Aunty Lee's Deadly Specials (31 page)

“He was already dead, wasn’t he?”

“He was technically alive but it is unlikely he could have been revived.”

Aunty Lee felt relieved. “So his body is not worth anything to anybody now?”

“Sentimental value to his family, but apart from that, no.”

Alive, Zhao Liang had been worth a minimum wage but little more. Semi-alive he had
been worth millions of dollars of transplant organs. Now dead, he was worth nothing.
But perhaps GraceFaith’s act would give his family closure.

“Do you know where GraceFaith Ang is?” Aunty Lee could not help being concerned for
the self-possessed, perfectly turned-out young woman.

“I would certainly like to talk to her if she shows up.”

But GraceFaith had her money and was probably too smart to show up on his radar for
a good while. Aunty Lee could see her somewhere in the Maldives. Or more likely buying
herself a house in Australia. Aunty Lee hoped she would hear from her again.

“Sir? Yes, I’m at Mrs. Lee’s house now,” Inspector Salim said in reply to the call
that came in at that moment. “I will be back there in under half an hour. Sir, we
are still waiting for the search warrant for Dr. Henry Sung’s house but we checked
the outdoor areas for, er”—he coughed—“mosquito breeding sites and we found the body.
The body has been transported to NUH for examination. I will get back to you once
we get any results. International Affairs has come in to assist. They assigned Timothy
Pang because of the PRC links uncovered. No, sir, I did not. I believe he requested
the assignment for family reasons.”

Aunty Lee had been listening to the one-sided exchange with fascination till Salim
cut the connection.

“How is Commissioner Raja?”

“He said you were talking about illegal organ-transplant syndicates from the start,
ever since the body of the dead PRC woman’s fiancé was not found. And he said I should
have remembered that in Singapore the Lees are always right, and that means Lee Kuan
Yew and Aunty Lee.”

Illegal Organ Traders Caught

The
Straits Times Online:

International Illegal Organ Traders Nabbed!

Officers of the Singapore Police Force, acting on information from the public, have
cracked an international organization dealing in illegal organ trading. Apparently
the organization has been transporting live donors from China around the region and
especially into Singapore via a network of maid agencies and travel agents. The ring
is thought to have been dealing in most cases with transplants of nonessential organs.
Large sums of money and at least sixteen individuals are thought to be involved. Unfortunately
any surviving donors appear unwilling to come forward for fear of prosecution.

The police and the Health Ministry are looking into cases of supposed “miracle” cures.

Evening Drive Time Buzz:

It looks like things were going well for the illegal organ traders for years—if you
look at what people are willing to pay for a Lamborghini or Lexus, it almost makes
more sense to pay for a cornea or kidney, doesn’t it? Anyway, apparently things changed
when local lawyer Mabel Sung let it be known she was willing to pay anything for a
live donor heart for her precious son. Yes, a heart! Have a heart, lady! We can all
get along reasonably well minus a few platelets, minus a few liver cells, but without
a heart? Did she not realize what she was asking for or did her mother love drive
her to murder? It’s almost enough to make me forget the traffic report . . .

Inside Health Weekend Special:

At the time Mabel Sung and her son, Leonard Sung, died, everything was ready for her
son’s operation. It appears Mabel Sung had paid her PRC contact half the costs up
front and was to pay the remaining amount following a successful transplant. A medical
consultant had been preparing Leonard Sung for the procedure, feeding and hydrating
him to stabilize his condition.

According to Staff Sergeant Timothy Pang, Head of the Special Task Force on Illegal
Organ Trading, a kidney transplant operation in China costs around $70,000, a liver
transplant around $160,000, and a heart transplant over a million dollars. For the
sake of comparison, he pointed out that in the United States a kidney transplant starts
at $100,000, a liver transplant at $250,000, and a heart transplant at $860,000. Given
the relatively low cost of Chinese organs, China is currently a major provider of
underground organs for transplantation surgery to other countries.

Speaking to our
Inside Health
reporter, Staff Sergeant Pang said, “The PRC organ traffickers brought ‘donors’ into
Singapore as tourists or domestic workers. These were poor, healthy people from China.
They were given a deposit on a kidney, say, a sum that seemed immense to them but
is minuscule compared to what the body parts bring in. These donors believed that
once they were paid for the donated kidney, the money would be enough to start them
off on a new life. We believe this is what happened in previous cases but none of
the previous donors have been willing to come forward. However, in this case the request
was for a donor heart. The donor believed he was donating a kidney and the first payment
was made according to the agreement. His trip to Singapore was paid for by the client.
But after that the donor, Zhao Liang, aged 23, was kept unconscious on life support
until such time as his heart could be transplanted into Leonard Sung. It is believed
the rest of his organs were then to be sold to the highest bidder.”

Aunty Lee was, of course, fascinated by all the stories. She had long since discovered
that online news sites carried far more juicy details—and put them out sooner—than
she could get from the official newspapers, and Nina was kept busy supplying her with
all the latest speculations and details.

“These people are saying it’s not so terrible because otherwise those people would
be carrying drugs in, they are so desperate for money. And in that case it is a death
penalty anyway, so . . . but it is terrible, right? They say Singapore is stupid to
make such a big fuss. After all, the family gets compensation, probably more than
they could earn in a lifetime.”

“I don’t think we are making such a big fuss. It is terrible,” Aunty Lee said, “and
I think we should make a big fuss about the death penalty here too. That’s what they
used to do in China, right? Sentence people to death and then use their organs for
transplants? Here we sentence people to death for carrying drugs for other people
and don’t even use their organs!”

The death penalty was one of Aunty Lee’s favorite rants, but at the moment there were
more interesting wrongs to focus on while slicing mushrooms for drying.

“They say this is the first case in which Singaporeans were involved. Do you think
that’s true?”

“Until they find out some more cases, it must be true, lor.”

It was also reported discreetly in the press that one Dr. Edmond Yong was helping
the police with investigations. By this time everyone agreed that Mabel Sung had contacted
Edmond Yong to get a living heart donor for her son, Leonard. Aunty Lee was certain
that she had thought of it first. If only certain authorities had paid more attention
to her instead of investigating her kitchens, things would have been resolved far
more quickly. It was Edmond Yong who had arranged for the living donor to be kept
on life support on the Sung property, in the locked pool house, which the police investigators
had so irresponsibly overlooked. Other people on the Never Say Die waiting list had
been in need of parts from the same donor, but Mabel Sung refused to let any other
transplants take place until after her son was taken care of. Fortunately this made
them more disposed to speak out against her and they did. The scheme might have worked,
but when the power supply to the Sung property and pool house was cut off so was the
life supply system and the living donor turned into a corpse.

Aunty Lee wondered whether GraceFaith had known the consequences of cutting off the
power supply to the house. She had no doubt at all that this had been GraceFaith’s
doing. And even if the girl had only made the call to spite Sharon and make things
difficult for Edmond Yong in the Sung house, she had ended up sabotaging the whole
of their grand moneymaking scheme. Something about that made Aunty Lee think of how
Mabel and Leonard had been almost casually poisoned. But Aunty Lee could not imagine
GraceFaith deliberately doing something to provoke Mabel Sung as Sharon had.

And Aunty Lee could find no mention in all the papers (even the Chinese ones that
Cherril was delegated to scour) of what had become of Wen Ling, the China woman responsible
for the local organization. Her contacts at various maid agencies and travel centers
could only give the phone numbers they had reached her at, numbers that were no longer
in use. They had only done what they were told, they said. And she had not yet paid
them.

“It’s all about money, isn’t it?” Cherril said. “If only people had enough money they
wouldn’t do things like that.”

Neither of her companions agreed with her.

“Singaporeans think there’s never enough money!” Nina said as she thumped a huge plastic
carrier of string beans onto one of the tables.

“Mabel Sung was trying to save her son,” Aunty Lee said from behind her pile of papers.
“Once Mabel Sung found out about the illegal transplants, she became fixated on getting
a new heart for her son. A parent would do anything to save the life of a child. But
. . .”

Nina heard her change of tone and looked worried.

“But what?”

“But why would they kill her?” Aunty Lee demanded.

“The case is over, bad people are in prison or out of the country. Everybody is happy.
Why worry?”

“She must have found out about the illegal transplants last year and discovered a
way to link them to the Never Say Die people,” Cherril said. “That was brilliant actually.
If people wondered why they were suddenly healthy, they could say the praying works
miracles. Mycroft says it’s not like it is in India, where a kidney transplant operation
runs for around as low as five thousand dollars and they get medical tourists from
the West all the time. I was surprised Mabel didn’t bring her son to India for the
operation, but Mycroft says people here are prejudiced. They don’t trust the doctors
there or they think that if the organs come from Indians they must be dirty.”

Her husband, Mycroft, an ethnic Indian, looked embarrassed. He had taken to walking
over to the shop with Cherril when she came in on weekends. He said it was because
he needed the exercise but Aunty Lee suspected he was being a protective husband and
his need for exercise would fade away now the murderers had been brought to justice.
But had they?

“She was a racist, elitist woman but there was no reason for them to kill her,” Aunty
Lee said.

Aunty Lee’s mind was already elsewhere. The illegal transplant business had required
a lot of planning and organization. If the same people had branched out into murder,
they would have to had put in a lot of careful advance planning, like the amount of
preparation that went into making chicken
buah keluak
. But the deaths of Mabel and Leonard Sung did not feel like that sort of murder at
all. They felt like impulse murders. Ingredients like the
buah keluak
and Algae Bomb and the food tray all coming together were like the sort of dish that
just fell into your lap. Like when a husband went fishing and came back with a huge
garoupa
or a net full of plump
kembong
and you happened to have a sack of charcoal and a bag of salt. Then no planning was
needed at all. All you had to do was grab and gut the fish and get it onto the grill
as fast as possible. Because you could take your time to decide who to call to come
over to dinner later, but without enough freezer space the whole point was being able
to kill and gut a fish fast.

That was the kind of murder it felt like to Aunty Lee. Not one that had been planned
for a long time but one that had depended on chance uniting motive, opportunity, and
a calm killer.

“I should go and talk to that Dr. Yong again,” Aunty Lee said thoughtfully. Any or
all of the others, tired and stressed by recent events, would have told her to drop
it. But at that moment Mycroft was asking Cherril if she felt ready to return home
and Cherril was teasing Nina for
gayuma
recipes because with the right Filipino love potions on the drinks menu, people might
be persuaded to fall in love with the shop as well as with each other. Aunty Lee took
their silence for agreement.

But it wasn’t until she was back in her house that evening that Aunty Lee got the
chance to pursue her inquiries further. Nina had firmly refused to discuss a case
she considered closed and settled on clearing fallen leaves out of the driveway drain
gratings, something she had been dying to do for weeks. Aunty Lee retreated to her
living room. She was feeling low and dissatisfied, both tired and restless at the
same time. The room felt unpleasantly empty and even the portrait of ML failed to
comfort her. Perhaps she should get it reframed? But then the reframing of pictures
and redecorating of houses was precisely the kind of pointless
tai-tai
busyness Aunty Lee hoped to avoid.

Aunty Lee told herself she was only feeling bad because her case and her shop were
both closed. But once the paperwork was done, they would reopen and everything would
be back to normal. But even there, what was the point? Wasn’t that just more aimless
busyness? She even had her doubts about why the PRC gang would have wanted to kill
Mabel Sung. Was she just another bored old woman matchmaking corpses and motives?

Perhaps she should take up tai chi in the park with all the other old aunties . . .

“Rosie!”

Aunty Lee turned and saw the only (live) man capable of making her feel better right
then standing at the French doors that opened from her living room to the lawn.