THE AMBASSADOR'S WIFE (An Inspector Samuel Tay Novel)

by Jake Needham

  “Khop khun kha,” she said to the man, but he had already turned away. He slammed the door without answering.

  “I didn’t know you could speak Thai,” Tay said to Cally.

  “A few words.”

  “Sounded like more than a few to me.”

  Cally shrugged and pushed the button for the elevator.

  TWENTY-NINE

  THE apartment was nothing but a single room on the third floor facing the back of the building. It probably had never been much to look at. It certainly wasn’t now.

  “My God,” Tay said. “What was an American ambassador doing in a place like this?”

  When Cally didn’t answer, Tay glanced over at her and she shrugged again. That was rapidly becoming the gesture of the day, he noticed.

  A brown sofa bed was just opposite the door. It was half open and its cushions had been pulled off and dumped haphazardly on the floor. A motley assortment of beaten up chairs and tables had been pushed over to the same side of the room. The carpet was green and thin. It had been partially peeled up and lay rolled back against the front of the sofa bed, leaving the grimy concrete floor underneath it exposed. The windows on the right side of the room were covered with a set of dirty, crooked blinds and a snarl of cords trailed onto the floor. On the left, a door led to what Tay assumed was a bathroom. He was afraid to look in there.

  “The body was on the sofa bed?” Tay made half a question out of the phrase, but he had seen the pictures Cally took of the crime scene and he already knew it was.

  “Yes.”

  “But it was open when you took the pictures, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes. It was.”

  “The bed was stripped?”

  “Yes. Just like in Singapore.”

  “No clothes? No jewelry?”

  “Nothing.”

  “So the killer cleaned up after himself again.”

  “That’s the way it looks.”

  “Did the killer do this?” Tay asked, waving a hand at the destruction in the room.

  Cally hesitated. It was for only a moment, but it was long enough for Tay to notice and shift his eyes to her.

  “No,” she said when she realized he was looking at her. “The room wasn’t like this when I was here.”

  “Then how was it?”

  Cally took a couple of steps forward and folded her arms.

  “The sofa bed was pretty much where it is now, but it was open and the ambassador’s body was on it, of course. The chairs and tables were...”

  She unfolded her arms as if she was about to point out where they were, but she didn’t.

  “Oh, I don’t know. It just looked like a normal room.”

  “Except for the dead body in it, of course,” Tay said.

  “Yes, except for that.”

  Tay nodded, but he didn’t say anything else. He thought Cally might, so he waited. She didn’t. When he got tired of waiting, he took a deep breath and walked over and opened the door opposite the windows. Sure enough it led to a tiny bathroom which was very dirty but otherwise entirely unremarkable.

  He closed the door again and went to the windows. Pushing the blinds aside he looked out and saw they were right above where Cally had parked the Volvo. Tired-looking air conditioning units and flapping laundry crowded the balconies of another building opposite the windows and unidentifiable trash was piled up down in the alleyway. Other than that, there wasn’t much to see.

  Tay let the blinds drop.

  “What’s going on here?” he asked. “Somebody was looking for something. What was it?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  Tay thought Cally probably did know, but he also thought that this wasn’t the right time to argue the point. Instead, he stood quietly waiting to see if more silence might finally draw something out of her. It didn’t.

  Maybe he was wrong, he mused. Maybe the neighbors looted the place after the police left. That would hardly have been surprising in Thailand. On the other hand, maybe someone had come back and trashed the scene to make it harder for them to make any sense out of it. The more Tay thought about it, the less sure he was of anything.

  “Then I guess we’re done here,” he said.

  Cally nodded and they left. She shut the door behind them. Tay noticed she didn’t bother to lock it.

  Downstairs Cally started toward the car, but Tay put a hand on her arm.

  “Let’s walk around a little before we leave,” he said.

  “What for?”

  “I don’t know, but we’re here. Why not?”

  There were only three cars in the parking lot. A nondescript gray Toyota, a blue pickup truck of some make Tay didn’t recognize, and a new-looking black Mercedes. Tay shook out a Marlboro as they walked across the lot to the street. When they stopped just opposite the grocery store, he lit it, and then he turned around and looked up at the front of the apartment building. Tay had no idea what he was looking for, none at all; but he stood quietly and smoked and looked the building over with as much care as if he did. The truth, he supposed, was that he just wasn’t ready yet to leave.

  There was a taste to the air in Bangkok that was foreign to him. He had noticed it from the moment they left the air-conditioned cocoon of the Volvo, but he hadn’t yet been able to put a name to it. Now it dawned on him what it was and it was a flavor he wanted to savor.

  The air in Singapore was different. It was dank and humid, too, but it was scrawny and homogenized. The air in Bangkok was a thick, rich stew of potential, prospect, and promise laced with a whiff of the illicit and a hint of the forbidden. It seemed to contain everything that he had ever imagined all at once: all the things that he had ever been curious about, all of the things he had been warned about, all of the things that he had been told would lead him to ruin. It tasted, Tay thought, exactly as the apple in the Garden of Eden must have tasted to Eve.

  “Cally, girl!”

  The voice was high-pitched, the squeal of a teen-aged schoolgirl.

  Tay looked over his shoulder and was startled to see a middle-aged man hurrying toward them. The man was slim and neatly dressed, his light brown hair cut close to his head in a style that looked military, and his eyes so blue that they made Tay think of a David Hockney painting.

  “What are you doing, girl? And what in the world are you doing in this neighborhood?”

  “I could ask you the same thing, Jack,” Cally said to the man with a small smile, “but I’m not really sure I want to know.”

  “Just doing my shopping, girl. A boy’s got to eat.”

  The man lifted up the white plastic bag he was carrying in his left hand and wiggled it. Tay could see what looked liked a bunch of carrots and a head of lettuce bouncing around at the top.

  “This store is a real dump,” he said as he put his free arm around Cally and gave her a hug, “but it’s on my way home and I’m just too darned lazy to go anywhere else.”

  “Sam,” she said when the hug ended, “this is Jack Tanner. He works in the embassy.”

  Tay offered his hand and received a rather limp and moist one in return. He studied Tanner as they shook. Since Tanner had found them standing in front of the building where Ambassador Rooney’s body had been discovered the day before and made no reference at all to it, either the murder wasn’t common knowledge yet or Tanner was being very discreet.

  “Sam is over from Singapore with me for a couple of days,” Cally said to Tanner, but that was all she said.

  “So…” Tanner said, giving Sam a thorough looking over. “This is the new boyfriend, huh?”

  Sam could have sworn Cally blushed faintly.

  “No, Jack, nothing like that. We’re here on business.”

  “Yeah,” Tanner said. “Sure.”

  Then he winked. Winked. Tay didn’t know people actually did that anymore.

  “Monkey business maybe,” he said. “Anything to get away from Singabore, huh?”

  “Get out of here, Jack.” Cally waved one hand at Tanner and
with her other gave Tay a nudge toward the Volvo. “Not everyone has your appetites.”

  “Oh, girl! You’d be surprised how many people do. I’ll bet you really would.”

  Cally waved again. “So long, Jack.”

  “Now don’t be a stranger, girl!” Tanner waved back. “And you either, Sam. Drop by the embassy anytime and say hello. You hear?”

  Tay and Cally circled the building in silence and got into the Volvo.

  “You seem to have friends everywhere,” Tay said.

  “I have acquaintances everywhere,” Cally said. “When you work for the State Department it goes with the territory. Whether it’s a blessing or a curse I haven’t yet decided.”

  “Do you figure this guy knows what happened here yesterday?”

  “Yes, of course, he knows.”

  “Then why didn’t he mention it? Was he just being discreet in front of me?”

  Cally shrugged as she started the engine.

  Well, Tay thought, so they were back to that again.

  “Anywhere else you want to go?” Cally asked.

  Tay looked around. From where they sat he could see nothing but an unbroken vista of decaying buildings and mounds of trash. The alleyway looked as though a pack of wild animals, crazed with hunger, had dragged all the garbage in the neighborhood there and scattered it around in a desperate hunt for scraps of food. It also looked like nobody cared.

  He had never really thought much before about how green and luxuriant Singapore was. The rows of trees lining wide, clean streets; the banks of carefully tended flowers; the landscaped and tightly mowed vacant lots. He had almost forgotten that every city didn’t look more or less the same. Bangkok certainly didn’t look the same. It was dirty and ugly.

  Tay shook his head and glanced at his watch.

  “No, I’ve had enough. I want to take a shower. I want to change clothes. I want a drink. Any suggestions on finding a hotel before it gets any later?”

  Cally hesitated. “I’m staying at the Marriott.”

  “What is it with you people and Marriotts?”

  “A lot of government people stay in Marriotts. Why shouldn’t we?”

  “Why should you?”

  “They give us a good rate.”

  Tay nodded, but he didn’t say anything.

  “The Bangkok Marriott is a really classy place,” Cally prompted. “You’d probably like it a lot.”

  Tay was pretty certain there was a compliment in there, but he was too tired to tease it out.

  “Then take me to the Marriott, driver,” Tay said, leaning back in the seat. “I place myself entirely in your hands.”

  A few days before, Tay would have cheerfully bet his life he would never spend a single night in any Marriott hotel anywhere, ever. Now he was about to spend his second in two days.

  Wasn’t it extraordinary what a mess of a man’s principles the intrusion of a beautiful woman could make?

  THIRTY

  THE Bangkok Marriott looked like an ocean liner unaccountably run aground on lower Sukhumvit Road. The lobby was lush and romantic with art deco furnishings and melodramatic lighting. Just walking across it made Tay feel like Fred Astaire in Flying Down to Rio. Cally was probably too young to have ever heard of Fred Astaire, of course, so Tay kept the idea to himself.

  There was room at the inn and the front office manager even offered Tay the same government rate that Cally was getting. To tell the truth, Tay liked the look of the place so much that he would have stayed regardless of what they wanted to charge him.

  They checked in and headed for the lifts.

  “I think I’ll hit the gym,” Cally said. “You want to go?”

  Tay looked at her as if she had begun speaking Urdu.

  “Oh, come on,” she said. “It’ll do you good.”

  “I doubt that,” Tay said. “Besides, as luck would have it, I didn’t bring anything with me I can wear in a gym.”

  “Then how about a swim instead?”

  “No swimming gear either.” Tay spread his hands, palms up. “Sorry.”

  “Just walk out front.” Cally pointed toward the main road. “I’ll bet one of the street vendors sells bathing suits.”

  “Buy a bathing suit off the street?”

  “Oh, God.” Cally put her hands on her hips and looked at Tay. “You are such a Singaporean. What are you thinking here? If it’s not wrapped in plastic at a department store, it’s not clean enough for you to wear?”

  That was exactly what Tay was thinking, of course, but he tried to look thoughtful and said nothing at all. A faint chime announced the arrival of the lift. When it opened it was empty and they got on. Tay didn’t like talking in lifts and apparently neither did Cally, so he had a few moments of silence in which to weigh his options.

  Going for a swim with Cally was certainly an appealing idea or, to jump straight to the important point without flinching at the unadorned political incorrectness of it, hanging around with Cally while she was wearing a bathing suit was certainly an appealing idea. On the other hand, he couldn’t sit by the pool with Cally wearing a white dress shirt and dark slacks. The whole concept led inevitably to the necessity of him putting on a bathing suit, too. That was perhaps not altogether such an appealing idea.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Tay could see Cally was watching the lights that tracked the upward progress of the elevator. Experimentally, he sucked in his stomach a bit and tried to hold it there. Could he keep that up for an hour or so? Well…maybe.

  The chime sounded again and the elevator stopped on the eighth floor. Cally got off and looked back at Tay.

  “I’ll be sitting by the swimming pool in half an hour,” Cally said. She pointed her index finger at him and smiled. “Be there.”

  Then the lift door closed again.

  By the time Tay reached his room on the tenth floor he had made up his mind. He would take his chances. He would buy a bathing suit somewhere and meet Cally at the hotel pool. He was not that great a swimmer, that was true, but he could manage and what better way to get to know Cally than to spend time with her sitting around the pool?

  If he could only hold in his stomach and avoid drowning at the same time, perhaps everything would go well. It was, he supposed, worth a shot.

  TAY had hardly expected to find grass and trees on the sixth floor of a Marriott hotel right in the middle of Bangkok, but lush green grass and swaying palm trees was exactly what he found. The pool was on an open deck next to the gym. A luxuriant garden surrounding water so blue Tay could have sworn it had food coloring in it.

  The bathing suit he bought from a street vendor in front of a McDonald’s fit better than he had expected. It was a little big maybe, but then again so was Tay. Against all odds, he thought he actually looked pretty good in it. Cally was at the pool when Tay got there just as she said she would be. She was stretched out on a teak lounge under a tall palm tree. The pool boy dragged another lounge chair over for Tay and spread out two thick, yellow towels for him. Cally ordered a Diet Coke and Tay said he would have the same. The boy went off to get their drinks and Tay settled himself next to Cally.

  From the sixth floor of the Marriott, Bangkok looked a good deal better than it did from ground level. The forest of office towers around them gleamed like columns of white marble. Off in the west the unrelenting sun had been tamed to nothing more than wisps of yellow and purple floating on the horizon and the sky had turned the color of a ripe peach. An involuntary collaboration of nature and the effluent drifting in Bangkok’s air was producing a spectacular, if less than environmentally pristine, sunset.

  Tay glanced at Cally and when he saw her eyes were closed he allowed his own to linger. It was an awful cliché, Tay knew, but at rest Cally made him think of a cheetah or perhaps a jaguar. Languid and serene, but only a blink from blurring into motion.

  Her body was long and sleek. Her black Lycra tank suit was cut high on her thighs and it emphasized both the length and the firmness of her tanned legs. Their sh
ape was really remarkable: thighs slim, knees perfectly formed, calves muscled, ankles elegant; and feet … well, lovely. Tay had never before felt moved to think of anyone’s feet as lovely, but Cally’s were. There was just no other word for them.

  “If you want to check out my ass, too, just say the word. I’d be glad to roll over for you.”

  Tay’s eyes jumped away from Cally in embarrassment. For a moment he tried studying the skyline out beyond her lounge chair with feigned concentration but, almost at once, feeling ridiculous, he abandoned the feeble subterfuge.

  “Okay,” Tay said. “You got me.”

  The pool boy returned at that moment and set out their Diet Cokes, which blessedly saved Tay from having to say anything else. When the boy had gone, Cally pushed herself into a sitting position and clasped her hands around her knees.

  “I don’t know about you, Sam Tay.”

  “I’m very sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have been looking at you.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Then what …”

  Tay felt a strong tide tugging him toward deeper water and he was powerless to swim for shore.

  “I don’t know anything about you, Sam. You pull things out of other people, but you give nothing away about yourself. I think you’re hiding something.”

  “Not really. What you see is pretty much what you get.”

  “No, it’s not. Sometimes you’re almost scary.”

  Tay had never thought of himself as particularly scary so he wasn’t at all sure what to say to that.

  “You underplay yourself,” Cally continued. “You pretend to be over your head when you’re not. Why do you do that?”

  “Maybe I’m just a modest kind of guy.”

  “No, it’s more than that. You approach everything with the same sort of caution. I can’t quite figure out where it comes from, but I see it in your eyes. You never let your guard down.”

  Tay was unprepared for the rate at which their seemingly casual conversation had turned intimate. Come to think of it, he was probably unprepared right now for any kind of intimate conversation at all, regardless of the speed at which it developed. Of course he had hopes that eventually he and Cally might reach such a point, but he had been thinking in terms of weeks, perhaps even months. In ten minutes Cally had taken them straight from small talk to a place from which both good and dangerous things were within their grasp.