by Jake Needham
Tay shivered, stubbed out his cigarette, and went back to his room.
THIRTY-TWO
THE next morning Cally was up before her wake-up call came. She had some coffee and toast from room service and flipped through the copy of The Bangkok Post that came on the tray with her breakfast. She found no mention at all of Ambassador Rooney’s murder. Either the blackout was holding or the Thai press was too lazy to bother digging out any real news. Quite possibly both.
Just before nine, Cally entered the embassy through the main gate on Wireless Road. She went to the cafeteria to get another cup of coffee and took it with her to the security office on the second floor.
Jack Tanner was sprawled in a chair waiting for her.
“That was very subtle yesterday, Jack,” she smiled. “I loved the high-pitched voice.”
“Just looking out for you, Cally girl. Old Uncle Jack likes to know who’s screwing around with his girls.”
“Three things, Jack. First, I’m not one of your girls, whatever that means. And second, Sam and I are not screwing around.”
Cally took a long hit on the coffee and settled in behind a desk that looked unoccupied.
“What’s the third thing?” Tanner asked.
“Oh yeah, the third thing. I almost forgot. Go fuck yourself, Jack. That’s the third thing. Go fuck yourself.”
Tanner started out to mime a laugh, but the gesture turned into a yawn before it was done.
“Damn,” Tanner said, stretching his arms and rolling his shoulders. “I guess I must have been up a little late last night.”
“Please don’t tell me what you were doing, Jack. I’m sure I’d really rather not know.”
“Why, Cally girl, Uncle Jack’s adventures in Bangkok are the stuff of which legends are made. You would be fortunate indeed to—”
“Have you got something for me, Jack, or are you here just to bask in the unparalleled pleasure of my company?”
Tanner shifted his body around in the chair and swung his feet up onto the front edge of Cally’s desk. Crossing them at the ankles, he knitted his fingers together behind his head.
“I wanted you to know that the Agency is in the clear on this, Cally. We haven’t used that apartment in a couple of years.”
“Maybe not, but between the first time I was in it and when I brought Sam yesterday, somebody did a very effective job of turning the place over. It looked like your work to me, buddy boy.”
“It wasn’t.”
“You sure you weren’t taking out a few bugs, Jack? Maybe a couple of cameras and recorders? Something like that?”
“Nope. We did that a long time ago.”
“Why should I believe you, Jack?”
“Because I can tell you who really did toss the place.”
Cally swung her own feet up on the desk, crossed them at the ankles, and knitted her fingers behind her head in a mirror image of Tanner’s pose.
“I’m all ears.”
“I was there when the body was removed and thought I’d hang around a little longer to see if anything interesting happened afterwards. Sure enough, about a half-hour later, five or six guys wearing uniforms like local cops showed up. They stayed for fifteen or twenty minutes and then left. When I went upstairs I saw what you saw.”
“Thai cops turned the place over?” Cally made a face. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
“I only said they were wearing uniforms. Maybe they weren’t real cops.”
“But if they weren’t real cops, then who—”
“I can tell you where to start if you really want to find out.”
Cally folded her arms and waited.
“One of your guys was calling the shots for them,” Tanner said. “Ask him.”
“One of my guys?”
Tanner nodded. “Yeah, one of your esteemed colleagues from Singapore. Tony DeSouza. He went in with the guys wearing the uniforms and he came out with them. Tony boy looked to me like he was running the whole show.”
The coffee Cally had brought up from the cafeteria was well past its prime, but she picked it up anyway and swirled it around in its white Styrofoam cup while she thought about what Jack Tanner just told her. What the hell was Tony DeSouza doing at the apartment after Ambassador Rooney’s body had been removed? And why had he brought in Thai cops to trash the place, if they were Thai cops.
“Do you know if the FBI has been using that place recently?” Cally asked.
“No idea.”
Cally gave the coffee an exploratory sip. It was cold and foul and she made a face and put it down.
“Maybe DeSouza was just investigating the murder,” Tanner suggested.
“I don’t know why he would do that,” Cally said. The FBI has people here in Bangkok. Besides, you don’t toss a crime scene when you’re just investigating. You preserve it.”
“You’re assuming that the FBI has some reasonable understanding of how an investigation is supposed to be conducted.”
“That apartment was tossed. They were looking for something, Jack. My money is on hidden surveillance devices. How about yours? What’s your money on?”
Cally cocked her head and studied Tanner. He was an annoying bastard, but a good man.
“You always know more than you tell me, Jack. What were they looking for?”
Tanner shook his head. “This time I can’t help you.”
“Can’t. Or won’t.”
“Can’t, Cally girl. I’ve got no fucking idea. Hand to my heart.”
“Jeez, Jack, I didn’t know you even had a heart.”
Tanner felt around on his chest with his open hand.
“Sure, Cally girl, Uncle Jack’s got a great big heart. It’s just that I don’t use it often enough to remember exactly where I keep it.”
THIRTY-THREE
TAY didn’t wake up until after eight, an occurrence he normally regarded as a fine omen for the coming day. He managed to locate the room service menu and ordered coffee and rolls, and whilwhile he was waiting for them to come he took a shower, shaved, and dressed in a clean white shirt and a pair of khakis. He had really fouled up his packing and now he realized he should have put a little more effort into the whole process. He hardly had any clean clothes left.
Tay looked through the drawers in the desk until he found a form for the hotel’s laundry service. He was about to send out the things he had worn the day before when he noticed the prices. The numbers looked very big, but of course they were in Thai baht and he struggled for a moment to convert them into Singapore dollars. It was too much to attempt without a few cups of coffee in him and he got nowhere. Fortunately, just then the doorbell rang and room service arrived.
A half-hour later Tay had finished the entire pot of coffee and eaten all the rolls in the basket and he was feeling sufficiently energized to take another crack at doing the currency conversion for the laundry list. He worked at it for a few minutes, but the numbers kept coming out so big he decided he had to be getting it wrong. Surely no one charged that much to launder a shirt and press a pair of trousers, did they? He gave up and shoved the half finished list into a drawer with his dirty laundry. He would deal with it later.
Then Tay remembered he still had to call the OC to tell him that he was going to be in Bangkok for another day or two. He knew what the OC would say to that, of course, and he wasn’t looking forward to the inevitable wisecracks. Still, it was a telephone call he had to make and now that he had a nice little caffeine buzz going, this might be the best time to do it. On the other hand, Tay mused, perhaps it wasn’t. He would think about that for a little while and make the call later.
Lighting a Marlboro, he opened a collection of Asian travel stories by Paul Theroux that he had found in the Marriott gift shop the night before and settled back to read. Tay smoked four cigarettes in complete peace and read almost a hundred pages of the Theroux book, but he knew he really did have to call the OC and he couldn’t put it off much longer. Eventually he turned down the corner of the p
age where he was and closed the book.
He switched on his cell phone and watched the screen as it located a service provider in Bangkok and connected with their system. On those few previous occasions Tay had used his cell phone outside Singapore, he never quite believed it was going to work, but somehow it always did. He had no idea at all how such a thing was possible. On the other hand, there were many things in life about which Tay had no idea at all and the way cell phones worked just wasn’t something he cared enough about to try to figure out.
At almost the moment the phone connected with a service provider, it started ringing and the screen began flashing with an incoming call from Singapore. Singapore felt so far away at that moment Tay’s immediate reaction was to shut off the phone, forget about calling the OC, and bury the damned thing in the drawer under his dirty laundry; but of course he didn’t.
“Hello.”
“Sir, it’s Sergeant Kang here.”
Robbie Kang shouted into telephones the same way he shouted across rooms and Tay fumbled to lower the phone’s volume.
“Can you hear me, sir?” Kang bellowed when Tay didn’t respond immediately. “Hello?”
“I could probably hear you without a telephone, Sergeant. Stop shouting for Christ’s sake.”
“Yes, sir.” Kang cleared his throat and lowered his voice, but only a little. “Well, sir, I’ve been trying to reach you since yesterday, but I couldn’t get through for some reason.”
Tay made a noncommittal noise and waited.
“There are a couple of things here you ought to know about. First off, Dr. Hoi has been trying hard to reach you, sir. One call yesterday and another one this morning.”
“Who?”
“Dr. Hoi, sir. You know, the doctor who did the autopsy on Mrs. Munson. She seems to want to talk to you very badly, sir.”
“What about?”
“I asked her if it had something to do with the Munson case, sir, but all she would say was that it was … uh, personal.”
Tay cleared his throat.
“Anything else?” he asked.
“Yes, sir. We’ve finished the tapes from the Marriott and there’s no sign at all of Mrs. Munson.”
“That doesn’t surprise me.”
“Then here’s something that might, sir. We found somebody else. It was all sort of an accident. I had Leslie Tan going through the tapes. You know him, don’t you, sir? His father was—”
“I know him, Sergeant. Get on with it.”
“Yes, sir. Well, one of the batches of tapes the hotel gave us had the wrong dates on the boxes and Leslie spent a half a day looking at them before he realized they were from the week before the murder. But that turned out to be a real break for us. If he hadn’t done that, Leslie would never have spotted him.”
“Spotted who?”
“As it was, he only recognized him because they had played in some golf tournament together and he just mentioned him to me by chance. He didn’t see that it had anything to do with the investigation and I suppose it doesn’t.”
“For God’s sake, Sergeant, who did Leslie see?”
“That FBI man from the American embassy, sir. The one you said came to see you.”
“Tony DeSouza?”
“Yes, sir.”
Tay thought about that for a moment and wondered if there was any significance to it.
“Is Leslie sure it was DeSouza?”
“Yes, sir. He says he remembers this guy really well. He got so mad when he hit a sand trap at the golf tournament he started banging his club into a tree and wouldn’t stop until some friend of his wrapped his arms around him and pulled him away.”
“When was this?”
“When was the golf tournament?” Kang sounded puzzled.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Sergeant. When was DeSouza on the security tapes at the Marriott?”
“A week before Mrs. Munson was killed, sir. Exactly one week.”
“What was DeSouza doing?”
“Nothing really, sir. It was the lift lobby camera that caught him, but only for a moment and it wasn’t a very good picture.”
“Something was wrong with the camera?”
“I’m not sure, sir. The camera seemed to be working fine at first, but when he got right up close it flickered and then he wasn’t there anymore. It almost looks like the camera went off and then came on again later after he was gone.”
If DeSouza had only been walking through the lobby, Tay thought, maybe that could have been just a coincidence. The Marriott was a big place in a prominent location and a lot of people walked through the lobby. But the security camera flickering off and coming on again after DeSouza was gone? It sounded very much like he had used one of the security cards to kill the system. But why would DeSouza have a security card? He was FBI, not CIA. Wasn’t he?
Tay felt uneasy. Fathers battering children with concrete blocks and women going after husbands with cleavers were the sort of things he dealt with, not embassy safe houses and American intelligence operations. Now he had an FBI agent creeping the Marriott a week before Mrs. Munson’s murder, even possibly turning the hotel’s security system off and on with a surreptitiously copied security card that probably came from the CIA.
What did all that add up to? Tay had no idea at all, but he was absolutely certain it couldn’t be anything good.
“And there’s something else, sir.”
“Yes?”
“Well, sir, I know an FBI guy myself. Actually he’s retired, living in Phuket now. But back when he was at the US embassy in KL we used to try to play golf together whenever he came down here.”
Sometimes, Tay thought, if it were not for the game of golf, Singaporeans would be entirely incapable of communication with other human beings.
“Yes, Sergeant?”
“Anyway, sir, I called him and asked him if he knew anything about DeSouza. He said he hadn’t ever met him, only knew him by name. But he said something else that seemed strange to me, sir.”
“Strange?”
“Yes, sir. He said that there was talk DeSouza had been sent out here in the first place as a kind of punishment. That some of the higher-ups in Washington had wanted him to resign, but they agreed to allow him to come to Singapore instead.”
It annoyed Tay that the FBI saw an assignment to Singapore as an alternative to resignation, but he supposed he shouldn’t have been surprised.
“Why did they want him to resign?” he asked.
“For beating up his wife, sir. Apparently, he nearly killed her. Put her in the hospital for weeks.”
When Tay didn’t say anything, Kang went on.
“You don’t think, do you, sir, that there’s any possibility—”
“I need you to do a couple of things for me right now, Sergeant,”
Tay interrupted.
“Yes, sir.”
“First, put me on hold and call the American embassy. Find out where DeSouza is.”
“Right, sir. What else?”
“Do that first. I’ll wait.”
There was a click and Tay found himself listening to something that sounded like Greensleeves played on a kazoo. After a minute or two, Sergeant Kang returned and mercifully the idiotic toodling ended.
“Sir? You still there?”
“Of course, I’m still here, Sergeant. Where the hell else would I be? Listening to Greensleeves played on a kazoo?”
Kang hesitated. “Sorry, sir?”
“Never mind. What did you find out about DeSouza?”
“He’s there, sir.”
“He’s at the embassy in Singapore right now, is he?”
“No, sir. He’s there, sir.”
“What are you talking about, Sergeant? Where the hell is there?”
“Bangkok, sir. They said you could reach him at the American embassy in Bangkok.”
Tay’s intuition told him that was not good, and his intuition had always been his best friend. Still, he reminded himself, he had to step lightly here. All
he had right now were a few bits and pieces that didn’t feel right, nothing more than that, and looking at an FBI agent as a possible suspect in two murders was no small thing. If he was going to do something like that, he had damn well better turn out to be right. Maybe this time he wasn’t right.
Maybe this time his intuition wasn’t being entirely honest with him. DeSouza was an asshole, of course, and perhaps that was affecting the way he was looking at him. Being an asshole didn’t make a man a killer, did it? Tay decided he needed to talk to Cally. He needed to know what she thought.
Then Tay suddenly remembered. Cally said she was going to the American embassy today. And DeSouza was at the American embassy.
Cally knew none of what he had learned in the last few minutes. He had to reach her. He had to talk to her before she did anything that might accidentally tip DeSouza off as to how much they knew. Or how little.
Tay took a deep breath.
“Go see the boss for me, Sergeant. Tell him I’m…tell him that the investigation…I don’t know. Tell him any damned thing you want. Just let him know I won’t be back for another day or two.”
“Don’t you think, sir, that it might be better if you—”
“Just tell him, Sergeant. You got that?”
“Yes, sir. Got that, sir. Good luck.”
THIRTY-FOUR
AS soon as Tanner was gone Cally called the embassy in Singapore and got a cell phone number for Tony DeSouza. She dialed it and he answered on the second ring.
“Tony, it’s Cally Parks.”
“Well, this a surprise.”
“A pleasant one, I hope.”
“Just a surprise. To what do I owe the honor, Ms. Parks?”
“Where are you right now?”
