Tay didn’t wake up until after eight, an occurrence he normally regarded as a fine omen for the coming day. He managed to locate the room service menu and ordered coffee and rolls, and whilwhile he was waiting for them to come he took a shower, shaved, and dressed in a clean white shirt and a pair of khakis. He had really fouled up his packing and now he realized he should have put a little more effort into the whole process. He hardly had any clean clothes left.
Tay looked through the drawers in the desk until he found a form for the hotel’s laundry service. He was about to send out the things he had worn the day before when he noticed the prices. The numbers looked very big, but of course they were in Thai baht and he struggled for a moment to convert them into Singapore dollars. It was too much to attempt without a few cups of coffee in him and he got nowhere. Fortunately, just then the doorbell rang and room service arrived.
A half-hour later Tay had finished the entire pot of coffee and eaten all the rolls in the basket and he was feeling sufficiently energized to take another crack at doing the currency conversion for the laundry list. He worked at it for a few minutes, but the numbers kept coming out so big he decided he had to be getting it wrong. Surely no one charged that much to launder a shirt and press a pair of trousers, did they? He gave up and shoved the half finished list into a drawer with his dirty laundry. He would deal with it later.
Then Tay remembered he still had to call the OC to tell him that he was going to be in Bangkok for another day or two. He knew what the OC would say to that, of course, and he wasn’t looking forward to the inevitable wisecracks. Still, it was a telephone call he had to make and now that he had a nice little caffeine buzz going, this might be the best time to do it. On the other hand, Tay mused, perhaps it wasn’t. He would think about that for a little while and make the call later.
Lighting a Marlboro, he opened a collection of Asian travel stories by Paul Theroux that he had found in the Marriott gift shop the night before and settled back to read. Tay smoked four cigarettes in complete peace and read almost a hundred pages of the Theroux book, but he knew he really did have to call the OC and he couldn’t put it off much longer. Eventually he turned down the corner of the page where he was and closed the book.
He switched on his cell phone and watched the screen as it located a service provider in Bangkok and connected with their system. On those few previous occasions Tay had used his cell phone outside Singapore, he never quite believed it was going to work, but somehow it always did. He had no idea at all how such a thing was possible. On the other hand, there were many things in life about which Tay had no idea at all and the way cell phones worked just wasn’t something he cared enough about to try to figure out.
At almost the moment the phone connected with a service provider, it started ringing and the screen began flashing with an incoming call from Singapore. Singapore felt so far away at that moment Tay’s immediate reaction was to shut off the phone, forget about calling the OC, and bury the damned thing in the drawer under his dirty laundry; but of course he didn’t.
“Hello.”
“Sir, it’s Sergeant Kang here.”
Robbie Kang shouted into telephones the same way he shouted across rooms and Tay fumbled to lower the phone’s volume.
“Can you hear me, sir?” Kang bellowed when Tay didn’t respond immediately. “Hello?”
“I could probably hear you without a telephone, Sergeant. Stop shouting for Christ’s sake.”
“Yes, sir.” Kang cleared his throat and lowered his voice, but only a little. “Well, sir, I’ve been trying to reach you since yesterday, but I couldn’t get through for some reason.”
Tay made a noncommittal noise and waited.
“There are a couple of things here you ought to know about. First off, Dr. Hoi has been trying hard to reach you, sir. One call yesterday and another one this morning.”
“Who?”
“Dr. Hoi, sir. You know, the doctor who did the autopsy on Mrs. Munson. She seems to want to talk to you very badly, sir.”
“What about?”
“I asked her if it had something to do with the Munson case, sir, but all she would say was that it was … uh, personal.”
Tay cleared his throat.
“Anything else?” he asked.
“Yes, sir. We’ve finished the tapes from the Marriott and there’s no sign at all of Mrs. Munson.”
“That doesn’t surprise me.”
“Then here’s something that might, sir. We found somebody else. It was all sort of an accident. I had Leslie Tan going through the tapes. You know him, don’t you, sir? His father was-”
“I know him, Sergeant. Get on with it.”
“Yes, sir. Well, one of the batches of tapes the hotel gave us had the wrong dates on the boxes and Leslie spent a half a day looking at them before he realized they were from the week before the murder. But that turned out to be a real break for us. If he hadn’t done that, Leslie would never have spotted him.”
“Spotted who?”
“As it was, he only recognized him because they had played in some golf tournament together and he just mentioned him to me by chance. He didn’t see that it had anything to do with the investigation and I suppose it doesn’t.”
“For God’s sake, Sergeant, who did Leslie see?”
“That FBI man from the American embassy, sir. The one you said came to see you.”
“Tony DeSouza?”
“Yes, sir.”
Tay thought about that for a moment and wondered if there was any significance to it.
“Is Leslie sure it was DeSouza?”
“Yes, sir. He says he remembers this guy really well. He got so mad when he hit a sand trap at the golf tournament he started banging his club into a tree and wouldn’t stop until some friend of his wrapped his arms around him and pulled him away.”
“When was this?”
“When was the golf tournament?” Kang sounded puzzled.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Sergeant. When was DeSouza on the security tapes at the Marriott?”
“A week before Mrs. Munson was killed, sir. Exactly one week.”
“What was DeSouza doing?”
“Nothing really, sir. It was the lift lobby camera that caught him, but only for a moment and it wasn’t a very good picture.”
“Something was wrong with the camera?”
“I’m not sure, sir. The camera seemed to be working fine at first, but when he got right up close it flickered and then he wasn’t there anymore. It almost looks like the camera went off and then came on again later after he was gone.”
If DeSouza had only been walking through the lobby, Tay thought, maybe that could have been just a coincidence. The Marriott was a big place in a prominent location and a lot of people walked through the lobby. But the security camera flickering off and coming on again after DeSouza was gone? It sounded very much like he had used one of the security cards to kill the system. But why would DeSouza have a security card? He was FBI, not CIA. Wasn’t he?
Tay felt uneasy. Fathers battering children with concrete blocks and women going after husbands with cleavers were the sort of things he dealt with, not embassy safe houses and American intelligence operations. Now he had an FBI agent creeping the Marriott a week before Mrs. Munson’s murder, even possibly turning the hotel’s security system off and on with a surreptitiously copied security card that probably came from the CIA.
What did all that add up to? Tay had no idea at all, but he was absolutely certain it couldn’t be anything good.
“And there’s something else, sir.”
“Yes?”
“Well, sir, I know an FBI guy myself. Actually he’s retired, living in Phuket now. But back when he was at the
