Umbrella Man (9786167611204) (31 page)

Fortunately, banks in Singapore opened
earlier than Sam Tay usually got up. Actually, almost everything in
Singapore opened earlier than Sam Tay usually got up.

The receptionist apparently recognized him
because she rose to her feet and smiled even before he got near
enough to her desk to say anything.

“Good morning, Inspector.”

“Good morning,” Tay responded, but then it
occurred to him he had no idea what the woman’s name was and he
finished with a quick nod. He hoped he didn’t sound like a man who
had forgotten a woman’s name, but of course he knew that was
exactly what he sounded like.

“Mr. Lee is in a meeting outside the bank,
I’m afraid,” the woman said before he could fumble around any more
than he already had.

“I’m here to see Mei Lin anyway. Is she
in?”

Tay wondered if it was just his imagination
or had the receptionist — whatever her name was — smiled slightly
at that? Did she think Tay had come back just to flirt with Mei
Lin? He wondered fleetingly if he ought to tell the receptionist
why
he wanted to see Mei Lin.

“Oh, Inspector, you should have called first.
She’s home sick today.”

“Then I need for you to give me her home
address and telephone number.”

A shadow crossed the receptionist’s face. Her
eyes slipped away from Tay’s and she consulted the top of her desk.
Apparently finding no instructions written there, she said
nothing.

“Look, I understand giving out the home
address of an employee is probably against the rules,” Tay said,
trying to put an agreeable note into his voice, “but you already
know from Mr. Lee that this is a national security investigation.
It is urgent that I speak to Mei Lin immediately.”

The receptionist fidgeted without looking up
at him. Tay could see how uncomfortable she was. He was sure he
could wheedle the information out of her eventually if he just kept
up a line of friendly patter, but he was sick of wheedling. And
then, too, he’d had only one cup of coffee this morning which
didn’t do much for his disposition.

“Look, miss,” he snapped, “this is a matter
of national security. I want that address right now or I’ll have
you in an interrogation room at ISD in half an hour and you won’t
come out for a lot longer than that.”

The woman’s head snapped up.

“You’re with ISD? I thought you were—”

“You thought I was what?
Just
a
policeman?”

The woman said nothing else, but she quickly
swiveled her chair around to her keyboard and began to tap at
it.

Tay had to work to suppress a smile. He had
never thought of trying that before. On the whole, being a
policeman was usually enough to command obedience in Singapore. But
when you needed a nuke, apparently claiming affiliation with ISD
was the way to go.

There was a whirring sound and the woman bent
down and pulled a sheet of paper from a small printer beneath her
desk. She handed it to Tay without a word.

“Thank you,” he smiled. “We’ll remember your
cooperation.”

As Tay turned and left the bank, he wondered
if perhaps that last part wasn’t a bit much, but he had heard a
line like that in a movie once and had always wanted a chance to
use it. He supposed this was it.

***

Tay found a cab easily enough and gave the
driver the address the receptionist at the bank had printed out for
him. When the cab got there, he pulled the paper out and checked to
make sure the driver had the right place. He did.

Tay hadn’t recognized the street address, but
now that he was there he certainly recognized the building. Gallop
Green was a group of glittering white, three- and four-story
townhouses wrapped in sheets of blue-green glass and clustered
around an immense swimming pool. If there was a more prestigious —
or expensive — place in Singapore to live, Tay didn’t know what it
was.

He got out of the taxi and stood for a moment
trying to decide what to make of this. There was no way Mei Lin
could live in a place like this on a bank clerk’s salary so
how…

Well, of course,
he thought
. She’s
married.

Tay was a little annoyed with himself that
the possibility hadn’t even crossed his mind up until now.
Generally men just couldn’t help themselves when they met
stunningly attractive women like Mei Lin. They always saw such
women as beautiful flowers ripe for picking. That these women might
already have lives that included husbands, even children, seldom if
ever occurred to most men. Tay was certainly no exception to the
rule.

By now the uniformed guards at the gate to
Gallop Green were eyeing Tay suspiciously. He didn’t blame them. He
was starting to eye himself suspiciously as well.

Tay strode up to the guards, held out his
police warrant card, and told them why he was there. He asked them
not to tell Mei Lin he was on his way to her unit, but he had
little doubt the moment he was out of sight they would do so
anyway. You didn’t keep a job at a place like this by doing
anything other than treating the residents as if no one else
mattered.

***

“Well, Inspector, this
is
a
surprise!”

When Mei Lin answered the door of unit D12,
she was barefooted and wearing white shorts with what looked like a
man’s blue-striped dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up and the
tails hanging out.

Her husband’s shirt, Tay had no doubt. Of
course.

“The guards didn’t call up to tell you I was
here?”

Mei Lin hesitated, which answered Tay’s
question. But what she actually said when she finally responded
still came as a surprise.

“Yes, they did call.” She laughed and her
laugh made Tay think of wind chimes. “But they said you told them
not to.”

Most people would have instinctively lied.
Mei Lin hadn’t. Tay wondered if that meant anything. He had no
idea.

“I’m sorry to bother you at home,” Tay said.
“I went to the bank, but they said you were ill.”

“And you came to check out my story?” she
laughed again. “Oh, how exciting! The police have caught me in a
lie. Are you taking me in?”

Tay cleared his throat and looked away. He
doubted Mei Lin was flirting with him — no, of course she wasn’t —
but even the possibility of it made him uncomfortable. Maybe that
explained why he was still single.

“I’d like you to look at another picture and
see if you recognize the man in it.”

“Well then, Inspector, by all means come it.
Your visit is easily the highlight of my day.”

THE APARTMENT WAS expensively decorated
perfection. It looked like a suite in an extortionately priced
European hotel. Well, Tay had never actually been in a suite in an
extortionately priced European hotel but, if he had, he was certain
it would look exactly like this apartment.

Oriental rugs laid over dark-stained wood
floors, furniture color-coordinated with the drapes, and massive
bouquets of fresh flowers in giant white vases. Outside the
floor-to-ceiling windows, the relentless Singapore sun glinted so
brightly on the shimmering, blue-green surface of a huge swimming
pool that it made Tay’s eyes water. There wasn’t a discarded
newspaper, a half-empty cup, or an abandoned pair of shoes in
sight.

“May I offer you something, Inspector?
Coffee? Tea, perhaps?”

Tay couldn’t bear to clutter up the living
room.

“No,” he said. “Thank you.”

They sat opposite each other on two matching
love seats upholstered in yellow silk and Mei Lin smiled
expectantly.

“Is this another photograph of Mr. Hysmith
with your father, Inspector?”

Tay ignored the question and continued as if
she had never asked it.

“Please try to picture in your mind this Mr.
Hysmith who has been coming into the bank.”

“Yes?”

“Tell me exactly what he looks like.”

“Well…” Mei Lin leaned back and crossed her
legs. She folded one arm into her lap and stretched the other
across the back of the love seat. Her shorts were very short and
her legs were very attractive. Tay strained to stay focused on her
face against the near gravitational force that was pulling his eyes
downward.

“Mr. Hysmith is big, rugged looking. Well
over six feet tall and heavy, but not fat. Muscular. A powerful
man.”

Tay felt another frisson of jealously as he
listened to Mei Lin describe the man who had been coming to HSBC to
access the safety deposit box. No woman would ever describe Tay the
way Mei Lin had described Joseph Hysmith and the recognition of
that scratched at him somehow.

“Mr. Hysmith has very deep brown eyes,” she
continued, “and light-colored hair, and he wears his hair cut very
short, military-style, close to his head. His hands are huge. They
look like the hands of a man who has done physical work for most of
his life.”

“How do you know he was the man you picked
out from that photograph I showed you at the bank? That photo was
taken nearly forty years ago. How can you be certain it’s the same
man?”

“His eyes.”

“His eyes?”

Mei Lin laughed again and the sound of it
tickled Tay’s heart.

“You’re just a man, Inspector. You wouldn’t
understand.”

“Try me.”

“Well…” Mei Lin tilted her head to one side
and smiled. “A woman can see a man’s eyes in a way another man
never can. She sees things in them that you can’t. The man in this
picture and Joseph Hysmith have the same eyes. That’s all there is
to it.”

“That seems to me a pretty weak—”

“Haven’t you ever heard it said that the eyes
are the windows to the soul, Inspector? A woman can look straight
into those windows. And no matter how much a man ages, his soul
never changes.”

Tay wasn’t sure what to say to that. In fact,
it sounded very much like the beginnings of a conversation that
threatened to address certain considerations with respect to his
own soul, and he wanted absolutely nothing to do with that.

Tay leaned forward and took his phone out of
his pocket. He fiddled with the buttons until he found the picture
of Vincent Ferrero he had taken in front of his house the morning
Ferrero had shown up and tried and scare him away from the
Woodlands case. He hadn’t seen any resemblance between Ferrero and
the umbrella man before, and he wasn’t sure he did now, but some
combination of synapses had snapped shut as he slept and he had
found a message waiting from him when he woke up.

Ask Mei Lin if Vincent Ferrero is the
umbrella man.

It seemed inconceivable. But if Ferrero
was
the umbrella man, then…

Tay stopped dwelling on his skepticism.

“I want you to look at this picture and tell
me if you recognize the man.”

Mei Lin nodded and he handed his telephone to
her.

She took it and he watched her eyes go to the
photograph of Vincent Ferrero that he had taken.

“Yes, of course,” she said almost
immediately. “That’s Mr. Hysmith.”

“
This
is the man who has been coming
into the bank and accessing a safety deposit box under the name
Joseph Hysmith. You’re certain?”

“Yes. Absolutely certain.”

“And this is the same man who was in the
picture with my father?”

“Yes. He’s bigger now. Not just tall like he
was in that photo, but…well, much more filled out. More muscular.
Still, it’s him. I’m certain of it.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“His eyes, Inspector. His eyes.”

That sounded like nothing but romantic crap
to Tay, but what did he really know about what women saw in men and
what it was they remembered about them? The shortest book in the
world would have the title,
What Samuel Tay Knows About
Women.

Still, he had no real doubt that Mei Lin was
right. She thought Vincent Ferrero was Mr. Hysmith and that Mr.
Hysmith was the umbrella man. Tay’s subconscious also thought
Vincent Ferrero was Mr. Hysmith and that Mr. Hysmith was the
umbrella man. Although he could never explain it to anyone, Tay
believed in the leaps his subconscious made while he slept. They
were always right on the nose, even if he didn’t understand how
they could be. So he trusted them.

When you came right down to it, he supposed,
that was romantic crap as well.

***

He and Mai Lin made small talk for a while
after that, but all Tay could think about was Vincent Ferrero so
later he wasn’t absolutely certain what else they had talked about.
Whatever it was, they didn’t talk about it for very long. No more
than fifteen minutes later, Tay was walking out through the gates
of Gallop Green to the street. This time both security guards
snapped off crisp salutes as he passed. He nodded but said nothing
and walked quickly north toward Farrer Road where he knew there
were plenty of taxis.

He found one almost immediately. The driver
was a heavy-set Sikh wearing a dark blue turban who just nodded
silently when Tay told him to go to the Cantonment Complex. Even
the cab’s radio was turned off. That was more than Tay normally
hoped for given the average Singapore cab driver’s tendency to talk
nonstop or listen to full-throated Cantopop on his radio or, all
too frequently, to do both at the same time.

Tay leaned back against the seat, savored the
silence, and looked out the window while he thought about what he
knew now.

He knew now that Joseph Hysmith was really
Vincent Ferrero, the man who was doing everything he could to
prevent Tay from investigating the death of Johnny the Mover.

Vincent Ferrero was the man holding the
umbrella in the photograph with his father and the dead man.
Vincent Ferrero was the man who had been regularly visiting the
safety deposit box at HSBC for the last three years. Vince Ferrero
had the ledgers for Paraguas Ltd with his father’s initials in
them.