“I don’t drink coffee,” Tay grumbled as he picked up the bicycle and turned it around. Opening his gate, he wheeled it back inside.
NINE
Tay took one of the two brown leather chairs facing the row of French doors that opened onto his small, brick-paved garden. DeSouza glanced around and then settled himself on the couch opposite the two chairs.
“Jeez,” DeSouza said. “Nice house.”
Tay watched DeSouza run his eyes over the floor-to-ceiling bookcases that covered two walls of the room. Then he glanced at Tay’s small collection of contemporary oil paintings on the other walls, none of which he could apparently identify, and spent somewhat longer examining the Turkish rugs spread on the dark-stained oak floor.
“They must pay you guys better than they pay me,” he said.
“It was my father who was well paid.”
“And he gave you this house?”
“He died and left it to me.”
“Huh,” DeSouza grunted. “How about that? Christ, a rich cop.”
“Not really.”
“From where I sit, you look pretty rich to me. What does a house like this run around here anyway?”
“Do you really expect me to answer that?”
DeSouza shrugged. “Why not?”
“Look, if I walked into your house, wherever it is, and asked you what it’s worth-”
“Doesn’t matter. I’d tell you. It’s rented anyway.”
“Look, Agent DeSouza-”
“It’s Special Agent.”
The man sounded so earnest Tay almost laughed out loud. “Could I just have your full name again?” he asked instead.
“It’s Tony DeSouza. You can call me Tony.”
Tay shook his head. Americans.
“Hey, you want to hear a great joke?” DeSouza asked. “Stop me if you’ve heard it.”
“I left my gun upstairs.”
“What?”
Tay just shook his head again.
“Okay, it goes this way,” DeSouza said. “A Sudanese, an Indian, and a Singaporean are each asked, ‘In your opinion, what is the nutritional value of beef?’ The Sudanese says, ‘What is nutritional value?’ The Indian says, ‘What is beef?’ And the Singaporean says, ‘What is an opinion?’”
DeSouza snickered in a way that seemed to Tay to have little humor in it. Tay remained silent.
“You’re not laughing,” DeSouza said when he stopped snickering.
“It’s an old joke. But even if it were a new joke, I probably wouldn’t be laughing. It’s not particularly funny.”
“I think it’s funny.” DeSouza snorted again as if to emphasize the point. “Jeez, you people got no sense of humor.”
Tay had a sudden urge for a Marlboro, but bit it back. He didn’t want to give DeSouza the satisfaction of seeing him reach for a cigarette.
“Let’s just cut the crap, Special Agent DeSouza. Can we do that? What is this all about?”
DeSouza smoothed down his mustache with two fingers. Then he leaned back on the couch and knitted his fingers together behind his neck.
“On Thursday, you sent a set of fingerprints to Interpol with a request for an ID. They passed them along to us. I’m here to tell you we got a hit for you.”
Tay kept his expression empty. This guy had sucker-punched him just as he had obviously intended to, but Tay wasn’t going to look surprised so that he could enjoy it.
“I assume the prints are from your so-called suicide at the Marriott a couple of days ago,” DeSouza continued when Tay didn’t say anything.
“What do you know about that?” Tay asked.
“Only what I read in the papers.”
“Do you have some interest in the case?”
“I didn’t until this morning. I didn’t until I saw the ID and worked out that’s whose prints you were trying to trace. Am I right?”
“Does it make a difference?”
“Why are you being such a hardass with me, Tay? My boss sends me an overnight cable that gets me out of bed at seven on a Sunday morning. I have to cancel my golf game to track you down, and then I come over here all friendly like to tell you who you got there at the Marriott and you treat me like something your dog just dragged in.”
“I don’t have a dog.”
“Probably couldn’t find one that could live with your sunny personality.”
DeSouza grinned and Tay saw something unpleasant in it.
“Why do I get the feeling, Special Agent DeSouza, that when you finally get around to telling me who my prints belong to it’s going to be somebody important.”
“Yeah,” DeSouza nodded slowly, “it is.”
“So stop playing games. Let’s have it.”
“Nope. I want something from you first. Are the prints from the woman you found at the Marriott or not?”
“Yes,” Tay said. “They are.”
“So the suicide story you put out was pure bullshit. Am I right?”
“It was a homicide.”
“Go on.”
Tay hesitated. It rubbed him the wrong way to give DeSouza any information on the case, particularly the way he was dangling an identification of the deceased to get it. On the other hand, if the FBI had the woman’s prints the chances were good that she was an American citizen and the FBI would be entitled to know anyway. So Tay told DeSouza what little he knew, at least most of it. Somehow it slipped his mind to mention his conversation with Dr. Hoi or anything she told him about the actual cause of death.
“Damn,” DeSouza grunted. “Tied up and beaten to death, huh?”
Tay said nothing.
“Tortured and murdered.” DeSouza shook his head. “This one’s going to get hairy, my friend. This is going to hit a lot of people like another September 11. Terrorism has just moved to a whole new level.”
Tay wasn’t quite sure what to say to that. He had a murdered woman in a room at the Marriott. Yes, it was an American hotel and, in light of the sudden appearance of the local FBI man in his living room, almost certainly the woman was going to turn out to be an American, too. But that didn’t automatically turn her murder into a terrorist attack, let alone an attack anybody could begin to compare to September 11.
“Who is she?” Tay asked.
DeSouza made a funny little move with his head, turning it very slowly first one way and then the other, like a man who had a stiff neck and was working out the kinks.
“A citizen of the United States,” he said, “Elizabeth Jane Munson.”
The name meant nothing to Tay so he just looked at DeSouza without saying anything.
“You know who she is, don’t you?” DeSouza asked.
Tay shook his head.
“Then grab your balls, old buddy.”
