THE GIRL IN THE WINDOW (The Inspector Samuel Tay Novels Book 4) (21 page)

“Yes, sir, I will call if I hear from Mr. Wang. You can count on me, sir.”

“If you do not call, I will come back here and arrest you and you will go to prison for the rest of your life. Do you understand?”

The clerk increased the velocity of his nodding to the point that Lee thought his head might pop off his neck. She turned around and pushed out through the lobby doors before she laughed out loud. Tay pointed his index finger at the clerk and followed. As the door swung closed, they could hear the clerk frantically promising them undying cooperation.

“Oh yes, sir, I will call. You can be certain of that, sir. I will not let you down. I am a most reliable man who is loyal to our country and I know that—”

When the closing door finally cut the clerk off, Tay allowed himself a small smile. Sometimes it was good to be a policeman in Singapore.

The Woodlands HDB estate is almost all the way out to the narrow Straits of Johor that separates Singapore from Malaysia. Lee drove and Tay sat looking out the window. It took less than an hour to drive to the Woodlands from the part of Singapore in which he lived, but as far as he was concerned they might as well have been traveling to another planet.

Singaporeans had a particular expression for those parts of their tiny island state that, like the Woodlands, were far removed from the tourist and financial districts most of the world thought of when they thought of Singapore. It was called the heartland, and that was an expression Tay loathed. He thought it was sad to have to come up with a meaningless platitude to make people feel better about places that were cheerless and sometimes even downright creepy.

A government agency called the Housing Development Board had been relentlessly throwing up pre-packaged villages all over Singapore for as long as Tay could remember. Now something like eighty percent of the country’s population lived in government-built housing. Every one of the HDB estates looked more or less the same. They were immaculate, of course. Since this was Singapore, the buildings were all in good repair, the walls were all freshly painted, and the landscaping was in perfect order thanks to an army of Indian and Bangladeshi workers permitted into the country on short-term work visas to do the manual labor Singaporeans wouldn’t do.

No matter how hard the bureaucrats worked to dress up the HDB estates, however, they still amounted to nothing more than clumps of nearly identical apartment towers pushed together around some community facilities. Every estate had a mosque, a Chinese temple, a Christian church, a community club, a coffee shop, a mini-mart, and a school. What the estates did not have was the feeling that any real, actual life was lived in them. They were not places where the daily stuff of bona fide human existence thrived. The make-believe villages of the heartland had nearly everything, Tay thought, except a heart. He hated them.

The dreary monotony of the Woodlands HDB estate even extended to its street names. Sergeant Lee turned off Woodlands Avenue at a Shell Station and followed Woodlands Street to Woodlands Drive.

They passed building after building, each about a dozen stories tall and all absolutely identical in color and design. In what Tay assumed was a desperate effort to introduce some degree of novelty, the balconies of the buildings had been painted in varying shades of gray, yellow, and green, but if the idea behind either the colors or the apparent randomness of their distribution was to make the buildings appear more cheerful, the effort had been an abysmal failure. There was nothing cheerful about the relentless ranks of buildings that lined both sides of the road.

When they passed Woodlands Circle, Tay pointed into the cul-de-sac. “Robbie and I had a case down there once.”

Lee didn’t know what Tay was talking about, but she nodded politely.

Once he had brought up the subject, Tay wished he hadn’t.

“It wasn’t important, Sergeant,” Tay muttered. “Never mind.”

Even now it was difficult for him to think about that case. When he and Kang had entered the apartment and found the body of a man stretched out on the floor, almost immediately Tay had been seized by a conviction he was somehow connected to the man. He had never met him, he was certain of that, but the sense of some link was overwhelming.

Finding that man’s body eventually spun Tay off on a journey of memory that had led him all the way back to a father who had died almost forty years before, a father Tay hardly remembered. It was not a trip he wanted to make again. Ever.

LEE PULLED UP to the curb in front of a building exactly like all the other buildings in the Woodlands HDB estate. Ten stories tall, it had about a dozen apartments on each floor, every single one with the same number of windows and an identical narrow balcony. The only visual distinction Tay detected was the variety of junk each resident had piled on his balcony.

The whole area was as deserted as if it had been abandoned. A few cars and motorcycles were parked on the street, but there was no sign of human activity anywhere. No music on the breeze, no conversation in the distance, no flashes of movement. The place was as barren and sterile as anywhere Tay ever remembered being. If it hadn’t been for the laundry drying on some of the metal poles that extended out from each balcony, Tay would have wondered if anyone lived here at all.

“Mr. Wang is in 504, sir.”

Tay’s eyes flicked up five stories. He scanned the apartments on that level and saw absolutely nothing interesting, so he just nodded and got out of the car.

When the elevator opened on the fifth floor, they stepped out into a corridor with a white tiled floor, freshly painted off-white walls, and six black metal doors on each side. There was a faint smell of accumulated cooking odors and something else Tay thought might be urine. He hoped it was from dogs and cats.

They walked down the corridor checking the numbers painted on the doors until they found 504. Lee looked at Tay and raised her eyebrows in the obvious question. Tay nodded.

“Police!” Lee called out. She knocked on the door with her knuckles and the metallic rapping sound echoed in the quiet hallway. “Police!”

No response. After a polite interval, Lee knocked again. Still no response and no sign of life from any of the other apartments on the corridor. Tay reached out and jiggled the doorknob, but it didn’t turn.

“I could probably open it, sir. It looks like a simple pin tumbler.”

“You know how to pick locks, Sergeant?”

“I have no idea how to pick locks, sir.” Lee took out her police warrant card, a laminated card about twice the size of a credit card and a little thinner. “But this works more often than you might think.”

Bending over until her eyes were level with the doorknob, Lee slid her warrant card between the door and the jamb and moved it down until she felt the edge of the bolt. She pushed on the door with her left hand, jiggled the card a little further down, and bent it to the left until it almost touched the doorknob. Maintaining her pressure on the door, Lee suddenly bent the card back in the opposite direction and pushed it hard into the jamb. The bolt snapped back and the door swung open.

“It’s that easy?” Tay asked.

“Not always, sir, but usually.”

Tay just shook his head. He wouldn’t have believed that if he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes.

The smell came to them the moment they opened the door. Neither Tay nor Lee had any doubt what they would find somewhere inside.

Dead bodies have an unmistakable odor, a sickly sweet stench with stomach-churning undertones that always made Tay think of spoiled cheese. The odor comes from the urine and feces released by the relaxation of muscles at death mixed with the gases from the first stages of organic decomposition. It is a smell anyone who has encountered will remember forever. It is a smell that no homicide investigator can forget no matter how hard he tries.

“He’s in here, sir,” Lee called from the bedroom.

The body was face down on the carpet just inside the door. The corpse’s head was turned to the right and Tay could see the face clearly. He had no doubt, but he stepped to the side so Lee could get a good look as well. Lee just nodded.

It was the elderly Chinese-looking man who had been behind the desk when they rushed into the Fortuna Hotel at the sound of gunshots. Lee squatted down beside the corpse and studied the wound.

“One shot to the back of the head, sir. Looks to me like a nine.”

Three men dead from a single shot in the back of the head with a nine millimeter handgun in less than a week. Was there any chance at all that was a coincidence?

Tay didn’t want to think about his dream and the conversation he imagined having with his mother, he really didn’t, but of course it all came back to him clearly now…

“And what about the other body?”

“What other body?”

“You know, that man who…oh wait, never mind. You haven’t found that one yet.”

When Sergeant Lee got to her feet, Tay was standing and staring off into space.

“Are you okay, sir?” she asked.

Tay shook off the memory and nodded. He got down on his knees and lifted the corpse’s right arm an inch or two. The body was cold and he felt very little rigor in the elbow. The man had been dead for a while, probably two or three days. Tay lowered the arm, put his cheek against the floor, and examined the corpse’s face.

“There’s no exit wound,” he said. “The bullet must still be in him.”

“Must have been a low velocity subsonic round,” Lee said. “Heavy bullet, slow speed, no penetration. Fired through a suppressor, it wouldn’t have made much noise.”

A low velocity subsonic round? A heavy bullet fired through a suppressor? That wasn’t some robber with a cheap revolver who panicked when he was discovered.

Tay pushed himself up and stood looking down at the man lying on the floor of the dreary little apartment in the Woodlands. He was just an old guy trying to earn a living running a second-rate tourist hotel, and then somebody came into his apartment and shot him in the back of the head. Who would do that? Who would
want
to do that?

Tay could only think of one answer to that question. He tried to put it all together in some other way, but he couldn’t.

Somebody was trying to cover up the connection between ISD and Suparman. They were tying up loose ends, getting rid of anyone who knew about it. Tay didn’t have a lot of respect for ISD, but couldn’t see them as cold-blooded murderers. He simply wasn’t prepared to believe the Internal Security Department went around killing people because they knew something they didn’t want revealed. But if it wasn’t ISD tying up those loose ends, who in the world was it?

There had to be another explanation. He just had no idea what it could be.

“Should I call this in now, sir?”

Tay hesitated. Nothing good could come of their discovery of the hotel manager’s body lying on the floor of his apartment. Not for him, and certainly not for them. How would they explain to the SAC what they were doing there, or how they had gotten in?

But what else were they going to do? Just leave the guy’s body lying there and walk away?

“Maybe we should call it in anonymously,” Tay said after a moment.

“Anonymously, sir? Why?”

“To keep anyone from knowing who made the discovery, Sergeant. That’s what anonymously means.”

Tay took a couple of steps over to the window, pulled the flimsy curtain aside, and looked out. The glass was grimy and streaked with dirt, but off in the distance he could see the narrow straits that separated Singapore from the southern tip of Malaysia. Just on the other side, indistinct in the afternoon haze, loomed the buildings of Johor Bahru, the slightly shabby Malaysian city at the other end of the causeway.

What if his worst suspicions
were
true? What if ISD had killed the hotel manager and did it because he could connect ISD to Suparman? That meant ISD was willing to go to pretty much any lengths to cover up the fact that they had Suparman and were protecting him for some reason.

Any lengths?

Tay knew of only five people in the world who could link ISD to Suparman. One was the hotel manager, and he was lying dead on the floor right in front of them. The second was Suparman’s sister, but she was dead as well, run down by a truck in the middle of Serangoon Road. The third was Robbie Kang, and of course he was dead, too, presumably shot by Suparman.

That left two people, just two people, who could tie ISD directly to Suparman: Tay and Lee.

Tay didn’t like looking at it that way. He really didn’t. But that was how it was.

IT HAD STARTED to rain when they were in Robert Wang’s apartment. The rain began with a mist so light it was as if the city were being cooled by a spritz from a gigantic spray bottle, but by the time they got back to the car the rain had turned earnest and fat drops pinged against the windshield with a rhythm that reminded Tay of a song he couldn’t quite remember. He watched the raindrops collect at the top of the windshield, join into big rivulets, and streak across it.

Tay walked his memory back through the time they had spent in Wang’s apartment. He was pretty certain they left the apartment exactly as they had found it. Neither Tay nor Lee had touched anything but the body and the front doorknob and Tay had used his handkerchief to wipe the doorknob on both sides of the door. It was probably more caution than the circumstances required, but if it was wasted effort it wasn’t much effort to waste.

“This isn’t right, sir.”

“No, it isn’t, Sergeant, but we’re going to do it anyway.”

“We should call it in, sir. We just left that poor man lying there.”

“I doubt he cares much one way or the other.”

“You know what I mean, sir. For God’s sake, we’re the police. We can’t just ignore a dead body.”

“We’re not going to ignore it. Tomorrow you will find a pay phone and report it. You’re just not going to tell anybody who you are.”

Lee looked away and shook her head, but she didn’t say anything.

“Look, Linda, don’t you see what’s going on here?”