The Ambassador's wife

DeSouza up at his house about midnight and took him to the Hard Rock Cafe, but instead of going inside he walked up Cuscaden Road to Orchard. When he got to Orchard, he crossed over and-”

“I don’t need a fucking travelogue, Sergeant. Just tell me where DeSouza went.”

“To Orchard Towers, sir.”

Tay struggled to get his mind around that piece of information, but right off the top of his head it suggested nothing significant to him. “The office building?” he asked after a moment.

“Well, sir, it’s not exactly an office building, at least not at night. You know what I mean, don’t you, sir?”

“Not really.”

“Seriously, sir?”

“For fuck’s sake, Robbie. It’s the middle of the goddamned night and I’m not in the mood for games.”

“Yes, sir. Orchard Towers, sir. The first few floors are a shopping center during the day, but at night there are bars there that mostly tourists go to. Sometimes they call it Four Floors. It’s across the street from the Hilton-”

“I know where Orchard Towers is and I know what it is. But what did you just call it?”

“Four Floors, sir. That’s short for Four Floors of Whores. Some people call it that.”

“Well, I don’t call it that. I call it Orchard Towers.”

“Yes, sir.”

Tay thought for a moment, perhaps a bit more slowly than normal given the time of night, but in a way that at least bore some resemblance to normal brain activity.

“How long did he stay?” Tay asked.

“He’s still there, sir. Been inside about a half-hour.”

Tay chewed at his lip as he thought about that.

Okay, so DeSouza likes girls and he’s making the rounds of a few bars where a good number of them are available for rent. So what? Still, up until now DeSouza hasn’t done anything but go to work at the embassy and back to his house. He doesn’t seem much like a party boy and, if he’s not, then what is he up to?

“Are either of your men inside with him, Robbie?”

“No, sir. One is covering the front and the other is covering the back. They’re afraid if they go inside they might lose him. The building has four floors-”

“So I gather.”

“The bars in there are all so packed with tourists that the prime minister could be in there and you wouldn’t see him unless you just happen to stumble over him.”

Maybe DeSouza has made the surveillance and is trying to shake it. Orchard Towers certainly sounds like a good place to do it. On the other hand, maybe he’s meeting someone and wants to surround himself with enough hubbub to make it unlikely anyone will spot them.

“What should we do, sir?”

“Give me a moment, Robbie. I’m thinking as fast as I can at one o’clock in the morning.”

There was another possibility, of course, and it was the one that gave Tay the most pause.

Maybe DeSouza had killed all three women himself. Maybe he had found out that he liked killing women. Maybe he was a budding serial killer out trolling for his next victim.

“Can DeSouza get out of the building without your men picking him up?”

“I don’t think so, sir. As far as I know, there’s just one front entrance and one back entrance and we’ve got both covered.”

“Right then. Leave your men where they are, but you get over there yourself and get inside. See if you can find DeSouza and see what he’s up to.”

There was a pause. “Me, sir?”

“Yes, Robbie. You.”

There was another pause, longer this time.

“Yes, sir,” Kang muttered.

Tay ignored Kang’s unhappiness. “Where are the men you have outside the building?” he asked.

“Danny’s covering the front. He’s at a table at the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf right across from the main entrance.”

“Who’s at the back?”

“Sergeant Lee. He’s in a place called 3 Monkeys. It’s a little cafe right by the back steps.”

Tay’s eyes searched for and eventually found the clock on his bedside table. Ten minutes after one in the morning. Good Lord. He was getting way too old for this kind of thing.

“I’ll be there in twenty minutes. At the back entrance. Let Lee know I’m coming.”

“What do you think DeSouza’s up to, sir?”

“I have no idea, Robbie. No goddamned idea at all.”

Sergeant Kang had been inside Orchard Towers exactly twice before. The first time was on the night of his twenty-first birthday and the less said about that the better. The second time was four or five years ago when his best friend from school moved to Australia and gave himself a going-away party. Come to think of it, perhaps it would be better to forget about that occasion as well.

Orchard Towers was not a place where Singaporeans customarily went. It was a place for foreigners, and even then only male foreigners. All those foreign men went to Orchard Towers looking for Singaporean women, of course, but what they found instead was almost every other kind of woman on earth. Thai women, Filipino women, Cambodian women, Vietnamese women, Malay women, Indonesian women, Chinese women, Japanese women, and even a few Russian and Latin American women. They also found not a few women at Orchard Towers who looked a whole lot better than most of the others but weren’t actually women at all. Singapore had been famous for that sort of thing for generations.

Orchard Towers was not large, but its focus was single-minded. Every floor was lined with narrow bars bearing names like Naughty Girl, Bongo Bar, Club Romeo, and Queens Disco. Throngs of men drifted from one bar to another and, as the doors opened and closed, the clashing sounds of different music flooded the atrium with a painful din.

Sergeant Kang rode the escalators from the front entrance on Orchard Road all the way up through the atrium to the fourth floor to get his bearings. At the top, Kang stuck his head into a bar called the Crazy Horse. The place looked like a half-darkened school hall. Several women danced on a small stage at one end and there was a pool table at the other. The rest of the room was in darkness, but there was enough light for Kang to see the place was packed with people. At a glance it looked as if the women outnumbered the men, but most of the men were middle-aged Caucasians and Kang could see he would never find DeSouza in a crowd like this unless he ran straight into him.

He glanced at his watch. One forty-five. Who the hell were all these people? Didn’t they sleep at night like everybody else?

Kang backed out of the Crazy Horse and circled the atrium until he found a dead spot in the uproar and leaned back against a pillar. Pulling out his phone, he dialed Tay, who answered on the first ring.

“I’m here, Robbie. With Lee in the cafe at the back.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You find DeSouza yet?”

“Uh…no, sir. It’s a mob scene in here.”

“At two o’clock in the morning?”

“Wall-to-wall people, sir, and all of them who aren’t women look more or less like DeSouza. Even some of them who are women look like DeSouza.”

“What are you talking about?”

“It was just a little joke, sir.”

“I see. You told a joke.”

“Yes, sir.”

Tay didn’t say anything else. Kang thought about waiting him out, but he knew that would be a waste of time.