The Feng Shui Detective's Casebook (36 page)

‘Mr Lin doesn’t take visits or calls from reporters, and especially not from your newspaper. If you want to learn about our company, we can send you an annual report.’

One was a little more helpful. ‘If you send in a written request with all the questions written down, one of our staff may be able to answer them.’

But none of them agreed to meet her.

Then she went back to the newspaper library, to see if she could learn more about the five individuals from what Boy called ‘the cuts’.

Meanwhile, Wong had stayed in the library throughout the day, reading newspaper after newspaper, working his way through several months worth of the
Philippine Daily Sun
, and then moving on to other newspapers, including the
Philippine Daily Inquirer
and the
Philippine Star.
He scribbled pages of notes.

Five-thirty—the designated hour for Wong, Boy Santos Jr and herself to regroup with the editor—came around all too fast, and Joyce felt that nothing had been achieved. As she walked towards Ferdinand Cabigon’s room, she was embarrassed to reveal what little she had to show for the hours she had spent making calls and poring over cuttings. What on earth would they put in tomorrow’s newspaper?

Santos was not in the least bit down-hearted. ‘It’s going great,’ he told editor Cabigon. ‘Head: REPORTER HAD ENEMIES, COPS SAY. Story: The fearless reporting of murdered
Philippine Daily Sun
columnist Gloria Del Rosario led to her having a host of enemies, a top police chief confirmed yesterday.’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Cabigon. ‘But how about going on the investigation angle?’

‘I’m saving that for the sidebar, until we get stronger results,’ said Santos. ‘Head: Top Names In Murder Probe. Story: Some of Manila’s biggest names in business and politics are being investigated by a
Philippine Daily Sun
team and a crack team of police detectives in a bid to solve the murder which has rocked the country.’

Joyce listened to the discussion with fascination. She thought they had spent a dull day and obtained no significant results, but the way Santos phrased it, the investigation was powering ahead and results appeared to be just hours away.

The following morning, Wong decided to take a break from his reading, and headed to Gloria’s apartment in Mandalu-yong on the west side of Manila to see what had gone so tragically wrong on the
feng shui
front.

Although access to the apartment was officially off-limits, the police had finished their investigations and moved on. The newspaper had supplied a security guard to loiter in the area to stop anyone—meaning rival reporters—from entering. When Wong showed the guard his temporary staff badge from the
Philippine Daily Sun
, he was allowed through.

On the Friday morning, Gloria had said that she wanted them to tell her if the apartment was suitable for a home office. She was apparently thinking of leaving the newspaper business and working from home, although she hadn’t explained why.

The apartment was mostly blue-grey and was in the southeast sector of the building. Although due east was associated with busy, active work, the
ch’i
of the southeast had a similar energy, albeit noticeably gentler—and thus perhaps more suitable for a mature writer who had passed the youthful workaholic ace-reporter stage.

Wong had produced a plan to gently redesign the apartment to make it more comfortable, and also to provide space for two functions: a living area and a home office.

For the second of these, he had drawn up plans for a curved surface set into a corner, at a 45-degree angle to the walls. This gave the desk a southern position, which would have allowed Ms Del Rosario to tap into the south’s fiery
ch’i
energy. As a woman whose career was concerned with being in the public eye, she needed to produce work that caused her to shine.

He had also added to the report a list of adjustments she needed to make—such as purchasing a purple mat to go under her chair to maintain the fire energy. He had mapped out a plan for how she should arrange her furniture, right down to the items on the desk (journalistic awards and pictures of loved ones on her right, computer in the centre, plant on the left and something representing finance in the northeast quadrant).

The whole process seemed straightforward enough, as did the
lo shu
charts he drew up for her birthday. But clearly he must have overlooked something important.

As he was on his knees, looking to see if there was something under one of the items of furniture he had missed, Madam Xu entered the apartment with the security guard at her side.

‘On the floor, Wong? You’ll simply destroy your trousers, not that they are really worth saving.’

Ah! Madam Xu. You better? Recover fully I hope?’

Upholstered in a red outfit with gold brocade, she looked larger than life. She placed her large handbag on the dining table.

‘Never better, Wong. Just had to get over the shock,’ she said, pulling out a handkerchief with which to pat her neck. ‘Damage to the self-confidence muscle is always painful, but fortunately my personality is massive enough to absorb even the most devastating of attacks. I am a rock, I am an island, as Confucius said.’

She sat down and started pulling objects out of her bag: various packets of cards, charts, rocks, a crystal ball and some metal trinkets. Her job had been difficult on Friday. Because Gloria had to go to work, she had left a handprint and some personal effects for Madam Xu to analyse. It was always harder doing readings from inanimate objects in place of a live client.

‘The glass showed me silver clouds on Friday—but I am wondering whether they were really grey clouds. It is such a small difference to the eye, but of course a huge difference in the interpretation of the subject’s fortune. There were also streaks of colour on the underside of the clouds, as one sees during the sunset. I took them for orange streaks, implying emotional times—but now I wonder whether they were red for danger.’

Madam Xu picked up the print of Del Rosario’s hand. It was an Air Hand: a square palm with deeply etched lines and long, artistic fingers. The overall shape of the hand implied quick-wittedness and deviousness: both good qualities for a newspaper columnist, one would have thought. The Mount of Mercury, the area of the palm just below the little finger, was rather small and flat, implying poor ability at interpersonal relationships, while the Mount of Jupiter, under the index finger, appeared firm and high, indicating a powerful drive for success.

Ms Del Rosario’s head line and heart line were so close that they actually combined into a single line for more than half their length. Such circumstances were notoriously difficult to read. If the lines were truly united, they could indicate a single-minded individual whose heart and mind were in perfect accordance. But more often they indicated something much more negative: an imbalance in which one line swamped the other. But which was dominant?

Madam Xu started at the handprint and sighed. This was a hard decision to make, even when the person’s hand was right there in front of you. To try and examine the question from a palm print—well, it was almost impossible.

What remained undeniable—and it was devastating, however brave a face she put on it—was that she had used all her predictive arts to look at someone’s future, and got it completely wrong.

Wong rose to his feet, having found nothing unusual under the furniture. ‘Very strange,’ he said, picking up Gloria Del Rosario’s natal charts for the seventeenth time. ‘We mess up real bad.’

Joyce marched purposefully into the car park. The words of Boy Santos Jr were ringing her ears.
A good reporter never takes
no for an answer.

Velma Palumar, the secretary of businessman Jaime Mangila Jr, chief executive of Bagolbagol Industries, had flatly refused to allow any access to her boss. Velma would not take a message, accept a fax, allow written questions, or even agree to send her any written information of any kind.

This had made Joyce depressed, then hostile and finally suspicious. What had these people got to hide? If they were straightforward business people, they should accept straightforward queries from honest members of the media (she was, after all, presenting herself as a reporter working on a feature on behalf of the
Philippine Daily Sun
). It was all decidedly fishy.

Before leaving the office, she had asked Santos: ‘What sort of word is Bagolbagol anyway? Sounds weird. Sounds like a monster from a children’s book.’

‘I’m not sure,’ the reporter had replied. ‘But remember, this country has lots of languages. As well as English and Tagalog, we speak Ilocano, Pangasinan, Kapanpangan, Bicol and loads of other languages.’

Santos had telephoned a friend, who told him that Bagolbagol was a Cebuano word for ‘Skull’.

‘Phoo!
Definitely
a baddie or what?’ Joyce said. ‘Who but a MAJOR villain would call their company Skull? He might as well just walk around with a placard saying:
I am a baddie
or something.’

There had been very little information in the files about Jaime Mangila Jr, although the piece that Gloria had written about him had painted him as very mean indeed—it said that he had been dating a beauty queen while his wife had been in hospital dying of cancer.

Most of the other references to him in the newspaper library had been to deals his company had done, which revealed very little that made much sense to her. In one article, it reported that he had bought twenty-one per cent of a company of which his family had majority ownership. In another, it said that he had used nominee companies controlled by people ‘working in concert’ to shore up his share price and had been censured by a commission overseeing dealings on the Manila stock exchange.

The only article that contained anything about him that stayed in Joyce’s mind was another one of Gloria’s: a piece she had written a year earlier. It was a news feature about car number plates of the rich and famous in the Philippines. Jaime Mangila Jr drove a white sedan with the number JMJ 4444, it said. Joyce knew that the number four was associated with death in several Chinese cultures. This had confirmed the businessman’s Probable Bad Guy status in Joyce’s eyes.

So she had travelled to Mangila’s office to see if she could find his car and catch him going in or out. Santos had explained that such an action was called ‘doorstepping’ in journalistic slang. She had no intention of cornering a possible murderer by herself. She merely wanted access to him. If she could ask him a few questions while he was getting into his car, she might find out something useful—but more importantly, she would surely impress the hell out of the others on the investigative reporting team.

Applying the old adage that a person with a clipboard can penetrate any space, she bought a cheap one from a stationary shop and marched straight into the garage at Consol Towers, where Bagolbagol Inc. was based on the thirty-fifth floor. The guards at the entrance did not give her a second look.

It took surprisingly little time to find Mangila’s car. At the back of Lower Ground Level Two she found a roped-off cluster of long, expensive-looking cars—mostly BMWs and Mercedes-Benzes. But there was one car in the most convenient parking space (right next to a private elevator) which was a white sedan: a Lexus. As she approached, she noted the number plate: JMJ 4444.

Glancing behind her to make sure the coast was clear, she raced over to the car and hid herself behind it, realising that she might have to wait several hours. She placed a newspaper on the ground to sit on, put her CD Walkman earphones into her ears, and started reading some magazines she had bought at the hotel kiosk.