Koko

“I don’t feel like turning Underhill over to the police,” Beevers said. “Do you? I mean, is that what we came here for?”

“We still don’t know it’s Underhill,” Poole said. “We don’t even know he’s still in Singapore.”

“You don’t shit in your backyard. You got it now, Michael?”

Poole was going page by page through the Straits Times.

“Here’s Underhill right now,” Conor said. “He still wears that funky old bandanna. He’s fat as a pig. He gets stoned out of his gourd every single night. He owns a flower shop. All these young guys work for him, and he bores the shit out of them when he talks about all the stuff he did in Nam. Everybody loves the old ratbag.”

“Dream on,” Beevers said.

Poole had gone on to another paper, and was flipping pages with the regularity of a metronome.

“Every now and then he goes into his study or whatever, locks the door, and sweats out a new chapter.”

“Every now and then he locks himself in an abandoned building and kills the shit out of somebody.”

“Are those eggs really a hundred years old?” Conor asked. He had picked up the menu while Beevers spoke. “What’s the green shit?”

“Tea,” Poole said.

Ten minutes later Poole found a small advertisement for “The Fabulous Lola” in Singapore After Dark, one of the cheap guides to Singapore’s night life he had picked up in the gift shop. Lola was appearing at a nightclub called Peppermint City at an address up in the ten thousands out on a road too far from the center of the city to be on Beevers’ map.

All three men stared at a tiny black and white photograph of a girlish male Chinese with plucked eyebrows and high teased hair.

“I don’t feel too good already,” Conor said. He had turned as green as a century egg, and Poole made him promise that he would spend the day in his room and see the hotel doctor.

4

Michael did not know what he expected to learn from the murder sites any more than he could anticipate what Lola might tell him, but seeing the places where the deaths occurred would help him to see the deaths themselves.

He and Beevers walked in less than ten minutes to the villa on Nassim Hill where the Martinsons had been found.

“Picked a nice place, at least,” Beevers said.

Surrounded by trees, the villa stood on a little rise in the land. With its red roof tiles, golden plaster, and big windows, it might have been one of the pretty houses Michael had seen from the window of his hotel the previous morning. Nothing about it suggested that two people had been murdered there.

Poole and Beevers walked through the trees to shade their eyes and peered into a room like a long rectangular cave. In the middle of the wooden floor, thick with balls of dust like dirty cotton, as if someone had pitched brown paint onto the floor and then made a half-hearted attempt to clean it up, was a wide eccentric stain surrounded by dots and splashes.

Then Poole realized that a third shadowy reflection had fallen between his own and Beevers’, and he jumped, feeling like a child caught stealing. “Please excuse me,” a man said. “I did not mean to startle.”

He was a massive Chinese in a black silk suit and gleaming black tasseled loafers. “You are interested in the house?”

“Are you the owner?” Poole asked. He seemed to have appeared from nowhere, like a well-dressed ghost.

“I am not only the owner, I am the neighbor!” He swept his arm sideways toward another villa just a short distance up the hillside but barely visible through the trees. “When I saw you walk up, I thought to protect against vandalism. Sometimes young people come here to use the empty building—young people same all over, correct?” He laughed in a series of flat hollow barks. “When I see you, I know you are not vandals.”

“Of course we’re not vandals,” Beevers said a little testily. He looked at Poole and decided not to say that they were New York City detectives. “We were friends of the people who died here, and since we came here on a tour, we decided to take a look at the place where it happened.”

“Very unfortunate,” the man said. “Your loss is my loss.”

“Very kind,” Poole said.

“I am speaking commercially. Since the event, nobody wants to look at the house. And if they did, we could not let them in to show it because the police have sealed it!” He pointed out the rain-spattered yellow notice and the seal on the front door. “We cannot even wash away the bloodstains! Oh, excuse me, please, I did not think! I regret what happened to your friends, and I do sympathize with your grief.” He straightened up, and took a few steps backward in embarrassment. “It is cold in St. Louis now? You are enjoying the Singapore weather?”

“You didn’t hear anything?” Beevers asked.

“Not on that night. Otherwise, I heard things many times.”

“Many times?” Poole asked.

“Heard him for weeks. A teenager. Never much noise. Just one boy who slipped in and out at night like a shadow. Never caught him.”

“But you saw him?”

“Once. From the back. I came down from my house and saw him walking through the hibiscus trees. I called to him, but he did not stop. Would you? He was small—just a boy. I called the police, but they could not find him to keep him out. I locked the place, but he always found a way back in.”

“He was Chinese?”

“Of course. At least I assumed he was—I only saw him from the back.”

“Do you think he committed the murders?” Poole asked.

“I don’t know. I doubt it, but I don’t know. He seemed so harmless.”

“What did you mean, you heard him?” Beevers asked.

“I heard him singing to himself.”

“What did he sing?” Poole asked.

“A song in a foreign language,” the man said. “It was not any dialect of Chinese, and it was not French or English—I have often wondered if it was Polish! It went … oh …” He burst out laughing. “It went ‘rip-a-rip-a-rip-a- lo.’ ” He sang the words almost tunelessly and laughed again. “So melancholy. Two or three times I heard the song coming from this house while I sat in my courtyard in the evening. I came down here as quietly as I could, but he always heard me coming and hid until I left.” He paused. “In the end, I accepted him.”

“You accepted a housebreaker?” Beevers asked.

“I came to think of the boy as a sort of pet. After all, he lived here like a little animal. He did no damage, and he sang his lonely little song. Rip-a-rip-a-rip-a-lo.”

He seemed a little forlorn. Poole tried to imagine an American tycoon looking forlorn in a black silk suit and tasseled loafers, but failed.

“He must have left before the murders.” The man looked at his watch. “Anything else?”

He waved good-bye as they walked back down to Nassim Hill and was still waving when they turned toward Orchard Road to find a cab.

They saw where the body of Clive McKenna had been discovered as soon as their cabdriver pointed out the Goodwood Park Hotel. The white hotel stood on a rise that looked down toward the fringes of the city’s business district and the land fell away in a steep green slope. When the cab dropped them off, Poole and Beevers walked through a fringe of shrubbery and looked down the hill. Some tough, dark green plant like myrtle covered it, and low hedges grew at intervals.

“He lured him here,” Beevers said. “They probably met at the bar. Let’s go out for some fresh air. In goes the knife. Good-bye, Clive. I wonder—I wonder if we can find out anything interesting at the desk.” Beevers sounded very cheerful, almost as if he were celebrating the murder.

Inside, Beevers asked, “Was a Mr. Underhill registered here around the time Mr. McKenna was killed?” He held a ten-dollar note folded into his palm.

The clerk bent over and pushed buttons on the computer terminal set beneath the registration desk. He