THE GIRL IN THE WINDOW (The Inspector Samuel Tay Novels Book 4) (23 page)

“What did I fuck up?”

“The meeting between Suparman and his sister, if she
was
his sister, and I’ve got to tell you I’m not absolutely sure about that.”

“You don’t believe the woman was really his sister?”

“I sure as hell don’t think she was sick. That was just a horseshit story somebody dreamed up. And if she wasn’t sick, she may not have been his sister either.”

“You’re losing me, Goh.”

“I don’t think so. I’d bet both of those things have already occurred to you.”

Tay said nothing.

“Here’s what I’m trying to tell you. Somebody in Singapore is protecting Suparman. Suparman thought his sister was really sick and he demanded his protectors arrange for him to see her. Some genius decided the best way to hide their meeting was to tell all of us it was going to occur, but point us to the wrong place. Then the sister would slip away and go to a different place to meet Suparman. That way, if you ever need them, you’ve got a list of witnesses as long as your arm swearing they never met.”

“Who’s protecting Suparman?”

“There are people in ISD who know it’s happening, but not many. Most of us don’t have a clue. It goes higher than that.”

“Higher than ISD?”

Goh said nothing.

“Higher than the Minister of Home Affairs?”

“You’re not going to get me to say any more than I have, Tay. Use your imagination.”

Although the Minister of Home Affairs presumably supervised ISD, it was widely assumed in many quarters that the director of ISD actually answered only to the Prime Minister. If that were the case, no wonder Goh didn’t want to say any more.

“I still don’t understand what you’re telling me here, Goh. Why in God’s name would anybody here in Singapore be protecting Suparman?”

Goh tilted his head back and took a couple of deep breaths.

“Let’s say that somewhere in ISD somebody started running Suparman as an asset—"

“Can we drop the spy movie bullshit, Goh? What does that actually
mean
?”

“It means Suparman was feeding information to ISD on Muslim radicals in Malaysia and Indonesia, giving them warnings of impending attacks. At least they thought he was. Can I go on now?”

Tay nodded.

“And let’s also say they started doing it well back before the Bali bombings, and finally let’s say what they were doing was cleared at the high level of government. So all those folks are sitting behind their big desks in their big offices and Bali gets hit and other places get hit and they slowly start to realize that their prize asset may be shoving one up their ass. So somebody goes out and has a heart to heart with Suparman and he tells them,
not me, brother, you’ve got this all wrong
. And they decide to believe him.”

“And the somebody who believed him was high up in ISD.”

“Very high up.”

“And he cleared his decision to believe Suparman all the way to the top.”

“I have no doubt a decision like that would have been discussed at the highest levels of government.”

Tay nodded. “Go on.”

“So they keep running Suparman and, because he’s been linked to all of these big events and because he feeds them just enough about each one to make them believe him, ISD keeps telling these high levels of government they’ve got a prize asset on the inside and he’s giving them the good stuff. No matter what happens, they keep saying that. If they ever admit they’ve been burned, half the people at the top of ISD will go down and take some of the people above them down, too.”

“So they protect Suparman no matter what he does, and they keep hoping the intelligence they get will be worth more in the end than the damage he does.”

“See, Tay, you’ve figured it out already. I knew you were a smart guy.”

Tay thought back to the ISD men he had seen at the Fortuna hotel. Even then, they looked to him like close protection, which would make sense if what Goh was telling him now was true. But then who was the woman who had apparently shot Suparman? And how was the guy from the Australian High Commission involved?

Tay felt like he had been asked to assemble a giant jigsaw puzzle with a thousand little pieces, but someone had thrown the box away and he had no idea what it was supposed to look like. He could have been trying to put together a picture of the Eiffel Tower or one of a pot of petunias.

“Why are you telling me all this, Goh?”

“Because this is fucked up and it’s got to be stopped. I hate to admit it, Tay, but you have a better chance to stop it now than I do.”

“How am I supposed to do that?”

“I have a lot of confidence in you, Tay. Now that you know your sergeant died because a bunch of bureaucrats are trying to cover their ass, you’ll figure it out. There’s just one other thing.”

Tay looked at Goh and waited.

“Be careful, man. They’re in so deep now they won’t hesitate if they think you’re getting too close. They will drop you without a second thought. You have to find a way to get to Suparman before they see you coming.”

“And what am I supposed to do if I do get to him?”

“You’ll have to decide that for yourself, Tay. I don’t have any doubt what I would do, but then you’re not me.” Goh scratched at his neck and looked away. “You see what I’m getting at here?”

Tay saw what Goh was getting at all right, but he didn’t see what use there was in acknowledging it. So he didn’t.

“I’ve got something else to ask you,” Tay said instead. “Is it possible ISD had the Fortuna Hotel under surveillance?”

Goh looked exasperated. “Haven’t you been paying attention to anything I said, Tay? I’m telling you the people there with Suparman were protecting him, and they were ISD.”

“I don’t mean them. I mean somebody else. Somebody watching the hotel from another building.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“There was a woman in a building across the street. She was watching the Fortuna Hotel when all this happened.”

“Across the street?”

Tay nodded.

“Did she make contact with the ISD team covering Suparman?”

“Not that I saw.”

“Or the so-called sister?”

Tay shook his head.

“Fucking hell,” Goh laughed, shaking his head. “You mean somebody
else
is involved in this thing, too?”

“Then you’re saying she wasn’t yours?”

“She sure as hell wasn’t mine, and it doesn’t sound to me like she was anybody else’s at ISD either. I don’t see why anybody at ISD would want a witness when they had just gone to such elaborate lengths to get rid of all the witnesses.”

“Then who was she? Who else could have possibly known something was going down at that hotel?”

Goh chuckled. “It sounds to me, Tay, like you’ve got yourself another player somewhere out there.”

“Any ideas?”

“Nope. This just gets better and better, doesn’t it?”

Tay shook out a cigarette and lit it. Goh didn’t seem to be in any hurry to leave, but he didn’t say anything else either.

Tay smoked quietly for a while, then asked, “Is that it, Goh?”

“That’s it.”

“You’re not going to give me anything else to go on?”

“I
got
nothing else for you to go on.”

Tay thought about that briefly, and then he stood up and nodded at Goh. He turned and strolled away up the bricked pathway. He didn’t say anything, and he didn’t look back.

When he got out to Hill Street, he flicked away his cigarette butt and started looking for a taxi.

THE NEXT MORNING Tay drank far too much coffee and ate a couple of pieces of toast while standing over the sink to keep the crumbs from falling on the floor. After that, he walked through Preranakan Place to Orchard Road and got in the first taxi he saw.

“The Fortuna Hotel,” he said to the driver.

“On Serangoon Road?”

Tay nodded and the driver started the meter.

He was missing something. He was sure of that now. And whatever he was missing was important. He was sure of that as well.

He needed to go back over everything and think it all through from the beginning. That was why he was doing this alone. Thinking, he had learned long ago, was always best done alone.

Tay got out of the taxi across the street from the Fortuna Hotel and stood there looking around. The vegetarian restaurant from which he and Kang and Lee had watched the hotel was closed. A steel shutter had been pulled across the front and secured on both sides by heavy padlocks attached to U-bolts sunk into the concrete walls of the building. He went into a few of the neighboring businesses, but his inquiries as to why the vegetarian restaurant was closed were answered with shrugs that varied only in their intensity. After ten minutes, he was back on the sidewalk and no wiser than he had been before.

Was it just a coincidence that the restaurant was closed, or was that too somehow connected with the events of the week before at the Fortuna Hotel? He couldn’t see the connection, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t one.

Tay leaned back against the metal shutter, folded his arms, and contemplated the Fortuna Hotel on the other side of Serangoon Road.

The traffic was heavy. Serangoon Road was a major traffic artery and now that artery was in full thrombosis, clogged with so many trucks, buses, and passenger cars Tay could barely see across it. It was well after rush hour, but these days the city seemed to be jammed with traffic regardless of the hour. He wondered if he drove around at three o’clock in the morning whether the traffic might be lighter. It probably would be, but he wasn’t going to drive around at three o’clock in the morning just to find out.

The older Tay got, the less pleasant he found many things. He knew most people would dismiss such thoughts as nothing but evidence of a man growing crotchety in his old age, but that was unfair. It wasn’t him. The world really
was
less pleasant than it used it be.

Tay’s eyes roamed over the scene. He tried to see it as it was the evening they had watched the hotel from the vegetarian restaurant. He picked out the spot near the intersection with Owen Road where Kang first noticed the two men sitting in the dirty white Toyota. He pictured the silver blue Hi-Lux van, unmarked and without windows, pulling up behind the Toyota and the three men getting out. He pictured the two men from the Toyota going into the hotel, then the other men getting back in the van and rolling up to the entry before getting out again with the fourth man and going into the hotel, too. But none of that told him anything he didn’t already know.

So Tay started over at the beginning and worked his way methodically through each of the events again, trying to recall exactly what each of them had said at the time. And this time he added in the piece of the puzzle about which he had the least understanding.

“Now who the hell is that?”

Tay glanced at Kang to see what he was talking about. Kang pointed at the apartment building across Owen Road from the hotel.

“Third floor, sir. The corner window.”

Tay counted up to the third floor and his eyes found the corner of the building where Owen Road and Serangoon Road met.

“Do you see her, sir? The girl in the window?”

Tay did see her. She was standing close to the glass and appeared to be watching the same men he and Kang were watching.

“If those men are ISD,” Kang said, “who is the girl watching them? She’s not one of ours, is she?”

Tay shook his head.

“Okay, so we’re CID and she’s not ours, and they’re ISD and she not theirs since she’s watching them. So who is she?”

It was a good question. A very good question. Tay had no answer for it so he said nothing.

The entrance to the building was unlocked. The double glass doors were scratched and pitted and they opened into a small and dreary lobby with a black-and-white tiled linoleum floor and several dozen black metal mailboxes on the wall opposite a staircase.

There was no elevator so Tay trudged up the stairs to the third floor. By the time he passed the second floor, he was already short of breath. He kept telling himself he had to get some exercise, maybe lose a little weight, but it was only at times like this he really thought about it seriously. Was fifty too old to start exercising? It probably was. Diet and exercise programs were meant mostly for young people, weren’t they? Maybe he ought to just stop walking up staircases instead.

The third floor hallway was floored in the same black-and-white linoleum as the lobby. The walls had once been white, but the paint had yellowed into a sickly looking color that caused Tay to think of things he would rather not have thought about. The lights along the middle of the ceiling were surprisingly bright and they showed every crack and chip in the walls.

Tay stood still for a moment orienting himself. The third-floor corner window in which they saw the girl had to be at the end of the hall to the left, he finally decided. The apartment door all the way at that end was whiter and cleaner than the hallway walls, but not by much. The two brass numerals screwed into it at eye level said 62. How could apartment number 62 be on the third floor? Tay had no idea. He knocked on the door and it opened almost at once.

“What you want?”

The man was short and heavy and wore baggy brown pants and an undershirt that barely stretched over his belly. He had a Chinese face framed by a few wisps of white hair and a pair of gold-rimmed glasses low on his nose. His feet were bare.

Tay held out his warrant card, but the man didn’t even glance at it.

“What you want?” he asked again.

“I’m Inspector Tay from Singapore CID.”

The man closed the door.

Tay stood there a moment feeling like an idiot. The old man had just closed the door in his face, but what could he do about it? Arrest him? Not bloody likely. He would have considered shooting him, but he had left his gun at home. He settled for pounding hard on the door with his open hand.

Once again the door opened almost immediately.

“You come to wrong place. I no call police.”

“I know you didn’t call the police. I want to ask you a few questions.”