“He’s going to the taxi stand, sir,” Sergeant Lee said.
“Yes, I see him,” Tay nodded. “He’s with that tall woman in the red dress.”
“No, sir.”
“Of course he is. I can see him plainly. He’s with that woman.”
“No sir, what I actually meant, sir, is…well…”
“What the hell are you trying to say, Sergeant?”
“That’s not a woman, sir.”
Tay glanced briefly at Sergeant Lee, then back at the person with whom DeSouza was walking. She was wearing a dark red, kneelength skirt with a matching red bolero jacket, a white blouse, black stockings, and expensive-looking red pumps. Her dark hair was cut short and frosted with silver highlights, and when she glanced over her shoulder for a moment, Tay saw the face of an attractive and elegant woman who looked to be in her late twenties.
“You’re out of your fucking mind,” Tay said after his inspection was complete.
“Uh…no, sir. That’s a bapok. A shim.”
“A what?”
“Shim, sir. A she-him. Orchard Towers is where most of them hang out.”
Tay took another look, but saw nothing that caused him to change his mind. “That can’t be a man, Sergeant.”
“It is, sir. Really, it is.”
Tay thought of asking Lee why he was so sure, then decided he might not want to know.
“So DeSouza’s gay?” Tay asked instead.
“No, sir. He wouldn’t be gay.”
Tay shot a sharp look at Sergeant Lee. “Didn’t you just tell me that’s a man he’s leaving this place with?”
“Yes, sir. But gay men aren’t attracted to shims. Gay men are attracted to men. The men who go with shims are straight men. They like shims because they’re so feminine.”
Tay was having difficulty getting his mind around what he was hearing. Lucinda Lim told him that Elizabeth Munson wasn’t gay regardless of the fact that she slept with other women. Now Sergeant Lee was telling him that men who picked up other men — other men who dressed like women, to be sure, but still men — weren’t gay either.
Tay accepted that very few things in this world were certain. Still, the division of the human species into males and females and the separation of human sexual attraction into gay and straight seemed to him to be clear enough. Were there actually shades of gray in both matters that he had completely missed? Surely not. Surely, even in a world apparently turned enthusiastically relativistic in nearly all matters of belief and conviction, at least this single principle of physiological, if not moral, certainty still held true. There were men and there were women, and there were straights and there were gays. And that was that.
Or perhaps not.
DeSouza and his companion joined the line at the taxi stand and Tay continued to study them. He still thought Sergeant Lee was probably pulling his leg, but he resolved to start thinking of whoever that might be with DeSouza in gender-neutral terms just in case. There were a dozen or more people in front of them in the taxi line and not many taxis at that hour so it looked as if they might have to wait for a while. That was a break for Tay, since all at once he had a great deal to think about and very little time in which to do it.
If DeSouza really was the stone-cold murderer of three women, Tay could hardly let him pick up somebody in a bar and just walk off into the night with them, could he? Of course, Tay didn’t have any real evidence that DeSouza had killed anyone, and this person with whom he was walking away into the night might not be a woman. Still, did DeSouza know he might not have picked up a woman and, if he didn’t know, how was he going to react when he found out? Tay really couldn’t work out where any of that left him.
There was another possibility Tay couldn’t ignore either. This might be the very break they had been waiting for. Perhaps DeSouza wasn’t a killer trolling for his next victim. Perhaps he had chosen this way to make contact with someone who could tie the whole case together for them. After all, there was the chance that both Munson and Rooney had been gay, wasn’t there? That might take the case in all sorts of directions and to all sorts of places where Tay’s apparently limited experience with human sexuality left him on very shaky ground. Couldn’t this woman, or man, with DeSouza somehow be connected with the case he was trying to build? Perhaps she, or he, could.
But then maybe none of this had anything to do with Tay’s investigation at all. Maybe DeSouza was just a lonely, middle-aged man out looking for sex on a dull Tuesday night and this was the companion he had chosen. If that were the case, it was absolutely none of Tay’s business who, or what, it might be, was it?
His head was starting to hurt. The punch line of a joke he had once heard came to mind.
What I really want is a one-armed lawyer. That way the bastard can’t say, “On the one hand, that might be true; but on the other hand, it might not be.”
Tay was still trying to decide which hand to go with when his telephone rang.
“I’ve got the car, sir,” Kang said. “Look to your right and you’ll see me.”
Tay glanced over and saw Kang’s Toyota at the curb. Then he looked back to where DeSouza and his friend were working their way closer to the front of the taxi line. They were in luck. Kang’s car was facing the right direction. Whether DeSouza’s taxi went straight ahead down Claymore Road toward Orchard or made a U-turn and went the opposite direction, Kang could pull out and get behind it. Thank Christ for small favors.
“Let’s go,” Tay said to Sergeant Lee and bolted for the Toyota.
The sergeant dropped some bills on the table and took off right behind him.
Tay would have preferred to circle around the building and approach the Toyota from the opposite direction, but there was no time and he was pretty sure that DeSouza wouldn’t spot him anyway. Still, he was careful to keep his face turned away from where DeSouza waited in the taxi line.
“Did he see me, Robbie?” Tay asked as he slid into the passenger seat of the Toyota.
“No, sir,” Kang said. “Too wrapped up in his girlfriend. God, that one’s a looker, isn’t she?”
Tay was just trying to decide whether or not to say anything to Kang when Sergeant Lee caught up and slid into the back seat.
“They’re getting into a taxi, sir,” Kang said from the driver’s seat as the door closed.
Tay decided any discussion with Kang of modern sexuality in Singapore could wait for a more convenient time.
“Don’t lose him, Robbie.”
“No, sir. I won’t.”
Tay leaned back in his seat as Sergeant Kang pulled away. He still didn’t have the first idea how to play this, but he supposed not much would happen as long as DeSouza and his friend were in a taxi. There wasn’t anything he could do now but wait and see where they went.
THEY went to the Hoover Hotel on Balestier Road, not very far from Orchard Towers.
When the taxi stopped at the hotel’s entrance, Kang pulled to the curb about fifty yards away and cut his lights. Tay and the two sergeants watched in silence as DeSouza and his companion got out of the taxi and went into the hotel.
“A lot of the girls live there, sir,” Sergeant Lee said.
Tay twisted around and looked at him in the back seat. “Girls?”
“Well…” the sergeant hesitated. “It’s the term most people use for them.”
“What are you talking about?” Kang asked.
“DeSouza’s friend,” Tay told him. “She’s a chim.”
“Shim, sir,” Lee corrected him.
“What friend?” Kang asked.
“The one he just went into the hotel with,” Tay said.
Sergeant Kang’s face slackened. “You’re joking,” he said.
Kang looked from Tay to Lee and back again, but neither of them said a word.
“You’re not joking,” he said. “Oh man, I would never have believed it.”
“Most of the shims come in from Thailand on tourist visas,” Lee said. “They work for a couple of weeks, then leave before their visas expire so they won’t have any trouble getting back in again. The money’s so good here they want to keep straight with the immigration people.”
“You mean we can’t do this kind of thing ourselves here in Singapore?” Tay asked. “We have to import them?”
“We’ve got some,” Lee shrugged, “but all the best-looking ones are Thai.”
“Why do you suppose that is?” Sergeant Kang asked.
“Gentlemen,” Tay said, “if it’s all the same to you, could we drop the subject? It seems to me that we’ve got our hands full here without trying to interpret the mystery of human sexuality at the same time.”
“Right, sir,” both sergeants responded almost in unison.
There was a small silence as the three men contemplated the front of the Hoover Hotel.
“What do you want to do now, sir?” Kang finally asked.
“I don’t know, but I’m worried about what DeSouza is up to. If he did kill Munson and Rooney…” Tay left the thought unfinished.
“You don’t have enough to bust in on them, sir,” Kang said. “You don’t have anything really. And if you do bust in, you’ll have to admit to the unauthorized surveillance and we’ll all be-”
“The implications have indeed occurred to me, thank you, Robbie.”
“Maybe they’ve just gone in there to talk anyway, sir,” Kang added, nodding toward the hotel.
Tay and Lee just looked at him.
“Well,” Kang muttered, “it’s possible, isn’t it?”
Tay scratched at his ear as he studied the hotel’s entrance.
“Anybody got a camera?” he asked.
“There ought to be one in the glove box,” Kang said. “What are you going to do with it?”
Tay opened the glove compartment. Rummaging around he found a small Minolta digital camera. He turned it on and Kang watched while he fiddled with the controls and made sure the battery was charged.
“You’re not thinking about going in there and taking pictures of those two together, are you, sir?” he asked.
“There are all sorts of things in this life I’d rather not see, Sergeant, and Tony DeSouza having sex with a man in a dress is definitely on that list.”
Taking the camera with him, Tay got out of the car and crossed the street to the opposite sidewalk. He made certain the flash was turned off and then he took several shots of the front of the hotel from different angles. After that he stood quietly in the shadows, thinking.
The main road had no pedestrian traffic at that hour at all, but Tay saw several people on the street that ran along the side of the hotel. Was there another access to the hotel over there? He lifted the camera again and squeezed off three more exposures that included the side street in the frame, although he had no idea what good that would do him.
When he returned to the Toyota, he bent down next to the open driver’s window and handed the camera to Sergeant Kang.
“Can you get some prints of these made first thing in the morning?”
“Right, sir. But why-”
“I don’t know,” Tay interrupted. “Just do it.”
Tay straightened up and fished a Marlboro out of his shirt pocket. Cupping a match carefully in his hand to block the frame, he lit it and leaned on the roof of the car with his forearms while he smoked.
Kang was right, of course. He had nothing on DeSouza but his instincts. If he went charging into the Hoover Hotel and just found two people having sex, whatever their respective genders actually were, the whole surveillance operation would unravel. He was willing to take responsibility for what he was doing. That wasn’t the problem since, after all, he was responsible. The difficulty was that Sergeant Kang and the other six men would share the responsibility with him. They didn’t deserve to be punished for their loyalty to him.
Tay smoked quietly for a few minutes. His every instinct told him DeSouza hadn’t taken his companion into the Hoover Hotel to commit another murder. Was he just rationalizing his unwillingness to move on DeSouza or did he really believe that? He supposed it didn’t really matter. If he turned out to be wrong and DeSouza was committing another brutal murder inside the Hoover Hotel right at that moment, he would live the rest of his life knowing he could have stopped it and didn’t.
Tay was just putting the Marlboro to his lips again when he saw DeSouza come out of the hotel’s front door. He quickly bent down behind the car and dropped the cigarette into the gutter.
“Bloody hell,” Kang whispered. “He’s done already?”
Tay glanced at his watch. DeSouza had been in the hotel less than ten minutes. Ten minutes might be long enough to murder someone, but it wasn’t long enough to clean up and stage a crime scene. And DeSouza wasn’t carrying anything out of the hotel with him. On the other hand, ten minutes wasn’t long enough to have sex either. At least, not if you were doing it right. So what in the world was going on?
“What do you want us to do, sir?” Kang asked.
“Keep him covered. This doesn’t change anything.”
“How about the girl?” Lee asked.
Tay looked at Sergeant Lee. The terminology was still giving him a lot of trouble.
“What about…” Tay hesitated, “her?”
“I meant, sir, do you want us to follow her when she comes out, too?”
Tay thought for a moment. “Who was the man covering Orchard Towers with you?” he asked Lee.
“Danny Ong, sir.”
“Right. Get out of the car here, Lee. Call Ong and have him come over and pick you up. When the girl comes out, you take her. Sergeant Kang can stay with DeSouza.”
“But, sir,” Kang asked, “don’t regulations require a female officer to deal with female suspects?”
“Sergeant Lee will explain that one to you, Robbie,”
Lee grinned and slid out of the back seat, joining Tay on the sidewalk. Tay glanced back toward the Hoover Hotel and saw DeSouza getting into a taxi. He slapped the Toyota’s roof with his open palm.
“Don’t lose him, Robbie.”
“What are you going to do, sir?” Kang asked.
“I’m going to go home,” Tay said.
Then he walked off into the night to look for a taxi.