Aunty Lee's Deadly Specials (24 page)

Mabel Sung must have been poisoned by one of the people at the party that day. They
were the ingredients Aunty Lee would be working with. And the person must have had
access to Leonard Sung’s food tray. After exempting herself, Cherril, and Nina from
the list of suspects, Aunty Lee was left with:

Aunty Lee looked at her list. She felt that she had the makings of a satisfying dish
in hand but that a main ingredient—a motive—was missing. Was this an impulse killing?
To know this she had to find out more about the personalities of the people; for example,
who was always losing his temper with bad drivers, who was most aggressive with queue
jumpers who took her spot? But still it came back to needing a motive.

This was a
buah keluak
killing; the preparation, the risk, the fragrant black paste that only appealed to
the initiated. And it was hard to predict who it appealed to. Mark, for example, did
not like
buah keluak
despite his Peranakan roots. But Mycroft Peters with his Anglo-Indian forebears loved
the dish. Aunty Lee reminded herself not to make assumptions about the people involved.
The problem was she felt she had already done so.

The worst mistakes come from generalizations we don’t realize we are making. Aunty
Lee decided she had to go more thoroughly into the personalities, impulses, and motives
of the people on her list. And she also wanted to find out more about the people who
had turned up unexpectedly. Even if they could not have put the poison into the dish,
their presence might have triggered a chain of events that landed it there. She was
thinking of the long-haired Wen Ling and Patrick Pang’s friend Benjamin.

Inspector Salim had requested information from other departments but there was no
trace of Benjamin Ng in Singapore or Shanghai or anywhere else.

Sometimes it is harder to see the most obvious cause of problems when you know the
people involved. This is not necessarily due to partisanship or prejudice but to the
blindness that comes with familiarity. It is the daughter you see every day that you
don’t notice is growing up and the father asleep in front of the television every
night that you don’t realize has grown old.

Aunty Lee took a mental step back. If she did not know all these people, if they were
all characters on a television drama, who had the greatest motive to kill Mabel Sung?

Aunty Lee settled on Mabel’s husband. After all, clichés existed because they were
so often true. Henry Sung’s motive would be to stop his wife before she lost everything
they had. She was on the verge of bankruptcy and Sung Law looked like a lost cause,
but with Mabel gone, could he save himself and Sharon? Sharon would have no difficulty
finding a job in another company if she did not have her mother and Sung Law weighing
her down. And if he sold the house there might be enough left for him to live on.
But what about his son? Aunty Lee knew it was far less common for men to kill their
sons than their wives. Perhaps Henry had never forgiven his son, Leonard, for throwing
away his life and disgracing the family name?

Could Mabel have killed herself and her son? Yes. But Aunty Lee thought she would
have done it differently. More decently? No, more privately. Mabel would not have
killed herself with her house full of people. But maybe she wanted witnesses to see
that she killed herself? She could just have left a suicide note or a suicide video.
Or a suicide note like the PRC woman who jumped. Was the closeness in time of the
three deaths a link or just a coincidence?

I really wish I could find that long-haired Chinese woman, Aunty Lee thought, but
until then she would make the most of her time by visiting Bukit Timah Plaza.

Aunty Lee had not been to Bukit Timah Plaza for some time. The shopping mall was not
far from Binjai Park. But it was too far to walk comfortably to yet too close by to
be worth getting the car out for. It was not surprising that Aunty Lee had not noticed
Edmond Yong’s clinic there. But perhaps someone else had.

Aunty Lee had arranged to meet Professor Koh Heng Kiang, an old friend, at his Bukit
Timah Plaza clinic. But first she stopped at a bustling little kiosk on the second
level to talk to Cosmo.

Cosmo was part of the third generation of his family to run the little Peranakan deli
stall with the best
nasi kunyit
outside of Aunty Lee’s own kitchen. Rumor had it that Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s
chauffeur had been seen queuing for Cosmo’s
mee siam
. Yes, equality in Singapore meant that even if you were satisfying the prime minister’s
craving for rice vermicelli in addictively spicy, sweet, sour, shrimpy sauce, you
had to stand in line like everyone else.

“Have not seen you around for a long time, sister,” Cosmo said when he saw her.

“Been busy, lah.” There was a long line and Aunty Lee got straight to the point. “I
want to take away some of your
kueh
. Pack for me about half a dozen, can? I heard there was fire here a while ago? One
of the clinics in the medical center?”

“Ah yes. Not that nice Dr. Koh’s side. You take ten
kueh,
okay? I can pack for you nicely in this box. One of the small clinics on the other
side for men who want to look like women and women who want to look like teenagers.
You want to try my
bubur terigu
? Made by my sister following my mum’s recipe.”

“If you can pack for me I want. But ten
kueh
I don’t know I can finish or not. Here you are always so full there’s nowhere to
sit. When was this fire? Whose clinic, do you know?” Cosmo always knew everything
going on in Bukit Timah Plaza.

“More than a year ago. Dr. Yong and Dr. Sung’s clinic, I think. See, I pack the coconut
milk for you separately. The
kueh
no need to eat all at once. Can put in the fridge one week. They are attached to
some kind of church, I think. Always got people praying outside while they are operating
inside. See this
oh ku kueh
with mung-bean paste, turtle shape for long life, and this green
ku kueh,
with
gula melaka
coconut? I give you two each, okay? You see ten in the box, just right.”

“Okay. Anybody died in the fire? How much do I owe you?”

“Yes, one woman. But don’t know who. They said she was a foreigner working as a prostitute
on a social visit pass, came for plastic surgery then had heart attack. Nobody claimed
the body. Poor thing. Here’s your change. Have a blessed day.”

Professor Koh’s late wife had been one of the women in Aunty Lee’s women’s travel
group (so much safer than traveling alone and so much easier to shop when traveling
without husbands). Since Eva Koh’s death Aunty Lee had kept Professor Koh on her list
of recipients for Christmas and Chinese New Year goodies. Therefore it was only natural
that when Aunty Lee whipped up a batch of
ayam pongteh,
the chicken and potato stew that Malacca-born Eva had loved so much, she should bring
a large Tupperware of it over to Professor Koh. That and the cakes from Cosmo would
be something for him to share with his eldest son and his family, who Aunty Lee had
learned he was now living with.

She had also learned that the retired former head of NUH (the National University
Hospital) had been chief of surgery when Dr. Edmond Yong left the hospital suddenly.

Though Professor Koh had refused treatment for colon cancer, he looked well enough,
and Aunty Lee said so.

“I am well. I suppose as usual they told you to remind me that there’s a lot more
life worth living and I should let them cut me up and microwave me?”

Aunty Lee suspected part of Professor Koh was touched by the attempts of his family,
right down to his grandsons and domestic helpers, to try to get him to accept treatment.
But the former surgeon was adamant about not pursuing treatment for his stage-two
disease, preferring to wait and see how it progressed. More than 70 percent of people
diagnosed would be free of cancer five years after even without adjuvant chemotherapy,
and Professor Koh said he would take his chances. “If it goes away, I am well. If
it doesn’t go away, I see my Eva again sooner.”

“She might not want to see you so soon,” Aunty Lee pointed out. They had been friends
long enough for her to know how much Professor Koh enjoyed talking about his late
wife, a subject most other people shied away from.

“She might say you better hang around longer, I want you to take photographs of the
grandchildren getting married for me to see!”

“We can watch together from up there.” Professor Koh laughed. “But I know you didn’t
come to see me just to talk about Eva. How can I help you, Rosie?” There was a touch
of professional apprehension in his voice. Though his son-in-law and two daughters
now ran what was still known as “Professor Koh’s Clinic,” many older patients preferred
to speak to Professor Koh himself when worrying symptoms showed up.

“Do you remember an Edmond Yong? He used to have a clinic around here.”

Professor Koh looked at Aunty Lee as though debating whether to ask why she wanted
to know. But reticent good manners won out. He answered her question.

“Edmond Yong. His crowning achievement was getting his medical degree. He just stopped
working after that. You can tell the really keen ones. They are the ones who are nonstop
investigating new methods, new stats, new ways of handling old problems.”

“So you don’t think much of him?”

“Well, I wouldn’t say he was very promising, but workwise, nothing very disastrous.
He got into some trouble at the hospital. A patient complained about inappropriate
behavior. Said the boy had touched her and made a suggestive comment when the nurse
was not in the room. In such cases it’s very difficult to tell what really happened.
Sometimes people genuinely misinterpret or for whatever reason they have some ax to
grind. But the problem is, once a complaint is made, the hospital has to investigate.
And then even if you are cleared you have to work under a shadow, very unpleasant.
In fact I was chairing the board of inquiry for his case.”

“Did it ever happen to you?” Aunty Lee asked, diverting him because she wanted to
hear his reflections on the case rather than the factual summary that he might automatically
deliver. She was certain he had never fallen under this particular cloud. Her old
friend seemed too genial about the subject to have ever experienced it himself.

“Oh no, not me. I was one of the fortunate ones. Remember Eva and I got married even
before I finished medical school? After that, with my wedding ring on, even in the
wards nobody saw me as a man, just as ‘married.’”

That was probably untrue, but the eyes of this man had noticed only one woman since
they got together as pre-university classmates, and would not have noticed attention
from anyone else. Aunty Lee remembered her late friend and smiled. Professor Koh smiled
also, following her thoughts.

“She was always so careful of my health. ‘Don’t work so hard,’ ‘Don’t eat junk food
for lunch,’ ‘Nobody is going to die if you take one week off to take your children
on holiday.’ We always thought I would be the one to go first. Male life expectancy,
you know. And of course the job was taxing. That’s why I always tried to make time
for the family. I wanted them to remember me. My brother was only fifty when he got
his heart attack. My father, fifty-four. Eva never said so, but after I turned fifty
I knew she started worrying. Instead—” He raised a hand and dropped it with a little
laugh. Eva had died eight months after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. She
had been two days away from her sixty-fifth birthday.

“But you don’t have any doubt that Dr. Yong was falsely accused?”

This time there was a longer pause. All Aunty Lee’s
kaypoh
receptors were primed and on alert as she watched Professor Koh, waiting for him
to speak. He noticed this and laughed at her. But he sobered immediately as he said,
“From his past actions, from everything his colleagues said about him, there was no
reason to doubt him whatsoever . . .”

“But?”

“But I was uncomfortable. For no good reason, you might say. The nurse had stepped
out for a while. It is a rule that there must always be a female nurse present when
the doctor is examining a female patient. But in this case the patient had asked for
a drink of water in the middle of the examination and the nurse went to get it. She
left the door open, which is also a standard procedure, but when she came back with
the water it was closed.”