DR. HOI WAS waiting in Block Nine’s tiny reception area when Tay came through the door. He had walked as slowly as he could, but he still got there in fifteen minutes. She was wearing a short white lab coat and Tay had to admit it looked good on her.
“Let’s do this outside,” she said. “You’re going to need a cigarette when you hear what I’ve got to tell you and you can’t smoke in here.”
That obviously meant at least Tay wasn’t going to be asked to contemplate a collection of disassembled body parts. He liked that. He just didn’t much like the rest of what Dr. Hoi seemed to be suggesting. He wasn’t ready for another surprise. He was already up to his ass in surprises and he had never much liked them anyway.
They left the reception area and took a path that curved across a lawn mowed as neat and tight as a putting green. The day was hot, and the air was so thick and heavy you could almost feel the moisture draining out of it. A dome of gray clouds hung so low over the city they looked like fog. The morning light, frail and wispy, suddenly seemed to Tay to be filled with foreboding.
***
Dr. Hoi headed straight for a grove of palm trees that rippled and swayed in the light breeze. There was a bench at its center constructed of green wooden slats over a black iron frame. It didn’t look very comfortable, but even from thirty feet away Tay could see the cigarette butts scattered on the ground all around it so he supposed, comfortable or not, the bench served its purpose as a center for social rebellion.
As soon as they sat down, Dr. Hoi pulled her phone out of the side pocket of her lab coat. She fiddled with it for a moment, pushing buttons, and when she apparently had what she wanted on the screen she handed it to Tay.
Tay took it and studied the photograph but it meant nothing to him. It looked like a piece of malformed white china, but he didn’t see why Dr. Hoi was showing him a picture of a plate.
“Your deceased had a depressed fracture of the squama occipitalis,” Dr. Hoi said, “the large bone the forms the base of the anterior portion of the skull. And you’re looking at it.”
Tay nodded,
“That was in my report,” she said.
Tay nodded again.
“The fracture was caused by a significant blunt force trauma which most likely rendered the deceased unconscious.”
Tay remembered that much at least. Sergeant Kang had told him the autopsy report identified the cause of death as blunt force trauma and a broken neck. He probably should have read the report for himself before he came to see Dr. Hoi, but he hadn’t and that couldn’t be helped now.
“So this plate is what was used to break the dead man’s neck?” he asked.
“What are you talking about?” Dr. Hoi looked irritated. “What plate?”
It was coming back clearly to Tay now why he found doctors so annoying. Why couldn’t they just say what they meant in words he could understand? Why did every conversation with a doctor have to turn into an extended game of Twenty Questions that seemed designed primarily to prove how smart they were and, by contrast, how dumb he was?
“That picture is a close-up of the anterior portion of the skull of the deceased,” Dr. Hoi continued pointing at the phone Tay was holding. “His neck was broken manually after he was rendered unconscious by the blow that caused the fracture you’re looking at. Obviously by someone who was very strong and who knew exactly how to break a man’s neck.”
“Obviously,” Tay muttered, feeling ridiculous for just having mistaken the dead man’s skull for a china plate.
“That’s not why I’m showing you this.” Dr. Hoi waved a hand dismissively and Tay felt another stab of annoyance. “I thought you might be interested in what caused the blunt force trauma.”
“Do you know?”
“Well…not exactly, of course. But I have a theory.”
Now Tay saw where this was going. Dr. Hoi wanted to play detective and naturally she wanted to do it off the record. Normally that would have annoyed him, but since he didn’t have much going for him right then anyway, he was more than happy to let her speculate as much as she wanted.
“You see how nicely shaped that compression is?”
Tay looked back at the color photograph displayed on Dr. Hoi’s iPhone. Now that he knew what he was looking at he didn’t see anything about it he would consider describing as nice, but he nodded anyway and waited for Dr. Hoi to get to the point.
“I think he was struck with something round and heavy, an inch and a half to two inches in diameter. It would have been swung upward in a tight arc…”
Dr. Hoi shaped her hands as if they were gripping a pole, twisted her torso, and mimed a swing at the back of Tay’s head.
“Which would explain the point at which the blow landed and the direction of impact.”
She lifted one hand and tapped her forefinger on the base of Tay’s skull about three inches above his neck.
“So what was it?” Tay asked. “Something like a hammer?”
“No, not a hammer. Have you ever seen an American baseball bat?”
Tay nodded. “But that seems pretty unlikely to me,” he said. “There can’t be all that many American baseball bats in Singapore.”
“I agree. Pretty unlikely. And that’s where my theory comes in. I thought about what was like an American baseball bat: round, heavy, long enough to be gripped with two hands and swung with force. And you know what occurred to me?”
Tay didn’t, of course, so he waited for Dr. Hoi to tell him.
“A flashlight,” she said. “One of those big black ones that—”
“Patrolmen carry in the back of their fast response cars,” Tay finished. “Maglites, they’re called.”
“Exactly.”
“You’re saying a policeman killed this man?”
“No, of course not, Sam. I’m saying a heavy flashlight like a Maglite might have been the source of the original trauma. I’ve done a little research and there’s a six-cell model that’s almost two feet long and weighs over three pounds. The barrel is almost exactly two inches in diameter.”
Dr. Hoi reached over and tapped the photograph on her phone.
“That’s a perfect fit for that fracture.”
“So you are saying a policeman might have killed this man.”
“How would I know who swung the Maglite? It might have been a policeman. It might even have been you. I just do autopsies and come up with possibilities. You’re the detective.”
Tay thought about that for a moment. “You didn’t put this in your autopsy report, did you?”
Dr. Hoi smiled. “I knew you hadn’t read it.”
Tay didn’t know what to say to that so he said nothing.
“No, it’s not in my report. I’m not completely stupid. This is just for your ears, Sam.”
Dr. Hoi leaned forward and retrieved her phone with one hand. With the other, she rubbed Tay’s right knee as if it were a small animal of which she was exceptionally fond.
***
Tay reached for his cigarettes and automatically tipped the pack toward Dr. Hoi. He was surprised when she nodded and took one. His movement had been a reflexive gesture of courtesy as deeply engrained in Tay’s muscle memory as opening a door for a woman. Gestures like that seemed old-fashioned now, stodgy even. Tay couldn’t remember the last time a woman had actually accepted a cigarette from him.
“I didn’t know you smoked,” he said.
“There’s a lot you don’t know about me.”
That was true enough, but Tay figured the conversation could go nowhere good if he responded, so he didn’t. Instead he lit both their cigarettes and they sat quietly on the bench together and smoked.
“Do you have an ID on the deceased yet?” Dr. Hoi eventually asked, breaking the silence.
“No. Nothing.”
“The fingerprints didn’t get a hit?”
“Not locally. We’ve sent them to Interpol, but God knows how long it will take to hear from them.”
“Nobody in the area knew him?”
“The apartment is owned by an old man who’s gone to live with his daughter in LA. Nobody was supposed to be in it.”
Dr. Hoi said nothing, but she shook her head slightly.
“So I’m looking for anything, really,” Tay continued. “Anything at all that might point me in the right direction. I’m not sure if this business about the Maglite helps, or if it just makes everything more complicated.”
“Well…” Dr. Hoi began, then trailed off.
“Yes?”
“There is something else.”
“Something else you didn’t put in the report?”
“Well…” she trailed off again.
This time Tay just waited.
After a moment or two of silence, Dr. Hoi removed a clear plastic envelope from the pocket of her lab coat and handed it to Tay. Inside the envelope was a silver key. The key was narrow and flat on both sides with big, rectangular teeth and no grooves. Tay didn’t have a bank safety deposit box, but he had opened bank boxes before when they were connected with an investigation and he knew immediately that this was almost certainly the key to one.
Tay shifted his eyes from the plastic bag to Dr. Hoi, but he said nothing.
“This is a little gift to you from the dead man at the Woodlands.”
“I don’t understand.”
“He had it when he died.”
Tay remembered going through the corpse’s pockets as it lay on the floor of that sad little apartment in the Woodlands. He didn’t understand how he could he have missed something as important as this.
“Not in his pockets,” Dr. Hoi said as if she knew what Tay was thinking.
Tay didn’t get it.
So he mulled it over for fifteen seconds. Maybe twenty.
Then he did get it.
“It was in his rectum,” Dr. Hoi said just as Tay was thinking that was exactly what she was going to say.
Tay had to beat down an overwhelming urge to drop the bag. He succeeded, but his fingers involuntarily shifted around until he was holding it by the barest corner.
Dr. Hoi noticed and smiled.
“Not the whole bag,” she said. “Just the key.”
Tay’s eyes flicked back to the shiny metal key tucked between the two layers of clear plastic. Registering the large, rectangular teeth on its shaft, Tay felt his anus constrict.
***
Tay laid the plastic envelope carefully on the bench between them.
“Why did you leave this out of your report?”
“Normally it would have been in there, of course, but since you’re the investigating officer on the case…well, I figured I’d tell you about it first and see what you thought.”
Tay looked at the plastic envelope and said nothing.
“So what do you think?” Dr. Hoi asked when she got tired of waiting.
“I think it’s a key to a safety deposit box, but as far as…well, I really don’t know. Why would anybody shove a key to a safety deposit box up the poor old guy’s ass?”
“No one did.”
Dr. Hoi drew on her Marlboro, then tilted her head up and exhaled. The gesture reminded Tay of Lauren Bacall in some black and white movie from the forties.
“But I thought you said you found it in—”
“I think he did it himself.”
Tay felt his anus twitch again.
“There were no contusion on the rectal wall,” she added. “No abnormal stretching in either the internal or the external sphincters. And I found what I think are traces of lubricant on the lining of the upper anus, but I won’t know for sure until the lab reports come back.”
Dr. Hoi reached out and tapped on the key with her forefinger.
“My guess is he just lubed himself up and shoved that little sucker right up his own butt.”
***
Tay was too embarrassed by the whole subject to make eye contact with Dr. Hoi, so he focused his full attention on finishing his cigarette while he thought about what she was telling him.
The old man had pushed a safety deposit box key up his own ass before he was killed? Was he just trying to conceal it, or did he know he was about to die and wanted to leave it for someone like Tay to find? Either way, whatever was in that box had to be pretty damn important, at least to the dead man, so maybe it would help Tay figure out who the guy was.
“So…” Dr. Hoi cut into his reverie, “what do you want me to do about putting the key in my report?”
“Can you give me a few days?”
“You want to find the box and see what’s in it first, don’t you?”
That was exactly what Tay wanted to do, but he hated to be so transparent so he said nothing. He just dropped his cigarette butt on the ground and pushed it into the dirt with the toe of his shoe.
Then he picked up the plastic bag and slid it into his pocket.