“HELLO?”
Laura Anne Zimmerman’s voice was soft, and Tay thought he heard a cautious note in it, too.
“Mrs. Zimmerman, this is—”
“It’s Miss.”
Tay hesitated. “I’m sorry?”
“It’s Miss Zimmerman. Not Mrs. Zimmerman.”
Then Tay remembered Kang telling him the woman had never been married, but did women really care these days about what prefix people put in front of their names? He had no idea.
“I apologize, Miss Zimmerman,” Tay said, trying and probably failing to inject at least a modest amount of remorse into his voice. “My name is Inspector Tay. I’m with the Criminal Investigation Department of the Singapore Police. I need to ask you a few questions.”
“About what?”
“About your mother.”
“My mother? You can’t be serious. Who is this, really?”
“Miss Zimmerman, I am exactly who I told you. I am Inspector Samuel Tay of Singapore CID.”
“Why would you want to ask me about my mother? My God, she’s been dead for—”
“Yes, I know. It’s a little complicated to explain. May I come to your house? I can be there in just a few minutes.”
“Come to my house? What’s this all about?”
“It is about your mother. It really is. If you will give me just a few minutes of your time, I can be more specific.”
There was a silence on the other end of the telephone. The woman was obviously skeptical, but now she was clearly curious as well. Tay could imagine how she felt. If someone had suddenly phoned him asking about his father, he would have felt exactly the same way.
“Can this wait? My mother’s been dead for thirty years. Surely there can’t be any hurry.”
“I’m afraid there is, Miss Zimmerman. I won’t keep you long.”
“I was just leaving for work. I really can’t wait for you.”
“Then I’ll be happy to meet you at your place of work. This is important, Miss Zimmerman. I need to show you some pictures.”
“Pictures? Of my mother?”
“Where is it that you work, Miss Zimmerman?”
There was another silence. Tay could almost hear the woman weighing caution against curiosity, then making up her mind.
Curiosity won.
“I’m the front office manager at the Marine Bay Sands. Give me a couple of hours to deal with the shift change and then come there and ask for me at the reception desk.”
Tay glanced at his watch. “Shall we say twelve noon?”
“Yes,” Laura Ann Zimmerman said, sounding a little relieved. “Twelve o’clock will be fine.”
***
The Marina Bay Sands was probably the most recognizable building in Singapore. Its three slim towers set along Marina Bay were capped with a dramatic structure called the Sky Park that spanned all three towers at the fifty-fifth level. The Sky Park was curved on one end and squared off on the other and had always looked to Tay like a huge surfboard unaccountably abandoned across the tops of three blue and white skyscrapers.
Tay took a taxi home and had the driver wait while he went inside and removed some of the photographs from his father’s albums and placed them in a brown manila envelope. Then he took the same taxi to the Marina Bay Sands. At exactly twelve o’clock he presented himself at the reception counter and asked a smiling young man with an Indian face to tell Laura Anne Zimmerman that Inspector Samuel Tay was there to speak with her.
While he waited for the woman to appear, Tay folded his arms, leaned back against the counter, and inspected the lobby of the hotel. It was undeniably spectacular, but far too outsized and over-scale for Tay’s taste. He assumed it must have been purposely designed to be architecturally intimidating, but exactly who was trying to intimidate whom was unclear to him. In keeping with the vast open space, everything in it was huge. Huge plants, huge pots, huge lamps. Human beings were reduced to ants scurrying for safety across the gleaming marble floors.
The interior of each tower was an open atrium rising the full height of the buildings, which had to be at least six hundred feet. All too frequently the police were called to collect the scattered pieces of a guest who had lost more than he could bear in the huge casino adjoining the hotel. How desperate did someone have to be, Tay often wondered, to jump to his death inside a hotel that he couldn’t afford to stay in anymore? Leaping from the Golden Gate Bridge or the Eiffel Tower he could almost understand. At least he could see the poetry in something like that. But jumping to one’s death inside a hotel that had little to recommend it apart from its cost seemed to Tay to be an unbearably sad thing for anyone to do.
“Inspector Tay?”
So absorbed had Tay been in contemplating the mysteries of human behavior that he had not noticed the woman walk up beside him. When she spoke and he turned his head, his first thought was how hard it was for anyone to be that absorbed.
Laura Anne Zimmerman was well over six feet tall and so thin she called to mind photographs Tay had seen somewhere of prisoners just freed from concentration camps. Her reddish-colored hair was cut very short and lay tight against her head. She was wearing a bright green dress that ended a good way above her knees. The woman’s skin was an unhealthy looking ivory color and her facial features were so sharp they looked as if you could cut your hand on her nose. Still, the whole effect was extraordinary and striking. Laura Anne Zimmerman could not have been described by anyone as a beautiful woman, but Tay had no doubt she was noticed and remembered by everyone she met.
“Is there somewhere we can talk privately, Miss Zimmerman?”
She led him across the lobby and into some kind of cocktail lounge that had not yet opened for the day. They sat at a table far enough into the lounge that people passing through the lobby couldn’t overhear their conversation. Tay took out his warrant card and placed it on the table between them. The woman barely glanced at it.
“What is this about my mother, Inspector?”
Tay returned his warrant card to his pocket and replaced it on the table with one of the photos he had taken from his father’s album. The photograph included three women standing in a straight line in front of a desk on which could be seen an old-fashioned adding machine with a big handle on its side. There were three names penciled on the back of the photograph and one of those was Ethel Zimmerman. Since two of the women in the photo had Chinese faces, Tay assumed it was fairly obvious which one Mrs. Zimmerman was.
“Is this your mother?”
Laura Anne Zimmerman broke into a smile as soon as she saw the picture, and Tay thought it was a very nice smile indeed. It seemed to him to come from somewhere deep within the woman, not just from the surface muscles of her face, and it made her unexpectedly interesting to Tay.
“Where did you get this?” she asked. “I’ve never seen it before.”
“So one of these women is your mother?”
“Right there.” She reached out with her forefinger and it hovered over the woman in the photograph who was Caucasian. “That’s my mother.”
“What can you tell me about her?”
“Not much. I was only ten or eleven when she was killed. Why do you want to know about her?”
Tay told her. At least he told her some of it.
He told her about her mother working for his father, that some old accounts with his father’s initials had turned up in the course of another investigation, and that he was trying to locate people who had worked with his father in an effort to figure out what the accounts might actually mean. To be honest, Tay didn’t think his explanation sounded like it made all that much sense, but maybe the story was better than he thought it was since the woman didn’t question it.
“My mother worked for your father?” she said. “How incredible. Is your father still alive?”
“He died the year before your mother.”
Tay saw the woman thinking about that. She was no dummy, he could tell. She immediately worked out that it was a little odd both her mother and his father had died within a short time of each other and now a policeman was asking her questions.
“Are you saying their deaths were somehow connected?” the woman asked, picking her words carefully.
“I thought your mother died in an automobile accident.”
“She did, only…well, I’ve always wondered a little what really happened since there were apparently no witnesses. Is that what this is about?”
Instead of answering, Tay removed from the envelope the picture of his father, Johnny the Mover, and the umbrella man and placed it on the table in front of the woman.
“Do you recognize any of these men?”
The woman examined the photograph, seemed to study it a minute. Then she answered without any sound of doubt in her voice, “No, I don’t think so.”
Then Tay took out the rest of the photographs and dealt them out onto the table one by one like a blackjack dealer. After looking at each of them, the woman shook her head.
“I’m sorry I can’t be of more help,” she said when Tay was done and began to return the photos to the envelop. “I just don’t remember much about my mother. She was a bookkeeper for somebody, but I don’t even know who. And I certainly don’t remember ever meeting anyone she worked with.”
They made small talk for a while after that. Tay knew he had all he was going to get and was mostly keeping the conversation going just because Laura Anne Zimmerman was a striking woman who was interesting to be with. Tay wondered if perhaps he should be pitching himself to her a little bit, but then she was so much taller than he was that they would make a ridiculous-looking couple, wouldn’t they? No woman wanted to go out with a man who made her look ridiculous. So what point was there in that?
“Inspector, I think there’s something else I ought to tell you.”
Tay said nothing.
“I’m not entirely insensitive to men,” the woman continued. “I do occasionally know what men are thinking and…well, I have this feeling right now you’re trying to make up your mind whether to ask me out.”
Tay glanced away, embarrassed. Was he that transparent? He supposed he must be. Good Lord, was he ever going to stop being so clumsy.
“So let me tell you this now and get it over with,” she smiled. “I’m gay.”
***
Tay’s first instinct, of course, was to bolt.
He successfully fought down that impulse, if only because he imagined it would make him appear even more foolish than he already did to be seen frantically fleeing the lobby of the Marina Bay Hotel. So he smiled and nodded and continued making conversation until a decent enough interval had passed for him to end the conversation with some shred of dignity still intact.
“I’m sorry I can’t remember any more about my mother, Inspector,” the woman said as they shook hands at the hotel’s entrance. “If my father were still alive, I’m sure he could have been of much more help.”
“Has your father been gone long?”
“Oh yes. Ten, maybe twelve years now.”
The woman stopped talking and seemed to be thinking back to something.
“You know it’s funny now that I talk about him, but…” She trailed off with a slight chuckle and shook her head. “Never mind.”
“Go on,” Tay said. “You never know what might be helpful.”
“Well…it just came to me that my father and I were going through some old family pictures right before he died and a lot them were of my mother. My father said…”
She stopped talking again and shook her head. “No, that’s too silly. I have no idea what he meant.”
“Meant about what?”
“About my mother.”
Tay said nothing. He knew she wanted to tell him what she had just remembered and if he waited her out she would eventually.
“He looked at this one picture of my mother for a really long time,” she went on after a moment just as Tay had known she would. “When he put it down, he said to me, ‘You know, your mother wasn’t really a bookkeeper at all.’”
Laura Ann Zimmerman chuckled again.
“And then he said, ‘Your mother was really a spy.’”