Umbrella Man (9786167611204) (45 page)

A couple of hours later, just after nine, Tay
remembered he had intended to call the lawyer in New York that
evening, but then he realized he had left the man’s letter in his
office and didn’t have the telephone number. Awash in his own
foolishness and his failures of the day, Tay turned on the
television and sat staring at it for two hours with only the
dimmest realization of what he was seeing. Then he turned it off,
brushed his teeth, and went to bed.

Tomorrow, he promised himself, would be a
better day.

Or maybe it wouldn’t.

***

On Friday morning Sergeant Kang brought Tay a
copy of the FMB report. Just as Kang had predicted, there wasn’t a
thing in it of any use.

“Any progress on the ID, Sergeant?”

“We’re almost through the visitor list, sir.
Nothing at all yet.”

“This woman didn’t parachute in. If she’s not
a local, she’s a visitor. There are no other possibilities.”

“Maybe she was in some kind of special group
and isn’t on the regular visitor list.”

Tay thought about that. “What kind of group
would that be?”

“I don’t know, sir. It was just an idea.”

“Well, I doubt that’s the answer, but maybe
you’d better ask Immigration if that’s possible.”

“Right, sir.”

Sergeant Kang started out of Tay’s office,
but suddenly stopped and turned around again.

“I almost forgot, sir. The autopsy is
scheduled for two o’clock. Since it’s right after lunch, and with
the facilities being so conveniently located just across the street
from here and all, I assume you’ll be popping over after you polish
off a nice big plate of chicken curry?”

Tay had no intention of rising to the
bait.

“Who’s the forensic pathologist assigned?” he
asked instead.

“Don’t know, sir. You want me to find out so
you’ll be sure to knock on the right door?”

“Get out of here, Sergeant.”

“Yes, sir.” Kang grinned and disappeared.

Tay’s lunchtime routine on Fridays had become
for him a ritual of some significance. Today, especially today, he
had absolutely no intention of altering it.

Instead of eating lunch on Fridays, he took a
taxi to one of two places: Borders in Wheelock Place or Kinokuniya
in Ngee Ann City. They were the two biggest bookstores he had ever
seen and browsing through them without any specific purpose in mind
was about as much fun as he had these days. Sometimes he bought
some fiction. Sometimes he bought some nonfiction. Once, seized by
a fit of something he was still unable to identify, he had even
bought a book called
Living and Working in France
, but that
had been an aberration.

Regardless of what books Tay bought, however,
he was happy to know that he would have their company over the
weekend. He didn’t drink much, he wouldn’t go shopping except
perhaps at gunpoint, and he loathed golf. That left nothing much
for him to do in Singapore on the weekends other than read books,
and it was that pursuit that kept him going back either to Borders
or Kinokuniya almost every Friday at lunchtime.

Tay had long ago decided that his custom of
spending his Friday lunch hours in a bookstore had two particular
benefits: one mental and one physical. The mental benefit was that
the ordered ranks of books tidily subdivided into categories and
subcategories testified to the existence of mankind’s thirst for
understanding, and prompted Tay to contemplate there might be order
and meaning in the universe after all. The physical benefit was
that it forced him to skip a meal. He could stand to lose about
five pounds. Maybe ten. He really could.

This particular Friday, it was Borders’
privilege to bask in Tay’s patronage. Trying to take his mind off
the image of the battered body propped up on the bed at the
Marriott, he splurged a little and loaded up. He bought the British
edition of
Esquire
, which he thought far superior to the
American version of the magazine, a breathtakingly expensive
three-volume biography of Graham Greene, and a paperback copy of a
Martin Cruz Smith novel set in Japan that he had intended to read
when it first came out but had never gotten around to.

Tay was pleased with his purchases and when
he spotted an empty table in the outdoor area of Borders Café he
plunked himself down without giving a thought to the time. He
ordered a cappuccino that was served to him in a white ceramic cup
the size of a cereal bowl. He wasn’t certain whether smoking was
allowed there, but there had to be some benefit in being a
policeman so he said to hell with it and smoked two Marlboros fired
up with his brand new lighter anyway. When he was done, he tucked
the lighter carefully away in his pocket. This time he had no
intention of abandoning it in some idiotic gesture intended to
purge his guilt over smoking.

By the time Tay returned to the Cantonment
Complex it was very nearly three o’clock. There were no messages of
any consequence waiting for him and he gathered his long lunch hour
had gone completely unnoticed. He was just trying to decide whether
that amounted to good or bad news when his telephone rang.

“Yes?”

“Inspector Tay?”

It was a woman’s voice, a very nice voice,
but one that Tay didn’t recognize. Nevertheless, its agreeable
quality prompted him to admit his identity without undue delay.

“This is Susan Hoi,” the woman said.

That was no help. Tay was reasonably certain
he had never heard of anyone named Susan Hoi.

“Yes?” he said as noncommittally as
possible.

“I’ll have a preliminary report by the end of
the day, but there are several things I thought you would like to
know now.”

Tay found it terminally annoying when people
started talking on the telephone as if you already knew exactly
what they were talking about when you didn’t, even women with very
nice voices. One thing pretty much cancelled out the other as far
as he was concerned, and he felt completely relieved of any
inclination he might normally have toward courteous behavior.

“Who the hell are you?” he asked the
woman.

“I’m sorry?”

“I asked who you are. I’ve never heard of
you. And I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”

There was a lengthy pause. Just when Tay had
decided that the woman had hung up either out of embarrassment or
anger — and, frankly, he didn’t really give a damn which one it
might be — she spoke up again.

“Is this the Inspector Samuel Tay who is the
investigating officer in case E/1225/09?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“I am Dr. Susan Hoi and I have just completed
autopsying the deceased Caucasian female found yesterday in a room
at the Marriott Hotel who is the subject of that case.”

A protracted silence followed during which
Tay wallowed richly in his embarrassment.

“Oh, God,” he eventually sighed, not able to
think of anything better to say. “I’m so sorry, but nobody told
me—”

“Are you the investigating officer in that
case?” the woman snapped. “Or just some asshole who happened to
answer his phone?”

Inspector Tay cleared his throat. “Actually,”
he said, “I think I’m probably both.”

The woman laughed -- thank Christ, Tay
thought -- and the sound of it was unexpectedly warm and
musical.

“I really am very sorry,” Tay said, trying to
regain his footing. “I just get unreasonably annoyed when someone
calls me and just assumes I know what they’re on about. No one told
me who was doing the autopsy and you didn’t really say what report
you were referring to.”

“Yes, when you’ve been absorbed in something
like this for a while you do rather just assume that everyone else
in the world is thinking about it, too.”

“I
am
thinking about it,” Tay said,
“but right at that moment—”

“Look,” the woman interrupted again. “Let’s
just start over. Shall we do that?”

“Yes. Fine. Let’s do that.”

“The reason I’m calling, Inspector, is that I
thought you would like to come over and look at this before I
close.”

“Look at what?”

“The deceased, of course. The woman from the
Marriott.”

Tay cleared his throat yet one more time.
“Thank you, doctor. It’s good of you to offer, but I have no doubt
your report will cover everything quite satisfactorily. It won’t be
necessary for me to view your work personally.”

“Oh, but I think it is. You do need to see
this, and anyway you’re just across the street. You know where we
are, don’t you? I’ll send someone out to wait for you in reception.
Shall we say fifteen minutes?”

“Really, doctor, I can’t—”

“Fifteen minutes then,” Dr. Hoi interrupted
again. “I’m looking forward to meeting you, Inspector.”

And with that she hung up.

Inspector Tay sat looking at the receiver for
a long moment before he slowly replaced it in its cradle. He rubbed
his eyes and slapped his forehead with his palm a few times. He
knew he was trapped. He would rather have a root canal than to go
over there and peer at that poor woman sliced open from neck to
pelvis, but what was he going to do now? Call this doctor back and
tell her he tended to throw up at the sight of dead bodies? No,
that was out of the question.

The Centre for Forensic Medicine was located
in a building called Block Nine of the Singapore General Hospital
just on the other side of New Bridge Road behind the National Heart
Centre. The building itself was a nondescript, modern two-story
structure that looked to Tay like it could shelter almost any kind
of commercial activity. But of course he knew all too well what
actually took place inside Block Nine. Equipped as he was with that
knowledge, the otherwise unremarkable structure with the aluminum
chimney pipes poking out here and there took on a genuinely creepy
appearance. Normally it would take him no more than five minutes to
walk from his office in the Cantonment Complex to Block Nine. On
this day, however, he wondered if he might be able stretch it out a
little, perhaps even a lot.

Like, maybe, to a year or so.

A MAN WAS waiting for Tay in Block Nine’s
tiny reception area. He was wearing a starched lab coat with a
breast pocket full of ballpoint pens and shifting from foot to
foot. He seemed very young, too young to be a doctor, and Tay
wondered if he was. He also wondered briefly whether it was really
that this man in particular looked so young or if everyone was
starting to look young to him; and of course, if that was so, he
knew full well what
that
meant.

“Are you Inspector Tay?”

“Yes, although I’m not particularly happy
about it right now.”

“Pardon me?”

“Never mind.”

The man looked doubtfully at Tay and pushed
his gold-rimmed glasses up the bridge of his nose. Finally, he gave
a little half shrug, which apparently signaled the end of his
interest in whatever Tay may or may not have said.

“This way, please.”

Tay followed the young man through a door,
down a long, white corridor, and through another door. Beyond the
second door was yet another long, white corridor, but the man
stopped abruptly and knocked lightly at an unmarked door on the
right. Without waiting for an answer, he opened it and tilted his
head to indicate that Tay should go through.

The prospect of dealing with whatever was on
the other side of that door was decidedly unappealing and Tay tried
to catch the young man’s eye hoping to see there some possibility,
however slight, of a reprieve. The man wouldn’t look directly at
him and Tay didn’t know exactly what to make of that, but he
doubted it could be anything good. There seemed to be only two
alternatives open to him. Fling up his arms and flee, or take a
deep breath and walk through that door.

Tay took the coward’s way out. He walked
through the door.

To his considerable surprise, the door did
not open into some kind of Frankenstein laboratory where rows of
partially dissected corpses were laid out on steel tables with
unidentifiable fluids draining out of them. Instead, he found
himself in an institutional looking office not all that different
from his own. Behind the gray metal desk, a woman who appeared to
be in her mid-thirties was writing in a file.

“Give me a second before I lose my thought,”
she said, not looking up.

“Take your time.”

At the sound of Tay’s voice the woman shifted
her eyes toward him without lifting her head and, although she
continued to write, he saw her examine him with evident
curiosity.

“Please sit down,” she said, moving her eyes
back to the file she was working on. “I’ll just be a moment.”

Tay sat on a straight chair in front of the
desk and took the opportunity to make his own assessment of Dr.
Susan Hoi. She was a looker. He had not been prepared for that. Her
hair was short and stylishly cut and, although mostly black, there
were highlights that appeared almost red under the fluorescent
lights of her office. Beneath her white lab coat he could just see
what looked like a square-necked black dress and a single strand of
pearls. Pearls and a little black dress to cut up dead bodies? Who
would have thought?

The woman sat very straight in her chair, her
shoulders back and squared to her work, and wrote quickly with
long, fluid strokes. There was something about her posture that Tay
found very attractive, enticing even, but how could that be? When
encountering a beautiful woman, surely not many men found
themselves attracted to her posture. Legs, of course; breasts, yes;
face and eyes, naturally; even occasionally arms and hands. Tay had
heard there were some men who were attracted to women’s feet, but
he couldn’t see Susan Hoi’s feet under her desk and doubted he was
one of those men in any case. But to be attracted to a woman’s
posture? What in the world did that say about him?