Aunty Lee’s Deadly Specials

by Ovidia Yu

  And Aunty Lee could find no mention in all the papers (even the Chinese ones that Cherril was delegated to scour) of what had become of Wen Ling, the China woman responsible for the local organization. Her contacts at various maid agencies and travel centers could only give the phone numbers they had reached her at, numbers that were no longer in use. They had only done what they were told, they said. And she had not yet paid them.

  “It’s all about money, isn’t it?” Cherril said. “If only people had enough money they wouldn’t do things like that.”

  Neither of her companions agreed with her.

  “Singaporeans think there’s never enough money!” Nina said as she thumped a huge plastic carrier of string beans onto one of the tables.

  “Mabel Sung was trying to save her son,” Aunty Lee said from behind her pile of papers. “Once Mabel Sung found out about the illegal transplants, she became fixated on getting a new heart for her son. A parent would do anything to save the life of a child. But . . .”

  Nina heard her change of tone and looked worried.

  “But what?”

  “But why would they kill her?” Aunty Lee demanded.

  “The case is over, bad people are in prison or out of the country. Everybody is happy. Why worry?”

  “She must have found out about the illegal transplants last year and discovered a way to link them to the Never Say Die people,” Cherril said. “That was brilliant actually. If people wondered why they were suddenly healthy, they could say the praying works miracles. Mycroft says it’s not like it is in India, where a kidney transplant operation runs for around as low as five thousand dollars and they get medical tourists from the West all the time. I was surprised Mabel didn’t bring her son to India for the operation, but Mycroft says people here are prejudiced. They don’t trust the doctors there or they think that if the organs come from Indians they must be dirty.”

  Her husband, Mycroft, an ethnic Indian, looked embarrassed. He had taken to walking over to the shop with Cherril when she came in on weekends. He said it was because he needed the exercise but Aunty Lee suspected he was being a protective husband and his need for exercise would fade away now the murderers had been brought to justice. But had they?

  “She was a racist, elitist woman but there was no reason for them to kill her,” Aunty Lee said.

  Aunty Lee’s mind was already elsewhere. The illegal transplant business had required a lot of planning and organization. If the same people had branched out into murder, they would have to had put in a lot of careful advance planning, like the amount of preparation that went into making chicken buah keluak. But the deaths of Mabel and Leonard Sung did not feel like that sort of murder at all. They felt like impulse murders. Ingredients like the buah keluak and Algae Bomb and the food tray all coming together were like the sort of dish that just fell into your lap. Like when a husband went fishing and came back with a huge garoupa or a net full of plump kembong and you happened to have a sack of charcoal and a bag of salt. Then no planning was needed at all. All you had to do was grab and gut the fish and get it onto the grill as fast as possible. Because you could take your time to decide who to call to come over to dinner later, but without enough freezer space the whole point was being able to kill and gut a fish fast.

  That was the kind of murder it felt like to Aunty Lee. Not one that had been planned for a long time but one that had depended on chance uniting motive, opportunity, and a calm killer.

  “I should go and talk to that Dr. Yong again,” Aunty Lee said thoughtfully. Any or all of the others, tired and stressed by recent events, would have told her to drop it. But at that moment Mycroft was asking Cherril if she felt ready to return home and Cherril was teasing Nina for gayuma recipes because with the right Filipino love potions on the drinks menu, people might be persuaded to fall in love with the shop as well as with each other. Aunty Lee took their silence for agreement.

  But it wasn’t until she was back in her house that evening that Aunty Lee got the chance to pursue her inquiries further. Nina had firmly refused to discuss a case she considered closed and settled on clearing fallen leaves out of the driveway drain gratings, something she had been dying to do for weeks. Aunty Lee retreated to her living room. She was feeling low and dissatisfied, both tired and restless at the same time. The room felt unpleasantly empty and even the portrait of ML failed to comfort her. Perhaps she should get it reframed? But then the reframing of pictures and redecorating of houses was precisely the kind of pointless tai-tai busyness Aunty Lee hoped to avoid.

  Aunty Lee told herself she was only feeling bad because her case and her shop were both closed. But once the paperwork was done, they would reopen and everything would be back to normal. But even there, what was the point? Wasn’t that just more aimless busyness? She even had her doubts about why the PRC gang would have wanted to kill Mabel Sung. Was she just another bored old woman matchmaking corpses and motives?

  Perhaps she should take up tai chi in the park with all the other old aunties . . .

  “Rosie!”

  Aunty Lee turned and saw the only (live) man capable of making her feel better right then standing at the French doors that opened from her living room to the lawn.

  “Nina told me you were back here, so I thought I would come round this way and join you.”

  Raja Kumar had taken off his tie and rolled up his shirtsleeves in an attempt to look casual.

  “Please come in,” Aunty Lee said, all thoughts of tai chi immediately forgotten. “I thought you were out of the country. I called your office a few times but every time they said you were busy or in meetings, so I thought for sure you went off to Indonesia or Vietnam on some hush-hush business.”

  “This is an unofficial meeting,” Commissioner Raja said. “I just happened to stop by on my way home and ran into you when you just happened to be here.”

  “That’s an easier story to believe if you set it in my shop than in my house!”

  “You can open your shop again anytime. Your paperwork is cleared. Salim will bring it over to you tomorrow once it is stamped and recorded. You won’t be inconvenienced again by this whole kitchen investigation nonsense. You’ll have seen from all newspapers that you were right. There were more than minor discrepancies in the accounts at Sung Law. From the look of things they are in serious trouble. And Mabel Sung’s personal accounts are just as overextended,” Commissioner Raja said. “Everything was going to collapse sooner or later no matter what happened. That might make the suicide theory easier to believe. Mabel had bankrupted her company and her husband trying to find a cure for her son, but Mabel’s son was not going to recover. It was only a matter of time before he died and Mabel lost everything.”

  “Mabel and Edmond Yong must have arranged with the Chinese employment agencies for a donor who thought he was coming to donate a kidney. The Chinese agency who brought him in was not paid in full till after the operation—”

  “They must charge a lot. Did you see how much Mabel Sung took out of her accounts?”

  “Edmond Yong must have persuaded her they could more than make up for it by selling off the poor bugger’s other body parts. He was never going to make it to the wedding he was selling a kidney to pay for. Dr. Yong was quite happy to make money on the side with a kidney or cornea transplant, but it must have been a jump for him to agree to do a transplant that would kill the donor.”

  “So you’ve arrested him?” Aunty Lee asked eagerly. “Make him tell you who his China contacts are and who else is involved. The transplant scheme was still going on after Mabel died. Henry and Sharon Sung must be involved somehow.”

  “We don’t have proof of that yet. We have to wait and see what Edmond Yong gives us.”

  “I wish I could talk to him,” Aunty Lee said. Commissioner Raja made a point of not hearing her.

  “And I thought you would like to know that given Leonard Sung’s state of health and Mabel Sung’s probable state of mind at the time of her demise, they are writing it up wi
th weight on the mercy killing/suicide angle.”

  Aunty Lee could see Commissioner Raja thought this was good news for her. If the unofficial official view was that Mabel Sung had indeed killed herself and her son, that meant Aunty Lee and her catering business were off the hook.

  But convenient as it was, Aunty Lee could not believe it. If Mabel had killed herself and her sick son after her live donor transplant scheme crashed, then it would have made sense. But before, with all the plans for her son’s operation in place, why would Mabel have killed her son and herself? And there was as little reason for the illegal organ traders to kill them.

  “What about the woman who was organizing things from the China side? Wen Ling?”

  “Wen Ling has probably moved all her operations out of Singapore, at least temporarily. It’s too profitable a business to give up. And as they get richer they can buy into legitimate businesses, probably in the West.”

  “Actually that’s not so different from what our ancestors did,” Aunty Lee said.

  As soon as Timothy Pang opened the door, the senior officer—Sergeant Yap? Sergeant Yeo?—rose to his feet to acknowledge him. “Sergeant Pang. Good of you to come. Your brother came to offer us a statement.”

  “I want to clear Benjamin’s name,” said Patrick. “I want the papers to print that they were wrong. They were saying all kinds of things about him. That he was part of some illegal business and set the fire to cover his tracks and then disappeared.”

  “Come with me first,” Timothy said firmly. “I’ll take care of it.”

  A small ungenerous part of him wondered whether he was going to be spending the rest of his life taking care of his younger brother. Maybe the years that Patrick had spent not talking to him had not been so bad after all.

  Patrick protested—he wanted to see the statement he had given the police, he said. He wanted them to remove Benjamin Ng’s name from whatever suspects list they had put it on. He went on talking even as his brother tried to genially erase any record of his visit without making it look like any kind of a cover-up.

  “I have to be sure you don’t say anything to incriminate yourself,” Timothy Pang said.

  “Maybe you should both hear our current report on Benjamin Ng,” Sergeant Yeo Seng Meng suggested respectfully. Timothy hesitated but the sergeant gave a small nod.

  “Benjamin Ng was commissioned to design a home ICU and operating theater for the Sungs. He put it down to the eccentricities of rich people wanting to prolong their lives beyond death. This was completed before the fire at the Beautiful Dreamers clinic and Benjamin Ng did not make the connection then. Notes subsequently found in his apartment and handed over to us reveal that Ng became suspicious after the fire when the intensive-care-unit equipment, like the bedside monitor and dialysis pumps he had been sourcing for the home ICU setup, were offered to him cheap without purchase history or guarantees. His notes include records of serial numbers verifying this. His research linked these items to those supposedly destroyed in the fire at the Beautiful Dreamers clinic. Ng asked Edmond Yong about this but did not get a satisfactory answer. This was before the suicide death of the PRC girl. He suspected only that Dr. Yong was involved with arson for insurance and was trying to make extra money by forcing him, Pang, to buy back the same equipment that had supposedly been lost in the fire.”

  “What happened to him after that is anybody’s guess,” said the other officer.

  Patrick listened quietly to these words. “So you don’t have him down as a criminal.”

  “No. Quite the opposite. He was one of the first to suspect there was something funny going on. I just need you to sign a receipt for the notebooks you brought in.”

  Edmond Yong was released on bail.

  His body was found the next morning dumped at a Downtown Line station construction site.

  “It will cause work holdups and delay the station opening,” Nina said when the news came over the radio. “That man was always a troublemaker. You want to read the online reports?”

  “Such a waste.” Aunty Lee sighed, moving to where Nina was priming her iPad to STOMP, Singapore’s “citizen journalism” web portal.

  “You think it is a waste? That man who is supposed to be a doctor saving lives goes around killing people and you think it is a waste?”

  “It is a waste I didn’t get to talk to him,” Aunty Lee said with dignity. “Now he is dead and I still don’t know what happened.”

  But it was a waste, Aunty Lee thought. She had not liked Edmond Yong and she felt sorry for him because not only his death but his life had been a waste.

  27

  What Next?

  Aunty Lee got her kitchen license back. Everything had returned to normal, but as Aunty Lee told the portrait of ML by the wine room door, she was not yet satisfied,

  “The China gang had every reason to keep Mabel Sung and her son alive as they had not yet got all their money. And Mabel had every reason to stay alive because her son had not yet got the transplant!”

  However, everyone else was satisfied, including Mark, who came by to congratulate her on the reopening, then disappeared into his precious wine room.

  “You can still come back to visit, you know. Even after you sign the business over to Cherril,” Aunty Lee said when he finally emerged to join her and Selina for tea.

  “Not if she returns all the stock to the distributors. Wine doesn’t travel well, you know. It was not easy getting all the bottles here in good condition. And I don’t know whether Cherril knows enough to take care of them even if she keeps them here.”

  Mark looked like a disappointed small boy, Aunty Lee thought.

  Selina said nothing. Aunty Lee could tell she was also trying to get Mark to sign the forms that would complete the handover. For once, Selina and Aunty Lee were on the same side. And vague, gentle Mark, whom each of the women suspected the other of bullying, was defying them both.

  “It’s most important to decide what kind of dish you are preparing, and for who,” Aunty Lee said as Mark sat down beside his wife. “That doesn’t depend on the ingredients because your ingredients can always be adjusted.”

  “Like chili-pepper ice cream. And we saw squid-ink-and-octopus ice cream in Japan.” Mark snorted with laughter. “Sel said she wouldn’t eat it if they paid her.”

  “Sambal ice cream would be interesting, especially in hot weather. Maybe sambal ikan bilis ice cream . . . Nina, remind me to follow up on this ice cream business when all this fuss is over, okay? But what was I saying . . . oh yes. What kind of dish. What motive. Someone must have had a reason for killing Mabel Sung. If we can find out who had reasons, then it will be easier to find out who did it.”

  “Money,” Mark said. “It’s always about money, isn’t it? The root of all evil and all that?”

  “Love,” suggested Selina. “Jealousy, infidelity . . .” Aunty Lee hoped that Mark was paying attention.

  “Damage control,” said Cherril from the sink, her hands in a tub of pineapple chunks, “so a situation doesn’t get worse. Or revenge. Maybe Mabel Sung did something to somebody years back and they waited until now to get back at her. Or maybe Mabel knew some secrets about somebody and they had to shut her up because they are running for MP or something.”

  Aunty Lee hoped Cherril wasn’t speaking from experience. The very proper, ultrarespectable Mycroft Peters did not seem the sort to have secrets about anybody. But then neither did he seem the sort of man to marry a former air stewardess, so there were obviously depths to him.

  “Salim says sometimes people kill to protect other people,” Nina said. “Like to protect their children or their parents.”

  “Mabel Sung probably killed her son to protect him,” Selina said. “Better to get it over quickly than a long drawn-out death costing a lot of money. And then she killed herself because she couldn’t live with the thought that she killed her son. Anyway I have to go. I have a hot-yoga class,” she said. “I know, some people say that it’s satanic and all that,
but for me it’s just exercise. Mark, have you discussed everything you want to? You want to just sign the papers now then you won’t have to come back?”

  “Sel likes hot yoga because she can sweat without exercising too hard,” Mark said with a snort of laughter that no one joined in. “I should just help Aunty Lee sort out this mess she got herself into first. Wouldn’t be fair to desert a sinking ship.”

  That was most unjust, Aunty Lee thought. She never created messes. Indeed, a goodly amount of her time was spent clearing up the messes made by other people. Very few people understood that if you wanted to do a good, thorough cleanup of something, you had to dig right down deep, turn it inside out if possible, and shake out all the debris that had accumulated. It was the same whether you were tackling a store cupboard, an old handbag, or somebody’s life. And then you untangled and cleaned up the contents and replaced them in an orderly fashion.

  Aunty Lee’s kitchen sometimes looked as though she cooked in a state of chaos. But the chaos was only on the surface and always temporary. Everything in her kitchen had a place and reason for being there.

  “I’m sure the police are looking into that,” Selina said. “You should all just leave it to them and Aunty Lee. After all, you don’t want to get into any more trouble, right?”

  Aunty Lee reminded herself that Selina probably meant to be helpful and supportive. It was not the woman’s fault that her voice made her sound bossy and condescending. Besides, it was a good suggestion. Aunty Lee was never surprised by good suggestions, taking them as part of the natural flow of life. What surprised her was that the suggestion came from Selina.