THE GIRL IN THE WINDOW (The Inspector Samuel Tay Novels Book 4) (35 page)

“I’ve got a motorcycle. That’s where I left it. You don’t think I walked here, do you?”

Claire smiled at Tay and an awkward silence followed.

Shouldn’t they at least shake hands or something, Tay wondered? No, that would feel ridiculous.

Perhaps a more personal gesture might be appropriate considering what they had just been through together. A hug, maybe? Tay knew he was overthinking this. But he overthought everything, didn’t he?

He decided he would just embarrass himself if he tried to hug Claire. He would probably embarrass her, too.

“Thanks for the backup,” he said, and left it at that. “I don’t know how this would have all come out without you.”

“I only made noise. You did all the hard stuff.”

“Tell August hello for me.”

“I will.”

“And then tell him to fuck off and stay the hell out of my life.”

Off in the distance they heard the first faint
wal-wal-wal-wal
of sirens approaching.

Claire got tired of waiting for Tay to hug her so she stepped up, put her arms around him, and gave him a hard squeeze.

“I can’t resist a heavily armed man,” she laughed.

With the Mossberg in one hand and his .38 in the other, Tay didn’t know what to do so he just stood there and let Claire hug him. He supposed the truth was he wouldn’t have known what to do whether he had been holding the weapons or not, but having them gave him a way to laugh off his discomfort.

“So long, Sam,” Claire said, stepping back.

“Goodbye, Claire.”

She turned around and walked rapidly toward the park. She didn’t look back, and Tay didn’t watch her go.

Tay found a kitchen knife inside and cut Linda loose. As he sawed at the duct tape he told her quickly what had happened. He also told her how important it was that no one know Claire had been there.

When he got most of the duct tape off, Linda started ripping at the rest and in a moment she was standing up and rubbing her wrists.

“How are you going to explain it if someone looked out of a house and saw the two of you out there together?”

“The most they could have seen was a woman carrying a shotgun. They have no way of knowing that was Claire. So for all they—”

“I get it,” Linda interrupted. “It wasn’t Claire. It was me.”

“Yes, it was, wasn’t it?”

Tay handed Linda the shotgun. “Let’s get back to the body and wait for the fast response cars.”

“I just hope I have a minute or two to enjoy knowing the son of a bitch is dead before it gets crowded around here.”

Tay and Linda leaned against the wall near Suparman’s body to wait. Linda propped the shotgun next to her, and Tay laid his .38 down at his feet. It would be a very bad idea to be holding weapons in their hands when cars full of armed police arrived.

Tay fumbled in his pockets until he found his cigarettes. He shook one from the pack and automatically offered it to Linda. When she took it, he shook out another for himself and lit both of them.

“I didn’t know you smoked,” Tay said.

“I don’t. But I figure this might be a good time to start.”

Linda coughed slightly, just once, but then she leaned her head back against the wall and the two of them stood together smoking quietly and listening to the sirens coming closer.

“Maybe I shouldn’t say this right now, sir, but I hope you’ll consider me when the time comes for a new sergeant to be assigned to you.”

“That time's not coming.”

“I thought all inspectors in CID—”

“They want me out of CID, Linda.”

“Out of CID? You, sir?”

“They’ve offered me a Deputy Superintendent’s job. They’re calling it a promotion, but it’s an administrative position that has nothing to do with CID.”

“Turn it down.”

“They say I have to take it, or I have to retire.”

Tay drew on his cigarette and exhaled a long stream of smoke.

“The time for people like me is over, Linda. This is no longer a world I understand, or one that understands me.”

Linda cleared her throat.

“I’m not sure how to say this, sir, so I’m just going to say it. You saved my life. Thank you. It took a brave man to come in there all by himself and face down Suparman.”

“I’m not a brave man.”

“How can you—”

“I came in because I’m afraid of my mother. Can you imagine what she would say if I hadn’t gotten you out of there in one piece?”

“I thought your mother passed away.”

“Yes, she did.”

Linda waited in puzzled silence for Tay to explain what he was talking about, but he said nothing else. He just stood there, smoking and listening to the sirens.

The fast response cars were coming closer. Tay and Linda both took out their warrant cards and got ready to hold them up when the first car arrived.

“Do you mind if I ask you just one more thing, sir? Before they get here?”

“No, I don’t mind.”

“It’s that woman. Who is she? I mean, who is she
really
?”

Tay finished his cigarette and 
thought about how to answer that. When he had taken the last puff, he dropped the butt on the ground and rubbed it out with the toe of his shoe.

At exactly that moment, two fast response cars turned into the top of the street. The melancholy
wal-wal-wal-wal
of their sirens sounded doleful 
to Tay, like French horns playing the last notes of an elegy. Whether it was an elegy for Suparman’s passage to the other side or one for the end of his own times, he couldn't say.

“I honestly don’t know who she is, Linda.” 
Tay raised his voice a little so she could hear him over the sirens. 
“Can we just say she's a girl I saw in a window and leave it at that?”

Then he tilted his head toward Sergeant Lee and gave her a look that was almost, but not exactly, a smile.

WHEN HIS CELL phone rang, Inspector Samuel Tay considered ignoring it. But then he always considered ignoring it and he almost never did, so he answered it just as he usually ended up doing.

The caller was a sergeant Tay didn’t know. He told Tay the Officer in Charge of the Special Investigations Section of CID wanted him to come the Singapore Marriott urgently. Tay asked what was going on. The sergeant said he didn’t know.

Oddly enough, Tay was at that moment only a few blocks from the Marriott. He was stretching his lunch hour a bit browsing in Sunny’s, a used bookstore whose cheerful disorder was almost an act of public rebellion in tidy little Singapore. Sunny’s was on the third floor of Far East Plaza only a couple of hundred yards up Scotts Road. Was that just a coincidence, Tay wondered, or was he being summoned because the OC somehow knew he was at Sunny’s? He doubted his personal habits were that well known, but in Singapore you could never be absolutely certain about a thing like that.

Tay took the steps down to street level and walked quickly up Scotts Road. As he dodged through the sidewalk crowds he tried not to think too much about where he was going. He didn’t just dislike the Marriott, he loathed the goddamned place.

The Singapore Marriott was a thirty-three story octagonal-shaped tower crowned by a gigantic Chinese-style roof that loomed over the corner of Scotts and Orchard Roads, the busiest intersection in the city. The roof was no doubt supposed to soften the building’s appearance by making it look vaguely reminiscent of a traditional Chinese pagoda. Tay thought that was ridiculous. What it really made the building look like was a giant dildo. Worse, the stupid roof was green with something right at its peak that resembled a red pom-pom. The Marriott not only looked like a giant dildo, it looked like a giant dildo wearing a green rubber with a red tip on it.

Merry fucking Christmas everybody
.

It broke his heart sometimes, this city of his. Back before the Marriott had been built, there was a traditional Chinese department store on that very same corner. It was a glorious building, each of its five floors wrapped in graceful, iron-arched galleries supported by tiled colonnades. Tay remembered the mysterious air they had cast over the structure, the way they had obscured its interior in dim shadows and enveloped it in an unnaturally soft, almost dreamlike light. Parallel lines of dark green shutters bordered every floor of the store and, as Singapore’s warm winds blew in and out of the half-open windows, the shutters clicked and clattered together with a sound that came back to him now with absolute clarity even after almost forty years.

Buildings like that were all gone, as gone as if they had never existed at all, and now the city was mostly somewhere he did not know, somewhere he had never been. For over thirty years the people who decided such things, the bastards, had been tearing down glorious structures just because they were old. Sometimes they even replaced them with new structures touted as modern versions of whatever they replaced. They never were, of course. They never were anything, really, other than just new. Through the merciless grinders of progress the soul of a city had passed, along even with Tay’s own soul, and each of them had emerged as…well, he really had no idea.

Sometimes Tay thought he could close his eyes and see everything again just as it had been before, back when he was eight years old and Singapore was thrilling to him; but he wasn’t absolutely sure anymore he really could. Was he seeing something he actually remembered, or was he only seeing something he hoped he remembered?

The older Tay got, the harder it was for him to tell.

Tay’s sergeant, Robbie Kang, was waiting for him just inside the Marriott’s main entrance. Kang had long, black hair and a fair complexion and was tall and gangly for a Singaporean. He was wearing his customary short-sleeved white shirt with a button-down collar and a pair of dark chinos.

“What’s going on, Sergeant?”

“They didn’t tell you, sir?”

“All I know is that somebody called to say the Chief wanted me here fast. And when the big bull trumpets, I answer the call.”

Kang didn’t smile, so Tay stopped smiling.

“What is it, Sergeant?”

“We’ve got a deceased woman upstairs, sir. A homicide. It’s…” Kang hesitated and Tay could see his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed. “I’m told it’s messy, sir. Very messy.”

Inspector Tay did not like messy. He and Sergeant Kang didn’t talk about it, but Tay knew Robbie Kang knew perhaps all too well. He really did not like messy.

“You haven’t looked at the scene yourself yet, Sergeant?”

“No, sir.” Kang shoved his glasses up the bridge of his nose with his forefinger. “Not yet.”

Tay had never before had to deal with a woman found dead in one of the city’s five-star hotels, not even a neatly expired woman let alone one who had become deceased in such a manner that Sergeant Kang felt compelled to describe it as messy. And he really didn’t want to start now.

Even after nearly twenty years as a policeman, each time he approached the scene of a violent crime he struggled against a squeamishness he feared might yet master him entirely. For years he had watched his colleagues out of the corner of his eye searching for someone else who shared his secret weakness, but he had never found anyone at all. As far as he could tell, his colleagues thought nothing of spending an afternoon poking around the charred corpses of two children killed in a suspicious apartment fire and then going straight out for a rare steak.

Tay couldn’t do it. Whatever gene might be required to achieve that sort of detachment, he lacked it.

For a fleeting moment, Tay toyed with telling Sergeant Kang that he could no longer bear any of it. He would not on this day stand gazing down at broken bones, unsupported flesh, and extruded innards. He would not squat down next to a glistening heap of blood and tissue, poke at blood-drenched clothing, and try to still his pounding heart while he fought against nausea. He would not do that again. Not ever again.

But Tay said none of that.

What he said was this.

“Okay, Sergeant, let’s get to it then.”

The elevators were only a few steps away. Kang pushed the call button and one opened immediately. Inside, Kang touched twenty-six, Tay heard a slight humming sound, and the elevator doors closed as silently as they had opened. As he and Sergeant Kang levitated in an air-conditioned hush, Tay tilted his head back against the polished wood paneling and shut his eyes.

Singapore was normally an uncomplicated place to be a policeman, particularly one who investigated homicides. In Tay’s tiny country — its five million people an ethnic stew of Chinese, Malays, Indians, Caucasians, and Eurasians together with a smattering of almost every other race on earth — there were few criminals and even fewer killers. No more than a couple of dozen murders were committed in Singapore each year, almost all of which were the result of domestic violence. But that Singapore’s few killers mostly killed people to whom they were related did nothing to make the killings any easier for Samuel Tay to take.