by Ovidia Yu
Of course Nina remembered. Laura Kwee had tasted all the wine in all her glasses before realizing Mark meant to walk the guests through the samples one by one. Seated between Mycroft Peters and Harry Sullivan, Laura had chattered to both of them till, rebuffed by Mycroft, who fixed his attention firmly on Mark (Mycroft took wine seriously—but then Mycroft took most things seriously), she had focused on Harry, who, himself, was leaning across to whisper to Marianne, who was seated on his other side. Laura had reminded Nina of a schoolgirl trying to get a boy’s attention. She had waved to Nina and asked her to top up her glasses. Nina got no direction from Mark or Selina, who were deliberately ignoring Laura. Laura, getting impatient, waved two of her already empty glasses in the air. She knew she was not drunk. After all, Mark had assured her that people never got drunk at wine tastings. She was just slightly tipsy and feeling daring and sophisticated . . .
“Do you remember what Laura said to Marianne that night?” Aunty Lee’s thoughts had obviously run along the same lines as Nina’s. “Something about her supposed holiday plans? And I could see Marianne was quite cross with her. Do you know what she was talking about?”
Nina had no idea. All she remembered was Aunty Lee calling her to the pantry and passing her a bottle of red wine to top up Laura’s glasses.
“The same in all the glasses?” Nina had been concerned. Mark had been very particular earlier about not getting his special wines and the sequence of glasses mixed up. What Aunty Lee handed her was one of the bottles kept in the kitchen for adding body to soups and sauces.
“She won’t be able to tell the difference.”
In retrospect, it had probably been a bad idea. But at the time their only concern had been to keep Laura satisfied and quiet. Instead she had gone on giggling and whispering, rolling her eyes when Mark glared and Selina shushed her. Laura had definitely not been used to wine. Selina had been so furious with the woman that Nina would not have been surprised if Laura had been banned from all future wine dining events. But apparently Laura had apologized abjectly, offered to help at future wine tastings (for free), and been forgiven.
Laura Kwee had not struck Aunty Lee as the sort of person to experiment with drugs. In her thirties, she had been a secondary school teacher until she gave it up for a career in arts management. She had probably hoped that the change would lead to meeting exciting people and becoming or marrying an arts impresario, but so far her life had plodded on without any sign of taking off.
Laura Kwee had always seemed a safe, responsible, rather dull woman to Nina. Overly concerned with what other people thought of her perhaps. And overly disappointed with how little most did. Several times she had tried to get Nina to tell her what Aunty Lee and Mark “really” thought of her. It had been easy for Nina to say honestly that she had never heard Laura’s name mentioned.
“Maybe someone gave it to her? Put it in her drink or something?”
Things like that happened on television, but it was hard to imagine it happening in Singapore, and to someone like Laura Kwee. It was not just the difficulty of imagining Laura Kwee in a nightclub partying and drinking, but why Laura Kwee? Why would someone have picked her?
“I have to talk to that girl again. That American girl,” Aunty Lee said. “You wrote down her hotel and mobile phone, right?”
“Ma’am, if you don’t know what is happening, how can she know? That Carla Saito just arrived in Singapore, she never met Laura Kwee before.”
“But there’s something she knows and wouldn’t say. I could see it very clearly. I just didn’t want to push her with everybody around. And those Cunninghams are also not saying something. I could see it from how they reacted to her when she came in. Maybe it’s the drug connection. Maybe they were Laura’s drug connection. You heard them say they came to meet her too, right?”
“You can ask Senior Staff Sergeant Salim about the drugs,” Nina said, seeing a familiar car pull up outside the gate. “But careful—he’ll think you want to take drugs to go party!”
“I doubt he’ll tell me. Anyway, he may not approve of us knowing such things.” Aunty Lee stopped and looked around, nose twitching slightly as though she were trying to detect an elusive scent. Her hearing and eyesight might be failing, but she could still read people better than most. The change in Nina’s attention had alerted her.
“What is it? Is somebody here? Who is it? Not that policeman again?” Without looking out her front windows, Aunty Lee deduced the arrival of SSS Salim before he had time to buzz the gate intercom. She perked up immediately.
“That’s good. Maybe he can answer some of my questions. Let him in, Nina. Put him in the living room and give him a drink. I have to go and change my clothes.”
The automatic gate clicked open and SSS Salim walked up the short stretch of gravel driveway that led up to the house. This time he was able to take in details he missed on his previous visit with all his thoughts focused on the dead woman. A lane branched off, leading around and behind the house—to a garage, Salim presumed, since he could not see any cars. The staff sergeant stopped at the steps leading to the glassed-in verandah. It was clearly designed to be enjoyed in air-conditioning. This was how the rich lived in equatorial heat: enjoying green lushness within a space of air-conditioned comfort.
Salim took a deep breath to prepare himself. He was not intimidated by the rich. In his opinion, having money did not make you a better or worse person. But in his experience, while the very wealthy and the very poor were relaxed in their dealings with others, those in between could be more difficult to deal with. They were very conscious of trying to climb into what they saw as the upper class and very afraid of sliding down into the lower. They were also generally very eager to show how well they knew their rights by being unhelpful and rude to a police officer who was just trying to do his job. SSS Salim had asked his aide to wait in the car so that it could be moved immediately if anyone had to go in or out. Some people also leaped at the chance of reporting police vehicles every opportunity they got. SSS Salim did not really mind that either. It kept his men on their toes, making them more vigilant. But it also meant a lot of time spent on paperwork and he had other problems to deal with right then.
“Please come in and take a seat. Aunty will be coming soon. You want to drink coffee or tea or soft drink?”
Again his presence seemed to have been anticipated, but SSS Salim didn’t mind. He had noticed the maid from his previous visit hovering protectively around her mistress. Most people did not bother to notice maids and cleaners, likewise drivers and technicians, but these were the people Salim had grown up with. Salim also remembered this woman because she had not struck him as a domestic helper at first—or even a waitress—though she had been waiting on Aunty Lee. Was it her posture? Her clothes? SSS Salim could not say. Her manner as she welcomed him into the house now was faultless, as it had been a few days ago.
“Thank you,” SSS Salim said. He hesitated.
“Sir, no need to take off shoes,” the girl said.
She was very good at reading people, SSS Salim thought. Had he been on a private visit, he would likely have removed his shoes nonetheless. But today SSS Salim was calling on Mrs. M. L. Lee on official business and the Singapore police force did not take off its shoes for anybody.
The living room was large and airy. On the walls, modern white curving shelves undulated above stolid pieces of heavily inlaid teak furniture. SSS Salim was no expert in old furniture, but he guessed these were antiques and probably expensive. He sat down. The sofa seemed to be made of bamboo, but the thick green seat was comfortably cushioned. Overall, the room had an effect of lightness above and solidity beneath. Somewhat to his surprise, Salim immediately felt comfortable there.
“You work in the café also?” Salim asked the maid. The question would have sounded purely conversational to anyone unfamiliar with Singapore’s Ministry of Manpower rule that stated that a foreign domestic helper “shall not engage in any form of employment, paid or unpaid, o
ther than that of a Domestic Helper.”
Nina was only too aware that Aunty Lee could be fined and she herself deported if this man decided to make trouble. Even as she decided she didn’t like him, Nina knew she could not let him see she did not like him. She gave him a wide, shy smile that could have meant anything.
“How long have you been working in Singapore?”
“Sir, I like work in Singapore very much!” Nina beamed to make up for the abrupt deterioration of her spoken English.
SSS Salim looked at her suspiciously, but before he could say anything further, they heard the chair lift descending the stairs. The chair lift that followed the curve of the specially constructed staircase had been installed after the late M. L. Lee broke his ankle in a golf accident. Normally it was used only to transport Aunty Lee’s enormous ornamental flowerpots between floors. But Aunty Lee knew how to make an appearance and did so now.
Even Nina, who knew her better than anyone alive, was taken aback. Earlier Aunty Lee had been perfectly presentable in her usual work-at-home outfit of a comfortable T-shirt and what she called her tai chi trousers. Now she was wearing a coarse, dark blue silk blouse over loose natural linen trousers. She was also wearing her pearls.
“How nice to see you again, Sergeant,” Aunty Lee greeted SSS Salim graciously. To her, comfort meant being dressed for the job. It was obvious to her that getting the upper hand in an interview with a police officer required a different outfit from supervising the cleaning of bean sprouts.
Nina remained in her typical at-home attire—today she was wearing a light pink T-shirt beneath a flowered sundress. It was Aunty Lee who had come up with this compromise after Selina declared the sundresses Aunty Lee had bought for Nina (so cheap, so comfortable, after they wear out you can use them for cleaning or patchwork) not suitable for a maid. Her chief objection had been to the strappy top and bare shoulders, which would catch the attention of men and boyfriends and lead to rape, pregnancy, abortions, and other such expense-causing phenomena. Selina was firmly convinced that how women dressed, talked, and behaved was to blame for unwanted male attention.
But now Aunty Lee did not depend solely on her appearance. Right now she was playing the grande dame, very different from the busy café chef.
“How nice to see you again, Senior Staff Sergeant. Do take a seat if you haven’t come to arrest me. You haven’t? Oh good.
“I gather you are here about the body on Sentosa. Such a terrible place. I still remember stories about dead bodies washing up on the beach there in the morning after the Japanese took Chinese men and boys out on boats at night. They tied them together before they shot them and threw them in, so that even if they didn’t die right away from the bullets, they would drown. Of course, at that time it was just a Malay fishing kampong there. And the Malay villagers would secretly bury the bodies, and even years later, when the wives and mothers and sisters came to ask, they could tell them where their men were buried. Did you know that? It is part of our history, how an outside threat made different races here watch out for each other. But nowadays people are not interested in that, they only want to know about property values.”
That was rich, Salim thought, coming from someone whose District 10 property was probably among the highest valued on the island. But he appreciated Aunty Lee’s attempt to establish a connection with him. And he wanted information from her too, so he responded in kind.
“My uncles used to tell us about that time when they brought us fishing as kids. Every school holiday we used to look forward to going out on the boats. From Pasir Panjang right across to Sentosa. For us it was just fun. And sometimes when we went out night fishing, we would try to scare each other. But my uncles always told us to respect the dead.”
“Speaking of the dead,” Aunty Lee said, now that tea had arrived and her welcome accepted. “Are you here to talk about Laura Kwee’s cell phone?”
“Laura Kwee’s cell phone was found in a burning bin outside your shop.” SSS Salim got straight to the point.
“The red metal one below the flowerpots?”
“Yes. Mrs. Lee, I would like to ask you to help us by telling me who was present at your café that night. We are interviewing all the proprietors along that stretch.”
“Wait, wait. Slow down for me, young man. You say you found Laura Kwee’s phone in the burning bin—you were looking for it there? Why?”
Nina was impressed anew by Aunty Lee’s acting skills. But then again, she might not have been acting. She genuinely wanted to know why the police were following up on this particular tip, given the many others she had called in.
“Yes, ma’am. It was fortunate that Laura Kwee had previously downloaded the GPS tracking application onto her phone. We knew that Mrs. Mark Lee received a text message from Laura Kwee’s cell phone before the dinner that night. Therefore we know her phone had to be turned on so that the stolen-phone recovery application could work. Normally a mobile phone can only be traced when it is still on because the lookout servers need to be able to trigger the phone to use its GPS chip to determine the phone’s location. This is the case with all stolen-cell-phone recovery programs. However, we were able to get enough information off the servers to be able track its approximate location at the time the message was sent.”
SSS Salim spoke as though this elaborate system was just a matter of course, but it was clear to Nina that he expected her and Aunty Lee to be impressed. Though she was impressed, Aunty Lee was focusing on something else.
“Wait, wait, wait a minute. That means that when I am carrying my hand phone, then you can track to where I am whether it is on or off?”
“Oh no, ma’am. Your phone has to be on so that it can use the servers or GPS to figure out where it is.”
“But you managed to find Laura Kwee’s phone even though it was off—unless it was still on?”
“No, no. That is different altogether. Because it is a crime investigation—”
“That means actually you can track whoever you want, but only the police are allowed to do it?”
Aunty Lee seemed genuinely curious. SSS Salim had encountered many hostile civilians and didn’t think she was one of them.
“If I lose my phone, can you use that tracking system to find it for me?”
SSS Salim decided to get the conversation back on track. “Probably not, madam. The reason why I came to see you today is to tell you that though we found the phone, the SIM card had been removed. We would like to take a look inside your shop to see if we can find it there.”
“Why do you think you will find it there?”
“It is one of several locations we are searching, ma’am.
“Someone in the vicinity of the shop must have sent that message and left the phone there,” SSS Salim continued as though Aunty Lee had not spoken. “We would like to know who was there that night as well as how we can contact them.”
Aunty Lee nodded to herself. SSS Salim looked at her, then in Nina’s direction. Had he said too much too fast? He reminded himself that Mrs. Lee was an old lady. Worse, she was an important old lady. Salim had already been told to be “sensitive” in dealing with her and had thought that coming to see her in person was the way to be sensitive.
Nina was not concerned—at least not for Aunty Lee. She knew that look. Aunty Lee was processing. When she was ready she would—
“Do you need to get a search warrant to check my shop?”
Again Salim did not sense hostility.
“If necessary, I will have to get one. But I thought that if we can come to an agreement, then you can give us permission to look around your shop, and if we find anything, then we will take it from there.”
SSS Salim did not want to frighten the woman by putting it too bluntly, but—
“You say Laura Kwee was already dead at the time when the message was sent. That means you don’t think Laura sent the message from my shop. You think that the murderer sent it, right?”
“Well, we must not jump to any co
nclusions—”
“That means you think that one of the people who was there in my shop was the murderer who made the call! Nina! Nina!”
“Yes, ma’am?”
“Go and get the paper for him. You know the one we made that night with all the people and where they were around the time when Silly-Nah got the message . . .”
Now it was Aunty Lee’s turn to look modestly efficient. SSS Salim was impressed. He was even more impressed when Nina returned with the list.
Mrs. Rosie Lee—front shop, dining room, kitchen, pantry, outdoor cooking area (behind kitchen).
Nina Balignasay—dining room, kitchen, pantry, outdoor cooking area.
Mark Lee—dining room. Made several trips out to his car to get things he had forgotten.
Selina Lee—sidewalk, front shop. Used her mobile phone to text and call.
Harry Sullivan—sidewalk. Stayed outside till last minute smoking because no smoking inside, dining room.
Frank and Lucy Cunningham—front shop, dining room, toilet, Lucy Cunningham was texting, Frank Cunningham went out front and back to take photographs.
Cherril Lim-Peters—dining room, went to car several times with Mark Lee.
Carla Saito—outside somewhere. She said that she came looking for Laura Kwee and had come straight in as soon as she arrived, but in fact she arrived much earlier and was watching from outside.
The contact numbers for all these people were written down in Nina’s careful script on the reverse side of the paper.
SSS Salim was very impressed. People were always coming up with ideas and suggestions on how he could do his work better, but they seldom passed him anything he could use, and even when they did, it was never so organized. In fact Aunty Lee’s list reminded him of an ingredient list for one of his grandmother’s recipes; written out casually but carefully.
“How do you know that?” SSS Salim asked, pointing to the comments that appeared after Carla Saito’s name. “Did you see her outside? What was she doing?”
