THE GIRL IN THE WINDOW (The Inspector Samuel Tay Novels Book 4) (16 page)

“That is the dumbest story I’ve ever heard,” Tay said. “You don’t really expect me to believe that, do you?”

“That’s what happened.”

Tay shook his head and looked up at the ceiling.

Bruce Willis appeared to consider Tay’s skepticism thoughtfully for a moment.

“Look,” he said, “don’t take this the wrong way, man, but I don’t really give a fuck whether you believe me or not. I got a lot bigger problems than that to worry about right now. My boss is going to gut me for this.”

“Who’s your boss?”

Bruce Willis chuckled. “Nice try, but you’re going to have to do better than that.”

“You can count on it. I’m going to do a
lot
better than that. I’m coming for you, and I’m coming for your boss, and I’m coming for his boss’s boss. I’m going to roll up the whole mess of you for this.”

“Tough guy, huh? You don’t look so tough lying there on the floor.”

“Just be patient. You’ll see me again, and when I do you’ll be the one on the floor.”

Bruce Willis made a little clucking sound with his tongue.

“You don’t know what you’re getting into, man. Take my advice. Stay out of this. Stick to giving out traffic tickets. This is big boy stuff, and the big boys will grind you up and spit you out.”

Then Bruce Willis stepped through the door into the stairwell and let the door slam shut behind him. The sound was the exclamation point on his disdain.

The ambulance attendants burst out of the elevator a few minutes later pushing a gurney stacked with equipment cases. One of them grabbed the closest of the cases and went straight to Kang while the other one produced a knife and cut away the zip-ties binding Tay and Lee together.

“Either of you hurt?” he asked, looking from one to the other.

Lee rubbed at her wrists and shook her head.

Tay didn’t even do that. Instead he pushed himself up on his knees and looked at the man bent over Kang. The man raised his head and caught Tay’s eye. He didn’t say anything. He just gave a small shake of his head. Tay sank back against the wall and closed his eyes.

The hallway quickly filled with patrolmen from the arriving fast response cars. The patrol sergeant who had command of the scene recognized both Tay and Lee and shooed the other cops away from them.

“What happened?” he asked Lee.

“Somebody shot Robbie Kang.”

“Do you know who it was?”

She shook her head.

“Did you or the inspector see him shot?”

She shook her head again.

Tay said nothing.

The sergeant pointed at the handgun lying in the hallway. “Is that Kang’s?”

“Yes,” Lee said.

The patrol sergeant walked over to the gun, got down on his hands and knees, and smelled it without touching it.

“Sergeant Kang didn’t fire?”

“If he did, I didn’t hear it.”

The sergeant looked at Tay as if he was going to ask him what he had heard, but Tay wouldn’t meet his eyes so he looked back at Lee.

“I don’t understand,” he said. “What the hell really happened here?”

“I’m not sure I know,” Lee said.

The ambulance attendant lifted a blanket of plain white canvas out of his equipment bag and ripped away the clear plastic wrapping. He spread the blanket over Kang, then stood up and began packing his equipment away.

Tay and Lee sat without moving, their backs still against the wall. They kept their eyes fixed on Kang’s canvas-covered body. They didn’t want to, but neither one of them could take their eyes off it.

“I let him go in alone,” Lee said. “I should never have done that.”

Tay continued staring at Kang’s body. He didn’t reply.

Lee put her hand on his arm. “Are you okay?”

Tay just tilted his head back. He looked at the ceiling and said nothing at all.

TAY CLOSED HIS front door and stood wrapped in the comforting darkness of his living room. He tried to remember the last time he had been there. Was it really only this morning? Surely not.

He had been a policeman for nearly twenty-five years and for fifteen years he had been the senior investigator in the Criminal Investigation Department of the Singapore Police Force. He had seen almost a thousand homicides in his career and every single one of them had one thing in common: they had all made him sick to his stomach. In his darkest moments, Tay saw the onset of dementia as something almost inevitable when he grew old, but he also looked at that in one way as a blessing. At least then he would forget what he had seen.

He had seen people shot, people stabbed, people slashed, people beaten, people mangled, people bludgeoned, and people broken. He had even once seen a corpse that had been torn apart by a pack of Dobermans.

But there was one thing he had never seen.

He had never seen the body of a friend lying dead on the dirty carpet of a cheap hotel.

Now he had.

Robbie Kang dead in the second-floor corridor of the Fortuna Hotel.

Robbie Kang shot by…well, by whom?

Tay shook his head and flipped on the light. He walked into the kitchen and filled a glass with water from the tap. After he drained the glass, he put it in the sink, kicked off his loafers, and walked barefooted across the living room, through the French doors, and out into his little garden.

The air was hot and heavy, but the brick pavers felt chilly against his feet and the living room lights cast a pale and calming glow out through the panes of the French doors. He walked to the teak table where he drank his coffee in the mornings, pulled out one of the chairs, and sat down. Then he pulled another chair over and swung his feet up into it. He fished a pack of Marlboros and a box of matches out of the front pocket of his shirt and put them on the table next to the big glass ashtray.

Smoking wasn’t much more than a habit for most people, but for Tay it was an undertaking filled with ritualistic meaning. Each cigarette he smoked offered a few moments of escape from the indifference of a pitiless world.

Or maybe it wasn’t anything nearly that metaphysical. Maybe he just enjoyed smoking.

He did like unwrapping the pack, feeling the cellophane between his fingers, and listening to the crinkle as he rolled it between his thumb and forefinger. He loved the sudden whiff of tobacco he got when he slit the package with his thumbnail and tore back the top. It pained him that the busybodies who gloried in telling everyone how to live and what to do had stripped the simple act of smoking of all dignity. The more difficult the smug, self-righteous nannies made it for Tay to smoke, the more determined he was to continue doing it.

He would quit smoking soon. Of course he would. Everybody who smoked was going to quit smoking soon. But with all the crap he already sucked into his lungs every day just from breathing the air in Singapore, he couldn’t see any advantage to doing it right away. He sure as hell wasn’t going to do it tonight.

Tay struck a match, touched it to the cigarette, and felt the first rush of nicotine do its usual fine job of constricting his vascular system and filling body and soul with a sensation of wellbeing. He exhaled and watched as the smoke spiraled away in the darkness until it became part of the darkness, too.

What the hell had really happened at the Fortuna Hotel?

It wasn’t the first time Tay had asked himself that question, of course. He had thought of little else while the ambulance crew was taking Kang’s body away, while he gave his initial statement to the responding officers, and while he sat in the fast response car as they drove him home. He had thought of little else, but he still didn’t know how to answer that question. He knew he would be expected to answer it as well as other questions people would ask tomorrow and the day after and for many days to come, but he had no idea what he was going to say to any of them.

Did Suparman kill Robbie Kang? Somebody had. And as much as Tay wanted to blame ISD, that didn’t make sense to him.

Robbie must have come out of the stairwell into the hotel corridor, reacted to the crowd of men there, maybe even recognized Suparman, then turned to retreat and wait for Lee to catch up. And that was when he was shot. Tay couldn’t accept the ISD men he saw there in that second floor hallway at the Fortuna Hotel had coolly shot a CID sergeant in the back of the head when he was turning away.

God help him, but he believed Bruce Willis when he said Suparman killed Robbie. He believed him because of the process of elimination if nothing else. There was no one in that corridor but ISD people and Suparman. If ISD hadn’t shot Robbie, who else could it have been
but
Suparman?

Then who shot Suparman? Bruce Willis claimed it was Suparman’s sister. That was also hard to believe, but again that was where the process of elimination took Tay. No one else was present but ISD men and Suparman’s sister. Either ISD shot him, which made no sense at all, or his sister had. Unless, of course, the woman wasn’t really Suparman’s sister at all.

There was another thing about the whole scene that bewildered Tay. He had gotten a sense during those few minutes in the upstairs corridor at the Fortuna Hotel that Suparman wasn’t in the custody of ISD at all, but rather that he was somehow under the protection of ISD, which is also what Bruce Willis had told him, more or less.

But how could that be? ISD set an elaborate trap at the Temple Street Inn to lure Suparman out of hiding. If ISD already had Suparman, what was the point of that? And if ISD did have him, why would they be treating him like an important figure for whom they were providing security rather than one of the world’s most hunted terrorists?

Tay got up and went in to the kitchen. He poured two fingers of Powers Irish whiskey into a heavy cut-glass tumbler, hesitated for a moment and added a bit more. Then he took his drink back out into the garden and lit another cigarette.

Robbie Kang had been his friend, and he didn’t have many friends. As much as it unsettled him when Kang had asked out of nowhere for him to become the godfather to his unborn child, he had also been profoundly touched. But he hadn’t told Robbie that. He hadn’t even really admitted that to himself. Thinking back on the conversation now, his failure to do either almost made him weep.

Why hadn’t he said something? All he had to do was thank Robbie for asking him and tell him he was honored by the invitation. He supposed he had been unnerved by the subject of the relationship between parents and children coming up and he simply didn’t know what to say. He had never married and had no children, so parents and children was something he knew very little about. He had parents, of course, but he hadn’t learned very much about the subject from them either.

Tay was the only child of an American-born Chinese man and a Singaporean-born Chinese woman. His father was an accountant, a careful man who insisted his family live modestly and who died of a heart attack on a business trip to Saigon in 1975. Tay’s mother had been shocked to discover she and her son had inherited a small fortune in real estate. She hadn’t even known her husband had for decades been buying properties, let alone that his investments would leave her and her son quite comfortably off for the rest of their lives.

Within a year, however, she appeared to adjust to the concept very nicely. She moved to New York and acquired what she described to Tay as a Park Avenue duplex although Tay noticed the address was on East 93
^rd
Street. When his mother married a widowed American investment banker who was a senior partner at some investment firm, Tay was at university. He hadn’t gone to New York for the wedding. He couldn’t really recall being invited, but he supposed that was beside the point. He wouldn’t have gone, he told himself, even if he had been invited.

By the time Tay graduated from university, he had chosen to his mother’s horror to make his career in police work. Looking back on his decision now, Tay couldn’t for the life of him remember why he had made it. Still, he was a brighter-than-average recruit and suitably conscientious so he rose in the department until he reached the Criminal Investigation Department. It was there that he found his calling. Many times over the years he had been offered further promotions, but he had turned them all down and that puzzled most people who knew him. Why wouldn’t someone want to advance in his chosen profession, reaching higher and higher ranks and attaining greater and greater levels of power and prestige? Wasn’t that everyone’s aspiration, no matter what his profession?

Perhaps it was for some, even most, but it was not for Tay. His refusal to accept promotion had marked him as an oddball to most of his colleagues, but he simply didn’t care. He had a reason to stay right where he was. Whether or not it made sense to other people, it made sense to him, and that was all that really mattered.

It was Tay’s great good fortune to have stumbled relatively early in his life into a profession for which he perfectly suited. Tay was in his soul an investigator, someone who solved human puzzles. He was not a leader of men and he did not wish to be. He did what he did and he did it best on his own. He was a craftsman whose greatest pride was his individual craft. At first an investigator had been his profession. Now it was who he was.

Tay felt now as if his whole life had been leading him to this particular moment. His friend, perhaps his only real friend, had been murdered. And now it was up to him to use his craft to bring his friend redress.

Was that seeking justice, or was it merely looking for revenge? The more Tay thought about, the less it seemed to him to matter. Call it what you wanted, whoever had taken Robbie Kang from his wife and unborn child—and, yes, from Tay—was going to pay for it. And Sam Tay was going to be the man who made him pay for it.

Tay finished his cigarette and stubbed it out in the ashtray. He stood up and stretched, picked up his glass, and took it back into the kitchen. He had drunk only about half the whiskey, but he didn’t want any more. He dumped the rest into the sink and rinsed out the glass.

He felt so tired. He could never remember ever feeling so tired before. All he wanted to do was sleep and crash into the depths of a blackness where no one could find him. He went upstairs, brushed his teeth, and got into to bed, and almost at once he fell into exactly the kind of sleep he wanted.