David Rotenberg - The Hamlet Murders

“We let her . . . ?”

“She called us from there. I put an officer at the door.” Fong nodded and began to move about the room again.

Chen had worked with Fong several times since Lake Ching and knew the procedure. Fong prowled and Chen waited. Finally feeling he had waited long enough, Chen asked, “Should I bring her up?”

“No. Bars are just as good for interrogations as offices.”

“It’s a suicide, right?”

Fong wanted to agree but he was troubled by the calibre of the gun. He was troubled by a big man even owning such a small gun. It was a woman’s gun. Fong was also troubled by a man committing suicide. In China, suicide was a woman’s choice. More often a countrywoman’s choice. Most often accomplished by swallowing the omnipresent clear colourless pesticide provided by the government. But then again this was an American urban male, not a Chinese rural female. Fong gently returned the man’s head to its original position on the desk. “Call in Li Chou’s Crime Scene Unit and Forensics. And get our business folks on this. I want to know exactly what the International Exchange Institute does.”

Chen nodded and headed out. Fong waited a moment to take in the place one more time. New. Clean. Sterile. Western. And a big guy with a small bullet that went in his left ear and out the right side of the head, taking off the earlobe. The bullet had created a small hole in the cheap drywall across the room and was probably lodged, if they were lucky, in the under lath. If they were unlucky, it had hit a strut and shattered. But then again, who needs the bullet? We have the gun and the fingerprints on the gun, if there are any.

A big, white beefy guy put a tiny gun into his left ear and pulled the trigger. Suicide. Not murder.

Then Fong looked at the man’s date book – and a darkness crossed his face.

The woman sitting on the high barstool looked as much hooker as secretary to Fong’s eyes. She wore a small sheer black top with spaghetti straps over her lovely shoulders. The tops of her patterned silk stockings weren’t completely covered by the short skirt. She identified herself as a personal assistant to the deceased.

Her English was passable, but Fong decided to ask his questions in Mandarin. “How long have you worked for Mr. Clayton?”

“Bob, you mean,” she corrected him.

“Do I?”

“His name is Bob.”

“While we’re busy correcting each other, your use of the present tense in reference to Mr. Clayton is inappropriate, one could say, wrong, since he is now dead.” That quieted her for a moment. She reached for her drink but Fong beat her to it and pushed it aside. She dead-eyed him and he dead-eyed her right back. She reached for her bag on the bar and withdrew a long cigarette. “Do you mind?” she asked, clearly not giving a shit if he minded or not.

He didn’t mind. Who minds a beautiful woman smoking a cigarette?

“Did Mr. Clayton smoke too?”

A burp of laughter exploded from her mouth.

“What’s funny?”

“He was trying to cut back. He was worried about his health.” This last was interrupted by a spluttering laugh that ended with her snorting. Pretty woman smoking, fine; snorting, not so good.

“So what exactly did you do for Bob?”

For a moment, Fong thought she was going to respond by listing sexual positions and precise bedroom activities, then he saw that she got the meaning of his question and said, “Typing, filing, girl stuff.”

“Did you do his tattoos?”

She stopped, her cigarette midway to her mouth, sighed then said, “If only. They are beautiful, aren’t they?”

Fong nodded, choked down his desire to ask her for a smoke and said, “You were lovers.”

Without flinching, she responded, “I was everything he’d let me be.” She reached down and lifted the hem of her short skirt. Where the stocking tops ended, the tattoos began. They seemed to be in the same style as her dead boss’s although newer.

“Did it hurt to have it done?” Fong asked.

“What do you think?” she said blowing a line of smoke past Fong’s left ear.

He began to answer but sensed her retreating. He moved to the cop standing guard at the bar-room door. “Don’t let her leave.” Fong took out his wallet and handed over several bills. “Buy her a drink if she needs one, but she’s to stay here until I come back.”

Back in Bob’s office, Li Chou, the plump head of CSU was finishing his work. Fong had already crossed swords with this man during the investigation into the abortion clinic bombings that eventually led to the killing of Angel Michael. “But that was then and this is now,” Fong thought.

“Anything, Li Chou?” Fong asked.

The man looked up from his work and stared at Fong as if he didn’t initially recognize him. Then something that could pass for a smile crossed his face, “Not yet.”

No “sir” on the end of the sentence Fong noted. Well, he’d played the insubordination game himself often enough in the past so he let it pass. “Initial thoughts then, Li Chou?”

“Small calibre gun. Burn marks on the skin inside his left ear suggests that he put the gun in there . . . then put a teensy hole through his stupid head.” Two of Li Chou’s assistants giggled.

Fong’s responding silence killed the hilarity in the room. Li Chou smiled and prompted his guys with, “Teensy-weensy hole, I’d say.” Laughter, although somewhat forced, greeted Li Chou’s comment. Fong looked at the CSU guys. They were much closer to Li Chou’s age than his. Li Chou was their dim sum ticket, not him. Fong nodded then cut through the tittering saying, “Are you right-handed, Li Chou?”

“Yeah, so?”

“So pretend that the stapler on the desk is a gun, okay?”

“Sure,” Li Chou said slowly as he made a funny face for his guys. “Funny kinda gun, wouldn’t you say?”

“So sit in the chair over there,” Fong said. Li Chou made yet another face then did as Fong asked. “Now grip the stapler as if it were a gun. You’re righthanded so use your right hand. Good. Now put it in your left ear.”

The man tried to do it then realized that he couldn’t get his finger to the trigger and still keep the gun in his ear. A look of real hatred crossed the man’s face. “So what?” Li Chou demanded.

“So Mr. Clayton was right-handed too. That’s so what,” Fong spat back.

Too late, Fong realized that he had embarrassed Li Chou in front of his subordinates. Fong glanced over and the younger men made themselves look as busy as they could. Fong knew he should apologize. He knew that losing face was a real thing in this world but he couldn’t resist adding, “If your English was better, you would have seen that from his writing.”

Of course, if Fong hadn’t been so cocky he would have bothered to read the dead man’s final words on the notepad. It would not be until almost eighteen months later, in a far-off Western Canadian town called Kananaskis, that he would finally get a hint of what the International Exchange Institute actually exchanged.

Back at his office on the Bund, Fong was greeted by the head of the business section of Special Investigations. The man was a few years older than Fong and had at one time run a major corporation in Hong Kong. Run it just a tad on the wrong side of the law. When Hong Kong came back to the fold of Mother China, the man was offered two options: either join Special Investigations and work for the good of China or spend his remaining days in Ti Lan Chou, the world’s largest political prison. The man moved his family to Shanghai and began to work for Special Investigations. And in many ways he was happier than he’d ever been. He drove a more modest car, he no longer spent time in expensive Japanese teahouses and he had actually relearned to appreciate his wife, which was helped along by his inability to finance his mistress. Kenneth Lo was now an elegant man in a somewhat pedestrian world.