THE GIRL IN THE WINDOW (The Inspector Samuel Tay Novels Book 4) (40 page)

Tay looked at his watch. What time was it in New York now? He tried to work it out, but he wasn’t certain. And what was he going to do anyway? Telephone his mother and ask how she was? That didn’t seem like a very good idea. If she had had a stroke, perhaps her speech had been affected. He briefly considered calling her husband, but he hardly knew the man and hadn’t talked to him in ten years. He supposed he could always call this fellow Rosenthal who had written the letter, but what would be the point of that? Presumably he had already told Tay all he knew.

Maybe he should just go to New York and find out what the hell was going on, but that was out of the question, too, wasn’t it? He was responsible for finding the killer of a dead woman who had been viciously brutalized. Murder investigations didn’t wait around until you found a convenient time to fit them into your schedule. Tay would have to transfer the case to someone else if he went to New York. He didn’t really want to do that and, besides, flying halfway around the world on the basis of a half-page letter from someone he didn’t even know really made no sense at all.

Tay leaned back in his chair, swung his feet onto the desk, and shifted his gaze out the window. From his office on the fifteenth floor of the Cantonment Complex, he had a glorious view of the city. Straight ahead across the Singapore River lay the green patch of Fort Canning Park and off to the right were the glass and steel towers of the financial district. If Tay stood up and walked to the window and looked off to the left, he could even see the Marriott somewhere in the middle of the long line of luxury hotels scattered along Orchard Road. But then he wasn’t about to do that.

Tay made a pocket of air in one cheek, shifted it to the other, and then blew it out in one long stream. A feeling about this case was taking root within him and, as he threaded it back and forth through his mind, examining it first from one direction and then from the other, he saw at least one thing with unmistakable clarity. This case was going to turn into a real son of a bitch, a shit storm of the first order.

He didn’t know how he knew that, he just did. And now there was this, too. His mother was in a hospital in New York and there was a letter on his desk from somebody he didn’t know telling him she might have brain damage. Well, goddamn it all to hell, what in Christ’s name was he supposed to do about that? Was he supposed to drop everything and fly to New York and sit there holding his mother’s hand until they found out? His mother hadn’t held his hand for forty years. For all he knew she had
never
held his hand.

Tay had no life other than his job, a job his mother had always hated, and now she was trying to ruin it for him. At the precise moment when he was needed the most, she wanted to take him away from his job. Or maybe she didn’t. If she’d had a stroke and was now suffering brain damage, then she probably didn’t know what she wanted, did she?

Tay knew he was going around in circles and not making a great deal of sense, not even to himself. He tried to stop thinking about any of it and clear his mind altogether, but he couldn’t.

It might be a few days before they could even get an ID on the murdered woman, he thought. All he was doing right now was waiting. Waiting for the immigration list to be checked; waiting for Interpol to respond to the fingerprint request; waiting for the FMB report; waiting for the autopsy. None of that was going to happen for a few days. Maybe he could make a quick trip to New York and get back before any of it did happen, he thought to himself. But even as he did, he knew that was complete nonsense.

What he was actually waiting for was something else altogether, and he knew perfectly well what it was.

He was waiting for this whole fucking case to swoop down and take a humongous dump all over his sorry ass. In every fiber of his body he could sense it circling above him, and he would be goddamned if he would be sitting in a half-darkened hospital room in New York doing absolutely nothing useful for anyone when it finally let loose.

Yesterday he had so little to do he was spending his lunch hour browsing through the paperbacks at Sunny’s. Today there was a bloody goddamned maelstrom howling around him and his mother was in a hospital room halfway around the world with possible brain damage.

Jesus H. Christ on a motherfucking crutch. Good night, Irene. Put out the lights, will you?

ON THURSDAY MORNING Inspector Tay tried to telephone the number on the letter from New York and got no answer. After thinking about it for a few minutes and counting back and forth on his fingers, Tay realized that he had miscalculated the time change. The International Date Line was a real bastard. He would have to call at night, Singapore time, in order to get through during business hours in New York, so he made a mental note to try again when he got home that evening.

The rest of Thursday was no more productive for Tay than had been his effort to call New York. The FMB report was put over until Friday and Sergeant Kang’s men continued working their way through the list of female visitors Immigration had provided without finding anyone who was missing. Tay could feel the case going dead around him and it wasn’t even forty-eight hours old. He was going to have to do something to get it moving, but what? Without knowing who the woman was, the investigation wasn’t going to go anywhere, and how were they to identify her with no papers, no clothes, no jewelry, nothing at all to work with? All they had was a set of fingerprints and so far they couldn’t match them to anyone.

Hoping to clear his head and start thinking about the case from a new perspective, Tay left the Cantonment Complex about five o’clock and walked up New Bridge Road all the way to the Singapore River. He cut through the Merchant Court hotel and found a table alongside the river at the Brewerkz where he had two gin and tonics and some kind of chicken dish, but he was unable to conjure up even a single novel idea as to how to identify the murdered woman at the Marriott. He sat for a while after he finished eating and drank two cups of coffee. Then he took a walk along the river and very slowly smoked three Marlboros, one after another. When night came on as suddenly as if a blanket had been dropped over the city, he found a taxi and went home.

A couple of hours later, just after nine, Tay remembered he had intended to call the lawyer in New York that evening, but then he realized he had left the man’s letter in his office and didn’t have the telephone number. Awash in his own foolishness and his failures of the day, Tay turned on the television and sat staring at it for two hours with only the dimmest realization of what he was seeing. Then he turned it off, brushed his teeth, and went to bed.

Tomorrow, he promised himself, would be a better day.

Or maybe it wouldn’t.

On Friday morning Sergeant Kang brought Tay a copy of the FMB report. Just as Kang had predicted, there wasn’t a thing in it of any use.

“Any progress on the ID, Sergeant?”

“We’re almost through the visitor list, sir. Nothing at all yet.”

“This woman didn’t parachute in. If she’s not a local, she’s a visitor. There are no other possibilities.”

“Maybe she was in some kind of special group and isn’t on the regular visitor list.”

Tay thought about that. “What kind of group would that be?”

“I don’t know, sir. It was just an idea.”

“Well, I doubt that’s the answer, but maybe you’d better ask Immigration if that’s possible.”

“Right, sir.”

Sergeant Kang started out of Tay’s office, but suddenly stopped and turned around again.

“I almost forgot, sir. The autopsy is scheduled for two o’clock. Since it’s right after lunch, and with the facilities being so conveniently located just across the street from here and all, I assume you’ll be popping over after you polish off a nice big plate of chicken curry?”

Tay had no intention of rising to the bait.

“Who’s the forensic pathologist assigned?” he asked instead.

“Don’t know, sir. You want me to find out so you’ll be sure to knock on the right door?”

“Get out of here, Sergeant.”

“Yes, sir.” Kang grinned and disappeared.

Tay’s lunchtime routine on Fridays had become for him a ritual of some significance. Today, especially today, he had absolutely no intention of altering it.

Instead of eating lunch on Fridays, he took a taxi to one of two places: Borders in Wheelock Place or Kinokuniya in Ngee Ann City. They were the two biggest bookstores he had ever seen and browsing through them without any specific purpose in mind was about as much fun as he had these days. Sometimes he bought some fiction. Sometimes he bought some nonfiction. Once, seized by a fit of something he was still unable to identify, he had even bought a book called
Living and Working in France
, but that had been an aberration.

Regardless of what books Tay bought, however, he was happy to know that he would have their company over the weekend. He didn’t drink much, he wouldn’t go shopping except perhaps at gunpoint, and he loathed golf. That left nothing much for him to do in Singapore on the weekends other than read books, and it was that pursuit that kept him going back either to Borders or Kinokuniya almost every Friday at lunchtime.

Tay had long ago decided that his custom of spending his Friday lunch hours in a bookstore had two particular benefits: one mental and one physical. The mental benefit was that the ordered ranks of books tidily subdivided into categories and subcategories testified to the existence of mankind’s thirst for understanding, and prompted Tay to contemplate there might be order and meaning in the universe after all. The physical benefit was that it forced him to skip a meal. He could stand to lose about five pounds. Maybe ten. He really could.

This particular Friday, it was Borders’ privilege to bask in Tay’s patronage. Trying to take his mind off the image of the battered body propped up on the bed at the Marriott, he splurged a little and loaded up. He bought the British edition of
Esquire
, which he thought far superior to the American version of the magazine, a breathtakingly expensive three-volume biography of Graham Greene, and a paperback copy of a Martin Cruz Smith novel set in Japan that he had intended to read when it first came out but had never gotten around to.

Tay was pleased with his purchases and when he spotted an empty table in the outdoor area of Borders Café he plunked himself down without giving a thought to the time. He ordered a cappuccino that was served to him in a white ceramic cup the size of a cereal bowl. He wasn’t certain whether smoking was allowed there, but there had to be some benefit in being a policeman so he said to hell with it and smoked two Marlboros fired up with his brand new lighter anyway. When he was done, he tucked the lighter carefully away in his pocket. This time he had no intention of abandoning it in some idiotic gesture intended to purge his guilt over smoking.

By the time Tay returned to the Cantonment Complex it was very nearly three o’clock. There were no messages of any consequence waiting for him and he gathered his long lunch hour had gone completely unnoticed. He was just trying to decide whether that amounted to good or bad news when his telephone rang.

“Yes?”

“Inspector Tay?”

It was a woman’s voice, a very nice voice, but one that Tay didn’t recognize. Nevertheless, its agreeable quality prompted him to admit his identity without undue delay.

“This is Susan Hoi,” the woman said.

That was no help. Tay was reasonably certain he had never heard of anyone named Susan Hoi.

“Yes?” he said as noncommittally as possible.

“I’ll have a preliminary report by the end of the day, but there are several things I thought you would like to know now.”

Tay found it terminally annoying when people started talking on the telephone as if you already knew exactly what they were talking about when you didn’t, even women with very nice voices. One thing pretty much cancelled out the other as far as he was concerned, and he felt completely relieved of any inclination he might normally have toward courteous behavior.

“Who the hell are you?” he asked the woman.

“I’m sorry?”

“I asked who you are. I’ve never heard of you. And I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”

There was a lengthy pause. Just when Tay had decided that the woman had hung up either out of embarrassment or anger — and, frankly, he didn’t really give a damn which one it might be — she spoke up again.

“Is this the Inspector Samuel Tay who is the investigating officer in case E/1225/09?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“I am Dr. Susan Hoi and I have just completed autopsying the deceased Caucasian female found yesterday in a room at the Marriott Hotel who is the subject of that case.”

A protracted silence followed during which Tay wallowed richly in his embarrassment.

“Oh, God,” he eventually sighed, not able to think of anything better to say. “I’m so sorry, but nobody told me—”

“Are you the investigating officer in that case?” the woman snapped. “Or just some asshole who happened to answer his phone?”

Inspector Tay cleared his throat. “Actually,” he said, “I think I’m probably both.”

The woman laughed — thank Christ, Tay thought — and the sound of it was unexpectedly warm and musical.

“I really am very sorry,” Tay said, trying to regain his footing. “I just get unreasonably annoyed when someone calls me and just assumes I know what they’re on about. No one told me who was doing the autopsy and you didn’t really say what report you were referring to.”

“Yes, when you’ve been absorbed in something like this for a while you do rather just assume that everyone else in the world is thinking about it, too.”

“I
am
thinking about it,” Tay said, “but right at that moment—”

“Look,” the woman interrupted again. “Let’s just start over. Shall we do that?”

“Yes. Fine. Let’s do that.”

“The reason I’m calling, Inspector, is that I thought you would like to come over and look at this before I close.”

“Look at what?”

“The deceased, of course. The woman from the Marriott.”