Free The Feng Shui Detective's Casebook by Nury Vittachi

suffered a death recently, he could very easily do some perfunctory readings, re-edit and re-present the work he had already done, and double his money.
    So he had raced to a telephone and quickly made an appointment to see the manager of the facility, a woman named Dominique Alegre. He agreed to meet her at four o’clock that afternoon. To sneak out during a period when he was being paid by one client to try to set up some work with another client—well, it had a feeling of financial impropriety that thrilled Wong. Getting one client to cover billable hours during which he signed up other clients— that was the only way a self-respecting independent businessman should run an operation.
    At the Millennium Health Centre, he found loud, echoing music coming from a frosted-glass-walled room and he could see colourful shapes moving inside. It sounded more like a nightclub than a health facility. He swung the glass door open, took a step inside and then froze.
    ‘Sorry-sorry!’ he said. The room, it seemed to him, was full of women in their undergarments. He abruptly started to back out.
    ‘Come in, Monsieur Wong,’ the jack-jumping woman at the front shouted over the top of the music. ‘We’ll be finished ’ere in exactly twelff minoots. Grab a seat. Or join in, if you feel lack.’
    The feng shui master gingerly entered the shaking, noise-filled room, gluing his back to the wall. Eyes down, he shuffled as discreetly as he could along one side of the gym where he found a cluster of seats, a bowl of fruit and some magazines.
    Instead of instruments and singing, the music consisted largely of room-shaking bass notes, stuttering drum beats and a shrieking asexual voice half-talking, half-singing:
    Push it
    Push it
    Push it
    Push it
    Git the fever git the fever git the fever git the fever
    Come on down ya
    Come on down ya
    Come on down ya
    The woman leading the dance, or whatever it was, continued to shout over the top of the pounding, jarring music. ‘Knee-raise treeples, one last time, to ze right and back and back and back, to ze left and back and back and back. And repeat. And again. And one . . . last . . . time . . . And now we are going to take ze temperature down a leetle.’
    The leader, a tall brown-haired woman who was dressed in a purple skintight outfit with a black bikini over it, turned around and fiddled with the controls on a music system. The jarring music disappeared and something more contemplative started to play.
    Over the sound of electric piano chords, another female voice began to whimper:
    Oooh, oh whoa yeah
    Ooooh, whoa-whoa
    You are the angel of my dreams
    I loved you sight unseen
    But now you ’ ve gone away
    I need you more each day
    Oooh, I ’ m your stalker babe, you better know it
    I’m your stalker babe, not scared to show it
    I ’ m your stalker babe, I ’ m gonna grow it
    I ’ m stalkin ’ you, to-niiiiiiiiiiiight yeah yeah yeah
    whoa-oooh
    The twenty or so women in the room immediately trotted over to the opposite side of the hall where each of them grabbed a thin, plastic blue mattress. They each found a space on the floor and lay down, like three-year-old children ready for an after-milk nap.
    Wong watched fascinated until the women started lifting each leg up in turn. Suddenly he was faced with a forest of lycra-clad thighs and buttocks. This was much too indecent a display for him to watch. He hurriedly turned his chair so his back was to the aerobics class. Then he opened a magazine at random and buried his face in it. Unfortunately, the magazine—something called Shape— was full of pictures of underdressed young ladies, so was almost equally embarrassing. He eventually found a page of photographs of protein milkshakes, and read the recipe over and over again until the session came to an end.
    The feng shui master’s meeting with Dominique Alegre was not a particular success. For a start, he found it difficult to concentrate sitting in a small office with a woman in a