Umbrella Man (9786167611204) (9 page)

He had wanted a cigarette the whole time he
was sitting on that metal chest in the middle of the security area
and struggling to take in the destruction all around him. But it
had seemed wrong to smoke there, disrespectful somehow, and so he
hadn’t. He was ready now to make up for lost time.

While he smoked, he thought about the dead
man in the Woodlands apartment. He pictured the man’s face. Did he
know him?

He did. He was sure of it.

But then again, he didn’t.

And at exactly the moment he was thinking
that, he heard a woman’s voice.

***

“Of course, you know him, Samuel,” she said,
startling him out of his reverie. “You’re not senile. Not yet, at
least.”

Tay looked around, but he was alone in the
garden. Of course, he was alone in the garden. Had a neighbor
spoken from beyond his wall?

“You don’t even recognize my voice, do
you?”

He did, but how could he? His mother was
dead.

“A son who forgets his own mother’s voice.
What kind of a son is that?”

Tay looked around again. Was this an
elaborate prank of some sort? Surely not. No one pulled pranks on
Sam Tay.

“My God, Samuel, are you just going to sit
there like a moron? Speak up, boy.”

“Uh…hello, Mother.”

He felt like an idiot, but something made him
afraid to keep silent.

“That’s better. How are you, boy?”

“I’m fine,” Tay offered, his voice tentative.
“How are you?”

“How am I? I’m dead, Samuel. That’s how I am.
Dead.”

“So…how is it?”

“How is it to be dead? Is this your idea of
small talk, Samuel?”

“No, I just don’t know what to say and—”

“If you must know, it’s not a barrel of
laughs. But you’ll find out for yourself soon enough.”

Tay’s heart began to beat faster. Was that
what this meant? Was he about to die and this is how it happened?
Someone from your past appeared to you and
told
you that you
were about to die?

“Are you telling me I’m going to die,
Mother.”

“Oh, for God’s sake.” The tone in his
mother’s voice was one he remembered all too well. “Of course,
you’re going to die, Samuel. But probably not tonight. How should I
know? I’m dead, not clairvoyant.”

“I just thought—”

“Stop talking, Samuel. I don’t have much time
here so I want you to listen to me carefully.”

Tay said nothing. Were the dead given
something like a cosmic phone card which provided them only limited
minutes to communicate with the living, or was his mother just
following her usual pattern of trying to keep their conversations
as short as possible?

“Are you listening, Samuel? Are you listening
carefully
?”

“Yes, Mother. I am listening carefully.”

“What you are doing is important. Because he
was only one man, do not think finding out what happened to him,
and why it happened, is any less important than finding out why the
many died.”

Tay had no idea what to say to that. He
wasn’t even sure what it meant.

“It’s all connected, Samuel. All of it.”

“What’s connected?”

“For Christ’s sake, Samuel, listen to
yourself! Pay attention, boy!”

Tay was paying attention. He was fairly sure
he was imagining this entire conversation, of course, but he was
still paying attention. He didn’t have the vaguest idea what his
mother was talking about. If he was talking to her at all. Which
obviously he wasn’t.

“You must find someone to help you,” his
mother went on when he didn’t reply.

“Help me do what, Mother?”

“Help you to remember, Samuel. That’s what
life is really about: remembering. In the end, remembering is all
we have left to us.”

Tay hoped
that
wasn’t true. There were
all sorts of things in his life he didn’t
want
to
remember.

“Mother, I don’t really understand—”

“Find somebody to help you. Do you
understand?”

“Who?”

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

“No, Mother.”

“Maybe this will help. It will be a
woman.”

“A woman,” Tay repeated flatly.

“Yes, Samuel. A woman. You do still remember
what a woman is, don’t you?”

“Yes, Mother. I remember what a woman
is.”

“Good. Then what are you going to do?”

Tay said nothing. Everything he did say just
seemed to give his mother another way to take a shot at him.

“Tell me what you are going to do, Samuel,”
his mother prompted.

Before he could stop them, the reflexes of
his childhood kicked in. “I am going to find someone to help me
remember,” he responded dutifully. “A woman.”

Then something suddenly occurred to him.

“How do you know about the man at the
Woodlands, Mother?”

“Because you know about him.”

“You know everything
I
know?”

“Of course, Samuel. Being dead doesn’t have
many benefits, but that’s one of them.”

That gave Tay pause. His mother now knew
everything
he
knew? Did she know everything everyone knew,
or just everything he knew? He paused to formulate a careful
question.

“Mother, does that mean—”

“Never mind what it means, Samuel. Just do
what I tell you to do.”

“Yes, Mother.”

“I’ve got to go. I’m almost out of time. For
once in your life, do what I tell you to do. It’s important.”

“Mother, please don’t—”

“Good-bye, Samuel. Don’t be a stranger.”

“Mother?”

Silence.

“Are you there, Mother?”

Silence.

***

Tay sat perfectly still and threaded what had
just happened back and forth through his mind as if it had been
preserved on the spinning reels of an old fashioned tape
recorder.

Had he experienced a psychotic episode of
some kind? Most people would say so, of that he had no doubt, and
he wasn’t ready to argue with them. Samuel Tay was a rational man
above all else, and rational men knew people don’t carry on
conversations with the dead.

Still, he knew what he had heard. God help
him, he felt like he really
had
just talked to his mother,
whether he had or not. Perhaps the dead laid greater claim to us
than did the living. Perhaps they had found both significance and
permanence inside their own demise.

And what was all this about finding someone
to help him remember? Remember
what
? Who the dead man
was?

Surely he had just imagined the entire
conversation. That had to be all there was to it.

But then again, even if he altogether
discarded the possibility of supernatural intervention, what if it
had been his subconscious prodding him toward the direction in
which he should be going? Perhaps
that
was what was really
happening here.

Tay was prepared to follow the flashes of
intuition that bubbled up in his subconscious every now and then.
He was even willing to let the less rational part of his being take
flight occasionally and accept the possibly of random intervention
from the cosmos. But was he willing to start asking every woman he
knew if she could help him remember?

Well…no, he wasn’t going to do that. They
would think he had lost his mind.

A man had his limits.

THE NEXT MORNING Tay woke at his usual time
feeling strangely chipper. As he dressed and rummaged around the
kitchen making coffee, he realized the odd events of the night
before had pretty much disappeared from his mind altogether. Even
when he tried to remember them, and he certainly didn’t try very
hard, he could recall only a few snatches from the conversation he
had — or imagined he had — with his mother. That seemed to him to
settle the matter. Most likely, it had all just been the result of
a little indigestion.

Tay got to the Cantonment Complex about ten
and found Sergeant Kang waiting in his office.

“I’ve got the autopsy report on the deceased
from the Woodlands, sir.”

“Anything interesting in it?”

“Yes, sir. A couple of things. But…well, this
was the one that really got my attention.”

Kang handed Tay a piece of white notepaper
that had been folded over once in the middle.

When Tay unfolded the paper, he saw FROM THE
DESK OF DR. SUSAN HOI printed across the top. Below that, someone,
presumably Dr. Hoi, had written in black ink
Please call me on
my mobile,
followed by a telephone number.

Susan Hoi was the pathologist at the Centre
for Forensic Medicine who about a year earlier had done the autopsy
on the wife of the American ambassador after she had been found
naked and brutalized in a suite at the Marriott. Dr. Hoi was a nice
woman, and a real looker to boot, but back then she had made her
personal interest in Tay so plain he had automatically broken into
a trot in the opposite direction.

They hadn’t seen or spoken to each other
since that case, but more than once Tay had found himself wondering
if perhaps he had been a little hasty in blowing her off like that.
And now there was this note. Was Dr. Hoi using her autopsy report
as a matchmaking device? If she was, he didn’t know what to think
about that.

When Tay looked up, Kang was grinning at him.
“Are you going to call, sir?”

“I’m sure Dr. Hoi simply wants to discuss the
autopsy,” Tay said.

“Oh, right,” Kang nodded. “That’s exactly
what I was thinking, too.”

“Can we stick to the subject here, Sergeant?
Is there anything in the autopsy report I need to know about?”

“The dead man had cancer, sir.”

“Cancer?”

“Dr. Hoi says it was well advanced. He
probably didn’t have more than a few months left to live.”

Tay took that in although he couldn’t
immediately see what it could have to do with the man’s murder.

“And the cause of death?” he asked.

“Blunt force trauma to the back of the head
and a catastrophic fracture of the atlanto-occipital joint.”

“In other words, somebody hit the poor
cancer-riddled bastard over the head and then broke his neck.”

“Pretty much, sir.”

Tay took the report from Sergeant Kang and
flipped through it half-heartedly.

“Any progress on the ID, Sergeant?

“No, sir. Not really. I’ve sent the prints to
Interpol, but God knows how long they will take to get back to us
even if they find a match. We have DNA samples, of course, but we
don’t have anything to match them against.”

Tay pursed his lips and glanced back at the
report. “A well-nourished Caucasian male in his mid-sixties to
mid-seventies,” he read. “Five feet eleven inches in height and
approximately one hundred eighty pounds in weight.”

Kang nodded.

“That’s all the ID we’ve got?”

“Yes, sir. For now. But I’m working on
it.”

Sergeant Kang shifted his weight and cleared
his throat.

“Can I ask you something, sir?”

Tay nodded.

“What you said on the telephone last
night…about investigating the bombings.”

“What about it, Sergeant?”

“Well…you weren’t serious, were you,
sir?”

“What if I were?”

“What if you
were
? You don’t need this
job, sir. I do, and I don’t want to lose it.”

“Why would you lose your job?”

“I figure I would if we start investigating
the bombings when you were specifically told to stay away from
them.”

“I’m only doing it because it’s connected to
our murder victim at the Woodlands.”

“Oh, come on, sir. There’s no connection. You
just made that up.”

Tay briefly considered telling Kang about the
conversation he’d had the night before with the ghost of his mother
in which she had assured him there
was
a connection. But he
quickly came to his senses.

“Fine, Sergeant. I don’t want you to do
anything you think might harm your career. I’m your superior
officer, and I hereby release you from doing anything you don’t
want to do. Go with God.”

“But what are
you
going to do,
sir?”

“I’m going to do just what I told you last
night. I’m going to solve both cases. With or without you, I’m
going to solve both cases. After that, maybe I’ll quit.”

“Maybe you won’t have to.”

Tay said nothing.

Kang shook his head. “I don’t know what to
do, sir.”

“It’s not that hard to decide, Robbie. Do
whatever makes you comfortable. It’s entirely up to you.”

“You can’t manage all that by yourself,
sir.”

“Maybe, maybe not. Either way, I’m going to
try.”

Kang sighed heavily.

“I shouldn’t get involved, sir.”

“You’re absolutely right. You shouldn’t.”

Kang sighed again. “What do you want me to
do, sir?”

Tay kept his expression neutral. It wasn’t
easy. He was certain Sergeant Kang would come around eventually. He
just didn’t think it would be quite this fast.

***

After Kang left, Tay sat drumming his fingers
on the autopsy report. Should he call Dr. Hoi or shouldn’t he?

Perhaps she really did have something to tell
him about the autopsy that she didn’t want to put in her formal
report. But if she didn’t and she was trying again to warm up their
acquaintanceship…well, Tay just couldn’t get excited about a
relationship with a woman who spent her days slicing up dead
bodies.

Still, wasn’t it a bit egotistical of him to
assume Dr. Hoi had a personal motive for asking him to call rather
than strictly a professional one? And maybe this would be a bad
time to call her anyway. Maybe she wouldn’t even be in her office.
Should he find out when she was likely to be there and call her
then, if he was going to call her at all?

What a lot of nonsense, Tay told himself as
he reached for the telephone. When am I going to stop thinking
everything to death instead of just going ahead and doing what I
want to do?