THE NEXT MORNING, Tay took a small kitchen ladder out to his garden and opened it up. He pushed some banana trees aside and sat it next to the back wall. He felt like a fool doing it, but he did it anyway.
The ladder was just tall enough to allow him to scramble over the wall and drop into the narrow alleyway behind his house. From there he walked out to Hullet Road and then west to Cairnhill Road where he almost immediately found a taxi.
Tay had no idea if ISD still had him under surveillance or not. Goh had denied it, of course, but then what else was he going to do? Regardless, Tay saw no reason to take a chance. If ISD was there, they would be set up somewhere out on Emerald Hill Road waiting for him to emerge from his front gate. Tay was pretty certain it would never have occurred to them he might make his morning departure over the garden wall instead. Until today, it had never occurred to him either.
***
Tay told the cab driver to drop him on Farrer Road just in front of St. Margaret’s School. Crossing over the busy thoroughfare on a pedestrian bridge, he turned right on Woollerton Park Road and strolled slowly toward Gallop Green. The road dead-ended directly into the security gate at Gallop Green so that approach gave him the longest possible view of Mei Lin’s apartment complex without hanging around outside in the street and being painfully obvious about it.
And he figured he needed all the time he could get.
Because he didn’t have a bloody clue what he was going to do when he got there.
***
To Tay’s astonishment, he caught a break.
He was about a hundred yards from the guardhouse at Gallop Green’s security gate, an odd little structure that looked to Tay like a glassed-in mushroom, when one of the guards came out, slipped a light-colored cotton jacket over his uniform shirt, and began walking up the street directly toward Tay.
Keeping the same meandering pace, Tay turned left into the driveway of a house set back from the road where the gates had been conveniently left open. With the odd glance back over his shoulder, he walked slowly toward the house trying hard to look as innocent as he possibly could. After the guard passed the foot of the driveway, Tay turned around, walked back out to Woollerton Park Road, and followed the guard at a distance of about a hundred feet.
And the breaks just kept on coming.
The guard walked straight up to Farrer Road and went into a restaurant on the corner that appeared to cater to locals. Like a lot of similar places in Singapore, it was unairconditioned and open to the street on two sides, shielded from the sun and rain only by wide aluminum awnings painted bright blue. The guard settled himself at a table by the sidewalk and lit a cigarette. Tay walked a bit more slowly and watched the guard give his order to an elderly woman in a shapeless gray dress.
As soon as the woman left the table, Tay went straight to the table and seated himself on an orange plastic chair opposite the guard. Giving the man his very best dead-eyed look, he removed a pack of Marlboros from his shirt pocket and lit one without taking his eyes off the man.
Tay took a deep draw on his cigarette, and leaned forward slightly. “I’m from ISD,” he said. He kept his voice low and tried to imbue it with a certain degree of menace.
When Tay saw the frightened-rabbit look in the man’s eyes, he almost laughed out loud.
A bus rolled past, its engine grinding noisily, which gave Tay a chance to get himself under control. The ISD thing was becoming intoxicating. He had been a policeman for a long time and had never before experienced the kind of response he got from people by simply muttering those three initials. If someone asked for identification, he figured he would just produce his CID warrant card and then put it away again before they got a careful look at it, but he knew that was unlikely to happen anyway. When confronted by a man identifying himself as being from the Internal Security Department, not one Singaporean in ten thousand would have the balls to do anything but tug on his forelock and lower his eyes.
The guard was a dark-skinned older man who looked somewhat Indian. He was nearly bald with a deeply lined face and heavy brows. He didn’t have a forelock to tug, but he did lower his eyes.
“I have some questions for you,” Tay said.
The man nodded, but stayed silent.
“How long have you worked at Gallop Green?”
Tay saw the man’s Adam’s apple bob up and down as he swallowed once, hard. Now he understood that Tay knew who he was. This wasn’t just some kind of random stop.
“About six months, sir.”
“Like your job?”
The man nodded slowly. Tay could see him trying to work out what was coming.
“Want to keep it?”
Tay watched the Adam’s apple move up and down again.
“Do you know Mei Lin Lee?”
Tay could see in the man’s eyes his first thought was to deny it. In Tay’s experience, when asked a question like that by someone in authority, nearly everyone’s first thought was to deny it. But then the man realized that, of course, Tay already knew he did or they wouldn’t be having this conversation.
“I know who she is, sir.”
“How about Mr. Lee. Do you know who he is?
Now the man looked genuinely confused. “Mr. Lee?”
“Her husband.”
The elderly woman shuffled over and banged a bottle of Tiger beer on the table in front of the guard. She looked at Tay. He gave her his best version of a dead-eyed stare and said nothing. She gave it right back to him and shuffled away. Okay, Tay thought, maybe it doesn’t work on everyone.
“There no Mr. Lee. No, sir. No Mr. Lee. Least not at Gallop Green.”
“She’s not married?”
“Don’t know, sir,” the guard said, but Tay thought he could see traces of something like a snicker around the corners of his mouth.
Tay pulled out his telephone, located the photograph of Vincent Ferrero, and turned his phone so the guard could see it.
“Do you know this man?”
The guard licked his lips. Now he looked uncomfortable. The snicker, if it had ever been there, was long gone.
“Who is he?”
“The name on our list is Mr. Hysmith, but I don’t think that’s really—”
“What list?”
“The owners’ list, sir.”
“This man owns an apartment at Gallop Green?”
“Yes, sir.”
Tay was certain he already knew what the answer to his next question would be, but he asked it anyway.
“What apartment does Mr. Hysmith own?”
The guard cleared his throat and looked away. “It’s D12. The unit where Ms. Lee lives.”
Tay thought about that for a moment.
“Is he there now?”
“No, sir. He not come in long time. A week? Maybe two?”
“But Mrs. Lee is there now.”
“Yes, sir.”
Tay leaned slowly across the table toward the security guard, gave him another dose of the dead-eyed stare he was getting pretty close to perfecting, and said, “I going to make a telephone call. You will not move from that chair until I return. Is that clear?”
The man nodded quickly and Tay stood up, walked out to the sidewalk, and pretended to make a call. He had no one to call, of course, but he did need time to think.
So now he knew for sure Vince Ferrero was keeping a beautiful woman in an expensive apartment. So bloody what?
Tay was almost certain Ferrero killed Johnny the Mover, but he still had no idea why. Did Mei Lin know? Possibly, but he doubted it. She had been involved with Ferrero’s access to the safety box at the bank, that was true, but that didn’t make her his partner or his pal. She was probably his current punch and that was about it.
Well, that was a little harsh Tay had to admit. Maybe he was just jealous of a man who could stash a beautiful woman in a five million dollar apartment and keep her there until he got tired of her. It was like keeping a pet, wasn’t it? A pet who gave blowjobs. Probably.
So why had Mei Lin readily identified Ferrero as Mr. Hysmith when Tay had shown her the picture on his phone? All she had to do was say she didn’t recognize the man and that would have been that. Tay would have had no way left to connect up the dots.
But Mai Lin had served Vince Ferrero up to him right on the proverbial platter. Why had she done that? He had no idea. None at all.
***
When Tay returned to the table, the security guard was picking nervously at a pile of rice and something that looked like chicken curry.
“What’s your name?” Tay asked the guard after sitting down again. He tried for a friendly tone of voice, but he was less good at that than he was at nastiness and he thought it came out sounding a little strangled.
“Rahul, sir.”
“Well, Rahul, here’s the deal. You and I never had this conversation. Is that clear?”
The guard’s eyes darted nervously from side to side and the Adam’s apple went up and down.
“If you do tell anyone, if either this man or this woman find out I asked you these questions,” Tay went on without waiting for an answer, “I will find out. I will see that you lose your job, and I will make certain other even more unpleasant things happen to you.”
Tay could see Rahul trying to figure out what those more unpleasant things might be, which was okay with Tay, because he actually had no idea what he was talking about either.
After a moment, looking suitably cowed and frightened, Rahul nodded quickly.
“Are you on a meal break?”
“No, sir. It is the end of my shift. After I eat, I will be going home.”
“You will be going home now, Rahul. Forget the food. Get out of here.”
The guard cast a disappointed look at the plate in front of him and the nearly full bottle of beer, but he nodded quickly again, then stood up and hurried away.
Tay hated depriving a man of a meal, but he was going to have to go back to Gallop Green and have another talk with Mei Lin and he didn’t want Rahul anywhere in the neighborhood when he did. He had crawled way out on a limb with all this ISD stuff. The fewer people there were around who knew what he had been doing the happier he would be.