Umbrella Man (9786167611204) (44 page)

Tay suddenly realized that the taxi was
exactly the same shade of blue as the lighter he had just bought
and he wondered for a moment about the coincidence. In spite of the
healthy sugar and caffeine buzz he was carrying, he really couldn’t
see what significance that fact might have, so he stopped thinking
about it as abruptly as he had begun. Settling back against the
seat and shutting his ears to the music blaring from the driver’s
radio, Tay watched the streets and sidewalks slide by and tried
very hard to think about nothing much at all.

***

As soon as Tay got to his desk, he began work
on the investigation papers for the dead woman at the Marriot. The
investigation papers in every case were ultimately the
responsibility of the designated investigation officer, although
most IOs treated the job as the police equivalent of manual labor
and assigned it to the first junior officer they saw who wasn’t
fast enough to get out of the way.

Tay didn’t look at paperwork that way at all.
He really didn’t mind dealing with the IP on his cases himself. To
tell the truth, he rather enjoyed it. He sometimes thought he had
the soul of an accountant rather than that of a policeman.

Tay even found dealing with the IP himself
brought with it a sort of sense of personal redemption. Holding the
progress of an investigation right there in his own two hands was
both a symbolic and a practical act. It was symbolic in that it
reminded him he was accomplishing something, and it was practical
in that it prevented him from thinking he was accomplishing any
more than he actually was.

Tay worked on the IP in silence for nearly an
hour, methodically filling out the investigation diary with the
details of his observations at the crime scene. He wrote until he
was interrupted by a knock at his door. When he looked up, Sergeant
Kang was leaning in.

“In a little early this morning, are we,
sir?”

Tay had never understood how people who rose
early could lay claim to such moral superiority over those who
didn’t. Yes, Kang was usually in the office by eight and Tay seldom
made it until nine-thirty or even ten; but then Tay was usually
still in the office at six or seven, and there wasn’t a chance in
hell that Kang could be found there after five. And yet Kang could
still position himself as the zestful one and Tay as the lazy
bastard who came in late. It hardly seemed fair.

“I brought your mail, sir.”

Kang dumped a small stack of something into
Tay’s in-tray, but Tay was still thinking about Kang’s dig over his
working hours and didn’t bother to look at it.

Didn’t his late evenings count for as much as
Kang’s early mornings? They bloody well ought to; but where
arriving early at the office was taken as the mark of an energetic
man, staying late at the office was merely the indication of a man
with no better place to go. It was all just so goddamned
unfair.

“Did you get an ID on the woman at the
Marriott yet?” Tay asked Kang, covering his annoyance.

“No hit from the prints in the local
database, sir. It looks like she was a visitor.”

“What does Immigration say?”

“They’re generating a list of all the female
entries during the last thirty days who haven’t exited yet. They
ought to have it to us by this afternoon.”

“How many will there be?”

“No idea, sir.”

“When you get the list, I want you to check
everyone on it by tomorrow. If there’s anyone you can’t account
for, I want to know it by six o’clock.”

“I’m not sure I can do that, sir. There’ll
probably be hundreds of names. I won’t have enough—”

“The Chief has already authorized whatever
resources we need,” Tay interrupted. “I want that list checked by
tomorrow. Get the men you need and get it done, Sergeant.”

Kang bobbed his head and started to close the
door.

“And one other thing,” Tay added.

“Sir?”

“Get her prints into the Interpol system.
Maybe they’ll get a hit.”

“How much detail do you want me to
include?”

Tay thought about that, tapping the cap of a
felt-tip pen against his teeth with an audible clicking sound.

“Can you just send the prints without any
details?”

“Well, sir, if we don’t give them any reason
we’re looking to match them, the priority will drop pretty
low.”

“Yeah, you’re right.” Tay thought some more.
“Just tell them they’re unidentified prints from a crime
scene.”

“Perfect prints from all ten fingers? Nobody
will believe that, sir.”

“Just do it that way and let’s see what
happens.”

Kang shrugged. “Right, sir.”

“What about Forensic Management Branch? When
are we going to get their report?”

“Tomorrow, probably late, but it won’t say
much.”

“FMB didn’t get anything?”

“There wasn’t much to get. They’re running
the samples from the vacuum and the wipe-downs now, but they say
they’d be surprised to find anything. The killer cleaned up pretty
thoroughly. It almost looks like he knew exactly what he was
doing.”

“No prints either?”

“A few partials from the back of the
headboard and a couple of other places, but nothing good enough to
return a match.”

Tay nodded at that and returned his attention
to the IP on his desk. Kang took that as a signal that he was
dismissed and closed the door quietly behind him.

Tay started back to work on the IP. Then,
suddenly remembering the mail Kang had brought in, he put the file
down, pulled his in-tray across the desk, and peered into it. There
wouldn’t be anything but junk, of course; there never was. Still,
each time he flipped through a new mail delivery, some combination
of curiosity and hope always flared within him.

To his surprise, right on top of the pile
there appeared to be an actual letter. He picked it up curiously
and took a closer look. It was an airmail envelope with a metered
stamp that carried the return address of a law firm in New York
City. He checked to make certain the letter was actually addressed
to him. It was.

Tay held the envelope for a moment without
opening it. Perhaps he was being sued. He had never been sued and
didn’t know what he would do if he was. But surely that couldn’t be
what the letter was about. If he were going to be sued for
something, it certainly wouldn’t be by anyone in New York. He had
never even been in New York.

Eventually Tay opened the envelope and took
out the letter. It was only a single sheet of paper. He read it,
and then, not quite believing what he had just read, he read it
again from the beginning.

The letter was from a man named Rosenthal
whom Tay had never heard of. He said he was a lawyer representing
Tay’s mother and wanted to notify Tay that his mother had had a
stroke and was in Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York. She was expected
to recover, but the prognosis was uncertain as to whether she might
have permanent brain damage. That was all the letter said. Nothing
else at all.

“My God,” Tay murmured to himself.

He had not spoken to his mother in…Tay
thought about it, but he couldn’t remember for sure. Three years?
Perhaps four?

There wasn’t any significance to that, not
really. They certainly weren’t angry at each other. They had just
somehow slipped out of each other’s lives. His mother had lived in
New York for nearly twenty-five years now. She was married to
someone he had met only a couple of times. Their lives no longer
had anything to do with each other. It was just that simple. Was it
really possible for someone to actually lose track of his own
mother? He knew the answer to that. It was very possible indeed. It
was one of those things that happened in life when you weren’t
paying attention.

Tay looked at his watch. What time was it in
New York now? He tried to work it out, but he wasn’t certain. And
what was he going to do anyway? Telephone his mother and ask how
she was? That didn’t seem like a very good idea. If she had had a
stroke, perhaps her speech had been affected. He briefly considered
calling her husband, but he hardly knew the man and hadn’t talked
to him in ten years. He supposed he could always call this fellow
Rosenthal who had written the letter, but what would be the point
of that? Presumably he had already told Tay all he knew.

Maybe he should just go to New York and find
out what the hell was going on, but that was out of the question,
too, wasn’t it? He was responsible for finding the killer of a dead
woman who had been viciously brutalized. Murder investigations
didn’t wait around until you found a convenient time to fit them
into your schedule. Tay would have to transfer the case to someone
else if he went to New York. He didn’t really want to do that and,
besides, flying halfway around the world on the basis of a
half-page letter from someone he didn’t even know really made no
sense at all.

Tay leaned back in his chair, swung his feet
onto the desk, and shifted his gaze out the window. From his office
on the fifteenth floor of the Cantonment Complex, he had a glorious
view of the city. Straight ahead across the Singapore River lay the
green patch of Fort Canning Park and off to the right were the
glass and steel towers of the financial district. If Tay stood up
and walked to the window and looked off to the left, he could even
see the Marriott somewhere in the middle of the long line of luxury
hotels scattered along Orchard Road. But then he wasn’t about to do
that.

Tay made a pocket of air in one cheek,
shifted it to the other, and then blew it out in one long stream. A
feeling about this case was taking root within him and, as he
threaded it back and forth through his mind, examining it first
from one direction and then from the other, he saw at least one
thing with unmistakable clarity. This case was going to turn into a
real son of a bitch, a shit storm of the first order.

He didn’t know how he knew that, he just did.
And now there was this, too. His mother was in a hospital in New
York and there was a letter on his desk from somebody he didn’t
know telling him she might have brain damage. Well, goddamn it all
to hell, what in Christ’s name was he supposed to do about that?
Was he supposed to drop everything and fly to New York and sit
there holding his mother’s hand until they found out? His mother
hadn’t held his hand for forty years. For all he knew she had
never
held his hand.

Tay had no life other than his job, a job his
mother had always hated, and now she was trying to ruin it for him.
At the precise moment when he was needed the most, she wanted to
take him away from his job. Or maybe she didn’t. If she’d had a
stroke and was now suffering brain damage, then she probably didn’t
know what she wanted, did she?

Tay knew he was going around in circles and
not making a great deal of sense, not even to himself. He tried to
stop thinking about any of it and clear his mind altogether, but he
couldn’t.

It might be a few days before they could even
get an ID on the murdered woman, he thought. All he was doing right
now was waiting. Waiting for the immigration list to be checked;
waiting for Interpol to respond to the fingerprint request; waiting
for the FMB report; waiting for the autopsy. None of that was going
to happen for a few days. Maybe he could make a quick trip to New
York and get back before any of it did happen, he thought to
himself. But even as he did, he knew that was complete
nonsense.

What he was actually waiting for was
something else altogether, and he knew perfectly well what it
was.

He was waiting for this whole fucking case to
swoop down and take a humongous dump all over his sorry ass. In
every fiber of his body he could sense it circling above him, and
he would be goddamned if he would be sitting in a half-darkened
hospital room in New York doing absolutely nothing useful for
anyone when it finally let loose.

Yesterday he had so little to do he was
spending his lunch hour browsing through the paperbacks at Sunny’s.
Today there was a bloody goddamned maelstrom howling around him and
his mother was in a hospital room halfway around the world with
possible brain damage.

Jesus H. Christ on a motherfucking crutch.
Good night, Irene. Put out the lights, will you?

ON THURSDAY MORNING Inspector Tay tried to
telephone the number on the letter from New York and got no answer.
After thinking about it for a few minutes and counting back and
forth on his fingers, Tay realized that he had miscalculated the
time change. The International Date Line was a real bastard. He
would have to call at night, Singapore time, in order to get
through during business hours in New York, so he made a mental note
to try again when he got home that evening.

The rest of Thursday was no more productive
for Tay than had been his effort to call New York. The FMB report
was put over until Friday and Sergeant Kang’s men continued working
their way through the list of female visitors Immigration had
provided without finding anyone who was missing. Tay could feel the
case going dead around him and it wasn’t even forty-eight hours
old. He was going to have to do something to get it moving, but
what? Without knowing who the woman was, the investigation wasn’t
going to go anywhere, and how were they to identify her with no
papers, no clothes, no jewelry, nothing at all to work with? All
they had was a set of fingerprints and so far they couldn’t match
them to anyone.

Hoping to clear his head and start thinking
about the case from a new perspective, Tay left the Cantonment
Complex about five o’clock and walked up New Bridge Road all the
way to the Singapore River. He cut through the Merchant Court hotel
and found a table alongside the river at the Brewerkz where he had
two gin and tonics and some kind of chicken dish, but he was unable
to conjure up even a single novel idea as to how to identify the
murdered woman at the Marriott. He sat for a while after he
finished eating and drank two cups of coffee. Then he took a walk
along the river and very slowly smoked three Marlboros, one after
another. When night came on as suddenly as if a blanket had been
dropped over the city, he found a taxi and went home.