Aunty Lee's Chilled Revenge (22 page)

“Anyway, I was paying all her bills. Her rent, her car, the medical bills—though she wasn't turning up at the consultations. She was supposed to go for a full psychiatric consultation and follow-ups. It was one of the conditions of her getting off with a fine. And of course I didn't press any charges and I persuaded Mrs. Ameeta not to either.”

It showed a different side of the man from what Aunty Lee had been seeing. But if Allison Love had been his burden even after their divorce, it just gave him more reason to murder her. And of course it wasn't just Mike who had reason to want Allison Love dead—Josephine DelaVega had a very good reason too. Even if Mike could afford to wait for Allison to settle down, Josephine and her baby did not have that luxury.

“If someone wanted to send out moon cakes to her clients, where would she order them from?” Aunty Lee asked as soon as she got home. There was no sign of Vallerie, and Nina had been preparing vegetables in front of the television while waiting for her.

Nina did not pause in her tailing of bean sprouts. “Clients she wants to impress or to say thank you to?”

“Both I suppose. Without spending too much. She's doing well but she's not one of those big banks sending out gold pieces inside moon cake boxes.” Aunty Lee sat down on the sofa and swung her legs up.

“Madame, you sit down now very hard to get up later! You should shower and go to sleep! Traditional or snow skin or crazy new recipes?”

“She didn't say they were special, so I think they must have been traditional.”

“Probably somewhere like Bao's New Moons, where they personalize and deliver and don't charge too much. And Belinda Bao is a friend of Josephine's, right?”

“That's what I thought.” Aunty Lee was pleased with the confirmation as well as with how far Nina had come. When Nina first arrived in Singapore she had not liked moon cakes, finding them far too heavy for her taste. Since then she had become quite a connoisseur.

Aunty Lee herself did not order moon cakes to send to friends and clients. She always baked a few herself, just to keep her hand in. She only made the traditional sort with salted egg yolks and lotus paste because they were the ones she had learned to make when ML Lee teased her for not knowing how to make a basic Chinese cake. Aunty Lee had always loved a culinary challenge. She would get in touch with Belinda Bao. It was too late to try that night, and anyway there was no hurry.

Changing Portraits and Perspectives

“Miss Vallerie not awake yet?” Nina was back from the wet market. She appreciated the convenience of Singapore's twenty-four-hour supermarkets but, like Aunty Lee, her first loyalty was to food that appeared according to daily as well as yearly rhythms.

“She hasn't come downstairs yet.”

“I put the
chee cheong fun
I bought for you on the marble table outside. And there's some sweet bean curd and fresh
youtiao
. You should eat while it is still hot. Shall I call Miss Vallerie?”

If she could be persuaded to try it, Aunty Lee knew Vallerie would enjoy the smooth, silky sheets of
chee cheong fun
—rice paste rolled around juicy fillings of shrimp and scallops and steamed. And she would definitely enjoy the deep-fried
crispy
youtiao,
or dough fritters, even if she rejected the delicate, sweetened tofu pudding.

“I'm sure she will be down soon,” Aunty Lee said. She did not feel up to facing Vallerie yet. On hearing Josephine had been poisoned, Vallerie had abruptly declared her intention of leaving Singapore immediately, not even waiting for her sister's funeral and cremation. She had asked Aunty Lee to book her a ticket to London as soon as possible, without even a pretense of offering to pay. Perhaps she felt Singapore owed her board, lodging, and travel costs for her sister's death. Or, Aunty Lee thought more likely, Vallerie simply chose not to think about it. From what Josephine and Mike said, Allison had shared this blindness to her own responsibilities. Not for the first time, Aunty Lee wondered about the parents and environment that had produced these sisters. Or had coming east out of their comfort zone brought out this side of them? But Vallerie had moved away from England on her own years ago . . .

“Why London?” Aunty Lee wondered aloud. “Why would she go to London now?”

“Why not London?” Nina came in with a bucket of clams and other things on her mind. She wanted to get her boss and guest fed so she could start on the work for the day at the café. “You buy me free ticket to London I also want to go. See? I found stingray and
lala
today.”
Lala,
or thin-shelled clams, were a seasonal treat that didn't last long, so finding them in the market automatically made them a special.

Aunty Lee was distracted by the prospect. “We can steam with golden mushroom and lemongrass, or just fry with salt
and pepper and garlic. Better put on the website so people know that today we have.”

“Already put on the website, madame!” Nina's Internet prowess might make Selina uncomfortable, but her menu updates boosted customer flow to Aunty Lee's Delights.

“I remember as children we would go wading on the mudflats at low tide with our little spades and pails digging for these. We called them baby bamboo clams. And my father would do a cookout and throw them onto the grill next to his steak and
satay,
and we would grab them off once they opened . . .”

“Before cooking, the
lala
must scrub clean properly.” Nina was already getting down to it with a fierce-looking brush. “Then we can leave them to soak in salt water until time to cook for lunch. And we can cook some with your chili sauce, madame.”

“Sambal lala!”
Aunty Lee said. “
Lala
with my ginger and yellow bean sauce. Special seafood noodles with
lala
and—did you get fresh prawns and scallops, Nina?”

“Of course got, madame.” Nina sounded offended to be asked.

At the café that day, Vallerie eschewed the clams but agreeably arranged cubes of colored cake and agar-agar on large, round, woven wicker trays lined with parchment, eating any that she deemed too large, too small, or lopsided. She did not look up as Aunty Lee limped around the table to look at her handiwork, though Aunty Lee could tell the woman was aware of her; her exaggerated focus on the dessert tray gave
that away. It was beautiful, the bright colors of the
kuehs
contrasting with the translucent jellied agars. The woman had an artist's eye for color.

“It looks beautiful,” Aunty Lee said. “Good job.”

Vallerie looked surprised, but she automatically dismissed the compliment. “They're just stupid cakes. Fattening.”

“Once imported ingredients like sugar, butter, and white flour were expensive so cakes and desserts like this were a luxury, only made for special occasions, to show people had money. Nowadays people can afford the ingredients but they cannot afford the time. Making
kueh
like that is a dying art nowadays. Did you make your own cakes in California?”

Vallerie looked blank for a moment. “Of course not. There are professionals there. And they make beautiful cakes, gâteaux and things. It's not just homemade stuff like here!”

After lunch, when Salim's dropping in prompted Vallerie to go back to the house for a nap, Aunty Lee asked the young inspector to look up Vallerie Love's connections in America. All along they had only been trying to find connections to Allison in Singapore and England, and all they came up with was that she had filed complaints against her neighbors, school boards, and temporary employers.

“The sister? Why?”

“Vallerie Love talks a lot about her sister but nothing about herself,” Aunty Lee said. “I think we should find out more about her.”

“Ah.” Salim thought he understood. “She is ready to go
home and you want to make sure there is somebody there who will look after her.”

Sometimes Aunty Lee thought the young man was too nice to be a good policeman. Surely you had to have a more suspicious mind and sharper nose to do a good job. But then that was why there were people like herself to sniff around and make sure all the nice people blindly following set recipes didn't get thrown off by bad ingredients. Because Aunty Lee did not trust suppliers without checking out their sources, especially when the products smelled a little funny . . .

“I just want to get in touch with someone, anybody, who might know Vallerie. She's lived in America for how many years—about thirteen years at least? She must have made some friends there.”

“That's true. You think Miss Vallerie is going to go home soon?”

“She says she wants to go as soon as possible. She doesn't want to attend her sister's funeral if the husband is going to be there—and he is. And you people—the police—aren't keeping her here, right?”

“Oh no. We told her she is free to go as long as we can reach her.”

“I was thinking, sometimes the best way to find out what somebody is like is to see what kind of friends they have. I asked Jacky about numbers called from their hotel room, but they didn't make any.”

“Once people buy local SIM cards no need to use expensive hotel phones,” Nina said. “But Miss Vallerie used the
phone in the house, right? Can check on Madame Silly's machine. The one that records who is using your phone line.”

Nina had learned over the years that the strangest of Aunty Lee's hypotheses sometimes came true. But more importantly where she was concerned, if Aunty Lee was trying to do long-distance detecting, she was less likely to be trying to climb up ladders with a damaged ankle.

“Selina is monitoring your calls?” Salim wondered why Aunty Lee did not seem more horrified.

“That Silly-Nah means well,” Aunty Lee said generously. “She set up the machine to monitor calls because she said I don't know who is Nina talking to when I am not there. But she doesn't know how to get the information out of the machine, only Nina knows how to, so it's okay. Nina, later you try to get any numbers that weren't called by you or by me, okay?”

Some of Aunty Lee's wilder suppositions were not worth contradicting. Besides, Nina was curious about what the friends in L.A. had to say about Vallerie too.

“Now is not busy, I can go back and look—” But before Nina had finished and before Salim had managed to find an excuse to walk Nina back to the house (one drawback of living in one of the safest estates in one of the safest cities in the world), Anne Peters pushed open the door and half stepped, half fell through it.

The look on her friend's face brought Aunty Lee back two years to when Marianne Peters had died, and for a moment she froze, unable to go to her.

“My dog is very sick. Tammy is very sick. They say she may not make it!”

Tracing calls was forgotten as Aunty Lee sat with a sobbing Anne Peters. Tammy was still alive, but barely, and staying over at a Mount Pleasant vet clinic with a drip in her. Anne had brought her to the twenty-four-hour emergency clinic the previous night and come straight to the café when they told her to go home and leave Tammy to them. Even Josephine's poisoning (which Aunty Lee was not convinced hadn't been accidental or imagined) was dwarfed by this state of emergency.

“I don't know what happened. Tammy was fine all day. Then after dinner she started vomiting and there was blood oozing out of her hind end. The vet said she may have eaten rat poison or something. All they can do is try to rehydrate her and keep her going until she gets stronger. I should have watched her better! Rosie, I can't bear to lose her too!”

Neither of them noticed as Salim answered a call, stepped outside for better reception or privacy, and came back in. Nina hurried over when she saw him go over to where the two older women still sat.

“Not now, Salim,” Nina said. Then she saw something in his face. “What is it?”

“Brian Wong is dead.”

“What? How?”

“He killed himself.”

“No!” Aunty Lee shook her head.

Even Anne looked up, shocked. “Are you sure?”

“He left a message on his computer before doing it. Confessing that he killed Allison Love and Samantha Kang.”

“Why would Brian commit suicide?” Aunty Lee asked even as her mind darted around various possibilities. Had Brian killed Allison in an attempt to frame Mike? Had the two dead women known something about him that he had killed them to conceal? Had he been so hopelessly in love with Josephine all these years he would rather die than see her married to Mike Fitzgerald? Even if any of those reasons was true . . .

“Why would he kill himself now?”

“Mike Fitzgerald is not a suspect in Brian Wong's death,” Salim continued without answering the question. “He has been released without charge.”

Brian's suicide note, written on his computer and sent to Inspector Salim, filled in details that Josephine's account had left out. The vet, Samantha Kang, had sent him a note the day after Allison's murder. She said she had to talk to him, urgently, about someone suspicious she had seen. He guessed Dr. Kang had seen him in the hotel and was intending to blackmail him. He killed her to prevent her from talking.

“The fire at the vet clinic happened the morning that Allison was killed,” Aunty Lee said. “Samantha Kang couldn't have been at the hotel that day. She was at the clinic, rescuing animals from the fire, and then they would have taken her to the hospital, right?”

“Guilty conscience,” Nina said.

The dead vet must have been talking about somebody she saw at the clinic during or before the fire, Aunty Lee thought. That would have been uppermost in her mind. But
if Brian had been at Allison's hotel, then whom had Dr. Samantha Kang seen?

“The left side a bit down. No, that's too much. Yes—yes, that's right. Now come down carefully.”

Nina descended and folded the stepladder as Aunty Lee studied the casual photograph of ML in a light blue polo shirt. Here he had been caught off guard, squinting against the sun as he turned from opening the car door. It brought her back to a time when cars were already air-conditioned but car doors still had to be opened with keys. Mark's wife would have something to say when she saw it; she always dropped snide comments when Aunty Lee changed pictures around in her house or café. This time it would probably be something like “The frame probably cost more than the picture!” or “I'm sure Pa would prefer a more dignified picture.”

They thought she rotated ML's photos because there were too many of them to put up all at once. Several times Mark, prompted by Selina, had suggested Aunty Lee just pick and stick to her favorite portrait shots of his father rather than keep switching them around. “Selina says it makes her dizzy. Why not just put up the studio portraits with all of us in them?”

But though all photos of the late ML Lee were favorites of Aunty Lee's, she particularly liked those that captured him in unposed moments—those moments she would have taken for granted if he had been in front of her, because we seldom notice or appreciate what we see every day. And that was the reason Aunty Lee switched ML's pictures around. When she
missed her late husband most, looking at his photographs helped her see him anew. And after the shocking news of Brian's suicide she needed him more than ever.

“You should really think about moving somewhere more convenient,” Nina said, picking up the ladder. She had returned from the café to find the folding ladder out and her already limping boss looking guilty. If Aunty Lee had managed to get the ladder out of the storeroom more quickly, she might have finished before Nina got back. “Somewhere smaller. Where can hang pictures lower. And got railings for old people!”

“Maybe.”

They both knew Aunty Lee was never likely to move.

Rosie Lee had lived in other houses before this one. Before single-family high-rise apartments became more common than extended family dwellings, most had taken for granted the presence of multiple relatives who came to Singapore to work or study or simply because they had nowhere else to go. And she had not felt reluctant to leave the houses run by her grandmother or mother. Indeed, each previous departure had signaled a new stage in her life and been eagerly looked forward to. She had outgrown all her previous homes before she left them. Until now the move had always been toward, rather than away from, something. Perhaps you had to lose somebody in a house before you felt truly attached to it.