Jake Needham - The Ambassador's wife

Tay held the envelope for a moment without opening it. Perhaps he was being sued. He had never been sued and didn’t know what he would do if he was. But surely that couldn’t be what the letter was about. If he were going to be sued for something, it certainly wouldn’t be by anyone in New York. He had never even been in New York.

Eventually Tay opened the envelope and took out the letter. It was only a single sheet of paper. He read it, and then, not quite believing what he had just read, he read it again from the beginning.

The letter was from a man named Rosenthal whom Tay had never heard of. He said he was a lawyer representing Tay’s mother and wanted to notify Tay that his mother had had a stroke and was in Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York. She was expected to recover, but the prognosis was uncertain as to whether she might have permanent brain damage. That was all the letter said. Nothing else at all.

“My God,” Tay murmured to himself.

He had not spoken to his mother in…Tay thought about it, but he couldn’t remember for sure. Three years? Perhaps four?

There wasn’t any significance to that, not really. They certainly weren’t angry at each other. They had just somehow slipped out of each other’s lives. His mother had lived in New York for nearly twenty-five years now. She was married to someone he had met only a couple of times. Their lives no longer had anything to do with each other. It was just that simple. Was it really possible for someone to actually lose track of his own mother? He knew the answer to that. It was very possible indeed. It was one of those things that happened in life when you weren’t paying attention.

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.