by Jake Needham
“At least two hotel employees have seen the body. Rumors are probably spreading already.”
The OC looked at Tay. “What do you think, Sam?”
Tay made a vague movement with his head that could have meant anything. “I’ll take care of it,” he said. “I’ll have a word with Public Affairs and get them to put out something vague. If they handle it right, we can probably keep The Straits Times out of it until we have something concrete.”
“What about the other papers?”
“They won’t be a problem,” Tay said. “They never are.”
Kang grunted and both the OC and Tay looked at him.
“You disagree, Sergeant?” the OC asked.
“Not exactly, sir. I was just thinking…well, what about the foreign press? It seems to me this is the kind of thing that could easily be blown out of proportion.”
“And what would you say the proper proportion is, Sergeant?” Tay snapped before the OC could respond. “When you find a woman with her face beaten in who’s been stripped naked and had a flashlight jammed up her private parts, how would you fix the proper proportions for that, Sergeant? I’d really like to know.”
“What I meant, sir, was—”
“That murdered women in five-star hotels might damage the tourist trade?”
“No, sir.” Kang cleared his throat. “That something like this might damage the country’s image in general, sir. Foreigners being killed in luxury hotels here in Singapore and all. It makes us look like some Third World shithole.”
“Why do you think the woman’s a foreigner?”
“Well, because…”
Kang saw the trap he was falling into and trailed off into an embarrassed silence. He looked down at his hands as if he wanted to make certain that none of his fingers were missing.
“You didn’t mean to say foreigner at all, did you, Sergeant?”
Kang had hoped Tay would let it go. Clearly he wasn’t.
“You meant to say ‘white,’ didn’t you? You meant to say white people being killed in luxury hotels isn’t good for Singapore’s image, didn’t you, Sergeant?”
Kang shifted his weight and jammed his hands deep into his pockets. He didn’t even try to answer Tay’s question. He had said far too much already.
“Don’t worry about it, Sergeant,” the OC said after a few moments passed in an uncomfortable silence. “Go on downstairs and finish the interviews.”
Kang nodded and walked quickly away. The OC pushed himself off the wall.
“Fix this, Sam,” he said. “I’m depending on you.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll do my best.”
“Do better than that. Do whatever you have to. Just fucking fix it.”
FOUR
SERGEANT Kang completed the interviews in less than half an hour because nobody had anything useful to add to what little he and Tay already knew. Kang left the hotel’s executive offices and found Tay waiting for him in the coffee shop.
Tay was at a table in the outside section at the front of the hotel, the part that was supposed to look like a Parisian sidewalk café but didn’t. On his table were a small box of aspirin, a water glass, an espresso cup, two packs of Marlboro Reds, a purple plastic disposable lighter, and an ashtray. The aspirin box was open, the espresso cup and water glass were empty, and Tay was just finishing a cigarette, clearly not his first from the look of the ashtray.
“Hotel shops are wonderful places, Sergeant. They sell nearly everything a man could possibly want.”
“Apparently, sir.”
Kang pulled out a chair and sat down. He pointed at the red Marlboro box.
“Thoe are the strong ones, aren’t they, sir?”
“Don’t start, Sergeant.”
“If you’re going to begin smoking again, sir, don’t you at least think the light ones would—”
“Are we all done here?” Tay interrupted. “Do they need us upstairs for anything else?”
Kang shook his head. “The FMB guys will be a while yet, but I don’t think there’s anything more for us to do. Not unless you want to have another look at the scene before they move the body.”
Tay gave Kang a long look.
“I didn’t think so,” Sergeant Kang said.
Tay shook another Marlboro out of the pack and lit it. He exhaled a thick cloud of smoke and leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table.
“Do we have all the statements?”
“Statements from the manager, the security chief, and the maid—”
“You mean the housekeeping supervisor.”
“Right, sir, the housekeeping supervisor. I’ll type them up later and you can look at them all if you want, but I don’t think you’ll find anything in them.”
“What about the other guests on the floor?”
“Patrolmen have talked to three who were on the twenty-sixth floor last night, one who was on the twenty-seventh, and three who were on the twenty-fifth. We’re tracking the others down along with all of yesterday’s checkouts on those three floors, but so far no one seems to have heard anything unusual.”
“Somebody must have heard something. You can’t beat anybody that badly without making a hell of a lot of noise.”
“Unless she was tied up and gagged.”
Tay looked at Kang and raised his eyebrows.
“The FMB supervisor says there are marks on the woman’s wrists and ankles,” Kang went on. “He says he’s not sure yet, but they appear to be consistent with restraints of some kind.”
“Restraints?”
“You know, sir … ah, like she was—”
“Having kinky sex?”
“Yes, sir. Exactly.”
“Wonderful,” Tay muttered as he stubbed out his cigarette. “Sex and death. My favorite subjects.”
Two Japanese-looking men carrying black leather briefcases passed close to the table and Tay watched them until they were gone.
“Is there any evidence the woman had intercourse before she died?” he asked when the men were out of earshot.
“We won’t know for sure until the autopsy.”
Tay grunted.
“Even then,” Kang went on, “if it was normal vaginal intercourse, it may be difficult to tell for sure whether it was forced.”
“Why would it be difficult … oh, the flashlight.”
“Yes, sir. The flashlight.”
“Maybe we can at least find out where that came from.”
“We already know, sir.”
“We do?”
“There’s one in every room. The hotel has them in the closet for emergencies.”
Tay picked up the empty espresso cup and slipped his forefinger through the handle. Letting the cup drop, he watched it swing back and forth.
“What did they find in the room?” Tay asked after the cup stopped swinging.
“That’s what’s strange, sir. It’s not what they found; it’s what they didn’t find. No suitcases, no toilet articles, no clothing. She certainly wasn’t staying there.”
“What about the clothes she was wearing?”
“Nothing, sir.”
Tay blinked at that. “Her clothes were gone?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, even if there is an electronics trade fair in town, she sure as hell didn’t walk into the Marriott completely naked.”
“No, sir. Probably not.”
“What about her jewelry? Rings? A watch?”
“No, sir. Nothing like that. Both her hands show marks from rings, but they’re gone now.”
“Somebody cleaned up. And they made a thorough job of it.”
“Yes, sir. A guy takes everything, packs it into a suitcase or maybe a laundry bag, and walks out. Who notices a man walking out of a hotel with a bag?”
Tay leaned back, knitted his fingers together behind his head, and thought for a moment.
“What makes you think it was a man?” he asked.
“Oh come on, sir. No woman could have done that.”
&nb
sp; “Why not?”
“A woman just couldn’t do something like that, sir.”
“Don’t be naive, Sergeant. You need to get out more.”
“Well, sir, at the very least you have to admit no woman’s strong enough to beat another woman that badly.”
“Really? You obviously haven’t met any of the women my friends have been fixing me up with recently.”
Tay thought about what Kang had just told him for a second, maybe two.
“There won’t be any prints in the room,” he said. “Not the woman’s. Not the killer’s. He was too careful for that.”
“Probably not, sir. FMB says the whole room’s been wiped down. But they’re still checking everything anyway. Maybe there’s something that didn’t get wiped.”
“Have they found anything at all that would help identify her?”
“No, sir.”
“Do they know what was used to beat her face in?”
“Not yet.”
“Can they tell if the beating was the cause of death?”
“They’re not sure.”
“Are they at least certain she’s dead?”
“Pardon me, sir?”
“Never mind.”
Tay drummed his fingers on the table. He picked up the half empty box of Marlboros and then put it down again.
“Have our esteemed colleagues even managed to come up with a time of death?” he asked.
“They say she’s still in rigor, but the air conditioning was turned down so much it might have delayed the time it took her to reach it. They’re just guessing, but they figure it was something like twelve to twenty-four hours ago.”
Tay looked at his watch. He already knew more or less what the time was, but he looked at his watch anyway.
“Then she was probably killed between noon and midnight on Monday,” he said.
Kang nodded. “Yes, sir.”
Tay stopped, thought a moment, and then asked, “What do you make of the curtains?”
“The curtains, sir?”
“They were open in the living room, but closed in the bedroom. Don’t you think that’s a little odd?”
Kang didn’t really, so he wasn’t entirely sure what to say.
“Look, Sergeant, if they were in the room during the day, they might leave the drapes open, but at night they’d have them closed. Why leave them one way in the living room and the other in the bedroom?”
“Maybe they came into the room during the day and then moved into the bedroom after dark.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” Tay said. “Which would make the time of death somewhere in the range of six to seven o’clock, wouldn’t it?”
“That makes sense, sir.”
Tay sat for a while after that with his face perfectly still. He reached for the open box of Marlboros again and shook out another cigarette.
“Her killer posed her, Sergeant. He posed her after he was done with her and stripped away her dignity. He wanted to degrade her. He wanted to tell us just how worthless she is.”
Tay picked up the lighter and flipped it open. He watched the flame burn, but he didn’t touch it to his cigarette.
“How about a drink, Robbie?”
“I’m afraid I can’t, sir. My wife and I are going out tonight. She organized something with this friend of hers and if I show up late she’ll murder me.” Sergeant Kang paused and looked down at his hands. “Sorry, sir. I didn’t mean any disrespect to—”
“I know you didn’t, Sergeant. Go on home. We’ll see where we are tomorrow morning. At least we ought to have the preliminary-report from FMB and maybe we’ll even have an ID on the body by then.”
“I hope so. Thank you, sir. Good night.”
AFTER Sergeant Kang had gone, Inspector Tay lit the Marlboro and sat smoking it in silence. He watched the street and the crowds passing on the sidewalk and he wondered not for the first time what the hell he was doing there with a police warrant card in his pocket and the stink of death on his clothes.
The only child of an American-born Chinese man and a Singaporean-born Chinese woman, Tay had lived the whole of his life in Singapore. His father had been an accountant, a careful man who insisted that his family live modestly. When he died suddenly of a heart attack, Tay’s mother was shocked to discover she and her son had inherited a small fortune in real estate. She hadn’t even known her husband had been buying properties for two decades, let alone that his investments would leave her and her son quite comfortably off for the rest of their lives.
Regardless, she had quickly adjusted to the concept. Within a year, she moved to New York and acquired what she described to Tay as a Park Avenue duplex, although Tay noticed her address was actually on East Ninety-Third Street. When his mother married a widowed American investment banker who was a senior partner at some investment firm the name of which Tay could never quite remember, Tay was at the National University. He didn’t go to New York for the wedding. Actually, he couldn’t quite recall having been invited to New York for the wedding, but he supposed that was beside the point. He told himself he would have stayed in Singapore even if he had been invited.
By the time Tay graduated from university, he had chosen to his mother’s complete horror to make his career in police work rather than living the life of the idle well off she preferred for him. Looking back later on that decision, Tay could not for the life of him remember exactly why he had made it, but he had stuck with it regardless. As a brighter-than-average recruit who was dutiful and conscientious, he was soon promoted, first to general investigative work, then to the Criminal Investigations Department, and finally to the elite Special Investigations Section of CID.
After all this time, Tay thought he should have become accustomed to carnage and brutality, but he hadn’t. Each time he was called to a murder scene he still recoiled; and when he thought about it honestly, he knew exactly why that was.
It was not the violence Tay saw before him that caused the bile to rise in his throat at crime scenes. It was the violence he feared he had not yet seen, the violence that might even be hiding deep within himself. He had wondered many times if he could consciously bring about the death of another person and he had always answered that he could not. But he was not absolutely certain that was true. Whenever he was in the presence of unreasoning brutality, Tay found himself driven to examine his own soul; and he did not much like what he found there. He did not know exactly what it was, but he was sure of one thing. It made him afraid.
When Tay was done with his cigarette, he stubbed it out in the ashtray and pocketed both the box he had been smoking and the unopened one. On impulse, he left the purple lighter on the table next to the ashtray. He wasn’t entirely certain why he did that. Perhaps it was some sort of gesture of atonement for his weakness.
When Tay got outside he waved away the hotel doorman and stood for a moment watching a jagged, gray-green cloud rise in the west. It looked like a mountain range on the move, dark and dense and frightening. It seemed to be on the verge of overwhelming the city.
The sun was setting behind that seathing mass of clouds and it looked to Tay as though it would never come up again.
FIVE
THE first and most important truth about Singapore is this. It is hot. It is nasty, stinking, sweaty hot.
Although it was barely six the next morning when Tay opened his front door and stepped out onto his small porch, he could already feel the heat rising. The air was so heavy that the moisture was draining right out of it. Or maybe it was raining. In Singapore, sometimes it was hard to tell the difference.
Tay had been born in Singapore and he would no doubt die in Singapore, but he had never come to an accommodation with the savage heat and the sadistic humidity. If he owned both Singapore and hell, he would rent out Singapore and live in hell. How had people managed to survive there before air conditioning was invented; and why had they even tried? He had wondered about that for as long as he could remember and he still had absolutely no idea.
A storm had hit early in the morning hours and wakened Tay from a sleep so uneasy he almost welcomed the intrusion. The thunder made it sound as if massed cannon were shelling the city and the banana trees in his small garden had bent back and forth in the swirling winds, swishing over his bedroom windows like huge brushes against a snare drum. Sometime around six o’clock he gave up trying to sleep and got up and dressed.
Samuel Tay was not an early riser. He did not greet the new day cheerfully, anticipating the delights it might hold in store for him. Instead, he welcomed it warily, resigned to the new frustrations and the fresh disappointments it would surely bring.
Coffee generally improved his disposition in the morning, but this time it was so early that he doubted even it would help. Nevertheless, he made some anyway and drank two cups while he watched the BBC news channel on television. When he got bored with the news and shut it off, he saw that he had been absolutely right. The coffee hadn’t improved his disposition one damn bit.
For nearly a half-hour, Tay successfully avoided lighting a cigarette to go with his coffee, but then he began to wonder who he was trying to impress with his restraint. He found the trousers he had dropped on the floor the night before and fished the open pack of Marlboros out of a front pocket. That was when it came back to him he had abandoned the lighter in the Marriott coffee shop in a gesture of moral atonement.
Why on earth had he done an idiotic thing like that? Exactly whom was he trying to convince of his sincere remorse and good character? Tay wondered briefly if he had matches somewhere in the house, but knew he didn’t. He had thrown them all away along with his cigarettes the last time he had quit smoking.
He finally gave up, both on the cigarette and on trying to make himself feel better, and decided just to get dressed and go to work. Maybe he would even walk part of the way and stop somewhere for breakfast. Eat a nice greasy banana fritter. Maybe two. Yes, that sounded good. A sugar fix and another hit of caffeine. That might be just the ticket.
Standing now on his front porch, he saw the storm had passed and it had stopped raining. Or maybe it hadn’t. Tay eyed the sky with mistrust and took an umbrella out of the stand next to his door. Still, if this was rain, it had none of the drive, none of the interest it had shown during the night. The clouds seemed old and tired. Tay knew exactly how they felt.
