The Feng Shui Detective's Casebook (15 page)

‘Those doors lead to the stairs, and those lead to staff accommodation,’ said Puk. ‘On the second floor, we have some rooms—we keep junk in there. There’s a laundry room with spare uniforms and stuff, and a storage area where we keep car parts and that sort of thing.’

‘I need somewhere to work,’ said Wong. The
feng shui
master had subcontracted his afternoon appointment and those of the following days to a fellow practitioner named Sum, so that he could concentrate on Nevis Au Yeung’s garage for as long as needed. ‘I need a room to work from, small table, two chairs, good light.’

Puk looked dismayed. ‘There are no rooms with decent light in this building. There are just the cubby holes we use for offices downstairs . . . I know—you can use the table in Allie’s flat. We play mahjong on it sometimes.’

He led them over to a door that appeared to have been badly painted with leftover grey primer. Puk hammered on it. After two minutes, a thin, small man in striped pyjamas appeared. ‘Morning, Puk,’ Allie Ng said, his voice thick with sleep. ‘Or afternoon, is it?’

‘These are
feng shui
people,’ Puk said. ‘They’re going to use your table for their work for a couple of days, can or not?’

‘Yah, sure, no problem,’ said Ng. His nostrils suddenly whitened, and it was clear that he was trying to suppress a yawn. ‘’Scuse me,’ he said to the visitors, putting his hand to his mouth. ‘I’m a shift worker.’

‘Poor you,’ said Joyce. ‘What hours do you work?’

‘I’m on from six in the night to six in the morning six days a week.’

‘That’s terrible,’ she exclaimed. ‘Is that allowed? That’s— er—let me see—seventy-two hours a week. Don’t you have unions and stuff?’

‘I don’t mind,’ said Allie Ng, yawning again. ‘Especially in a difficult situation like now, with the cars disappearing.’ He put his arm on his colleague’s shoulder. ‘We are in this together. We are brothers.’

Puk turned to Wong. ‘Allie and I
are
in this together. The Chairman said that if one more car gets stolen, we’re both going to lose our jobs.’

‘Why don’t we let the poor guy go to bed?’ Joyce said.

The diminutive night guard ushered Wong and McQuinnie into the three-room flat. His wife Suma had gone out to the playgroup with their child, so the living room was empty. A small table about a metre square was cleared of plates and toddler playthings for them to work on. Then he went back to his bed.

Wong began the long process of examining the floor plans and mapping the directions of the influences. He started by making notes on the structure with the help of Harris Wu. The garage was well designed, with a total floor area of 4,500 square metres on four floors, including the roof. It had two hundred and forty vehicle spaces, plus the large enclosed workshop for the Alfa 24, staff accommodation, and some small offices on the ground floor. It was steel framed with a façade of mesh panels, architectural bracing and insulated cladding. The floors were pre-cast concrete, covered with a watertight membrane. The roof deck was covered with mastic asphalt.

The geomancer thanked Wu for his help, and the architect bowed once and left the room.

Looking at the floor plan, Wong noted with approval that Wu had cleverly managed to minimise the use of columns— not only were these irritating to drivers, but they sometimes chopped up the flow of
ch’i
into awkwardly small tributaries.

The structure was basically very simple—each floor was a rectangle of just over 1,000 square metres, with parts of the east and north sides closed off for other purposes. There was a 40-square-metre set of rooms used for offices on the ground floor, 25 square metres of storage rooms on the second level, and 42 square metres of space used for staff accommodation on the top floor. Wong calculated that the flat in which he was sitting was a thin rectangle, having a frontage of about 12.5 metres and a depth of about four metres. The living space in which he sat was four metres wide, and contained a kitchenette. The main bedroom next to it was also four metres wide, part of which had been hived off to form the unit’s only bathroom. Then there was a small room about one-and-a-half metres wide, which housed the baby’s cot.

Wong smiled as he noticed that Allie Ng’s flat was facing due south. It wasn’t an ideal location, but it was better than Nevis Au Yeung’s accommodation, which faced northeast, precisely the wrong direction for a tycoon born in the year of the rat, 1940.

Joyce, quickly bored, made a token effort at helping her employer, and then went for a walk. Allie Ng’s flat was airless and filled with the rank odour of sleep-breath and the sour milk smell of babies.

At first, she had no idea what to do. They were stuck in a car park for the entire day—perhaps for two days or more. There were no shops, no people, no coffee bars. Why on earth did no one have the idea of putting CD shops or boutiques into car parks? To her, that would be such an
obvious
thing to do, and what was really needed to brighten up the place. Perhaps she should suggest it to the tycoon? He might be really grateful to her for the idea.

She wandered around aimlessly for a while, not knowing what to do with herself. Then an idea came into her head. Suddenly she knew exactly what she was going to do—sneak a peek at that rare car that Harris had talked of.

She looked behind her guiltily as she turned a corner towards the back of the third floor—and walked straight into Harris Wu.

‘Oh. Sorry.’

‘No harm done,’ said the architect. ‘Where are you off to? Can I help you?’

‘I was just—I was just wandering around a bit, you know, getting a feel for the place.’ She gave an involuntary glance at the shuttered workshop.

He smiled at her, a grin that said he knew exactly what she was doing. ‘You want to have a look at the Alfa 24? It’s really quite something.’

‘Can I? Will we get into trouble? Have you got the key?’

‘Come.’

As they walked towards the enclosed area, he patted his pocket. ‘There’s no key. The only way you can open it from the outside is with a dedicated remote control device. The front door works like a shutter, but it’s four times as thick — I designed and installed it myself. Impossible to break through.’ He pulled a pair of small metal devices out of his jacket. They looked like miniaturised television remotes.

She expected them to go to the shuttered front, but when they reached the walled-in area, Wu beckoned to her to move past the door and round to one side. ‘The Curdy boys are doing some work in there today. Replacing something on the dash. They’re very temperamental about being disturbed. The air in that room is kept at a certain temperature and all that. Let’s just have a look through the window.’

He led her around the side of the enclosed area where there was a window, about two metres long, set into the wall. Peering in, she saw that everything was a bright orange-yellow colour, as if at the bottom of a sea of artificial fruit juice. She saw a slightly blurred image of Dick Curdy sitting in a car which looked as if it was a century old.

‘Why is everything orange?’

Wu said, ‘The Curdys installed a yellow filter to protect the paintwork against fading. The Chairman looks after this car better than He looks after His children or His staff, if you ask me. Don’t tell anyone I said that. The inside of this particular garage has its own climate control station—cost more than fifteen thousand dollars.’

‘Sing?’

‘US.’

‘Geez.’

She peered through the glass again. As her eyes got used to the scene inside the orange sea, she could locate both men. Dick Curdy was adjusting the left side headlamp, while younger brother Petey was in the passenger seat, with his arm half-buried in a hole in the dashboard. Petey turned and saw her looking at him. He gave her a smile and a wink.

Joyce was astonished. Cheeky! She decided not to respond. But somehow her face had its own ideas. Before she could stop herself, her mouth opened to reveal a bright, toothy smile, and her right eye winked back.

Petey lasciviously licked his lips with the tip of his tongue and then puckered them in her direction.

Joyce, shocked, again decided that she wouldn’t react. But still her features appeared to be in a state of mutiny. She heard herself laugh, and her lips drew themselves together and blew him a kiss back.

Amazed at herself, she blushed painfully and raised her hand to cover her mouth. Her face was burning. She hoped that her red cheeks wouldn’t show through the tinted window. Why on earth had she done that? And in front of a witness, too! She thanked Wu and fled to the safety of the room in which her boss was working.

The following day, Wong arrived at the car park early in the morning. It was a hot, glaring morning, and the building was baking when, a little after 9:45, he was handed a written message from Alyn Puk. It had been faxed to the security guard’s office from Winnie Lim. ‘Friend of Joyce came yesterday afternoon to try to fix stain on wall with stain remover,’ it said. ‘He made it worse. Now big red splodge on wall. Splodge is shape of cow.’

‘Aiyeeah.’ Things in his office were going from bad to worse.

Meanwhile, Joyce McQuinnie arrived at work at 10:30 am in a state of acute embarrassment at her exchange the previous afternoon with Petey Curdy. She found it hard to even think of yesterday’s encounter without blushing. Yet at the same time, she could think of nothing else. It was so strange. She had barely swapped two words with the guy in her whole life—and he had blown her a kiss. Was he saying that he had fallen madly in love with her? Or was he just teasing her? And what on earth had she been thinking of, blowing him a kiss back?

She spent the rest of the morning carefully avoiding the sealed workshop, walking long distances around it when she went out to take measurements, and using the stairs at the north end of the building when she needed to change floors.

But as noon approached, Joyce started to question whether she was taking the right approach. She tried to visualise what her older sister—a spectacularly successful tormentor of the male sex—would do in such a situation. Melanie certainly wouldn’t skulk around in a state of abject embarrassment.

Joyce asked herself why she should feel cowed. She was a single adult, and so, presumably, was Petey. There was absolutely no reason at all to be ashamed about a mildly flirtatious exchange. The truth was, Petey might well be very attracted to her. She was an attractive young woman, after all. Her dad always called her ‘Beauty’ and ‘Princess’. You couldn’t blame men for fancying a young woman like her. It was biology.

But as for herself, she had no interest in him whatsoever. She and Petey could be friends or not friends. It made not the slightest bit of difference to her. She was far too busy to be distracted by stuff like that. She had a job to do. So for her, the best reaction would be to continue with her life exactly as normal. If they bumped into each other at any time in the next few hours, so be it.

But they didn’t. By mid-afternoon, Joyce found her attitude had changed yet again. His face kept popping into her mind. In her mind, she replayed yesterday’s scene continuously, zooming in on the way his lips slowly puckered themselves up and then—pop!—a little kiss shot out in her direction. She was soon longing to see Pete Curdy again—but only so she could show by her cool, detached expression that she had absolutely no need whatsoever to see him again.

By four o’clock, she found herself sitting outside Allie Ng’s flat, on the hood of one of Nevis Au Yeung’s spare BMWs, trying to think of an excuse to re-visit the workshop. But even if she thought of something, what would she say when she got there? And anyway, how could you strike up a conversation with a gorgeous guy through a soundproof glass window?

No solution presented itself until Wong had nearly finished his work making
feng shui
charts for the building, its owner and the missing cars. She had an idea. She strode into Ng’s living room, where the geomancer was sitting, poring over twenty pages of
lo shu
charts he had drawn.

‘You know, I was thinking. If that Alfa thing is the most valuable car in the building, you better see how it fits into the calendar,’ said Joyce. ‘Remember how you told me that cars have birthdays and ages too?’