The Ambassador's Wife (17 page)

“Unless it was copied on a prior occasion before it was returned to you.”

“Our systems are installed and serviced by Chubb Security, Inspector. I assure you no copies have ever been authorized and it is absolutely impossible for one to be made without going through Chubb. The built-in encryption is unbreakable.”

Tay’s view on that was somewhat less sanguine. In his experience, what one man could build, another could tear apart. The resources required to do it might be considerable, or they might be closely held, but for the right people with the right access, nothing was ever impossible. Still, Tay saw nothing to gain by arguing the point with Keshar right then so he let it go.

“What does this Mr. Washington look like?” he asked instead.

“I don’t know. I never saw him.”

“Then how did you give him a security card and get it back?”

“One of our couriers delivered it in a sealed envelope along with the numbers of the suites I had blocked. Another courier returned it to me the same way.”

“Where did you deliver it?”

“To the American embassy.”

“Addressed to Mr. Washington?”

“Yes. That’s right.”

A small silence followed while Tay struggled with the implications of what Keshar was telling him.

“Look, Inspector,” Keshar interrupted his reverie, “I should never have told you any of this. I’m sure it’s got nothing to do with your investigation and I was instructed never to mention it to anyone. If head office hears I told you, I don’t know what will happen, but I like my job and I want to keep it. I’m asking you, begging you really, please tell no one that you heard this from me.”

“I’ll do my best, Mr. Keshar, but if the matter becomes relevant to my investigation, that may not be possible.”

Looking unhappy, Keshar waggled his head back and forth. What that was supposed to signify, Tay had no idea.

Tay was too absorbed in what he had already heard to ask any more useful questions and, even if he had, Keshar was so worried he had already said too much that he wouldn’t have offered any useful answers. That meant it was not long before the conversation died altogether, no doubt having bored itself to death.

“That business with the American embassy really can’t have anything to do with that poor woman’s murder, Inspector,” Keshar said yet again as they stood and shook hands.

Tay nodded. He noticed that Keshar’s palm was slightly damp. He examined Keshar’s face closely and saw the tentative look in his eyes, so he said no more. He merely nodded again, left the office, and closed the door quietly behind him.

SEVENTEEN

THE
American embassy had always looked to Tay like a combination of a Japanese warlord’s castle and the elephant house at a very prosperous zoo. The low-slung building was constructed entirely of giant blocks of stone that made the whole structure seem massively oversized. It sat well back from Napier Road atop a small, doubtless artificial rise and the grassy expanses surrounding it were a peculiar contrast to the uncompromising gray stone.

There was a security post out on the road built of glass and more gray stone. Beyond it, the only approach to the embassy was up a long, exposed concrete ramp. Tay figured its purpose was to give them a good opportunity to shoot you if the security post made a mistake in letting you in.

“Yes, sir. May I help you?”

To Tay’s surprise, the security guard behind the glass appeared to be a Singaporean, not an American.

“I’m Inspector Tay, CID-SIS.” He held up his warrant card. “I have an appointment with, ah…”

Tay hesitated. He suddenly realized he couldn’t remember Cally’s last name, but under the circumstances using her first name seemed unreasonably familiar.

“…your security officer,” he finished, thinking as he did how lame it sounded.

“Yes, sir.” The guard inspected Tay’s warrant card through the glass with obvious care. “We were told to expect you.”

There was a loud clunk and the glass door popped ajar. Tay tugged it open, surprised at its heft, and entered the security post.

“Are you armed, sir?”

The question came from a different guard, also apparently a Singaporean, and it took Tay by surprise. No one had asked him that in so long that he couldn’t remember the last time. He almost never bothered to carry a weapon anymore. That was a couple of pounds he hadn’t had any trouble losing.

“Only with a box of Marlboros,” he said.

Tay smiled, but no one else did.

“There’s no smoking here, sir,” the second guard said.

Tay abandoned the smile and nodded as soberly as he could. He also tried to mix into his expression enough embarrassment and contrition to cover any possible expectations the security guards might have along those lines.

“Cell phone, sir?”

“Yes.”

The guard held out a small plastic ticket, like a claim check, and Tay exchanged his telephone for it.

“You can collect it on your way out, sir. Any other electronic devices with you? Pager? Recorder? Digital camera? Anything like that?”

“No, nothing.”

“Right, sir. Then just step through the metal detector there, please.”

Tay turned and did as he was told.

He wondered what his expression looked like at that moment and whether the third guard in the room, the one who hadn’t yet spoken, was trying to decide if he looked suspicious. He always felt vaguely guilty walking through a metal detector and he suspected it showed. The device was like a lie detector. Even if you hadn’t lied about anything, being tested seemed to suggest that you might have. Whenever Tay passed through a metal detector he tried to shape his face into a look of innocence, and every time he no doubt ended up looking like an idiot. Worse, probably a guilty idiot.

At least the damned thing didn’t buzz this time. Thank the Lord for small mercies.

“Just outside and then up the walkway to your left, sir,” the guard said, pointing at the security post’s exit door. “Ms. Parks will meet you in the lobby.”

Ah, thank you
, Tay thought.
I remember now
.
Parks
.
Cally Parks
.

The exit door opened with the sound of an electronic lock disengaging and Tay was outside again walking up the long ramp to the main entrance of the embassy. No one shot him before he made it to the top, so he gathered he was doing pretty well so far.

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.