Umbrella Man (9786167611204) (7 page)

Tay took a few careful steps into the room
and moved to his right along the foot of the bed.

The body was just on the other side of the
bed, lying on its back on the floor. It was that of a Caucasian
male.

“My God,” Kang blurted. “What’s a white man
doing out here?”

Tay would have given Kang a disapproving
look, but he was too busy wondering exactly the same thing himself.
He would have been willing to bet there wasn’t a single Caucasian
living within ten miles of the Woodlands. Not one.

The man wasn’t young. He was probably in his
sixties, maybe even his early seventies. A little less than six
feet tall, he was dressed in a short-sleeved white shirt he had
left hanging out over his waistband, wrinkled khaki pants, and
brown loafers with light brown socks. Lying there on his back, his
arms stretched down along his sides, the man looked like someone
who had unaccountably chosen to sleep on the floor rather than in
the bed right next to him.

But the man wasn’t asleep. He was dead, and
he had been dead for a while. His pupils were fixed and dilated,
and his skin had a waxy pallor. There was some bloating, but not a
lot, and putrefaction wasn’t very far advanced. At a guess, Tay put
the time of death at more than one day, but less than two. The air
conditioning was running and the room was cold, so perhaps it might
have been even longer.

There was no blood that Tay could see
anywhere. That meant there were fewer flies than usual when a body
had gone undiscovered for this long. And the rats hadn’t been at
the body yet. Thank Christ for small favors, Tay thought.

Tay and Kang moved around the bed watching
carefully where they placed their feet. At least this was one time
Tay didn’t have to worry about stepping in blood. He would never
get used to walking into a room and thinking about stepping in
blood. He could never decide what he was more worried about
ruining: his shoes, or his soul.

Tay had stopped walking and was standing at
the corpse’s feet when Kang noticed the odd look on his face.

“Is this somebody you know, sir?”

Tay didn’t reply. He just stared at the
corpse. Kang shifted his weight from one foot to another,
waiting.

After a moment, Kang repeated the question.
“Do you know the dead man, sir?”

This time Tay nodded slightly.

“Who is it?” Kang asked.

“I don’t know.”

Kang was puzzled by Tay’s answer, of course,
but no more puzzled than he often was by things Tay said. So he
just waited.

“I thought for a minute I recognized him,”
Tay added after a short silence. “But now I’m not sure.”

“Who did you think it was, sir?”

“I don’t know.”

Kang just nodded and waited some more.

“There’s something about him that’s familiar,
but…”

Tay trailed off and pursed his lips, but he
didn’t say anything else.

“Maybe he just looks like somebody you know,
sir,” Kang suggested.

“Probably that’s it,” Tay said.

But he didn’t think that was it at all.

***

“Call FMB and find out where they are,
Sergeant.”

“But, sir, they’ll just tell me—”

“Get FMB out here. Threaten them if you have
to. Tell them I’ve got dirty pictures of their mothers and I’ll
send them to the Straits Times.”

“Sir?”

“Just call them, Sergeant.

Kang nodded slowly, then he took out his cell
phone and went to the living room to call FMB.

When Kang was gone, Tay squatted next to the
corpse and examined the man’s face for a long time. Something was
tickling the far distant recesses of his memory. He could feel it
as surely as if fingertips were fluttering on his forearm. But each
time he reached for it, the memory faded away like a dream in the
morning sun.

Did he know this man?

He was sure he did, although he couldn’t
remember who he was or even where he might know him from.

The man’s eyes had been brown, although the
color was already starting to drain out of them, and he had an
elongated jaw and a long, patrician-looking nose rounded at the
end. It was a weathered face, an old man’s face, but still strong.
It was the sort of face Tay hoped he might have when he reached the
same time in his life. Which, come to think of it, wasn’t all that
far off.

In spite of the gray pallor and sagging skin,
Tay could still see the deep vertical creases and imagine the ruddy
tinge on the face of a man who had lived his life with gusto. Yet
now here he was, dead, neatly stretched out on the floor of a
shabby HDB flat on the far rim of Singapore. Tay doubted the man
had ever imagined his life might end like this. He seemed to be
someone who was more likely to have envisioned an adventurous, even
noble end. But this was the end he got.

No cause of death was obvious. Maybe it was
just a simple unattended death, Tay told himself. The man was
certainly old enough for that to be a possibility. A heart attack
or a stroke maybe. But even as Tay formed the thought he knew it
wasn’t so. No one has a heart attack, then stretches out neatly on
the floor with his arms by his sides and just dies.

Tay carefully ran his hands into each of the
side pockets of the man’s khakis. When he found nothing, he rolled
the corpse a little first one way and then the other and checked
the man’s hip pockets as well. Nothing there either.

Who walks around with nothing at all in his
pockets?

Tay stood up and his knees cracked so loudly
they sounded like gunshots in the silent bedroom. He would be fifty
this year. Closer to the end than to the beginning, he knew. Far
closer, really.

When Tay thought about that, which he did
increasingly often these days, he was always surprised to realize
how dispassionate he felt about dying. He had seen so much death in
his lifetime that it had lost its capacity to frighten him. He did
not want to die. He imagined very few people wanted to die. But he
knew death made its own, sometimes bizarre choices as to when and
where it greeted each of us. He simply wasn’t inclined to use up
any of whatever days or years he had left on this earth worrying
about how many days or years he had left on this earth.

There were enough things in his life he could
do something about. That wasn’t one of them.

***

Tay glanced around the room. It had obviously
been searched in the same way the living room had: quickly and not
very thoroughly.

He walked over to the dresser and worked his
way through the drawers. Nothing at all in the first two. In the
third drawer there were two packs of Nicorette gum and a dog-eared
paperback copy of a novel called
Private Dancer
. Tay had
never heard of the book and from the slightly lurid cover he could
easily understand why. He picked it up and glanced at the title
page. Published in Thailand. No wonder he had never heard of
it.

Nicorette gum he
had
heard of. It
contained nicotine and people who were trying to quit smoking
chewed it, didn’t they? Perhaps the man, whoever he was, had a
taste for pulp fiction, was trying to quit smoking, and had just
arrived in Singapore from Thailand. At least it was a theory,
wasn’t it?

“FMB says they’re pretty busy, sir.”

Tay glanced up and saw Kang in the doorway
holding his cell phone in his hand.

“They told me they’d try to get somebody out
here in a couple of hours.”

Tay nodded. “Go down and talk to the kids who
found the body and to the woman who phoned it in. See if the
patrolmen missed anything. I’ll take a look around the apartment
again and then we’ll get out of here.”

As soon as Tay had said the words, he
realized how badly he
did
want to get out of there and as
far away from that apartment as he could.

He could feel the air quivering all around
him. He had no idea what it meant, if it meant anything at all, but
it scared the bejesus out of him.

TWO DAYS PASSED without Tay making any
progress at all in finding out who the dead man at the Woodlands
HDB estate was, let alone figuring out who killed him. He stayed in
his office, mostly, leaving the matter of getting an ID on their
corpse largely to Sergeant Kang. He simply didn’t want to encounter
his colleagues who were working the various aspects of the bombings
when he wasn’t.

As nearly as Tay could tell, he and Kang were
the only investigators
not
working the bombings. After more
than twenty years in CID and fifteen in its elite Special
Investigations Section, being pushed to the curb was a humiliation
Tay could not bear. He was angry and embarrassed in equal measures,
and from moment to moment first one emotion and then the other took
control of him. So he stayed in his office, talked to no one but
Kang, and shuffled papers without much of any idea what the papers
he was shuffling actually were.

Tay spent a lot of the time thinking about
resigning, of course. He had thought about quitting the police
force several times before, but never that seriously. He certainly
didn’t need the job. His father had left him comfortably off and he
was working only because he wanted to do something that
mattered.

Tay had been twelve or thirteen when his
father died on a business trip. He was an accountant, a careful man
who had insisted his family live modestly, and his death had been
entirely unexpected. Tay’s mother had been shocked at his father’s
death, but even more shocked to discover she and her son had
inherited a small fortune in real estate. Now Tay’s mother was
dead, too, and her share of his father’s estate had passed to him,
too. He had more money than he knew what to do with, so why was he
still doing this job?

He was doing it because it was what he did.
This was the only vocation Tay knew. It was sometimes stupid,
frequently meaningless, and always utterly compromised, but it was
a job he did as well as he could regardless of that. There were
days when he felt everything slipping away. There were times when
he felt his place in the world was somewhere he had never intended
to be. But through it all, he kept doing his job.

It was just that simple, really. Tay was a
policeman. That was who he was.

Sergeant Kang didn’t appear to mind their
banishment from the bombing case as much as Tay did. Robbie Kang
was a man who did mostly what he was told and hardly ever thought
much about it. That was what made him such a good Singaporean. It
was because of people like Robbie Kang that Singapore worked. They
didn’t care much about what their government was doing, so it just
did whatever it wanted and the Robbie Kangs of the world went on
living. They got married, picked out cars, had children, borrowed
money, bought apartments. They left the rest to others.

Tay was one of the others.

***

There was a rap on Tay’s half-open door and
Sergeant Kang’s head appeared around it.

“Am I disturbing you, sir?”

Tay looked startled, and probably a little
embarrassed. It was almost as if Kang had been standing outside
listening to his thoughts.

Kang seemed to sense something was wrong and
started to close the door.

“No, it’s fine,” Tay said quickly. “I was
just thinking about something. Come in.”

Kang sat down in one of the straight chairs
in front of Tay’s desk. “It’s about the FMB report on the apartment
at the Woodlands, sir.”

“They found something?”

“Not really, sir. There were some hair and
fibers and some prints, but the prints were mostly partials and we
didn’t get a match on any of them, and the hair and fibers are
pretty useless until we have something to match them to. Their best
guess is the place was carefully cleaned.”

“That’s it?”

“Just one thing that seems a little odd. They
found traces of flour on the shoes of the deceased.”

“Flowers?”

“No, sir. Flour. Like from a bakery. There
wasn’t much. Just some spoors in the treads of his shoes. He could
have simply walked across a kitchen where someone had once spilled
some flour. It probably doesn’t mean anything.”

Tay thought about that for a moment and
decided Kang was probably right.

“How about the ID on the deceased?” he asked.
“Are you getting anywhere with that?”

“Not really, sir.”

“Have you found the owner of the
apartment?”

“We’ve confirmed that Mr. Ching actually is
in LA. There wasn’t supposed to be anyone living there.”

“Who knew that?”

“I’m not sure, sir. Probably at least some of
the neighbors knew, but the daughter says she hadn’t talked to any
estate agents yet so it’s hardly public knowledge.”

“So you think Mr. Ching is in the clear?”

Kang hesitated. “In the clear, sir?”

“Yes, I gather you think we should take him
off our list of suspects.”

Kang hesitate again, even longer this
time.

“He’s an eighty-three year old man, sir.”

Tay said nothing.

“And he’s been in Los Angeles for the last
five months.”

Tay said nothing.

Suddenly Kang brightened. “You’re kidding me,
aren’t you, sir?”

“Yes, Sergeant Kang, I am indeed kidding you.
I’m so happy you finally noticed.”

Kang smiled uncertainly and Tay ticked off
another box on Kang’s list of Singaporean national characteristics.
Very little sense of humor.

Tay took the FMB report from Kang and flipped
through it. Nothing in it stuck him and he tossed it on his desk
among all the other pieces of paper from which nothing had stuck
him either.

“So where does that leave you on the ID,
Sergeant?”

“Nowhere, sir. No hits on the fingerprints in
our database, so he wasn’t a citizen or a PR here. And there was
nothing to go on in the apartment or in his clothes.”