Aunty Lee's Delights (18 page)

“She saved my image and saved the casino a lot of money once,” he added.

Anne Peters smiled. “Funny, isn’t it? You can be friends with people for years and not realize they know each other. Won’t you join us for something to eat?” She lowered her voice. “Please do. Reginald hasn’t eaten anything since last night. If you sit down with us, he may decide to sit down too, long enough to eat.”

Commissioner Raja looked cautiously at his friend. He was well aware that in such circumstances the best-intentioned friends could be more a burden than a source of solace. But Anne Peters seemed serious and at the moment her husband did not look as though he were aware of much of anything going on around him at all.

“Nina says Rosie told her to stay as long as we need her,” Anne Peters continued. “I told her we will be fine since they’ll be here to help with things when . . . well, you haven’t been able to tell us when we can make arrangements for Marianne.”

“Well, we had a bit of maid trouble,” Professor Peters cut in as though in response to a question. As long as his daughter’s body was not in the house, he did not have to face what had happened. “The girl just disappeared. Right after news about . . . Marianne . . . came out. Didn’t give any reason. We had no reason to think she was unhappy, she just upped and left.”

Commissioner Raja frowned. “You mean she’s also missing?”

“She ran off,” Anne Peters said dully. “She’s not missing.”

“So you do know where she is?”

Commissioner Raja looked at their blank faces. He did not mean to hound them. He had just told his good friends that their beloved daughter was dead. But he was also a policeman. He looked to Aunty Lee’s maid, who had finished setting up a buffet-style arrangement on the counter: chicken and potato curry, braised vegetables and steamed rice, with bottles of
achar, ikan bilis
with peanuts, and sambal. Nina had placed serving spoons and a stack of clean plates and cutlery at the end of the row.

“Do you know where their servant could have gone?” Commissioner Raja asked Nina. He was not sure why he asked. But she worked for a friend in the same estate and was clearly familiar with the Peterses’ household.

“No, sir. My boss ask me already. She also want to know.”

“I see.” Cowardly or tactfully, Raja decided to leave the question to her. “Tell your boss if she finds out anything, come and tell me. Tell her don’t go and do her crazy things, okay? This is serious, not play play.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Could Komal have seen who took Marianne?” Anne Peters asked. “She did disappear almost immediately after Marianne—”

“Komal wouldn’t have seen anything,” Professor Peters said. “Even if she saw something, she wouldn’t have known it. Anyway she didn’t disappear immediately after Marianne. If this crazy story is true, Marianne disappeared over two weeks ago. Those girls she was supposed to be traveling with say they never saw her!” Almost casually he picked up a small crystal vase and smashed it against the wall. His wife did not flinch. She looked as though she was beyond flinching. Discreetly, Nina got a pan and brush and started clearing up the shards.

“She was a good girl,” Anne Peters said. There was a quiver in her voice, but she spoke with quiet determination. “Komal spoke Hindi and Sindhi but not much English. She and Marianne hardly had anything to do with each other. She didn’t have anything to do with this.” She set her lips grimly. “Komal must have been seeing somebody. I didn’t want to believe it of her. I ignored all the people who warned me to keep strict controls. I wanted to respect her, but look at what she did, right when we needed her most.” There was a hurt betrayal in her voice that came from more than her feelings about their maid’s abandonment of them.

Nina, who had returned to the room after emptying the dustpan, had remained by the kitchen door while Anne Peters was speaking. Now she went over to where Mrs. Peters was sitting with Commissioner Raja. Professor Peters was still pacing around the room.

“I have cleaned up the kitchen. If it is all right, I will go and clean upstairs and do the laundry, then tomorrow I will cook things and bring over.”

Anne Peters glanced at her husband, but he was beyond caring about household arrangements. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you very much. That would help us very much. But don’t worry about cooking. We can phone for something. And Mycroft and Cherril will be back soon.”

“Let her prepare something simple for you,” Commissioner Raja advised. “At a time like this, you don’t want to be eating pizza and fried chicken.” And from experience he knew that at a time of bereavement, clean bedsheets and clear soups did more good than condolence notices and floral wreaths.

Finally leaving the Peterses’, Commissioner Raja told his driver to pull up alongside a property fronted by a long, low white picket fence before they reached the main road.

Aunty Lee was out her front door and coming down the drive before Commissioner Raja’s driver turned off the engine.

“Then why did Komal run away?” Aunty Lee demanded of Commissioner Raja before the commissioner had fully gotten himself out of the car. “She must have had something to do with it even if they didn’t leave together. The girl didn’t know anybody in Singapore. When they tried to give her Sundays off, she didn’t want them because she had nowhere to go. Don’t worry, they were not taking advantage of her. They were giving her thirty dollars for every Sunday she stayed in the house, even when there was no work for her to do. But if she didn’t know anybody here and didn’t want to go out on Sundays, why did she suddenly pack up and run away? How could she pack up and run away without a trace?”

“They knew her better than anyone else. If they say she ran away . . .” Commissioner Raja shrugged. He knew some maids had very good reasons for running away from their employers. Right now he didn’t want to go into why the Peterses were so certain Komal had run away from them. They were friends and they were good people, but they were also under extreme stress. Without admitting what he thought, even to himself, he hoped they would make it up to the girl when she came back safely.

“How are they taking it up there? What do they think happened?”

“They think someone attacked Marianne en route to join her friends. They blame her friends for not raising the alarm sooner.”

“Is that the official view?”

Commissioner Raja shrugged again. It was not that he did not trust Aunty Lee, just that there was no such thing as an official view, only the official report. And the official report had not been issued yet.

“If that was the case, why did Komal disappear? And did she take her things? Did she take any other things with her?”

“I don’t think the Peterses are in any state to notice what the girl took. They didn’t mention anything missing.”

“Sometimes these little girls are afraid of talking to the police,” Aunty Lee said absentmindedly. “Nothing at all to do with your people here, of course, but you don’t know what it might be like where they come from. I’ve asked Nina to see what she can find out for me.”

“I thought you might,” Commissioner Raja said. “But you realize, of course, that anything she says . . .”

Aunty Lee managed to smile and look grim at the same time. “She is also a poor young girl. I just want to make sure she is not also dead somewhere in the sea because that is where girls seem to be showing up these days. Anyway, I have to get to my shop. You can give me a lift out. Your suspects are all coming to eat at my place. Do you want to come in for a drink?”

“Be careful,” Commissioner Raja said. “Something funny is going on.”

“Exactly,” Aunty Lee said. “That’s why I need help from you and that nice man Salim.”

“You need our help?”

“Sometimes a bit of uniform and authority is enough to make people behave. If not, it is always good to have a strong man around.”

12

At the Café

Aunty Lee was not just
kaypoh
. She was driven by a compulsion to know that was as strong or stronger than hunger.

“So I thought, since you have to stay in Singapore longer than you expected, why not come and eat at my place?” Aunty Lee had suggested as though it had just occurred to her, and she had picked up the phone to call her prospective guests immediately. “At my café, I mean. I’m closing it to customers temporarily, so it will be my treat, of course. If you miss your food from back home, I am sure I can come up with something.”

Frank Cunningham, who had taken the call, relayed Aunty Lee’s invitation to his wife. The Cunninghams looked at each other. Though they were not hard up by any stretch of the imagination, this extended stay in the island city had thrown their travel budget off balance. New travel and hotel arrangements could be made, of course, but though the Raffles was a most understanding and accommodating hotel, it was not cheap. And their current frame of mind was far from adventurous. When Aunty Lee’s invitation came, they had been living almost completely on familiar and easily available fast foods.

Lucy gestured to her husband to cover the mouthpiece of the phone before saying, “Why not?”

“What does she want from us? There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”

“What does it matter? We have nothing to hide. Besides, it’s like the birds of the field, neither sowing nor reaping, but the Lord provides.”

“Nothing like free food, eh?” Harry Sullivan said to no one in particular as he watched the Cunninghams come into Aunty Lee’s Delights. The couple did not laugh.

“We’ll pay you what it’s worth,” Frank said to Aunty Lee. “Though seeing you’ve closed your shop, you wouldn’t be wanting to charge us your regular rates.”

“The police got you to close down, did they?” Harry asked. “We can’t leave the country and you can’t run your business.” He seemed genuinely concerned. “That’s not very fair to you, is it? It’s not just a matter of what you would be taking in today, this week, and so on. It’s what your customers are going to think. And the chaps who turn up and think you’re closed for good.”

“We just don’t really know where else to go. There are stalls, of course, but we don’t know how clean everything is—it’s Asia after all. And we were supposed to get our yellow fever vaccinations before coming out, but we never did,” Lucy worried. “Of course, we would like to pay you—please let us.”

They were looking less and less like a well-traveled tourist couple out to see the world.

“Don’t be silly,” Aunty Lee said in the manner of a motherly old lady. “I like having you people around. No, the police didn’t tell us to shut down. With everything that’s been going on, I didn’t want people coming in here out of curiosity, if you know what I mean—”

It was clear that the others—Lucy Cunningham at least—knew what she meant. “It’s so dreadful, isn’t it? We’ve never been mixed up in anything like this before. Now every time I leave our room, I can feel people looking at us, wondering whether we had anything to do with the murders.”

“I told you that’s ridiculous,” Frank said with a trace of impatience. “You’re imagining things. Nobody even knows who we are.”

“Our names were in the papers—they’ll recognize them from the register. And even if the hotel people don’t, he will . . . We should have left as soon as we found out that Laura Kwee wasn’t here!”

Genteelly helping the distraught Lucy to some slices of fried cold cuts (luncheon meat barely qualified as food in Aunty Lee’s book, but she had guessed correctly that cold cuts and bottled ketchup represented comfort food to her guests), Aunty Lee pounced. She had been waiting for this.

“Poor Laura Kwee. So sad. Did you know her well?”

“Oh, we never met her. She sent us an e-mail, didn’t she, Frank? That’s how we got to know her. We were going to meet her for the first time that night, that terrible night, but of course she never showed up—”

“Lucy!” Frank’s voice was low but absolute in its command to silence.

His wife, startled, stared at him. Then, with the advantage a long marriage brings to the least discerning, she saw what he was thinking. “No. You can’t think so. He wouldn’t have—you can’t say that. You can’t even think that!”

“He’s not the only one mixed up in the business now.”

Though this exchange told Aunty Lee nothing, apparently it was enough for Lucy Cunningham. All Aunty Lee could gather was that the Cunninghams had indeed been invited by Laura Kwee for more reasons than to sample Aunty Lee’s good food, but she was not offended. She was determined to find out what those reasons were.

“And you, Mr. Sullivan. You also had an appointment to meet with Laura Kwee here in my shop?”

This made both Cunninghams turn to study Harry Sullivan with great interest. Though perhaps they were still trying to figure out why he looked familiar.

“Hey, no fair. You’re supposed to call me Harry, remember? This ‘Mr. Sullivan’ business makes me feel like I should be in a suit and tie! And no. It was her friend Selina I ran into first. We had a common interest in wine and she told me about this project of her husband’s. And I thought, why not? I could do with a couple of good meals in good company. Pity about those poor girls. Wish I’d had a chance to get to know them better.”