Aunty Lee’s Deadly Specials

by Ovidia Yu

  “I hope you’re not going to back out just because of this business. You had a verbal agreement with Mark,” Selina said. “It was as good as settled.”

  “It’s a bit more complicated than that.” Cherril pulled her attention back. “It seems a good part of the wine stock here is on consignment.”

  “That’s how these things are done,” Mark said. “Of course it only works when the suppliers know you well enough. But they all know me, so it won’t be a problem.”

  “You can’t just use Mark’s name,” Selina said quickly. “The wine is here on consignment to Mark. So he will sell the bottles to you and pay the suppliers after he takes his cut. That’s only fair because he’s the one who arranged to have the bottles brought in and he’s the one who made sure that they were kept in the right conditions. This way it’s easiest for everybody. You pay Mark and he’ll take care of everything. Then you can go ahead and run the business however you want to.”

  “But I don’t want to buy the wine from Mark,” Cherril said. “This is great, actually. We can return all the bottles and nobody will have to pay for them!”

  “Cherril, listen to me. If you don’t take the wine, how are you going to run a wine business?” Selina said with the sarcastic precision of a teacher facing a particularly slow student.

  “It’s not going to be a wine business. It’s going to be a drinks business. That’s what it says on the contract, right? Aunty Lee showed me her copy.”

  That was indeed what the contract said. Mark had focused on wines because Mark always focused on what he was interested in.

  “I can come and help you if you’re afraid you don’t know enough about the wines,” he said kindly. “For example, in Singapore you have to be careful of room temperature wines.” His wife might look down on Cherril for not having a university degree, but Mark had always found a willing listener in her. “The French recommend serving their reds à chambre but the temperatures of French chambres are probably around eighteen to twenty degrees Celsius. Here room temperatures can go up to thirty degrees Celsius and anything you store and serve at that temperature is going to taste heavy, hard, and very bitter. That’s why the wine room is so important. And it’s even worse for sweet dessert wines. But there you have to be careful not to overchill them, especially the more complex and vibrant ones. I’ll point out to you the ones you should take special care with. Not just because they are more expensive, which they are, but because you don’t want to damage their vibrancy . . .”

  Mark rose, intending to walk Cherril round his precious wine room yet again. But Cherril shook her head. “Not now, Mark. Thank you. I’ve already learned so much about wine from you, Mark. But that’s not what I want to focus on. I’m going to serve all kinds of hot and cold drinks to go with all the food. Maybe there will be some wine and some beer, but that’s not what I will be focusing on.”

  Mark looked flabbergasted. Selina stepped in. “Well, what are you going to do with the wine room, then? It cost a lot of money, you know.”

  Aunty Lee knew that. She had paid for the construction of the wine room because, as Selina had pointed out, it was installed in her café. And she loved it. The inch of high-density, rigid foam insulation was discreetly covered with unfinished oak, the sophisticated Breezaire system worked almost silently, and Mark had chosen a double pane of dark-tinted glass for the door that hinted at joys within without revealing too much.

  Despite being widely seen as the sweet old aunty championing traditional foods and cooking methods, Aunty Lee loved modern electronic gadgets and systems. She might have an enormous charcoal brazier standing in the back alleyway, but she also had Certis CISCO Integrated Operations round-the-clock burglar and fire alarms, which Nina had linked to the nearest neighborhood police station. And though Aunty Lee swore by the superior quality of spices hand-pounded in the heavy granite mortar and pestle (never to be washed with soap), she also owned the latest models in blender mixers (for catering) and took no chances with her API Food Poison Detection Kits and a GHM-01 Detector for Common Heavy Metals that covered possible food contaminants from rusty water pipes to arsenic.

  She had been less happy about the room’s exit to the rear alley, a legacy of its origin as a toilet. “If you don’t lock the door properly, alcoholics can come through the back door and steal my kitchen equipment.”

  “Alcoholics are hardly likely to steal your kitchen equipment, Aunty Lee,” Selina had pointed out sarcastically.

  “You think just because they like to drink they don’t like to cook?”

  “I’ll make sure Mark locks the door properly,” Selina had said.

  Now Aunty Lee had the temperature-controlled walk-in storeroom every Singaporean cook dreamed of. It would be perfect for store-at-room-temperature goods like soy sauce and sesame oil once they got rid of the wine bottles. “I could make kimchi,” Aunty Lee said dreamily. “Part achar, part kimchi. It will be like a fusion pickle.”

  “We will serve wine of course,” Cherril said. “After all, it would be a waste not to when we have the wine license. But it’s not going to be our main focus. We’re also going to serve cocktails, mocktails, and doctails. Doctails . . .” Forestalling the question: “Doctails are the medicinal drinks. The drinks that TCM and folk remedies recommend as healing. Honey drinks and aloe vera and wolfberry teas as well as energy drinks.”

  “That’s actually a good idea!” Selina said. “Traditional Chinese medicine is a growing market today. Mark, are you sure you don’t want to do this? You haven’t signed the papers yet. This could work. You take care of the wine, I take care of everything else. You—this to Aunty Lee—“you must agree not to sell any kind of cold drinks or desserts so that people are forced to buy from us . . .”

  Mark had intended to cultivate a Singapore-based wine appreciation platform. Making money from the business had never been a priority for him. And now even the people he had been trying to help didn’t appreciate him.

  “I don’t want to,” he said sulkily.

  Aunty Lee wondered how this would influence his next career step. ML had been wise, she thought, to set a limit on how much of his inheritance Mark could tap into during her lifetime. Though both he and Mathilda had been left well off by their father and would be wealthy by Singapore standards after her death, Mark had already drawn substantial loans on his future inheritance.

  The shop phone rang just then. Nina answered, “Aunty Lee’s Delights, good morning,” brightly enough, but as she listened to the voice at the other end her expression changed. “But it is not a problem, ma’am. You want to postpone until tomorrow or another day? No? But you should speak to Aunty Lee first. She is here, I will pass the phone to her, you wait—”

  “This evening’s client canceled?”

  Nina nodded. “She said there is some family emergency, they have to cancel the party.”

  “I already ordered dry ice for the drinks chiller—and what about all the food!” Cherril said. “I’m sure they’re lying. Family emergency, my foot. They are going to order in Pizza Hut or Kentucky Fried Chicken. I hope they all end up with food poisoning. They deserve it!”

  “Don’t say that,” Aunty Lee said. “Nobody deserves food poisoning.”

  Even a rumor of food poisoning could haunt a café for years. Aunty Lee hoped this would not happen to hers. She turned for assurance to ML Lee’s portrait. ML was smiling with his usual charm but Cherril, standing in front of the frame, looked really upset.

  “It’s just one booking,” Aunty Lee said briskly. The deposit on the canceled meal would cover what she had spent on ingredients. “Come help me experiment how to package cooked food for the freezer. I want to make two-person servings of yellow chicken curry and rice with achar separate. Like they sell at the petrol station to heat up in the microwave. Only mine will be nicer.”

  10

  Home Interrogation

  The Peters family home was a large bungalow off Binjai Crescent, deep in the Binjai housing estate and closer to
the hilly center of Singapore island. Mycroft Peters had grown up in this house. Now he and his wife, Cherril, lived in a newly added two-story wing with its own pebbled path leading from the driveway.

  “So this is how the rich people live,” Staff Sergeant Panchal said snidely. Salim could tell she was intimidated and made no comment.

  Salim buzzed the gate intercom. Mycroft appeared at the front door of the main house.

  “You shouldn’t park there,” Mycroft said, looking at the police Subaru. Though parking opposite the continuous white line outside was illegal, it was an offense for which drivers seldom got fined, especially here in Binjai Park, where people were rich and roads were wide. Since Singaporeans did not understand the concept of bribery, it just meant paperwork and bad karma for the traffic officer. Warning people off worked much better for all concerned and cleared the road faster, which was the point of the whole exercise.

  But few people challenged the police on where they, the police themselves, left their cars.

  “I’ll give myself a warning,” Salim said.

  Mycroft laughed. “Come in.”

  Mycroft was not usually home at noon. But Cherril had phoned him to say the police were coming to speak to her at home and he had postponed two meetings, canceled a lunch, and got back to the house before the police arrived for their appointment.

  “They already talked to you yesterday, why should they want to question you again? And why here if they were at the shop earlier?”

  “Mykie, I don’t know!” She looked frightened.

  Mycroft looked at his wife fondly. He knew some people thought he had married beneath him, that he had been seduced into this marriage or had chosen her to spite his parents. In fact it was Cherril’s addiction to learning that had caught his attention. Her curiosity about how systems worked matched his own. He had fallen in love with her when they started learning Japanese together. And now he meant to protect her.

  “Mother is out to lunch. We’ll talk to them in the big house.”

  Cherril, who had taken some time to get used to living in a house larger than the three apartments in her old housing block combined, knew that Mycroft was deliberately trying to intimidate the police visitors with his lawyer side.

  “But why? Do you think they suspect me of having something to do with it? Is that why you rushed home?”

  “I think they want to talk to you and Aunty Lee separately, that’s all. But I would like to hear what they have to say.”

  After Mycroft settled them into a living room that seemed to the police officers the size of a community center recreation basketball court, Staff Sergeant Panchal started to ask questions. Speaking with Cherril apart from Aunty Lee had been her idea and she wanted to make sure any evidence she extracted was credited to her.

  “Someone heard you saying, ‘I hope it wasn’t the chicken buah keluak,’ after Mrs. Sung and her son were found dead. Can you explain why you said that?”

  “Because—well, you know they can be poisonous if not prepared properly. But nobody ever had any problems with Aunty Lee’s buah keluak before.” Cherril glanced at her husband and Inspector Salim as she spoke. Mycroft remained impassive but Salim nodded slightly.

  “Did you mention your concern to the police you gave a statement to?”

  “No. I didn’t. It was just a thought. A joke, in fact.”

  “I understand you were helping with food preparations yesterday.”

  “Actually I was taking care of the drinks.”

  “So you did not touch any of the food? You did not help with any of the preparations?”

  “Well, of course I did help a bit. There are only three of us, Aunty Lee, Nina, and myself—”

  “What qualifications do you have in food preparation, Mrs. Peters?”

  “I—well, I’m sort of learning on the job.”

  “Yet you were helping with the food preparations for the party yesterday. Did you help with preparing the chicken buah keluak?”

  “No.”

  “You were formerly working as an air stewardess, am I correct? “And you left your job as a stewardess after some complaints were made against you, is that correct? Did these complaints have anything to do with your food service?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure? There is a copy of the complaints made and the passenger, one Mr. Scott Barber—”

  “The passenger said that he wanted the chicken main dish but he didn’t want to eat halal chicken because he was not Muslim. I explained to him all the chicken on board was halal and he got angry. Actually he was very drunk. But I didn’t leave my job because of that. I left because I got married.”

  “And do you cook at home, Mrs. Peters?”

  “I don’t see what that has to do with anything,” Cherril said. “Why are you asking such stupid questions?”

  She turned to Mycroft but he was watching as Staff Sergeant Panchal pointedly wrote down “uncooperative” on her pad.

  “I think you should leave now,” Mycroft said.

  “Are you sure you want to go through with this?” he asked after the police had left. “Why not just go for cooking classes? We can do up the kitchen here if you like.”

  “Of course I want to go through with it. What happened has got nothing to do with Aunty Lee. We just happened to be there when it happened, that’s all.”

  “Aunty Lee manages to be around a lot whenever something happens. I don’t want her dragging you into trouble. You know they’ll probably decide it’s food poisoning and drop it, right? And you know that’s going to have an effect on her business. Are you sure you want to go into it now? Just think about it.”

  “Who else would take me on without any experience? Besides, you don’t know who else might have had a motive to do away with the Sungs. Maybe Mabel’s daughter had a boyfriend.” Mycroft snorted at this. “Or her husband had a mistress. Any of those people might have had something to do with it. And you said yourself, isn’t it possible that Mabel killed herself and her son rather than watch him die slowly?”

  Cherril was already starting to sound a little like her culinary mentor, Mycroft thought. Whatever she wanted to do was fine with him as long as she was happy. But now it struck him that it might also be very tiring—for him.

  11

  Buah Keluak

  “We should get back to the guest list,” Salim said as they got back into the car.

  “We are wasting our time questioning people on the guest list,” Staff Sergeant Panchal said. “Why would anybody purposely kill people like that? They got poisoned by the buah keluak, we should bring in the catering people. They would have been arrested already if you weren’t so friendly with them.”

  “I’m sure there’s more to it than that.”

  “You are biased.”

  “I have previous info. Personal experience.”

  “What are we waiting for now?”

  “More info.”

  Back at the station, general opinion was on Panchal’s side. The risk of eating buah keluak was a well-known urban legend, even though none of the officers knew anyone who had died from eating it. Even Salim would probably have blamed the deaths on the buah keluak if the caterer had been anyone other than Aunty Lee.

  “Anything more from the Sung house?”

  “There were canisters of Algae Bomb and rat poison stored in the pool area, brands banned in Singapore. Neither the husband nor daughter can say where they came from. They both said Mabel Sung couldn’t stand any kind of dirt or pests around. She was afraid of infection getting to her son. Apparently she used to get friends to bring pesticides in from Malaysia because she said the safe ones sold here are not effective,” Corporal Chan said. She and Corporal Ismail were on a three-month training posting and still new enough to be excited about lab and interview reports.

  “Anything on that other death? The jumper?”

  “She told people her fiancé came here to sell a kidney to pay for their wedding and died during the illegal transplant op.
But there’s no record of his death or a body. What happened to the guy? Mysterious, right?”

  “Fishy story. The guy probably just ran out on her,” Corporal Ismail said with the worldly-wise air of a twenty-two-year-old. “If he came here for an illegal transplant, he’s not going to come forward. The last time those guys got caught coming to donate kidneys to Singaporeans, they could not prove they were related to each other, so they got prison time and caning.” To deter profiteering off organ trafficking, transplants were illegal unless a family relationship could be proved.

  Back in his own office, Salim went over the notes he’d taken at the Sung house. No results had come in yet from the tests he had ordered. It was only on television dramas that results came so quickly. On his instructions, his team had recorded not only the answers to their questions but everything they observed yesterday. Salim knew that you could learn more about people from what they did than from what they chose to tell you. According to the investigators who had been at the Sung house that day, Henry Sung had spent all day at his computer watching what was going on in the rest of the house via security camera feeds. He had agreed to supply the police with recordings from the cameras, only to find that the live feeds had not been recorded. Yes, he had been cooperative enough but he was an old man who did not seem to know much about how the house was run or about what his wife had been doing. At the hospital where he had worked for almost forty years, he had an office and the title of “advising consultant” but no duties.

  Sharon Sung had spent the rest of the evening at the Sung Law office, immersed in Mabel’s files and paperwork. Dr. Edmond Yong and GraceFaith Ang had showed up and spent some time with her, the officer who escorted Sharon had written said. Salim called him to his office.

  “Edmond Yong was looking after Leonard Sung’s health at the Sungs’ place, right? What was he doing at Sung Law?”