The Ambassador's Wife (4 page)

“Is there any evidence the woman had intercourse before she died?” he asked when the men were out of earshot.

“We won’t know for sure until the autopsy.”

Tay grunted.

“Even then,” Kang went on, “if it was normal vaginal intercourse, it may be difficult to tell for sure whether it was forced.”

“Why would it be difficult … oh, the flashlight.”

“Yes, sir. The flashlight.”

“Maybe we can at least find out where that came from.”

“We already know, sir.”

“We do?”

“There’s one in every room. The hotel has them in the closet for emergencies.”

Tay picked up the empty espresso cup and slipped his forefinger through the handle. Letting the cup drop, he watched it swing back and forth.

“What did they find in the room?” Tay asked after the cup stopped swinging.

“That’s what’s strange, sir. It’s not what they found; it’s what they didn’t find. No suitcases, no toilet articles, no clothing. She certainly wasn’t staying there.”

“What about the clothes she was wearing?”

“Nothing, sir.”

Tay blinked at that. “Her clothes were gone?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, even if there is an electronics trade fair in town, she sure as hell didn’t walk into the Marriott completely naked.”

“No, sir. Probably not.”

“What about her jewelry? Rings? A watch?”

“No, sir. Nothing like that. Both her hands show marks from rings, but they’re gone now.”

“Somebody cleaned up. And they made a thorough job of it.”

“Yes, sir. A guy takes everything, packs it into a suitcase or maybe a laundry bag, and walks out. Who notices a man walking out of a hotel with a bag?”

Tay leaned back, knitted his fingers together behind his head, and thought for a moment.

“What makes you think it was a man?” he asked.

“Oh come on, sir. No woman could have done that.”

“Why not?”

“A woman just couldn’t do something like that, sir.”

“Don’t be naive, Sergeant. You need to get out more.”

“Well, sir, at the very least you have to admit no woman’s strong enough to beat another woman that badly.”

“Really? You obviously haven’t met any of the women my friends have been fixing me up with recently.”

Tay thought about what Kang had just told him for a second, maybe two.

“There won’t be any prints in the room,” he said. “Not the woman’s. Not the killer’s. He was too careful for that.”

“Probably not, sir. FMB says the whole room’s been wiped down. But they’re still checking everything anyway. Maybe there’s something that didn’t get wiped.”

“Have they found anything at all that would help identify her?”

“No, sir.”

“Do they know what was used to beat her face in?”

“Not yet.”

“Can they tell if the beating was the cause of death?”

“They’re not sure.”

“Are they at least certain she’s dead?”

“Pardon me, sir?”

“Never mind.”

Tay drummed his fingers on the table. He picked up the half empty box of Marlboros and then put it down again.

“Have our esteemed colleagues even managed to come up with a time of death?” he asked.

“They say she’s still in rigor, but the air conditioning was turned down so much it might have delayed the time it took her to reach it. They’re just guessing, but they figure it was something like twelve to twenty-four hours ago.”

Tay looked at his watch. He already knew more or less what the time was, but he looked at his watch anyway.

“Then she was probably killed between noon and midnight on Monday,” he said.

Kang nodded. “Yes, sir.”

Tay stopped, thought a moment, and then asked, “What do you make of the curtains?”

“The curtains, sir?”

“They were open in the living room, but closed in the bedroom. Don’t you think that’s a little odd?”

Kang didn’t really, so he wasn’t entirely sure what to say.

“Look, Sergeant, if they were in the room during the day, they might leave the drapes open, but at night they’d have them closed. Why leave them one way in the living room and the other in the bedroom?”

“Maybe they came into the room during the day and then moved into the bedroom after dark.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” Tay said. “Which would make the time of death somewhere in the range of six to seven o’clock, wouldn’t it?”

“That makes sense, sir.”

Tay sat for a while after that with his face perfectly still. He reached for the open box of Marlboros again and shook out another cigarette.

“Her killer posed her, Sergeant. He posed her after he was done with her and stripped away her dignity. He wanted to degrade her. He wanted to tell us just how worthless she is.”

Tay picked up the lighter and flipped it open. He watched the flame burn, but he didn’t touch it to his cigarette.

“How about a drink, Robbie?”

“I’m afraid I can’t, sir. My wife and I are going out tonight. She organized something with this friend of hers and if I show up late she’ll murder me.” Sergeant Kang paused and looked down at his hands. “Sorry, sir. I didn’t mean any disrespect to—”

“I know you didn’t, Sergeant. Go on home. We’ll see where we are tomorrow morning. At least we ought to have the preliminary-report from FMB and maybe we’ll even have an ID on the body by then.”

“I hope so. Thank you, sir. Good night.”

AFTER
Sergeant Kang had gone, Inspector Tay lit the Marlboro and sat smoking it in silence. He watched the street and the crowds passing on the sidewalk and he wondered not for the first time what the hell he was doing there with a police warrant card in his pocket and the stink of death on his clothes.

The only child of an American-born Chinese man and a Singaporean-born Chinese woman, Tay had lived the whole of his life in Singapore. His father had been an accountant, a careful man who insisted that his family live modestly. When he died suddenly of a heart attack, Tay’s mother was shocked to discover she and her son had inherited a small fortune in real estate. She hadn’t even known her husband had been buying properties for two decades, let alone that his investments would leave her and her son quite comfortably off for the rest of their lives.

Regardless, she had quickly adjusted to the concept. Within a year, she moved to New York and acquired what she described to Tay as a Park Avenue duplex, although Tay noticed her address was actually on East Ninety-Third Street. When his mother married a widowed American investment banker who was a senior partner at some investment firm the name of which Tay could never quite remember, Tay was at the National University. He didn’t go to New York for the wedding. Actually, he couldn’t quite recall having been invited to New York for the wedding, but he supposed that was beside the point. He told himself he would have stayed in Singapore even if he had been invited.

By the time Tay graduated from university, he had chosen to his mother’s complete horror to make his career in police work rather than living the life of the idle well off she preferred for him. Looking back later on that decision, Tay could not for the life of him remember exactly why he had made it, but he had stuck with it regardless. As a brighter-than-average recruit who was dutiful and conscientious, he was soon promoted, first to general investigative work, then to the Criminal Investigations Department, and finally to the elite Special Investigations Section of CID.

After all this time, Tay thought he should have become accustomed to carnage and brutality, but he hadn’t. Each time he was called to a murder scene he still recoiled; and when he thought about it honestly, he knew exactly why that was.

It was not the violence Tay saw before him that caused the bile to rise in his throat at crime scenes. It was the violence he feared he had not yet seen, the violence that might even be hiding deep within himself. He had wondered many times if he could consciously bring about the death of another person and he had always answered that he could not. But he was not absolutely certain that was true. Whenever he was in the presence of unreasoning brutality, Tay found himself driven to examine his own soul; and he did not much like what he found there. He did not know exactly what it was, but he was sure of one thing. It made him afraid.

When Tay was done with his cigarette, he stubbed it out in the ashtray and pocketed both the box he had been smoking and the unopened one. On impulse, he left the purple lighter on the table next to the ashtray. He wasn’t entirely certain why he did that. Perhaps it was some sort of gesture of atonement for his weakness.

When Tay got outside he waved away the hotel doorman and stood for a moment watching a jagged, gray-green cloud rise in the west. It looked like a mountain range on the move, dark and dense and frightening. It seemed to be on the verge of overwhelming the city.

The sun was setting behind that seathing mass of clouds and it looked to Tay as though it would never come up again.

FIVE

THE
first and most important truth about Singapore is this. It is hot. It is nasty, stinking, sweaty hot.

Although it was barely six the next morning when Tay opened his front door and stepped out onto his small porch, he could already feel the heat rising. The air was so heavy that the moisture was draining right out of it. Or maybe it was raining. In Singapore, sometimes it was hard to tell the difference.

Tay had been born in Singapore and he would no doubt die in Singapore, but he had never come to an accommodation with the savage heat and the sadistic humidity. If he owned both Singapore and hell, he would rent out Singapore and live in hell. How had people managed to survive there before air conditioning was invented; and why had they even tried? He had wondered about that for as long as he could remember and he still had absolutely no idea.

A storm had hit early in the morning hours and wakened Tay from a sleep so uneasy he almost welcomed the intrusion. The thunder made it sound as if massed cannon were shelling the city and the banana trees in his small garden had bent back and forth in the swirling winds, swishing over his bedroom windows like huge brushes against a snare drum. Sometime around six o’clock he gave up trying to sleep and got up and dressed.

Samuel Tay was not an early riser. He did not greet the new day cheerfully, anticipating the delights it might hold in store for him. Instead, he welcomed it warily, resigned to the new frustrations and the fresh disappointments it would surely bring.

Coffee generally improved his disposition in the morning, but this time it was so early that he doubted even it would help. Nevertheless, he made some anyway and drank two cups while he watched the BBC news channel on television. When he got bored with the news and shut it off, he saw that he had been absolutely right. The coffee hadn’t improved his disposition one damn bit.

For nearly a half-hour, Tay successfully avoided lighting a cigarette to go with his coffee, but then he began to wonder who he was trying to impress with his restraint. He found the trousers he had dropped on the floor the night before and fished the open pack of Marlboros out of a front pocket. That was when it came back to him he had abandoned the lighter in the Marriott coffee shop in a gesture of moral atonement.

Why on earth had he done an idiotic thing like that? Exactly whom was he trying to convince of his sincere remorse and good character? Tay wondered briefly if he had matches somewhere in the house, but knew he didn’t. He had thrown them all away along with his cigarettes the last time he had quit smoking.

He finally gave up, both on the cigarette and on trying to make himself feel better, and decided just to get dressed and go to work. Maybe he would even walk part of the way and stop somewhere for breakfast. Eat a nice greasy banana fritter. Maybe two. Yes, that sounded good. A sugar fix and another hit of caffeine. That might be just the ticket.

Standing now on his front porch, he saw the storm had passed and it had stopped raining. Or maybe it hadn’t. Tay eyed the sky with mistrust and took an umbrella out of the stand next to his door. Still, if this was rain, it had none of the drive, none of the interest it had shown during the night. The clouds seemed old and tired. Tay knew exactly how they felt.

He walked down to Orchard Road, crossed over, and followed it west toward the Mandarin Hotel until he came to a Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf. He bought a double espresso and two banana fritters and sat down at a table on which someone had thoughtfully abandoned a copy of that morning’s
Straits Times
. Taking a long pull on the espresso and biting into the first of the fritters, he glanced around the room. He was surprised to see it was almost full.

Four schoolgirls in green skirts and while blouses giggled and squealed in a back corner as they exchanged confidences. A darksuited man with a round Chinese face sat at a small table holding his coffee in one hand while with the other he methodically emptied his briefcase onto the table and then repacked it again. Three men and a woman conversed earnestly at a table covered with files, papers, cell phones, and empty coffee cups. Two young women came in wearing hip-hugging jeans slung so low that they threatened, or promised depending on your point of view, to reveal all at any moment.

What were all those people doing here? Tay wondered. Were so many people generally up and around Singapore at this godforsaken hour? Surely not.

Tay finished the first banana fritter and realized that, against all odds, he was beginning to feel moderately human. He took another long hit from the espresso, then started on the second fritter and unfolded
The Straits Times
.

As a rule Tay did not like reading newspapers in the morning. He thought their everlasting recitations of the tragedies, atrocities, and scandals that had occurred while he slept were a poor recommendation for the coming day, the one just past having turned out so revoltingly. If he read a newspaper in the morning at all, he tried to stick strictly to the sports pages and the supermarket ads. He found they passed the time without awakening his sense of foreboding.