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

nine, Tay remembered he had intended to call the lawyer in New York that evening, but then he realized he had left the man’s letter in his office and didn’t have the telephone number. Awash in his own foolishness and his failures of the day, Tay turned on the television and sat staring at it for two hours with only the dimmest realization of what he was seeing. Then he turned it off, brushed his teeth, and went to bed.
    Tomorrow, he promised himself, would be a better day.
    Or maybe it wouldn’t.
    ON Friday morning Sergeant Kang brought Tay a copy of the FMB report. Just as Kang had predicted, there wasn’t a thing in it of any use.
    “Any progress on the ID, Sergeant?”
    “We’re almost through the visitor list, sir. Nothing at all yet.”
    “This woman didn’t parachute in. If she’s not a local, she’s a visitor. There are no other possibilities.”
    “Maybe she was in some kind of special group and isn’t on the regular visitor list.”
    Tay thought about that. “What kind of group would that be?”
    “I don’t know, sir. It was just an idea.”
    “Well, I doubt that’s the answer, but maybe you’d better ask Immigration if that’s possible.”
    “Right, sir.”
    Sergeant Kang started out of Tay’s office, but suddenly stopped and turned around again.
    “I almost forgot, sir. The autopsy is scheduled for two o’clock. Since it’s right after lunch, and with the facilities being so conveniently located just across the street from here and all, I assume you’ll be popping over after you polish off a nice big plate of chicken curry?”
    Tay had no intention of rising to the bait.
    “Who’s the forensic pathologist assigned?” he asked instead.
    “Don’t know, sir. You want me to find out so you’ll be sure to knock on the right door?”
    “Get out of here, Sergeant.”
    “Yes, sir.” Kang grinned and disappeared.
    Tay’s lunchtime routine on Fridays had become for him a ritual of some significance. Today, especially today, he had absolutely no intention of altering it.
    Instead of eating lunch on Fridays, he took a taxi to one of two places: Borders in Wheelock Place or Kinokuniya in Ngee Ann City. They were the two biggest bookstores he had ever seen and browsing through them without any specific purpose in mind was about as much fun as he had these days. Sometimes he bought some fiction. Sometimes he bought some nonfiction. Once, seized by a fit of something he was still unable to identify, he had even bought a book called Living and Working in France , but that had been an aberration.
    Regardless of what books Tay bought, however, he was happy to know that he would have their company over the weekend. He didn’t drink much, he wouldn’t go shopping except perhaps at gunpoint, and he loathed golf. That left nothing much for him to do in Singapore on the weekends other than read books, and it was that pursuit that kept him going back either to Borders or Kinokuniya almost every Friday at lunchtime.
    Tay had long ago decided that his custom of spending his Friday lunch hours in a bookstore had two particular benefits: one mental and one physical. The mental benefit was that the ordered ranks of books tidily subdivided into categories and subcategories testified to the existence of mankind’s thirst for understanding, and prompted Tay to contemplate there might be order and meaning in the universe after all. The physical benefit was that it forced him to skip a meal. He could stand to lose about five pounds. Maybe ten. He really could.
    This particular Friday, it was Borders’ privilege to bask in Tay’s patronage. Trying to take his mind off the image of the battered body propped up on the bed at the Marriott, he splurged a little and loaded up. He bought the British edition of Esquire , which he thought far superior to the American version of the magazine, a breathtakingly expensive three-volume biography of Graham Greene, and a paperback copy of a Martin Cruz Smith novel set in