Umbrella Man (9786167611204) (36 page)

“Is your father at Raffles now?”

Mei Lin pursed her lips and her shoulders
moved up and down in the tiniest, most feminine of shrugs.

Tay took out his cell phone, but he stopped
when he realized he didn’t have the number for Raffles and he
wasn’t at all certain how to use the phone to go about looking it
up. He was probably the last person in Singapore who still looked
for a telephone directory when he needed a number, but he knew
admitting that to Mei Lin would probably make him look like an old
fart so he just pursed his lips, looked at his phone, and did
nothing at all.

“6337-1886,” Mei Lin said.

Tay looked up, surprised.

“I work in a bank,” she said. “I have a good
memory for numbers.”

Tay called Raffles and quickly established
that Vincent Ferrero wasn’t registered there.

“Any other ideas?” he asked Mei Lin.

“Maybe he’s staying there under another
name.”

“Why would he do that?”

“Because, Inspector,” Mei Lin replied very
slowly as if addressing a dimwitted child, “he doesn’t want just
any jerk to call up and find out he’s there.”

“Where else would he be?”

Mei Lin shook her head and said nothing, but
then she stopped and looked at Tay and he knew she had thought of
something.

“What?” he asked.

“We were being driven home from dinner one
night. We’d been to some seafood place on the East Coast Parkway
and the driver cut through Geylang. I’d never been there at night
before and I couldn’t believe how many prostitutes there were on
the streets.”

Geylang was Singapore’s official red light
district, an otherwise unremarkable neighborhood of shophouses
about halfway between the central business district and Changi
Airport where the authorities tolerated an almost unlimited number
of brothels and even looked the other way at street prostitution.
It was something they did in return for not tolerating it much of
anywhere else in Singapore.

“Maybe my father had a bit too much to drink.
We were making our way slowly thorough the traffic on one of the
little streets there when he pointed to a red door and said,
That’s my whorehouse
.

I must have looked shocked because he laughed
and patted my hand.

Then he said,
I don’t mean I go there. I
mean I own it. I have a place upstairs where I meet people who
don’t want anyone to see us meeting. What better cover is there
than a man going to a Geylang whorehouse?

“Do you remember the name of the street it
was on?”

“No, I…wait, there was a Buddhist center near
it. It had something about karma in its name, and when my father
said he owned a whorehouse across the street from a temple that had
something to do with karma, I laughed right out loud. I don’t think
he got the joke.”

“This place your father owns is across the
street from the Buddhist center?”

“Yes. It’s the shophouse with a red door.
Directly across the street.”

***

As soon as Tay left Mei Lin’s apartment, he
did two things.

First, he shook out a Marlboro and lit it.
Then he pulled out his phone and called Sergeant Kang.

“There’s a Buddhist center of some kind in
Geylang that has the word karma in its name. Find out where it is.
I’ll hold on.”

“You could just look up the street directory
on your phone, sir. There’s a detailed—”

“Sergeant, just find out where the damn place
is for me.”

“Yes, sir.”

Tay stood quietly and smoked, holding his
phone to his ear. He hadn’t had more than a few puffs when Sergeant
Kang spoke again.

“There’s a Karma Kagyud Buddhist Center on
Lorong 22. Is that what you’re looking for?”

“Is that inside the prostitution zone?”

“Uh…I think so, sir. I think the designated
zone is that whole area south of Geylang Road from Lorong 2 up to
Lorong 28 or 30.”

That had to be it, Tay thought. How many
Buddhist centers could there be surrounded by whorehouses and with
the word karma in their name?

“Meet me there in thirty minutes,” he told
Kang.

Then Tay suddenly thought better of that.

“No, wait.”

Standing around on the street in front of
Vince Ferrero’s whorehouse waiting for Sergeant Kang to show up
really wasn’t all that great an idea, was it? Tay tried to think of
someplace not that far from Geylang where Kang could pick him
up.

“Get an unmarked car, the plainer the better,
and meet me at Chijmes,” Tay said.” I’ll be just inside the
entrance on North Bridge Road right behind Raffles. Just pull over
and I’ll get in. Then we’ll go to Geylang together.”

Chijmes was once the Convent of the Holy
Infant, but enterprising developers had converted it into a complex
of pubs and restaurants that were thronged at night by the young
and self-consciously hip. At this time of day, the place would be
deserted other than for a few tourists engaged in the age-old
pursuit of trying to find something to do in Singapore.

Kang wouldn’t have been any more surprised if
Tay had asked him to come straight to the prime minister’s
house.

“It’s a little early for you to start
drinking, isn’t it, sir?”

Tay didn’t laugh.

“Come armed, and bring a pair of field
glasses,” he snapped at Kang. “Thirty minutes.”

Then he hung up.

***

Tay drew deeply on his cigarette and walked
out to the street to look for a cab.

He was starting to get the same feeling he
always did when a case that seemed on the verge of defeating him
began coming together. The usual exhilaration was there, of course,
but something was bothering him, too.

If John August were to be believed, Vincent
Ferrero had murdered his father to protect his business. Tay
trusted August in a moral sense, but he also knew August wasn’t
beyond trying to manipulate him for what he thought was a higher
purpose.

Was that what he was doing now?

Even if August was telling the truth, that
had happened over thirty-five years ago and Tay had hardly known
his father. He could hardly be expected to rise up now in
hot-blooded outrage over either the crime or who the victim had
been, could he?

But still, it
was
his father they were
talking about here…

Tay firmly pushed his personal musings aside.
There might be a time for them later, but this wasn’t it. He wanted
his full focus where it belonged: on what he had to do now.

Johnny the Mover had smuggled in the
explosives that had destroyed Singapore.

Vince Ferrero had killed Johnny the Mover
because he was going to admit it.

John August was going to kill Ferrero and
bury the whole mess.

Tay had to find Vince Ferrero and arrest him
before John August got to him.

It was just that simple.

And when Tay did find Ferrero, maybe he would
simply ask him about his father and find out if it was true Ferrero
had killed him.

If it was…well, he would decide what that
meant to him then.

And what he would do about it.

THE BROWN TOYOTA slowed. Then it pulled to
the curb on North Bridge Road and stopped. Tay glanced around to
see if anyone was watching him. He knew he didn’t actually have a
clue whether anyone was or not, so he just walked over to the
Toyota and got into the passenger seat.

“What’s going on, sir?” Kang asked.

“Drive to that place I asked you to
find.”

“The Buddhist Center in Geylang? The one
called Karma something?”

“Yes. But just drive by. Don’t stop. Don’t
even slow down.”

It took ten minutes for them to get there,
which was just long enough for Tay to tell Sergeant Kang about Mei
Lin, about Vince Ferrero, and about the whorehouse with the red
door.

***

When they turned off Geylang Road into Lorong
22, nothing immediately caught Tay’s attention. There was a Chinese
temple on the left and rows of narrow three-story shophouses lined
both sides of the street, some of which had apparently been
converted into small hotels. The Kim Tian Hotel, the Min Wah Hotel,
the Char Yong Hotel all sported large neon signs stretching the
width of the buildings. Tay assumed these were not the sort of
hotels that were listed in tourist guides.

“Where’s this Buddhist center?”

“The other end of the street, sir. On the
right.”

After a few moments Tay saw it. It was a
two-story cream-colored building behind a low wall with a small
parking area in front. He examined it for a moment, then swiveled
his head to check the other side of the street for a shophouse with
a red door. By then, Kang had already reached a T-junction where
the street they were on dead-ended into a much busier street.

“Turn around somewhere, Sergeant, and drive
up the block again.”

Kang turned into a Shell station, swung
around the pump island without stopping, and headed back up Lorong
22 going in the opposite direction.

The shophouse Tay was looking for wasn’t
directly across the street from the Buddhist Center, but close
enough. It was no more than twenty feet wide and three stories
tall, and it was painted an unattractive institutional green with
dirty white grill work around all the windows. An open carport with
a red plastic roof and a closed metal gate stood in front of it.
Next to the red front door was a white box about a foot square with
the number 38 painted on its glass front. It looked to Tay like the
box was probably illuminated at night so the number could be read
from the street.

Tay saw no sign of life at number 38. The
door and windows were all closed and the carport was empty.

“What now, sir?” Kang asked as they rolled by
at a steady rate of speed.

“Drive around to the street behind. I want to
see if there’s any other way in or out.”

***

There was.

The next street to the east was Lorong 24 and
a narrow alleyway ran out from between two green metal garbage bins
from a narrow rear door to number 38.

They drove around the block again and Kang
pulled into an Esso Station and around to one side where they could
stop the car without blocking the pumps. Tay looked at his watch.
Just after four o’clock.

“Put the car over on the other side of the
station so you can see the alleyway that runs up to the back of
number 38. Where are those glasses I asked you to bring?”

Kang pointed at the glove compartment and Tay
opened it and fished out a pair of field glasses not much bigger
than a paperback book.

“I’m going around to the front and find a
hotel where I can watch the other side of the building. We’ll sit
on it for a while and see what happens. Call me if Ferrero
shows.”

“Who, sir?”

Tay pulled out his phone and found the
picture of Vince Ferrero he had taken the day Ferrero came to
Emerald Hill to intimidate him into abandoning his investigation
into the dead man at the Woodlands.

“You remember what Ferrero looks like, don’t
you, Sergeant?”

“Yes, sir. But what makes you think he’s
coming here now?”

The answer to that, of course, was Tay had no
reason at all to think so.

But he was full of hope.

“Just do it, Sergeant.”

***

A half hour later Tay was seated in front of
the partially-opened drapes of a room on the third floor of a place
called the Hotel Compass that was just a few doors down from the
Buddhist Center. He had an almost straight-on view of number 38 and
he lifted the glasses and examined its windows one by one without
seeing any sign of life. He hit the speed dial on his
telephone.

“Are you in position, Sergeant?”

“Yes, sir. I can see almost the entire
alley.”

“Call me if anyone at all goes in or out of
number 38, whether it’s Ferrero or not.”

“Will do, sir.”

Tay lit a cigarette and settled back to
watch.

***

Except for one quick trip to the toilet, Tay
stayed in front of the window, smoking and glancing occasionally
into the field glasses for the next several hours. By seven it was
dusk, and by eight it was dark.

No lights came on in number 38 and Tay had
seen no one come near the place.

He hit the speed dial on his phone again.
“Nothing at all, Sergeant?”

“No, sir. It’s too dark in the alley to see
the back door any longer, but there’s no way anyone could go in or
out of it without walking through the alley and I’d see them
then.”

“Then just stay on it.”

“How much longer are we going to do this,
sir?”

“Until I tell you we’re through,
Sergeant.”

Tay cut the connection and lit another
cigarette.

***

When he saw it, he first thought that his
eyes must be tired. But he rubbed them and looked again and it was
still there.

A dim glow from somewhere in the back of the
carport.

But even as Tay stared at it, it was
gone.

Had he been mistaken?

No, it was a light. He was sure of that. Not
the full-on illumination from someone flipping on a light switch,
but something dimmer. Something like a flashlight that had been
flicked on, then quickly flicked off again.

Tay telephoned Kang again.

“Sergeant, were your eyes ever off that
alley?”

“No, sir.”

“No breaks to get coffee? Nothing like
that?”

“No, sir. I haven’t even been to the
bathroom, but now that you mention it—”

That was when Tay remembered he
had
gone to the bathroom. He had been away from the window only a
minute or two, but it was at least possible someone had approached
number 38 while his eyes had been off it even for just that short a
period of time.

“Never mind, Robbie. I want you to walk up
the alley and cover the back door. Have your weapon ready and hold
anyone who comes out.”