TAY DIDN’T SEE a body at first, but the rancid smell of death in the air left no doubt there one was in there somewhere.
There was something else in the air, too, and Tay couldn’t immediately put a name to it. It was like a buzzing sound too distant to hear but close enough for the vibrations to be felt. Whatever it was, it produced in Tay a vague pricking on the skin. He felt as if he was about to put his hand close to a flame he could not see.
The bedroom was as sparsely furnished as the living room. The double bed had no headboard and was covered in a brown bedspread with odd tufts of yarn sticking out in no discernible pattern. It looked lumpy and uncomfortable to Tay and he doubted anyone had slept on it for some time. There was a table next to the bed with a lamp on it, and against the wall nearest the door was a bureau with a mirror mounted above it. Both the bureau and the bedside table were made of some kind of dark brown wood and looked old fashioned and beaten up.
In the wall to his right there were two doors, both closed. Tay assumed one was a closet and the other was the bathroom. Between the doors there was a single straight-back wooden chair with a light-colored cane seat.
Tay took a few careful steps into the room and moved to his right along the foot of the bed.
The body was just on the other side of the bed, lying on its back on the floor. It was that of a Caucasian male.
“My God,” Kang blurted. “What’s a white man doing out here?”
Tay would have given Kang a disapproving look, but he was too busy wondering exactly the same thing himself. He would have been willing to bet there wasn’t a single Caucasian living within ten miles of the Woodlands. Not one.
The man wasn’t young. He was probably in his sixties, maybe even his early seventies. A little less than six feet tall, he was dressed in a short-sleeved white shirt he had left hanging out over his waistband, wrinkled khaki pants, and brown loafers with light brown socks. Lying there on his back, his arms stretched down along his sides, the man looked like someone who had unaccountably chosen to sleep on the floor rather than in the bed right next to him.
But the man wasn’t asleep. He was dead, and he had been dead for a while. His pupils were fixed and dilated, and his skin had a waxy pallor. There was some bloating, but not a lot, and putrefaction wasn’t very far advanced. At a guess, Tay put the time of death at more than one day, but less than two. The air conditioning was running and the room was cold, so perhaps it might have been even longer.
There was no blood that Tay could see anywhere. That meant there were fewer flies than usual when a body had gone undiscovered for this long. And the rats hadn’t been at the body yet. Thank Christ for small favors, Tay thought.
Tay and Kang moved around the bed watching carefully where they placed their feet. At least this was one time Tay didn’t have to worry about stepping in blood. He would never get used to walking into a room and thinking about stepping in blood. He could never decide what he was more worried about ruining: his shoes, or his soul.
Tay had stopped walking and was standing at the corpse’s feet when Kang noticed the odd look on his face.
“Is this somebody you know, sir?”
Tay didn’t reply. He just stared at the corpse. Kang shifted his weight from one foot to another, waiting.
After a moment, Kang repeated the question. “Do you know the dead man, sir?”
This time Tay nodded slightly.
“Who is it?” Kang asked.
“I don’t know.”
Kang was puzzled by Tay’s answer, of course, but no more puzzled than he often was by things Tay said. So he just waited.
“I thought for a minute I recognized him,” Tay added after a short silence. “But now I’m not sure.”
“Who did you think it was, sir?”
“I don’t know.”
Kang just nodded and waited some more.
“There’s something about him that’s familiar, but…”
Tay trailed off and pursed his lips, but he didn’t say anything else.
“Maybe he just looks like somebody you know, sir,” Kang suggested.
“Probably that’s it,” Tay said.
But he didn’t think that was it at all.
***
“Call FMB and find out where they are, Sergeant.”
“But, sir, they’ll just tell me—”
“Get FMB out here. Threaten them if you have to. Tell them I’ve got dirty pictures of their mothers and I’ll send them to the Straits Times.”
“Sir?”
“Just call them, Sergeant.
Kang nodded slowly, then he took out his cell phone and went to the living room to call FMB.
When Kang was gone, Tay squatted next to the corpse and examined the man’s face for a long time. Something was tickling the far distant recesses of his memory. He could feel it as surely as if fingertips were fluttering on his forearm. But each time he reached for it, the memory faded away like a dream in the morning sun.
Did he know this man?
He was sure he did, although he couldn’t remember who he was or even where he might know him from.
The man’s eyes had been brown, although the color was already starting to drain out of them, and he had an elongated jaw and a long, patrician-looking nose rounded at the end. It was a weathered face, an old man’s face, but still strong. It was the sort of face Tay hoped he might have when he reached the same time in his life. Which, come to think of it, wasn’t all that far off.
In spite of the gray pallor and sagging skin, Tay could still see the deep vertical creases and imagine the ruddy tinge on the face of a man who had lived his life with gusto. Yet now here he was, dead, neatly stretched out on the floor of a shabby HDB flat on the far rim of Singapore. Tay doubted the man had ever imagined his life might end like this. He seemed to be someone who was more likely to have envisioned an adventurous, even noble end. But this was the end he got.
No cause of death was obvious. Maybe it was just a simple unattended death, Tay told himself. The man was certainly old enough for that to be a possibility. A heart attack or a stroke maybe. But even as Tay formed the thought he knew it wasn’t so. No one has a heart attack, then stretches out neatly on the floor with his arms by his sides and just dies.
Tay carefully ran his hands into each of the side pockets of the man’s khakis. When he found nothing, he rolled the corpse a little first one way and then the other and checked the man’s hip pockets as well. Nothing there either.
Who walks around with nothing at all in his pockets?
Tay stood up and his knees cracked so loudly they sounded like gunshots in the silent bedroom. He would be fifty this year. Closer to the end than to the beginning, he knew. Far closer, really.
When Tay thought about that, which he did increasingly often these days, he was always surprised to realize how dispassionate he felt about dying. He had seen so much death in his lifetime that it had lost its capacity to frighten him. He did not want to die. He imagined very few people wanted to die. But he knew death made its own, sometimes bizarre choices as to when and where it greeted each of us. He simply wasn’t inclined to use up any of whatever days or years he had left on this earth worrying about how many days or years he had left on this earth.
There were enough things in his life he could do something about. That wasn’t one of them.
***
Tay glanced around the room. It had obviously been searched in the same way the living room had: quickly and not very thoroughly.
He walked over to the dresser and worked his way through the drawers. Nothing at all in the first two. In the third drawer there were two packs of Nicorette gum and a dog-eared paperback copy of a novel called Private Dancer. Tay had never heard of the book and from the slightly lurid cover he could easily understand why. He picked it up and glanced at the title page. Published in Thailand. No wonder he had never heard of it.
Nicorette gum he had heard of. It contained nicotine and people who were trying to quit smoking chewed it, didn’t they? Perhaps the man, whoever he was, had a taste for pulp fiction, was trying to quit smoking, and had just arrived in Singapore from Thailand. At least it was a theory, wasn’t it?
“FMB says they’re pretty busy, sir.”
Tay glanced up and saw Kang in the doorway holding his cell phone in his hand.
“They told me they’d try to get somebody out here in a couple of hours.”
Tay nodded. “Go down and talk to the kids who found the body and to the woman who phoned it in. See if the patrolmen missed anything. I’ll take a look around the apartment again and then we’ll get out of here.”
As soon as Tay had said the words, he realized how badly he did want to get out of there and as far away from that apartment as he could.
He could feel the air quivering all around him. He had no idea what it meant, if it meant anything at all, but it scared the bejesus out of him.