Aunty Lee's Delights (24 page)

“I put him in his old car. Car was as dead as he was. Useless. All useless—the old man, the old car, that falling-apart old shack he called a house. At least I was giving him a burial at sea, so to speak.”

“And then you helped yourself to his things. His name, his papers, his pension . . .”

“Old fart wasn’t going to need them where he was headed, was he? Besides, there were no other relations left for him to leave anything to. If there were, they would have been my relatives too, wouldn’t they? They’d have some obligation to keep an eye out for a relative in desperate need, wouldn’t they? But, oh no. Nobody qualified as a relative, I tell you! I wouldn’t have them if they held a gun to my head!”

Aunty Lee nodded as though this made perfect sense to her. “We can’t choose our relatives,” she agreed. She poured out more tea for them both. Her hand seemed quite steady. Harry wondered whether too much tea would dilute the effects.

“You didn’t mean to kill Marianne Peters either, did you?”

“I didn’t kill Marianne! You see, I knew that’s what people like you would think. Everything’s my fault. Let’s pick on someone to blame, someone who nobody is ever going to listen to or believe. We’ll put the blame on him and string him up for it, why not. Why bother to find out what really happened? Who cares what really happened! I knew it. I knew that’s how it was going to come down.”

“Did you know poor Marianne had epilepsy?” Aunty Lee said. “Not many people knew. She looked so normal, didn’t she? And then when she had a seizure—” Aunty Lee closed her eyes and shuddered slightly, as though at a horrible memory.

“Exactly!” He thumped the table, knocking his teacup over. “She was rolling her eyes and shaking. It was like something out of
The Exorcist
. Scared me shitless. I tried to get her to stop. Tried splashing her with water—like for shock, but she wouldn’t stop.”

“Did you call for an ambulance?”

“I thought I’d wait. Just see whether she stopped on her own, you know. I thought she would. But when I went back—well, she was already dead, so there was no point.”

“You left her alone? For how long?”

“You know for how long.” He was getting tired. All these women were so stupid. “I came for the wine dining that night, remember? That was the night Miss Laura decided to surprise us all with her bloody cupcakes after the dinner. If it hadn’t been for her, I would have got back to Marianne earlier. I might have been able to do something to help her, the poor girl. It’s all that stupid slut bitch’s fault that Marianne died. The way she was going on and on about her cupcakes as a bloody art form. If you’re looking for someone to blame for what happened to poor Marianne, you put the blame on that one!”

“Only it’s no use blaming Laura Kwee now, is it?” Aunty Lee stood up, pushing her chair away from the table.

He looked at her blearily. There was something wrong but his sluggish brain could not pinpoint what it was. His body was quite comfortable where it was—though it would have felt good to lie down. Or he could put his head down on the table and nap right there like Selina was doing. The tea-wet surface of the table suddenly looked very inviting.

“Feeling tired?”

“Yeah. Don’t you?” He knew the old woman should have been the one lying unconscious on the floor, but she was still pottering around. Once she fell asleep, he would find Laura Kwee’s laptop and get himself out of there for good.

“It’s the tea,” Aunty Lee said from a great distance. “If you drink the right tea, it gives you energy.”

He looked at his spilled tea. It had pooled on the table in an oval shape without trickling off. The tabletop was perfectly level. It looked like something one of those modern artists would put up as a work of art. Normally he would have snorted at the thought, but suddenly, as he looked at the clear, thin golden-brown liquid, it looked beautiful to him. And he was awfully sleepy.

“Why did you kill Laura Kwee?” Aunty Lee asked him sharply.

He had to search his brain to remember who she was talking about.

“She was a bitch.”

Aunty Lee nodded agreeably. She had brought a bowl and a round, wooden chopping board back to the table. “Perhaps. But why did you kill her?”

“It’s none of your fucking business.” He would go to sleep for a while, he decided. Then, when he woke up, he would kill this old woman who was standing in front of him taking things out of her bowl and putting them onto the chopping board. He told her so. “Because she’s just like you. Fucking busybody bitches. What are you doing?”

“Pig’s foot,” Aunty Lee said sweetly. “You want to know what human beings taste like, all you have to do is eat pork.” She lifted a chopper and expertly whacked the long, pale-skinned leg. “Very sweet. You and the pig are both red meat. Your muscles about the same size. You eat your junk food, the pig eats what is left over from making your junk food, so same taste, same texture, only difference is your meat is juicier.”

He stared at her blearily, trying to work out what she was saying.

Aunty Lee brought her chopper down and cleanly dismembered a section of the pig’s foot. “I tell you, most people cannot tell the difference whether they are eating pig meat or human meat—” She peered at the meat through her spectacles, poked at something, then reached for an enormous pair of tweezers. “Nina is supposed to pull out all the hair for me first. But sometimes they are extra hairy—like you. Look at your hands!”

“Nothing wrong with my hands.” He stretched out his hands and looked at his good strong fingers with their curly ginger hair.

“Do you know how long it would take me to get all that hair off your fingers?” The thwack of Aunty Lee’s chopper startled him. “Same like people’s hands, you see—”
Thwack
. “If you chop at the right place, you can cut up the fingers clean through. No chips. People don’t like to bite into bits of bone. But very hard to teach people to chop nowadays. Hard to get fresh meat to practice on—”

He curled his fingers protectively in his palms as Aunty Lee thwacked again.

“Why did you kill Laura Kwee?” she asked again, holding up the chopper.

“You’re mad,” he said. He tried to get up, but his legs seemed strangely detached from the rest of his body.

“You don’t need to be very strong. You don’t even need a very sharp knife as long as you know where to chop.”

“She’s the one that was coming after me,” he whined. “I didn’t want to have anything to do with her.”

Aunty Lee came around the table and moved toward him, nonchalantly hefting her chopper. She picked up one of his limp hands and shook it as he watched helplessly.

“Really? What happened?”

“She was trying to blackmail me. She was saying how she saw me and Marianne together, how well we got along. She kept asking if Marianne told me where she was going. I know her type. She was trying to scare me out of everything I had, then after that, she would have sold me out. I know her type! I was only trying to stop her, that’s all. It was self-defense!” He could barely speak, but what was left of his conscious brain told him to say whatever he had to in order to get this madwoman away from him.

Just then, SSS Salim, Nina, and Carla Saito appeared from the inner pantry, Nina flying to Aunty Lee’s side so fast that Aunty Lee almost did not notice the quick, grateful look she gave the police officer. “Ma’am! Can already!”

“Did you get it?” Aunty Lee asked. “Can you use it as evidence? Can you make copies?”

“I can but I won’t,” Carla Saito said. “I’ve already put it on YouTube. The police can get it from there.”

“She insisted on coming,” SSS Salim explained. “Are you all right, Mrs. Lee?”

“I’m not all right!” Harry Sullivan moaned. “She put something in my tea, she drugged me. I could be dying—do something!”

“What did you put in his tea?” SSS Salim asked Aunty Lee.

Aunty Lee shook her head in innocent wonder. “Tea—
pu erh
—but I added some licorice bark and some fennel seeds and some dragon-eye berries . . . I know it’s an unusal combination, but he was looking a bit under stress and I was feeling sleepy myself, so I thought—”

“She’s lying!” the man wailed wetly. “Make her tell you what she put in my tea!”

“I may have accidentally switched our cups,” Aunty Lee said steadily. “Maybe you should ask him what he put into my cup?”

Harry Sullivan moaned.

“I didn’t mean to,” Harry Sullivan said. “It was all a terrible accident, a terrible mistake. I’m not a murderer.”

“So you accidentally tried to put poison in my tea?” Aunty Lee said, as though trying to understand his point of view. “Luckily my tea counteracts the effects. You should be grateful you did not get as big a dose as you gave those poor girls. You drugged them like you drugged Selina, didn’t you? Laura Kwee wasn’t drunk that night. She was sitting next to you, you slipped something into her cup.”

Harry Sullivan stared blearily at Carla Saito. “If you hadn’t come to Singapore, everything would have been fine.”

“Here. Make him drink this.”

“What is it?” Salim hesitated.

“Mustard and water. He’ll get over the effects faster. And hold him over that basin. It’s all going to come up. Better now than later. Did you call your people to come and collect him yet?”

“On their way.”

“Good,” Aunty Lee said, then to Harry, “Drink up, then. Better get it out of your system now rather than in the police car.”

Aunty Lee went on with her chopping and tweezing as Harry Sullivan purged himself.

Harry Sullivan tried to bluster. “She was threatening me. I have my rights. I want my lawyer. You can’t hold me. I thought I was dying. Of course I said whatever she wanted!”

This last was directed at SSS Salim, who only looked at him curiously before asking Aunty Lee, “What about Mrs. Selina Lee?”

“I think we’ll let her sleep it off.”

“According to his documents, Harry Sullivan would be eighty years old now. Immigration didn’t notice. They must have just glanced at the younger Harry, at the photo. Probably assumed it was a bad photo and didn’t bother noticing the age.” Anyway, age was so difficult to tell with Caucasians. They liked to sit in the sun and make their skin look older.

“I believe he didn’t mean to kill Marianne. He took her over to Sentosa to see the cabin he booked. I suppose that’s the cabin you told her you would let her have for a week or two. Only she didn’t want to stay in it with you, did she?”

“I was only trying to help her,” Harry Sullivan said. “Look, Officer, man-to-man, you can see that. I was trying to give her a chance, help her change. Even her family would have seen it would be good for her to be with a real man.”

“Let me kill him.” Carla Saito started toward him. “You can hang me after. It’ll be worth it—”

“And Laura Kwee?” Aunty Lee asked calmly.

“Laura Kwee—she knew about Sentosa. She kept going on about the Sentosa cabin, how ‘fun’ it must be, how she just wanted to see it. In the end I just brought her over and gave her what she wanted.”

“Laura was flirting with you, you know. That’s how she flirted. She just wasn’t very good at it.”

Aunty Lee finished chopping her pig’s foot with a last satisfying thwack. “Fingers,” she said. “If you slice through the joints, no chips.”

Salim would not be the only one not eating pork for a while.

18

Aunty Lee’s Wrap-up

One of Aunty Lee’s Delights’ greatest catering successes was the commitment celebration of Otto Thio and Joseph Cunningham on the Sentosa beachfront not far from where everything began. As Aunty Lee always said, you can’t cut out bad memories without removing part of your heart, but you can always create good memories to override them.

Harry Sullivan—or Sam Ekkers, as he was really named—was charged in Singapore with the murders of Marianne Peters and Laura Kwee. This triggered an extradition stalemate because according to the records, Sam Ekkers had never entered Singapore, Harry Sullivan was dead in Australia, and these nations held different views on the death penalty.

But as far as Aunty Lee was concerned, the case was over. The man would not be hurting any more women. She went to watch
The Bodies on Sentosa,
a local musical based on the events of the case and written by Joe Cunningham’s husband, Otto, which opened at the Esplanade Theater. The show was a great success, but it was overshadowed (in Aunty Lee’s opinion) by the incredible food at the show’s opening night party—catered by Aunty Lee’s Delights.

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to the wonderful people at William Morrow: associate publisher and marketing director Jen Hart, creative director Mary Schuck (who created the lovely jacket), marketing coordinator Alaina Waagner, production editor Joyce Wong, publicist Joanne Minutillo, international sales directors Samantha Hagerbaumer and Christine Swedowsky, and especially to my editor Rachel Kahan and assistant editor Trish Daly. Big thanks also to Jayapriya Vasudevan, Priya Doraswamy, and Helen Mangham, my cheerleaders/coaches/agents from Books@Jacaranda.

With them doing the real work, I had fun writing and any faults in the book are mine alone.