“I’ll start going through these places one by one, sir,” Kang continued, “but unless I get awfully lucky, there’s not much hope.”
“I don’t want to lose this guy, Robbie. And you really don’t want to be the one to lose him for me.”
“Regardless, sir, I doubt I’m going to find him in here. Your best bet is to sit on both exits until DeSouza comes out and pick him up then.”
Then Kang heard another voice speaking from the other end of the phone.
“Where?” Tay said to whoever it was.
The voice spoke again and after a pause Tay responded, “I see him.”
“Robbie,” Tay spoke quickly, “where is your car?”
“In the car park, sir. The one just beside the building.”
“Get it. DeSouza just came out.”
FORTY-TWO
“He’s going to the taxi stand, sir,” Sergeant Lee said.
“Yes, I see him,” Tay nodded. “He’s with that tall woman in the red dress.”
“No, sir.”
“Of course he is. I can see him plainly. He’s with that woman.”
“No sir, what I actually meant, sir, is…well…”
“What the hell are you trying to say, Sergeant?”
“That’s not a woman, sir.”
Tay glanced briefly at Sergeant Lee, then back at the person with whom DeSouza was walking. She was wearing a dark red, kneelength skirt with a matching red bolero jacket, a white blouse, black stockings, and expensive-looking red pumps. Her dark hair was cut short and frosted with silver highlights, and when she glanced over her shoulder for a moment, Tay saw the face of an attractive and elegant woman who looked to be in her late twenties.
“You’re out of your fucking mind,” Tay said after his inspection was complete.
“Uh…no, sir. That’s a
“A
“Shim, sir. A she-him. Orchard Towers is where most of them hang out.”
Tay took another look, but saw nothing that caused him to change his mind. “That can’t be a man, Sergeant.”
“It is, sir. Really, it is.”
Tay thought of asking Lee why he was so sure, then decided he might not want to know.
“So DeSouza’s gay?” Tay asked instead.
“No, sir. He wouldn’t be gay.”
Tay shot a sharp look at Sergeant Lee. “Didn’t you just tell me that’s a man he’s leaving this place with?”
“Yes, sir. But gay men aren’t attracted to shims. Gay men are attracted to men. The men who go with shims are straight men. They like shims because they’re so feminine.”
Tay was having difficulty getting his mind around what he was hearing. Lucinda Lim told him that Elizabeth Munson wasn’t gay regardless of the fact that she slept with other women. Now Sergeant Lee was telling him that men who picked up other men — other men who dressed like women, to be sure, but still men — weren’t gay either.
Tay accepted that very few things in this world were certain. Still, the division of the human species into males and females and the separation of human sexual attraction into gay and straight seemed to him to be clear enough. Were there actually shades of gray in both matters that he had completely missed? Surely not. Surely, even in a world apparently turned enthusiastically relativistic in nearly all matters of belief and conviction, at least this single principle of physiological, if not moral, certainty still held true. There were men and there were women, and there were straights and there were gays. And that was that.
Or perhaps not.
DeSouza and his companion joined the line at the taxi stand and Tay continued to study them. He still thought Sergeant Lee was probably pulling his leg, but he resolved to start thinking of whoever that might be with DeSouza in gender-neutral terms just in case. There were a dozen or more people in front of them in the taxi line and not many taxis at that hour so it looked as if they might have to wait for a while. That was a break for Tay, since all at once he had a great deal to think about and very little time in which to do it.
If DeSouza really was the stone-cold murderer of three women, Tay could hardly let him pick up somebody in a bar and just walk off into the night with them, could he? Of course, Tay didn’t have any real evidence that DeSouza had killed anyone, and this person with whom he was walking away into the night might not be a woman. Still, did DeSouza know he might not have picked up a woman and, if he didn’t know, how was he going to react when he found out? Tay really couldn’t work out where any of that left him.
There was another possibility Tay couldn’t ignore either. This might be the very break they had been waiting for. Perhaps DeSouza wasn’t a killer trolling for his next victim. Perhaps he had chosen this way to make contact with someone who could tie the whole case together for them. After all, there was the chance that both Munson and Rooney had been gay, wasn’t there? That might take the case in all sorts of directions and to all sorts of places where Tay’s apparently limited experience with human sexuality left him on very shaky ground. Couldn’t this woman, or man, with DeSouza somehow be connected with the case he was trying to build? Perhaps she, or he, could.
But then maybe none of this had anything to do with Tay’s investigation at all. Maybe DeSouza was just a lonely, middle-aged man out looking for sex on a dull Tuesday night and this was the companion he had chosen. If that were the case, it was absolutely none of Tay’s business who, or what, it might be, was it?
His head was starting to hurt. The punch line of a joke he had once heard came to mind.
Tay was still trying to decide which hand to go with when his telephone rang.
“I’ve got the car, sir,” Kang said. “Look to your right and you’ll see me.”
Tay glanced over and saw Kang’s Toyota at the curb. Then he looked back to where DeSouza and his friend were working their way closer to the front of the taxi line. They were in luck. Kang’s car was facing the right direction. Whether DeSouza’s taxi went straight ahead down Claymore Road toward Orchard or made a U-turn and went the opposite direction, Kang could pull out and get behind it. Thank Christ for small favors.
“Let’s go,” Tay said to Sergeant Lee and bolted for the Toyota.
The sergeant dropped some bills on the table and took off right behind him.
Tay would have preferred to circle around the building and approach the Toyota from the opposite direction, but there was no time and he was pretty sure that DeSouza wouldn’t spot him anyway. Still, he was careful to keep his face turned away from where DeSouza waited in the taxi line.
“Did he see me, Robbie?” Tay asked as he slid into the passenger seat of the Toyota.
“No, sir,” Kang said. “Too wrapped up in his girlfriend. God, that one’s a looker, isn’t she?”
Tay was just trying to decide whether or not to say anything to Kang when Sergeant Lee caught up and slid into the back seat.
“They’re getting into a taxi, sir,” Kang said from the driver’s seat as the door closed.
Tay decided any discussion with Kang of modern sexuality in Singapore could wait for a more convenient time.
“Don’t lose him, Robbie.”
“No, sir. I won’t.”
Tay leaned back in his seat as Sergeant Kang pulled away. He still didn’t have the first idea how to play this, but he supposed not much would happen as long as DeSouza and his friend were in a taxi. There wasn’t anything he could do now but wait and see where they went.
