by Jake Needham
Cally was waiting in the lobby. They shook hands and ran through the usual greetings.
“There’s one more stop, I’m afraid,” she said when they were done. “You need to sign in at the marine post.”
She pointed to a glass window at the back of the lobby from behind which a United States marine in a crisp-looking khaki uniform was watching them carefully. Tay’s first thought was the man looked extraordinarily tough, like a bit player in some Clint Eastwood film, but the closer he got to the window the younger the man seemed to become. By the time Tay had walked all the way across the lobby he realized that the marine was just a kid, no more than nineteen or twenty.
“I need some ID please, sir,” he said to Tay.
Tay produced his warrant card for a second time, wondering if the marine inside had some reason to mistrust the security guards outside who had just looked at it. He passed the card through a slot in the bottom of the glass and the young marine examined it closely, methodically comparing the photograph with Tay’s face.
“Right, sir.”
The marine put Tay’s warrant card in a wooden pigeonhole and pushed out through the slot a green plastic badge with a clip at its top edge.
“Wear this at all times within the embassy, sir. It gives you permission to be in this facility on an escorted basis.”
“An escorted basis?” Tay asked.
“Authorized embassy personnel must be with you at all times.”
“What happens if I have to go to the bathroom?”
The young marine didn’t smile. “I hear that one every day, sir.”
God, what’s wrong with these people? Don’t any of them have a sense of humor?
Tay clipped the badge to his shirt pocket and turned around. Cally was watching him with her hands on her hips and a half smile on her face.
“A Singaporean policeman trying to joke with a United States marine?” she laughed. “If you live long enough, I guess you’ll see almost everything.”
Tay was still trying to come up with a snappy retort to that when another loud buzz sounded and the inner door to the embassy popped open.
“I hope you don’t mind,” Cally said as she led him to the main staircase and started up, “but our meeting will be delayed about fifteen minutes. The ambassador is running a little behind schedule this morning.”
Right at that moment, Tay minded very little indeed. Cally was wearing a crisply starched white blouse tucked into a straight, dark gray pinstriped skirt that ended just above her knees. Her shoes were matching gray pumps with heels just high enough to tighten the muscles in her bare, tanned legs. As Tay trailed her up the stairs, he was exactly at eye level with absolutely the best-turned pair of calves it had been his pleasure to behold for a very long time.
“That’s not a problem, is it, Inspector?” Cally asked over her shoulder when she reached the top of the stairs.
“No indeed,” Tay said, swallowing his disappointment they wouldn’t be climbing another floor or two. “That’s fine.”
He followed Cally down a deserted corridor and through a pair of heavy wooden doors into a conference room. It was somewhere at the back of the embassy and overlooked the tops of a thick grove of palm trees. The room was furnished with a round table of blond wood circled by eight swivel chairs upholstered in dark green fabric. On the wall opposite the windows, a long sideboard of matching blond wood held a coffee urn, a half-dozen white china cups and saucers, cream and sugar, and a silver tray of what looked to Tay like thick bread rolls with big holes in the middle of them.
“Coffee, Inspector?” Cally asked. “Bagel?”
“Nothing,” he said. “Thank you.”
Tay took one of the chairs and examined the palm trees briefly.
“Is it always so quiet around here?” he asked when Cally made no move to join him at the table.
“This is a fairly small post as embassies go. It is pretty quiet most of the time. But then Singapore is also…” Cally suddenly stopped talking, realizing that finishing her thought might not be a particularly diplomatic thing to do.
“Pretty quiet most of the time,” Tay finished for her. “Yes, it is, isn’t it?”
Cally gave a little shrug, mostly with her eyebrows.
“Look, I have to leave you for a few minutes,” she said. “Help yourself to coffee and a bagel if you change your mind. I’ll be back in about ten minutes and we’ll go up to the ambassador’s office.”
“I’ll be fine,” Tay said. “Thanks.”
When Cally had gone, Tay examined the palm trees some more, but found very little about them that interested him. Then, having nothing better to do, he started thinking about Elizabeth Munson’s murder again. Perhaps the unexpected delay was something of a blessing. Not to put too fine a point on it, but he still didn’t have a fucking clue what he was going to ask the American ambassador.
He took a small spiral notebook and a felt-tip pen out of his pocket and opened the notebook flat on the table. He uncapped the pen, but he was not immediately able to think of anything to write so he just sat for a minute or two tapping its point on the blank page.
It seemed to Tay all but certain Elizabeth Munson knew her killer. How else would she have come to be in a suite at the Singapore Marriott with him? She certainly hadn’t been kidnapped and dragged there against her will. On the other hand, if she had cheerfully strolled into the Marriott to meet someone she knew, why was she not on any of the hotel’s surveillance tapes and why did no one there remember seeing her?
Tay thought he knew the answer to that. More than likely that she had entered the hotel very discreetly due to the reason she had come there.
A married woman did not go to a hotel suite on a Monday afternoon to meet the Avon lady. Elizabeth Munson went there for sex. And that, speaking generally, required more than one person, at least it did if you were doing it right. All of which brought Tay back to his original question. Who was Elizabeth Munson meeting in room 2608 of the Singapore Marriott on the afternoon she was murdered?
Well, for starters, it could have been someone right here in the American embassy. Mrs. Munson probably knew most of the staff, and there was that business about the security card to consider, too. She had slipped into the Marriott without leaving a trace and entered a suite that was supposed to be unoccupied. Only someone with a hotel security card could have made all that happen and someone at the embassy had been in possession of a hotel security card several times even if Tay didn’t yet know who it was.
Who at the embassy would have needed regular off-the-books access to the Marriott? And why did they need a security card that allowed them to enter and leave the hotel without leaving any evidence they had ever been there? Could whoever had the security card have copied it and continued to have unrecorded access to the Marriott even after the original card had been returned to Keshar? Keshar had insisted it was technically impossible, but Tay was far less certain of that.
Maybe none of that really mattered. Maybe none of that had anything at all to do with Elizabeth Munson’s murder. The place to start working out whether it did or not, of course, was with whomever in the American embassy had had access to that security card, and that straight away brought up the most interesting question of all.
Exactly who the fuck was Mr. Washington?
Tay shook his head and put the cap back on his pen having written absolutely nothing at all. He was returning the notebook to his pocket when Cally Parks opened the door.
“If you’ll come with me, Inspector, the ambassador is ready to see you now.”
EIGHTEEN
THE ambassador’s office was imposing, intimidating even, as Tay gathered it was supposed to be. Behind a desk the size of a ping-pong table, two large flags hung from polished wooden poles mounted in brass bases. One was obviously the American flag, but the other one was dark blue with something white in the middle of it and Tay didn’t know what it was. Did ambassadors have personal flags like admirals? He didn’t think so, but he
wasn’t certain.
Ambassador Munson was standing behind his desk when Tay entered. He came around it and walked toward Tay with his hand outstretched.
The ambassador was a big man, and so homely he was almost nobly ugly. He had rough, weathered skin, a huge misshapen nose, and oversized jug ears that stuck straight out. Droopy, dark brown basset hound eyes stared out of a face that looked like someone hadn’t read all the directions before they began to assemble it.
In spite of all that, there was something about the ambassador that overwhelmed the background against which he posed. He even looked familiar somehow, although Tay was certain he had never met any American ambassador, let alone this one. It was like encountering an actor you had seen over and over again on television, one whose appearance you recognized immediately but whose name you couldn’t quite remember. Could the Americans have hired someone to play the role of the ambassador, Tay wondered for a moment, just to make a fool of him? No, of course they hadn’t. That was ridiculous.
The ambassador enveloped Tay’s hand in his own enormous, gnarled fingers. “I want to thank you for meetin’ with me today, Inspector. I’m very sorry I had to keep you waitin’.”
When he heard the Texas drawl, Tay suddenly realized why Ambassador Munson looked so familiar. The man bore far more than a passing resemblance to Lyndon Johnson. That was it exactly. To shake hands with the ambassador was to watch a waxwork figure of Lyndon Johnson circa 1968 lurch into life. Good God, Tay wondered, could it be that everyone from Texas looked like this? Surely not.
The ambassador gestured with his head to an area by the windows opposite his desk. It was furnished with two leather couches and several chairs upholstered in dark fabric, all grouped around an oval-shaped glass coffee table.
“You know my boys here, Inspector?”
Tay looked where the ambassador was indicating and saw two men he didn’t recognize and one he did.
“I’ve met—”
“The one there with the tie is Tony DeSouza, our legal attaché,” the ambassador interrupted without waiting for Tay to finish. “The one sitting next to him who looks too damn young to be out of college is Marc Reagan, my staff assistant, and the old goat on the other couch is Dewey Garland, our commercial attaché.”
“I met Mr. DeSouza last week,” Tay said.
“Well, that must have been fun for you,” the ambassador said and flashed Tay a one-of-the-guys smile to let him know he was only joshing.
The ambassador waved Tay toward one of two empty chairs facing the windows and Cally took the other. Only then did the ambassador settle into a chair opposite Tay, cross his legs, and let his long arms dangle carelessly over the sides. The glare from the windows behind the ambassador made his eyes hard to see and Tay gathered that was exactly the point of the seating arrangement.
“You want a Coc’-Cola or something else ‘fore we get started?” the ambassador asked Tay.
“No, sir. Thank you.”
Nodding, the ambassador fixed Tay with what he apparently thought was a caring smile.
“First,” he said, “let me tell you that I ‘preciate the horse sense you showed in putting out that suicide story after Liz’s body was found.”
“I’m not sure I understand what you mean, sir. The only reason we made any press statement at all was—”
“We figure it was a pretty sharp idea,” the ambassador interrupted. “We’re thinking of sticking with it.”
Now Tay really was confused. “With what?” he asked.
“Your suicide story. We’re thinking of sticking with it and announcing that Liz committed suicide.”
“But she didn’t.”
“Look, dammit, we have to tell the press something. I’ve read the file. I know what happened. Is that what you want me to tell the world? That my wife was tortured to death and died with a flashlight shoved up her pussy?”
Tay was hardly an expert on the proper relationship between government and the press, but it did seem to him generally better for governments to tell the truth, or at least a mildly edited version of the truth, rather than to make something up. No matter how bad the truth was, when governments lied and got caught doing it, things always seemed to get much worse.
“Are you telling me, sir, that you intend to cover up your wife’s murder by telling the press that she committed suicide?”
The ambassador held up both hands, palms outward.
“Shoot now, Inspector, let’s not get off on the wrong foot here. I intend to treat Liz’s death with dignity. Under the circumstances, suicide is far more dignified than what happened to her. And I say that both as a husband and as an American ambassador.”
“But then the investigation of her murder will—”
“What we tell the press won’t have jack shit to do with that. We’re going to investigate the crap out of this thing. You can bet your butt on that. Terrorist acts against United States citizens are within the jurisdiction of the FBI and nobody’s better at getting to the truth than those boys.”
The corners of the ambassador’s mouth moved quickly up and down in what might or might not have been a miniature smile.
“No offense to you and your people, of course, Inspector. I’m sure you’re pretty good, too.”
“Yes, sir,” Tay said, not doing much to disguise his irritation at the ambassador’s obvious condescension toward the Singapore police force. “We are.”
“While we’d certainly ‘preciate your help, of course, Tony DeSouza will head up this investigation. He’ll get the sons of bitches that did this and get ‘em right quick.”
Tay wanted very much to ask the ambassador exactly how he thought DeSouza would be able to do that, not to mention why he had already assumed that there was more than one killer. But he didn’t ask the ambassador anything. He just sat quietly with what he hoped was an interested expression on his face and listened. That was apparently what he was meant to do because almost immediately the ambassador started talking again.
“And you can bet your butt on one other thing, too, Inspector. When we find the bastards that did this, they will be punished. Tony and I were both United States marines. I have two combat tours in Vietnam behind me and Tony did his two tours in Iraq. We do not flinch from taking the fight to those who do us harm. Oh no, we surely do not.”
Tay didn’t bother to ask exactly what that meant.
“Well then, Inspector, I’ve talked enough now. You take over. After all, you’re the one who asked for this meetin’.”
For the next ten minutes, Tay tossed out meaningless questions and nodded earnestly at all of the ambassador’s answers without bothering to listen to any of them. He was seething and needed a little time to calm down before he could trust himself to say anything of consequence.
Who the hell did this clown think he was? He might be the American ambassador — Tay didn’t give a flying fuck if he was the goddamned President of the goddamned United States — but he wasn’t going to pat Tay on the head, tell him that the FBI would take over from here, and oh by the way, they were going to tell the public that Elizabeth Munson committed suicide. Well, on second thought, perhaps it was a little hard to get self-righteous about that, wasn’t it? After all, the suicide story had originally been Tay’s own idea, even if he did regret it now.
“Inspector, I gotta be honest with you about something,” the ambassador suddenly volunteered apropos of nothing at all Tay could see. And when he heard that, Tay started paying more attention. In his experience, when people told him they were going to be honest with him, they usually weren’t.
“I want you to hear this from me,” Ambassador Munson said, looking down at his hands for a moment.
There was something about the gesture that looked wrong to Tay. He wasn’t absolutely sure what, but there was.
“Elizabeth and I were finished. She was going to divorce me and she wanted it to hurt like a son of a bitch. To tell you the truth, for the last few years it felt like that woman was fucking me up
the ass with a garden rake.”
Tay glanced at DeSouza and at the two men sitting with him, but they were impassive. He assumed they were accustomed to the way the ambassador expressed himself. Still, he would have given a great deal right at that moment to see what kind of expression Cally had on her face, but she was sitting next to him and turning his head would have been obvious and clumsy so he didn’t do it.
“You’re going to hear that from someone sooner or later,” the ambassador continued, “and I wanted it to be me. Anyway, I suppose it doesn’t matter. I can’t see what it could have to do with Liz’s murder.”
Tay didn’t really see either. As far as he knew, no one was seriously suggesting the ambassador had murdered his wife and it sounded unlikely to Tay, too, if only for logistical reasons. For the American ambassador to Singapore to walk into the Marriott on a Monday afternoon, shoot his wife in the head, pulp her face with the gun butt, strip and clean the room, dispose of all her clothing, and then hop a plane without anyone knowing about it seemed unlikely to the point of impossibility. Still, it was interesting to know there had been bad blood between the ambassador and his wife. It was even more interesting to Tay that the ambassador had volunteered it without the slightest prompting.
Tay glanced quickly toward DeSouza again and saw he and the other two men had all turned their faces expectantly in his direction to gauge his reaction. They already knew about all this, Tay thought to himself. He wondered if Cally knew as well.
“I just have one or two more routine questions, sir,” Tay said, shifting his eyes back to the ambassador.
When Tay didn’t show any interest in pursuing the issue of the relationship between the ambassador and his wife, he was certain he could feel the room around him breathe out in relief.
“It is necessary, sir, for me to establish your whereabouts on the day when your wife was killed.”
“That’s outrageous,” DeSouza snapped before the ambassador could say anything. “How can you sit there and suggest—”
