Dinessen’s car was an old, primer-patched Citroen. I found it parked just outside the entrance to the office, the key in the ignition. That was something, at least. I wouldn’t have had the stomach to search the mangled thing there in the warehouse; it had been bad enough during the minute I had used to wipe my fingerprints off the surfaces I had touched on the forklift.
That act had been automatic, and now I wondered why I had taken the time to remove the prints. It was, in a bitter sense, like closing the barn door after the horse had fled. But I still had some hope-the odds were a little better now-and I decided I had done the wisest thing. There was no point in tightening the noose around my neck.
I slid in under the Citroen’s wheel, holding my stiffened right arm in my lap. There had been no time for cleaning up, and my bush jacket and khakis were stained with patches of blood; but the wound had stopped bleeding at least. My head still ached piteously, and my strength was flagging from pain and exertion and loss of blood. And yet the urgency which filled me was like a narcotic, allowing me to function, compensating.
I got the car started and brought it into a sharp turn, onto a short access lane. I had to shift the four-speed transmission awkwardly across my body with my left hand, using my shoulder to keep the wheel in position. The floodlit buildings, the small and darkened airstrip, receded and finally disappeared as I reached Bukit Timah Road and swung south along there, into the city proper.
The Citroen had a dash panel clock, and its luminescent dial coincided with my wristwatch… 8:05. It would take me maybe twenty minutes to get to the Lavender Street area and Tampines Road… 8:25. Not much time-but I had to go there, I had to find whatever evidence Dinessen had planted with Marla King’s body; and if it could be accomplished, if there was enough time, I had to get rid of the body as well. Even with any evidence removed, I didn’t want Tiong walking in there and finding her dead.
There was a considerable amount of traffic on Bukit Timah Road, and the headlights of the oncoming cars were like streaks of yellow-white paint on the black canvas of the night. Tall palms and Jamaican peppers and fruit-laden mangosteens dotted the landscape, occasionally illuminated by the headlights, occasionally drenched in the clinical white shine of the moon when it drifted free of a rolling pattern of clouds. I drove too fast in spite of the traffic, with too much exigency and too little concentration.
I kept thinking of Marla King, and of Dinessen, and how the two of them fit together in this thing. It could be that she had killed La Croix, and that the Frenchman had given her Dinessen’s name-but not the exact location of the Burong Chabak. Van Rijk had told me she was on the island illegally, and so Dinessen might have seemed like her way out to Thailand and the buyer. He already knew about the figurine from La Croix, and she had had to promise him a slice of the pie in order to get him to go along with her plans. Then she had come to me, and when she was sure that I was going to pony up the figurine, she had tried to double-cross Dinessen the way La Croix had double-crossed her-and had gotten the same reward for her greed; she would probably have tried to cross me if she’d had the chance as well. It could also be that she had been planning a double-cross of La Croix from the beginning-Jesus, the treachery involved in all this-and had enlisted Dinessen’s help almost immediately, without telling him of the Burong Chabak; he had discovered its existence, and its worth, from the Frenchman, confronted her with the knowledge, and been ostensibly brought in as a partner. If that was the answer, then Marla King might not have killed La Croix. I liked it better with the first explanation, because that answered a lot more of the questions which until now had had no answers. But I had no way of knowing, one way or the other.
I had no way of knowing, either, why La Croix had told Dinessen I was aware of where he had secreted the Burong Chabak. A ruse of some kind? No, that didn’t add up; what possible reason could the Frenchman have had for that kind of smoke screen? He hadn’t known he was going to die, and he had expected Dinessen to fly him to Thailand that night. Had La Croix really thought I knew where he’d put the figurine? That seemed impossible…
I reached Jalan Besar, ran a traffic light at the intersection there, and turned east across the bridge spanning the Kallang River. Thai romvong music filled the car with false gaiety as I passed the multicolored lights of the New World Amusement Park, and it increased my urgency somehow, caused me to bear down harder on the accelerator. The Lavender Street intersection came up finally, and I veered south there, toward the harbor, and began looking for Tampines Road.
Lavender Street had once been a wide-open sin center in Singapore, before the Japanese invasion in 1942 and during their occupation of the island. You could have had a woman in one of the brothels or dance halls, an opium pipe in one of the Chandu shops under distinctive black-and-white signs, a chance at Dame Fortune in one of the fan-tan parlors. The opium dens had been pretty much closed down at the end of the war, and the People’s Action Party had made an attempt to clean up Lavender Street in recent years by urban renewal and vice crackdowns. They hadn’t quite succeeded. It was still the place to go in Singapore for a quick lay or a quick way to lose your money.
I found Tampines Road, finally-a short side street lined with small cottages squatting in uneven rows on both sides, a great many of which would belong to the people who worked on Lavender Street. Along the road and in the front yards grew tall palms and ferns and blood-red Javanese Ixora plants; but they were deceptive in their lushness, like fine silks and laces concealing the tired bodies of middle-aged washerwomen.
The dash panel clock read 8:23.
There were a few cars parked along the road, but none of them were marked with police insignias, or looked to be anything other than private vehicles. I drove slowly along the darkened street, looking left and right, watching for some sign of Tiong or his men, for a constable staked out to watch Number Seven. I saw nothing. I had gotten here first, then, but I knew that he could be a minute, two minutes away. So damned little time…
Number Seven was an attap-roofed bungalow on the near corner, with an ell-shaped garden grown heavy with weeds and ferns and wild flowering shrubs; a gravel path extended from the street to an open, slant-roofed porch. Its location was a point in my favor. The cross street was Jalan Tenah, and that would release into Serangoon Road. When I left the area I wouldn’t have to double back along Tampines to Lavender Street.
I made the turn onto Jalan Tenah and parked the Citroen fifty yards beyond a wooden fence which marked the side boundary of Number Seven. I stepped out of the car, and my legs felt rubbery for a moment, as if they would not support my weight. Sweat encased my body in thick, hot mucus. I leaned against the side of the car for a time, taking deep lungfuls of the cooling night air. A pervasive odor clogged the stillness, a combination of damp green foliage and the heady perfume of flowers.
Time, time, time…
The word seemed to throb in cadence with the pain inside my skull. I moved away from the car, jerkily, and went to the side fence. Beyond the palms on that side of the ell, Number Seven looked as dark and still as it had moments earlier. Bamboo blinds shaded the two visible windows on that side of the bungalow; the front entrance was on Tampines Road.
I glanced quickly up and down the street. No cars, no lights in the nearest cottage, no strollers. I went into the yard and made my way through the heavy grasses, the tangled vines, the flowering shrubs. I stood in the shadows at the side walls of the bungalow, listening. A bird sang somewhere nearby, softly, and a chichak lizard, exposed momentarily in a patch of moonlight, peered at me with bright terror before it darted away among the vegetation. There was no sound at all from within the dwelling.
I started toward the rear, stepped around the corner. A wood-framed set of stairs was tacked off-center to the back wall, shaded by a huge weeping willow that drooped its leafy fronds on the ground and on the stairs like long hair on the bowed head of an old woman. I moved to the steps and up them, to where a screen door barred admittance to an enclosed rear porch. I pulled on the handle. It gave slightly, with a soft rattling sound-enough to tell me that it was locked with an eye hook.
My watch said 8:33.
Taking a firmer grip on the handle, I jerked the door sharply outward. It made a hellish amount of noise, but the eye hook held fast. Fresh beads of sweat broke and ran on my face and neck. I yanked on the handle again, viciously this time, bracing my left foot against the bottom of the door. The eye pulled free of the wood with a sound like fingernails dragged across a blackboard, and the door wobbled open in my hand.
I went in quickly, because there was no more time to think about Tiong or about any of the neighbors having been aroused by the amount of noise I’d made. The screen slapped shut behind me, and glass wind bells, suspended from the ceiling, tinkled musically in the rush of air as I moved across the porch toward the rear door. It was locked, but it had two rectangular panes set side by side in its upper half. I looked for something I could use to break the glass, and there was one of those old-fashioned metal watering cans on a dusty table to the left, set under a wall-bracketed planter containing the corpses of long-dead plants.
I caught up the can and took it to the door and broke one of the panes with the round, pinholed metal spout. Shards of glass tinkled like the wind bells as they fell onto the floor inside. I got my hand through without cutting myself and fumbled at the latch on the inside; there was a heavy key in the lock, and I turned that and opened the door.
The kitchen. An extended wooden drainboard covered most of the side wall, and moonlight washed in through a window above it, giving substance to the shadows of an icebox, a stove, a dinette table, a row of storage cupboards. There was another door directly across from me. I went to it without hesitation, pushed it open, and looked into a short hallway. At its far end, an arch gave on a room filled with shadows.
It seemed likely that that was the living area, and that Marla King had made her call to me from there. I stepped through and traversed the hallway, passed under the arch. It was a large room containing several rattan chairs, a rattan settee, a writing desk, and huge brightly colored batik pillows whose hues seemed almost phosphorescent in the darkness. I moved deeper into the room. The floor was comprised of blocks of what looked like Ipoh marble but was probably some ersatz composition.
The smell of blood was thick and brackish in there.
Near the bamboo-shaded front windows, I could see the outlines of a low Chinese table. On its top I thought I could make out the form of a telephone through the gloom. I started in that direction-and an inert shape materialized in the shadows behind one of the large chairs, took on the contours of a female body.
I saw as I reached her that she was dressed in a thin silk robe. It had fallen away from her legs and upper thighs, and one of her breasts was exposed. The whiteness of her skin had an eerie, unreal quality. I knelt beside her, turned her a little. The back of her head was crushed, and her butter-yellow hair was streaked with black ribbons that would be dried blood. There was blood on the floor, too, a coagulated blot of it like a Rorschach form on the whiteness of the ersatz marble. She had fallen or been thrown to the floor, and had struck and caved in the back of her head that way; or Dinessen had knocked her down and straddled her and battered her head repeatedly against the unyielding surface. Judging from the amount of damage to her skull, it had happened the latter way.
I searched her body and the area near it as efficiently as I was able in the darkness; I couldn’t take the chance of putting on a light, or even of striking a match. There was nothing for me to find-nothing that linked me with Marla King’s death, nothing that Dinessen had planted there. I felt a return of the impotent rage I had known earlier. It looked now as if the bastard had been planning to frame me for his murder, all right, but only after he had finally killed me too. He hadn’t planted any evidence to link me originally, he had simply gone foxy on me in the office in an attempt to pry loose the location of the Burong Chabak. Well, I’d let him convince me it was the truth, but in one way I wasn’t sorry I had come here to find out it was a lie. There was still the problem of Marla King’s body, and I knew that I had to try to get her out and hidden somewhere, buried somewhere. That would buy me more hope and continued freedom and time to figure a way out from under once and for all; otherwise, Tiong would have me jailed, and the possibility existed that he’d find some way to put the murder on my neck despite previous co-operation and lack of evidence…
I ran into the kitchen again, caught up a dishtowel, wet it in the sink, and took it back into the front room. I spent a precious minute cleaning the blood off the floor. Maria King’s skin was cold when I touched her, and her limbs had stiffened in rigor mortis. I pulled at her, sweating, cursing my flopping right arm, and finally managed to get her into a sitting position. Her face was flaccid in death, and yet she looked sixty years old and completely ugly.
I wrapped the bloodied towel around her head, and then struggled with her body, maneuvering her and myself so that I could get her up onto my shoulder. My eyes stung with inpouring sweat, but I could see the dial of my wristwatch; it was 8:48. I got her onto my shoulder at last, gathered strength, and heaved up, staggering under the deadweight, sidestepping a chair. I regained my balance, turned, started for the archway.
And froze.
There were footsteps outside, footsteps on the gravel path leading up to the porch, footsteps on the wooden stairs and on the floor of the porch. Two sets, maybe three. For some reason of his own, Tiong had decided not to wait for Van Rijk at all. He was moving in early, without taking any chances; he’d had whatever cars he’d brought parked down the street, and he and his men had come up silently on foot.
Fists hammered against the wood paneling of the door.
Tiong’s voice, demanding and officious, called out, “Open this door. We are the polis.”
I stood there with the body of Maria King draped across my shoulder, motionless, trapped. Time had finally and abruptly run out, and there was no way I could get free with the dead girl. The panic came in a spiraling rush, and before I could fight it off with cold reason, it had taken me beyond the point of commitment. I dumped Marla King brutally onto the settee, heard her stiffened form hit the back, heard the settee tilt up and crash over backward under her weight-and I was running.