by Jake Needham
“If you ask him not to tell her we’re nosing around, can you trust him?”
In Tay’s experience, you could trust almost no one to keep their mouth shut, at least not for longer than a few days. Two people can keep a secret, went the old expression, if one of them is dead. Tay thought that was just about the way it usually went, but he didn’t say that.
“I think it’ll be okay. Besides, it’s the only way I can find out for you if this girl works at Raffles. What’s her name again?”
“Betty Lee.”
“Okay,” Tay said. “I’ll see what I can do.”
Tay stood up and dropped two twenty-dollar notes on the table. Emma collected the box of Marlboros, the matches, and her notebook and pushed them all into her purse. Then she stood, too.
“Thanks, Sam.”
“No promises. All I can do is make a call.”
They shook hands, which made Tay feel awkward. Shaking hands with a woman always made him feel awkward. Either he held her hand too firmly, or not firmly enough. He never seemed to get it right. But he and Emma shook hands anyway, and exchanged smiles, and then they went their separate ways.
As Tay approached his front gate, his thoughts drifted back to whether ISD had his house under surveillance, and he got angry all over again. He passed his gate walking at a steady clip and peered into every parked car he saw until he reached the end of the block. They were all empty.
He turned around and studied the street in front of his house looking for vantage points from which his gate could be watched. There were dozens, he realized.
Both sides of Emerald Hill Road were lined with two-story shophouses, most of which had been built in the nineteenth century and remodeled every few decades. Their façades were mostly painted in bright colors, yellow and pink being the most popular choices, and every single one had lines of louvered shutters across the second floor. ISD could have a guy behind any one of those shutters and Tay would never see him.
Was Goh telling him the truth when he denied that ISD had any interest in him? But if he was, why had those two ISD goons grilled Robbie Kang? Tay still couldn’t put it together. He simply couldn’t see why ISD might have any interest at all in the shooting that led to his suspension.
If they did, wouldn’t Goh know about it? Of course he would. And of course he would lie to Tay about it. Goh had looked to Tay like he was telling the truth when he said ISD wasn’t interested in him, but Tay knew Goh was the Maria Callas of liars. No matter what tune he was singing, it sounded perfect.
Tay walk slowly back down Emerald Hill Road toward his gate, casting suspicious glances at the shutters of the shophouses on the other side of the street.
And that was when he saw the camera.
It wasn’t pointed toward his house. It was mounted underneath the overhang of the green shophouse immediately across the street from his gate and was pointed downward covering that house’s front door.
Tay was certain the camera had nothing to do with him, but seeing it suddenly made him realize that ISD didn’t have to stick a guy on the second floor of some shophouse who passed the day drinking cold coffee and peeing in a bottle to keep him under surveillance. All they needed was a tiny little box and an internet connection, and they could look at whatever the camera captured on any laptop at their leisure.
Sometimes Tay felt particularly old, and this was one of those times. Why hadn’t he thought of that before? Why was technology generally the last thing to cross his mind? Perhaps he really had turned into a dinosaur, and he knew perfectly well what had happened to the dinosaurs.
Was the time to leave police work to the younger guys almost on him? He had known that day would come sometime, of course, but now that he was on the other side of fifty it seemed so close he could almost touch it.
He had been thinking about a guy sitting in a car or hiding behind a half-closed shutter. It hadn’t even occurred to him until now that they could be watching his house with a camera.
Tay shook his head at his own foolishness, unlocked his front gate, and closed it behind him.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
TAY POURED HIMSELF a cup of coffee, opened the French doors to his garden, and walked out on the brick pavers in his bare feet.
He was disappointed to see that the haze had returned. Breathing air you could see wasn’t a good way to start the day, and he liked sitting in his garden in the mornings before the heat and humidity started choking the city. Mornings were the best time of day in Singapore. Just as long as it wasn’t too early…
Maybe having the haze back wasn’t all bad news. At least it gave him a good excuse to keep smoking a little longer. How much worse were a few Marlboros than this crap he was breathing even when he wasn’t smoking? He sat down at the table and lit a cigarette. It made the air around him taste better. He was certain of it.
Tay had slept well, and he knew that was mostly because his mother had not made one of her occasional appearances in his dreams. Then again, he was also mildly disappointed she hadn’t turned up. He wanted to ask her about all this nonsense with ISD. His mother had once claimed the dead knew everything, so surely she would at least know if ISD was watching his house.
He had to admit his mother had a pretty good track record of steering him in the right direction when he took her advice, but would she tell him the truth even if she did know? He had never really known when to believe his mother even when she was alive. Now that she was dead, he really didn’t have a clue when to believe her.
After Tay finished his cigarette, he took his coffee inside and found his cell phone. The head of security at Raffles was a retired CID detective he knew fairly well. If Betty Lee worked at Raffles, he was sure it wouldn’t be very difficult for him to find out what she did and when she would be there.
And it wasn’t, so his next call was to the Ritz-Carlton.
“Betty Lee is the hostess at the Raffles Grill,” he told Emma. “She has the evening shift tonight. She’ll be coming in at five and she gets off at ten.”
“How sweet of you to ask, Sam,” Emma responded almost at once. “I’d be delighted to have dinner with you tonight at Raffles.”
Were all American women so forward, Tay wondered? Yes, he thought they probably were.
Still, there were far worse things than having dinner with Emma Lazar at Raffles, so…
“I could meet you in the lobby of Raffles about eight,” he ventured tentatively.
“See you then, handsome.”
Raffles isn’t just a hotel. It’s nothing less than the symbol of Singapore, an international icon recalling the glorious days of Empire when the British stood astride the world and the locals knew how to keep their place. The structure began in the 1840s as a private home and grew from there. Famously, it housed Japanese officers during the occupation of Singapore in World War Two, and the staff buried the silverware in the garden to keep the Japanese from stealing it.
Raffles is a low-slung, three-story building, blinding in its whiteness, which occupies a full block of prime real estate directly in the center of Singapore. The main entrance is set back in a little courtyard off Beach Road, and the residential wings of the hotel, bedecked with iron grillwork and swirls and curlicues that serve no purpose at all other than to make the place look precious, surround an open courtyard filled with impossibly spindly coconut palms.
His was an eccentric point of view, Tay knew, but he personally thought Raffles was something of an eyesore. It always made him think of an enormous wedding cake baked by a badly stoned pastry chef.
Tay arrived at exactly eight, and the hotel doorman opened the door of the taxi. The doormen at Raffles were all Indians costumed in white turbans and white cassocks with lots of gold braid. He supposed that had something to do with remembering the era of Empire, although he wasn’t sure why anyone in Singapore would want to remember the era of Empire. It might have been glorious for the Brits, but it was considerably less glorious for the people they colonized. Regardless, Tay di
dn’t think the costumes made much of a contribution to preserving the dignity of history anyway. Mostly, they just made the doormen look like those genies in the toilet cleaner commercials he saw on television.
Emma was waiting for him in the lobby. She was sitting in a red and gold damask upholstered chair, one of a pair arranged on a deep red oriental rug in front of a wall of floor-to-ceiling mahogany bookcases. She was wearing a white sheath dress and white slingback heels, and she looked exactly like the art director of Vogue had posed her there for a magazine feature on the world’s most glamorous hotels.
Tay stopped walking and stared, speechless, as Emma stood and floated toward him. Her long skirt covered her shoes and she moved so gracefully that she seemed to be rolling on tiny wheels.
“It would probably be best if you shut your mouth, Sam.”
Tay didn’t trust himself to try to speak, so he only nodded.
“Shall we go in?”
Tay nodded again.
Emma slipped her arm through his, and they walked toward the dining room.
The maȋtre d’ smiled in that slightly oily way that every maȋtre d’ Tay had ever met smiled.
“Good evening, lady and gentleman. Under what name is the reservation?”
If Tay had been carrying his police-issued revolver, he would have considered taking it out right then and shooting himself through the head. He had not made a reservation. He had not even thought about making a reservation. He was an idiot.
“Mr. Samuel Tay,” he heard Emma saying from somewhere very far away.
The maȋtre d’ consulted the thick leather-bound book lying open on his stand.
“Ah yes,” he said. “For two at eight o’clock.”
“Yes,” Emma said, “that’s right.”
The maȋtre d’ turned away and gestured to a tall, vaguely Chinese-looking girl on the other side of the dining room.
Tay tilted his head toward Emma and murmured, “Thank you for remembering.”
“Not at all,” she murmured back. “I thought you wouldn’t.”
Tay was still trying to figure out what that was supposed to mean when the Chinese-looking girl got to the maȋtre d’ stand. She had a pleasant but unremarkable face that was half obscured behind her heavy black-framed glasses, long black hair done up in what Tay remembered someone telling him was called a French twist, and a smile that had been painted on several hours earlier and could now stand a bit of a touch up.
“This young lady will show you to your table,” the maȋtre d’ said. “Bon appétit!”
They crossed the dining room several strides behind the hostess and Emma asked in a low voice, “Do you think it’s her?”
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Tay whispered.
The woman seated them at a table tucked away in a small alcove along the back wall. Tay looked her over as subtly as possible to see if she was wearing a nametag. She wasn’t, of course. The Raffles Grill wasn’t a nametag kind of place.
“Stop staring,” Emma said when the girl was out of earshot. “Everyone’s going to think I’m out with a dirty old man.”
Tay had no idea what to say to that, so he said nothing at all.
The Raffles Grill had an air of shabby gentility that Tay quite liked. He felt like he was dining in his old maid aunt’s parlor, if his old maid aunt had been very rich and owned a really big house. And if he had an old maid aunt.
The room had a glistening mahogany-planked floor and there were at least a dozen slowly rotating ceiling fans suspended from the white plaster ceiling. The tables were draped in stiff linen, and each of them groaned under a load of glassware and china that looked large enough to stock a small department store. Emma started reading her menu, and Tay automatically scanned the faces of the other diners to see if anyone caught his attention. No one did.
“What is Les gamberoni simplement rôtis dans leurs sucs?” Emma asked.
She read the phrase with what Tay thought sounded like a very passable French accent, but he didn’t speak French and all he really knew about a passable French accent came from what he had heard in movies.
“I assume you don’t really expect me to answer that,” he muttered.
“Not anymore, I don’t.”
They studied their menus in silence until a waiter appeared to take their order. Emma ordered a starter and a main course, and Tay didn’t understand a word she said. He ordered in English, not as if he had any real choice in the matter, and selected the only two dishes on the menu he was able to read: smoked salmon and a grilled sirloin.
He also ordered a bottle of Beaujolais. He couldn’t work out from what Emma had said whether she had ordered meat or fish so he didn’t know whether red wine or white wine was the correct choice. He wasn’t about to ask and admit he hadn’t understood her since no man wants to look like a jackass in front of a beautiful woman. That was why he ordered Beaujolais. Half red, half white. Neither one nor the other. Genius.
Their food came more quickly than Tay expected. He had assumed that dishes with such complicated names would take a long time to prepare, but apparently not. They made small talk while they ate, but they were both seated in such a way that they could watch the woman they thought was Betty Lee without being obvious about it.
“How do you want to do this?” Tay asked when they were about halfway through their main courses.
“Your friend said she gets off at ten, didn’t he?”
Tay nodded.
“Then why don’t we just invite her somewhere for a drink when she’s ready to leave?”
“If she’s Betty Lee.”
“Yes, if she’s Betty Lee.”
“How do you propose to find that out?” Tay asked.
“Well…” Emma appeared to think. “Maybe I’ll just ask her.”
They both glanced almost simultaneously at the maître d’ stand. The vaguely Chinese-looking woman was standing there alone.
“No time like the present,” Emma said and pushed back her chair.
Tay watched the two women talk, but they were too far away for him even to guess at what they were saying. The Chinese-looking woman’s body language appeared friendly enough to him, and he could see she held Emma’s business card as if she was reading it carefully. At the very least, the woman hadn’t shrieked, hit Emma with the reservation book, and fled the room. That seemed to Tay to be a pretty good start.
The conversation was short. As Emma walked back to their table, Tay saw the woman at the hostess stand turn and look right at him.
“It’s Betty Lee all right,” Emma said after she sat down. “She said she would meet us at a place in the hotel called the Courtyard.”
“That’s a good choice. It’s the garden in the center of the hotel. We should have plenty of privacy.”
“I told her we would follow a few minutes behind when we see her leave.”
Tay nodded and returned to his steak. Emma went back to eating her main course as well. Even now, when Tay could see it right there on her plate, he had no better idea what it was than he had when he heard her order it.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THE CENTERPIECE OF the Courtyard is a large pavilion of filigreed ironwork with a peaked, red-tile roof. The pavilion shelters an elaborate bar and is surrounded by widely spaced wrought-iron tables, each positioned under its own white canvas umbrella. The umbrellas shielded the occupants of the tables almost completely from the gaze of any guests curious enough to glance out the windows of the hotel. It made for near total privacy in public.
Tay and Emma came out through the back of the Raffles Grill and saw Betty Lee waiting at a table set off to itself. Tay’s first thought was that she looked nervous.
“Thank you for talking to us,” Emma said as they pulled out the two chairs opposite her and sat down.
Betty’s eyes flicked from Emma to Tay and back again.
“Are you really a writer for the Wall Street Journal?” she asked Emma.
“Yes, I am.”
�
�But he’s not, is he?” she said, looking at Tay.
“Not exactly. He’s—”
“He’s from the government, isn’t he?”
“The government? What government?”
“Our government. The Singapore government.”
“Why would you think that?”
“Is he from the military? Or is he from the Ministry of Home Affairs?”
“Look, Betty, Sam is working with me to—”
“I’m a policeman,” Tay interrupted. “I’m a detective with the Special Investigations Section of CID. But I’m on suspension so Emma has asked me to help her with the research she is doing into Tyler’s death. I’ve agreed to do that. I have no official position here.”
“Why were you suspended?”
“I shot somebody.”
“Did you mean to?”
“Yes, I meant to.”
“Who did you shoot?”
“A man who would have killed my sergeant if he’d had the chance.”
Betty held Tay’s eyes. She seemed to be trying to see in Tay’s face whether there was more to what he was saying than he was telling her.
“I don’t want to talk to the government,” Betty said.
“You’re not,” Emma reassured her. “Sam is helping me research my piece. He’s not here as a policeman. You can trust him exactly as you would trust me.”
“Why don’t you want to talk to the government?” Tay asked.
Betty looked at Tay for a long moment. He saw her blink rapidly several times behind her heavy glasses, but she didn’t say anything. She just shook her head.
Tay could see Betty was frightened. But of what?
“Do you think Tyler committed suicide?” Emma asked. Tay folded his hands on the table and waited for Betty’s answer.
“I don’t know. I think about it all the time, and that’s the truth. I just don’t know.”
Emma slipped her pad and a pen from her purse and placed the purse on the ground next to her chair.
