Aunty Lee's Deadly Specials (36 page)

Aunty Lee hurried to the wine room, then stopped cautiously at the door. Should she
just lock it and call for help?

“Madam! Madam!”

“Nina, wait. I have to find that crazy girl!”

“Untie me first, madam!”

“She said the light inside is not working. I think a bottle fell down and hit her
on the head. But just now I thought I heard someone inside. And why was the door open,
did you open it?”

“Madam, untie me!”

Now Aunty Lee definitely heard someone in the wine room, “Who’s there—Cherril, is
that you?”

“Hi, Aunty Rosie.” It was Mark. “There’s nothing wrong with the light. I unscrewed
the bulb. I was inside when they came in through the back and I didn’t want to interrupt,
so I just kept quiet—”

“What did you do to Sharon?” Aunty Lee asked Mark. “Where is she?”

“I just hit her with a bottle. On the side of her head. She’s somewhere on the floor.
I don’t think she’s really hurt, but there’s glass—and wine—all over the floor so
I’m not sure.”

“You came to take more bottles, right?” Nina turned on him. Being threatened by death
had a way of making your employers less frightening. “You are the one who took the
bottles and then Madam Silly blame me! Because you don’t want to pay Madam Rosie and
Madam Cherril!”

“Oh, Mark.” Suddenly Aunty Lee was teary and trembling with relief. It seemed to her
that ML’s portrait seen over Mark’s shoulder was smiling with relief too. “Your father
would be so glad you are exactly as you are!”

Mark put his arms around her and gave her a big hug. “I heard what Sharon said about
Selina and me wanting Dad’s stuff. It’s not true.”

Aunty Lee’s “Selina?” was slightly muffled by Mark’s comforting shoulder.

“No. Not all the time, anyway,” Mark admitted. They both laughed.

That was when Inspector Salim kicked open the kitchen door and rushed in. Once he
saw Nina, he stopped and took a deep breath.

“If this was some kind of joke, I’ll kill you myself,” Salim said to Nina.

At least she looked glad to see him, Aunty Lee thought.

“What took you so long?” Nina demanded. “I left my phone on for so long the battery
is dead!”

After Salim released her from a most inappropriate but totally satisfactory hug and
went back to his car to radio for support, Nina kept watch with a pair of lethal-looking
rotary barbecue skewers while Aunty Lee tied the dazed Sharon’s hands behind her with
bamboo and reed strings that were soaked and rinsed and all ready to tie up bundles
of
nonya
rice dumplings. Modern cooks used raffia, but anyone who had ever struggled with
knotted bamboo and reed twine knew their tenacity. It seemed unnecessary to tie up
Henry Sung. He was sitting on the floor against the wall, moaning, with tears running
down his face, and ignoring the confused stream of mumbled complaints and commands
coming out of Sharon.

“What did you do to my father? Help him! Call an ambulance! Dad, don’t just sit there—do
something! You better let us go or I’m going to sue you until you wish you are dead!
Oh God, my head hurts.”

“What did you do to him?” Mark asked. “Is he going to be all right?”

“Naga king chili oil,” Aunty Lee said. “My best home-dried and fried chili-oil concentrate.”
Two or three drops of the prized oil was enough for most dishes. A liquid potent enough
to burn careless fingertips . . . even now Aunty Lee winced at the thought of what
it could do to the eyes and lips.

“Nina, take some coconut milk from the fridge and rub on his face.” Coconut was an
all-purpose salve, working especially well to soothe chili burns.

“Salim is back. I can see the car. I go and talk to him first.”

“You knew exactly what Wen Ling’s people in China were doing, didn’t you? You put
them in touch with people willing to pay for transplant organs and they were supposed
to pay you enough to save your house and the law firm.”

“It would have worked too, if you hadn’t come nosing around. It was good for everybody.
We could have saved a lot of people’s lives!” Henry Sung wailed.

“And what about that poor man?”

“That poor man had no job, no money, no prospects. He could have been hit by a car
and killed and it wouldn’t have made a difference to anybody on the planet. He was
willing to sell a kidney for money and people die on the operating table all the time.
We gave his family compensation money, more than he would ever have earned if he survived,”
Henry Sung said. “Alive he was worth nothing.”

Aunty Lee decided it would not hurt to let the man burn a while longer. She put away
the coconut milk.

“Maybe you should take out an ad in the papers,” Mark said to Aunty Lee, “telling
people there was never any poison in your
buah keluak
, that a murderer who wanted to cover up killing people to make money off illegal
organ transplants framed you and your restaurant.”

That sounded too complicated even for Aunty Lee. Singaporeans didn’t like complications
around their food or in their food. Besides . . .

“Newspaper advertisements cost a lot of money,” Nina said, coming back in.

Things were getting back to normal, Aunty Lee thought. “We’ll just open and see if
anybody comes,” she said.

Open for Business

“Well, the crowd in here is not bad tonight,” Mark said. He had finally completed
the transfer of the wine business to Cherril Peters.

Being hailed as a hero suited him. Aunty Lee had made much of the fact that Mark had
saved her life, and no one asked why he had sneaked back into the shop. Selina must
have known. After all she had been waiting in the car outside. But she didn’t say
anything either.

Aunty Lee’s Delights was full of customers again.

Not only were people coming back, they were all ordering Aunty Lee’s Deadly Special,
the chicken
buah keluak
, and taking photos of themselves “risking” their lives.

“They are crazy,” Nina said. But these were paying customers, so she said it indulgently.

As far as Aunty Lee was concerned, a traditional dish had been given a new lease on
life and that had to be good.

Aunty Lee’s Delights was extra-safe that night too, because the very police officer
who had kicked in the back kitchen door leading to the alley was stationed by it,
well supplied with the best samples of what the busy, happy cooks thought were their
best dishes.

Of course another reason Salim was more comfortable in the kitchen was that his big
boss, Commissioner Raja, was in the main restaurant and seemed determined to stay
until he saw Aunty Lee safely home.

“You don’t have to play security guard here all night. If you can’t eat any more you
should go now,” Nina told him as she saw his appetite flagging.

“Of course Salim can eat more!” Aunty Lee swept by, depositing a dish of gelatinous
blue rice cakes by him as she passed. “We haven’t fed him for days!”

“I surrender.” Salim laughed helplessly. “But I don’t want to hurt her feelings.”

“She will be happy that you are full,” Nina promised. “But I will pack the
pulot tai-tai
cakes up for you to bring home. The butterfly pea flowers for the coloring came from
the old vines behind the police post, your Sergeant Panchal helped collect for us.
She is not too bad when she not trying to show off for you. You can give your mother
for breakfast, they will last two, three days.”

Salim did not try to digest all Nina’s information at once, but he accepted the blue
cakes along with a container of
kaya,
or coconut jam, for dipping them in. “Thank you. My mother likes homemade
kaya
very much. And speaking of my mum, she wants to meet you.”

“What?”

“Come for lunch at my mum’s place this Sunday.”

“No, Salim.”

“Nina, we are alive. We should take full advantage of being alive before it is too
late. I keep thinking, if Mark had not been there—”

“Salim, don’t—”

Nina knew that if she had died, Salim would have grieved in a most genuine and romantic
way and everyone would have pitied him and left flowers and candles for her. But alive,
they would get very little sympathy or support. Restrictions on foreign domestic workers
marrying were severe. And as a police officer, Salim must be only too aware that many
of Singapore’s laws and restrictions equated “racial harmony” with “Chinese majority,”
and “traditional values” with “Christian morality.”

“It’s just a lunch. My mum knows you are always cooking for me. She wants to cook
for you.”

Nina wavered. “I have to check with Aunty Lee first.”

“Don’t worry. Giving domestic workers their day off is mandatory now, remember? If
Aunty Lee won’t let you come, I’ll arrest her!”

“Mycroft’s here,” Cherril said when the café was almost empty.

Mycroft had asked Cherril to wait at Aunty Lee’s Delights till he came to walk or
drive her home. It was probably safer for a woman to walk alone along the well-lit
housing estate streets of Singapore than almost anywhere else in the world, but Cherril
was smart enough to be appreciative. And Aunty Lee had made up a bento-box dinner
for Mycroft.

“Any news? Have you had your dinner yet? We packed up something for you in case. Just
some leftovers. Do you know what’s going to happen to Sharon Sung yet?”

“No I haven’t had dinner,” Mycroft admitted. “Oh, thank you—I was going to get some
cup noodles at home—”

“This is much better for you than cup noodles,” Cherril said. “Why don’t you eat it
here and tell us what you heard? Aunty Lee won’t mind waiting a little while, right?”

Aunty Lee, all agog, had already set up a serving place for Mycroft and plunked herself
down across from it. “Cherril, sit down so that Mycroft can eat and tell us. Raja,
don’t pretend you’re not interested. Come here and listen to what happens to murderers
after your people bring them in!”

Both Henry Sung and his daughter, Sharon, had been charged with murder, attempted
murder, and a host of other things Cherril dismissed as unimportant. Given they all
paled in importance next to the attempted murder of Aunty Lee, Aunty Lee agreed.

Mycroft said that Henry Sung had been calm, even genial. He smiled, waved, and told
reporters, “Her mother could probably have got us off with no problem, but now we’ll
have to wait and see what’s going to happen. I don’t have as much influence as people
think.” Henry Sung did not seem to feel any remorse for what he had done.

“It could be part of his defense. He’ll probably say his late wife was responsible
for everything and he and Sharon were only trying to cover up for her.”

Asked about Mabel and involvement in the black-market organs, Henry had said, “You
people don’t understand about Mabel. She did it for our son. Any parent would do that.
If it was your son who was dying, maybe you would be able to understand.”

He could not grasp that other people had lost their children because of his wife’s
actions. Perhaps people other than family were not quite real to him.

“I suspect he still thinks he and his friends can smooth everything over once public
interest has died down. But that’s not going to happen. GraceFaith came to testify
at the preliminary hearing. Sharon started shouting and screaming she was going to
kill her and had to be taken away,” Mycroft said.

“Most people learn they can’t have everything their way all the time when they are
children. I think it’s a lesson easier learned when young,” Aunty Lee said.

“Mabel Sung was in much deeper trouble than anyone guessed. But she was such a forceful
personality that nobody thought to question her. The people in her law firm, the members
of her prayer group and her family had been under her leadership for so long that
questioning her would have seemed like an act of treason to them. That’s why until
Sharon went through the books, no one knew that Mabel had got Sung Law into serious
financial trouble. What made it worse from Sharon’s point of view was that Mabel had
borrowed against her house as well as the company. If Mabel was declared bankrupt
they would lose the house, their reputation, everything.”

“Everything was all right until Mabel Sung was careless enough to let Sharon find
out what was happening,” Cherril observed. “If she pulled off the organ scam she would
have had more than enough money pay back everything and to rescue the house and the
law firm.”

“I don’t think it was carelessness.” Aunty Lee said. “The problem from the start was
that Mabel Sung and Sharon never understood each other. To make it worse, they thought
they did.

“My stepdaughter, Mathilda,” she continued, “told me how competitive Sharon already
was back in her school days. If Sharon couldn’t be the best at something, she had
to put it down and show that it wasn’t worth doing. But it wasn’t her teachers or
her peers that she was trying so hard to impress. What Sharon really wanted was to
get her mother to notice her.

“It was only after she was made partner that Sharon discovered her mother had been
putting more than prayer into Leonard’s recovery. His drug use had damaged his heart.
Because of his HIV-positive diagnosis, it was unlikely Leonard would be considered
for a heart transplant in Singapore no matter how much money his family threw into
the system. Which is probably why Mabel started to look outside the system. By then
Leonard wasn’t well enough to travel, so she had to find a way to bring a donor into
Singapore—and someone and someplace to perform the operation.

“That night Sharon learned that Mabel had ruined the law firm—which she considered
her birthright—to try to save her sick son’s life. That’s what drove her to put the
Algae Bomb powder into Leonard’s food. And almost by accident she killed her mother
too.”

“So Sharon killed them?” Commissioner Raja could remember Sharon Sung as a skinny
girl in a school uniform.

“I don’t think she meant to. But after she did it, I don’t think she minded. You know,
accidents upset some people terribly. They run over a dog by accident and feel so
guilty they kill themselves and leave all their money to the SPCA. Of course that’s
a bit extreme, but I don’t think Sharon Sung felt anything except that she had got
away with it. And it would have got easier with practice,” Aunty Lee said. “Like with
killing chickens. So it’s a good thing you stopped her.”