“Right, sir.”
“Okay, that’s it, Sergeant. Get going.”
TAY knew he should take what he had to the Chief, but he wasn’t certain what would happen when he did so he wasn’t in any big hurry to do it. He decided to sort out the files on his desk first and get his day into some kind of order.
He had two other murder cases open in addition to the body at the Marriott: a woman beaten half to death by her husband who claimed she attacked him first with a kitchen knife, and a Filipina maid whose body was found outside the building where she worked for two British expatriate bankers. The maid had either jumped or been pushed from the balcony and Tay wasn’t yet sure which it was, but it had certainly been no accident. Those two files went into the metal rack on the corner of his desk where he kept his open cases, but they went in the back.
Then he took the Marriott Unknown case file, replaced the label with a blank, and printed Elizabeth Munson on it. That file went in the front of the rack. The other files were just a lot of junk and he gathered them up and pushed them into a bottom drawer.
He was mostly stalling, he knew, but not altogether. He was the son of an accountant and organization for him was a virtue next to godliness. It was a messy, disorderly world out there. Tay’s policy was to keep his little piece of it as tidy as possible.
Eventually Tay could think of nothing else to do and no reason to wait any longer. He stood up and took a couple of deep breaths. It was time to make his way upstairs to the office of the Officer in Charge of CID-SIS and tell him what they had found out about the murder of the American ambassador’s wife.
Tay decided he would use the stairs. It took longer and the exercise wouldn’t hurt him either.
ELEVEN
In the anteroom to the OC’s office, Tay stopped and stared in amazement. What in the world was going on here?
As long as Tay could remember, the room had been furnished with two metal chairs, a table piled high with old magazines, and a gray metal desk, inevitably cluttered and unoccupied. There were still two chairs, but now they were upholstered in a rich blue fabric and looked stylishly uncomfortable. The table between them was glass and chrome and on it was nothing but a single white vase filled with fresh flowers, maybe chrysanthemums. Tay really didn’t know much about flowers.
The secretary’s desk, also glass and chrome with a blue upholstered swivel chair behind it, was decked out with a white flatpanel computer monitor and a matching laser printer. It was also decked out with a new secretary which, when Tay stopped to think about it, might well explain everything else.
“May I help you?” the woman asked.
She seemed quite young, although recently Tay noticed everyone seemed quite young to him, and she was undeniably very attractive. Her skin was
“Do you work here?” he asked.
“I’m Nora Zaini, sir. I started last week. I’m the OC’s new secretary.”
His boss had never had his own secretary before as far as Tay knew. He had always answered his own phone, or not answered it depending on his mood, and used somebody from the secretarial pool when he needed typing done. Was it possible the sudden appearance of this beautiful young Malay woman in the Chief ‘s outer office portended big changes in the wind?
“Is he in?” Tay asked, inclining his head toward the door leading to the inner office. Before the young woman could answer, the door opened and the OC appeared.
“It’s very nice, Chief,” Tay said, waving his hand at the newly decorated room. “I like it.”
The boss looked mildly embarrassed. “The whole thing was mostly…” he nodded toward his secretary, “Nora’s idea. She thought, well-”
“Absolutely about time to do something like this, Chief,” Tay cut in, taking the OC off the hook. “Look, I’m sorry to barge in without calling first, but I need to see you for a minute.”
“The woman at the Marriott?”
Tay nodded slowly and the OC nodded back. They went into his office and closed the door.
The OC sat listening in silence while Tay told him about DeSouza’s visit on Sunday afternoon and the identification of the murdered woman as Elizabeth Munson, wife of the American ambassador to Singapore. The OC leaned back in his chair and sighed, but before he could say anything Tay quickly moved on to Dr. Hoi’s discovery of the gunshot wound in Mrs. Munson’s ear. When Tay finished telling both stories, the OC closed his eyes and rubbed them with the heels of his hands.
“Oh boy,” he said.
The OC opened his eyes again and looked at Tay. Tay got the distinct impression the OC was hoping that he might be gone, but of course he wasn’t.
“Well,” the OC said after a small silence. “The American ambassador’s wife, huh? Shot in the head.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I met her once. At some damn party. Nice woman as I recall.”
“I wouldn’t know, sir.”
“You don’t have any reason to suspect the husband, do you?”
“Why would you ask, sir? Have you heard something that suggests we ought to?”
“No, no.” The OC waved his hands like he was shooing away flies. “It’s just that when a wife is murdered, the first person you always look at is…” he hesitated as if he was unwilling to voice the thought out loud. “Well, you know.”
“As we understand it now, sir, the ambassador was out of town when his wife was murdered.”
“Well, thank God for that at least. Having to investigate the American ambassador for the murder of his wife is a problem we can damn well do without.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Have you sent a copy of our file to this FBI guy yet?”
“I wanted to talk to you first.”
“Well, send it right now. Maybe if we’re lucky they’ll take over the whole damned case.”
Tay hesitated. “Sir?”
“Look, Sam, the FBI is better equipped than we are to deal with some terrorist shooting the wife of an American ambassador.”
“DeSouza doesn’t know about the gunshot.”
“Why not?”
“Because I didn’t tell him.”
“You didn’t tell him about the gunshot?”
“No, sir. I didn’t tell him.”
“Why on earth not?”
Tay considered, if only briefly, giving the OC the same explanation he had given Sergeant Kang, but thought better of it.
“I didn’t want to give up everything we had until you and I talked about it, Chief.”
“I don’t see what that’s got to do with it.”
“Sir, we don’t even know for sure yet that the deceased woman really
“You doubt that for some reason?”
“I think we should go slowly here, sir. Either way, this case is going to get a lot of attention and there will be a lot of people second-guessing everything we do. At least some of them will be trying to make us look like a bunch of local clowns. If something goes bad in the investigation, you can bet the FBI will blame us.”
