Aunty Lee's Deadly Specials (11 page)

“This evening’s client canceled?”

Nina nodded. “She said there is some family emergency, they have to cancel the party.”

“I already ordered dry ice for the drinks chiller—and what about all the food!” Cherril
said. “I’m sure they’re lying. Family emergency, my foot. They are going to order
in Pizza Hut or Kentucky Fried Chicken. I hope they all end up with food poisoning.
They deserve it!”

“Don’t say that,” Aunty Lee said. “Nobody deserves food poisoning.”

Even a rumor of food poisoning could haunt a café for years. Aunty Lee hoped this
would not happen to hers. She turned for assurance to ML Lee’s portrait. ML was smiling
with his usual charm but Cherril, standing in front of the frame, looked really upset.

“It’s just one booking,” Aunty Lee said briskly. The deposit on the canceled meal
would cover what she had spent on ingredients. “Come help me experiment how to package
cooked food for the freezer. I want to make two-person servings of yellow chicken
curry and rice with
achar
separate. Like they sell at the petrol station to heat up in the microwave. Only
mine will be nicer.”

Home Interrogation

The Peters family home was a large bungalow off Binjai Crescent, deep in the Binjai
housing estate and closer to the hilly center of Singapore island. Mycroft Peters
had grown up in this house. Now he and his wife, Cherril, lived in a newly added two-story
wing with its own pebbled path leading from the driveway.

“So this is how the rich people live,” Staff Sergeant Panchal said snidely. Salim
could tell she was intimidated and made no comment.

Salim buzzed the gate intercom. Mycroft appeared at the front door of the main house.

“You shouldn’t park there,” Mycroft said, looking at the police Subaru. Though parking
opposite the continuous white line outside was illegal, it was an offense for which
drivers seldom got fined, especially here in Binjai Park, where people were rich and
roads were wide. Since Singaporeans did not understand the concept of bribery, it
just meant paperwork and bad karma for the traffic officer. Warning people off worked
much better for all concerned and cleared the road faster, which was the point of
the whole exercise.

But few people challenged the police on where they, the police themselves, left their
cars.

“I’ll give myself a warning,” Salim said.

Mycroft laughed. “Come in.”

Mycroft was not usually home at noon. But Cherril had phoned him to say the police
were coming to speak to her at home and he had postponed two meetings, canceled a
lunch, and got back to the house before the police arrived for their appointment.

“They already talked to you yesterday, why should they want to question you again?
And why here if they were at the shop earlier?”

“Mykie, I don’t know!” She looked frightened.

Mycroft looked at his wife fondly. He knew some people thought he had married beneath
him, that he had been seduced into this marriage or had chosen her to spite his parents.
In fact it was Cherril’s addiction to learning that had caught his attention. Her
curiosity about how systems worked matched his own. He had fallen in love with her
when they started learning Japanese together. And now he meant to protect her.

“Mother is out to lunch. We’ll talk to them in the big house.”

Cherril, who had taken some time to get used to living in a house larger than the
three apartments in her old housing block combined, knew that Mycroft was deliberately
trying to intimidate the police visitors with his lawyer side.

“But why? Do you think they suspect me of having something to do with it? Is that
why you rushed home?”

“I think they want to talk to you and Aunty Lee separately, that’s all. But I would
like to hear what they have to say.”

After Mycroft settled them into a living room that seemed to the police officers the
size of a community center recreation basketball court, Staff Sergeant Panchal started
to ask questions. Speaking with Cherril apart from Aunty Lee had been her idea and
she wanted to make sure any evidence she extracted was credited to her.

“Someone heard you saying, ‘I hope it wasn’t the chicken
buah keluak,
’ after Mrs. Sung and her son were found dead. Can you explain why you said that?”

“Because—well, you know they can be poisonous if not prepared properly. But nobody
ever had any problems with Aunty Lee’s
buah keluak
before.” Cherril glanced at her husband and Inspector Salim as she spoke. Mycroft
remained impassive but Salim nodded slightly.

“Did you mention your concern to the police you gave a statement to?”

“No. I didn’t. It was just a thought. A joke, in fact.”

“I understand you were helping with food preparations yesterday.”

“Actually I was taking care of the drinks.”

“So you did not touch any of the food? You did not help with any of the preparations?”

“Well, of course I did help a bit. There are only three of us, Aunty Lee, Nina, and
myself—”

“What qualifications do you have in food preparation, Mrs. Peters?”

“I—well, I’m sort of learning on the job.”

“Yet you were helping with the food preparations for the party yesterday. Did you
help with preparing the chicken
buah keluak
?”

“No.”

“You were formerly working as an air stewardess, am I correct? “And you left your
job as a stewardess after some complaints were made against you, is that correct?
Did these complaints have anything to do with your food service?”

“No.”

“Are you sure? There is a copy of the complaints made and the passenger, one Mr. Scott
Barber—”

“The passenger said that he wanted the chicken main dish but he didn’t want to eat
halal chicken because he was not Muslim. I explained to him all the chicken on board
was halal and he got angry. Actually he was very drunk. But I didn’t leave my job
because of that. I left because I got married.”

“And do you cook at home, Mrs. Peters?”

“I don’t see what that has to do with anything,” Cherril said. “Why are you asking
such stupid questions?”

She turned to Mycroft but he was watching as Staff Sergeant Panchal pointedly wrote
down “uncooperative” on her pad.

“I think you should leave now,” Mycroft said.

“Are you sure you want to go through with this?” he asked after the police had left.
“Why not just go for cooking classes? We can do up the kitchen here if you like.”

“Of course I want to go through with it. What happened has got nothing to do with
Aunty Lee. We just happened to be there when it happened, that’s all.”

“Aunty Lee manages to be around a lot whenever something happens. I don’t want her
dragging you into trouble. You know they’ll probably decide it’s food poisoning and
drop it, right? And you know that’s going to have an effect on her business. Are you
sure you want to go into it now? Just think about it.”

“Who else would take me on without any experience? Besides, you don’t know who else
might have had a motive to do away with the Sungs. Maybe Mabel’s daughter had a boyfriend.”
Mycroft snorted at this. “Or her husband had a mistress. Any of those people might
have had something to do with it. And you said yourself, isn’t it possible that Mabel
killed herself and her son rather than watch him die slowly?”

Cherril was already starting to sound a little like her culinary mentor, Mycroft thought.
Whatever she wanted to do was fine with him as long as she was happy. But now it struck
him that it might also be very tiring—for him.

Buah Keluak

“We should get back to the guest list,” Salim said as they got back into the car.

“We are wasting our time questioning people on the guest list,” Staff Sergeant Panchal
said. “Why would anybody purposely kill people like that? They got poisoned by the
buah keluak
, we should bring in the catering people. They would have been arrested already if
you weren’t so friendly with them.”

“I’m sure there’s more to it than that.”

“You are biased.”

“I have previous info. Personal experience.”

“What are we waiting for now?”

“More info.”

Back at the station, general opinion was on Panchal’s side. The risk of eating
buah keluak
was a well-known urban legend, even though none of the officers knew anyone who had
died from eating it. Even Salim would probably have blamed the deaths on the
buah keluak
if the caterer had been anyone other than Aunty Lee.

“Anything more from the Sung house?”

“There were canisters of Algae Bomb and rat poison stored in the pool area, brands
banned in Singapore. Neither the husband nor daughter can say where they came from.
They both said Mabel Sung couldn’t stand any kind of dirt or pests around. She was
afraid of infection getting to her son. Apparently she used to get friends to bring
pesticides in from Malaysia because she said the safe ones sold here are not effective,”
Corporal Chan said. She and Corporal Ismail were on a three-month training posting
and still new enough to be excited about lab and interview reports.

“Anything on that other death? The jumper?”

“She told people her fiancé came here to sell a kidney to pay for their wedding and
died during the illegal transplant op. But there’s no record of his death or a body.
What happened to the guy? Mysterious, right?”

“Fishy story. The guy probably just ran out on her,” Corporal Ismail said with the
worldly-wise air of a twenty-two-year-old. “If he came here for an illegal transplant,
he’s not going to come forward. The last time those guys got caught coming to donate
kidneys to Singaporeans, they could not prove they were related to each other, so
they got prison time and caning.” To deter profiteering off organ trafficking, transplants
were illegal unless a family relationship could be proved.

Back in his own office, Salim went over the notes he’d taken at the Sung house. No
results had come in yet from the tests he had ordered. It was only on television dramas
that results came so quickly. On his instructions, his team had recorded not only
the answers to their questions but everything they observed yesterday. Salim knew
that you could learn more about people from what they did than from what they chose
to tell you. According to the investigators who had been at the Sung house that day,
Henry Sung had spent all day at his computer watching what was going on in the rest
of the house via security camera feeds. He had agreed to supply the police with recordings
from the cameras, only to find that the live feeds had not been recorded. Yes, he
had been cooperative enough but he was an old man who did not seem to know much about
how the house was run or about what his wife had been doing. At the hospital where
he had worked for almost forty years, he had an office and the title of “advising
consultant” but no duties.

Sharon Sung had spent the rest of the evening at the Sung Law office, immersed in
Mabel’s files and paperwork. Dr. Edmond Yong and GraceFaith Ang had showed up and
spent some time with her, the officer who escorted Sharon had written said. Salim
called him to his office.

“Edmond Yong was looking after Leonard Sung’s health at the Sungs’ place, right? What
was he doing at Sung Law?”

Sergeant Bong, the young officer assigned to observe/protect Sharon Sung the previous
day, had no idea. He had watched everything but wondered about nothing and found the
whole assignment very boring. Bong was a stolid Candy Crush addict who found most
of real life very boring.

“He went there to talk to Miss Ang, sir. Miss Sung got angry with them for talking
without her. She said they should not keep secrets from her because she is in charge
of everything now. Then they went inside her office to talk and closed the door, so
I didn’t hear what they said.”

“In charge of what, that’s the real question,” Staff Sergeant Panchal said from the
doorway. “Bong, you’re useless. Why didn’t you say you had to stay in the room with
her and listen?”

For once, Salim agreed with her. The two young corporals were tense with excitement,
hoping he would give them a chance to do better. But Salim knew it would be no use.
Sharon Sung had decisively dismissed Sergeant Bong and the idea she needed protection.
Salim could sense she had information she was not sharing and they would have to get
it some other way. And he knew someone who would do the job better than corporals
Chan and Ismail.

Salim announced he would be out of the office for a while and left, ignoring the surprised
looks of his staff.

Less than fifteen minutes later Inspector Salim pushed open the door to Aunty Lee’s
Delights.

“Aunty Lee,” he said, “can you tell me everything you know about
buah keluak
?”

“What are you doing here?” Nina asked. “We are very busy here, you know. Shouldn’t
you be busy doing your own work, questioning people in their own homes and things
like that?” Though Nina was always busy, this time she looked genuinely cross. Salim
guessed Cherril had told them about the visit to the Peterses’. But this time he was
there because he was busy too. And getting information from someone who knew both
the subject and what he needed to understand was faster than sifting through material
online.

“I want to do my work. But I need to understand more about the background first.”
He looked past Nina to Aunty Lee, who nodded. He hoped she would understand. After
all it was something he had learned from her as well as from his mother . . . you
had to understand a process inside out before you could find out where it had gone
wrong. “I’m not here to question anybody, just to learn. I’ve been eating
buah keluak
all my life, I just don’t know much about it.”

“Get Salim a drink, Nina.” Aunty Lee waved him to take one of the bar stools by the
kitchen counter. She was always ready to talk about food, especially traditional foods
that modern young people risked losing touch with.