The Ambassador's Wife by Jake Needham Read Free Book Online

be sued for something, it certainly wouldn’t be by anyone in New York. He had never even been in New York.
    Eventually Tay opened the envelope and took out the letter. It was only a single sheet of paper. He read it, and then, not quite believing what he had just read, he read it again from the beginning.
    The letter was from a man named Rosenthal whom Tay had never heard of. He said he was a lawyer representing Tay’s mother and wanted to notify Tay that his mother had had a stroke and was in Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York. She was expected to recover, but the prognosis was uncertain as to whether she might have permanent brain damage. That was all the letter said. Nothing else at all.
    “My God,” Tay murmured to himself.
    He had not spoken to his mother in…Tay thought about it, but he couldn’t remember for sure. Three years? Perhaps four?
    There wasn’t any significance to that, not really. They certainly weren’t angry at each other. They had just somehow slipped out of each other’s lives. His mother had lived in New York for nearly twenty-five years now. She was married to someone he had met only a couple of times. Their lives no longer had anything to do with each other. It was just that simple. Was it really possible for someone to actually lose track of his own mother? He knew the answer to that. It was very possible indeed. It was one of those things that happened in life when you weren’t paying attention.
    Tay looked at his watch. What time was it in New York now? He tried to work it out, but he wasn’t certain. And what was he going to do anyway? Telephone his mother and ask how she was? That didn’t seem like a very good idea. If she had had a stroke, perhaps her speech had been affected. He briefly considered calling her husband, but he hardly knew the man and hadn’t talked to him in ten years. He supposed he could always call this fellow Rosenthal who had written the letter, but what would be the point of that? Presumably he had already told Tay all he knew.
    Maybe he should just go to New York and find out what the hell was going on, but that was out of the question, too, wasn’t it? He was responsible for finding the killer of a dead woman who had been viciously brutalized. Murder investigations didn’t wait around until you found a convenient time to fit them into your schedule. Tay would have to transfer the case to someone else if he went to New York. He didn’t really want to do that and, besides, flying halfway around the world on the basis of a half-page letter from someone he didn’t even know really made no sense at all.
    Tay leaned back in his chair, swung his feet onto the desk, and shifted his gaze out the window. From his office on the fifteenth floor of the Cantonment Complex, he had a glorious view of the city. Straight ahead across the Singapore River lay the green patch of Fort Canning Park and off to the right were the glass and steel towers of the financial district. If Tay stood up and walked to the window and looked off to the left, he could even see the Marriott somewhere in the middle of the long line of luxury hotels scattered along Orchard Road. But then he wasn’t about to do that.
    Tay made a pocket of air in one cheek, shifted it to the other, and then blew it out in one long stream. A feeling about this case was taking root within him and, as he threaded it back and forth through his mind, examining it first from one direction and then from the other, he saw at least one thing with unmistakable clarity. This case was going to turn into a real son of a bitch, a shit storm of the first order.
    He didn’t know how he knew that, he just did. And now there was this, too. His mother was in a hospital in New York and there was a letter on his desk from somebody he didn’t know telling him she might have brain damage. Well, goddamn it all to hell, what in Christ’s name was he supposed to do about that? Was he supposed to drop everything and fly to New York and sit