Umbrella Man (9786167611204) (14 page)

“Maybe I just didn’t feel like answering my
phone. Maybe I was in the shower. Maybe I had picked up a
girl.”

“And maybe you’d had a stroke brought on by
stress, bad temper, and old age.”

Tay looked away and tried not to smile.

“Do you know what happened to me,
Sergeant?”

“Not really, sir. When I walked up to your
front door, it was half open and I saw you lying just inside. It
looked like you’d been knocked out. I didn’t want to wait for an
ambulance so I carried you to my car and brought you straight
here.”

“Thank you, Sergeant.”

“Don’t mention it, sir.”

“I won’t. Certainly not again.”

“Dr. Gupta says someone knocked you out with
a club. Why would anyone attack you, sir? Like that, I mean.”

For Kang’s benefit, Tay pretended to think
about it. “No idea,” he said after a few moments.

But, of course, that was complete nonsense.
He had a very good idea.

He was just curious how many of the ledger
sheets from the HSBC safety deposit box would be gone when he got
home.

***

They were all gone. Every last one of
them.

This time he had let Sergeant Kang drive him
home from the hospital rather than taking a taxi. To tell the
truth, he would rather have taken a taxi, but Kang was enjoying the
role of rescuer so much that Tay didn’t have the heart to say so.
That would have been downright cruel.

When they got to Emerald Hill, Tay had
insisted Kang leave him outside and go home. Just in case the
ledger sheets were still where he had left them, Tay didn’t want to
have to explain to Kang what they were. And if Kang came in and
spotted them, Tay had no doubt he would ask.

He need not have worried. He stared at the
table in his living room where he had left the stack of files when
he went to answer the door, but they were gone. All of them.

Tay found a pack of Marlboros, sat down, and
lit one.

He knew he smoked way too much, and he kept
telling himself he was going to quit soon, very soon, but he never
did. The truth was he simply liked the damned things. He missed
cigarettes like crazy when he was stuck somewhere he couldn’t have
one.

Perhaps he should ask Dr. Gupta if there was
a hospital in Singapore that allowed smoking. It would be good to
have one in mind, just in case things like this kept happening to
him.

***

At least he still had the key to the safe
deposit box, it occurred to him as he was finishing his cigarette.
He had put it into the little safe he had upstairs where he usually
left his side arm rather than carrying it with him.

Tay didn’t much like carrying a gun. It
wasn’t that he harbored high-minded scruples that prevented him
from shooting people. He had never actually shot anyone, but he had
a long list of people in mind he thought could
use
shooting.
Maybe it was more a matter of not wanting to be tempted.

Just to be certain, Tay stubbed out his
cigarette and went upstairs. He opened the safe and found both the
key and his gun exactly where they ought to be. He started to close
the safe again, but he hesitated. Then, in spite of the feeling
that he was probably overreacting, he took out his revolver and
relocked the safe.

Tay’s choice of duty gun marked him as even
more of an old fart than everyone already thought he was, which was
really saying something. He still had his old-fashioned wheel gun,
a Smith and Wesson .38, five shots with a two-inch barrel. The gun
was practically an antique. Carrying it was pretty much the same
thing as making telephone calls with a rotary dial phone.

Policemen these days all carried
semiautomatics, or perhaps one of the big Taurus revolvers
chambered for a .44 magnum. Both of those were a lot more gun than
Tay had any use for, so he just stuck to his old Smith and Wesson
.38 and endured the jokes. It’s a great weapon if you get into a
gunfight in an elevator, Kang chuckled on those rare occasions Tay
still bothered to carry it.

Tay figured it didn’t matter all that much.
He had no intention of getting into a gunfight anywhere. To tell
the truth, if he did somehow end up in a gunfight, he was such a
lousy shot one gun would be about as useless to him as another.

He unsnapped the safety strap and slid the
little gun out of its holster. Spinning the cylinder to make
certain it was fully loaded, he slid it back into its holster and
snapped the safety strap. Then he laid it on his bedside table and
went back downstairs.

ACCORDING TO TAY’S alarm clock, the numerals
of which were glowing in a shade of green that some idiot
apparently thought was soothing, it was 3:00 am exactly.

Tay woke up with a conviction at the
forefront of his mind that he now knew something he had not known
before. He just didn’t know what it was.

He rolled onto his side to get away from the
sickly green glow coming from his alarm clock and tried to go back
to sleep, but he soon realized that wasn’t going to happen. His
mind was racing to bring something into focus. But like a dream, it
hung somewhere just out of reach.

A dream?

It flashed across Tay’s mind that perhaps his
mother had appeared to him again and slipped him one of those cheat
sheets she kept pushing at him, but he didn’t think so. He
generally remembered when he dreamed about his mother, and he
always remembered when she claimed to be tipping him off about
something. Unless, of course, he hadn’t remembered at all, in which
case he wouldn’t know he had forgotten, would he?

Tay’s head was spinning so fast he thought he
might never sleep again, so he pushed himself upright in bed,
propped his back against the headboard and tried again to focus on
whatever it was that was working at him.

He thought for a minute more about his
mother…

And, suddenly, there it was.

***

Tay jumped out of bed and put on a robe.
Pulling the belt tight around him and tying it in a bow, he went
downstairs to the kitchen and got the pitcher of cold water from
the refrigerator. He poured himself a glass and sat at his kitchen
table. Before he had finished drinking the water, he knew exactly
what was on his mind.

Up in one of the spare bedrooms where he
never went anymore, were two old trunks filled with things his
mother had left behind when she moved to New York. For years Tay
had been telling himself he would throw them out, but he never did.
Eventually, he more or less forgot all about them.

Until about twenty minutes ago. When he was
fast asleep.

And that was when he remembered the things
his mother had left included some photographs he hadn’t looked at
in nearly forty years. Photographs of his father, the place he used
to work, and the people he worked with.

If he could find a way to identify any of
those people, if they were still alive, if he could locate them
now, they might have some idea why his father’s initials were on
those ledger sheets in the HSBC safety deposit box.

A lot of if’s.

But it was a place to start.

He wondered briefly if his mother had tipped
him off about the photos in a dream, but he quickly dismissed the
whole concept as far too wobbly to think about at 3:00 am and
decided to make some coffee and get to work.

***

Tay measured coffee into the filter of the
coffeemaker, poured in some water, and went upstairs while it was
dripping. He changed into a t-shirt and a wrinkled pair of khakis
and, by the time he got back downstairs, the coffee was ready. He
filled up a white ceramic mug, drank half of it straight down
purely for medicinal purposes, then refilled the mug and trudged
upstairs again.

This time he turned the opposite way, went
all the way to the end of the hall, and entered a small bedroom in
the back of the house he didn’t think he had been in for years. He
flipped on the light and was pleased to see the room was neat and
clean. His housekeeper, an elderly woman from Indonesia, was almost
as obsessive as he was and had obviously been cleaning the room
religiously whether he went into it or not.

The room had been used for storage for as
long as he could remember, probably even back when his father had
been alive and he had been a child and they had all lived in this
house like a normal family. Well…normal might be overdoing it a
bit, but this was hardly the time to dig up those bones.

Now the room looked like a used furniture
store, if there was any such thing as a used furniture store
anymore. Chairs, upholstered and plain; cabinets of various
description; at least half a dozen tables; lamps, mostly with
ceramic bases, sitting on every flat surface; and over against one
wall, the two black steamer trunks banded in bronze metal strips
that Tay remembered.

Tay put his coffee mug on a small mahogany
table against the wall, pulled up a straight chair, and then opened
the lid of the first trunk. It took him a while to work his way
through it, but when he had finished he had found nothing but
women’s clothing. It all belonged to his mother, he presumed.
Still, none of it looked familiar, but then he couldn’t describe
what Dr. Hoi was wearing when he saw her two days before so he
guessed it was pretty obvious he wouldn’t recognize clothes his
mother wore several decades ago.

Had he been wrong about the photographs? He
piled the clothes back into the trunk, closed the lid, and sat on
the straight chair for a minute sipping his coffee which was now
lukewarm. No, he was sure he wasn’t wrong. The photographs were
either in the other truck or they were somewhere else in this room.
He was sure of it.

***

He put down his coffee mug and opened the
second trunk, and he saw immediately that it was filled with things
that had belonged to his father. There were some clothes, but most
of the space was taken up with stacks of ledger books, piles of
neatly labeled file folders, and — right there on top, underneath a
double-breasted blue blazer folded in half — two green leather
photo albums.

Tay lifted the two albums out, sat back down
in the straight chair, and piled them on his lap. When he opened
the cover of the first one, he saw neatly mounted on each page rows
of postcard-sized photographs of people at an office. The color
photos were faded, some of the ones that looked like old-fashioned
Polaroids were even too dim to make out, but the black and whites
were crisp and clear.

Tay popped one photo out of its mounts and
turned it over. Sure enough, he found exactly what he was hoping
for. Someone had written a date on the back of the photograph in
pencil, and beneath it were four names.

As soon as he saw the writing on the back of
the photograph, it gave him another idea. He put the albums on the
floor and picked up one of the ledger books at random. When he
opened it, he found page after page of hand-written accounts,
although he had no idea what they were accounts for. He flipped
slowly through the book’s pages, skimming each of them quickly, and
about a dozen pages in he found exactly what he was looking
for.

DST.

The initials were penciled in the margin next
to a column of figures that had been totaled.

DST.

His father’s initials.

Tay had no idea what the accounts were or why
his father’s initials were on them, but that wasn’t the point.

What really mattered was the handwriting
looked exactly the same as the initials he had found on the ledger
sheets in the HSBC safety box. If Tay still had any doubt there was
some connection between the dead man and his father, he had it no
longer. He just didn’t have the first idea what that connection
could possibly be.

***

Tay opened one of the photo albums and leafed
through it. There must have been forty or fifty photographs in all.
His father was in several, but most were of people he didn’t know
doing things that didn’t look very interesting. They had all been
taken in what looked to be the same office and they were all images
of people working at desks or drinking coffee from big ceramic
mugs. The subjects were mostly men, but there were a few women,
too. Judging by the mode of dress and the haircuts, Tay guessed the
photos had all been made in the late sixties or early seventies,
but he couldn’t be sure. He assumed the office was his father’s
office there in Singapore, but he couldn’t be certain of that
either.

The very ordinariness of the photographs made
him wonder. Why would anyone have taken them? And why would his
father have kept them at all, let alone mounted neatly and with
such obvious care in an expensive leather photo album.

He laid the first album on the floor and
picked up the second. The photographs in the second album were
entirely different. The first one even looked somewhat official. In
it, his father and three other men were formally posed in
somebody’s office standing next to an American flag hanging from a
staff set in a heavy-looking metal base. What kind of an office had
an American flag in it? Then Tay remembered his meeting with the
American ambassador at the embassy in Singapore. The ambassador’s
desk had been flanked with an American flag on one side and some
other kind of flag he didn’t recognize on the other, so an
ambassador’s office was certainly one possibility. No doubt, Tay
reminded himself, there were a lot of other possibilities as
well.

The rest of the photos had mostly been taken
outdoors somewhere. While the place looked Asian, Tay did not think
it was Singapore. Most of the photographs were of his father, and
in many of those he was with a stunningly beautiful girl who looked
to be not more than twenty. She was clearly Asian, perhaps Laotian
or Vietnamese, Tay guessed. In every photograph the woman was
simply but elegantly dressed in western clothes.