The Ambassador's wife

State and I’m assigned to the United States embassy here in Singapore as the Regional Security Officer.”

“How did you get this number?”

“Ah…Tony DeSouza, our legal attache, gave it to me. Is there some problem, Inspector?”

“This is my cell phone you’ve called.”

“I see. Is there some other number I should be calling you on instead?”

Tay closed his eyes and swallowed. He thought about saying that perhaps she shouldn’t be calling him at all, at least not at this hour of the morning, but he didn’t say that. He didn’t say anything.

“Tony asked me to thank you for the file that you sent to him,” the woman continued without any encouragement on his part, “but he noticed there was no autopsy report in it. He wanted me to ask you what happened to it?”

“Couldn’t this have waited until I get to the office?”

“Well, sir, we come in to work here at the embassy around seven and I just assumed that you…”

The woman trailed off into silence, although whether it was out of embarrassment or irritation Tay wasn’t certain. Regardless, he mentally kicked himself. Why had he admitted to this woman that he was still at home and implied that she shouldn’t be calling him so early? Most Americans assumed that people who weren’t fortunate enough to be Americans were all basically lazy anyway, and here he had just gone and added fuel to that fire.

Americans seemed to think that getting to work at dawn was the mark of a real man, or a real woman as the case might be, and they never stopped telling you how early they themselves went to work. Tay remembered one detective from New York with whom he had worked a child kidnapping case a couple of years ago. For some bizarre reason the man always insisted on having breakfast meetings to discuss their progress. Breakfast meetings? Trying to hold an intelligent conversation before it was even fully light outside? Were breakfast meetings America’s most significant contribution to the culture of international cooperation? Lord have mercy.

“The autopsy report didn’t come in until late yesterday,” Tay said. “I’ll have a copy sent to Agent DeSouza when I get to the office.”

“Anything interesting in it?”

Tay hesitated. He had no idea who this woman was so he had no intention of telling her anything on the telephone. Actually, who was he kidding? Even if he’d known exactly who she was, he still wouldn’t have told her anything.

“I was away from the office when it arrived,” he said after a moment. “I haven’t seen it yet.”

Tay had no doubt the woman had heard his hesitation and knew he was lying, but fuck her. It was too early in the morning for him to care. She and everyone else would find out what was in the autopsy report soon enough.

“Fine,” she said. “Then let me tell you the other reason I’m calling this morning. The ambassador is back now and I can arrange for you to talk to him if you still want to.”

The offer caught Tay unprepared. He had told the OC the Americans would work with him if he worked with them, but he wasn’t really sure he actually believed it. Maybe he had been right after all.

“I thought Tony said you wanted to interview the ambassador,” the woman continued when Tay didn’t respond quickly enough for her. “Did I get that wrong? If you don’t think it’s really necessary, then-”

“No, that’s right,” Tay said. “I need to interview the ambassador as soon as possible. Today?”

“Tomorrow would be better for him if you don’t mind.”

“Yes, okay. Tomorrow.”

“Here at the embassy then? At, say, eleven?”

“Fine. Eleven tomorrow. I’ll be there.”

“I’m afraid we don’t have any parking at the embassy for the general public, but give the security post my name when you do get here and I’ll pass you in. Good-bye, Inspector.”

Tay briefly considered pointing out that a CID-SIS inspector on official business wasn’t exactly the general public and they could damn well provide him a place to park a car, but then he decided that was just being querulous for no useful reason and let it go.

“Good-bye, Miss…”

“Just make it Cally, Inspector. Just plain Cally will do fine.”

Tay had to admit to himself that American over-familiarity was a little bit less grating when it came packaged in such an agreeable female voice.

“Cally then,” Tay said. “Good-bye, Cally.”

He pushed the power button and shut off his cell phone before the damned thing could ambush him again. Then he dropped it into the chair and went back to the bathroom to finish brushing his teeth.

The first thing Tay noticed when he got to the office that morning was that the pile of papers on his desk had grown noticeably overnight. Maybe they were actually breeding in the dark. He rooted around in them until he found the Munson autopsy report, then made a copy of it and put it in an envelope addressed to DeSouza at the embassy. After that he studied each little newborn briefly, just long enough really to find it a permanent home in some file that with any luck he would never open again.

After the paperwork was cleared away, he opened the Elizabeth Munson file and drank another cup of coffee while he methodically read through it again from beginning to end. Nothing new came to him, so he tilted back in his chair, propped his feet on the desk, and looked out the window at the rain clouds gathering off in the distance. When he got bored with the rain clouds, and purely for the sake of visual variety, he began studying his feet.

He was wearing a pair of black Gucci loafers that Lucinda Lim of all people had given him back when they first started going out. At the time he had been startled by the idea of a woman giving him a pair of shoes — actually he was pretty startled by the idea of a woman giving him anything at all — but after he wore them a few times to please her he decided he liked both the shoes and the whole concept of a woman giving him a gift. He was still wearing the shoes, but of course no woman had given him a damned thing since.

That was a depressing thought and he tried to shake it off with a more detailed examination of the shoes themselves, but they were no help. He couldn’t get past a sense that the shoes were staring back at him in gentle reproach, although whether it was for making a mess out of his relationship with Lucinda or his failure to make any progress on the Munson case he wasn’t absolutely sure. Exactly a week had passed since Elizabeth Munson’s body was found and he was floundering. He didn’t have a single lead. If his shoes were disappointed in him, he could hardly blame them.

Tay figured he had another couple of days at the most before Interpol’s formal identification of Elizabeth Munson got to his boss’s desk. If he still had no alternative motive by then, the Americans’ knee-jerk claim of a terrorist attack would be the only story on the table and that would be pretty much that. He turned his attention back to the file and started through it one more time.

On the top was a 5x7 color photograph of Elizabeth Munson that Sergeant Kang must have gotten from Singapore Tatler since it looked as if it had been taken at some social function. Mrs. Munson was alone in the picture, although from the way she was holding her head it was obvious she was in conversation with someone who had been cropped out. She was concentrating on the unseen speaker in such a way that he — and Tay somehow knew beyond doubt it was a man Elizabeth Munson was listening to — probably felt he had not only her undivided attention but probably her undying admiration as well.

In the photograph Mrs. Munson appeared to be in her thirties, but Tay knew her actual age had been forty- four. Was this an old picture? He turned it over and found a date stamped on the back. No, it was only a few months old. It was exactly how Mrs. Munson would have looked on the day she was murdered.

Elizabeth Munson had been a woman of uncommon beauty, there was no doubt of that. Her dark eyes were wide spaced below a high, unwrinkled brow, and her nose was narrow and, there was no other word for it, regal. She wore little makeup and her black hair was pulled back and rolled in what Tay seemed to remember women called a French twist. She wore a dark, straight dress that looked elegant and expensive, but the lithe, taut body of an athlete, a runner perhaps, seemed to shine through her finish of sophistication.

Tay lifted the picture out of the file and held it in both hands. He rested his elbows on his desk and sat staring into Elizabeth Munson’s eyes for a long time.

The Americans had immediately categorized this woman’s death as terrorism, of course, but then the Americans categorized everything as terrorism these days. Regardless, Tay knew that was still the first question he had to answer here. Had this murder really been an attack on America, or had it been an attack on Elizabeth