Umbrella Man (9786167611204) (11 page)

Tay shifted his eyes from the plastic bag to
Dr. Hoi, but he said nothing.

“This is a little gift to you from the dead
man at the Woodlands.”

“I don’t understand.”

“He had it when he died.”

Tay remembered going through the corpse’s
pockets as it lay on the floor of that sad little apartment in the
Woodlands. He didn’t understand how he could he have missed
something as important as this.

“Not in his pockets,” Dr. Hoi said as if she
knew what Tay was thinking.

Tay didn’t get it.

So he mulled it over for fifteen seconds.
Maybe twenty.

Then he
did
get it.

“It was in his rectum,” Dr. Hoi said just as
Tay was thinking that was exactly what she was going to say.

Tay had to beat down an overwhelming urge to
drop the bag. He succeeded, but his fingers involuntarily shifted
around until he was holding it by the barest corner.

Dr. Hoi noticed and smiled.

“Not the whole bag,” she said. “Just the
key.”

Tay’s eyes flicked back to the shiny metal
key tucked between the two layers of clear plastic. Registering the
large, rectangular teeth on its shaft, Tay felt his anus
constrict.

***

Tay laid the plastic envelope carefully on
the bench between them.

“Why did you leave this out of your
report?”

“Normally it would have been in there, of
course, but since you’re the investigating officer on the
case…well, I figured I’d tell you about it first and see what you
thought.”

Tay looked at the plastic envelope and said
nothing.

“So what
do
you think?” Dr. Hoi asked
when she got tired of waiting.

“I think it’s a key to a safety deposit box,
but as far as…well, I really don’t know. Why would anybody shove a
key to a safety deposit box up the poor old guy’s ass?”

“No one did.”

Dr. Hoi drew on her Marlboro, then tilted her
head up and exhaled. The gesture reminded Tay of Lauren Bacall in
some black and white movie from the forties.

“But I thought you said you found it in—”

“I think he did it himself.”

Tay felt his anus twitch again.

“There were no contusion on the rectal wall,”
she added. “No abnormal stretching in either the internal or the
external sphincters. And I found what I think are traces of
lubricant on the lining of the upper anus, but I won’t know for
sure until the lab reports come back.”

Dr. Hoi reached out and tapped on the key
with her forefinger.

“My guess is he just lubed himself up and
shoved that little sucker right up his own butt.”

***

Tay was too embarrassed by the whole subject
to make eye contact with Dr. Hoi, so he focused his full attention
on finishing his cigarette while he thought about what she was
telling him.

The old man had pushed a safety deposit box
key up his own ass before he was killed? Was he just trying to
conceal it, or did he know he was about to die and wanted to leave
it for someone like Tay to find? Either way, whatever was in that
box had to be pretty damn important, at least to the dead man, so
maybe it would help Tay figure out who the guy was.

“So…” Dr. Hoi cut into his reverie, “what do
you want me to do about putting the key in my report?”

“Can you give me a few days?”

“You want to find the box and see what’s in
it first, don’t you?”

That was exactly what Tay wanted to do, but
he hated to be so transparent so he said nothing. He just dropped
his cigarette butt on the ground and pushed it into the dirt with
the toe of his shoe.

Then he picked up the plastic bag and slid it
into his pocket.

WHEN TAY GOT back to his office he called
Sergeant Kang in and explained Dr. Hoi’s theory about the blow to
the dead man’s head having come from a Maglite. But he didn’t tell
Kang anything about the safe deposit box key.

Tay wasn’t absolutely sure why he didn’t
mention the key. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Kang — he did — but
there was just something about the dead man that was still making
his skin tingle. He was sure he had some connection with the man.
He just couldn’t figure out what it was. And if the old man did
something like that so he could pass the key to Tay, or someone
like Tay, he didn’t feel right about sharing it with anyone else.
At least not yet.

“She thinks a policeman killed this guy?”
Kang’s voice was doubtful.

“She thinks the blow from behind might have
been struck with a Maglite. And policemen have Maglites.”

“So do a lot of other people.”

That was true enough so Tay let it go.

“One other thing, Robbie. Do you know how to
link a safe deposit box key with the box it goes to?”

“By the number on it, I suppose, sir. Usually
the box number is on the key, isn’t it?”

“No, I mean, how do you tell what bank the
box is in?”

“You can’t remember which bank your safety
deposit box is in?”

“It’s not for me, Sergeant. A…uh, friend
asked me.”

Kang didn’t say anything, so Tay improvised a
bit more.

“A woman I know found some safety deposit box
keys in her mother’s things when she died, but she doesn’t know
where the boxes are.”

Close enough for government work, Tay
figured.

“Can’t she just check the banks he has
account statements from?” Kang asked. “People usually keep their
boxes at the same banks where they do the rest of their
business.”

Tay ignored Kang’s question and tried
again.

“Doesn’t the key somehow indicate which bank
the box is in?”

“I don’t think so, sir. I never heard of it.
If you have the key, you’re supposed to know where the box is.”

That wasn’t good news. Tay’s eyes shifted
involuntarily to the center drawer of his desk where he had put the
plastic bag with the key inside it. Maybe he should tell Kang about
it after all. There had to be some way to match the key to the box
it opens, but Tay knew nothing about bank safety deposit boxes and
didn’t see how he would go about working out something like
that.

Kang might be able to figure out how to do
it, but Tay could hardly produce the key now and ask Kang for his
help, could he? What was he going to say?

Oh, Sergeant, I forgot to mention our dead
guy had a safety deposit box key up his butt when he was murdered.
Yes, I know Dr. Hoi left it out of her report, but then she left
out her Maglite theory, too.

Yeah, right. Kang was such a Singaporean
straight arrow that he would no doubt pee himself at all the stuff
Tay and Dr. Hoi were hiding. Worse, Kang would naturally ask
why
he and Dr. Hoi were keeping the key and the Maglite
secret and he just didn’t have the slightest idea what to tell
him.

“All right, Sergeant. Thank you. Let me know
when you make some progress on the ID. And keep knocking on doors
in your spare time.”

“Right, sir.”

***

After Kang was gone, Tay opened his desk
drawer and removed the plastic envelope. He laid it gently in the
center of his desk blotter, then he bent toward it and examined the
key without touching it.

He peered closely at the head of the key and
read the numbers engraved there. In spite of what Kang had just
said, he thought surely there had to be
some
way of
identifying the box from the engraving on the key. Otherwise, what
sense did it make to have engraving on it in the first place? It
had to mean something. He made a mental note to ask someone to help
him who couldn’t link his curiosity about the key with the
Woodlands investigation.

And making that mental note caused Tay to sit
and think about what else he had so far in the Woodlands case.

It didn’t take him all that long.

Because he had nothing. Nothing at all that
pointed to anything.

He had a dead white guy lying on the floor of
a presumably unoccupied apartment in a housing estate where the
presence of a white guy should have been noticed by hundreds of
people, yet no one had noticed him.

He had a dead white guy who had nothing in
his pockets that could be used to identify him and whose prints
weren’t in the system as either a citizen or a resident of
Singapore.

He had a dead white guy who may or may not
have been hit over the head with a Maglite before his neck was
broken, but he had no suspects and no motive.

Of course, he
did
have a key to a
safety deposit box that the dead white guy had shoved up his ass at
some point before he was killed, but he had no idea what was in the
box or even where the box was.

Tay stood up and walked to the window. Off in
the distance he could see a hole in the city skyline that the
bombings had made. Orchard Road had once been a solid line of
luxury hotels and massive shopping malls that stretched for miles.
Now it looked like a jack-o-lantern with a bunch of missing teeth.
The only home he had ever known, the city of his birth, had had its
heart cut out by a band of mad men who left hundreds of dead bodies
blown apart in its streets. And what was Tay doing to right that
monstrous wrong?

Not a goddamned thing.

Instead, he and Sergeant Kang had been
assigned to identify a single murdered Caucasian male, and then —
assuming he could even eventually find out who the corpse actually
was
— figure out who killed him.

His mother might think those two things were
both equally important, but
he
didn’t.

He scooped the plastic bag with the key off
his desk and pushed it deep into his right-hand trouser pocket.
Then he got up from behind his desk went out to lunch without
telling anyone where he was going.

TAY DIDN’T KNOW either of the two men who
were waiting for him when he came back to his office after
lunch.

“Inspector Tay?” one of them asked when Tay
opened his door.

Tay didn’t answer. He didn’t like finding
anyone in his office other than Sergeant Kang. He was old fashioned
enough to believe you only went into another man’s office when you
were invited.

So Tay said nothing. He walked around his
desk, sat down, and looked at his visitors with his face blank.

He had no doubt the man who had spoken was a
Singaporean. He had a square Chinese face and black, badly cut
hair. His most prominent feature was a scar that started somewhere
inside his hairline just above his left ear, meandered more or less
diagonally across his cheek, and then disappeared just below his
jaw. It look liked the sort of dueling scar actors in old black and
white movies had when they played German aristocrats, but in
Singapore people didn’t duel with swords anymore, they dueled with
money. And money generally left scars that were deeper than just a
discolored welt across the cheek.

Tay’s first thought was the man was probably
a policeman, but he didn’t remember ever seeing him before so that
seemed fairly unlikely. Before Tay could take his speculation any
further, the man held out an identification card.

“I’m Philip Goh. ISD.”

The Internal Security Department. That would
explain both the bad haircut and, probably, the scar. It would also
explain why these jokers were in his office without an invitation.
In his experience, ISD didn’t care much about invitations. They
went wherever they wanted.

Tay’s eyes shifted to the second man, who
plainly was not a Singaporean. He was Caucasian, and so big that
the straight chair in front of Tay’s desk seemed to be struggling
to contain him. The man’s face was slightly discolored as if it had
once been burned and the new skin grafted to the old had taken on a
slightly different coloration. Or perhaps the grafts had been less
than perfectly done. When you looked at the man, all you saw was
his size and the huge pink blotches on his face. The whole effect
was downright scary.

Were the ISD guys going around with hired
muscle after the bombings? No, that was silly. Even if they were,
their hired muscle certainly wouldn’t be Caucasian.

The Caucasian man looked back at Tay, but he
didn’t introduce himself. It was Goh who handled that.

“This is Vincent Ferrero,” he said. “Vince is
with the American Embassy.”

In Tay’s experience,
with the American
Embassy
was the euphemism normally used to identify the local
CIA guys.

Wonderful. An ISD man and an American spook
waiting for him in his office. And the afternoon was young. There
was still a chance it might get even worse, wasn’t there?

So what the hell was going on here? He’d had
a perfectly nice lunch, was looking forward to an afternoon of
relaxed contemplation about the state of the Woodlands case that
would no doubt lead him straight to a blinding insight of some
kind, and…well, he hadn’t figured on Phil and Vince here ambushing
him in his own office.

Tay still hadn’t spoken a word since he had
walked into his office and found the two men waiting on him. That
policy seemed to be working out just fine, so he leaned back in his
chair, folded his arms, and awaited developments.

***

“What progress have you made in the
investigation of the dead man found at the Woodlands?” the ISD man
asked.

The question took Tay by surprise, but he
tried not to show it. Instead, he consulted a spot on the wall just
over his visitors’ heads and tried his best to look reflective.

“I thought you guys would be busy enough with
the bombings,” Tay said after a moment or two. “Why are you
interested in that case?”

“I don’t really need to tell you that,
Inspector.”

“No, that’s true, you don’t. But — and this
is just a guess — I’m thinking you’d probably get a more helpful
answer to your question if you answered mine first.”