ago the world was a very different place. Mad men had not yet blown up half of Singapore. Tay hadn’t yet caught a homicide case that appeared to have nothing to do with the bombings, until it did. And he hadn’t yet shot a man and been put on administrative leave. He had been quickly exonerated and returned to duty, of course, but then eight months later he had been suspended again. CID’s new commanding officer decided the first investigation of Tay’s actions had been incomplete. He ordered a new investigation and a new suspension for Tay until the second investigation was concluded.
Tay had not been all that surprised. There were senior officers in the Singapore police force that had been trying for years to get rid of him. Presented with the best opportunity to force him out they might ever get, they weren’t going to give up without making a fight of it. The incident should have been a simple case of a police officer defending himself and another officer. That’s probably what it would have been if he had fired once. Or even twice. Ten shots made for a somewhat more difficult conversation, even if the first review panel had done their best to ease past that problem.
The bell outside the gate rang again. Tay considered the possibility it was a personal visitor who had nothing to do with his job, but he thought that was unlikely. Off hand, Tay could think of only one person not involved with police work who had rung his doorbell in the last few years, and that was Cindy Shaw.
Cindy was either a widow or divorced. Tay didn’t know which, and he didn’t want to know. She had made her interest in him so plain and pursued it so embarrassingly it had become a major preoccupation of his life to avoid her at all costs. Cindy lived two doors north of h
im on Emerald Hill Road and Tay had made a habit of taking a quick glance at the road outside his gate before going out just to make certain he didn’t run into her by accident. Some neighborhoods had angry, snarling dogs people had to avoid whenever they left their houses. His neighborhood had Cindy Shaw. He would have preferred angry, snarling dogs.
Tay pondered the two rings of his doorbell and asked himself again whether he was going to answer it. He cocked his head and studied the dirty brown sky. Somewhere up there he found the answer written on the smog.
Tay walked over to the little teak table where he drank his coffee in the mornings, pulled out one of the chairs, and sat down. He fished a pack of Marlboro Reds out of the front pocket of his shirt. He was going to quit smoking soon. Of course he was. Everybody who smoked was going to quit smoking soon. With all the crap he was already sucking into his lungs from breathing the air in Singapore, however, he couldn’t see any advantage in doing it right away.
Smoking was purely a habit for most people, but it wasn’t for Tay. Ritualistic meaning pervaded every step of the process. He saw each cigarette he smoked as a few moments of personal meditation on the perfidiousness of the world.
He supposed the plain fact was he liked smoking. He liked unwrapping the pack, feeling the cellophane between his fingers, and listening to the crinkle as he rolled it between his thumb and forefinger. He loved the sudden whiff of tobacco he got when he slit the package with his thumbnail and tore back the top. It pained him that the public nannies that gloried in telling everyone how to live had stripped the simple act of smoking of all dignity. The more difficult the smug, narrow-minded bureaucrats made it for Tay to smoke, the more determined he became to continue doing it.
Tay returned the Marlboros to his pocket and took out a small box of wooden matches. He always carried a box of real matches. Not a matchbook filled with cardboard imitations of matches, not a plastic lighter, but a box of actual matches made of real wood and tipped with honest sulfur. It didn’t matter to the cigarette what he lit it with, Tay knew, but it damn well mattered to him.
He struck a match, touched it to the cigarette, and felt the first rush of nicotine do its usual excellent job of constricting his vascular system. He exhaled and watched the smoke rise into the sky, and he felt at least some of his perpetual annoyance at the world being carried away with it.
A half hour later, Tay was in the kitchen making coffee when the gate bell rang again.
“Damn it,” he muttered when the sound of the bell caused him to lose track of the number of spoons he had measured into the machine’s filter, “I give up.” He shook his head, dropped the scoop back into the coffee jar, and went to open the door.
Tay lived in a row house with a small garden in front that was surrounded by a high brick wall. A black iron gate gave access from the garden to Emerald Hill Road, a quiet residential street that carried almost no traffic since it dead-ended less than fifty yards past his house. He stepped off his front porch, walked out to the gate, and looked through it.
A woman was standing there. She said something to Tay, but she was wearing a breathing mask and it muffled her voice so badly it was impossible for him to understand her.
“I’m sorry,” Tay said. “I can’t hear you with that thing on your face. Who are you looking for?”
The woman put two fingers under the mask and lifted it away from her mouth.
“Inspector Samuel Tay,” she said.
“I am Samuel Tay.”
The woman hesitated. She weighed the distinction between the question she had asked and the answer Tay had given.
“Aren’t you a police detective, sir? They told me you’re an inspector with the Singapore police.”
“Who told you?”
“I’d rather not say.”
“You’d rather not say?”
The woman nodded.
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
Reaching into her purse, the woman took out a business card. She turned it sideways and pushed it toward Tay between the iron bars of the gate.
“A source of mine suggested I come and see you,” she said. “He was the one who told me where you live.”
“A source?”
The woman wiggled the business card at Tay. He accepted it with reluctance and read it with even greater reluctance.
Emma Lazar
Staff writer
The Wall Street Journal
At the bottom of the card were a street address in New York City, a telephone number, and an email address.
“Look, could I possibly come in?” the woman asked. “Talking to you through a gate feels very awkward.”
Tay wasn’t certain he cared how the woman felt, and he was even less certain he wanted to invite a masked woman into his living room. Still, she seemed harmless enough. She looked to be in her mid-forties, slim and tall with short blonde hair cut tight to her head in a mannish look. She wore a straight black skirt and white blouse, both of which were obviously expensive, and she seemed to be attractive. With the white surgical mask covering most of her face, however, Tay was only guessing about that part.
“Are you an American?” he asked.
“Does whether I get in depend on how I answer that?”
Tay smiled in spite of himself.
“I noticed your accent,” he said.
“Then I guess I can’t fool you. Yes, I’m an American. Like it says on the card, my name is Emma Lazar, I live in New York, and I’m a writer for the Wall Street Journal.”
Tay nodded, but he didn’t say anything, and he made no move to open the gate.
“I would be grateful if you would hear me out, Inspector. I think what I have to say might even interest you.”
Tay was pretty sure the woman wasn’t an out-and-out crazy, and it wasn’t as if he was all that busy at the moment. The fact that she was an attractive, well-dressed woman made no difference to him whatsoever. Of course it didn’t.
Tay turned the bolt on the gate, pulled it open, and gestured toward his front door.
“Thank you,” the woman said.
Tay nodded and followed her up the walkway.
CHAPTER TWO
“I WAS MAKING coffee. Would you like some?”
“That’s kind of you, Inspector. Yes, I think I would.”
“How do you—”
“Black. No sugar. Just as it comes.”
Tay nodded and gestured toward a brown leather loveseat. “Please make yourself comfortable while I—”
“I’m sorry to turn up at your door unannounced like this. I really am. But I was afraid you would refuse to see me if I called first.”
It was the second time the woman had interrupted him and so far he had only spoken three sentences. As a rule, Tay wouldn’t have put up with that, but what the woman said caught his attention. It was, of course, exactly what he would have done. Showing up to confront a potentially reluctant witness was always more productive than trying to gain permission for a conversation in advance. But even so, what was it he was supposed to be a witness to?
“Let me get the coffee,” he said. “Then you can tell me what this is all about.”
In the kitchen, Tay dumped the coffee out of the filter and started over again. He counted out six measures and filled the coffeemaker with enough water to make half a pot. While he waited for the coffee to drip, he drummed his fingers on the counter and asked himself why a writer from the Wall Street Journal wanted to talk to him. Nothing came to mind until all at once an unsettling thought occurred to him.
Could this woman be here to ask him about the shooting and his two suspensions?
He couldn’t imagine why an American newspaper would have the slightest interest in any of that, but he supposed it was at least possible. After all, what else had he done recently that was even remotely interesting? If that’s what this woman wanted to talk about, he had no intention of telling her anything. All he needed was for a few pithy lines uttered by him about his suspension to appear in
an American newspaper and he wouldn’t have a hope in hell of ever getting his job back.
Had he made a mistake by letting this woman into his living room in the first place? He supposed that didn’t matter now since she was there. He certainly wasn’t going to go in and fling her bodily back out into the street. Besides, what harm could there be in listening, just listening, to whatever she had to say? If she started asking questions about his suspension, he didn’t have to answer them, did he?
The coffeemaker dinged. Tay poured two mugs of black coffee and carried them back into the living room.
The first thing that Tay noticed was that the woman had removed her breathing mask. The second thing he noticed was that he had been right. She was indeed attractive. Very attractive, if he was being completely honest.
She wore little makeup, and ridiculously wide cheekbones set off her green eyes, a perfectly sculptured nose with a tiny bob at its tip, and wildly sensuous lips. Tay wasn’t certain he could articulate what made lips sensuous but, whatever it was, this woman’s lips possessed it in abundance.
“I’m glad to get this thing off,” she said, folding up the mask and sliding it into her purse. “Is the air like this in Singapore a lot?”
“Not a lot, but the last few years it’s gotten worse.”
“The last few years everything everywhere has gotten worse.”
Tay bobbed his head at that. He, of course, thought exactly the same thing. Perhaps this conversation was going to work out all right after all.
He placed a mug of coffee on the table in front of the woman, then settled into one of the two upholstered wingbacks facing the loveseat and put his own mug on the table next to his chair. His visitor raised the mug to her lips and took a small sip. Apparently she found the coffee to her liking because then she drank some more, returned the mug to the table, and leaned back into the corner of the loveseat.
