Koko (27 page)

“Long time ago,” Billy said. He cast his eyes down, tilted his head. “This person
have a name?”

“Tim Underhill,” Poole said. He placed one of the photographs beside Billy’s drink.
Billy blinked.

“Does he look familiar?”

“He might.”

Poole pushed a Singapore ten-dollar note across the table and Billy twinkled it away.
“I believe I did know the gentleman.” Billy made an elaborate business of scrutinizing
the photograph. “He was a bit of a
one
, wasn’t he?”

“We’re old friends of his,” Mike said. “We think he might need our help. That’s why
we’re here. We’d appreciate any information you could give us.”

“Oh, everything’s changed since those days,” Billy said. “The whole street—really,
you’d hardly know it.” He moodily inspected the photograph for a moment. “Flowers.
He was the man for flowers, wasn’t he? Flowers this and flowers that. He’d been a
soldier in the war.”

Poole nodded. “We met him in Vietnam.”

“Beautiful place, once,” Billy said. “Free-wheeling.” He startled Conor by asking,
“Did you ever see Saigon, lover?”

Conor nodded and gulped down a mouthful of vodka.

“Some of our best girls used to work there. Nearly all gone now. The wind shifted.
Got too cold for them. Can’t blame them, can you?”

Nobody said anything.

“Well, I say you can’t. They lived for pleasure, for delight, for illusion. Can’t
blame them for not wanting to start grubbing away at some job, can you? So they scattered.
Most of the best of our old friends went to Amsterdam. They were always welcome in
their own very elegant clubs—the Kit Kat Club. You gentlemen ever see the Kit Kat
Club?”

“What about Underhill?” Beevers asked.

“All mirrors, three stages, chrystal chandeliers, best of everything.
It’s often been described to me. There’s nothing like the Kit Kat in Paris, or so
I hear.” He sipped his scotch.

Conor said, “Look, do you know where we can find Underhill, or are we just dicking
around?”

Another of Billy’s silken smiles. “A few of the entertainers who worked here are still
in Singapore. You might try to see Lola perform. She works good clubs, not these remnants
left on Bugis Street.” He paused. “She’s
vivacious.
You’d enjoy her act.”

Four days earlier, Tina Pumo was interrupted by Maggie Lah’s giggling over the front
page of the
New York Post
while they ate breakfast together at La Groceria. (Tina was sentimentally attached
to the little restaurant where he had so often read and reread the back page of the
Village Voice.
) They had each purchased newspapers at the newsstand on Sixth Avenue, and Tina was
deep into the
Times’s
restaurant reviews when Maggie’s laughter distracted him. “Something funny in that
rag?”

“They have such great headlines,” Maggie said, and turned the tabloid toward him:
YUPPIE AIRPORT MURDER.
“Random word order,” Maggie said. “How about
AIRPORT YUPPIE MURDER
? Or
YUPPIE MURDER AIRPORT
? Anyhow, it’s always nice to read about the end of a yup.”

Tina eventually found the story in the
Times’s
Metropolitan section. Clement W. Irwin, 29, an investment banker whose income was
in the upper six figures and was regarded as a “superstar” by his peers, had been
found stabbed to death in a men’s room near the Pan American baggage counters at JFK
airport. Maggie’s paper carried a photograph of a blubbery face with small, widely
set eyes behind heavy black eyeglasses. Equal amounts of appetite and aggression seemed
stamped into the features. The caption read:
Yuppie financial whiz Clement W. Irwin.
On the inside pages were photographs of a townhouse on East 63rd Street, a manor
on Mount Avenue in Hampstead, Connecticut, and a low, rambling beach house on the
island of St. Maarten. The story in the
Post
, but not the
Times
, contained the speculation that Irwin had been murdered by either an airport
employee or a fellow passenger who had been on his flight from San Francisco.

The morning after his tour of the Bugis Street bars, Conor Linklater swallowed two
aspirin and a third of a bottle of Pepto-Bismol, showered, dressed in jeans and a
short-sleeved shirt, and then joined the other two in the Marco Polo’s coffee shop.

“What kept you?” Beevers said. He and Michael were garbaging down on the weirdest-looking
breakfast Conor had ever seen. They had toast and eggs and that stuff, but they also
had bowls of gooey white pasty porridge full of green and yellow shit and fatty evil
things that would have looked like eggs if they hadn’t been green. Both Mike and Beevers
seemed to have taken no more than a bite or two of this substance.

“Little rocky this morning, think I’ll pass on breakfast,” Conor said. “What is that
stuff, anyhow?”

“Don’t ask,” Beevers said.

Mike asked, “Are you sick, or just hung over?”

“Both, I guess.”

“Diarrhea?”

“I chugged down a ton of Pepto-Bismol.” The waiter came up, and he ordered coffee.
“American
coffee.”

Beevers smiled at him and pushed a folded copy of the
Straits Times
across the table. “Take a look and tell me what you think.”

Conor scanned headlines about new sewage treatment plants, about the increase of bank
loans to nonbank customers, the expected overload of bridge traffic on the New Year’s
holiday, and finally saw this headline in the middle of the page:
DOUBLE HOMICIDE IN EMPTY BUNGALOW.

An American journalist named Roberto Ortiz, Conor read, had been found slain in a
bungalow on Plantation Road. Also found was the body of a young woman identified only
as a Malaysian prostitute. Forensic pathologists stated that the corpses, found in
a state of putrefaction, had been dead approximately ten days. The bungalow was the
property of Professor Li Lau Feng, who had left it vacant for a year while he taught
at the University of Jakarta. Mr. Ortiz’s body had been mutilated after death from
gunshot wounds. The unidentified woman had also died of gunshot
wounds. Mr. Ortiz was a journalist and the author of two books,
Beggar Thy Neighbor: United States Policy in Honduras
and
Vietnam: A Personal Journey.
Police were said to have evidence linking this crime to several others committed
in Singapore during the past year.

“What kind of evidence?” Conor asked.

“I bet they found Koko cards,” Beevers said. “They’re finally getting cagey. You think
they’d release a detail like that if it happened in New York? Don’t be crazy.
Mutilated
, it says. What do you want to bet his eyes were poked out and his ears were cut off?
Underhill’s at work, my friends. We came to the right place.”

“Jesus,” Conor said. “So what do we do? I thought we were going to, ah, look for this,
ah …”

“We are,” Poole said. “I got all the papers and guidebooks in the gift shop, and we
were just about to try to find out where this Lola works, if she is working. The clerks
in the shop won’t admit to ever having heard of anybody named Lola, so we have to
do it this way.”

“But this morning,” Beevers said, “we thought we ought to look at the places where
they found the other bodies. The bungalow where they found the Martinsons, and this
one, and the Goodwood Park Hotel.”

“Should we maybe talk to the police? Find out if there were cards with these other
people?”

“I don’t feel like turning Underhill over to the police,” Beevers said. “Do you? I
mean, is that what we came here for?”

“We still don’t know it’s Underhill,” Poole said. “We don’t even know he’s still in
Singapore.”

“You don’t shit in your backyard. You got it now, Michael?”

Poole was going page by page through the
Straits Times.

“Here’s Underhill right now,” Conor said. “He still wears that funky old bandanna.
He’s fat as a pig. He gets stoned out of his gourd every single night. He owns a flower
shop. All these young guys work for him, and he bores the shit out of them when he
talks about all the stuff he did in Nam. Everybody loves the old ratbag.”

“Dream on,” Beevers said.

Poole had gone on to another paper, and was flipping pages with the regularity of
a metronome.

“Every now and then he goes into his study or whatever, locks the door, and sweats
out a new chapter.”

“Every now and then he locks himself in an abandoned building and kills the shit out
of somebody.”

“Are those eggs really a hundred years old?” Conor asked. He had picked up the menu
while Beevers spoke. “What’s the green shit?”

“Tea,” Poole said.

Ten minutes later Poole found a small advertisement for “The Fabulous Lola” in
Singapore After Dark
, one of the cheap guides to Singapore’s night life he had picked up in the gift shop.
Lola was appearing at a nightclub called Peppermint City at an address up in the ten
thousands out on a road too far from the center of the city to be on Beevers’ map.

All three men stared at a tiny black and white photograph of a girlish male Chinese
with plucked eyebrows and high teased hair.

“I don’t feel too good already,” Conor said. He had turned as green as a century egg,
and Poole made him promise that he would spend the day in his room and see the hotel
doctor.

Michael did not know what he expected to learn from the murder sites any more than
he could anticipate what Lola might tell him, but seeing the places where the deaths
occurred would help him to see the deaths themselves.

He and Beevers walked in less than ten minutes to the villa on Nassim Hill where the
Martinsons had been found.

“Picked a nice place, at least,” Beevers said.

Surrounded by trees, the villa stood on a little rise in the land. With its red roof
tiles, golden plaster, and big windows, it might have been one of the pretty houses
Michael had seen from the window of his hotel the previous morning. Nothing about
it suggested that two people had been murdered there.

Poole and Beevers walked through the trees to shade their eyes and peered into a room
like a long rectangular cave. In the middle of the wooden floor, thick with balls
of dust like dirty cotton, as if someone had pitched brown paint onto the floor and
then made a half-hearted attempt to clean it up, was a wide eccentric stain surrounded
by dots and splashes.

Then Poole realized that a third shadowy reflection had fallen
between his own and Beevers’, and he jumped, feeling like a child caught stealing.
“Please excuse me,” a man said. “I did not mean to startle.”

He was a massive Chinese in a black silk suit and gleaming black tasseled loafers.
“You are interested in the house?”

“Are you the owner?” Poole asked. He seemed to have appeared from nowhere, like a
well-dressed ghost.

“I am not only the owner, I am the neighbor!” He swept his arm sideways toward another
villa just a short distance up the hillside but barely visible through the trees.
“When I saw you walk up, I thought to protect against vandalism. Sometimes young people
come here to use the empty building—young people same all over, correct?” He laughed
in a series of flat hollow barks. “When I see you, I know you are not vandals.”

“Of course we’re not vandals,” Beevers said a little testily. He looked at Poole and
decided not to say that they were New York City detectives. “We were friends of the
people who died here, and since we came here on a tour, we decided to take a look
at the place where it happened.”

“Very unfortunate,” the man said. “Your loss is my loss.”

“Very kind,” Poole said.

“I am speaking commercially. Since the event, nobody wants to look at the house. And
if they did, we could not let them in to show it because the police have sealed it!”
He pointed out the rain-spattered yellow notice and the seal on the front door. “We
cannot even wash away the bloodstains! Oh, excuse me, please, I did not think! I regret
what happened to your friends, and I do sympathize with your grief.” He straightened
up, and took a few steps backward in embarrassment. “It is cold in St. Louis now?
You are enjoying the Singapore weather?”

“You didn’t hear anything?” Beevers asked.

“Not on that night. Otherwise, I heard things many times.”

“Many times?” Poole asked.

“Heard him for weeks. A teenager. Never much noise. Just one boy who slipped in and
out at night like a shadow. Never caught him.”

“But you saw him?”

“Once. From the back. I came down from my house and saw him walking through the hibiscus
trees. I called to him, but he did not stop. Would you? He was small—just a boy. I
called the police, but they could not find him to keep him out. I locked the place,
but he always found a way back in.”

“He was Chinese?”

“Of course. At least I assumed he was—I only saw him from the back.”

“Do you think he committed the murders?” Poole asked.

“I don’t know. I doubt it, but I don’t know. He seemed so harmless.”

“What did you mean, you
heard
him?” Beevers asked.

“I heard him singing to himself.”

“What did he sing?” Poole asked.

“A song in a foreign language,” the man said. “It was not any dialect of Chinese,
and it was not French or English—I have often wondered if it was Polish! It went … oh …”
He burst out laughing. “It went ‘rip-a-rip-a-rip-a-lo.’ ” He sang the words almost
tunelessly and laughed again. “So melancholy. Two or three times I heard the song
coming from this house while I sat in my courtyard in the evening. I came down here
as quietly as I could, but he always heard me coming and hid until I left.” He paused.
“In the end, I accepted him.”

“You accepted a housebreaker?” Beevers asked.

“I came to think of the boy as a sort of pet. After all, he lived here like a little
animal. He did no damage, and he sang his lonely little song.
Rip-a-rip-a-rip-a-lo
.”