THE DEAD AMERICAN (The Inspector Samuel Tay Novels Book 3) (3 page)

THAT NIGHT, TAY
went to bed early, but he couldn’t sleep. After a while he turned the light back on and looked through the stack of books on his bedside table, thinking that he would read for a while. He found a thick biography of Winston Churchill that was far too solemn even to consider, a recent Lee Child novel, and something by Richard Ford he had no memory of buying.

He flipped through the first few pages of the Child novel, but he couldn’t get into it so he turned off the light again and just lay there watching the soft glow of the streetlights
filtering throu
gh the palm trees in his front garden. A gentle breeze rippled the big palm fronds and the shadows in his bedroom moved and shifted, becoming ghosts in the darkness dancing merrily around him.

Sometimes Tay wondered about all the people who must have slept in that same room before him. He had inherited the house from his parents so there had been his mother and father, of course, and then, after his father died, just his mother. The house had been built well over a hundred years before, however, so there had been many others, too. How many different people, he wondered not for the first time, had lived and died and made love and argued and fallen asleep burdened by sadness within the same four walls where he slept now? Sometimes Tay wondered if the spirits of those who had lived there before him regarded him now as a friend or as an interloper. Since he wasn’t sure himself which one he was, he sympathized with their uncertainty.

Tay didn’t believe in ghosts, of course, but he did believe when human beings died they left a sense of their presence in the spaces they had inhabited in life. He had never entered into the scene of a murder without feeling the victim all around him. In the air, on the walls, in every molecule of the places they had once been alive. If was as if the dead hung on as long as they could, clinging desperately to life until they were finally dragged out of it and away to whatever came next.

If anything came next.

Which Tay had no confidence it did.

Tay knew full well it was not abstract philosophical thoughts about the existence, or nonexistence, of the hereafter that were keeping him awake. The reason was much more secular, and far more immediate.

Tomorrow was his fiftieth birthday.

Tay had told absolutely no one, and he was nearly certain no one knew. He hated the ritual of birthdays and the mostly insincere congratulations and disingenuous expressions of warmth that came with them. He was willing to accept commendation for something he had accomplished, but not dying during the previous twelve months struck him as a poor reason for a pat on the back.

Usually he didn’t give birthdays much thought one way or the other. This birthday, however, was different.

It was the simple numerical value that was the killer. Fifty. Half a hundred. A number of such overwhelming roundness that he could not ignore it as he had every other number that had come before. Each man’s life was made up of a number of markers, and a fiftieth birthday was probably the most prominent of those markers whether he wanted it to be or not. It made him think about death far more these days than he ever had before. Almost without realizing it, his life had become a Woody Allen movie. Was it that way for everyone? Was fifty life’s Rubicon? Once you crossed it, was everything that came afterwards just an inexorable slide toward the end?

He wasn’t frightened of dying, Tay told himself, not really. He just couldn’t get his mind around the concept of ceasing to exist, that one day he would be sitting in his garden or going off to sleep, and he would slide away into the darkness never to return. It seemed… well, downright banal. Five or six or seven decades of living deserved a far more ceremonious send off than just all at once not being here any longer.

Tay lay in bed for a long while without coming close to sleep. Eventually, he got up and put on his robe, picked up his cigarettes, and went downstairs. In the kitchen he got a glass out of the cabinet, turned on the tap, and stood waiting for the water to run cold.

His parents were both dead now. He had no other living relatives. He had never married and had no children. He had moved to the head of the line and he was standing there all alone. With an empty glass in his hand. And that was pretty much that.

Tay filled the glass from the tap, and then he walked barefooted across the living room, through the French doors, and out into his garden. The air was hot and heavy, weighted down with the smoke from Indonesia that still lay over the city, but the brick pavers felt cool against his feet. He sat in a chair and wiggled his toes against the brick. Then he pulled over another chair and swung his feet up into it.

The only child of an American-born Chinese man and a Singaporean-born Chinese woman, Tay had lived the whole of his life in Singapore. His father was an accountant, a careful man who insisted his family live modestly, and he had died of a heart attack in 1975 when he was on a business trip in Saigon the very day the North Vietnamese swept over that poor, benighted little city. Tay’s mother was shocked to discover she and her son had inherited a small fortune in real estate. She hadn’t even known her husband had been buying properties for decades, let alone that his investments would leave her and her son quite comfortably off for the rest of their lives, but she had quickly adjusted to the concept.

Within a year, she moved to New York and acquired what she described to Tay as a Park Avenue duplex, although Tay noticed her address was on East Ninety-Third Street. When his mother married a widowed American investment banker who was a senior partner at an investment firm the name of which Tay could never quite remember, Tay was at the National University. He hadn’t gone to New York for the wedding. To be honest, he couldn’t recall having been invited to New York for the wedding, but he supposed that was beside the point. He wouldn’t have gone, he told himself, even if he had been invited.

By the time Tay graduated from university, he had chosen to his mother’s complete horror to make his career in police work rather than living the life of the idle well off she preferred for him. Looking back now on that decision, Tay could not for the life of him remember why he had made it. Still, as a brighter-than-average recruit who was dutiful and conscientious, he was soon promoted, first to general investigative work, then to the Criminal Investigation Department, and finally to the elite Special Investigations Section of CID.

Now a police detective was what he was. A police detective was
who
he was. For most people, work was about a paycheck, perhaps personal status, but little more. Tay didn’t think most people understood what a true vocation was. They didn’t understand a vocation being important for what it makes of you, not what it gets you.

He was fifty years old now, which was far too late to become someone else.

If he didn’t get his job back, he couldn’t imagine what would become of him.

Time passed, although Tay had no idea how much, then abruptly he sat up and pulled his feet out of the chair where he had propped them. When his bare feet touched the brick pavers, a cool chill ran all the way up through his body until it came to rest on the back of his neck. Had he slipped off to sleep? Yes, he supposed he had. But what had wakened him? Or was he even awake? Might he still be sleeping and simply dreaming that he was awake?

Sometimes Tay had dreams so vivid he couldn’t tell if he was awake or asleep. He had conversations with people that were so real he would have been
convinced they had actually taken place but for one thing. Most of the people he talked to were dead. His mother, for example. He talked to her more often now than he did when she had been alive.

Tay didn’t like being too hard on these occasional appearances his mother made in his subconscious, since he had to admit she did sometimes give him good advice. On a couple of occasions she had even offered insights that helped him make cases he was investigating.

Of course, he knew perfectly well his dead mother wasn’t really talking to him. What seemed to be a conversation with his mother was just the gathering of thoughts and impressions as they rose from the depths of his subconscious and rearranged themselves in ways he had not before considered. He was far too rational a man to believe for a moment that the ghost of his mother was giving him helpful hints about the investigation of cases. Such a thing was plainly not possible.

And yet…

Tay stood up and stretched. Thinking he ought to go back to bed, he walked toward the French doors that led inside and placed his hand on the handle. As he did, something made him look back over his shoulder. That was when he saw the lights.

At first, he thought it was a swarm of fireflies around the chair where he had been sitting. Then the lights moved up and to the right, and they formed themselves into what looked like a spinning disco ball suspended about five feet above the center of his garden.

Tay closed his eyes and shook his head. “If that’s you, Mother, please go away.”

He felt silly saying it out loud, but he said it anyway. His mother frequently appeared to him this way, in a swarm of lights that looked like a cornball effect from a cheaply filmed ghost story. It was so trite he could hardly stand it.

“I’m tired and I need to go to sleep, Mother. I’m in no mood for this now.”

The disco ball spun faster. Something about the whirling mass of lights made Tay think it looked annoyed.

That was when he heard the woman’s voice.

“Sometimes you are so disrespectful, Samuel, that I truly cannot believe I gave birth to you.”

“I know you’re not really here, Mother.”

“Then where do you think I am?”

The philosophical implications of that question were far too complicated for the middle of the night so Tay kept silent.

“It’s a simple question, Samuel.”

“Yes, but you didn’t really ask it because you’re not here. And I’m not in the mood to talk to myself.”

The disco ball bobbed up and down a few times. Tay imagined it was chuckling, which he saw as one more proof that he was not really talking to his mother. In life, she had never had much of a sense of humor.

“All right, Samuel, I have better things to do than hang around here and listen to you insult me.”

Tay considered asking exactly what those things were, but he didn’t.

“I am here simply to deliver a message. I will deliver it and be on my way without further commentary.”

That, Tay thought to himself, would be a first. But he didn’t say that, of course.

“A message, Mother? From who?”

“That should be
from whom
, Samuel. Not
from who
. I’ve been gone barely a year and here you are already picking up bad habits.”

“I have a lot of bad habits, Mother.”

“No, actually you don’t. But you’d probably be better off if you did.”

“Now who’s insulting whom?”

“Very good, Samuel. Got your subjective pronouns exactly right that time. Good for you, boy.”

Now Tay was annoyed, but he was determined not to show it. Showing annoyance to a lighted disco ball, one that wasn’t even really there, would just make him feel like a complete nincompoop.

“If you have a message, Mother, please just give it to me and go away.”

The disco ball moved up and down, then left and right. Tay stood with his arms folded and said nothing, waiting.

“You should help the woman who came to see you today.”

Tay was not sure what he was expecting, but it had not been that, and the surprise doubtless showed on his face.

“Don’t look so startled, Samuel. Of course I know about that. I know about everything. It’s one of the few advantages of being dead.”

“I really don’t understand—”

“Oh, don’t start blithering. You know exactly what I mean. It would be good for you to help Emma. It would benefit both of you.”

“Emma? So you’re on a first name basis with her?”

“She’s a nice girl, Samuel. She needs your help, and you need to help her. Besides, she’s single and very attractive. You’re going to be fifty years old tomorrow. How much longer can you wait to find a wife? You don’t want to die all alone, do you?”

“Don’t start, Mother.”

“Mothers never stop caring about their children, Samuel. They worry about them their whole lives, even when they’re ungrateful little wretches like you.”

“I’m not listening, Mother. You’re not here, so I’m not listening.”

“Why don’t you stick your fingers in your ears? That seems to me just the sort of thing you would do.”

Tay was determined not to let his mother goad him so he didn’t reply.

“You’re beginning to bore me, Samuel. Go back to bed. But just remember what I told you.”

“That I’m supposed to help Emma.”

“That’s right.”

“Help her do what?”

“Investigate the death of that boy, of course. Find out what really happened.”

“Why don’t you just tell me now, Mother? You must know. You know everything. You said that was one of the advantages of being dead. Wouldn’t it save me a lot of time if you just told me?”

“For God’s sake, Samuel, do you expect me to do everything for you?”

“I only thought—”

“You thought wrong, boy. You’re going to be fifty tomorrow, and I’m still going to be dead tomorrow. How long will it be before you understand that you’re on your own now?”

Tay flinched at that, but he kept his voice flat and even. “I understand that already, Mother. I understand that all too well.”

“Then for Christ sakes, Samuel, act like it.”

For a moment the disco ball spun faster, then Tay blinked and it was gone. He stared for a long time at the place where it had been, or appeared to have been, and he wondered if it might just be possible that it had really been there after all. No, of course it hadn’t been there any more than his mother had been talking to him. He was asleep, and he was dreaming, and that was that.

As he stood there thinking about it, however, a feeling came over him that he could not remember ever having had before. He was momentarily overwhelmed. It was as if a curtain had been peeled back just long enough to allow him a fleeting glimpse of some universal truth. He just couldn’t figure out what it was.